APARTHEID AMERICA

Lest there be the slightest doubt that the Trump Presidency has a racist agenda it has been dispelled by his decision to end the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals, (DACA), program that legitimized 800,000 undocumented immigrants that were brought to America as six year old children and know no other country than America. The decision makes no moral, economic and even political sense and shares the same insane cruel twisted logic of the apartheid South African regime that also desired to keep South Africa white. 

The decision, coupled with Trump’s unambiguous campaign rhetoric, his association with the national purist Bannon faction - including the latter’s earliest protege, Jeff Sessions and his chief lieutenant “alt right” leader, Robin Spenser, who has called for a white state, the POTUS's labelling of Mexicans as inferior and criminals, his failure to outright condemn alt right racists who were shouting anti semitic slogans and his recent pardoning of the unashamed tormentor of Latinos, Sheriff  Arpaio, sets the stage for an attempt to turn America back to the Confederate days, whose leaders’ statues he so much admires. For those who take hope from Trump’s apparent ambivalence, forget it - there is his racial agenda to ensure America remains white. 

 A CLIFF NOTE ON AMERICAN RACISM 

South Africa and the United States share a remarkable genesis in common, a point that Robert Kennedy made in his Academic Freedom Speech at the University of Cape Town in 1966. Both countries were colonized by predominantly the English and the Dutch in the middle of the seventeenth century. Both countries were part of the British Empire. Jay H. Ell believes that while both were initially populated by those seeking religious freedom the USA differed in that  entrepreneurs and fortune seekers overwhelmingly chose the “New World”. America’s demographics became further altered by the fact that it was bolstered by wave after wave of immigration which allowed its economy to prosper beyond imagination. The “Immigrants” included twelve and a half million “imported” slaves who were the backbone of the Southern Confederate economy. 

The American colonizers desire for freedom led to the War of Independence which severed the ties from England. (South Africa only lost its connection with the British Commonwealth in the early sixties as a result of apartheid). In the economically thriving United States the 1850 Civil War intervened and was fought over the question of slavery in the belief that it was an evil practice that needed to be eliminated. However, the liberation did not end discrimination. The progenitor to the Trump racist resurgence began in the early twentieth century with the Jim Crow laws. America witnessed an ugly period where the white hooded Klu Klux Clan terrorized and lynchings were not uncommon. It is fair to say that the real moves for equality in America took off from the mid twentieth century with key judicial decisions declaring, inter alia, that separate facilities were inherently unequal and the earlier Brown versus Board of Education outlawing the segregation of educational institutions. Martin Luther King with his iconic resistance precipitated President Johnson’s Civil Rights Laws a decade later. 

Today the focus of the racial purists is specifically on the Latinos, who represent a sixth of the American population, (forty million citizens), a third of whom are immigrants and all non caucasian immigrants generally. There are estimated to be currently eleven million illegal immigrants. The Latino birth rate is far greater than the indigenous whites but whatever way the numbers are looked at now the forecast for 2050, by the Pew Research Center, is that whites will represent only forty seven percent of the American population. That projection however is made on the basis of current demographics remaining stable and if legal immigration proceeds at its current pace with its present selection process. The Trump regime is dead set on reversing both the variables of the current demographic make up and the present immigration policy in an attempt to keep America white. In addition to expulsions he proposes limiting legal immigration to half and allowing only English speakers - code for whites

A CLIFF NOTE ON SOUTH AFRICAN RACISM

After the Second World War, South Africa was poised to make cautious steps to decrease discrimination. The Prime Minister General Smuts, a world figure and a founder of both the League of Nations and United Nations, stung by the attack of racism by India at the UNO, was moving towards improving the lot of Blacks. He was to be shocked by an election reversal where a minority of voters, just as occurred in America, ousted him and elected a Nationalist segregationist Government. 

Within a decade and a half the discriminatory legislation of Apartheid, euphemistically labelled “Separate Development”, was institutionalized. Legislation was introduced which sort to see that whites would be in the majority in South Africa. The argument was that the indigenous blacks were not citizens of “white” South Africa. Several stratagems were introduced to effect this. The blacks had traditional homelands which would now become their designated nation states. The fact that many were not born there or had not lived there for generations was considered irrelevant. They, therefore, despite their economic contributions and the moral and natural law implications were not to be afforded any rights in “white South Africa” and would be designated as visiting laborers under permit. Visitors from a land that many of them did not know. Any superflous blacks would be banished.

