Image by Trent Yarnell.
In his haunting July 5, 1852 speech titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” the great abolitionist and escaped slave Frederick Douglass said this to United States Americans about the national birthday they had just hailed in the name of freedom and equality:
“Your celebration is a sham, your boasted Liberty, an unholy license, your national greatness, swelling vanity. Your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless, your shouts of Liberty and equality… mere bombast, fraud, deception, a thin veil to cover up crimes, which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
These are words worth revisiting as the United Stated prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary two weeks.
What is the meaning of the Declaration of Independence’s rhetoric about people’s rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to immigrants denied adequate medical care and otherwise abused in fascist Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) growing network of concentration, torture, and death camps?
What is the meaning of the Declaration’s stirring denunciation of despotism: to Black Americans stripped of Congressional representation; to women forced to carry out unwanted pregnancies; to civil servants stripped of employment for no just cause; to protesters bloodied and even murdered for opposing Trumps mass deportation program; to journalists silenced and fired for criticizing the Trump administration; to politicians prosecuted for criticizing the president?
What is the meaning of American “liberty”: to Iranians massacred by Donald Trump’s fascist-run Pentagon this year, to Cubans dying because of Trump’s escalated embargo on their socialist nation; to Latin Americans grieving the victims of Trump’s boat strikes (criminal extrajudicial executions in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific); to Africans dying because Trump and the trillionaire Afrikaner Nazi Elon Musk shut off humanitarian assistance to their continent; to millions denied the right of asylum and refugee status because of their skin color?
What is the meaning of July Fourth to the millions of US-Americans who desperately need but cannot afford the health care sold by America’s for-profit medical system and insurance mafia?
How does humanity expect to successfully pursue happiness in a planet poisoned by rampant capitalist pollution and warming, by a profit-mad ecocide the current US fossil-fascist president is eagerly accelerating?
What does the DOI’s notion that legitimate government rests on “the consent of the governed” mean when majority public opinion is consistently trumped by concentrated wealth and power on one key policy issue after another? What is the meaning of democracy in a nation where the top hundredth owns (a) more wealth than the bottom ninety percent and (b) most of “democratically elected” – that is, plutocratically selected – officials?
How does a nation square its claim to be a shining “beacon of liberty” with its status as the world’s mass incarceration leader? How do that claim and the nation’s boasts of freedom and happiness match-up: with the fact that the United States is an armed madhouse where schoolchildren must undergo regular mass shooting drills; with the confinement of millions to desperately poor and crime-ridden neighborhoods because of the color of their skin; with the regular ongoing murder of Black and brown people by racist police, unabated by past massive protests (the Mike Brown, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd rebellions)?
How does the DOI’s bill of grievances against the “royal brute” King George III square with the lethal presence atop the world’s most powerful state of the fascist Trump regime, whose “history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny” (Thomas Jefferson’s July 4th language), aim to remake US government and society on Amerikaner fascist – white supremacist, patriarchal, xenophobically nationalist, and dictatorial – grounds?
What is the meaning of July 4th’s rebuke to the British monarch when a deranged, malignant, and fascist President of the United States: says that nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning our blood;” orders a brutal racist and nativist campaign of ethnic cleansing; calls Somali Americans and a Somali-American Congresswoman “garbage;” puts up social media posts depicting himself dumping shit on “No Kings” protesters from a US bomber; repeatedly threatens to annihilate an entire civilization (“send it back to the Stone Ages where it belongs”); depicts the nation’s first Black president and First Lady as apes; orders a military parade in honor of his birthday; uses the White House grounds to stage a human cockfighting (“Ultimate Fighting”) exhibition that ends with him smiling as a victorious white gladiators says that former First Lady is a “man;” regularly conveys classic palingenetic and fascist narratives of national regeneration; relentlessly assaults free and fair elections; deploys fascist gendarmes to maim and even murder protesters; needlessly and unconstitutionally occupies US cities with military troops; calls domestic dissent, free speech, and public assembly as foreign-sponsored terrorism in needs of state repression; calls it “treason” (punishable by execution) for Congresspersons to tell military personnel that they have the right and duty to refuse to carry out illegal orders; tells 800-plus top US military brass that the nation’s top adversary is “the enemy within,” meaning all who criticize the Trump regime; tells US generals and admirals that US cities should be used as training grounds for foreign wars; regularly calls moderate and centrist political opponents “radical Left lunatics;” pardons 1600 fascist thugs who attempted to physically cancel an election he lost; turns the White House into a corrupt vehicle for monumental, previously unimaginable self-enrichment; turns himself into the de facto Speaker of the House of Representatives?
What is the meaning of the Fourth of July’s when this deranged, depraved, debased, disgusting, and demented swine of a president works with his fascist party to create a federal judiciary and a fascist Supreme Court that: lets him unconstitutionally run for a second term; obstructs his prosecution for high state crimes; grants him lifetime immunity from federal prosecution for any past, present, or future crime he commits in the name of official presidential duties?
What is the meaning of the nation’s founding promises when this ludicrous yet lethal monster of a president murders thousands, including hundreds of schoolgirls, in a reckless and failed imperialist “excursion” – his word for his monumentally criminal and expensive war on Iran – and then responds to his humiliation by claiming “victory” and saying he wants to put his illegal war “in the rear view mirror”?
And what are we to make of the Declaration’s trumpeting of the people’s right to revolution – to “alter or to abolish” and “throw off” governments that impose tyranny and despotism – when “we the [US-American]people” continue to tolerate the existence of an American fascist regime? As Refuse Fascism notes in its new call for sustained mass resistance:
“The danger we face is not only what the regime is doing. It is the millions who oppose fascism adjusting to, and being conditioned to, adapt to each new outrage. To tell themselves that the midterms or someone else will stop this. To learn to live with what they once swore they would never accept. History is full of moments when people deluded themselves there was still time—until suddenly there wasn’t. The question now is whether that will happen again—or whether a force can be forged that is capable of providing the leadership needed to change the course of history.”
The post What is the Meaning to Humanity of the Fourth of July in the Time of Trump? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.