In his letter to the editor, Adams discusses Communism, President Trump and hatred.
I read in The Sun’s letters section recently about “President Trump’s nod to white supremacists and Neo Nazis,” so I’d like to explain a couple of things to readers who, perhaps, get their news from television.
Trump denounced the haters in no uncertain terms. In case you missed it, I’ll quote him here: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”
There was hatred, bigotry and violence on both sides. The counter-protesters came with clubs to beat people and used them. Did you see the photos of people carrying anarchist and Communist symbols? The (Communist) Workers World Party was flying a big banner.
Communism is just as pathological as racism. Do you know that among the tens of millions of victims of communism in the 20th Century many were killed or sent to die as slaves in forced labor camps just because of their ethnicity or religion — others because of their actual or suspected political ideas?
Trump also said that there were “fine people on both sides.” Of course some of the protesters were despicable, but that’s not the whole story. If you’ve never spent time in the South, you may not think that decent folk would object to the removal of statues of Confederate heroes. You might think that the Civil War was a heroic battle to end slavery and nothing else. That isn’t the way Southern people remember it.
They remember how the politically powerful North enacted protective tariffs that enriched wealthy industrialist at the expense of poor farmers. They remember the war crimes, the rapes, the destruction of people’s farms and livestock. They remember how the Union army burned everything they couldn’t carry away leaving families and whole communities to starve.
To them, Generals Lee, Jackson etc. represent defiance of an evil foreign power. Racism doesn’t explain everything that happens — honest.