Trump's New Executive Orders Attack Blacks, Labor
Trump's attempt to enforce an official, white supremacist version of U.S. history is an attack on black America & all minorities. It is a major component of an attempt to cover-up all U.S. crimes.
“I have a lot of faith in ordinary people, much as their understanding is obscured by the media and by the politicians. I think that the people have basic common sense, basic decency. And if we keep hammering away at the truth–I think there is nothing more revolutionary than to tell the truth — if we keep telling the truth and insisting on it, it will break through, and the people will respond.” — Howard Zinn
The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of holocausts — and kings
(apologies to Lewis Carroll)
"War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery," and "Ignorance is Strength” — slogans written on the outside of the Ministry of Truth building in George Orwell’s novel, 1984
When the President of the United States puts out an executive order claiming there has been a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite” U.S. history, you can bet this site, which expressly exists to combat distortions and amnesias in American history, will sit up and take notice.
The new pronunciamento from the White House is a racist, sexist, anti-science screed the likes of which hasn’t been seen in U.S. presidential politics for some time. I believe you would have to go back in time to the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, who “segregated, downgraded and in some cases fired his Black workers” in the federal government, to see such naked racism portrayed. The fact that racial oppression represents a long-time component of mainstream of U.S. politics should surprise no one.
Yet for liberals and opponents of Trump, it’s really a matter of what flavor of imperialist history you favor. Neither Trump nor his Democratic opponents call for a wholesale re-examination of U.S. history. No political party in the U.S., nor any academic institution stands for “truth,” as the Establishment continually launders its presentation of U.S. history so that its most criminal elements are filtered out.
The U.S. has lied repeatedly about its worst war crimes, long denying the use of sarin nerve gas during the Vietnam War and the use of biological weapons during the Korean War, and punishing or ignoring those who would point out these crimes. When an international group of leftist attorneys and jurists traveled to China and North Korea in the early 1950s to examine charges of U.S. war crimes during the Korean War, they concluded that the mass bombing of Korea and other atrocities, including germ warfare, constituted in fact a crime of genocide. Their findings have been mostly censored from mainstream U.S. histories.
The falsification of history is larger even than the crimes of the U.S. government, as current historical accounts have suppressed the crimes of U.S. allies, too. To date, for instance, there is not one book that has ever been published in the United States, nor “a single monograph nor a single edited volume dedicated to the subject,” that directly addresses the mass murder of over three million Soviet POWs by the Nazis in World War II. (Germany today is, as everyone knows, a key ally of the United States.)
The mass slaughter of Soviet POWs, for which I will soon dedicate a full article, was horrific enough that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) recognized, “Second only to the Jews, Soviet prisoners of war were the largest group of victims of Nazi racial policy.” The second largest group of Nazi victims, with millions killed, and still the USHMM only dedicated one very small webpage to this crime.
Somehow, of course, this issue never comes up when the history of WWII is taught in U.S. schools. Imagine that the murder of millions of Jews was never mentioned in U.S. history books or classrooms. But somehow such a criminal silence is okay if those killed were Russians, Poles, Ukrainians and others fighting for the Soviet side against the racist WWII German Nazi regime. The mere fact of such an omission boggles my mind!
But if anyone thinks that major crimes don’t go unreported or are censored, they haven’t been paying attention to the U.S. support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and the crackdown in the West on those who would report Israel’s crimes.
“Truth” and Lies
In his recent executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” U.S. President Donald Trump wrote: “Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.”
But it is precisely ideological indoctrination that Trump wants to impose upon the American people. A bit further on in the EO, Trump decries “improper ideology,” which he will remove from U.S. museums and other federal institutions. Doubling down, he condemns again “improper partisan ideology.”
History as a discipline in the MAGA era should consist, Trump announces, of encomiums for “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.”
On first glance, it appears that Trump and Co. have released this new executive order because they are in a tizzy over some recent Smithsonian Institute projects.
This is not the first time a Smithsonian exhibit has come under attack for its political implications. Some years ago the institution was roiled with controversy over its plan to exhibit the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing some 140,000 people. While there was racism involved in how the victims of the atomic bombings in Japan were discussed and portrayed, the current controversy is much more directly about race than the controversy over the Enola Gay was.
The EO singles out the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which currently has an exhibit, “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” which, according to Trump, propounds the view that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”
But this view is actually mainstream! The exhibit was financially supported by the Ford Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, among a number of other mainstream funding sources. These are not radical political organizations, but at best liberal institutions, one of which played the role in the past of a financial conduit for CIA covert programs.
