SWASTIKA
After thousands of year’s association with positive cultural and religious symbolism, the swastika was co-opted by Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany in 1920. They transformed it into a symbol of genocide, hatred, violence, and racism. It is now the symbol recognized worldwide as the symbol of absolute human evil.
Recently an Ohio Republican Congressman named Dave Taylor was placed under Capitol Police investigation for desecrating an American flag with a swastika.
Why would any rational thinking lawmaker do such an idiotic thing?
Because it tells you where white Christian Nationalists want to take this nation. It tells you that upwards of 50 million American Christian Nationalists would not only welcome but embrace a rebirth of Nazism in this country.
In the 1930s, prominent religious leaders like Father Charles Coughlin (a Catholic priest) and evangelical minister Gerald L.K. Smith (a white Christian Nationalist of that era) offered religious praise and political glory for Hitler and Nazism. They found support from American business and cultural icons like Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and Phillip Johnson.
Americans had their own German American Bund (1936-1941) and the America First Committee (1940-1941) that praised Nazi ideology, waved swastikas during political rallies, railed against “Jewish influence,” and endorsed American isolationism.
Many conservative political Americans have had for more than a century at kindred spirit with fascism—especially the authoritarian brand espoused by Mussolini. Today political conservatives cut from the same cloth rail against “Antifa,” which is nothing more than a loosely applied acronym for “anti-fascism.”
President Trump has even declared “Antifa” a fascist “terrorist organization” even though there is no Antifa organization, nor leader, nor even a spokesman.
Ironically, Neo-Fascists today—like the swastika-American flag displaying congressman and some Young Republicans who were recently exposed for sharing racists, antiemetic, homophobic and violent content==are calling Antifa “anti-American fascists.”
The word “Antifa” derives from the German term “Antifaschistische Aktion”—a leftist movement that fought the spread of fascism across Europe in the 1930s. But the new Charles Lindberghs and Father Coughlins today have decided transform the anti-fascism ideology of Antifa into a pro-fascism ideology in order to make them “enemies of the state.”
The unanswered question remains about whether America will morph into a total authoritarian nation—the kind of nation the “No Kings” protesters took to the streets to oppose—where “enemies of the state” will be deemed “terrorist threats to national security” demanding arrest, torture and summary executions.
There are millions trying to make that happen.
That’s why every freedom-loving American should offer a “hats off” to those “No Kings” protesters who are trying to save us from ourselves.