Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina – and previous US ambassador to the United Nations – made a curious remark about the Confederacy. Earlier in December 2019, Haley stated that the Confederate flag represented ‘service, sacrifice and heritage’ until it was ‘hijacked’ by Dylann Roof. The latter is a white supremacist murderer responsible for the shooting deaths of multiple African American worshippers at a predominantly black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

When carrying out his attack, Roof was wearing, among other racist emblems, the flag of the Confederacy. Haley, who was governor in 2015, oversaw the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina legislature building. Her remarks defending the flag as an honourable emblem may seem surprising, at least initially. Haley, the child of Indian immigrants, represents an American success story. Intelligent, articulate and resourceful, her life typifies the social mobility of non-white migrants for which America is supposedly famous.

So why, as a member of a racial minority, is she defending a symbol of an openly racist enterprise? Haley has positioned herself – with help from her colleagues in the Republican party – as a moderate and reasonable voice, in contrast to the overtly misogynistic, vulgar and racist Trump. With her comments defending the Confederate flag she has, in one swoop, demolished her status as a ‘moderate’, but has also used her racial-minority status to deflect from her party’s racist platform.

The Confederate flag – a response to civil rights

The deployment of the Confederate flag, and the building of statues of slave-owning Confederate generals, is not a benign exercise in remembering the past. The flag, and associated monuments to the military leaders of the Confederacy, were erected as a direct response to the push by African Americans for civil rights. As black Americans organised themselves to fight segregation and racist legislation, politicians from the former Confederate states – such as South Carolina – raised the Confederate flag on state buildings.

In the immediate aftermath of the US Civil War, Confederate monuments and symbols all but disappeared. They were resurrected after World War 2, as the struggle of black Americans for civil and economic rights gathered momentum. National Geographic magazine published an article, in 2015, detailing how white segregationist politicians revived the Confederate flag in order to promote the white supremacist cause. Rather than being simple reminders of the Civil War, the Confederate monuments provided a rallying point for modern-day white racism fighting a rearguard action.

Since the end of the Civil War, there have been attempts by the neo-Confederate partisans to whitewash the purpose of the Confederacy by claiming that states’ rights was the main rationale for secession. Today’s defenders of Confederate monuments make the same claim. But this dishonest explanation is undermined by the words of those who began the Confederacy – slavery and white supremacy was encoded in the founding documents of the slave-owning states.

The ‘Lost Cause’

White supremacy was defeated, but it also metamorphosed – into segregation and legalised discrimination. In the 1950s and 60s, as segregation was being rolled back, the Confederate flag reemerged as a symbol of a white racist backlash. In the discussions about race and racism in the United States, the myth of the ‘Lost Cause’ was born – the Confederacy’s violence against African Americans was obfuscated by a wilful rewriting of its history. Racist vigilantism against black communities was rationalised as defence of a ‘lost cause’ and the values of an imagined past.

White Southerners have been passing on this mythology of the ‘lost cause’, wrapping the Confederacy in a reimagined past of honour and sacrifice. The South consisted of ‘gentlemen’ willing and able to sacrifice themselves against the Northern invaders – the Confederacy became a fixture of regional identity. Reinventing the Confederate flag as an emblem of ‘Southern pride’ allows white supremacy to cast itself in the role of victim – precisely the kind of voters Haley’s political career depends upon.

The neo-Confederate revision of history – sanitising the racism of the white South and promoting a fictionalised version of the Confederacy – is a main plank in the platform of the Alternative Right today. When Haley contributes to this fictional portrayal, she is actively aiding and abetting the extreme racism of the white Right. Dylann Roof did not ‘hijack’ the flag, but carried out the kind of violence the flag represents. Since the conclusion of the Civil War, white supremacy has fought a racial-vigilante-type of warfare against the African American community.

Lawless racist vigilantes – the forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan – may sound like relics from a bygone era, but today’s white supremacist terrorism falls squarely in that tradition. The main emblem of these killers is the Confederate flag. It is not unusual for white vigilante groups to direct their violence against federal authorities – white victimhood at the hands of ‘multicultural elites’ is a recurring theme of racist organisations.

When Haley defends the Confederate flag, she is providing a platform for recycled racism – or at least a ‘respectable face’ for white supremacy. She has proven that she is articulate and intelligent, unlike Trump – but just as extreme as the US President in her ideology. When she excuses Trump’s racist comments directed at Representative Ilhan Omar – ‘go back to where you came from’ – she is facilitating a white nationalist agenda. There is no rehabilitating white supremacy.

The South Korean mercenaries who fought in the Vietnam war are not heroes. The statement ‘support our troops‘ is not only completely meaningless and idiotic, it exhorts us to uncritically accept the agenda of the politicians who have deployed them.

Let’s unpack all of this, because while the Vietnam war finished decades ago, its repercussions are still with us today.

When we memorialise soldiers and the wars they fought in, we must ask ourselves what exactly we are being asked to remember. It is possible to recognise the suffering they endured, but be critical of the predatory and imperialistic goals for which they fought.

This sentiment is not original, and is certainly not my own invention. Sam Husseini, writing in Counterpunch magazine, stated his reflections on the passing of Vietnam veteran and POW John McCain. He, similarly to the Confederate soldiers of the slave-owning South, endured horrendous suffering, but fought for a cause that was economically predatory and motivated by racist misconceptions regarding the official enemy.

Current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe faces strenuous criticism from, among others, South Korea and Australia, when he attempts to rewrite the history of Imperial Japan’s conduct in World War 2. Abe, like other conservative Japanese politicians before him, visits the Yasukuni Shrine in his endeavour to minimise the crimes of the Japanese military during WW2.

The shrine is ostensibly dedicated to honouring the Japanese soldiers who died serving in that conflict. When Abe, and rightwing Japanese politicians, visit the shrine to honour the dead soldiers – the equivalent of ‘support our troops’ in our political culture – they are engaging in a concerted campaign to rewrite the history of WW2 to absolve the Japanese ruling class of its culpability for crimes against humanity.

South Korean troops in the Vietnam war

Another imperialistic war fought for economically predatory and racist motives was the American assault on Vietnam. This attack, more so than other overseas wars, has attracted more than its share of attempted rewriting and mythologising, in particular along the lines of ‘supporting our troops’. While the overwhelming focus of retrospectives on the Vietnam war examine the conduct and suffering of American soldiers, less well known are the contributions of their South Korean allies.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in has honoured those troops who served alongside the Americans in Vietnam. His comments have been criticised by the government of Vietnam as an attempt to whitewash the numerous crimes committed by Republic of Korea (ROK) forces in that conflict. The South Korean President in the 1960s, General Park Chung-hee, sent the first contingent of thousands of South Korean soldiers into the Vietnam war in 1965.

Overall, 320 000 South Korean troops would participate in the Vietnam conflict, forming part of the American-led effort. By the early 1970s, South Korean soldiers outnumbered their American counterparts, and the ROK became a model client state. In fact, much of South Korea’s success in transforming its economy, and becoming an economic miracle’ story, is because of its participation in the Vietnam war. The Park Chung-hee era, a military dictatorship characterised by its cultivation of clan-based conglomerates, the chaebol – was a solid ally of the US in the Vietnam war.

In the aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive, the American government and its ROK allies embarked on a massive campaign of retaliation. Unleashing an orgy of violence, South Korean soldiers targeted civilians, killing women and children, and committed terrible atrocities. While the voices of South Korean veterans from that conflict are steadily being heard, the war crimes they committed have not received the attention they warrant.

In much the same way as South Korea demands an apology from Japan for the latter’s kidnapping and use of Korean ‘comfort women’ during WW2, Vietnam is demanding answers from the Seoul government regarding the exploitation of Vietnamese women, raped and abused by South Korean troops in the Vietnam conflict. Campaign groups are urging recognition and for Vietnamese women afflicted by sexual violence from South Korean soldiers, and their children produced by such forced unions.

Cliches are soothing for the conscience

Empty slogans such as ‘support our troops’ make us feel good about ourselves, but they do nothing except shut down critical debate about the role of the military in overseas wars. In fact, such slogans help to disguise the criminal character of imperial wars, and implicitly portray anti-war dissidents as potential traitors – why would you not ‘support our troops!?’ Steven Salaita, writing in Salon magazine, states that unthinking patriotism, typified by the ‘support our troops’ slogan, makes for an exploitable consumer commodity.

Salaita makes an interesting observation:

Who, for instance, are “the troops”? Do they include those safely on bases in Hawaii and Germany? Those guarding and torturing prisoners at Bagram and Guantánamo? The ones who murder people by remote control? The legions of mercenaries in Iraq?

The Vietnam Veterans Against the War campaign organisation, in gathering evidence about the conduct of American troops in Vietnam, detailed how US troops cut off the heads and ears of Vietnamese deemed to be the enemy, used electric shocks on their victims, poisoned the wells of Vietnamese farmers, killed their livestock, burned down villages and scorched the countryside of South Vietnam. Future Secretary of State and Vietnam veteran John Kerry has stated how such crimes were known at all levels of command.

Such war crimes cannot be covered with anodyne slogans and ridiculous cliches.

The Marshall Islands, a stereotypically picturesque getaway in the Pacific, is the scene of a looming ecological catastrophe. The toxic legacy of nuclear weapons testing remains with the Marshall Islanders.

The Marshall Islands, located midway between Hawaii and Australia, was the site where the US conducted nuclear weapons testing, such as exploding their first functioning hydrogen bomb. Reefs and atolls were pulverised by these tests, 67 in all.

The nuclear weapons testing, conducted between 1946 and 1958, left a staggering legacy of ecological damage and associated health effects. The US authorities buried irradiated soil from the ‘ground zero’ of the weapons tests, the Enewetak and Bikini atolls in a massive concrete bunker. Decades after the military had stopped testing, the Runit Dome was constructed to store the waste from the numerous underwater and atmospheric nuclear explosions.

While weapons testing ceased, the nuclear waste problem did not go away.

The Washington Post reported, in May this year, that the concrete dome facility housing the radioactive waste was cracking. An ageing structure, as the dome is cracks, and sea levels rise due to climate change, lethal plutonium-239 waste threatens to leak into the Pacific. Water has begun to penetrate the dome, sparking fears of an environmental nightmare scenario for the Marshallese. Rising sea levels, and the increasing occurrence of typhoons and severe weather events are impacting the structural integrity of the concrete dome.

In the 1980s, the US military built a concrete dome – a ‘kind of coffin’ according to current UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres – to house the radioactive debris and waste. As a result of disrepair, and the increasing effects of climate change, the dome is cracking threatening to unleash an environmental catastrophe in the Pacific Ocean.

The US authorities did not admit to the Marshallese that they had transported tonnes of radioactive waste from Nevada to the atolls. The US military also did not disclose that they had conducted biological weapons testing in the Marshall Islands, in particular on Enewetak atoll.

Cracks have developed in the dome after decades of exposure

A study commissioned by the US Department of Energy in 2013 acknowledged that the Runit Dome is leaking while however downplaying the possibilities of environmental damage and health risks. Climate scientists have insisted that the Pacific waters are rising, and warming, and thus present a growing threat to the old concrete structure. Not only would the bunker be damaged, but groundwater reserves would become polluted.

After the US withdrew its forces, having occupied the islands in 1944 in the days of World War 2, the United States government accepted responsibility for compensating the Marshallese and cleaning up the toxic legacy of nuclear waste. However, the Marshall Islands authorities reported that compensation has been woefully inadequate, and cited a history of distrust towards the US.

The US signed a Compact of Free Association with the Marshall Islands – coming into force in 1986 – in which the latter gained nominal independence. As part of this compact, the US was released from all liabilities arising from the nuclear weapons testing and storage of plutonium waste in the dome.

The Los Angeles Times, in conjunction with the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, sent teams of reporters to the Marshall Islands five times over a period of 15 months. They documented the ongoing environmental damage, and outbreaks of disease, that afflict the atolls.

From the Los Angeles Times:

“Marshallese leaders acknowledge that America doesn’t bear full responsibility for their nation’s distress. But they say the United States has failed to take ownership of the environmental catastrophe it left behind, and they claim U.S. authorities have repeatedly deceived them about the magnitude and extent of that devastation.”

