India must challenge Modi’s capitulation to Trump (plus Rekindle the spirit of India’s anti-imperialist nationalism)

By Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist Liberation

Published 13 March, 2025

First published at CPI(ML) Liberation.

Trump 2.0 has begun on a tempestuous note. Compared to the narrow margins of his 2016 victory and 2020 defeat, this time round the Trump victory was quite thumping. And since being sworn in for the second term of his Presidency, Donald Trump has lost no time to unleash his agenda like a global bully gone berserk. From declaration of a tariff war in global trade and deportation in shackles of hundreds of foreign nationals calling them illegal immigrants to the televised bullying of Ukraine President Zelenskyy and several other visiting leaders and making frequent outrageous statements like turning Gaza into an obscene Trump-themed tourist destination emptied of Palestinians and incorporating Canada as the 51st state of the US — Trump has kicked up a veritable global storm.

In his first term Trump had surfaced as a toxic symbol of white supremacist misogynistic politics with a strong Christian fundamentalist streak. He is now following up on the aggressive nationalist overtone of his slogan of MAGA (Make America Great Again). Tariff and deportation are his favourite weapons to bolster his “nationalist” image by projecting himself as the saviour of US trade and US labour from so-called “unfair” trade barriers and “immigrant job-snatchers”.

In this project, Trump has found a close ally in the world's richest person, ironically an immigrant US citizen of white South African origin, Elon Musk. Unlike the Modi-Adani nexus, where Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi prefers to keep the partnership secret, Trump brazenly flaunts his alliance with Musk, acknowledges Musk’s massive corporate contribution to his campaign and has reciprocated by putting Musk in charge of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. And now as Musk’s shares have begun to crash, Trump has jumped to his rescue, asking Americans to support Musk’s electric vehicle model Tesla.

While Trump’s domestic agenda has been along predictable lines, it is in the foreign policy domain that Trump appears to be making some drastic shifts. The televised showdown with Zelenskyy was the most pronounced example of this shift when Trump accused Ukraine of gambling with a possible third world war and appeared ready to risk a rupture with Europe and rock the NATO alliance in pressuring Zelenskyy to accept a so-called “peace deal”. It is common to come across commentators seeing Trump’s bullying tactics as just part of his maverick style, and some even see it as Trump working at the behest of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In other words, these commentators view the Trump phenomenon as a freak development, something not organically connected to the historical trajectory and current priorities of US imperialism.

A closer look would however reveal that what Trump is trying to do is to concentrate on China as the US’ current number one strategic target. The Cold War era when the US had the Soviet Union as its principal adversary has long ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. NATO was a product of the Cold War period and should have also been dismantled after the USSR’s disintegration. Europe and the US however maintained this military alliance to contain Russia and also serve the common hegemonic interests of the Western world. But the dominant opinion in the US ruling elite now believes that the challenge from China has reached a level where encircling and containing China must take precedence over other strategic imperatives. Hence the desperate US attempt to “untie” Russia from China and declare the BRICS “dead”. Meanwhile, importantly there is continuity in US policy on Israel, with Trump continuing to back Israel to the hilt in its genocidal occupation of Palestine and escalating ruthless persecution of pro-Palestine voices in the US.

Where does India figure in the unfolding Trump agenda? Over the past two decades and especially since the signing of the Indo-US nuclear deal, India has considered itself a key strategic ally of the US. Since his ascent to power in 2014, Modi has tried to sell the illusion that there has been a qualitative jump in India’s international stature and particularly in India’s friendship with the US, as well as a special intimacy with fellow supremacist Trump. Trump is now openly snubbing Modi and humiliating India at every opportunity. The treatment meted out to Indian citizens who were found residing in the US without necessary documents has been among the harshest and most humiliating. Trump has also accused India of being a tariff abuser in Modi’s presence and is now showcasing the drastic import duty reductions being announced by the Modi government as a US victory.

The US surely values India as a major market and as a strategic ally in its policy of containing China. But the Indian hype over the rise of the Indian-American community and the so-called special bond between Trump and Modi has clearly been exposed as wishful Sangh-BJP propaganda. India had a trade surplus with the US, and Trump clearly wants to reverse that and wants a much bigger market access for US products in the Indian market. This has alarming implications for Indian exports to the US, especially in pharmaceutical and IT sectors, as well as for India’s domestic producers including those in agriculture. If the US’ highly subsidised agricultural produce is allowed to swamp the Indian market, it will be a death blow to Indian agriculture. The Modi government has already announced huge concessions to the US auto industry, especially for Musk’s electric vehicle venture Tesla. India’s Telecom giants, Jio and Airtel, are signing accords with Musk’s telecom arm SpaceX to sell Starlink internet service in India.

While the US’ continental neighbours in North and South America are standing up to the Trump administration’s tariff threats and arrogant posturing, the Modi government has adopted a policy of quiet capitulation. At stake is not just India’s national pride as a sovereign country, which attained independence through protracted anti-colonial resistance, but also India’s vital economic interests and strategic autonomy to pursue domestic and foreign policies needed for India’s own development. The Trump presidency represents an aggressive trend of unilateralism that has begun to defy the entire post-war framework of multilateralism beginning with the United Nations. The whole world will have to find an answer to this growing US threat to global peace and stability, sustainable development and climate justice.

