Since the “war on terror” was announced there has been virulent racism and bigotry targeting anyone from the Middle East, or anyone who even remotely looks like they are, and all Muslims. Trump’s campaign promoted this form of racist bigotry by advocating a “Muslim ban” and has since his assumption of the executive been fighting to fully enact such a religiously bigoted policy. Trump’s bringing such racism and bigotry to the executive has emboldened white Christian supremacists. This is evidenced by the events in Charlottesville where white Christian supremacists marched through the streets chanting, among other racist slogans, “Jews will not replace us”, before one of them drove through a crowd of counterdemonstrators in an act of domestic terrorism, killing Heather Heyer.
The recent act of domestic terrorism, the mass shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh perpetrated by a white Christian supremacist, illustrates the life or death significance of these social issues related to religion in the United States. These movements of white Christian supremacy that have recently erupted in heinous acts of terrorism must in the immediacy be opposed by any means necessary. Constructive social outreach, exchange and education ought to be pursued in order to at minimal temper such hatred, bigotry and racism. It is devastating that what Sigmund Freud diagnosed as the narcissism of minor differences appears to be ineradicable, though his prognosis of it as a relatively harmless manifestation of aggression is fatally erroneous (Freud, 1989), it must at all costs be defused.
References
Zinn,
Howard, (2003). A People’s History of the
United States: 1492-Present. HarperCollins.
Freud, Sigmund, (1989). Civilization and Its Discontents (p. 72). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1930).
