Donald Trump and the Enemies of the American People

[workinclasszero]

Donald Trump and the Enemies of the American People
By David Remnick February 18, 2017

When the leaders of the Bolshevik movement—Lenin, Stalin, and the rest—used the term vrag naroda, an “enemy of the people,” it was an ominous epithet that encompassed a range of “wreckers” and “socially dangerous elements.” Enemies included clergy, intellectuals, monarchists, Trotskyists, “rootless cosmopolitans,” and well-to-do farmers. To be branded an enemy of the people was to face nearly inevitable doom; such a fate was soon followed by a knock on the door in the middle of the night, a prison cell, the Gulag, an icy ditch—a variety of dismal ends. To be called an “enemy of the people” did not mean you had to hold oppositional thoughts or commit oppositional acts; it only meant that the dictator had included you in his grand scheme to insure the compliance of the population.

Robespierre, one of the architects of the Jacobin Reign of Terror, set out to “horrify” the opposition, and his instruments were the epithet, righteousness, and the blade. “The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation,” he said. “It owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death.”

In 1917, the same year as the Bolshevik seizure of power, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin published an essay in Pravda called “Enemies of the People,” in which he lionized the Jacobin Terror as “instructive.” His party, “the Jacobins of the twentieth century,” he wrote, should follow suit, if not with the guillotine, then with mass arrests of “the financial magnates and bigwigs.” Once in power, Lenin was far more brutal than the revolutionary French. He built the first outposts of the gulag archipelago. Stalin, Lenin’s energetic successor, expanded the system from western Russia to the Sea of Okhotsk, ten time zones to the east.

Now, Donald Trump, the elected President of the oldest democracy on earth, a real-estate brander and reality-T.V. star, has taken not to Pravda but to his own preferred instrument of autocratic pronouncement—the tweet—to declare the media “the enemy of the American People.” Here is the declaration in full:

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!
3:48 PM - 17 Feb 2017


http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trump-and-the-enemies-of-the-american-people

[dalton99a]

1. Only murderous dictators talk that way.

[workinclasszero]

2. But hey...this is America...

It could never happen here right?

Uh...right?

[Jarqui]

3. For most of his life, he's had money, corporate power and all the women he wanted

for Golden Showers or whatever he could buy.

I think the only thing left to entertain this mentally sick animal is the power and rush for killing people. I think he would get off on it and he can't wait.

Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are loving the circus distraction while they do what they can to dismantle things like Obamacare, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, environmental protection, taxation of the wealthy, etc, etc. So there are the domestic perils of their platform that will kill many Americans while Trump stumbles daily trying to remain in office.

But the rest of the world is sitting back, plotting how to take advantage of this blood thirsty buffoon. He wants to push the buttons of military might and the longer he is in office, the more likely it is that he will. Unchecked, I think he's going to kill a bunch of Americans. This idiot could be duped into World War III.