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Rekindle the spirit of India’s anti-imperialist nationalism

First published at CPI(ML) Liberation.

More than three hundred Indian citizens were deported to India in chains on US military aircraft in February. A list of 18,000 Indians who are liable to be deported in the coming days has reportedly already been handed over to the Narendra Modi government. Private estimates put the figure of Indians in the US facing the risk of deportation at over seven hundred thousand. India’s foreign minister has defended the US action in the Indian Parliament. Prime Minister Modi repeated the same line during his joint press conference with US President Donald Trump. Contrast this shameful capitulation to the position taken by countries such as Colombia and Mexico, which have denied permission to US military aircraft and brought their nationals back in their own planes with full dignity.

Let us now take a look at recent reports from Bhubaneswar which reflect the conditions for Nepali students in India. A Nepali woman student in the Bhubaneswar-based Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) was found dead in her hostel room on February 16. This was apparently a case of suicide triggered by an abusive relationship with a male student hailing from a powerful BJP family in Uttar Pradesh. When students started protesting in the campus demanding fair investigation and justice for the victim, the KIIT authorities responded by declaring the Institute closed sine die for Nepali students, asking them to immediately vacate the campus and dropping many of them off at Cuttack railway station. Viral videos show KIIT officials humiliating Nepali students as an “ungrateful lot”, taunting them about Nepal’s low GDP and telling them to go back to Nepal.

Do we find any similarity and connection between the Modi government’s acquiescence to the ill-treatment meted out to Indian citizens by the Trump administration and the KIIT administration’s racist arrogance towards students from Nepal? Capitulation to US domination and bullying of small neighbouring countries are in fact two sides of the same coin. The RSS responds to reports of attacks on members of the minority Hindu community in Bangladesh with a global cry of “Hindus in danger”. The Modi government presents India as a Hindu-majority country encircled by hostile Islamic neighbours and has even amended India’s citizenship law with a discriminatory and divisive clause to exclude Muslims. But here are students from even Hindu-majority Nepal being ill-treated in a BJP-ruled state. Appeasement of the self-proclaimed global big bully and attempts to play the regional big brother go hand in hand.

India’s protracted struggle for freedom from British rule had given rise to a nationalist consciousness that despised oppression in any part of the world and empathised with revolutions and national liberation movements the world over. Bhagat Singh famously combined the two slogans “inquilab zindabad” (long live revolution) and “samrajyavad murdabad” (down with imperialism) into an integrated clarion call for worldwide freedom for the oppressed. Even Mahatma Gandhi, having personally experienced racism during his stay in South Africa before his return to India, could easily identify with the cause of a free Palestine. Jawaharlal Nehru saw himself primarily as a representative of the emerging third world and shaped a foreign policy on the basis of anti-imperialist solidarity and cooperation among all the newly liberated countries of the world.

The anti-imperialist nationalism that arose from our freedom movement and defined India’s identity — internally as an inclusive multi-religious, multilingual nation, and externally as a champion of national liberation and third world unity — is now under attack from the Sangh brigade’s model of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism. This model of aggressive nationalism seeks to coerce India’s old model of “unity in diversity” (more accurately unity through diversity) into the straitjacket of Hindu supremacist uniformity. It finds common cause with Israel’s Zionist genocidal campaign in Gaza and with the anti-immigrant xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist frenzy of the far-right across the world, even if undocumented Indians find themselves at the receiving end of this xenophobia, as we now see in the US.

The preamble to our Constitution describes “we the people of India” as the originating power of the Indian Republic. The use of the word “people” instead of nation marked a conscious realisation of the Constituent Assembly that India was not yet a cohesive nation, it was only a nation in the making. The Constituent Assembly firmly rejected the idea of religion-based national identity. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was categorical that since Hinduism, the religion followed by the majority of Indians, provides religious legitimacy to the most entrenched form of social inequality and injustice in the shape of the obnoxious order of castes, a Hindu Raj, if it ever becomes a fact, would prove to be calamitous for India. Ambedkar considered caste to be the biggest obstruction to India becoming a really cohesive nation. The Constitution of course did not compromise with the idea of any kind of exclusion or discrimination, either on the basis of religion or caste, and promised comprehensive justice, equality, freedom and fraternity for all.

In the Modi era, the Sangh brigade invokes its own image of the nation and brand of nationalism to enforce its agenda of transforming secular democratic India into a fascist Hindu Rashtra. True to the old Golwalkar doctrine of reducing Muslims to second grade citizens, the Sangh brigade is busy exploring all possible opportunities to spew venom and unleash violence targeting the Muslim community. While various strategies of voter suppression are already being employed against the Muslim electorate, the Hindu Rashtra constitution draft, which was set to be released in the ongoing Prayagraj Kumbh advocates outright disenfranchisement of the Muslim community. Every voice of dissent within India risks being persecuted as part of an “anti-national conspiracy”, while members of the Indian diaspora who are critical of the Modi regime are also being denied visas and stripped of their status as Overseas Citizens of India.

In the seventy-fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution and foundation of the Indian republic, we the people of India will have to take up the challenge of reigniting the anti-imperialist nationalism that had united us as a modern democracy and opened up the vistas for a future where every Indian could live a life of dignity. Without that the Indian economy is liable to get more vulnerable to the vagaries of imperialist dependence and remain permanently enmeshed in the disastrous trappings of crony capitalism, where India’s corrupt corporate billionaires will continue to appropriate ever bigger shares of India’s wealth and income while the bottom half will have to survive on a sub-subsistence level deprived of even the basic necessities of life.

