Critical
thinking has taken a leave absence.
Reality is unreal. History is inverted,
so the villains become the victims, and the
victims the villains. Shakespeare
captured it in Macbeth when the witches say,
“fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Sounds
like the policies that emanate from this 47th President.
I
could write treatises about the illegality of
this President’s policies, and many of them –
the arrest of Newark Mayor of Ras Baraka, the
precipitous firing of Library of Congress
leader Carla Hayden, just the latest, but so
many breaches of decency and protocol.
This president does not care about decency,
nor about protocol. And clearly, with his
amusing executive order “Restoring Truth and
Sanity to American History, he neither cares
about truth or history. It is the
executive order, not a law, not enforceable,
simple rhetoric, that has both sparked
lawsuits and caused museum executives to
return historic items to their donors.
I
never thought anyone would make me long for
former President George W. Bush. We used
to joke about how little he must have read,
when we spied him reading the upside down
comic book after September 11. But
whatever he read, he had enough sense to help
establish the National Museum of African
American History and Culture (NMAAC). He
had enough sense to increase US assistance to
Africa through HIV global funding, economic
development assistance through the African
Growth and Development Act (AGOA) and other
legislation. He had enough sense to meet with
35 African heads of state, including, in 2001,
South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki. I wonder,
today, what the two Presidents talked about
when they met. I am certain they did not
talk about the way Afrikaners who colonized
South Africa and exploited its Black natives,
were “oppressed”.
Our current
President does not value history. He
makes it up as he goes along, and he has an
unfortunate coterie of power hungry sycophants
who know better but muffle themselves for fear
of being exiled from their lying leader.
So white South Africans, the oppressive
Afrikaners who exploited Black labor for
generations (hello, Mississippi), are now
feeling “discriminated against” because the
new South African constitution allow people to
take back some of the land that was stolen
from them.
Inversive
thinking. Down is up and up is
down. A President who says he wants to
eliminate “fraud, waste and abuse” send a
plane to pick up “oppressed” South African
land barons, grant them refugee status, and
offer them resettlement assistant (fraud,
waste and abuse) here in the United
States. Our President has prioritized
white South Africans, perhaps because his
purchased co-President is from that
country. Of the approximately re-settlers,
how many are his relatives or friends?
And since he is so flush with cash, will he
reimburse our government for his costly
attempt to impose racial hierarchy in foreign
policy?
Does
our elected President and his purchased
co-President Musk hope to resettle the entire
Afrikaner population to the United States,
providing them with monetary assistance to
compensate them for “discrimination”.
Sounds like fraud, waste and abuse, along with
a warped form of affirmative action to
me. But executive order 14151 – “Ending
Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs
and Preference – eliminated that, along with
Executive Order 14173 – “Ending Illegal
Discrimination and Restoring Merit Based
Opportunity” seem to preserve preference for
white people, especially exploited Afrikaners
who were only able to accumulate property in
South Africa by aggressively wiping out the
lives of Black South Africans.
Topsy-turvy toxic policy that reinforces our
President’s anti-Blackness as well as his
ignorance of history. It is a slap in
the face of the heralded South African
President Nelson Mandela, as well as an attack
of generations of anti-apartheid activists,
including Randall Robinson, Mary Frances
Barry, Ron Dellums, Dr. Dorothy Height, Harry
Belafonte, and others. While Black
Republicans were not notable activists, many
played quiet roles in our nation’s (contested)
opposition to apartheid. So General
Colin Powell helped
implement parts of the Comprehensive
Anti-Apartheid Act (1986) after it was passed
over President Reagan’s veto, but Black
Republicans, especially at the local level,
were reluctant to challenge their President
for fear of political consequences (sound
familiar?).
We
can expect more topsy turvey toxic policy from
this administration, where down is up, up is
down, victims are villains and villains are
victims. The peculiar distortion of
South African’s history is especially
egregious, but not unexpected. What’s
next?