The dome itself, containing 3.1 million cubic feet of radioactive soil, debris and plutonium, is the consequence of the US saddling the Marshall Islands with a polluting legacy. No other country has to face such potentially devastating consequences from nuclear testing – not even Belarus and the Ukraine, the nations immediately affected by Chernobyl.

Nejre Joseph is now 72 years old. At seven years of age, living on Rongelop Atoll with her family, she witnessed the largest thermonuclear explosion ever conducted by the United States, codenamed Castle Bravo. The nuclear weapons test, carried out on Bikini atoll in 1954, was in the words of Joseph, like watching two suns rise – the usual sunrise and then the explosion. This was the first weaponised hydrogen bomb detonated by the US military.

The fallout from that test rained down a white powder over hundreds of miles, contaminating the water, marine life, and the food and homes of the islanders. People on and near the atolls experienced skin burns, nausea, burning and eventually cancer. The Marshallese were unwitting human guinea pigs for the US military, which was testing the effects of radiation exposure on the human body.

Joseph has suffered radiation poisoning and has had her thyroid removed. She has been taking thyroid medication her whole life. Her example is typical of the health impacts suffered by the Marshallese in the aftermath of US weapons testing.

If the relevant authorities handling the fallout and consequences of the Chernobyl or Fukushima disasters had simply poured concrete on the area and left it, there would be howls of outrage in the media. Stinging condemnations would issue forth from international bodies, and activist-environment groups would find a receptive media willing to broadcast their message. The Marshall Islands are the forgotten ground zero.

This however, is a catastrophe which originates in, and is nurtured by, the actions of the United States. In our corporate media, outrage is selectively deployed against official ‘enemy’ nations – Russia, China, Iran, North Korea – the list is endless. The arrogance of our imperial overlords are rarely if ever questioned. A kind of tribalism is encouraged and promoted – surely we do not do things like that.

Do I think that the Marshallese are super-fantastic people deserving of special privileges? No, I do not. Do I think that there are no other equally important issues deserving of attention? No, I do not. Every political leader must take responsibility, and be accountable for, their decisions and actions. The US has consistently denied, or at least avoided, taking full responsibility for the mess which their predatory actions have created.

The Marshall Islands is where the Cold War legacy of nuclear weapons meets the modern, ongoing problem of climate change. Marshallese Islanders were exiled frim their homes, left in impoverished conditions, and with horrendous health impacts. The United States is a cowardly environmental vandal, damaging the lives of the Marshallese, and refusing to accept culpability. It is time to hold them to account.

In a bundle of leaked emails obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), Stephen Miller, senior political advisor to the Trump administration, expressed and recycled ultranationalist far right and white nationalist viewpoints. Miller, employed by Trump since the 2016 election campaign, regularly emailed his views to the rightwing Breitbart news outlet. Miller restated white supremacist and ultraright talking points, and is an architect of the Trump administration’s policies.

The emails by Miller, covering the period from March 2015 to June 2016, reveal the white supremacist thinking that underlies much of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant and racist policies. Miller lamented the demolition and removal of Confederate statues across the nation – monuments to the slave-owning states. He advocated the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory, a racially-paranoid view that sees white populations being systematically ‘replaced’ by immigration from nonwhite countries.

The ‘white replacement’ conspiracy theory is not only bonkers, it motivated far rightist and fascistic killers from Christchurch to El Paso. This perspective provides a perverse sense of solidarity – aggrieved victimhood along white nationalist lines. Such views have influenced the Trump administration’s policies against undocumented immigrants and refugees, denouncing them as a ‘security threat’ and ordering their deportation.

There is nothing particularly surprising about finding a white supremacist political advisor in the White House. However, there are a number of observations to make regarding the place of Miller in such a prominent position in the halls of political power. Earlier this year, Representative Ilhan Omar suggested – in a tweet – that Miller is a white nationalist. Her comment was met with volcanic rage from the rightwing Twittersphere.

Omar’s tweet – greeted with howls of outrage and scornful condemnations by the conservative bloviators – has been vindicated with the most recent revelations. Miller has not only directed his advice along white nationalist lines, he has resurrected racist literature from the recent past. One book that Miller approvingly cites, along with other white nationalists, is the French novel The Camp of the Saints.

The novel, published in 1973 by Jean Raspail, sets out a fictional dystopian scenario – France, a white European power, is overrun by teeming swarms of nonwhite and darker-skinned immigrants from Africa and Asia. Nonwhites, portrayed as ravenous and savage, gradually overwhelm white, Christian France – an early statement of the ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theory.

The portrayal of immigrants and refugees as ‘invaders’ pervades and underlines the immigration policies of the US administration. As refugees from Honduras and other Central American countries set out towards the United States, the Trump government denounced them as ‘criminals’, and began militarising the US-Mexico border. Honduras and El Salvador are afflicted by inequality and poverty. These outcomes are the results of decades of US regime-change policies implemented in Latin America.

The white nationalist fixates on the alleged racial threat posed by the nonwhite refugee, yet refuses to see the economic and political policies that turn those nations – such as those in Central America – into unliveable, poverty-stricken countries. In the wake of Hurricane Dorian, which hit the Bahamas in September this year, the Trump administration’s response to refugees from that disaster was to deny asylum – on the spurious pretext that ‘gang members might be’ among those seeking refuge.

While the mainstream corporate media has focused criticism of Trump on his mental state, narcissistic mindset and duplicity, this perspectives avoids discussion of a deeper malaise. It is not so much that Trump the individual has a fragile ego and frail mind – that may very well be the case. It is the fact that Trump personifies a free-wheeling, free-market white supremacist nationalism which is the scandal of the American political system.

Trump’s skulduggery, his vulgarity and deceitful behaviour are all appalling – but that behaviour is underscores by a white nationalist outlook. His campaign rallies have featured open calls by him and his supporters for vigilante violence against his opponents. When his acolytes chant ‘send her back‘ in reference to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, they are actively encouraging extrajudicial violence against their political opponents.

Alexander Hurst, writing in the New Republic magazine, states that when immigrants and refugees are routinely described as criminals, invaders, rapists, murderers and animals, vigilante violence against said immigrants in the predictable result. In fact, the United States has a long tradition of vigilante violence, in support of racist state measures. Throughout the history of American settlement, frontier-violence by white settlers was directed at the indigenous communities, abolitionists, ethnic and religious minorities, and civil rights campaigners.

Racial violence against ethnic minorities is not a relic of a long-distant past. The civil rights movement was historic and its accomplishments were game-changing. But let us not draw a false finish line under the issue of racism in the United States because it formerly elected a black president. The presence of Miller as a senior advisor indicates that white nationalism is being codified into institutional bigotry.

Vann Newkirk II, writing in the Atlantic magazine, states that the real scandal of the Trump White House is not the financial malfeasance or corrupt dealings overseas, but its platforming of white nationalist views and policies. Embracing bigotry is not just an academic exercise, but has real-world human consequences.

This month marks 30 years since the removal of the Berlin Wall. Border controls restricting the movement of people between East and West Berlin were demolished. This event was portrayed as ushering in a new period of the free movement of peoples. The wall had come to symbolise the ostensibly tyrannical nature of the former East German government, and its determination to stop free and unrestricted travel for its citizens.

The dividing wall was denounced by American politicians and the intellectual commentariat as an imposition on the inalienable right of Eastern Europeans to enjoy, among other things, freedom to travel. The Berlin wall indicated, for Western audiences, the punitive nature of an undemocratic regime. Surely a government that relies on walls is only demonstrating its politically bankrupt character?

The foreign ministers of Hungary and Austria at the time went one step further – performing a publicity stunt by symbolically cutting the barbed wire fence between their respective nations. This media-friendly PR move was meant to indicate the commitment of European nations, formerly enemies, to break down barriers, opening up a new era of cooperation.

This particular opening of the Eastern bloc border – the so-called ‘Iron Curtain’ – contributed to the restoration of capitalism in the Eastern European nations. The integration of the Eastern European countries into the global capitalist economy led to the formation of an enlarged European Union and the abolition of immigration requirements within the Schengen region.

Thirty years after the Berlin wall came down, the European Union has implemented a series of militarised borders, becoming a garrison against the entry of refugees from non-European nations. Hungary has gone so far as to authorise the deployment of the army to prevent refugees from entering the country. European countries are resurrecting electrified razor-wire borders, hermetically sealing its external borders, denying refugees any entry points. These measures are combined with the abolition of the 1995 Schengen area provisions for internal borders.

Not only have militarised borders been erected in Europe, the United States administration of Donald Trump openly campaigned on a pledge to build a militarised border wall along the US-Mexico border. Demonising Hispanic immigrants as criminals and economic parasites, the Trump administration has pushed on with its determination to build a barrier as part of his xenophobic political platform.

Across the capitalist nations, heavily-fortified borders are being implemented, in particular to stop the movement of refugees and asylum seekers. The hype about welcoming the free movement of peoples has evaporated. Walls and borders do not necessarily have to be physical structures – Australia has enacted a policy of mandatory detention of refugees, involving a series of legislative and coercive measures that punish the most vulnerable – the refugees themselves.

It is no exaggeration to state that Australia’s policy of institutionalised cruelty against refugees is an inspiration to ultra-rightist parties and their conservative supporters around Europe. Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott has given several speeches at conferences in Europe portraying refugees as basically cheats and fraudsters attempting to unfairly secure a place in the wealthier nations. Such punitive border measures are rationalised by picturing immigration as a civilisational threat.

The European Union has turned the entire Mediterranean sea as a maritime barrier against African refugees, with no expense being spared in turning that sea into a graveyard for approaching refugees. The United Nations has noted that this year marks the sixth year during which the refugee and migrant death toll in the Mediterranean has topped 1000. Migrant and refugee fatalities have become an almost regular feature of maritime traffic in the Mediterranean sea.

One of the African nations from which refugees are fleeing, and which is itself a transit point for asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa, is Libya. The latter has been in a state of fractured political and economic chaos since the 2011 European-led war of regime change against former Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Having once been a stable nation providing a unmatched level of prosperity for an African nation, Libya has been in a shambles economically as a direct result of policies pursued by the European powers.

Having created a failed state directly across the Mediterranean, the European Union washes its hands of all responsibility in producing an outflow of refugees. Instead, the militarisation of the Mediterranean is the preferred, xenophobic response of countries which once praised the free movement of peoples. The European Union has been outsourcing the refugee problem, by paying the Libyan authorities – at least the ramshackle tottering semblance of a government that the EU recognises – to house refugees in dangerous detention camps.

Sally Hayden, freelance journalist and writer who covers migration and refugee issues, wrote that the EU is funding a Libyan coast guard to prevent refugees from reaching European shores, and thus detaining them in makeshift camps in Libya. The refugees are at the mercy of rival militia groups and economic exploiters. The Italian government has been particularly duplicitous in pushing the refugee problem back into Libyan hands.

The 2017 Memorandum of Understanding between the Italian government and the Libyan authorities in Tripoli institutionalised a system of detention camps, where refugees face inhumane conditions. Such an approach only creates a pool of people vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. These immigration and refugee policies, while implemented in Libya, are designed and carried out by Italian and EU authorities.

In the immediate aftermath of the Berlin wall’s demise, the East German politicians who gave the orders for their border guards to use lethal force were put on trial and held accountable for their actions. Will we see the architects of the EU’s harsh and deliberately cruel refugee policies being held accountable for the deaths their decisions have caused?

While we remember the fall of the Berlin wall, let us not fool ourselves – Europe has erected thousands of kilometres of walls since that time. Building walls not only gives us a sense of xenophobic insularity; they project imperial power over the immigrant and refugee outsider. Walls, razor-wire and surveillance are not purely defensive measures. They have become the new status quo in relations between capitalist states.

Jews have been classified as white in the United States, but this has not insulated them against vicious and increasing anti-semitism.

In the previous article, we examined the question of whiteness in the United States, and how migrant communities have been categorised into a racially-ordered hierarchy. Those deemed to be white sit at the top of this racial pyramid, and immigrants, such as Italian Americans, struggled to be classified into the ever-fluid classification of whiteness.

However, what about the Jewish people? Technically regarded as white, they were nevertheless ostracised, subjected to anti-semitic attacks, and denounced as an internally-hostile, potentially treasonous element, in the body politic of American society. This month marks one year since the killing of 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Since the election of US President Donald Trump, anti-semitic harassment of and attacks against Jewish communities have increased.

