Trump’s racist rhetoric ‘key factor’ in rise of anti-Asian hate crimes in US: Analyst

Former US President Donald Trump's relentless xenophobic remarks about the Chinese is the “most important factor” in the rise of hate crimes against Asians and Asian-Americans in the country, according to a US-based political commentator.

Rick Staggenborg, a political observer from the US state of Oregon, told Press TV that Trump’s references to the COVID19 as the “Chinese flu,” characterization of China as “the enemy” and blatant racist comments has made others feel that “expressing their own bigotry is acceptable”.

Violent attacks against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the US have seen an alarming surge in recent years, mainly attributed to the former US president for employing racist language against them.

Last week, in yet another hate crime against Asian-Americans, an elderly woman was stabbed to death in Riverside, California, police said.  

It came less than a month after a gunman went on a shooting rampage in the Atlanta area, Georgia, killing eight people, including six women of Asian descent.

“These are also the type of people who are most likely to blame "the other" for their problems, just as the Nazis appealed to the antisemitism rampant in Weimar Germany,” Staggenborg told Press TV in an exclusive interview.

Many Americans, he said, fear that the “popular support for fascist policies is still strong on the right”, and Trump continues to yield influence which poses “a real threat to what masquerades as democracy in the US”.

“As in Nazi Germany, the normalization of such deviant behavior has emboldened the more violent racists to attack the targets of their hate,” the commentator noted, saying it is “very easy” to provoke racist violence when the former president “panders to the absolute worst of his base.”

On the people of color in the West being always subject to racism, Staggenborg termed the phenomenon “a fundamental aspect of European settler colonialism.

“Those who try to justify imperialism have done so in the name of "civilizing" other societies, bringing them the benefits of "Christianity" or in the case of Israel, "creating a place where Jews can feel safe," even at the cost of ethnically cleansing the indigenous population,” he said.

“All these rationalizations are based on the assumption of racial superiority,” he added. ”America was built by the labor of enslaved people. Chinese were brought to the US with promises of opportunity, used to build the railroads, then abused and victimized when they were no longer needed for that purpose.”

The US-based analyst said societies like the US and Israel were “established by genocide”, so it is not surprising that their legal systems were designed to “maintain the relationships between the subjugated populations and their Anglo and Zionist masters.”

“Of course, people of color were not the only victims of colonialism. The poor of England, people from Southern Europe and Jews have all been victims of the depredations of the wealthy elite who have made decisions for the British and Anglo-American empires. The fundamental benefit of racism in such a system is that by allowing poor Whites to imagine that they are superior to their brothers and sisters of color, they work to preserve the system to maintain their own positions of relative advantage,” Staggenborg explained.

He said the US government has not done enough to stop racism, especially against Asian-Americans, terming the narrative of America being “the land of the free” as “fiction”.

“To change things, it is necessary to admit to the ugly truth of racism and its lasting effects across generations. The civil rights protests of the 60s were a small step forward, but progress has not been steady,” the commentator stressed.

He said the political system in the US is corrupt and heavily prejudiced against people of color.

“While there are obvious exceptions like John Lewis and John Conyers, Black leaders do not ascend to the top rungs of government unless they are thoroughly subservient to the moneyed interests that really run the US and dictate its foreign policies,” Staggenborg said.

He, however, hastened to add that there is a “potential for real change” with the rise of Black Lives Matter movement, backed by many white Americans.

“The fact that calculating politicians in the Democratic Party have come to rely on identity politics to get out the vote for their corporatist candidates means that if they want to remain a viable party, they had better be willing to fight for racial justice, including for Asian-Americans,” the political observer stated.

“That may make it more difficult to continue the crazy China-bashing that Biden has engaged in, if advocates of racial justice can look beyond the rights of American BIPOC individuals and see that they are not the only ones under the thumb of the Anglo-Zionist Empire. As long as we tolerate justice anywhere, there will be no real justice for anyone,” he added.

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