In true Orwellian newspeak fashion wherein, “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”, the western mainstream media often accuses Donald Trump of precisely the opposite of that which he is doing. It comes from an arrogant attitude that those who have studied the last 60+ years of American rhetoric in geo-politics will be highly familiar with.
When terrorists become freedom fighters (the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan), patriots of a nation many in the US couldn’t find on the map become threats to America (Vietcong), when the occupiers become the victims (Israel), when torture because enhanced interrogation (George W. Bush’s war on Iraq) and when genocidal fascists become liberal Europeanists (the Ukrainian coup), it is easy to see how no nation has mastered what Orwell called “newspeak” in the novel 1984, just as thoroughly as has the United States.
But in recent years, what only those following geo-political affairs were subjugated to, became a mainstay of the domestic American political lexicon. Donald Trump is merely the most prominent victim of the all-American ultra-liberal newspeak.
Donald Trump has been accused of fomenting violence, inciting racial hatred, inciting hatred against women, of dumbing down political rhetoric, of being a traitor, of threatening the peace.
All of this is in actual fact true of many if not most of his political opponents and their mouthpieces in the increasingly vicious mainstream media. One doesn’t need to like Donald Trump’s policies to realise this objective truth.
If one has the objective of keeping the peace domestically, preventing revolution and holding off discontent, the best thing to do is give an agitated majority of would-be revolutionaries (or counter-revolutionaries as the case may be) a leader to call their own.
If one’s views that are felt to be oppressed, suppressed or ignored are given power in the form of a national leader who articulates and seems to genuinely hold such views, the people will be satisfied.
Donald Trump articulated this phenomenon of pure logic when at a post-election rally, he remarked about how much calmer the audience was vis-a-vis during the election. A boxer is always at his most outwardly violent at the weigh-in. He is always at his most subdued during a victory lap.
The fact is that as US salaries fail to catch up with rising prices, as domestic working class (sometimes called middle class) culture becomes increasingly ignored or mocked by mainstream politicians, as foreign interests are valued more than domestic ones and as foreign wars become increasingly, long, costly and deadly, the silent majority that Richard Nixon spoke of in the late 1960s has become vocal, agitated and angry.
This has been the case for years. In many ways, ever since the watershed of 9/11 when a combination of an economy that left the worker behind (a trend going back at least to the 1980s) became combined with an America whose airports increasingly looked like and whose legislators increasingly sounded like the kinds of soldiers America once sent to places like Vietnam and Korea, the perfect storm was set and the discontent became palpable even if often un-articulated.
Police-state America, complete with a censorship agenda stupidly called ‘political correctness’ not only took away the livelihoods of its working citizens, but it censored their culture, their humour and their colloquialisms to the point that they felt they didn’t even have a right to complain about the problems in their lives, in spite of a Constitutional guarantee to the contrary.
Politicians like Pat Buchanan had voiced these concerns for years. However, Buchanan had the misfortune to reach his political prime during a 1990s when many Americans had not yet begin to feel the full sting of economic disenfranchisement and others could still more or less openly complain about their daily lives without being called racist or sexist. Words like ‘homophobic’ and ‘transphobic’ which are merely epithet’s designed to censor the social concerns of ordinary people were not even part of the vocabulary and America’s post Cold War victory lap (arrogant and incorrect though it was), was miles away from the post-911 crypto police state.
Had Buchanan been a slightly younger man in 2016 and decided to run in the election, he would have beat Hillary Clinton or anyone like her in landslide.
Trump represented a kind of Buchanan with a slightly less specific political theory, less academic rhetoric but a more overt sense of humour.
Trump’s message to America was ‘everything is going to be alright. I hear your concerns, I have many of them myself, I will address them if you make me your President and I’ll not shut you up in any case’. This is what “Make America Great Again” means to the millions of Americans who are invisible to the mainstream media unless they are on the receiving end of a joke from liberal so-called comedians.
Post-election, rather than re-invent the American left from a liberal experiment in social engineering to a kind of socialist bread and butter materialist leftist way of thinking that may have resonated with many of those who agreed with Trump’s diagnosis while disagreeing with his prescription, instead resorted to attacking the new President in the way they once attacked the silent majority and later the vocal majority of working class/middle class Americans. On top of this, Trump is accused of being a Russian stooge, when in reality Turmp’s attitude and temperament is vastly more American than his opposition whose policies range from handing the already broken US medical system to the insurance companies while using tax payer money to fund jihadists in Syria under the guise that such head-choppers are ‘moderate rebels’.
In doing so, the liberal left have gone from an establishment that could have resigned itself to an electoral loss and redesigned its politics, to a kind of shadow-government waiting to take power from the legitimate leader at any time. It’s no wonder the US neo-cons and liberals are so united behind the Venezuelan opposition who are behaving in the same manner, but in a different political and ideological context.
The fact of the matter is that the masses in Venezuela chose socialism although a small vanguard of capitalists refuse to accept this decision. Another fact is that the masses in America, the majority who are no longer silent, chose Trumpism, although a small vanguard of old Republican and Democratic elites refuses to accept this decision.
Should Nicolás Maduro be overthrow by the ultra-capitalist vanguard in Venezuela, the world will see just how big a protest in Venezuela can be. After all, when the legitimate government of Ukraine, imperfect as it was, was overthrown in 2014, the protests throughout the country (not just in Donbass) dwarfed those on the Maidan which was comprised of a combination of paid agitators, zealous neo-Nazis and a few genuine (however misguided) liberals, all of whom delighted in hearing speeches from John McCain, more so than American audiences who twice rejected him in Presidential elections (the 2000 primary and the 2008 general election)
If Donald Trump is impeached, the violence in America that he is keeping in check will be unleashed with a vengeance. Trump is in many ways the quintessential unity leader. In an era with a more sane opposition, he would be viewed as a king of populist version of an Ike Eisenhower figure, a kind of household name since before entering politics whom one could openly dislike, but whom very few Americans could reasonably detest. Ironically just as Eisenhower was the military man who warned of the military-industrial complex, so too is Trump the businessman warning against the dangers of globalist finance and commerce.
Those who deride Donald Trump for being a throwback to the 1950s ought to really think twice. Is this a 1950s after Korea but before Vietnam when most Americans had unprecedentedly high living standards while the young weren’t being sent to die in a disastrous foreign war? For the generation raised on Bush’s Iraq, Obama’s Middle East and Ukrainian disasters and the idea that one cannot tell a joke about a man who wishes to remove his genitals, 1955 sounds like a rather pleasant place to be and certainly a safe place to be.
Donald Trump is the lid on the pressure cooker. So long as agitated Americans (whether one agrees or disagrees with what they are agitated about) have ‘their man’ in the White House, things will be calm. If he is impeached and replaced by the neo-con Mike Pence, America will see riots that will make the Vietnam/Civil Rights era look like a small and insignificant event.
Donald Trump promised to give ordinary Americans their country back, if Trump is removed from office, they will have clear evidence of an open conspiracy to take what they view as the genuine representative of that country away.
If the American left and neo-con right wants to vindicate every so-called right-wing conspiracy theorist, then remove Trump from office, if the American left and neo-con right wants to see what a Constitutionally “well armed militia” looks like, then remove Trump from office, if the American left and neo-con right wants to see what a genuine protest movement looks like, one that will easily spiral into a riot, then remove Trump from office.
Contrary to what some may feel, this piece is not an endorsement of Trump. It is a plea for those who have for too long said that ‘war is peace’ to avoid making the mistakes that will teach them what actual war looks like, in this case civil war. The liberals often mock Trump supporters for being ‘angry’….BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR.
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