Joe Biden: Stuck between hate and unity

At the much-heralded United We Stand anti-hate summit organized by the White House on Thursday, US President Joe Biden urged to "silence" extremist, racist ideas and the incitement to violence.

In his speech, he recalled a young mother killed during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, West Virginia, Heather Heyer, 32, who was killed in August 2017 when a neo-Nazi sympathizer charged into a crowd of anti-racist activists, an event that, according to Biden, convinced him to come out of ostracism and run for president.

“Hate is never defeated. It just hides, and if you give it fuel, it comes out of hiding. In recent years, we have given it too much fuel in politics, in the media, and on the internet," denounced the US president and asked Congress to "end the special immunity" that social networks enjoy in spreading hatred and inciting to violence.

But in his call for unity and reconciliation, a stance that has prevailed his mandate from the beginning, he limited himself to condemning right-wing white supremacism above all, rather than its instigators, perhaps because, as he said, "there are people who say when we talk about this issue, we are dividing the nation.”

In his speech, which was somehow centered on the legislative elections on November 8, in which the Democrats risk losing control of Congress, a visibly angry Biden affirmed in a solemn tone: “We have to say it, in a clear and strong tone. There is no place in America for white supremacy or any form of hate fueled by violence. Not calling it by its name is being an accomplice.”

The accusation against him of wanting to divide the country came after the president a few weeks ago called Trump and his supporters semi-fascists, whom he accused of shaking the very "foundations" of American democracy.

Evidently, the president is stuck between the contradictions of his purposes and the diatribes of his speech. At the same time that he is trying to end hate, to bring his nation together, and to deactivate Trump politically, he seems to have no qualms about accepting the policies of those who not only incite hatred within the United States, but beyond its borders.

The same day Biden held his anti-hate summit, Florida Senator Rick Scott, at a press conference held in front of the White House, accused the current administration of being weak for supporting dictatorships in Latin America such as Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

“The president of the United States is the leader of the free world. He needs to start acting like one. Our hemisphere is becoming a more dangerous place because of Biden's weakness," said Rick Scott. In Scott’s opinion, the first thing the president should do is to introduce the restrictions and sanctions on Cuba that dated back to the mandate of Donald Trump (2017 -2021) and which, according to him, were partially lifted last May.

Similarly, Trump’s supporters, who are confident that the November 8 legislative elections will give Congress power to the Republicans, demanded the current president close the Cuban embassy in Washington, reopened in 2015, and relist the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in its list of terrorist organizations, after having removed them in 2021.

Another member of the same horde of inciters, Republican Senator Marco Rubio, added at the same conference that only two years ago, with Trump in charge, "the White House was a place where activism in favor of democracy was carried out," while with the current administration, “sympathizers of those regimes” are in charge of that region.

Such nonsense would not have gone beyond a simple Republican electoral counteroffensive if, coincidentally? -also this Thursday-, the Assistant Secretary of the Department of State for Latin America, Brian Nichols, confirmed that the patience of the United States government is not "infinite” and threatened to intensify sanctions against Venezuela, if the South American nation does not resume negotiations with the opposition in Mexico City, which were interrupted last year.

According to the EFE news agency, the statements of the Assistant Secretary, who also believes that (Maduro) has "committed crimes against humanity," were made under pressure from the Democratic senator, with Republican thinking, Bob Menéndez, the main representative of the Miami Trumpist mafia, in the current administration.

Back to Biden and his United We Stand summit, as long as the current president maintains, in order to supposedly remain united, his condescension towards the semi-fascist Trump supporters, it will be very difficult for him to make his anti-hate speech credible. As much as both parties are alike in their imperial essence, you cannot be a Democrat and a Republican, or support Trump and Obama at the same time. As he himself suggested, good cannot be defended by giving fuel to evil, just as the opposition cannot be defeated based on electoral demagoguery.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff