Appearing at a rally in Richmond, Virginia with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam, Obama commented on the political climate in the country.

“Folks don’t feel good right now about what they see, they don’t feel as if our public life reflects our best,” Obama said. “Instead of our politics reflecting our values, we’ve got politics infecting our communities.”

Obama did not mention President Donald Trump by name, but did offer some pointed criticism that appeared to be directed at him.

“You’ll notice I haven’t been commenting on politics a lot lately, but here’s one thing I know: If you have to win a campaign by dividing people you’re not going to be able to govern them. You won’t be able to unite them later if that’s how you start,” Obama told the crowd of thousands at the Greater Richmond Convention Center.

Obama also got animated when offering some deeply personal thoughts on the events over the summer in Charlottesville.

“We saw what happened in Charlottesville, but we also saw what happened after Charlottesville, when the biggest gatherings of all rejected fear and rejected hate and the decency and goodwill of the American people came out,” Obama said. “That’s how we rise. We don’t rise up by repeating the past, we rise up by learning from the past.”

The race between Northam and former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie is considered the only competitive statewide race in the nation this year, raising the stakes for Obama’s visit to the state with the election less than three weeks away.

Obama slammed Gillespie for television advertisements attacking Northam over recent MS-13 gang violence in the Commonwealth, dismissing it as nothing more than fear-mongering.

“It’s a tactic by the way that shows Ralph’s opponent doesn’t really think very highly of Virginians,” Obama said, adding, “If he honestly thought these were serious issues he’d offer serious solutions. But he’s not because what he’s really trying to deliver is fear. What he really believes is if you scare enough voters you might score just enough votes to win an election.”

The former president is still popular in Virginia, a state he won in 2008 and 2012.

Appearing at an event earlier in the day in Newark with Phil Murphy, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Germany during the Obama administration, the former president praised Murphy as the right choice for New Jersey voters.

“When Phil and his family said I’m ready to go, I’m willing to step out there and step into what can be a pretty tough political environment, I wasn’t surprised because I knew him,” Obama said. “I knew their character.”

Obama’s re-emergence comes as President Trump has taken aim at various parts of his legacy, including the Iran nuclear agreement and the Affordable Care Act and as the controversy around Trump’s interactions with families of fallen U.S. soldiers persists.

Obama shied away from calling out Trump directly in his remarks in Newark, instead hammering his critique of the state of U.S. politics today.

“Some of the politics we see now, we thought we put that to bed. That’s folks looking 50 years back, it’s the 21st century, not the 19th century,” Obama said.

The former president also told the crowd to ignore the polls and focus on turning out as much grassroots support as possible.

“I don’t know if y’all noticed, but you can’t take any election for granted,” Obama said, “I don’t care what the polls say. I don’t care what the pundits say.”

Aides to the former president said Obama planned to stick to policy instead of political attacks on President Trump.

“It’s in no one’s interest – including the former president’s, the Democratic Party’s, or the country’s – for President Obama to become the face of any resistance or the party,” a senior adviser to the former president wrote in a statement to ABC News, “Instead, he is creating the space for leaders in the party to craft the best path forward that will make our country better.

“He is acutely aware that when he consumes political oxygen, it can stifle the attention that should be on current and emerging leaders in the party.”

The elections in New Jersey and Virginia will take place Nov. 7.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obama-hitting-campaign-trail-today-1st-time-trump/story?id=50586283

The post Obama slams state of US politics in 1st post-presidency campaign stops, calls for rejection of Charlottesville hate first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

When the Nazi iconography was discovered this summer in Herxheim am Berg, some called for the bell’s removal, others for its protection as a relic of a shameful national history. The village is still deciding what to do.

Germans have a word for coming to terms with the past: “Vergangenheitsbewältigung.” The word, coined after World War II, has no equivalent in the English language, no analog that might inform the American debate over Confederate monuments — whose defenders include not just torch-wielding neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., but also President Donald Trump.

On a continent riven in the last century by two world wars, genocide and a battle of ideas waged across the Iron Curtain, European nations have accepted the burden of curating the tortured landscapes of their past. Symbols — insignia, flags, monuments — have become explosive at moments of regime change, as shifts in political power alter the cultural currents of the day. East-west friction particularly marks the conflict over remembrance in Europe, from de-Nazification in the Cold War era to contests today over commemoration of communism’s past.