From the 1857 anthem “ham hain iske malik, Hindustan hamara” (India is ours, we own this land) to the constitutional affirmation of popular sovereignty defining India as a socialist secular democratic republic founded by “we the people of India”, our freedom movement was driven by the power of progressive nationalism. Fascism is today out to tarnish the glorious legacy of the freedom movement and destroy the democratic constitutional foundation that emerged from it. This calamity must be avoided by all means.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Hinduism Is Fascism

 

Centenary of the Communist movement in India: Achievements, lessons and challenges

By Dipankar Bhattacharya

Published 4 January, 2025

First published at Liberation.

The communist movement in India is now a century old. While there are different opinions regarding the actual foundation day of the communist party, the CPI and CPI(ML) both recognise 26 December 1925 as the formal foundation day of the CPI as a party. By all accounts, we can identify the early 1920s as the period when communist ideas and activities had begun to take shape in India and the movement is therefore clearly a century old in India.

The purpose of this paper is however not to revisit the history of the communist movement in India but to draw inspiration and lessons from the past to focus on the challenges of the present. Broadly we can divide the first century of the communist movement in India into four phases - the colonial era, post-Independence period leading to the Emergency and its aftermath, the post-1990s period of neoliberal policies and aggressive ascendance of Hindutva far right, and the current period of outright fascist offensive.

Internationally too, this period can be divided into similar phases. While the period till 1949 witnessed the remarkable global rise and consolidation of the communist movement marked by victorious revolutions in Russia (November 1917) and China (October 1949) and decisive politico-military defeat of the fascist alliance in World War II, the victorious Cuban revolution (1959) and defeat of US imperialism in the Vietnam war (1975) marked the high points of the post-War period.

The collapse of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War phase and pushed the world into a new phase of imperialist aggression and corporate plunder. While the communist or socialist movement is yet to regain lost ground in the old Soviet bloc region, during this period it has discovered more hospitable turf in Latin America and Asia. However, in large parts of the world we are currently witnessing a renewed rise of the fascistic far right.

During its formative years, the initial inspiration and impetus for the communist movement came from the success of the Russian revolution and from the deep urges of freedom from colonial rule, feudal oppression and social slavery within India. Beyond the formal camp of communists, the impact of the Russian revolution ran deep in India's anti-colonial awakening and the quest for social equality and emancipation. From Bhagat Singh and his comrades to Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and from Ambedkar to Periyar, we can see this impact in India's freedom movement, social justice movement, literature and other fields of popular culture.

In some countries communists were successful in emerging as the leading political force in the course of anti-colonial struggles and integrating the agenda of national liberation with the task of building or advancing towards socialism. In India, communists made considerable progress, but did not succeed in emerging as the leading current. Yet the catalytic impact of the communist ideology and movement was far more than the actual organizational strength of the Communist Party. The greatest youth icon of India's freedom movement, immortal martyr Bhagat Singh, was a communist pioneer in many ways. The communist leadership in building powerful movements to fight landlordism, organising the working class, championing social equality and communal harmony produced a wider impact and gave the freedom movement a broadly progressive orientation.

While the freedom from colonial occupation came with the trauma of territorial partition, unprecedented communal carnage and displacement of millions of families across the border, it was significant that the Constitution of India which was written and adopted after that traumatic turning point in Indian history rejected the idea of making India a Hindu state and opted for a secular democratic character for the new republic with equal rights for all citizens regardless of their religious identity. The RSS and Hindu Mahasabha which wanted a Hindu Rashtra and doggedly opposed the Constitution remained isolated and weak. In the first parliamentary election held between 25 October 1951 and 21 February 1952, the communist party emerged as the second largest party with 16 MPs and together with the RSP, PWP and Forward Bloc, the Left camp won 22 seats followed by 12 seats won by the Socialists while the Hindu Mahasabha and Jan Sangh won only 4 and 3 seats respectively.

The growing communist footprint in India's electoral map saw the communists emerge as the first non-Congress party to head a state government when communists under the leadership of Comrade EMS Namboodiripad won the first assembly election in the newly created state of Kerala. The government was of course not allowed to complete its full term and became the first victim of the toppling of an opposition government, a trend which has now assumed phenomenal proportions in the current Modi era.

The radical trend of the communist movement also tried to reignite the revolutionary flame of the Tebhaga and Telangana struggles and that's how Naxalbari happened in May 1967 and the CPI(ML) was born two years later. The peasant upsurge of Naxalbari blazed a revolutionary trail across the country and the spirit has endured in spite of the most brutal state repression. Even though the militant upsurge failed to achieve its goal of turning the 1970s into the decade of people's liberation, it took the communist movement deep into India's most oppressed social segments and backward areas.

In electoral terms too, the biggest expansion of the communist influence happened in the post-1967 period, with the beginning of the historic decline and split of the Congress in the late 1960s and especially in the wake of the Emergency. Land reforms, wage struggles and defence and extension of democracy through local self-government were the key planks that sustained and expanded the communist influence and enabled the Left to lead three state governments and send a sixty-strong contingent to Parliament only two decades ago.

