Will Trump’s Authoritarian Attacks On Peaceful Americans Make Violent Revolution Inevitable?
By Jon Hochschartner Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons As President Donald Trump’s fascist aspirations become impossible to deny, I’ve been thinking about a quote from one of his predecessors. President John Kennedy said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” The point is that when authoritarians cut off avenues of peaceful change, which Trump seeks to do, violence becomes the only option remaining. It’s unavoidable, given our irrepressible desire for freedom. Trump has created a vast secret police force that kidnaps people off the street, without due process, and sends them to foreign and domestic concentration camps. He’s ordering the military to occupy cities controlled by his political opponents. Comedians who mildly criticize him are pulled from the air through government coercion. Trump’s September 30 speech to a gathering of admirals and generals was just one of his latest authoritarian escalations. “We have many cities in great shape,” the president told the assembled leaders of the Pentagon at Marine Corps Base Quantico. “But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical-left Democrats — what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles — they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.” Americans need to understand Trump’s authoritarian threat clearly. He is in the process of consolidating a totalitarian regime which seeks to end democracy in this country as we know it. As a socialist, I’m well aware of left-wing criticisms of capitalist democracy. However, the system Trump is trying to replace it with, which takes inspiration from present-day autocracies in Russia and Hungary, would be infinitely worse. We cannot be sanguine about this possibility. Anyone with any kind of public platform at all — even if it’s as small as a few hundred social media followers — must do their part to raise the alarm about the looming authoritarian threat. The goal here, of course, isn’t to scare people into inaction. Rather, it’s to shake people out of their complacent stupor. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, we must stoke a revolutionary frenzy, because that might be what is required to dislodge Trump and his cronies from power. The anti-fascist coalition has a wide range of policy goals. For instance, above all else, I’m an animal activist. My priority is reducing nonhuman suffering and premature death. I believe the most promising way of achieving this is through a massive infusion of state and federal funding into cultivated-meat research. The new protein is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. However, none of our policy goals can be achieved under a right-wing dictatorship. I pray violence isn’t necessary to overthrow the current regime, but with each passing day it becomes harder and harder to imagine Trump and his fascist cronies leaving office voluntarily. We’ve already seen these gangsters launch a mob attack on the United States Capitol to halt the transfer of power on January 6, 2021. We must assume they will be far more organized, with much greater institutional support on their next attempt to end our fragile democratic experiment. Jon Hochschartner lives in Connecticut. He is the author of a number of books, including The Animals’ Freedom Fighter: A Biography of Ronnie Lee, Founder of the Animal Liberation Front. To Support our independent investigative journalism contributions are welcome via Cashapp to: $BlackStarNews Also support Black Star News by buying merch from our brand new Black Star Store!
Black News 
By Jon Hochschartner
Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
As President Donald Trump’s fascist aspirations become impossible to deny, I’ve been thinking about a quote from one of his predecessors. President John Kennedy said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” The point is that when authoritarians cut off avenues of peaceful change, which Trump seeks to do, violence becomes the only option remaining. It’s unavoidable, given our irrepressible desire for freedom.
Trump has created a vast secret police force that kidnaps people off the street, without due process, and sends them to foreign and domestic concentration camps. He’s ordering the military to occupy cities controlled by his political opponents. Comedians who mildly criticize him are pulled from the air through government coercion. Trump’s September 30 speech to a gathering of admirals and generals was just one of his latest authoritarian escalations.
“We have many cities in great shape,” the president told the assembled leaders of the Pentagon at Marine Corps Base Quantico. “But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical-left Democrats — what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles — they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.”
Americans need to understand Trump’s authoritarian threat clearly. He is in the process of consolidating a totalitarian regime which seeks to end democracy in this country as we know it. As a socialist, I’m well aware of left-wing criticisms of capitalist democracy. However, the system Trump is trying to replace it with, which takes inspiration from present-day autocracies in Russia and Hungary, would be infinitely worse. We cannot be sanguine about this possibility.
Anyone with any kind of public platform at all — even if it’s as small as a few hundred social media followers — must do their part to raise the alarm about the looming authoritarian threat. The goal here, of course, isn’t to scare people into inaction. Rather, it’s to shake people out of their complacent stupor. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, we must stoke a revolutionary frenzy, because that might be what is required to dislodge Trump and his cronies from power.
The anti-fascist coalition has a wide range of policy goals. For instance, above all else, I’m an animal activist. My priority is reducing nonhuman suffering and premature death. I believe the most promising way of achieving this is through a massive infusion of state and federal funding into cultivated-meat research. The new protein is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. However, none of our policy goals can be achieved under a right-wing dictatorship.
I pray violence isn’t necessary to overthrow the current regime, but with each passing day it becomes harder and harder to imagine Trump and his fascist cronies leaving office voluntarily. We’ve already seen these gangsters launch a mob attack on the United States Capitol to halt the transfer of power on January 6, 2021. We must assume they will be far more organized, with much greater institutional support on their next attempt to end our fragile democratic experiment.
Jon Hochschartner lives in Connecticut. He is the author of a number of books, including The Animals’ Freedom Fighter: A Biography of Ronnie Lee, Founder of the Animal Liberation Front.
To Support our independent investigative journalism contributions are welcome via Cashapp to: $BlackStarNews
Also support Black Star News by buying merch from our brand new Black Star Store!
