Some Thoughts on Violence, Nationalism, and Bigotry: 4th of July, 2016

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Photo Wendy Lynne Lee, 2015

To the editor:

It’s telling that the vote in the UK to leave the European Union is followed by calls for referenda elsewhere by nationalist, unfailingly far-right parties like France's National Front. Like our own "America First" pathology incarnated as Donald Trump, these “movements” pretend to be populist uprisings in defense of the working classes, but are in fact opportunistic exploitations of racist and xenophobic hornswaggle that, wrapped in the flag, suckers folks into voting not only against their own best interests but for a world that better resembles Game of Thrones than anything we’d want to leave to our kids. 

 

Then again, it’s not the Trumpster’s kids who’ll get their legs blown off in the next war—it’s yours.

In the face of unprecedented human migration, 65.3 million women, men, and children in 2015, decisions like BREXIT and the emergence of the ugly face of nationalist bigotry in the U.S., make it clear that the geopolitics of the planet are driven not by thoughtful deliberation, but by exploitable fear. 

To think that closing borders and building walls will protect us from terrorism is daft.  Indeed, quite the opposite is likely to be true in virtue of the fact that a world characterized by divided and competing fiefdoms, turf devoted only to their own version of “My country right or wrong!” is a world made very brittle by its own arrogant medieval territorialism.

 

The tremendous and sad irony of BREXIT, Trumpster-mania, and all forms of xenophobia is that none will have the slightest mitigating effect on the threat that endangers human life, indeed, all life, the most: climate change. We wring our hands over ISIS, all the while failing to see its biggest driver isn’t the religion that smug born-agains like Mr. Trump love to demonize; it’s the drought, flooding, loss of arable land, and lack of potable water caused by a human hubris that pours greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere as if the planet’s capacity to recover is limitless. It’s the desperation that makes young men ripe for recruitment to their own religion’s version of self-righteous hatred. 

It’s the same staggering callousness to the lives of others that excuses the moral depravity of four Southern Columbia football jocks who beat animals to death for fun. Indeed, if we think that these upstanding young men are any different that the young bucks recruited by ISIS, we’re both blind and stupid. Both have been taught the appalling lesson that some life has value, and other does not.

 

Is it apples and oranges to compare a local story with international events? Hardly. What torturing nonhuman animals, demonizing “others,” sealing borders, and building moronic walls all have in common is a human chauvinism whose psychotic sense of unearned entitlement is going to burn the planet down—or, well, not the planet—just the ecological and existential conditions that make living worth the struggle. Laughable it is that we’ll risk even speedier dissent into 500 PPB just to drill the hydrocarbons we need to fuel the weapons of “the war on terror,” and in so doing create the conditions of more terrorism. 

Make no mistake about it: that lethal combination of arrogance and willful ignorance that excuses beating animals to death is not one whit different manifest as racism, misogyny, homophobia, religious intolerance, and bigoted nationalism. Exploited by those like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson to advance their own egomaniacal agendas, the ends are all the same: violence, suffering, and oppression meted out by those who think they have the right to make of “others” objects for their own use.  

Wendy Lynne Lee

Lightstreet, PA

590 words.

The World Made Ever More Brittle by BREXIT

It is very telling that the vote in the UK to leave the European Union is followed by calls for referenda in France and the Netherlands--by their own nationalist far-right parties like France's National Front. 

The face of nationalist movements--like America's own "America First" incarnation in Donald Trump and Boris Johnson's "leave" campaign--are thinly veiled forms of racism and xenophobia wrapped in the flag. 

Even more surprising is that such movements would garner support in the UK--a union of countries whose societies reflect reason, great value for multiculturalism, and a deep sense of pride in their compassion for the plight of other peoples.

I understand that among the drivers that set BREXIT into motion is the widening gap between the wealthy and the poor in the UK. 

I understand that this is about class, and that there's a more complex story accompanied by decades of economic struggle and social injustice.

But what I also know is that what infuses the very bone marrow of nationalist campaigns like Trump's "America First!," France's National Front (Marine Le Pen), Belgium's Flemish Nationalist Party, and the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats is that fear of the "other" that, simmering just beneath the surface of legitimate discontent, readily becomes fodder for those who'd exploit it to their own geopolitical advantage.

In the face of unprecedented human migration--65.3 million women, men, and children in 2015--decisions like BREXIT suggest that the geopolitics of the planet are driven not by thoughtful deliberation--but by fear, bigotry, and the desperate attempt to save the thing that cannot be saved: the geographically bordered nation state.

To think that such decisions to close a border will protect from terrorism the turf on the other side is daft. 

Indeed, quite the opposite is likely to be true in virtue of the fact that a world characterized by divided fiefdoms--chunks of land devoted only to their own version of "Me First!"--is a world cancered by fissures and faultlines. 

It is a world made very brittle by its own arrogant and medieval territorialism.

What is the difference between the UK determining to leave the EU--and the psycho-maniacal Trumpster's promise to build a wall at the border of Mexico?

 Not really very much. 

Both aim to keep out the "other."

Both exploit shallow flag-waving patriotism to ends far more about privilege, and ethnicity, and money than about respect for country.

Both will make a very few of the already wealthy even richer.

Both will fuel the recruitment campaigns of terrorism. 

There's no doubt: the European Union is beset by many and serious problems. But these will not be solved by flag-waving claims to sovereignty--especially in a world set ablaze by climate change.
 
Especially at a time when the greatest and most profound issues the world faces demand unified global commitment--not the entrenchment of geographical borders antiquated by the hegemony of multinational corporations. 

BREXIT betokens a very sad day for the UK--and perhaps an even sadder day for the world.