Trump’s vulgarity: blessing in disguise?

30 Jan

This from OffGuardian today.

Obama sent drones to attack weddings and markets in Somalia and Iraq, and Britain and US sell bombs to the Saudis, who drop them on Yemeni civilians without a thought of repercussion, or even rebuke, from their Western allies. These countries have been destroyed. Libya, Iraq and Somalia are husks of states, with barely infrastructure to supply water to everyone, let alone do background checks on all the mercenaries and militant zealots hopping over the borders between the various war-zones America has dotted the Middle-East with.

Interestingly, none of these cynical and murderous acts of war ever resulted in a petition to stop Bush, Clinton or Obama from entering the country. Creating a failed state, killing a million people, and rendering millions homeless is less of a black-mark on your character than a 90 day travel ban.

I agree completely, but the piece then goes on to offer some questionable logic:

IF you believe in the rise of al-Qaeda and ISIS, IF you still think that these organizations are anything but American constructs for proxy wars and regime change, IF you truly believe in the fear porn and staged-managed terror the media hydra constantly pumps out, IF you truly believe these people are a threat to ordinary innocent civilians all over “the West”…then you have to agree a travel ban is a practical and logical step to control that threat. Just as it was in the 1970s, just as it was in 2011, just as it was in 2014.

And if your response to this move, as the mainstream media response has been, is to talk as if this threat doesn’t exist? Well, then you are admitting that you don’t believe your own coverage, that all the hyped-up “terrorism” talk was at best ratings driven hysteria, and at worst agenda-pushing lies.

Even if we agree with the premise (as I do not) that violent Islamism is just “fear porn and stage managed terror” – as opposed to believing (as I do) that it is the all too real creation of western imperialist aggression and its racist subordination of the aspirations of hundreds of millions in the middle east – the conclusion is still erroneous. To call Trump’s latest move a ‘travel ban’ is as euphemistic as his critics’ use of words like ‘unprecedented’ is false and hyperbolic. More importantly, the ‘travel ban’ is neither ‘practical’ nor ‘logical’. There’s a bunch of reasons why not but I’ll just take the most obvious: its exclusion of Saudi Arabia.

* * *

For all Trump’s nastiness I never bought the Clinton as lesser evil argument. On Syria she was set to take us into WW3. But now there’s something else. A UK petition cites Trump’s “misogyny and vulgarity” – crimes clearly worse than bombing the middle east every day for eight years – in demanding cancellation of his state visit here. It’s now topped a million signatures.

In its pressure on Theresa May, the petition raises the faint hope of another plus in Clinton’s defeat. Could the furore over Trump see the beginning of an end to a ‘special relationship’ in which the UK has traded all independence in foreign policy for favoured status in Washington?

OK. Probably not. Presidents come and presidents go, while imperialism is in for the long haul. All the same, these are interesting times …

2 Replies to “Trump’s vulgarity: blessing in disguise?

  1. To add to accuracy it also needs to be pointed out that the claim about the lack of opposition to the Bush State visit does not stack up. I cannot recall whether there was a petition or not but there were certainly massive demonstrations in London on the day of that visit. I even recall meeting two people from New Zealand, corralled near the park entrance near Buckingham Palace.

    • Yes, and this shows just how carefully we have to tread. Nine times out of ten I’ll take OffGuardian’s analysis of Trump over MSM and liberal analyses. But there’s a danger here, and I’ve experienced it in my own thinking and writing. Refusal to buy the liberal narrative on Trump – not just for its myopia, double standards and often as not sheer ignorance but because it lies too close to the agenda of a ruling class for whom HRC’s defeat was a setback – can lead to dubious reasoning of our own. And to defending the indefensible.

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