Other views on American white resentment

 8-13-17
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Charlottesville
https://www.facebook.com/notes/arnold-schwarzenegger/charlottesville/101...
 
I have been horrified by the images of Nazis and white supremacists marching in Charlottesville and I was heartbroken that a domestic terrorist took an innocent life. My thoughts and prayers are with the families of Heather Heyer, Lt. Cullen, and Trooper-Pilot Bates.
While these so-called "white nationalists" are lucky to live in a country that defends their right to voice their awful, incorrect, hateful opinions, the rest of us must use our voices and resources to condemn hate and teach tolerance at every opportunity.
My message to them is simple: you will not win. Our voices are louder and stronger. There is no white America - there is only the United States of America. You were not born with these hateful views - you can change, grow, and evolve, and I suggest you start immediately.
Today, I'm sending $100,000 to an anti-hate organization I've worked with for decades - the Simon Wiesenthal Center, named after the great Nazi hunter who I was lucky to call a friend. I have spoken to its founder, Rabbi Marvin Hier, and I know that my contribution can help advance the Center's mission of expanding tolerance through education and fighting hate all over America - in the streets and online. My dream is that all of you will join me in helping your favorite anti-hate organizations in any way you can.
United, we are greater than the hatred we saw this weekend.
 

8-14-17
DailyKos
Angela Merkel shows how a true leader responds to violent racism
Joan McCarter
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/8/14/1689407/-Angela-Merkel-shows-...
 

 
 
 
It shouldn't take a German to show an American president how to respond to racial violence, but Chancellor Angela Merkel does it, making Trump's refusal to condemn the Nazi terror attack in Charlottesville stand out as that much more deplorable.
In comments released via her spokesman on Monday, Merkel expressed shock at the "naked racism" seen during clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend.
"The scenes at the right-wing extremist march were absolutely repulsive—naked racism, anti-Semitism and hate in their most evil form were on display," Steffan Seibert told reporters, AFP reported.
"Such images and chants are disgusting wherever they may be and they are diametrically opposed to the political goals of the chancellor and the entire German government."
Seibert added that Merkel stood with "those who peacefully oppose such aggressive, far-right views."
That's how you condemn murderous Nazi racists. Since the entire world lived through a war over this once before, it shouldn't be hard to figure out that there aren't "many sides" to consider. There is good and there is evil on this one, and every day Trump refuses to issue that strong condemnation his true colors show through clearer and clearer.
 
2017
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
Age of Anger: A History of the Present
Pankaj Mishra
ISBN: 978-0-374-27478-8
 
...Self-distrust led to more boosting of the Volk, and the fantasy that the people rooted in blood and soil would eventually triumph over rootless cosmopolitans, confirming Germany's moral and cultural superiority over its neighbours. Thus, Germany generated a phenomenon now visible all over Europe and America: a conservative variant of populism that posits a state of primal wholeness, or unity of the people, against transnational elites, while being itself deeply embedded in a globalized modern world.
Self-hatred expanded into hatred of the 'other': the bourgeois in the mirror. In German eyes, the West was increasingly identified with soulless capitalism, and England replaced France as the embodiment of the despised bourgeois world, followed by the United States ...The United States became the 'land without a heart', another heir of the ultra-rational Enlightenment.
Bu the main embodiment of Western moral degeneracy and treachery was the Jew. Whether capitalist modernization boomed or went into crisis (which it did severely in Germany in 1873), the Jews were to blame.  Anti-Semitism, not withstanding its long historical roots, served a frantic need to find and malign 'others' in the nineteenth century; it acquired its vicious edge in conditions of traumatic socio-economic modernization, among social groups damaged by technical progress and capigtalist exploitation -- small businessmen, shopkeepers and the artisan classes as well as landlords -- and then condescended to by their beneficiaries. This was no traditional Jew hatred in a new guise, as the first generation of Zionists, all assimilated and self-consciously European Jews, recognized, if much too slowly. ... pp. 208-209
 

 
 
 
...and finally, a great article on a small town in Germany, Wunsiedel, birthplace and burial place of Rudolf Hess, one of Hitler's top Nazi officials, and what the townspeople did to protest the annual neo-Nazi pilgrimage to the site. -- blj
8-17-17
New York Times
How to Make Fun of Nazis
Moises Velasquez-Manoff
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/how-to-make-fun-of-nazis.html