Cherokee activist Albert Bender on the Trump/Andrew Jackson connection

[Tanuki]

http://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/2017/03/11/trump-takes-worst-andrew-jacksons-legacy/98970554/



....."Kittery calls Jackson, among other things, the father of our modern democracy,” and “the champion of the common man.” He was the standard bearer of the racist, Indian-hating frontiersmen who comprised the majority of the white population of his time.
Jackson’s legacy of racism is reflected in the election of Donald Trump. An unabashed admirer of Jackson, Trump’s advocacy of Jacksonian policies is evidenced by his hanging of Jackson’s portrait in the Oval Office in his first few days as president.
It is no accident or coincidence that on the very same day that he hung the portrait, he signed the abominable memoranda promoting the Dakota Access Pipeline and resurrecting the Keystone XL Pipeline.
The Trump-Jackson comparison is too alluring to pass up, notwithstanding their greatly differing financial backgrounds, Trump represents the most reactionary, racist backward thinking sections of the American populace.

The ongoing tragedy at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota – the brutal attacks on the peaceful, praying, nonviolent, gentle Indian water protectors, the tear gassing, the beatings, the shootings with rubber bullets, the holding of naked prisoners in frigid jail cells, the blinding of a protector, the water cannoning in sub-freezing temperatures of others, the police zip tying protectors in contorted positions for hours — these are all the legacy of Andrew Jackson.
Because of the hideous genocide campaigns of this purveyor of “manifest destiny” the South was all but completely ethnically cleansed of native people who had lived in comparative peace, prosperity and harmony for thousands of years.
Indeed, Hitler is said to have studied Jackson’s barbaric policies of extermination."
(More at link)