Possibly I have spent too many years ‘abroad’, outside of North America and Europe. Perhaps I don’t feel ‘white’, or ‘Western’ anymore. Or who knows, maybe I never really felt too ‘Western’ anyway, thanks to my Russian and Chinese blood.
That could help to explain why, when I listened to the acceptance speech delivered by Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, I felt detached. In fact I felt great emptiness. I understood the words and their meaning, and I was even able to analyze what these words would mean to the world, were this forceful man to be elected to the highest office in the most powerful country on Earth. But for a while, inside, I felt nothing; absolutely nothing, except, perhaps, exhaustion.
Outside my window was a great mass of water, separating the historic Penang Island from the rest of Malaysia. Cargo ships were majestically sailing to and from the nearby port, and it was raining heavily.
I was watching Donald Trump’s speech live on Al-Jazeera. There was hardly any other choice available, as in this suddenly pro-Western country there were no international alternative channels, for which I work for– no RT, no Press TV, and no Telesur.
Trump spoke and spoke, much longer than expected. Whenever cameras showed people listening to his speech, I felt a sense of déjà vu, that I had witnessed all this on many other occasions. Like when Obama was speaking and thousands of people were, religiously, as if in a trance, moving their lips, whispering ‘yes we can’… like when George W. Bush was being sworn in. Like…
The Messiah has arrived! Oh, that need for a religious experience, which is so omnipotent in the United States. The evangelical, putatively religious Trump (in reality, the man has no religious passion of any kind except a case of unquenchable Narcissism), defending ‘little people’! How lovely, honest and unexpected. Bravo!
And then, a few hours later, came the first ‘reviews’ of the speech. And the Western ‘left’ began doing something extremely weird, unexpected and in my opinion, thoroughly sick: in their indirect way, many prominent writers and alternative publications, actually endorsed Trump, while firing constant salvos of accusations against Hilary Clinton. (For the record before going any further: I am NOT arguing here that Clinton does not deserve all the hatred and contempt that any decent person, wherever s/he may be on the political spectrum, would level at a woman who has been, along with her huckster husband, little but an abject corporate shill and dangerous warmonger practically her entire public career. By the same token, there’s no question that the Democrats continue to be the more hypocritical side of the murderous duopoly, and that their betrayals are by now normalized, not to mention that, as witnessed with Sanders, they remain the graveyard of progressive movements.)
In any case, let us continue.
One could read directly or between the lines: “You see, the Democrats actually betrayed the ‘little people!’ They teamed up with big business, and they ruined the middle class. And now, so many good but angry folks will actually vote for Trump, because at least he is honest and he is sick of the establishment…”
Of course I am simplifying, but yes, there was that clear self-congratulatory tone I have written about in so many essays and analyses. Trashing Hilary Clinton, and trashing Democrats, was suddenly in vogue. One writer after another had to demonstrate to the world that he or she is simply too bright to believe that the Democratic Party is still the party left of center, and that it is still the force which is ready to defend the interests of the ‘common people’.
For years and decades, I thought that this was not a secret. The Republicans and Democrats were two sides of the same, crooked coin. Western ‘democracy’ —which never really came anywhere near its promise—was dead, in both North America and Europe. Why this sudden explosion of trivial statements, why this repetition of something that is so obvious, and for such a long time?
And then it hit me, as if a heavy sandbag had crashed on my head: many so-called left-wingers in the West actually do like Donald Trump! They really do! And they truly enjoyed his speech. And if it weren’t so embarrassing, they would put that religious fanatical mask on their face, hug each other, shed a few tears and begin whispering: “Yes we can!”
Yes, obviously the West’s anti-Communist ‘left’ also needs its Messiah. It needs a bunch of good Samaritans as well as those truly bad capitalists who are now suddenly ‘seeing the light’ and ‘changing their course’. It needs ‘popular revolts’.
The similarities are simply beyond amusing. Benito Mussolini Trump – the US President to be? (Source : prince.org)
Most of the West’s left has no ideology, really. It is too cowardly to aim at true revolution, and it is too Western and ‘Christian’ to actually push for internationalist ideas, ideals and solutions. And so it justifies its existence by concentrating on several local social issues, defending the interests of those so-called ‘little people’ who reside predominantly in both Europe and North America.
Now let us be very careful and define this correctly – let me repeat it once again: we are talking about the social issues that are preoccupying the West, and we are talking about the interests of those ‘little people’ living in North America and Europe, and perhaps in Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Japan (which had already been defined as a ‘honorary white nation’ by South African apartheid).
