El Paso, USA fascist terrorist massacre

This 4 August 2019 video says about itself:

Mourners gathered in Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, where 20 people were killed by a gunman who opened fire at a Walmart.

The Mexican government is looking into taking legal action against the United States after six Mexican nationals were killed and seven others were injured in a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, Secretary of Foreign Affairs Marcelo Ebrard said Sunday: here.

By Patrick Martin in the USA:

Behind the El Paso massacre

Race, class and the threat of fascism

5 August 2019

In the last eight days there have been three mass shootings in the United States, two of them occurring just over 12 hours apart this weekend. Events like the killings in Gilroy, California (4 dead, including the shooter, and 15 wounded), El Paso, Texas (20 dead and 26 wounded), and Dayton, Ohio (10 dead, including the shooter, and 16 wounded) have become part of the daily life of this country.

Again, as always, the press responds with the required dose of clichés about tragedy and the community coming together, but every serious political question is covered up.

What are these questions?

First, the massacres in Gilroy and El Paso occurred against the backdrop of Trump’s open incitement of violence against immigrants and racial minorities. Although Patrick Crusius, the El Paso gunman, went out of his way to absolve Trump in the statement he posted on the internet, there is no question that he and other fascist-minded individuals are acting with full knowledge that they enjoy the sympathy of the government.

It was Trump who declared during the 2016 campaign that he would post bail for any supporter who did violence to a protester, who urged police “not to be too nice” when they arrest suspects, and who pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio after his conviction on contempt of court charges related to the illegal detention of immigrants. At a campaign rally only two months ago, Trump posed the question of what could be done with refugee claimants at the border, and grinned broadly when a supporter shouted, “Shoot them!”

Over the past month, the US president intensified his incitement of violence. As the WSWS noted in the wake of his attack on the city of Baltimore as a crime-infested, rat-infested hellhole in which “no human being would want to live”: “Trump is playing with fire, and he knows it.” Trump and his advisors calculate that “his blatant provocations will intensify an already unstable political environment, with an immense potential for violence, and create conditions that will enable him to invoke dictatorial powers to uphold ‘law and order.’”

Crusius detailed his motivation in a four-page manifesto published on the internet that begins by hailing the Christchurch, New Zealand mass killer, who murdered 51 people at two Muslim mosques earlier this year. He then declares, in language that echoes countless Trump campaign rallies, “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”

More is involved, however, than Trump’s incitements. The killer in El Paso expresses the emergence of a distinctly fascist tendency in the United States, which combines virulent racism and anti-immigrant hysteria, while making an appeal to grievances against the capitalist system.

The reference to “replacement” in the manifesto signals the fascistic character of the Crusius manifesto. The white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 chanted “Jews will not replace us” (and were said by Trump to include “many good people”). Similar language is used by European neo-Nazis and by the New Zealand [Australian] gunman, Brenton Tarrant, all claiming a conspiracy by big business and/or Jews to replace whites in Europe and the United States with immigrants drawn from Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The shooter’s statement makes a demagogic appeal to social grievances, including unemployment, low wages, heavy student debt and the decline of working-class living standards, blaming all these phenomena on a supposed conspiracy by corporate America to replace high-wage American workers by importing low-wage foreign labor. This is also characteristic of fascism, which seeks to provide a nationalistic outlet for the social divisions within capitalist society.

…

Historically, the struggle against racism has always involved the exposure of its underlying illegitimacy. Race is not a genuine category of social analysis, but an antiscientific construct whose bankruptcy is increasingly obvious under conditions where there are tens of millions of children and young adults born of “mixed” marriages.

…

Finally, the proliferation of mass shootings is in the United States is clearly bound up with the generalized atmosphere of violence and the militarization of American society promoted by both parties over the past 30 years, particularly since the onset of the “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Patrick Crusius had just been born when Columbine took place. His whole life has taken place amid unceasing violence directed by American imperialism against the world.

The sickening regularity of incidents of mass homicide in America, now combined ever more directly with the politics of extreme reaction, is an expression of a deeply dysfunctional society.

The real opposite to race-based appeals is a political struggle based upon class: uniting all those who work and create the wealth of society, against the tiny minority of capitalist owners who appropriate that wealth and subject society to their ever more frenzied demands to increase it.

https://twitter.com/WheresMyArk_23/status/1157747796033716224

https://twitter.com/JamCityAntifa/status/1157750785553391616

At least 19 people are dead and several injured after the mass #walmartshooting in #ElPaso.

A Twitter account bearing the suspect’s name contains “BuildTheWall” hashtags, a photo of guns spelling out “Trump” & liked tweets from a far-right Youtuber. https://t.co/Kfno444Zty

— Southern Poverty Law Center (@splcenter) August 3, 2019

2020 DEMS LINK TRUMP’S RACISM TO EL PASO SHOOTING Democratic presidential candidates spoke out Sunday against President Donald Trump’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric, linking it to the El Paso shooting as police are investigating whether the suspected gunman, a 21-year-old white man, was motivated by a hatred of Hispanic people. [HuffPost]

MEXICO THREATENS TO SUE OVER SHOOTINGS Mexican foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard said Sunday that the attorney general would consider litigation claiming that terrorism was committed against Mexicans in a shooting in El Paso, Texas, in which 20 were killed, including six Mexicans. [Reuters]

Rihanna slams Trump’s apparent inability to call mass shootings “terrorism”.