How can an ethnic and religious minority, while legally regarded as white, still be subjected to racial attacks and prejudice? Let’s explore this topic by examining the road to whiteness.

Since the US Congress passed the first naturalisation act in 1790, Jews were defined as white and therefore entitled to apply for citizenship in the new republic. However, Jews were nevertheless the outsiders, practicing an ancient creed and its associated customs. Jews did settle in major cities, and also in those US states where slavery was permitted – the US South. In fact, southern Jews – a tiny minority of them – owned and even traded African slaves.

Mordecai Cohen, a prominent and wealthy citizen of Charleston, South Carolina, owned slaves. David Franks of Philadelphia, descendent of a prominent Jewish family and staunch loyalist during the American war of independence – loyal to Britain that is – owned and traded in African slaves. However, Jews were only a marginal player in the transatlantic racial slave trafficking. However, we must decisively reject the false and anti-semitic claim that Jews dominated and/or controlled the slave trade.

That slanderously false claim, made by former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and recycled by Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, only serves to poison relations between the Jewish and African American communities. This claim is not only historically inaccurate, it recycles the old anti-semitic canard of a malevolent and sinister conspiracy of deceitful Jews, setting out to profit from people’s misery.

The notion of a shadowy global Jewish conspiracy is centuries-old, and has undergone various permutations and manifestations. This subject is too large for the current article, but we can state that American anti-semitism, as elaborated by the US ruling class, has served to divide the white population from its Jewish neighbours. In fact, the United States, especially after the end of the civil war and mass immigration from Europe, increased the volume and scope of anti-semitism.

The new science – actually pseudoscience – of race and eugenics changed national perceptions of ethnic and religious minorities. The influx of Eastern European Jewish immigrants – with their customs, traditions and Yiddish language – was accompanied by a national campaign of paranoia that the new immigrants would dilute the ‘purity’ of the white stock and lead to a deterioration of the American lifestyle. The new ‘swarms’ of Jewish immigrants, the teeming masses bringing their culture and refusing to assimilate – these xenophobic themes resonate until today.

Eastern European Jews, escaping the anti-semitic pogroms and prejudice of Tsarist Russia, faced a new type of economic anti-semitism in the new country. Jewish immigrants took up work in the burgeoning factories and growing industries of the capitalist United States.

Henry Ford, the automotive genius responsible for revolutionising car production, was also a vicious lifelong anti-semite. Purchasing the Dearborn Independent newspaper, he used it as a mouthpiece to spread his increasingly anti-immigrant, anti-labour, and anti-semitic views. Ford updated the traditional Jewish conspiracy theory, suggesting that the 1917 Communist revolution in Russia, and its American adherents, were controlled by Jews.

According to Ford, Jewish bankers were responsible for starting World War One, positioning themselves to profit from the destructive conflict. Not only were Jews the sinister bankers at the centre of the financial world, they were also responsible for financing Bolshevik agitators and revolutionaries. The slander of Judeo-Bolshevism was not an exclusive invention of Ford’s, but he did his utmost to publicise this bizarre and ultra-rightist worldview.

The end of World War Two, and the revelation of the horrors of the Holocaust, led to a tactical shift in the United States – Jews would be welcomed into middle-class respectability, moving into comfortable suburbia. Given a small stake in the nation, Jewish communities achieved a level of acceptance, if only grudging, into the white racial hierarchy.

Donald Sterling, the real estate mogul and former owner of an NBA team, is originally Jewish. Imbibing the prejudices and outlook of white America, his bigotry against black Americans led to his disgrace. Able to amass a considerable fortune as a landlord, he held racist views towards African Americans, Hispanics and other racial minorities. His racism was ‘under the radar’ so to speak, during his rise to riches, because he adopted the whiteness necessary for advancement in American society.

However, it would be wrong to regard Donald Sterling as representative of the wider Jewish experience. It is no secret that American Jews participated strongly in the civil rights movement, suffering alongside their African American counterparts in an anti-racism struggle. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King welcomed Jews as equal supporters in anti-racism campaigns. While relations between Jews and African Americans have sometimes been tense and contradictory, there is no question that Jewish people have a long tradition of cross-ethnic solidarity with black Americans.

As anti-semitism rears its ugly head yet again, this time with the Trump administration providing a suitable platform, it is imperative to remember that whiteness is only a chimera, providing at best an illusory protection against racism. The best antidote to anti-semitism is multiethnic anti-racism and solidarity.

Since his election as US President in the 2016 elections, Donald Trump has made his sympathies for white nationalism plainly evident. He has used his office to provide a platform for white supremacist ideas, recycled white racist conspiratorial xenophobia, and has attacked anti-racist groups and political figures. Being white in the United States may seem like an obvious racial category, and membership of this group appears easy to determine.

But who exactly is white? Whiteness as a racial classification has undergone a long and unending period of social construction. In fact, social psychologists will tell you that the notion of race is a socially constructed category, influenced by political and cultural considerations. But is not whiteness obvious? After all, we can see who is white, black, Asian, Hispanic – can’t we?

Since the 1790 Naturalization Act, the United States has defined itself as a nation for ‘free white persons’. Only those fitting this latter category could apply for and achieve citizenship – with all the benefits and privileges that citizenship entailed. Better jobs, education, access to financial resources, social mobility, the opportunities for economic advancement, the chance to run for political office – being a citizen meant that you had a platform from which to make it.

The indigenous Americans, black slaves, and coloured persons were all excluded. But what about immigrants from Europe? Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians – the ‘new’ immigrants wanted their opportunity to achieve the ‘American dream’. They did so by overcoming prejudice – and becoming accepted as white. They did their utmost to prove their worthiness by conforming to the standard of whiteness. Achieving that status meant being included as citizens in the melting pot.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigrants from Italy, Greece, Eastern Europe and so on occupied an in-between place – not black, but not white either. In a book by Professor Matthew Frye Jacobson called Whiteness of a Different Color, the author examines the various ways in which the new immigrant groups battled for acceptance into the racial order – not on the basis of cross-racial and multiethnic solidarity, but by being classified as white.

The United States ruling class was already promoting national hysteria regarding the influx of ‘lesser breeds’ from Eastern and Southern Europe diluting the racial purity of white stock. Italian Americans, for instance, occupied a perilous position – not black, but still swarthy, darker-complexioned foreign-types. While Northern Italians were considered lighter-skinned and therefore more socially acceptable, the curly-haired compatriots from Southern Italy endured the hostility of the white American establishment.