Africa, the Middle East, Asia, or Latin America: be damned! Nobody in Paris or New York cares about what is being done to those parts of the world. At most, a few people in the West shout, once in a while: “Stop the wars!” Or: “Down with our foreign interventions!” But the tremendous and continuous plunder of the planet by the Empire never really becomes the main concern of the so-called Western left. It is mainly because the entire West benefits from it, including those sacred ‘little people’ (not to be confused with the ‘un-people’, defined as such by George Orwell and inhabiting almost the entire non-Western world).
In his recent outstanding essay “COMMUNIST CHINA vs. CAPITALIST PHILIPPINES vs. IMPERIAL FRANCE”, published on this site and his China Rising blog, my Beijing-based friend and comrade Jeff J. Brown, explained:
Westerners are deluded and brainwashed into believing that thanks to capitalism, they have their great monuments, skyscrapers, plazas, parks, museums, infrastructure, prosperity, luxury and grotesque super-consumption. Wrong. They can live like the Hampshire hogs of humanity, only because of the larcenous extraction and exploitation of 15th-21st century imperialism and colonialism.
So, who suffers the indignities, humiliation and hand-to-mouth existence of capitalism? The 30,000 children who die every day… for a lack of clean water, food, shelter and medical care, along with their surviving family members in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania. These 30,000 young innocents, 11,000,000 per year who die like starved rats, really ought to be sacrificed on altars of expropriated super-consumption, their throats slit in ritualistic fashion on the National Mall in Washington, DC; Hyde Park in London and Place de la Concorde in Paris. Ten thousand children in each capital, slaughtered every sunrise, so that Westerners can continue to luxuriate like sated gods and goddesses. It should be the civic duty of every Eurangloland citizen to at least witness it once in their life, if not plunge the knife themselves in a sacrifice’s neck, as atonement for their vulgar excesses.
People like Jeff and I cannot stomach to live in the West, anymore. And those moral and powerful statements, like those above, are constantly censored in the mainstream media. Both of us care about the ‘small people’, we care very much. But we mainly care about the common and small people living all over the world, people who are, somehow, much smaller, much tinier, weaker and more defenseless, that the tiniest ones in the West.
Such issues are not discussed by the US Presidential candidates, or by the would-be leaders in Europe. Such issues are actually taboo. All mainstream politicians in the West are well aware of the fact that their voters (those ‘small people’) do not want to hear anything about the suffering of others, no matter how excessive and monstrous the suffering is (and especially if that suffering is due to the global ‘arrangement’ which sustains astronomically high standards of living in the West, at the expense of impoverished and robbed masses in virtually all other parts of the world).
The West’s ‘small people’ only want to hear about their own misfortunes and ordeals. They want to be pitied. They want a much better deal than the one they are getting these days. If they go to the barricades, it is not to protest against the holocausts which their countries are committing all over the world. It is only to get more, more and more, for themselves, by any means available, and no matter who is really paying the bill.
In his “Donald Trump and the Revolt of the Proles”, Mike Whitney recently argued:
Liberals and progressives love to point across the aisle and accuse their opponents of racism, misogyny and xenophobia, but that’s not what the Trump campaign is all about. And that’s not what Brexit was about. While it’s true that anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise in Europe and the US, the hostility has less to do with race than it does jobs and wages. In other words, Brexit is a revolt against a free trade regime in which all the benefits have accrued to the uber-rich while everyone else has seen their incomes slide, their future’s dim and their standard of living plunge.
Donald Trump knows perfectly well how to cash in on those sentiments.
He is promising to make America great again. “America first!”
He creates an imaginary country, which almost resembles a war zone, where cops are not murdering but are being murdered, and where homicide rates have risen sky-high, somehow due to those ‘bad immigrants’ who are destroying both American lives and the country’s resources.
He is naming some of the names of those parents in the US who recently lost their children. He drops three names of the parents… And somehow it works; what he is doing is extremely effective. He is a talented demagogue.
I have encountered thousands of parents who lost their children, in the US-sponsored wars and coups, all over Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. And those I saw were only a handful compared to those millions, tens of millions of the silent victims. But these are not Americans. They should not be ‘first’. They are nothing more than just some insignificant numbers, statistics and yes, ‘un-people’.