Over the last decade and a half, the electoral strength of the Left in India has however suffered a steady and serious decline. The decline in West Bengal was triggered by an attempted policy adjustment with the corporate-driven development paradigm at the cost of the welfare agenda. The resultant rightward shift within the state was soon reinforced by the rapidly rising fascist consolidation in the all-India context.

Indeed, the rise and consolidation of fascism in India today poses the biggest challenge not just to communists but to the very constitutional vision of modern India as a secular democratic republic and an open and diverse society. Communists will have to reestablish themselves at this juncture as the most courageous and consistent champion of democracy and bulwark of resistance to the onslaught of Indian fascism.

I prefer the expression Indian fascism to the more generic term fascism in India to take due note of the national and historical peculiarities of fascism in today's India. Way back in the early period of rise of fascism in Italy, Spain and Germany, the international communist movement had rightly identified fascism as an international political trend with national specificities. The rise of fascism in India today is happening against the global backdrop of a renewed aggressive surge of the far right, but we can never lose sight of the typically Indian dimensions of this phenomenon especially given the crucial historical role of the RSS.

Unlike the various instances of European fascism in the first half of the twentieth century which had a rather stormy rise and fall, Indian fascism has had a very slow and steady rise, gathering momentum only in the last three decades, more particularly since the ascent of the Modi regime in 2014. While drawing strength from the regressive features of Indian society, especially the caste system, the patriarchal order and the feudal survivals that have had a long lease of life in the absence of a decisive rupture that could only be accomplished through a victorious democratic revolution, Indian fascism has also deeply penetrated the institutional mechanism of parliamentary democracy and formed an intricate nexus with India's crony capitalism. It also leverages the Indian state's strategic partnership with the US-Israel axis, the global attractions of the Indian market and India's resources and the growing presence of the Indian diaspora in the international arena. We should also take note of Hindutva's close ideological ties with Zionism and growing outreach among other far-right ideologies under the emerging international brand of national conservatism.

To build a powerful resistance to the escalating fascist onslaught, the communist movement will have to sharpen the edge of anti-caste and anti-patriarchal struggles alongside a sustained anti-corporate mobilisation of the working people. While there has never been an easy electoral escape from fascist forces entrenched in state power, every effort must be made to weaken and isolate the fascist camp in the electoral arena and rescue the Constitution and the Republic from their clutches. This of course calls for the fullest utilisation of the united front strategy, the broadest possible mobilisation of all forces opposed to the fascist regime, to combat the fascist campaign of hate, lies and violence and defend the rights and interests of the people.

We are now nearing the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Indian republic. It is remarkable that right at the time of adoption of the Constitution, its architects had forewarned us about the pitfalls that could obstruct and derail the journey of the republic. Some of the most insightful remarks were made by Dr. B R Ambedkar in his address in the Constituent Assembly on 25 November, 1949 on the eve of the adoption of the Constitution. It was Ambedkar, the chairman of the drafting committee appointed by the Constituent Assembly, who warned us right then that "however good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad (if) those who are called to work it happen to be a bad lot." Today, we are facing precisely such a juncture when the RSS, which was explicitly opposed to the Constitution and its core ideas and principles in the formative years, today controls the reins of state power, and the result of this paradox is there before all of us. We now have High Court judges who say majoritarianism is law, Governors who take special interest in obstructing and toppling non-BJP state governments, and parliament sessions that are used as a slaughterhouse of dissent and debate only to pass dubious unconstitutional laws.

In the same address, Ambedkar had identified bhakti in politics, the cult of hero-worship, as "a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship" and had stressed the need to reinforce political democracy with social democracy. A year earlier while introducing the draft of the Constitution he had described democracy in India as "a top dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic" thereby posing the task of democratisation of the Indian social soil for the sustenance of the constitutional 'top dressing'.

It is also remarkable that the Constitution had upheld individual citizens, and not the much romanticised traditional village communities, as the constituents of the Republic and preferred the expression 'we, the people of India' in all their diversity as the collective democratic identity instead of entertaining the delusional idea that India had already become a nation. Ambedkar categorically considered caste as the biggest anti-nation impediment and emphasised the inseparable trinity of liberty, equality and fraternity as the foundation of social democracy and national cohesion. The Constitution was also alive to the perils of majoritarianism and overcentralisation and was careful to safeguard minority rights and federal interests from these fatal threats. And let us also remember the most categorical warning that Hindu Raj becoming a reality would be the greatest calamity for India and had to be prevented at any cost.

The communist movement today has to lead India out of this calamitous juncture. The calamity being perpetrated every day using the levers of state power will have to be resisted tooth and nail to rescue the beleaguered republic and fortify democracy on a stronger foundation. The communist movement will have to rise to the occasion and ensure a decisive defeat of fascism through all-round democratisation of the society and state.

Communists in India also have the responsibility of finding solutions to the unresolved challenges before the international communist movement. There are questions left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union that are particularly relevant for communist parties in positions of governance whether in post-revolution situation or otherwise. In Soviet Union eventually the communist party got so cut off from the people and so completely immersed in governance and the bureaucratic apparatus of the state that after seven decades the entire structure eventually evaporated without any major military intervention from outside or within. Apart from economic stagnation and foreign policy distortions, clearly there was a great lack of internal democracy and dynamism leading to a massive loss of popular support and even legitimacy of the communist party's governing role. The erosion of the 'from the masses and to the masses' communication between the party and the people upsets the equilibrium between the people, party and the state. Communists in power in any set-up will have to be seen to be superior in terms of democracy, transparency and accountability in comparison to bourgeois dispensations. This is a major lesson that communists everywhere must learn from the Soviet debacle.

