Cyclone Idai is one more reason to feel utter
shame at the purposeful self-harm being indulged in this country and America at a time of
global need.
One part of the world wallows in excess in all its
forms while leaders indulge victim fantasies and the rest of the world goes to
hell. Two wealthy countries – the UK and the US - seem intent on jeopardising
their comfort and security to pursue ugly fantasies and chase the false
bogeymen they blame for problems which are actually caused by the excesses of unfettered
capitalism. The unprecedented growth in White Nationalist terror shows us that
those with everything are convincing some very unstable people that growing
social problems are not the result of greed and corruption of a few at the top
but brown people who have even less than they do. It’s the oldest trick in the right-wing
playbook.
In the US, Trump still whines on about a wall to
keep out Mexicans and ISIS (!) while an Australian white supremacist who
admired him slaughtered 50 worshipers in New Zealand mosques and all mortal
terror on US soil over the last decade has been at the hands of the White Nationalists/Supremacists
he refuses to condemn.
I know many on both left and right who indulge in
conspiracy theories. I always say to them – ‘I’d like to believe in conspiracy because
it would suggest someone was in charge. They are not.’ However, the self-interest
groupings of the mega powerful and ultra-wealthy chase hard what is best for
themselves, whether it is the wet dream of total de-regulation driving many in
the upper echelons of Brexit Apocalypse or those who – despite his obvious
failings as a human being and leader - continue to support Trump – because it
means they will get even more of what benefits them.
If Trump and Brexit do not convince you of what I
have just written, think of the recent hundreds of deaths of innocent air passengers
because – it appears – Boeing could not be bothered to train pilots properly
and the Air regulators no longer have the funds to properly oversee the air
industry. Think of the horrific human sacrifices torched to the god of Don’t Care at Grenfell Tower. Boeing’s message
is the same as Grenfell - profits before people every time now in the wealthy
West.
Here in the UK we may nominally live in a Western
Democracy as do Americans but it would be pushing it to call what we have now
Western Civilisation.
As Trump, son of a man who was arrested on a KKK
march in 1927 dog-whistles his followers on a political rampage through truth
and decency one thing is clear – White Nationalism in the US and its nasty anti-immigrant
manifestation in Australia have similar roots to the xenophobic imperialism
driving the Brexit hard right.
Trump’s unfortunate paternity would be less of an
issue if he had ever taken one of the many recent opportunities to condemned
White Nationalist terror and violence.
These personally flaky white men, like the recent
Australian murderer in New Zealand seem – ironically – to fear the very thing
their forefathers perpetrated on the indigenous inhabitants of their, now,
native lands. Many of the White Nationalists emboldened by unchecked right wing
leaders, state their fear of being ‘replaced’ like the anti-Jewish marchers in
Charlottesville. The anti- immigrant clarion call of Farage during the EU
referendum was ‘re-claim our borders’ ignoring the fact that since Thatcher,
much of what belonged to the British people has been sold off to the highest
bidder. What is there to put a border around?
Britain never imported the vileness of its
slave-trade to the UK as in the US; it did not ethnically cleanse indigenous
peoples on UK soil as European settlers did in the US and as white settlers
tried to in Australia. It did, however, export that brutality in the form of
empire and colonies and many of the wealthiest families in the UK can trace
their money back directly to the proceeds of the misery of slavery which
spanned centuries.
The cabal that call themselves the ERG (see last
week’s post) have a neo-colonialist style and rhetoric that is, to my brown ears,
one polite step away from White Nationalism.
We have the horrifically and tragically tangled mess
of self-interest verses a desperately needed green agenda. We have the extreme
profit motives literally killing people so some can amass more money than they
could ever spend. We have the cohesion of co-operation across borders which
took many bloody conflicts to birth verses the self-destruct of Brexit. There is
the abomination of Trump’s White Nationalist anti-Muslimism and anti-Mexican
rhetoric and the new Right anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim disease in Australia
which seems to feed off the unfounded but deliberately inflated fear that the
horrors that benefitted these very people could be visited upon them. It is all
an unholy mess and a truly black irony.