A Nation Divided

"[Heather] Heyer was struck down by a vehicle while exercising her peaceful first-amendment right to free speech."
"This senseless act of violence rips a hole in our collective hearts."
Charlottesville city official statement

"Donald Trump should] look at himself in the mirror."
"[He] should think very deeply about who he consorted with in his campaign, and the forces they chose to work with in their quest for political advancement."
Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer

"And yet here it was, the chants of 'Jews will not replace us' (as?). I had two more personal encounters. At Dogwood Vietnam Memorial, a man in a floppy beige sunhat started following me and explaining to me the lie of the Holocaust, the evil of the Jews, the value of DNA in determining purity. I retreated as he ran after me, screaming, 'My mother says I’m a Jew! My MOTHER! Does that mean I’m entitled to something?' (I resisted replying, 'Your mother’s love.')"
Nathan Guttman, 12 August 2017, What a Jewish Journalist saw in Charlottesville, Forward

Members of the KKK escorted by police past a large group of protesters during a rally in Charlottesville, Va. Steve Helber / AP

Journalist Nathan Guttman wrote a first-hand account of his day in now-infamous Charlottesville, there to observe the proceedings as neo-Nazis and far-right activists, the KKK and others marched to make their point that the United States belongs to red-blooded white Americans. None others need apply. They were reacting to the demands by left-wing activists and members of the Black Lives Matter group and their supporters that a century-old statue of a Confederate hero of the American Civil War, General Robert E. Lee, be removed, taken down, hidden, destroyed.

Like sensitive, progressive leftists and self-styled human-rights activists everywhere they demand that history be rewritten to obliterate all traces of those who fought for rights and values today recognized as contrary to the current social values of an enlightened society. Those who were once victims decry and embrace their victimhood at one and the same time, and any visual reminders of what, how and why they suffered, they claim triggers new pain and humiliation.

The past cannot be undone. It happened, and it is called history. We are meant to view history with today's vision, but we are not meant to believe that if we reject the history that betrays our humanity history will be re-enacted and everything will turn out just fine. There are statues of Civil War heroes to the Confederate cause in countless places in the United States. There is also the undeniable fact that the hallowed fathers of the American Constitution like humanist, intellectual and scientist of his day Benjamin Franklin was a slave-owner.

And so was George Washington, and so too was James Madison. Of the 55 founding fathers of the United States of America, 49 percent were slave owners. Should they be expelled from the annals of American history? If monuments and statues must be destroyed, why stop with Robert E. Lee? The absurdity of the righteous demands that such reminders of a dark place in history be abolished and with it the history they represent is beyond impossible.

Setting that aside as a provocation, there is nothing that can explain or exculpate the actions and counter-accusations of those who embrace fascism and express their frustrations in the form of verbal violence, let alone physical violence. That the current President of the United States issued an oblique condemnation of a violent far-right reaction to the entitled demands of those who wear their victimhood with pride and vehemence readily interpreted by the far right as support of their position is a signal that the polarized position of right and left in their extremes have much in common.

The deranged James Alex Fields Jr. whose use of a vehicle to ram the left-wing protesters marks him as an unrepentant murderer, is also someone who was once treated for psychotic behaviour. David Duke and others of his ilk are not insane, but they are dangerously threatening to those who do not subscribe to their fascination with the belief in superior and inferior humanity. And it seems that President Trump has given those threats to the universality of human equality an unspoken lift.

The mother of Fields Jr. whose name is Samantha Bloom may be a woman, given her name and its possible connections, whose offspring is a self-hating Jew by birth to a Jewish woman. It is not unheard of that some fundamentally troubled people detest that from which they were derived; this son of a woman named Bloom appears to have always venerated Adolf Hitler and everything the Fuhrer represented.

His horrified, stricken mother does not believe that her presided supports fascism though those who admire him, fascists, nationalists, anti-Semites and Hitler enthusiasts shouted "Blood and Soil", as they marched through the streets of Charlottesville in defence of a Confederate statue. And counter protesters were there in their numbers to oppose the fascists before one woman died and 35 people were injured by an incoherent man who might have shouted at a Jewish reporter: "My mother says I’m a Jew! My MOTHER! Does that mean I’m entitled to something?"

He is entitled to a fair trial. And the nation is entitled to justice.

Rescue personnel help injured people after a car ran into a large group of protesters after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017. Steve Helber/AP