Racist stereotypes about Italian Americans abounded in the media, portraying them as congenital criminals, dangerous elements and deceitful opportunists – in an eerily similar way in which stereotypes about Hispanic immigrants are recycled today. While Italians were employed in Louisiana and other southern US states as labourers – replacing the newly emancipated black slaves after the civil war – they were considered an inferior breed, and were the targets of racist lynch mobs.

After Italian Americans were lynched by racist killers in 1891 in New Orleans – killed by a mob whipped into a frenzy by official media denouncing Italians as ‘criminal and cowardly Sicilians’ – the US government faced political consequences. The Italian government, backed by its expatriates in the US launched formal measures to push the American authorities for swift resolution.

President Harrison declared – as a concession to the Italians – that 1892 would see the first nationwide celebration of Columbus Day. The 400th anniversary of the Columbus voyage was intended to be a one-off celebration. It became the portal through which Italian Americans would be accepted as white – abandoning their black American neighbours to the lynch mobs and racism of white America.

No longer would Italians be confused with blacks or other coloured ethnicities – the device they needed to acquire white respectability was at hand. Anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells, newspaper editor in Memphis – desired a cross-ethnic anti-racism focus to confront the problems of lynching, and the broader racism in American society. Italian Americans were advancing upwards in the racial pyramid of the capitalist United States.

The fight for inclusion into whiteness demonstrates the fluid nature of racial identity. Inclusion conferred economic advantages, but also meant distancing yourselves from the black outsider. The new immigrants – Greeks, Serbians, Polish, among others – began to imbibe the prejudices and underlying bigotry of their white neighbours.

Polish Americans, derided as an internal menace by white America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, gradually found acceptance by becoming white. Initially the target of racist violence, Polish communities found that be practicing the same discrimination against the African Americans as did the majority white community, they could find their position in the racial pyramid improved – though they would still be ‘ethnic whites’.

None of this is to suggest that multiracial solidarity does not exist in the United States. Black Americans have been at the forefront of building multiethnic cooperation, and have shown tremendous courage and foresight in confronting racism. Confronting black immiseration requires a multiracial struggle. However, whiteness as we understand it today has always been a malleable concept, invested with historical and political influences.

There is one group that has been regarded as white – technically – but continually targeted as the menacing outsiders. Denounced as either bankers or beggars, this group has faced the conspiratorial paranoid fantasies of the white ruling establishment in the United States. US President Trump, in his numerous Twittering rants, has rehashed malignant stereotypes and promoted phantasmagoric conspiracies about this group.

The Jewish people, while legally considered white from the early days of the emergent United States, have faced vicious anti-Semitism in all its forms. Judaism is obviously a religion, not a race; but we cannot sidestep the reality of racism faced by the Jewish community in the United States. Jews have had their place in the whiteness category, but have also found themselves on the receiving end of the racist bludgeon.

That will be the subject of the next article. Stay tuned.

This month marks one year – October 2 to be exact – since the grisly killing of dissident Saudi journalist and political figure Jamal Khashoggi. His murder, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, was particularly gruesome, and attests to the barbaric lengths to which the Riyadh monarchy will go to silence its critics. The Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the heir apparent and the ‘power behind the throne’ so to speak, has denied ordering the Khashoggi assassination. However, evidence is emerging that he ordered the killing.

Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancee, is demanding answers about her partner’s killing. Cengiz held a vigil outside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on the anniversary of his death. Thus far, no-one has been tried or held accountable for the assassination. There is no doubt that US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have enabled the Saudi campaign of denials and obfuscation regarding the Khashoggi assassination. They have supported Riyadh public relations efforts to absolve the Saudi monarchy of criminal responsibility for that crime.

The Crown Prince has carefully cultivated the image of a reformer and moderniser, cancelling the ban on female drivers, curtailing the power of the religious police, and relaxing laws on public gender segregation. The US and Britain have facilitated this image makeover of the Riyadh monarchy. The Saudi Crown Prince has been given a lavish welcome in the corridors of power in London and Washington.

In the immediate aftermath of the Khashoggi killing, the Saudi monarchy faced criticism for failing to pursue and prosecute the perpetrators. However, a year later, numerous American and British CEOs and corporate executives are gathering for the ‘Davos in the Desert‘ – the Saudi-hosted Future Investment Initiative. Corporate investment and business trading will continue as though the Khashoggi murder never happened.

The Saudi war machine takes a beating

The one area where the Saudi monarchy has received the full backing of the United States and Britain – with Australia tagging along – is its war on Yemen. Make no mistake; since March 2015, the Saudi military has waged an unrelenting war on Yemen, unleashing an orgy of destruction. The Saudis and their Gulf allies, the United Arab Emirates, are responsible for numerous war crimes, bombing hospitals, schools, water facilities, factories and bridges.

Two events over the month of September however, demonstrate that the Saudi war is not going according to plan. The Yemeni Ansar Allah movement, popularly known as the Houthis, struck the Saudi Arabian oil facilities at Abqaiq, causing the vital oil industry in Saudi Arabia to reduce its output. Saudi oil production was cut in half after the attack. Targeting the oil industry is something that the Ansar Allah movement was thought to be incapable of doing.

In addition to this attack on oil production, the Ansar Allah successfully invaded the southern Saudi Arabian province of Najran, capturing hundreds of Saudi soldiers and seizing military equipment. While all claims of military incursions and prisoner capture need to be treated with caution, there is credible evidence to support the Houthi version of events. Since the beginning of the Saudi-Gulf invasion of Yemen, Riyadh has consistently underestimated the resilience and military capabilities of its opponents.

These two events represent a serious defeat for the Saudi Arabian military, and its American and British supporters. Far from being the quick and easy victory that Riyadh expected when it launched this war in 2015, Yemen is turning into a quagmire out of which Saudi Arabia is finding it difficult to extricate itself. Despite the fact that the Saudis are the militarily stronger power, enjoying the support of regional allies, it is plausible to discuss the real possibility of Saudi Arabia losing this war – because the spectre of defeat is looming large over Riyadh.