Socialist models everywhere have made a mark for themselves in terms of redistributive equity, alleviation of poverty and unemployment and basic improvements in conditions of life and work for the working people. But when it comes to processes of production, the use of machines and technology and its adverse implications in terms of environmental degradation and human alienation, there has been little to demarcate existing socialism from capitalism. This is another area where in today's conditions of climate crisis, environmental degradation and growing unemployment and redundancies caused by indiscriminate use of labour-displacing technologies, socialist models will have to stand out in qualitative contrast to the destructive and disastrous trajectories of capitalism.

To conclude, let me return to the compelling national context. As history would have it, over the last few decades the communist movement in post-independence India had branched into diverse streams and formations. Today in the face of the unprecedented crisis of our Republic and the constitutional rule of law, communists must come ever closer with the necessary sense of urgency. The greater the unity of the fighting ranks, the stronger will be the anti-fascist resistance and the brighter will be the future of India's democracy. Paraphrasing the Communist Manifesto, we can say we have nothing to lose but the fetters of fascism while the promises of freedom await to be redeemed.

This paper was presented at the International Seminar on The Future of Marxism, Democracy & Socialism (18-20 December 2024), organized by the EMS Chair for Marxian Studies and Research, University of Calicut.

They Eat Humans, Don’t They?

John G. Russell

 September 24, 2024
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An AI-generated image shared on Twitter by the Republican-controlled United States House Committee on the Judiciary on September 9, later retweeted by Elon Musk, with the caption “Protect our ducks and kittens in Ohio!”

The Jews and Hitler come to mind
The thought of slavery far behind
But white paranoia is here to stay
The white boy’s scheming night and day

—Gil Scott-Heron, “The King Alfred Plan” (1972)

“This is your choice America. “If you import the Third World into your country, you are going to become the Third World. Simple as that. Elect Joe Biden and America becomes the Third World. Elect Donald Trump, and America remains America. That’s it, America. Two choices. Choose your future: Third World or an American Century.”

—Stephen Miller

“If you import the Third World into your country, you are going to become the Third World. That’s just basic. It’s not racist, it’s just fact.”

—Donald Trump Jr., original thinker and rumored founder of Talking Point USA

Turning on the news (an increasingly depressing addiction) is like tuning in to an episode of the late, great Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, but without the moralistic denouement.

In 1967, novelist John A. Williams wrote The Man Who Cried I Am, in which he mentioned the King Alfred Plan, a CIA plan to relocate America’s black population to concentration camps that was inspired by the McCarren Internal Security Act of 1950 and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations from 1956 and 1971. The King Alfred Plan is fictional.However, Trump’s plans to massively detain and deport “illegal” immigrants are more than just “concepts,” as portions of Project 2025 make clear, and his threats to impose martial law and jail his political opponents suggest that those plans are not limited to “illegals.”

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they for the Haitians….” You get the idea.

The problem is that to realize this scenario for the 21st century requires a new rationale. With the rise of the media-infotainment complex, internal revolution no longer looms as a perceived threat. A new, imaginary threat must be created in its place, one that ignites racist fears rekindled by the gradual emergence of an increasingly black and brown America, a rising tide of color that would make Lothrop Stoddard blanch. The real threat to white America comes not from black militants but from pet-hungry Haitian masses yearning to breed free. This is the narrative that Trump and company have fabricated to satiate a white paranoia that, if left unchecked, promises to cleanse America of its increasingly maligned racial and ethnic diversity.

Moral panic begets existential angst, which the surreal mendacity of MAGA contrives to stoke. About 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians live in Springfield, Ohio, out of a total population of around 60,000. While media reports have stated that many were granted Temporary Protective Status that allows them to live in the U.S. on a limited basis until conditions in Haiti improve, according to CNN, those residing in Springfield have come there because of its low cost of living and employment opportunities. They are there legally and of their own volition, not “shipped” there en masse like slaves by the Biden-Harris administration. And far from turning Springfield into a Third World city, they have, according to its business owners, helped to revitalize it economically. While some problems remain, as one might expect with any city undergoing rapid demographic change, instead of recognizing the contributions Haitians have made to their community, Trump and his xenophobic minions threaten them with deportation.

Indeed, never one to be dissuaded by facts, Trump not only inflates the number of “illegal” Haitian immigrants in Springfield to 32,000 but claims they doubled the population “in a period of a few weeks.” After spreading the lie that Haitian migrants are abducting and eating Springfield’s dogs and cats, alleged couch-humper JD Vance cautions, “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” But in true ends-justifies-the-means fashion, Vance assures us that his lies are righteous: He merely wanted to point out the real problems Springfield is facing that the “fake news” refuses to cover. In short, his goal was to combat “no” news with his own patented brand of fake news. Sadly, he has succeeded. According to NBC News, 1,100 posts on X, formerly Twitter, mentioned the pet-eating rumors on September 6; the next day, there were 9,100. After Vance took up the rumor on September 9, the number climbed to 47,000. The lie seems to be working, at least among Republicans. According to a Newsweek poll, 52% of likely Trump voters believe Haitians are eating pets, compared to only 8% of registered Democrats.

