WHO IS THIS STEVE BANNON?

By Robert P. Bomboy

            I never in a million years thought I’d say this. I shudder and gag even to think about saying it. But perhaps in the Alternative World of President Donald Trump, where everything is upside down and inside out, it might be useful to bring back the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee.

            And investigate Stephen K. Bannon.

            I jest of course. No fair-minded American would ever sit still for a return of HUAC (as it was known in the 1950s), though former House Speaker Newt Gingrich last June did indeed suggest bringing it back.

            The House of Representatives created its repellant Un-American Activities Committee to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities by private citizens, public employees, and organizations it suspected of having “Communist” ties.

            Memories of the Un-American Activities Committee are so repellent because any stiff who had a grudge against you could drop a dime (phone calls then were 10 cents), call you a Commie, and you’d be haled up to face the committee: “Are you a Communist sympathizer?” they would ask. “Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?”

            But now comes this Steve Bannon, who sits in the White House and brags outright that he wants to destroy the government. He is a revolutionary with unprecedented power. He wrote much of President Trump’s savage inaugural address and January’s first immigrant travel ban that cost 60,000 people untold hardship and misery. Until this week he was in the inner circle of the National Security Council whose members can push President Trump to unleash nuclear war. "I am," he says, with relish, "Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors." 

            He’s supremely ambitious for power. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power,” he believes.

               He’s an admirer of Friedrich Engels, who wrote the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx. He says he’s a “Leninist.” Lenin was the alias for the Russian revolutionary who created the Communist Party and, with his fellow Communists, began the Bolshevik Revolution that gave birth to the Soviet Union. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too,” Bannon has said. “I want to bring everything crashing down. It only helps us when . . . . they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

               In the old days, saying things like that would have put Steve Bannon first on the list for the Un-American Activities Committee.

HUAC! HUAC! God help us! HUAC!

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