It is worth noting that despite the asymmetrical nature of the conflict – the Saudis have imposed a full land, sea and air blockade on Yemen, given their naval and aerial superiority – the Saudi monarchy has little, if anything, to show as tangible results on the ground. The Saudi offensive – codenamed Operation Decisive Storm – was launched to impose the Yemeni government of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi as a Saudi proxy. Currently, Hadi is still living in exile with his Saudi patrons.

Britain plays along

Let us not forget the role of Britain, and its armaments exports, to the Saudi and Emirati military forces in helping to sustain the attack against Yemen. While the Khashoggi killing attracted media attention, the complicity of the UK (and Australia) in the ongoing mass slaughter in Yemen requires consistent and passionate outrage. David Wearing, lecturer in international relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, notes that it is British-made bombs and warplanes wreaking death and destruction in Yemen.

Let us dispense with the absurd notion that the armaments exports to regimes like Saudi Arabia provide jobs for workers back in Britain. The excuse of ‘job provision’ is regularly trotted out whenever the UK-Saudi relationship comes under close scrutiny. The only beneficiaries of the armaments exports industry are the owners of those narrow industries, not the working community nor the wider economy. Trade with Saudi Arabia may accrue benefits for the English ruling class, but the arms exports trade is only a minuscule percentage of Britain’s total exports worldwide.

We require a decisive break with Trump-Brexit parochialism that seems to dominate much of official politics in the English-speaking nations, and rediscover a politics of proactive solidarity and cooperation. While the Yemeni Ansar Allah movement are capable of inflicting defeats on the Saudi military, the ongoing pipeline of armaments to the Saudi war machine from Britain and the United States must be stopped.

There is no doubt that the addition of American actor Meghan Markle to the ranks of the English royal family is a public relations coup for the monarchy. Including a black princess – ‘biracial’ to use Markle’s self-description – has updated the image of an obsolete, feudal institution of privilege and power for the 21st century. As Kenan Malik observed in the Guardian newspaper, perceptions of blackness and Britishness have been revised in an attempt to make the monarchy more widely acceptable, especially to a younger audience.

There is also no doubt that Markle has been subjected to a steady stream of racist abuse and attacks on social media. Every detail of her life is opened up to the media, and Markle has faced obnoxious and vitriolic racism from the swamps of the internet and media. One example was the broadcast on Australia’s version of ’60 Minutes’, which purported to reveal that the royals are ostracising Markle, and calling for a ‘Megxit’ – a play on Brexit.

In an article for the Guardian, Kenan Malik stated that we can defend Markle from bigotry and hate, but also make a strident critique of the institution of royalty. The marriage of Harry and Meghan, while no doubt sincere, is also motivated by definitive political considerations. Nothing that the royal family does is without the input of public relations experts, advisors and intelligence officials who carefully choreograph every move and interview.

Markle’s role as a black princess – drawing from her extensive acting experience – is to bring the elements of ‘wokeness’ to the institution of monarchy. Her husband Harry, who only a few years ago spent his days exerting his energies with young women in hotel rooms, now fulfils the part of an ecologically aware philanthropist. Sitting on the board of various charities and environmental groups, Harry has had a complete image makeover, transforming into a ‘serious’ member of the UK community.

Markle has advocated for disability rights causes, as well as environmental issues. Making activism her main contribution, she recently published a Grenfell cookbook, supposedly to assist the survivors of the horrific Grenfell Towers fire – a crime for which no-one as yet has been held liable. Harry and Meghan have expressed their love of Africa – and have embarked on a tour of southern African nations. The royal tour, which includes a black princess, is designed as a public relations exercise. The British establishment seen to be ‘making amends’ for its history of colonialism in that continent.

Reinventing the image and appearance of this outdated institution of entrenched privilege is required in an age of increasing economic and social inequalities in Britain. While no expense was spared to host the wedding of Harry and Meghan, news of the Grenfell Tower fire inquiry barely registered on the corporate media’s radar. While the billionaires and millionaires gathered for the wedding, the UK government resisted demands to ban the cheap, flammable cladding which directly contributed to the lethal fire in Grenfell.

In an article for Jacobin magazine, staff writer Branko Marcetic states that regardless of Markle’s likeable personal qualities, associating her efforts as a philanthropist with the fight against global poverty actually distorts our view of the measures requires to eliminate poverty and inequality. Having a black ‘social justice warrior’ princess does wonders for reinvigorating the image of the royal family, but does nothing to alleviate the immiseration caused by the capitalist system.

Royal romances and weddings are useful platforms to deliberately cultivate a myth of national unity. Such myths can be deployed to disguise deep-seated divisions in the society, such racial discrimination. Britain has had a long history of excluding black Britons – including those whose country of origin are former British colonies – from mainstream British society. Even 70 years after the first black migrants arrived in Britain for work – the Windrush generation – the presence of black Britons is studiously ignored.

While Harry and Meghan were experiencing their budding romance, graduating on from there to an engagement and a wedding, what it means to be black in Britain came under sustained attack on social media. Professor Mary Beard, a classicist at Cambridge University, gave her approval to a series of educational materials about Roman Britain. What was controversial about that? In the depictions of Roman soldiers in Britain, the illustrator showed a black soldier alongside his white partner and children.

The fact that the Roman Empire was multiethnic cannot be disputed. Professor Beard’s ‘crime’, in the eyes of her critics, was to approvingly acknowledge that black persons – most likely North Africans – were part of the British people’s ancestry. The depiction of a high-ranking Roman soldier deployed in Britain was a cause of offence to many people. Professor Beard has described the torrent of abuse she faced on social media, by people refusing to accept British history as anything other than lily-white.

Robust debate is part and parcel of academic life in the field of Roman studies. However, we should point out that Beard’s critics were not concerned about historical accuracy – they were not complaining about any inaccurate depictions of Roman irrigation works, or Roman agricultural techniques. They were attacking the well-established feature of Roman Britain as a multiethnic society.

Britain’s history has been sanitised to fulfill the needs of an imperialistic nostalgia. The British Empire conquered not only nations, but dominated the interpretation of its own history. Black Britons, and their inclusion in Britain throughout the centuries, violate that picture of whiteness upon which British empire-building (and its monarchy) is based. Rather than listen to Meghan Markle, we should listen to David Olusoga, who has written about growing up black in today’s UK.