Who cares if his lies inflame racial tensions, increase divisiveness, and result in violence. Violence only matters when it (incompetently) targets MAGA’s marigold messiah. The left must curb its violent rhetoric; the right, however, is free to threaten poll workers, state attorney generals, and Democratic presidential candidates with impunity and treat actual incidents of political violence as hammer-fisted jokes.

Rumors, however, have consequences, if not for the people who spread them, then for those who are their victims. Certain groups are the go-to group for smears, even when there would seem to be no immediate benefit to slandering them. Jews have long been the victims of blood libel, a virulent canard that survives today in the guise of QAnon conspiracy theories about Pizzagate, adrenochrome harvesting, and Hollywood/media-controlling globalists. In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, rumors that a black^[1] man had attempted to rape a white woman ignited a race massacre that saw the total devastation of the town of Greenwood, then known as Black Wall Street, and the death of 300 black residents. In 1923, a similar rumor resulted in the same fate for Rosewood, a prosperous black community in Florida, resulting in the deaths of anywhere from 8 to 150 people.

Racist, xenophobic slander is not confined to America. An ocean away, in Japan, in the wake of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, rumors that ethnic Koreans were poisoning wells led to the slaughter of over 6,000 Koreans. But like old soldiers, old rumors never die; they just hibernate until circumstances reawaken them. Following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the rumor was resurrected, this time blaming both ethnic Koreans – and blacks. According to The Asahi Shimbun, ten years later, in 2021, following another earthquake and as Japan was recovering from the pandemic, the trope reappeared on Twitter, this time accusing Black Lives Matter, whose marches in Japan prompted accusations it was responsible for an uptick in COVID, of poisoning wells in Fukushima Prefecture.

So far, the rumors in Springfield have not resulted in any deaths. They have, however, produced bomb threats, closed schools, and led to marches by neo-Nazi groups like Blood Tribe, with whom, in the guise of the bearded, pseudonymously named incel “Nate Higgers” (real name Drake Berentz), the rumor began, and Trump’s favorite militia, the Proud Boys. None of this seems to have phased Vance, who has not only tripled down on the debunked claim but amplified it and, echoing the words of the man he himself once called “America’s Hitler” and who opined that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” insists that “skyrocketing” levels of HIV, TB, and other communicable diseases are poisoning the blood of Springfield, a claim public health officials deny.

Smears, like cancers, are malignant. Not content with slandering Haitians, Vance has moved on to Africans at large, reposting an online article that they are grilling cats in Dayton. One waits to learn from Vance what end justifies this meme. No doubt, it stems from his fear, stoked by the words of his dementing mentor, that the once great U.S. of A. will become a “shithole” country if immigrants – undocumented and legal – are allowed to “invade” its porous borders unless, of course, they are Silicon Valley billionaires from the Global North who help launch the careers of cushiony venture capitalists and can be solicited to bankroll their mendacious political campaign. Ironically, all the while, Vance, through his vile, dehumanizing rhetoric, digs a latrine of lies deep enough to bury his beloved America under several feet of excreable bullshit. Vance’s partner in grime, the self-described “feisty Jewess,” “investigative reporter,” and right-wing influencer (or is that racist influenza – her anti-black, Islamophobic delusions appear to be more infectious than Springfield’s alleged HIV-infected Haitians), Laura Loomer has taken things to a new, if not particularly surprising, low by claiming Haitians are eating humans. Who needs imaginary cannibals like Hannibal Lecter when you can conjure up wholesale old racist tropes of anthropophagous Africans and other “sand monkeys”? One can only imagine what Goebbels would have made of the Big Lie if social media had existed during the Third Reich and Elon Musk, today’s giddy platformer of “white paranoia” and self-proclaimed wannabe Taylor Swift impregnator, was minister of propaganda. In fact, as early as March, Musk was already platforming the Haitians-are-cannibal trope on X.

Then again, Vance may be right. Perhaps you have to make up shit for the mainstream media to focus on it. Still, ironically, Vance’s slurs have done little to highlight Springfield’s “real,” since the media is now justifiably preoccupied with covering Vance’s slanders and the palpable harm they have inflicted upon the community. Not only Haitians in Springfield but across the nation, including, New Jersey, New York, and Tulsa. If he intended to shock the media into reporting on real issues affecting the community, he missed the mark by a light year, as the media’s focus has shifted to coverage of the malignant idiocy of his claims, kitschy, AI-generated memes of scared kitties and puppies, and pet-eating song parodies.

But these are distractions. The vileness of these allegations, their utter looniness, and the unnerving yet somehow nervously amusing recklessness with which Trump and his acolytes mindlessly and unrepentantly regurgitate them have made them and the vicious attacks on their political opponents all the more the focus of attention. There may have been two failed assassination attempts on Trump, but that in no way mitigates the vulgar character assassination aimed at Kamala Harris and other black Americans in positions of power, let alone the death threats they continue to receive. Although the media has covered Loomer’s odious attacks that Harris will stink up the White House with curry (actually, the last time curry was in the White House, it was a cause of celebration) and that salaciously paint her as an opportunistic fellatrix. Even in the normative vulgarity of MAGA America, repeating baseless blowjob allegations and racist talking points lie outside the comfort zone of most mainstream newscasts. Instead, it has devoted less attention to her toxic podcasts against black women, or the fact that last year she posted to X an inflammatory image of a black man wearing a “Niggas 4 Trump 2024” T-shirt presenting the white supremacy hand sign. (No, it isn’t the usual suspects – Bryon Donalds, Tim Scott, Ben Carson, or Mark Robinson – but, she writes, a “friend” and “supporter.”)

