When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!
So, in a Tweet 7:31 AM – Aug 14, 2018 dehumanizing his former White House advisor and “Apprentice” contestant, Omarosa Manigault Newman, Trump represented an African American woman as a “dog” in his attempts to discredit her accusations that he is racist!
Irony?
But Trump is infamous in representing anyone who challenges him in vicious and often dehumanizing terms. Previously, this President referred to CNN anchor, Don Lemon, as “the dumbest man on television.” He questioned the intelligence of NBA star LeBron James, and he repeatedly said that California Democratic Representative Maxine Waters has a “low I.Q.”
Trump represents undocumented migrants from our southern border and the chain of sanctuary cities that protect them as infestations, and new in his arsenal of epithets is his term “breeders,” as if these migrants are an invading swarm of killer bees out to kill and devour the rest of us.
The German Nazis used similar language in its propaganda film “Der Ewige Jude” (“The Eternal Jew”) representing Jews as plague-ridden hordes of rats. The Nazi’s accepted and advanced the “scientific” view that European-heritage Jews, in fact, all Jews of every so-called “race,” constitute a separate and lower “race” as justification for extermination as if we were vermin.
Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the German secret police (Gestapo) who became the primary architect of the Nazi anti-homosexual campaign, argued in 1933 that male homosexuals are “like women” who cannot fight in a German war effort.
By all appearances, the Springs of Life Church patterned its 1990s anti-LGBTQ propaganda film “The Gay Agenda” along parallel lines.
The film’s announcer forthrightly states that “17% of homosexual men consume human feces for erotic thrills…, 20% homosexual men engage in sodomy with more than one thousand partners….,” and “They spread diseases that imperil the entire society.”
A crucial point in the psychology of stereotyping and scapegoating is the representation of minoritized groups as, in classical historian John Boswell’s words, “animals bent on the destruction of the children of the majority,” and dominant groups have long accused both Jews and LGBTQ people of being dangerous predators of young people.
In the Middle Ages, for example, dominant groups depicted the image of the hyena (an animal with a supposed homosexual nature) to represent both those engaging in same-sex sexuality and Jews.
The text of a medieval manuscript declared that the hyena “is an unclean animal… sometimes male and sometimes female,” and that “the children of Israel are thought to be similar to this animal, since they first worshiped their Lord and then, abandoning themselves to pleasure and lust, venerated idols and now pursue avarice.”
The hyena’s unsavory association with Jews and those engaging in same-sex sexuality was perpetuated in depictions of the animal’s predatory nature, such as the claim that it robbed graves and devoured corpses. It was just a small leap of imagination that Jews and LGBTQ people also abuse and recruit young people.
In 1144 began the so-called “Blood Libel” in England when Christian leaders accused Jews of slaying William of Norwich, a Christian male child, to use his blood in the making of the sacred Jewish matzos.
Many Christians believed that Jews used the blood of Christian youth because it was virginal and innocent and, therefore, was the most potent medication to heal hemorrhoids, to relieve pain during circumcision, to increase fertility, and to cure the so-called “stink of the Jews.”
Also, in line with the assertion of Christian leaders that Jewish men menstruate, they, along with Jewish women, need the blood from Christian youth to replenish their bodies of the blood lost during menstruation.
By the late 1800s, members of the medical and scientific community increasingly pathologized people with same-sex desires and people who gender non-conformed.
From the so-called “Eugenics Movement” of the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth century and beyond, medical and psychological professions have often proposed and addressed, in starkly medical terms, the alleged “deficiencies,” “mental diseases,” and even “physical” differences of LGBT people compared to heterosexuals and what has come to be known as people who are cisgender.
During what has come to be known as the “Eugenics” movement in science (coined by Francis Galton in England in 1883 from the Greek word meaning “well born” or “of good origins or breeding” in which the socially constructed hierarchical concept of “race” was codified), some members of the scientific community viewed people attracted to their own sex as constituting a distinct biological or racial type — those who could be distinguished from “normal” people through anatomical markers.
For example, Dr. G. Frank Lydston, U. S. urologist, surgeon, and Professor from Chicago, in 1889 delivered a lecture titled “Sexual Perversion” at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Chicago in which he referred to homosexuals as “sexual perverts” who are “physically abnormal.”
…the unfortunate class of individuals who are characterized by perverted sexuality have been viewed in the light of their moral responsibility rather than as the victims of a physical and incidentally of a mental defect…. Even to the moralist there should be much satisfaction in the thought that a large class of sexual perverts are physically abnormal rather than morally leprous.
Also, the American medical doctor, Allan McLane Hamilton, wrote in 1896 in his article “The Civil Responsibility of Sexual Perverts,” in the American Journal of Insanity:
The [female homosexual] is usually of a masculine type, or if she presented none of the ‘characteristics’ of the male, was a subject of pelvic disorder, with scanty menstruation, and was more or less hysterical and insane.
Physician Perry M. Lichtenstein published in his 1921 medical journal article “The Fairy and the Lady Lover,” that:
A physical examination of [female homosexuals] will in practically every instance disclose an abnormally prominent clitoris,” and that the “fairy” is a “freak of nature who in every way attempts to imitate women.
And in 1857 in France, the physician August Ambroise Tardieu wrote in his book, Medico-Legal Attacks on Morals, that:
This degeneracy is evidenced in men who engage in same-sex eroticism by their underdeveloped, tapered penis resembling that of a dog, and a naturally smooth anus lacking in radial folds.
The Swiss physician, August Forel, wrote in his 1905 book, The Sexual Issue:
The [sexual] excesses of female inverts [homosexuals] exceed those of the male,…and this is their one thought night and day, almost without interruption. [Male inverts] feel the need for passive submission…and occupy themselves with feminine pursuits. Nearly all [female and male] inverts are in a more or less marked degree psychopaths or neurotics.
And in Britain, Dr. Havelock Ellis, in Psychology of Sex, concluded:
Women’s colleges are the great breeding ground of lesbianism. When young women are thrown together, they manifest an increasing affection by the usual tokens. They kiss each other fondly on every occasion…They learn the pleasure of direct contact…and after this, the normal sex act fails to satisfy them.
The first Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) (the American Psychiatric Association-sponsored and endorsed handbook of mental disorders) published in 1952 listed homosexuality, for example, as “Sociopathic Personality Disorder.” The “updated” 1968 DSM-II described homosexuality as “Sexual Orientation Disorder (SOD).”
By 1973, the American Psychiatric Association had finally changed its designation of homosexuality for those comfortable with their sexual orientation, now asserting that it does not constitute a disorder.
Throughout history, when strong leaders engage in dehumanizing representations of entire groups of people and of individuals, oppression, including acts of violence and murder, results until and unless other individuals, groups, and nations step in to intervene and interrupt.
Returning to Donald Trump’s incessant abuses and representations, where are the Republicans and others who have supported him in the past to intervene and interrupt?
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