Trump’s United States resembles a ‘failed’ state. In many ways it is, of course, but mostly for quite different reasons than he is presenting.
In his speech, he singles out one country, one true ally of the United States – it is Israel. (Both parties are simply repugnant in their wooing of the Jewish vote, especially reactionary Zionist tycoons like Sheldon Adelson, the Vegas magnate Trump is hoping will donate the campaign $100 million in the next few weeks.—Eds.)
He further antagonizes China, calling its actions ‘criminal’. And he insults Iran, a country that had been suffering, for decades and centuries, from Western imperialism and colonialism.
He utters some usual Christian fundamentalist rhetoric, just so no one forgets where he stands in respect to the most aggressive religion, which has been devastating the Planet for so many centuries.
And it goes on and on, it seems that it will never stop, the same as the rain outside the window of my hotel room in Penang.
But it does stop, at some point, as everything in this world usually does. And then the roaring applause comes, and the camera shows some people crying, overwhelmed by emotion. Their leader has just spoken! Their leader just promised to make their country great again. Their leader declared that he is on their side – on the side of the ‘common people’, of hard-working Americans.
And then, almost immediately, the commentaries, analyses begin to appear online.
For some time, I cannot believe what I am reading. Several ‘progressive’ writers and publications are openly, or covertly, expressing their support for a real-estate magnate, who keeps promising to build an impenetrable wall around the United States of America! Yes, really, dudes: Bravo!
The fact that there is no difference between the Republican and Democratic parties, is something that I thought till now has been common knowledge for at least several decades. But it also appears that there is almost nothing that remains of the West’s ‘left!
I kept thinking about what several people recently told me in Beijing, Moscow, Iran and Latin America: “most of the so-called ‘left’ in Europe and the United States actually hates Communists and all socialist countries. It hated the USSR and now it hates China and Venezuela. And Russian as well as Chinese people don’t trust them, anymore; they don’t see them as an ally, but as yet another aggressive threat.”
And now comes Donald Trump, the Messiah! I’m afraid that the consensus among US ‘progressives’ will soon be: in order to damage corporatism and to defeat Hillary Clinton, let’s vote for Donald Trump!” Or is this consensus already there?
Vote for a fascist, vote for someone so clearly, so openly a fascist, in order to defeat market fundamentalism.
I think: “Damn it! No way! Never!”
Fascism and imperialism are two sides of the same coin.
If you really have that neurotic tick that forces you to stick some piece of paper into a box, periodically, every few years, then go and vote for your cat or your neighbor’s bulldog. They’d do a much better job as President. If they are not on the ballot, just add them, with your pen or a marker, then stick the paper in and go home. And you’ll not have to face the judgment and verdict of history, a few years or decades later!
Oh, and please, do not forget: both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were fully on the side of their ‘small people’. They wanted them to recover their pride, to get well-paid jobs, all sorts of social benefits. German and Italian trains began to run on time. Hitler began building the legendary Autobahns, and he believed that each German family should own its own automobile. (Volkswagen is not called “the People”s Car” for nothing!).
Both Germany and Italy were to become the greatest countries on Earth.
There was just one tiny detail and, so to speak, a defect throwing a shadow on those ‘noble’ designs: for Germans and Italians to thrive, millions, even tens of millions of human beings had to vanish! They were to be bombed, torn to pieces, gassed, or burned alive. Or forced into abject domination. But it did not matter much, did it? As these people were only lower beings, nothing more.
So long as that white ‘chosen’ race, those ‘supermen’ and ‘superwomen’ got their benefits and pride back, no price was considered to be too high.
If Hilary Clinton gets elected, the world will be on fire. She has demonstrated her ruthlessness, her ability to destroy entire nations. She may even force China and Russia into a military conflict with the West. Corruption will flourish, and the horrific corporatism will continue ruling over the Planet. We know what is ahead!
But the horrors that the humanity would have to endure, if Donald Trump gets elected, are unimaginable. Although, ‘to his credit’, he is honest, and he is providing plenty of hints. Nobody, absolutely nobody who will go and vote for him in November, will be able to later say that he or she ‘did not know’.
Both the choices given to the voters by the US regime are appalling.
But the true choice should not be between Ms. Clinton and Mr. Trump, but between this profoundly sickening and defunct system, and something totally different and new!
The bottom line is: to vote for either of these two candidates would be unpatriotic, but above all, it would be thoroughly immoral!
Philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist, Andre Vltchek has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or Twitter account.