“To some extent, Germany is an exceptional case,” said Arnd Bauerkämper, a historian at the Free University in Berlin. “Only the abandonment of Nazi ideology, and the clear break with the Nazi past, enabled integration into the West — membership in NATO, German reunification. There never was such a decisive break with Confederate ideas in the United States.”

But addressing monuments to people, parties and movements that have fallen into disrepute has not been simple in Germany, or elsewhere in Europe. And while memorials to victims now predominate, particularly here in the former capital of the Third Reich, continuing strife over names and symbols illuminates the continent’s enduring divisions.

A statue of Franz Joseph I again occupies a prominent position in Prague, a century after Czechoslovak independence made the commemoration of an Austro-Hungarian emperor unthinkable. Other figures remain unpalatable. For years, Czech officials have debated what to do with the plinth once supporting a statue of Joseph Stalin that weighed 17,000 metric tons, destroyed in 1962 as the communist party line turned against the Soviet dictator.

Jirina Siklova, a Czech sociologist active in the dissident Charter 77 movement, said the site remained indelibly linked to Stalin.

“It is stimulation for an explanation of this man,” she said. “Without this statue of Stalin, and without the liquidation of this statue, the new generation and tourists wouldn’t remember this period.”

Hungary has removed Communist-era statues from their pedestals and placed them in Memento Park, an open-air museum outside Budapest. Lithuania’s Grutas Park is similar.

This has not quieted dispute over public memorials, however, particularly as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has pursued nationalist politics. A monument unveiled in 2014 to mark the 70th anniversary of Hungary’s invasion by Nazi Germany was dedicated to “the victims of the German invasion.” Critics said it obscured Hungary’s involvement in the annihilation of its Jewish citizens.

This year, activists threw paint-filled balloons at a Soviet memorial in Freedom Square in Budapest, in protest of perceived lingering Russian influence in Hungarian affairs.

Jakub Janda, deputy director of the Prague-based European Values Think-Tank, said Russian influence was inseparable from a new effort by Czech communists to commemorate Communist-era border guards, who once policed the country’s frontier with West Germany and Austria. Josef Skala, vice chairman of the Czech Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, said memorializing the guards was part of an effort to demonstrate that Czechoslovakia, in addition to the Soviet Union, was a victim in the Cold War.

“I, personally, and the party I belong to do not like rewriting history,” Skala said. “We did not initiate the Cold War. We made mistakes, yes, but we were defending our interests.”

Antipathy to Russia in Poland’s ruling nationalist party, Law and Justice, has created a new row over Communist-era monuments in the former Soviet satellite state. The Polish government has set out to remove 500 Soviet monuments, as Russian senators call on President Vladimir Putin to respond with sanctions.

Statues of Stalin and Vladimir Lenin have also been toppled in Ukraine, as part of pro-Europe revolutionary activity that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

Still another approach is that of Romania, which last year unveiled a new sculpture — depicting three wings pointing to the sky — that honors those who died fighting Communist rule in Romania and Bessarabia.

The German capital is a tableau of conflicting impulses. An underground transit station was renamed for Karl Marx in 1946 — not in the communist east but in West Berlin. Parts of the Berlin Wall remain in place, including at Checkpoint Charlie, a major tourist destination. Two years ago, the head of a giant Lenin statue was exhumed and exhibited in Berlin.

The European Union dropped in 2005 proposals to ban both Nazi and communist symbols, due to concerns for freedom of expression as well as disagreement over the scope of the prohibition. Still, many European nations bar the use of totalitarian symbolism. In parts of Eastern Europe, bans expressly extend to communist iconography. In Germany, only the prohibition on Nazi symbols and signals is unambiguous; tourists from across the globe have recently learned that giving the Nazi salute is forbidden.

Many sites associated with the Nazis stand today as haunting museums. Other structures have been demolished to thwart neo-Nazi pilgrimages. A prison that housed Nazi war criminals was razed in 1987, its materials ground to powder and scattered in the North Sea.

But purging Germany of Nazism was not as swift as severe legal codes might suggest. Nor were the country’s motives as pure, said Jacob S. Eder, a scholar of German history and Holocaust memory at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena.