Olusoga, a journalist and historian, wrote about the racism that pervaded British life in the 1970s and 80s. Referring to today, he states that:

The walls of disadvantage that today block the paths of young black Britons are a mutated product of the same racism. Knowing this history better, understanding the forces it has unleashed, and seeing oneself as part of a longer story, is one of the ways in which we can keep trying to move forward.

Certainly, Markle has been treated appallingly, and she deserves to be defended. Let’s address the deeply entrenched problems of racism in Britain, rather than putting our hopes in a revamped feudal institution.

Earlier in the month (September), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that white supremacy is indeed a serious domestic terrorism threat. After the El Paso and similar white-supremacist shootings, the DHS has stated that combating white nationalism is a top priority for its work. Kevin McLeenan, the acting director of the DHS, said that the spate of white nationalist killings in the US has galvanised the department into taking action against this homegrown violent racist extremist ideology.

This change in focus from an exclusive preoccupation with Islamic extremism to one which examines the menace of white nationalism was welcomed by anti-extremism campaigners and groups. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is one of the organisations that has approvingly cited this refocus. Sharon Nazarian, the ADL’s senior vice president for international affairs, stated that white nationalism is not only a domestic threat, but has forged links with similarly-minded parties and groups across the Atlantic.

The ADL issued a wide-ranging report called Hate Beyond Borders: The Internationalization of White Supremacy. In its report, the ADL explains that white nationalism has not stayed put in the United States, but has connected with far-right parties in Europe, creating social media communities of hate and exchanging views and information about tactics to be deployed in their respective countries. This internationalisation has enabled white supremacists to rationalise their actions as part of a ‘struggle to save the white race’.

The ADL report’s authors express shock and dismay that white nationalist parties and groups have formed international connections. However, the cross-Atlantic sharing of ideas and strategies between white nationalist politicians and groups, while disturbing, is hardly new or surprising. Indeed, it is the non-surprising ‘surprise’ of our times. The ultranationalist and neo-fascistic parties, while fiercely racist, have a long history of supporting racist parties in other countries.

The globalisation of white supremacy is nothing new

A cursory glance at the history of the United States reveals that white nationalism, far from being an isolated product unique to American history, is a globalised ideology that has accompanied the rise of imperialist powers in Europe. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the codified racism of the United States was an inspiration for racist parties around the world, and in particular in Germany.

When the Nazi party hierarchy wanted to implement a series of racial laws in their own country, they looked around the world for a template they could study and follow. The practical example of a successful racially-stratified society they examined for inspiration was the United States. From the early part of the twentieth century, Nazi ideologues and party functionaries, including Hitler himself, sought to emulate the laws and regulations of legalised racial discrimination they found in the United States.

At first glance, this may seem like a strange observation to make – how could the United States, the exemplar of constitutionally guaranteed liberty and democratic governance provide a political model for Nazi Germany, the epitome of tyranny and racially-driven genocide? With the defeat of fascism at the end of World War Two, we have come to regard Nazi rule as the prime example of racial barbarism, and the Holocaust as the supreme example of unspeakable evil.

This perspective, while understandable, has made us blind to the precursors of Nazi racism. We have tried to distance ourselves from the savagery of Nazi white supremacy, while overlooking the ideological and political connections that the West made with Nazism prior to the outbreak of open hostilities. From the 1910s onwards, the global leader in legalised race-based segregation was the United States.

It was not only in the area of eugenics laws where the Nazis learned from the United States. Laws aimed at preventing the ‘racial pollution’ of the white race by intermixing with ‘African blood’ were pioneered in America. Madison Grant, author of the influential book The Passing of the Great Race, warned against racially mixed marriages and couples. This book was described as a ‘bible’ by Hitler himself. In the 1920s, Hitler expressed his admiration for the United States as the one place where the white race was making its best efforts in preventing racial mixing and thus promoting its advancement.

The Nazi party hierarchy admired the fact that the American immigration system placed race, and white racial ‘purity’, at the front and centre of its entry and application criteria. When the Nazis passed the Nuremberg laws in 1935 preventing marriage and sexual relations between ‘Aryans’ and Jews, they did so by following the direct examples of American anti-racial mixing statutes.

James Q. Whitman, a lawyer and professor at Yale Law School, wrote an extensive study of how and why the Nazis examined, and were inspired by, American racial laws. In his book, Hitler’s American Model, he elaborates how the United States was in its time, the place where legalised racism was most advanced anywhere in the world. It was in the United States, the Nazis noted, where efforts to stop the ‘mongrelisation of the white race’ were most developed. Whitman makes the astute observation that America, known for its innovation in corporate law today, was famous for its innovative race-laws in the decades prior to World War Two.

None of this is to suggest that the Americans are responsible for the crimes of the Nazi party and German military. Of course the lawyers and officials in Germany did not simply imitate American laws – they did not ‘copy and paste’. The German ruling class enacted its own bit of imperialism by joining the scramble for Africa in the late 19th century. However, the conquest of African nations, while welcomed by the Nazi party, did not interest them as much as acquiring lebensraum – living space – in the East of Europe.

Indeed, it was the white American conquest of the indigenous nations – the misnamed American Indians and their near-annihilation – which inspired the empire-builders of the Nazi white supremacists. If white colonisation could achieve a white-dominated society on the American continent, surely the same economic and political reordering could be achieved in Europe? When Hitler made his statement “Our Mississippi must be the Volga and not the Niger”, he was expressing a reorientation of German imperialism from Africa – the conquest of which he nevertheless approved as the Lord’s Judgement in enslaving an ‘inferior’ race – towards the annihilation of Jews, Slavs and other ‘inferior’ races.

White nationalism, and associated notions of ‘preserving its purity’, are neither uniquely Nazi in origin, nor confined to Germany. If the DHS wants to confront the ideology of white nationalism, it could begin by examining their own commander-in-chief, who has done his utmost to turn the Oval Office into a white nationalist pipeline. US President Trump has recycled and normalised the main ideas of white supremacy, whether he is talking to a domestic audience, or speaking on the international level.

Trump, standing in a long tradition of white supremacy, is providing a pole of attraction for ultra-rightist parties and corresponding ideology across the Atlantic. If the ADL understood this, and took steps to combat this ideology in the United States, they would not be so surprised.