The use of racism to maintain white supremacist power is not controversial either, or shouldn’t be. Such use can easily be ascertained merely by examining evidence from the hundreds of years of black chattel slavery in the colonial U.S, and later in post-1776 America, and up through the Civil War. Then there was yet another hundred years of suppressing black freedom via the Jim Crow segregation system in league with white supremacist terror.
In his EO, Trump singles out for attack “the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’”
In fact, as understood for quite a long time, there is no biological basis for breaking down human populations into a small discrete subset of “races.” As a recent edition of the scientific journal, European Neuropsychopharmacology, explained:
Race has become deeply rooted in our lives, institutions, and cultures such that the notion of race as a biological myth may seem unfathomable to most people. In fact, there is no biological basis to race. It is a purely social construct fabricated by 16th and 17th-century scientists and perpetuated thereafter…. Indeed, genetic differences between populations from within a particular race (e.g. Black) are often far more pronounced than between races (Black vs. White)…. the concept of race arose in the crucible of the transatlantic slave trade when European colonial expansion was motivated by amassing power and wealth.
For readers interested in a more in-depth, yet relatively popular discussion of the scientific approach to “race,” check out this article.
While Trump’s reactionary executive order occasionally chastises attempts to address the historical oppression of women and gay and transsexual individuals, the real object of this EO is to undo attacks upon the glorification of white supremacy, and return the issue of race back to its place as a fundamental keystone in the edifice of white Western imperialist rule.
So it is in the EO’s “recommendations” that we find the real purpose of Trump’s new edict. After packing the Smithsonian Board of Regents with Trump flunkies, including chief Trump flunky, Vice President J.D. Vance, the government will “remove improper ideology” from “the Smithsonian Institution and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.”
Concurrently, Trump will cut public funding for any federal programs said to “degrade shared American values, [and] divide Americans based on race,” i.e., that dare challenge the white supremacist view of race and the fact of U.S. societal oppression of blacks and other racial or ethnic groups, the narrative or visualization of which would expose the false image of U.S. “equality.”
Section 4 of Trump’s EO is the icing on the cake. Titled, “Restoring Truth in American History,” it directs the Secretary of the Interior to “determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology,” and then “take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties.”
The current Secretary of the Interior, charged with carrying out the orders in the latest EO, is the former GOP Governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum. In November 2021, he “signed a bill banning the teaching of critical race theory (CRT).” The bill defined “CRT as any suggestion that racism is systemically embedded in American society.” Hence, we can see that Burgum, who has political ambitions within the Republican Party, has already established that he will do Trump’s bidding.
Trump’s racist executive order is a direct response to the large-scale effort in recent years to remove Confederate monuments and statues that glorified Confederate generals, like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, as well as racist figures like KKK Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest, from public view.
The movement to remove these memorials to the Confederacy’s military and political heroes was successful in taking down hundreds of such offensive statues and monuments, though hundreds still remain, primarily in the U.S. South. But it was during this period that Trump stepped forward as a defender of racist memorabilia.
Here’s Trump tweeting as far back as 2017 about the removal of statues commemorating Civil War confederate “heroes” Lee and Jackson:
And here’s Trump in 2020, speaking in Tulsa, Oklahoma, about the takedown of “beautiful” Confederate monuments: “The unhinged leftwing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments, our beautiful monuments.”
Tulsa, Oklahoma, was, of course, the site of one of America’s worst race riots, where on May 31 and June 1, 1921, crazed mobs of white racists killed up to three hundred black people, as “the state's second-largest African American community… [was] burned to the ground.”
From Racist Attacks to Attacks on Labor
Trump’s racism is of long standing, and his executive order is the fulfillment of a promise to the racists and fascists who have supported him. It also speaks to an ongoing current of white supremacist ideology, which expresses itself as “white backlash” against putative “reverse discrimination,” and as apoplexies over DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies. Attacks on DEI are nothing more than pure racism, when they are not simply idiotic parroting of conservative memes.
Trump’s efforts to restore racism as a major pillar of U.S. policy, embodied by the restoration of Confederate monuments, has not escaped the notice of the U.S. liberal press.
NPR reports that the Secretary of the Interior has already begun a review of exhibits and materials throughout the National Parks System. A government statement to NPR equated the resurrection of Confederate monuments with what “makes America great.” The statement said, “We're doing a thorough, park-by-park review to protect the legacy of our nation's heroes and historic figures. This process takes time, but make no mistake — we are committed to upholding the values and history that make this country great.”
Another news article tried to explain the institutional constraints upon Trump’s Civil War racist revisionism.