This fiction was backed by legislation which sought to keep white South Africa white. Key to this objective was the Pass Law which mandated that any black South African had to have a document on their person which allowed them to work in white South Africa. Special courts were created as Blacks were repeatedly and systematically sent back to their homelands. Other legislation sort to classify races to discriminate and segregate. The fact that all this was bizarre and did not allow South Africa to prosper economically did not deter the master race. It is history that this social engineering racist experiment failed. Apartheid was finally recognized to have been a disgraceful historical episode that had caused untold misery and had stultified growth and development of the black peoples of South Africa. 

WHAT THIS MEANS

So both white Trump America and white South Africa faced threats to white supremacy by virtue of being outnumbered. The Southern African menace was from their indigenous peoples and the American peril from those that they had brought into the country one way or another. It matters naught that this process helped make America the richest and most powerful in the world. Both regimes have acted irrationally and cruelly in order to maintain racial superiority. Both regimes in power used a legal fiction to justify their behavior. South Africa argued that the blacks all had tribal origins that had homelands and “legally” belonged there. Trump’s America has pretended that those had been in the economy for years didn’t really belong in America as it was a nation of laws. He sought to unscramble the omelette of immigration under the canard that they were focussing on the “illegals” although they had been part and parcel of the American scene for generations. The fact that that most of the illegals are employed and an essential component of the economy is irrelevant. The fact that the best way to rectify this “illegal” situation would be to penalize the employers who were defying the law by employing those renegades was irrelevant as the real objective was to make America white again.

WHAT IS AT STAKE

What is at stake is everything that America has stood for and made America great. South Africa got a lucky break with two giant statesmen who negotiated a peaceful solution to the South African impasse. (The fact that that this demonstration of gigantic historical statesmanship is now at risk of being negated is irrelevant to this discussion). 

America, with all its faults, has become the leader and savior of the free world and the exemplar of human rights in the twentieth century. Twice they made the difference on what side triumphed between good and evil on the world stage. They then for four decades held the line on human rights versus suppression. Central to their legitimacy was the progress of human rights within their own country and their welcoming of “the poor and huddled masses yearning to be free…. “. All this is now on the line.

It is also forgotten that the DACA teenagers and young adults represent the cream of the crop. They have been vetted up the ying yang. They had the guts to sign onto Obama’s program with the inherent risk that has now become reality. 

The financial implications of this decision are humongous and vary according to what is measured and over what period of time. The Center for American Progress, as reported in Fortune, estimate the financial loss to the economy to be $463 billion dollars in a decade. This very young demographic which is desperately needed in the aging American population would also contribute a much needed $24 billion to entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security over this ten year period. When the mission to remove the eleven million illegals is calculated the devastation to the economy will be mind boggling. 

Most calamitous is that the integrity of the American Administration is at stake. Trump has already made the word of the United States, at best, suspect in the international arena. This local action is a betrayal of trust of unimaginable proportions and it is little wonder that seventy - four percent of Republicans oppose it.

WHERE IT STANDS NOW AND WHAT CAN SAVE THE DAY

While Trump’s Presidency ultimately has to hit the rocks as the Russian investigations grind on, in the interim he can and has already destroyed a century of American dominance of moral authority. The question is what can be done to halt America from falling further into the abyss and reverse the process. To a large extent the responsibility lies with the members of the Party he purports to represent. The Republican Congressmen have to step to the plate and unconditionally condemn and stop this movement that has hijacked their party and threatens to consign America to the dustbin of history. The legislators will be supported by nearly every institution and commercial entity in the country, not to mention the burgeoning ongoing street protests and at least sixty - five percent of the population. Major Cities have indicated that they will take on the rogue racist cabal led by the nonentities Bannon and Sessions  and President Trump. They represent the lowlife faction that for the entire history of America’s existence have sought to promote racial superiority above the values that the Founding Fathers sought so hard to define, enshrine and protect. 

It thus bears repeating that Trump, Bannon and Sessions and Co do not exist in a vacuum. While they are the inheritors of the canards of a long line of racists that have manipulated the expansive democracy, that has made America Great, with the objective of turning the country into a white isolationist bunker. This miscreant entity is currently the controlling component of the Republican Party and have yet to be told that they are not welcome and should go to hell. That action alone will help isolate this fringe movement that now has more influence than their numbers justify. It will come at a political cost but the alternative has to be too ghastly to contemplate. 

Should this philosophy become the manifesto of the Republican Party, with or without Trump, the Republican Establishment will have sold out not only Lincoln’s legacy but America itself. They will have been contributory in turning the United States into an apartheid society which discriminates on the basis of race and color. The DACA  decision which banishes eight hundred thousand individuals to “homelands” that they have never seen is reminiscent of South Africa’s apartheid policy and reveals Trump’s ultimate objective. It is not the beginning of the end it is the end.