All you have to do to join is look the other way

Yesterday I wrote about how racism compares to narcissism and that the base considers the nasty guy the personification of white supremacy. Today I look at another aspect of the nasty guy, the GOP, and white supremacists through a thread tweeted by A.R. Moxon.

Moxon begins with a the nasty guy saying 86,000 dead is a small percentage, that most people aren’t infected and most who are infected don’t die.

I clicked on my computer’s calculator and see that 86,000 is 0.03% of the population of this country. And, yeah, looking at it in terms of percent, this is indeed a small number. Even a million deaths would be 0.3%, which is still a small percent.

Most people rightly don’t look at it as a percentage. When one talks of a million deaths we think of a million as a very big number. We consider the million grieving families who lost someone they love.

Moxon wrote that the way this is framed shows the nasty guy is unconcerned with human life.

A leader capable of it is capable of killing millions.

A population obeying such a leader makes such death inevitable. That's what we're fighting.

Not only is the nasty guy downplaying the number of dead, he is also downplaying the grieving of it. No amount of loss is unacceptable, except for his own life.

This is a genocide mindset.

It is a mindset shared by GOP senators and by most of the party.

The great promise of his campaign is he would share the same disregard for *those people* as his base. That’s what I covered yesterday. That base hasn’t yet figured out he has the same disregard for them.

He is now asking for us to join him in his vast unconcern for the lives of other people. All you have to do to join is look the other way. Moxon included a quote from Elie Weisel:

We must always take sides.
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

After reading Moxon’s thread a question came into my head: Why do despots kill? Why is the nasty guy – and Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and all those other mass murderers – so unconcerned with life that they kill so readily?

One type of person a despot kills is the opposition. One can readily understand wanting to get rid of those who might be instrumental in removing a despot from power. But still, death seems extreme (and it is). There are other ways of neutralizing an opponent. Of course, despots usually do those first. Along with opposition are those who know secrets that if revealed would cause great difficulty for the despot (a recent example of this is the “suicide” of Jeffrey Epstein).

The next type of people a despot kills are those he targeted with hate. A despot frequently (always?) gets into power by targeting some group. He accuses them as being the reason the country is not doing well. He gets his followers riled up. Hitler did it with the Jews and others deemed “unfit.” The nasty guy is doing it with Muslims and immigrants.

This is supremacy. I’m better than you and to prove it I’m going to make your life miserable so that mine looks wonderful in comparison. I’m going to do it because I can. I understand that the more supremacist a person becomes the more oppressive he becomes and the more such oppression ends (and must end) in the death of those in the targeted group.

As I’m writing this I’m listening to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra streaming service and their performance from December 2017 of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10. Long after the premier the composer said that the second movement is a musical depiction of Joseph Stalin. The music is threatening and violent. Yes, it was written after Stalin died. I paused the stream when buffering problems interrupted the music a few too many times.

Neither of the above categories explains what is going on in America now. The nasty guy is killing (allowing the virus to kill) indiscriminately. The virus doesn’t care whether the victim is part of our despot’s base or opposition. I know he is working to deny masks and ventilators to blue states, which leads to deaths, but red state governors are trying to open their states too soon, also leading to deaths. So why is there a genocide mindset that seems to glory in death, no matter who it kills?

Again, I think it is supremacy taken to the extreme. A despot wants to control everyone. And the ultimate control is being able to kill. No matter who dies.

In listening to the third movement of this symphony I recognize the composer’s signature motive. He used it in several works. In the German spelling the first three letters of his last name are “Sch.” Add the first initial and in the German way of specifying notes this come out to D, E-flat (es), C, B (H). Perhaps the composer is saying the response to a despot you must assert yourself.

Shostakovich is a fascinating figure in modern music. He walked a very fine line between writing music that reflected the world around him and avoiding condemnation of the Soviet censors. Many people feel his music both celebrates and subverts Soviet life. I highly recommend his music, though the repetitions of the 7th Symphony can be a bit much and the end of the 8th can be depressing. Perhaps start with the 5th Symphony. His most well known pieces are the symphonies and the string quartets.