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  • TimB replied to the topic Is trump dog whistling for War on America's Fourth Estate in the forum Politics and Social Issues 5 years, 3 months ago

    T rump says the Impeachment Inquiry is a “lynching”.

    The following is an excerpt from the  Journal “Miranda” article by Wendy H. about America’s history with lynching.

    “As part of the lynching ritual, white participants would inscribe on the victims’ bodies the signs of their subordination to white rule so that their mutilated corpses came to emblematize racial difference. As Foucault insists: “torture forms part of a ritual. It is an element in the liturgy of punishment; … it is intended, either by the scar it leaves on the body, or by the spectacle that accompanies it, to brand the victim with infamy” (Foucault 34). When the lynching party had done its work, the victim’s body would often be displayed in a public place as a message to the community at large. This practice deliberately violates cultural customs that aim at honoring the dead, thereby showing the white supremacists’ disdain for the black victims, their families and their community… This public torture was visually documented, and the photographs of the mutilated victims were circulated in the community…  The lynching ritual focuses on the body, asserting white power by attempting to reduce the transgressor to a thing deprived of humanity. To this end, black bodies were cut up like meat both before and after death, with less respect or compassion than people show for animals… Burning the body reduced it to an even more grotesque deviation from the human form. One particularly horrifying postcard shows a charred corpse hung from a utility pole in the center of Robinson, Texas (Appendix Figure 2).13 Another way to abase the African American body was to make it into a figure of fun. In the photograph on the half title page that opens the Without Sanctuary collection,14 a man’s corpse has been seated in a chair and his face grotesquely painted so that it looks like a clown’s. A hand holding a stick like a puppeteer props up the head (Appendix Figure 3). In another photograph, the spectators have placed a hat on the victim’s head. With his neck broken by the rope, the man looks like a comically pathetic marionette hanging from a string (Appendix Figure 4; cf. Allen et al. Figure 93). Besides illustrating black degradation, these photographs also convey the disturbing holiday atmosphere of the lynching ritual. The victims’ bodies are displayed like exhibits at circuses…”

    Who would have thought that a Constitutional procedure like impeachment could be as profane and punitive as “lynching”? Yet our POTUS says it is.  Oh wait, it’s T rump.  He’s a liar.