Editor,
UNM President Frank has condemned “highly offensive” anti-fascist Trump graffiti at UNM. Does he also condemn fascism?
I imagine after the tumult of the next four years, this highly offensive grafitti is going to look pretty damn tame in 2020!
Appeasement in a social or political context is a diplomatic policy of making political or material concessions to an enemy power in order to avoid conflict. Frank can try his best to be fair and balanced, but fascism should never be appeased.
During the GOP debates, future U.S. Education Secretary, Dr. Ben Carson, often compared centrist President Obama to Adolf Hitler and fascism, which is weird because for the past eight years these same know nothings have also been calling the Muslim Marxist Usurper a socialist? Do these folks comprehend that fascism/socialism are complete opposites on the scale?
Here is how Robert Paxton defines Fascism: “A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal ethnic cleansing and external expansion.” #MakeGermanyGreatAgain
Does any of this sound familiar? Umberto Eco defined fascism as anti intellectual irrationalism, and racist by definition. According to Eco, it “grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference.” One of the most typical features of historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, Eco states: “a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.“
Far-right politics are defined as right-wing populist ideologies known for extreme nationalism and opposition to immigration, as well as Nazism, and ideologies that feature extreme nationalist, chauvinist, xenophobic, racist, or reactionary views, which can lead to oppression and violence against groups based on their supposed inferiority, or perceived threat to the nation, state or ultraconservative traditional social institutions. Sound familiar?
On election night Katy Tur from NBC News interviewed future U.S. Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani about comments made about Hillary Clinton to the effect, assassinate that bitch. She was unable to get Giuliani to actually answer the question, he kept talking about a rock thrown through a window at the RNC Headquarters, as if that is equivalent to a political assassination? Trump’s surrogates have stated Hillary “should be put on the firing line and shot for treason.”
On election night as Trump gave his victory speech, a man kept yelling out, “Kill Obama!” Eight years ago, when John McCain came to speak at UNM, national coverage showed Republicans calling out the same thing! What is with their blood lust?
It IS vile for a swastika to be drawn on a Jewish bakery, but on Trump, that’s just telling it like it is! Isn’t that what made Trump famous - refusing to be politically correct? If it’s not appropriate to waste UNM resources, let’s cut 15 percent of UNM executive salaries, and rescind Frank’s new gig as director of the not-yet-created UNM Center for Innovation in Health and Education!
Brian Fejer
UNM alumnus
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