The most
interesting thing about Donald Trump is that he is genuinely running for the
office of President of his nation. All his rivals – except Bernie Sanders,
maybe – want to become Emperor of the World.
There’s a huge
difference – huuuuge, as Trump himself
would say. Trump wants to keep foreign Muslims out of the USA, or at least
submit them to security clearance until he figures out what the hell is going
on. The rivals want to slaughter foreign Muslims in huge numbers – wherever
they live and for as long as the manufacturers keep the bombs and rockets
coming off the production line. (Or until Israel is satisfied with its imperial borders. Whichever comes
last.)
We don’t know
the depth of Trump’s humanitarian feelings. Does he care if millions of civilians
in foreign lands lose their homes and livelihoods, and if their children die of
disease and malnutrition? Maybe, maybe not. But I don’t believe he wants to be
the cause of it. His rivals are less
squeamish. They do want to be the
cause, and are set on continuing America’s long-term program of wars of
aggression. As one Christian cleric ordered in an earlier Crusade, “Kill them
all. God will know his own.”
Trump is not
a psychopath. That alone makes him different from most of the candidates. Aspiring
Emperors by their terms of reference are pretty much obliged to be psychopaths
who happily engage in at mass murder on a Biblical scale. Witless cruelty is their
stock in trade.
Unfortunately,
the whole idea of Trump becoming President of the US is nonsense, based on a
false premise. Neither he nor we will be called upon to judge his Presidential
legacy, because he will never succeed, being dead. The Deep State will see to
that.
He might, conceivably, overcome the obstacle of electronic
voting-machines specially programmed to foil his supporters – first, in the
race to become the Republican nominee, and later in the nationwide election. But
the lone gunman will be a tougher proposition. Or gunmen plural, or remotely
controlled cars or planes or whatever it takes. There are a thousand drugged-up
patsies prepped to sacrifice their lives to maintain a puppet-Presidency of the
kind the US has had since Kennedy.
We usually
attribute the Kennedy assassinations to the CIA – although the guilty party is
more likely to have been the FBI. Legally, it’s the FBI that is responsible for
domestic issues, so Standard Operating Procedure would be for that organisation to remove designated
domestic enemies who can’t be silenced by blackmail.
However, it
really doesn’t matter which agency it was. All the official death squads are enforcement
units of what’s now called “The Deep State” – the manipulators in the
national and imperial bureaucracy who direct the business of the empire.
As much a
patriot of the USA as Putin is of Russia, he has not sold his soul to The Deep
State or any of its sponsors. I can’t see him ever selling the Palestinians
down the river in exchange for the votes of AIPAC and the Israel-right-or-wrong
lobby, or continuing the worldwide imperial rampage in exchange for
the goodwill of the Military-Industrial-Security Complex. That moral stance is
what will get him killed.
Of course the
man is no fool. He is well aware that they (“They”) will either cheat him out
of the Presidency or kill him out. Yet he carries on with his mission. For me,
that pretty much proves his sincerity. I don’t particularly admire patriotism
as a virtue. An excessive love of country gets in the way of a respect for mankind
in general, as tribal loyalty beats out loyalty to the human species. But a truly
patriotic Head of State does not jeopardise his people’s personal safety by making their
nation hated by the rest of the world.
Trump’s patriotism
stands apart from the imperial arrogance that really doesn’t care whether its citizens
are hated or not by the rest of the world. Only military might is worth
anything – and then only in the service of the self-defined aristocrats. And they
are not about to make room for a genuine patriot.