Mocking Kamala Harris as a “pretend black” who speaks ebonic-inflected English when talking with her rachet homegirls, the “unleashed” social media gadfly, her voice buzzing in a high-pitched nasal that makes one wish she would dog whistle her caustic hate instead of torturing listeners with her eardrum-shattering screed, rants on X:

“I’m an independent black woman, and I don’t need no man. And I’m gonna get whitey. I’m gonna get whitey, and I’m gonna lock Donald Trump up, just like Letitia James, right.”

And she goes, “Now y’all go and elect me and I’m gonna lock him up. We’re gonna get Trump.” Like the way they talk, and their little DEI Shanequa voices. They all have the same voice. I’m talking about Kamala Harris, uh, Letitia James, and Fanny Willis. Like meritless DEI Shanequas talk the same way. Very obnoxious, the way that they talk.

Loomer, the Alice Jolson of vocal blackface, continues:

Kamala Harris who of course pretends to be black, also pretending to have a, uh, black urban accent, which is pretty racist and offensive, cause look at the way she talks. She tries to use this like real ghetto talk and it’s like, okay, “You think that all black people talk like that, Kamala? You think dat we all talk like dis and we want to ax question? That we don’t know how to speak proper English? You know, we don’t ask questions, we ax. We gonna talk about this, home girl?”

 I mean, really, honestly, it is so disrespectful and racist to black people. So there’s a lot of educated black people out there that don’t talk like that. Okay, there’s a lot of black people out there who know how to speak proper English that don’t go around speaking jive. “You feels me? We wuz kangs! I’ll tell you home girl, but we get this done together, my friend, you feels me? You feels me, when we get this done together? You feels me? You feels me, home girl? We wuz kangs! You feels me? I worked at McDonald’s. I used to smoke weed. Listen to Tupac in my, in my college room.” [Squeals.]

Loomer, in case you have forgotten, called the late Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee a “ghetto bitch.” This is the person who has Trump’s ear, the good one.

Where was Marjorie Taylor Greene, our champion of racial tolerance, when we needed her? No doubt, out desperately searching for Jewish space lasers in Jasmine Crocket’s eyelashes and combs through peach tree dishes of Gestapo soup. Well, at least the pot has called the kettle black, albeit belatedly, something Vance has yet to do, though his reluctance has nothing to do with an aversion to hypocrisy. Instead, he interprets Loomer’s insult as a distracting, relatively benign commentary on “dietary preferences,” adding that he “makes a mean chicken curry.” Apparently, he is oblivious to the fact that curry is not a dish commonly associated with self-professed Ivy League hillbillies with alleged preferences for Ikea Esseboda two-seaters and $14.88 Mike Lindell pillows. When Meet the Press’ Kristen Welker pressed him if the statement offended him because his wife is Indian American, Vance deflected again, stating that while he disagreed with the statement, it was not because it was racist but because “whether eating curry at your dinner table or fried chicken (yes, he went there), things have gotten more expensive thanks to [Harris’] policies.” When asked to react to Trump’s questioning of Harris’ racial identity, as he had in an earlier CNN interview, Vance redirected the inquiry to paint Harris as a “chameleon,” defending Trump’s statement as “totally reasonable.”

In some ways, the current political plays less like a Twilight Zone episode than a compilation of scenes from Amazon Prime’s The Boys, with Trump cast as Homelander, Loomer as Stormfront, and, given his rumored proclivities, Vance as Tek Knight, which might explain his awkward campaign visit to a donut shop.

Can a group sue for racial defamation? Can Haitian immigrants file a defamation lawsuit against Trump, Vance, and Loomer? Perhaps, although it would probably change nothing. Still, in a kinder, “Never Again “world, Loomer, as a member of a group that was the original target of blood libel, might be expected not only to refrain from such slanders. Then again, because Haitians and Africans aren’t Jews, some consider it inappropriate to label the abuse directed toward them “blood libel.” Not that this necessarily matters to Loomer, given the fact that she notoriously celebratedthe white nationalist “hostile takeover” of the GOP with neo-Nazi chum Nick Fuentes. “Free spirits” like Loomer are free to spew such libels through filler-filled DSLs – which, judging by the similarly inflated lips of Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, are the price of admission women pay to gain entry into the Trump clan – while they vulgarly accuse Harris of literally sucking up to power.

These are the perks for those who identify with whiteness in hive-minded MAGA America. Loomer, however, is not alone in her calumny. Stephen Miller, Trump’s follicle-deprived, erstwhile chia pet, political advisor, and Roy Cohn clone, whose ancestors fled Jewish pograms in Belarus, presses for travel bans on Muslims and massive detentions and deportation of immigrants, both undocumented and legal. While a student at Duke University, he accused Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia” and co-founded the Duke Conservative Union with neo-Nazi and Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally organizer Richard Spencer. Spencer, it should be recalled, in 2018, advocated that the U.S. enslave Haitians a year after Hurricane Irma devasted their country instead of providing relief and today promotes the creation of a white ethnostate for the “dispossessed white race.”