“It’s important to avoid making the mistake of thinking that now because every German city has some kind of memorial or museum to the Nazi past, that this was an easy process,” Eder said. “It’s actually quite the opposite.”

Certain debates, he said, still confound the public. Parade grounds in Nuremberg where Hitler held massive rallies lie in disrepair. “The question is what to do with it and whether to let it just decay,” Eder said.

Controversy in the 1990s and early 2000s marked the conceptualization of the Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin.

“People considered it a mark of shame,” Eder said — an argument revived this year by Björn Höcke, a state leader of Alternative for Germany, a far-right party poised to enter the German Parliament for the first time in elections next month. “It was the government of Helmut Kohl that pushed for this monument, not out of a sense of moral responsibility but much more a political necessity, to improve Germany’s reputation abroad.”

From the beginning of the postwar era, as West Germany rebuilt under the Marshall Plan, external pressure guided de-Nazification.

“Our deliverance from the Nazi period wasn’t a development within Germany, but we were forced by the Allied forces to become a civilized nation again,” said Volker Beck, a Green Party lawmaker who heads the Germany-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group.

The process was faltering, as ex-Nazis sometimes found their way into power, said Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, author of “The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism.”

“But the thing that kept West Germany in the American orbit — and committed to de-Nazification — was fear of the Soviet Union,” he said. “There was no such fear in the American South.”

Aid to reconstruct Western European economies hinged on strict conditions to adopt democratic policies.

By contrast, a decade after the Civil War, as federal troops were withdrawn from the South, the decrees of Reconstruction went unenforced.

Luisa Beck contributed to this report.

Source: http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/in-a-german-village-the-bell-still-tolls-for-hitler/article_33cae76b-3629-5ad8-9648-1adba16f2903.html

The post In a German village, the bell still tolls for Hitler first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Americans have been so entangled in the Middle East for the past few decades that they have begun interpreting their own politics in the terms of that region. Is driving a car into protesters an ISIL tactic? Is pulling down statues of Confederate generals like destroying ancient Assyrian antiquities? Is Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad a mass murderer or a bulwark against fundamentalist hordes? How helpful is this importation of symbols from a region the United States has done so much to roil?

Joyce Karam points out that the white nationalist marchers in Charlottesville had a love affair with Assad. KKK figure David Duke has been flying off to give speeches in Damascus for years, attracted by the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Syria’s ruling Baath Party and its enmity for Israel (about which it mainly talks a good game). The white nationalists also admire the Russian Federation as a bastion of whiteness. Russian president Vladimir Putin has put his country’s air force at the service of Assad. Both Putin’s and America’s far right (and some elements of the American far left) see Assad as a bulwark against Muslim terrorists.

President Donald Trump struck Syria with cruise missiles last spring after allegations that the regime had used sarin gas on villagers. Breitbart, the webzine built up by current White House chief strategist Steve Bannon as a voice for the “alt-right” (white nationalists in business suits or khakis and polo shirts), suggested that the strike was the work of Ivanka Trump. Duke and a neo-Nazi site also attributed the strike to “Jewish extremism” and “manipulation” by Jews, respectively.

The far-right gangs who invaded Charlottesville last weekend chanted, “you will not replace us,” but at some point changed the slogan to “Jews will not replace us.” This sentiment reflects conspiracy theories about globalization being the work of Jewish business interests, leading to the offshoring of American jobs or the importation of cheap labor from abroad. These slurs have a long history in America, going back at least to Father Charles Coughlin’s Christian Front in the 1930s, but connecting them to Israel and Middle East policy is a recent wrinkle.

The Daily Beast and many other commenters referred to the homicide by automobile, allegedly committed by James Fields Jr., which robbed 32-year-old Heather Heyer of her life and injured 19 others, as an “ISIS-style terrorist attack.”

The reference was to the use of vehicles by lone-wolf sympathizers of the declining Muslim extremist group ISIL (IS, ISIS, Daesh) to ram civilians. Although they did not pioneer the technique, which has been used dozens of times by terrorists of various stripes for years, it has been wielded by the terrorist group’s acolytes with special lethality. In July 2016, a man of Tunisian background drove a heavy truck into crowds in Nice, France, killing more than 80. On June 3 of this year, two men of Moroccan heritage and one born in Pakistan launched a vehicular terrorism attack on London Bridge, killing eight, mostly tourists from abroad.

