Naughty Trump against PC tyranny

Even many Republicans, especially the neocons, hate Donald Trump because, unlike them, he intuitively opposes tyrannical PC orthodoxy.

I suspect the feeling is indeed intuitive rather than cerebral, for the president doesn’t strike me as a man capable of thinking things through, especially before he talks. Hence, even when his heart is in the right place, his head often goes its own way, trailing in the wake of his tongue. That often gets him in trouble, even when he doesn’t deserve it.

The current outburst of vitriol has been caused by Trump’s supposed ambivalence about the events in Charlottesville, Virginia. The outburst of violence there was ostensibly caused by a protest against plans to remove the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee from the city centre. The protesters clashed with counterprotesters, and mayhem ensued.

‘Ostensibly’ is the operative word here, for political thuggery is always an aim in itself, with the face value of the argument only ever acting as a pretext. But let’s consider the face issue first.

Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War, was the most brilliant general on either side, winning numerous battles despite being grossly outnumbered and outgunned.

Before that he had served in the US Army for 32 years, distinguishing himself as a talented officer. In fact, Lincoln offered Lee the command of the Union forces, but the latter felt honour-bound to lead the army of his native Virginia and later of the whole Confederacy.

However, Lee’s side lost the war, and the victors wrote its history. According to them, the North attacked the South for the sole noble purpose of liberating the slaves. That’s simply not so.

The issue of slavery was more complex than simply splitting the country along the Mason-Dixon Line. The Southern states, being mostly agricultural, used slaves more than the industrial North, but both sides were tarred with the same brush, as it were.

Most signatories to the Declaration of Independence were slave owners, and one of the most radical egalitarians among them, Thomas Jefferson, not only owned slaves but also increased their number by avidly copulating with some of them.

In his Monticello estate he bred slaves using the same agricultural principles as those applied to breeding farm animals – and had them whipped to raw meat when they tried to escape.  “All men are created equal,” Jefferson wrote – but presumably only if they’re white. Dr Johnson was right when quipping: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Many Northern commanders, such as Grant and McClellan, were themselves slave owners, while many Southern generals weren’t. And Lee had actually freed his slaves two years before the war. This emphasises what has to be obvious to any unbiased observer: the war was not just about slavery.

True enough, the Southern states seceded largely because the federal government had put obstacles in the way of spreading slavery into the newly acquired territories. However, Lincoln and his colleagues explicitly stated on numerous occasions that they had no quarrel with slavery in the original Southern states.

Their bellicose reaction to the secession was caused not by slavery but by their in-built imperative to expand the power of central government over state rights.

“If that would preserve the Union, I’d agree not to liberate a single slave,” Lincoln once said. Note also that his Gettysburg Address includes not a single anti-slavery word – and in fact Lincoln dreaded the possibility that he himself might be portrayed as an abolitionist.

In other words, either Lee deserves a statue in his native state or practically none of his illustrious contemporaries does. Slavery is a widely shared blot on American history, and few historical figures were left unsullied.

Therefore the protest against the removal of Lee’s statue was legitimate in general, and it was legal since the state authorities had issued the requisite permit. However, life is lived not in general but in particular. And the particularity in question was such that the marchers were mainly assorted scum: Klansmen, neo-Nazis, white supremacists et al.

I once lived in the South for 10 years and, if I still did, and didn’t detest gangbangs, I might have joined in. It’s possible that some perfectly decent Virginians joined in too, out of respect for their history. But they would have gone home having taken one look at the human refuse who marched with them – or for that matter against them.

For the counterprotesters were as fanatical as the other lot, and their action wasn’t officially endorsed. But it had to be organised: such outbursts are never haphazard. Hard-left ‘community organisers’ did their job, and a crowd of leftie scum looking for trouble turned up on cue, brandishing baseball bats.

The febrile atmosphere was charged with violence and it duly arrived. The two gangs, one mainly Nazi-brown, the other mainly leftie-red, clashed – as their typological ancestors did in the streets of Berlin, Rome and even London. While aware of the chromatic difference, I can discern no other.

Neither could Trump, who offended the PC neo-fascists by saying correctly that both sides were to blame. “What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?” he asked reporters. “Do they have any semblance of guilt?”

But then Trump pulled off the contortionist trick of putting his foot in his mouth. There were “fine people” on both sides, he said. Moral equivalence was indeed called for, but that was the wrong kind. There were no fine people on either side. They were all scum.

All hell broke loose: Trump violated one of the seminal laws of political correctness, according to which brown scum are the embodiment of evil, whereas red scum are merely impetuous youngsters who may commit regrettable acts, but at least they do so in a good cause.

Political correctness has become a surrogate god, and it’s a wrathful deity devoid, unlike real God, of mercy. Hence the neocon senator McCain tweeted: “There’s no moral equivalency between racists and Americans standing up to defy hate and bigotry.” Even those who favour their own brand of hate, was the unspoken refrain.

McCain’s parteigenosse Marc Rubio chimed in with “White supremacy groups… are adherents of an evil ideology which argues certain people are inferior because of race, ethnicity or nation of origin.” Presumably, as opposed to adherents of another evil ideology whose offshoots claimed tens of millions of lives in the previous century.

Then the former community organiser Obama broke the world record of tweet readership. Yet his contribution is unparalleled in its mind-numbing banality: “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin or his background or his religion… People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.”

Yes, they can be taught to love neo-fascist political correctness and hate its neo-fascist bogeymen. Hence the enslavement of transplanted Africans by racists continues to rankle much more than the enslavement of half the world by communists.

The latter only committed unprecedented crimes against humanity, while the former wicked lot did something worse: they defied political correctness two centuries before the term even came into being.

The retrospective indulgence issued to communists also covers every other hue of reddish fascism. Bad boy, Trump. He went against the grain of the new cult and got hurt in the process.