On X, Miller complained, without a scintilla of self-aware irony, about Trump’s dismal performance in the debate with Harris. It is worth quoting at length:

The Democrat Party has subjected President Trump to eight years of dehumanizing eliminationist rhetoric, vile slanders, an endless parade of sinister hoaxes, financial warfare, civil lawfare, spying, framing, defaming, raiding, and a weaponized Democrat justice system hellbent on jailing the opposition leader while wildly portraying him as an enemy of democracy –even going so far as to criminalize GOP legal advice.

In recent days, the Democrat Party and its officials – the same ones who let Hamas-loving mobs terrorize Jews – desperate to win the election, began forcefully trotting out the repugnant Nazi/Hitler smear, the vilest lyingest, most detestable smear of them all, whipping their followers into a frenzy.

What message do you think it sends to the violent, deranged or unstable when this language is used? And what kind of predicate does it establish for the future?

Kamala even made the infinitely-debunked Charlottesville Hoax a centerpiece of her rehearsed debate lines, which of course ABC let go unchallenged [….]

Kamala’s entire campaign narrative has been that Trump [… ] is a threat to Democracy, spending untold millions to program this message into impressionable minds.

After an assassins’ [sic] bullet came within a millimeter of violently taking Trump’s life, did the Democrats stop? Did Kamala stop? Did the leftwing media pull back?

No, their rhetoric only became more reckless and unhinged.

And now there has been a second assassination attempt.

A second assassination attempt. To vote for Kamala is to vote to endorse the Democrat Party tactics that have created such a frightening and dangerous environment. And it would be a vote to cement the idea that anyone who opposes the Democrat agenda is an enemy of the state who can be bankrupted, jailed and persecuted.

President Trump has put everything on the line for us again and again. It’s not enough just to vote for him. You have to organize. You have to register everyone you know. You have to get your block, your neighborhood, your church, your entire social network, to mail in their ballots en masse.

We are counting on you.

All of us are counting on you.”

The fascist doth project too much.

There’s much to deconstruct here, but let’s begin with the conclusion. Aren’t Trumpists opposed to mail-in ballots? As for Democrats inciting violence, Trump is not known for being reluctant to incite violence, as is evident in the way he handles protesters at his rallies, the fact that he encourages police to rough up suspects – excluding himself, of course – his desire to have peaceful demonstrators protesting police violence shot, and his “jokes” at the expense of Paul Pelosi.

Miller suggests that the media distorted Trump’s “good people on both sides” statement on Charlottesville, dismissing its media reports on it as another “hoax.” In fact, Trump “denounced” the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville the same way Bill Clinton denied having sex with Monica Lewinski – semantically. Charlottesville aside, Trump has had plenty of opportunities to unequivocally denounce racist rhetoric, past and present, whether from Fuentes, Kanye West, or Loomer, none of which he has utilized. Instead, he denies knowing who they are or disingenuously declares unfamiliarity with what they have said.

Miller condemns Democrats for perpetuating hoaxes, while the presidential and vice presidential nominees of his own party publicly spew debunked lies about Haitians, lies amplified by Loomer, who, not to be outdone, has, in true birther fashion, also posted a copy of Harris’ birth certificate, declaring that Harris isn’t black because it lists her mother as “Caucasian” and her father as “Jamaican” and that she is “the descendent [sic] of slave owners” on her father’s Irish side, as if this makes her, what, white? News Flash, Laura: A lot of black people are descendants of white slave owners; in “one-drop rule” America, that does not make them white. Still, if Loomer is a birther “literalist,” one wonders how she can insist that Harris is an “Indian” given her mother’s listing as “Caucasian,” unless it is because, according to U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), Asian Indians, while technically classified as “Caucasian,” are not legally white and were barred from becoming U.S. citizens until 1946, the latter decision one which Loomer would most likely like to see reversed.

But we’re still in Twilight Zone territory, that liminal space between insanity and inanity where not only do Haitian migrants dine on an assortment of domesticated delicacies, but children go off to school one gender and return home another, and prisons perform transgender operations on incarcerated “illegal aliens.” Forget The Apprentice, Trump is auditioning to host the reboot of Fear Factor.

The prospective Fuehrer-for-a-day’s arsenal of lies grows more bizarre every day. Not only does the would-be emperor of the U.R.A. (United Reich of America) have no clothes, he has revealed himself to be a rambling, flatulent, incontinent racist with a spray-on tan and a molting hair weave. Yet despite his monotonous tantrums, incessant whining, and petulant Mussoliniesque pouts, he is still considered mature enough to again serve as commander-in-chief.

If Harris shows even the slightest sign of emotion, she is hysterical; Trump, in contrast, no matter how bombastic and belligerent his responses, is seen by his idolaters as manly, steely-eyed reason personified. Yet, during the debate, the “low IQ” Harris, in the immortal words of former RNC chair Michael Steele, “spanked that ass.” The best that Trump’s supporters can come up with to explain their messiah’s failure is to claim that ABC gave Harris the questions in advance and she was wearing Nova H1 audio earrings.

In a normal world, rumors that Haitians are eating dogs and cats would be hard to swallow; groundless accusations of rigged elections and audio devices hidden in jewelry would fall on deaf ears.

You can’t make this shit up. Then again, they have and they do.

Note

[1] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.