Did the fire and fury, lock and load rhetoric of President Donald Trump cause Kim Jong Un to retreat? On Tuesday, North Korea’s state controlled media reported Kim paused his own nuclear brinkmanship to watch “the foolish and stupid conduct of the Yankees.” Trump delivered it by once more arguing that both sides were to blame for the violence in Charlottesville.
The president’s response to both crisis is a clear and imminent threat to our democracy.
The “Unite the Right Rally” began with hundreds of neo-Nazi supporters and sympathizers carrying torches to the Thomas Jefferson statue on the University of Virginia (UVA) campus. Around it they found a few dozen people forming a human chain and chanting “no Nazis, no KKK, no fascists USA.” The torch bearers shouted back with ugly slurs while some screamed “we outnumber you” several times just before the fighting broke.
A UVA student filming the scene admitted he couldn’t see who started the fight. But the neo-Nazis seemed intent on provoking the weaker of the two sides so they could show their strength by striking back.
The following day, they marched into the downtown area near the newly renamed Emancipation Park. Many wore body armor and carried combat weapons. Instead of unequivocally condemning their demented worldview, Trump focused on a minority of helmeted counter protestors holding wooden sticks or baseball bats. He claimed they charged “with clubs in their hands.”
The violence culminated in a terrifying scene where neo-Nazi supporter James Alex Fields Jr. allegedly drove his car into the crowd, killed a 32-year-old woman and injured 19 others. It took three days for Trump to call that an act of murder.
Although we can’t know what was going through Fields’ misguided mind, he may have believed the neo-Nazis couldn’t bully their adversaries into submission unless someone like him was willing to use the violent means at his disposal.
And that’s the frightening aspect of Trump’s rhetoric toward North Korea. Especially because his choice of words echoed President Harry S. Truman, who, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, said Japan could “expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this Earth” if they refused to surrender. Three days later he dropped another one on Nagasaki.
Nuclear bombs haven’t been used in a war since then. But in the early stages of the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur sought permission fire up to 50 of them into the North. Even though Truman refused, a three-year U.S. bombing campaign still killed more than a million civilians.
Every U.S. president since Truman has proclaimed using nuclear weapons is a last resort. And yet none of them have issued a formal policy against the first strike option. Last summer, several cabinet members convinced President Obama not to change that, with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter arguing Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin would take it as a sign of American weakness.
Formidable threats to destroy the nation’s enemies might be a projection of strength. But with Trump in the White House, that poses the danger of affirming the neo-Nazi and white supremacist belief that violence is justified to control or eliminate all non-white, non-Christian people that they define as America’s enemy. For Congress and the public to ignore that is to follow the path taken by those in Germany who silently watched the mass deportation of Jews to concentration camps.
Now there may have been far too many exaggerated, poor taste references to Hitler made during Obama’s presidency and George W. Bush’s before him. But when our president fails to distinguish between those marching with the neo-Nazis and counter demonstrators, it’s time to admit it can happen here.
The so-called “counter-violence” by radical leftists isn’t the solution. We must create a nation dedicated to non-violence as an enduring first principal. It must include denouncing the first strike option, endorsing the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and working to fulfill our obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty we ratified in 1970.
But right now, there’s little hope of ensuring peace at home or across the world. And that won’t change until the American people push back hard enough so that Trump and his enablers will have to resign from office.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
