Monday, August 5, 2019

“Mental illness” is to blame for El Paso massacre—but whose?


Donald Trump’s televised address “condemning” white supremacy and bigotry should be the kind of thing that from him rings as hollow as the vacuum of space (between his ears?). “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul.” Pretty words that he clearly was incapable of coming up with all by himself, or truly believes himself. Remember his “denunciation” of bigotry after Charlottesville that was clearly forced on him? How long did it take him to reverse course? One day? It might take a little longer for that to happen this time—but probably no longer than his next campaign rally. With 22 now reported dead from the El Paso mass shooting specifically targeting Hispanics, Trump’s words ring both false and hypocritical, and he has only himself to blame. Trump has compromised himself with his unending stoking of racial animus in his “base,” and he lost any credibility he ever had in being a source of “healing” in this country the moment he opened his mouth announcing his intention to run for president in 2015
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Trump, like everyone else on the political right, blames violent video games and “mental illness” for the record number of mass shootings that have occurred during his presidency, most of them by white supremacists. Hell, half the country would be suffering from “mental illness” if the definition of mental illness is what we knew of Patrick Crusius if you deleted the references to killing from his anti-Hispanic hate manifesto (which I am certain sounded “logical” to millions), containing the same typical racist paranoia that Trump and many like-minded people have broadcast loudly and clearly to the world on a daily basis. So is Trump and his racist base suffering from “mental illness” too? Is the difference between being “mentally ill” or not nothing more than actually going out and killing innocent people just because they belong to a race or “ethnicity” that you hate, rather than, say, “merely” confronting a Hispanic man and his mother doing yard work and shouting racist epithets at them, or threatening a black couple with a gun because they didn’t have a “permit” to have a picnic at a campground?

Were the “ordinary” Germans who claimed to be “ignorant” of what was going on in the concentration camps and the handicapped children’s homes right in their own midst suffering from “mental illness”? How about those who looked away from the Nazi thuggery that was going on before their very eyes? What about “ordinary” soldiers or police who “merely” carried out “orders” to commit atrocities? What about “ordinary” Americans—not just those consumed with racial animus, but even some who style themselves as "moderate," “liberal” or “progressive” who just go about their self-obsessed daily lives acting the same way they always do, completely oblivious to children being warehoused in and sometimes dying in filthy cages, or the latest carnage wrought in this Trumpian atmosphere of hate, very likely because if they are white or Asian they have no real motivation (beyond momentary “guilt”) to change it because they are its technical “beneficiaries” rather than its principle target? They may even harbor similar beliefs as that of people like Trump and Crusius, but they are  less “dangerous” because it isn’t their principle “obsession” in life. Still, such “benign” prejudices do in fact have tangible effects, such as what Trump parolee Dinesh D’Souza called “rational discrimination,” a phrase he coined to “justify” racial stereotypes and discrimination.

It is ironic that Trump uses the term “mental illness” to describe others in order to escape responsibility for words and actions emanating from his own questionable mental and emotional stability. “Mental illness” has been used in other contexts as well; in George Orwell’s 1984, it was those perfidious “loners,” who quietly opposed the rule of “Big Brother,” who after being arrested and accused of harboring “thought crimes,” and were tortured into something almost unrecognizable as a human being, and after “reeducation” were obliged to broadcast to the masses that they had been suffering from “mental illness,” confessing to a laundry list of made-up crimes. It was “mentally ill” to simply desire to live and let live without being fed a steady diet of hatred against whoever or whatever the state decreed was the “enemy” of that moment—always a group that did not possess recognizably Caucasian features (or was a “traitor” with a “Jewish” name)—as a means of controlling people by feeding on their fears, the reasons usually complete inventions. And hatred  toward and fear of what group has Trump routinely fed the masses to keep them in line? And who has Trump routinely accused of being “low IQ” and suffering from “mental illness” for having had the audacity to criticize him for his “Big Brother " proclivities?

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