The direct impact of Trump's order will be limited, given that few toppled Confederate monuments were ever on federal land, Jesse Holland, author of "The Invisibles" and "Black Men Built the Capitol," tells Axios.
Still, the explicit policy endorsement by the Trump administration could be a powerful catalyst for some states to resurrect them.
Indeed, the power of the presidency behind a rollback of even the limited, and often cosmetic attempts to correct and ameliorate the U.S.’s racist past, should not be underestimated. Such a campaign will also give a boost to both race terrorists and more establishment proponents of white supremacy.
Trump’s racist campaign has its echo in another executive order also recently released. Titled “Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs,” this new EO announces an “end [to] collective bargaining with Federal unions in… agencies with national security missions.” The order broadly defined what is “national security,” and the affected agencies include everything from the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Department of Homeland Security to the FDA, FCC, and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service!
This new executive order has been condemned for the union busting it is by the AFL-CIO and the National Treasury Employees Union, which has filed suit to stop the action. Meanwhile, the American Federation of Government Workers (AFGE) says Trump’s EO will throw over a million government workers out of a job!
AFGE President Everett Kelley stated, “This administration’s bullying tactics represent a clear threat not just to federal employees and their unions, but to every American who values democracy and the freedoms of speech and association. Trump’s threat to unions and working people across America is clear: fall in line or else.”
But the fact no one mentions is that the federal workforce is disproportionately black! While self-identified Whites make up 76 percent of the civilian workforce, they are only 60 percent of the federal workforce. Blacks, who represent about 14 percent of the U.S. population, constitute nearly 19 percent of the federal workforce, while Latinos make up another 10 percent.
In other words, the heavily unionized federal workforce has traditionally been a place where ethnic groups in America could get a job, or at least has been since the era of political hiring protections were implemented in the 1960s. As the website for Partnership for Public Service (PPS) summarized it: “40% of the federal workforce was comprised of individuals who identified as part of a racial or ethnic minority group.”
It is worth mentioning, however, that while this is true, the racist aspect of the federal workplace reasserts itself the higher up the federal pay scale one goes. According to PPS, “People of color make up much of the federal workforce in positions from the GS-2 to GS-6 level, these grade levels typically comprise lower and entry-level administrative positions. White employees make up much of the workforce above the GS-7 level, which consists of mid-level technical and first-level supervisory positions and top-level technical and supervisory positions.”
The true nature of federal unions can be understood through the following two salient points: 1) pay scales for unionized federal workers are set by Congress, and not via collective bargaining. 2) In addition, federal workers have no legal right to strike. The AFGE website declares, “Under 5 U.S.C. § 7311, federal workers are legally barred from striking, and doing so can result in termination and a ban from federal employment.”
But for much of U.S. history, no unions had a recognized democratic “right” to strike. That didn’t stop generations of trade unionists from railway workers and miners to auto workers, teamsters and longshoremen from battling the state for the right to organize. While today’s federal unions are a pale shadow of what powerful unions should be, they do represent the only institution in the federal workplace that can protect workers against workplace abuses. Today’s federal unions must be defended, and their rights extended. If Trump succeeds in his attack, more mainstream unions will certainly be next.
For much of U.S. history, the government used “race” and “ethnicity” as a means to pit worker against worker. The victories of the labor movement in the U.S. were always partial, and like the need to defeat racism once and for all in the United States, the struggle to secure workers’ rights and ability to organize themselves as a class against the bosses and billionaires is still on our national agenda.
Trump’s attempt to roll back even the incremental progress of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and the women’s and gay and trans rights movements will hopefully be defeated, but not if people sit on their asses and do nothing, waiting for the next guy.
At the same time, it is a mistake to rely, as mainstream union associations and other rights’ groups do, on Democratic politicians and the courts to protect and defend groups under attack. The Democrats in particular, have proven themselves impotent to maintain even a modicum of protection to oppressed groups, while morally they have caved in to support Zionism’s genocidal policies in Palestine.
The true power of the working class and major groups under attack — blacks, women, people of Latino and Asian background, Palestinians, etc. — is revealed when these groups are united. Together, they can defeat the forces of reaction. How this will unfold is anyone’s guess. But Trump and his allies have definitely thrown down the gauntlet.
As black scholar and antiracist activist W.E.B. DuBois said, “We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong — this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it.” Labor sloganeering also points in the right direction: An injury to one is an injury to all!
What would you expect from a Wall Street boy? He's a paid up club member who's been prepped for this role for many decades.
Thanks for giving light to all these atrocities. Please add to your list the starvation of Germans after WWI and the murderous treatment of German POWs after WwII.