The far right quickly took up the vehicle attack as a tactic. In an apparent revenge incident, a British man drove a van into congregants issuing from London’s Finsbury Park mosque on June 19, killing one and wounding 11.

The alleged perpetrator in Charlottesville, James Fields, ironically enough, resembles some of the young ISIL terrorists in Europe. He idolized Nazi Germany and immersed himself in the minutiae of its military history. He tried to join the Army but was discharged after basic training for not meeting requirements. His wheelchair-bound mother’s 911 calls allege that he abused and terrorized her, at one point pulling a knife on her. He is said to have been prescribed medication for anger issues. The Nice attacker, Mohamed Bouhlel, was also accused of having anger issues and of abusing his family.

A predictable controversy also broke out about whether the alleged Charlottesville attacker could be termed a terrorist, as opposed to being a hothead who flew into a murderous rage. Some feared that tossing around the charge “terrorism” could encourage the government to attempt to widen its domestic terrorism statutes at a time when the Justice Department is increasingly hostile to any dissent. Others, myself included, pointed out that if Fields had been a Muslim, there would have been no controversy about using the label.

This debate is paralleled in the Middle East. Many who support the remaining rebels in Syria are justifiably angry that all are being tagged as al-Qaida or ISIL, pointing out that many just wanted to escape the tyranny of the Baath one-party state. The Lebanese political elite does not agree with the United States and Israel that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization (it functions as a national guard for the Lebanese south, given the long history of Israeli attempts to annex that region). The unsettled character of the definition of terrorist groups in the Middle East led neophyte Donald Trump simply to assume that the Lebanese government is an ally of the United States against Hezbollah — which is actually a part of the Lebanese government and has been for many years.

In the wake of the Charlottesville atrocity, left-leaning crowds gathered to protest the agenda of the white nationalists. In Durham, North Carolina, a crowd pulled down a Confederate statue. The American right wing has for some time peddled a meme that removing or vandalizing Confederate monuments resembles ISIL’s attacks on historic sites. The latter, a puritan Muslim iconoclastic movement, sees ancient Assyrian and other pagan statues and monuments as works of Satan (rather as in 391 AD, when Roman patriarch Theophilus and his followers tore down a pagan temple, the Serapeum, in Alexandria, as a den of demons).

The statues of Confederate figures, however, are hardly works of longstanding. Most were erected in the early or mid-20th century as a movement of official white nationalism in the South, celebrating Jim Crow or implicitly rejecting the civil rights movement. Many see them as celebrations of the region’s slave culture. As for history, the American right wing was positively ecstatic when Russians and other ex-Soviets tore down statues of Stalin, and in 2003, the Bush administration orchestrated the pulling down of the statue of Saddam Hussein in American-occupied Iraq. The issue does not appear to be the preservation of history (which could be addressed by putting Confederate statues in a museum, where they could be contextualized). It appears to be the preservation of the history of white nationalism.

That Americans are measuring themselves against the Middle East is no accident. The era of US neo-imperialism in that region, which changed in a big way with Ronald Reagan’s encouragement of the Muslim far right in its guerrilla insurgency against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and went on steroids with George W. Bush after 9/11, has helped affect how Americans see themselves at home. In a ratcheting movement, Reagan enabled the rise of al-Qaida, and Bush the rise of ISIL, providing further justifications for the new militarism. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have cycled through the military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Headlines continually blare about the foreign terrorist threat, taking the spotlight off the dangerous white nationalists at home. While most veterans are highly admirable people, the Bush administration, desperate for canon fodder, lowered military standards and it is well known that some white nationalists sought to serve in his wars as part of their ideology. One such appears to be the leader of one of the hate groups that marched in Charlottesville. American wars abroad have fed into the new white supremacism, and our longest wars are warping domestic politics. The answer to the question in my title may be “yes.”

Source: http://billmoyers.com/story/right-wing-extremism-america-middle-east/

The post Charlottesville: Is America Becoming the Middle East? first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.