We live in tumultuous days… one could say “the end of an era”.
It is clear that there is a storm coming, however, the question is will it be the sort of storm that provides sustenance and relief to drought-stricken and barren lands, or will it be the sort of storm that destroys indiscriminately and leaves nothing recognizable in its wake?
President Trump is definitely a traditional, Christian, law-and-order kind of guy. A progressive he is not, though he is remarkably pragmatic. For all of his (hopefully) first term Donald Trump has been a man under siege from the Left, which has wielded all of its power in ever-greater levels of attack. The Blues have been after him in this new Civil War, doing everything imaginable to separate Trump’s supporters from Trump. Now, those attacks have taken the following forms over the years:
The American Civil War in 1861-1865 proved that even constitutional governments are not able to stand when civil opinion determines that the Constitution no longer needs to be obeyed. This is the same situation that is unfolding in our sight now, during the begining of the Second American Civil War.
Due to the Black Lives Matter protests statues around the world of “racists” are being torn down, but why?
Right now, as statues across America and beyond are being defaced and/or destroyed by Black Lives Matter protestors it is a good time to reflect on who the heroes on our monuments should be and ask ourselves if we even need any of these pieces of brass and concrete at all in the 21st century. Why does seemingly every country on Earth bother with using public space for the secular worship of dead political and military figures? What point do monuments even serve?
Statues commemorating colonizers, slavers and imperialists are toppling from their pedestals on both sides of the Atlantic in the wake of mass protests over the U.S. police killing of African-American man George Floyd. The surge in anti-racist public anger has widened to target other icons seen as glorifying racism and oppression of other peoples.
In earlier articles, I noted that America has been skirting the precarious cliff-edge of ancient antagonisms, dating back to the Civil War – Red versus Blue. The two irreconcilable visions of American life: on the one side, the ‘Federalists’, who partly have morphed into cosmopolitan ‘Sorosites’, and claim the moral high ground on matters of life; and on the other, a tradition of state co-sovereignty, dating back to the 1871 (the Articles of Confederacy). That divide remains. It is – as it has long been – aside from the FDR era, an overarching frame.
Libya as a nation has never been the same since the start of its Civil War. A war that was ultimately started by then U.S. President Barack Obama.
Caitlin JOHNSTONE
I have a bedtime story for you.
