Realm of the SCENSCI

What’s this liberal media’s hullabaloo and condemnation of Donald Trump all about? And lo and behold , even political saints like David Cameron, Ben Carson, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton and other angels and honest men in the media and intellectual culture, have combined to condemn poor old Trump. Actually, it’s quite hypocritical of mainstream media, intellectual culture and politicians to condemn Trump, when in fact they have laid the ground for someone like him to appear–in two ways:

First, through making the democratic process a sham where the policies don’t matter and the personalities do. The elections are totally run by the PR industry. People often do not even know their favorite politician’s actual policies. The focus then shifts to trivialities like: “I think he is a nice guy who will be kind to my children and my dog”. As Noam Chomsky said before the Bush-Kerry election: “People don’t even know where the candidates stand on issues. It takes a research project to find out… If you take a look at the polls, what you are supposed to be concerned with is things like ‘leadership’: ‘is he a nice guy, would I like to meet him at a bar?’ There is a big thing about whether Kerry goes windsurfing while Bush drives a pickup truck with a hoe over his shoulders. That’s what you are supposed to worry about. Not issues. And it shows. The latest Gallup polls, asking people why they were voting for a candidate, it turns out that for issues it was only ten percent of the people. Part of the reason is that nobody knows the position of the candidates on the issues. And you are not supposed to know. It’s none of your business. Issues will be taken care of by someone else…Most of them [candidates] are created figures, trained figures, who are supposed to act a certain way. About 75% of the population regards elections as a farce. Candidates are trained to project the ‘right’ qualities [and to] make sure that the public doesn’t understand anything about the issues. There are polls upon polls showing that people’s awareness of candidates’ policy issues keeps going down. [And also for the question] ‘Do you think the government works for you’, [the numbers] keep going down”

The policies are nowhere to be seen, because the public by design is supposed to be taken out from the whole charade. So for example, during the 2004 elections, a majority of the Bush supporters were in favor of the Kyoto protocol (climate change convention) and erroneously thought that he was also in favor! (The US ended up rejecting the treaty). In 2008, the majority (if not all) of Obama supporters believed that he was being funded by small funders. In fact, he was heavily financed by major corporations, with top honors going to Goldman Sachs! And to put the icing on the cake, the PR industry honored Obama as the best marketer of the year for 2008, ahead of Apple. If that was not an open admission of the vacuity of the electoral process, then one does not know what is.

Therefore, Trump deserves praise for at least being clear about his policies. He will ban Muslims from entering the US and he will build a wall around the Mexican border among other things. Furthermore, it’s all very easy to blame his supporters as some crazy closed-minded idiots. These are the people who have harbored real grievances over the years. They are among those people who, as the polls indicate, painfully realize that the government does not work for them. They are the ones who have seen their real wages continuously decline for the last forty years while the rich have become richer. It is easy to mobilize such people by giving them easy scapegoats such as the Mexicans or the Muslims and so on. Of course, what they do not realize is that by supporting people such as Trump they are cutting off their own limbs. But then again, the other choices (including the democrats) are only marginally better. So how does it really matter? ‘At least with Trump we know where he stands’. For most of the remaining ones, like Chomsky said, it takes a research project to find out where they stand.

The second way through which the general intellectual and political culture have led to Trump is paved by their insistence on ignoring the crimes of their own states. Thus, as far as Muslims are concerned, Trump should be applauded for his honesty. If terrorism means what everyone has been defining it to mean, then Trump is dead on the money. Of course, the operative word here is “if”. What is terrorism? Contrary to the popular definition, as one of the few honest western intellectuals explains: “It’s only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it’s not terrorism.”

In my last post I mentioned that around a million people were killed as a result of the Iraq war. What, much to my shame, I forgot to mention is that the figure inflates to 2.5 million if we count the casualties from the start of the first Iraq war, and the subsequent sanctions. And that includes at least half a million children till as early as mid 1990s alone. But who cares? Where is the awareness, the guilt, the shame, and most importantly, the atonement? It’s nowhere to be found. Forget Iraq; much like Pakistan has  refused to apologize to Bangladesh, the US too has still not apologized or more importantly given massive reparations, to Vietnam. And Vietnam is not an old story. As I write, to this very day, deformed babies affected by the chemical warfare launched by the Americans, are being born in Vietnam. To this day. But who is counting?

The west is engaged in committing the greatest number of atrocities in the world, terrorizing and killing millions. However, the intellectuals and media describe those monsters as terrorists who kill on a relatively miniscule scale, while ignoring their own, bigger, monstrous crimes. This reminds me of a story that St. Augustine narrates in the City of God:

A pirate was captured by Alexander the Great, who asked him how dare he molest the sea.

“How dare you molest the whole world” the pirate replied. “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor”.

But, if you believe in the Emperor’s version of reality, then Trump has got to be right. There are no ifs and buts about it. The only reason you would be against Trump is if you are like that hypocritical lady from Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” who is horrified at seeing cows being slaughtered but the very next day feasts on their flesh without any second thoughts. Trump not only eats animals with gleeful joy, he also watches them suffer zealously! And he is entertaining! After all, elections have been carefully engineered over the last few decades to mean nothing more than quadrennial entertainment extravaganzas. So why should anyone be surprised that Donald Trump is so successful. No one is making any humane proposals anyway. Hollande of France has vowed to increase French bombing. That shall probably lead to another version of ISIS springing up. And when that happens, when everything seems bleak, instead of looking at their own gruesome crimes, the best that the so-called liberal intellectuals would offer would be to say that we did not have enough political will to see the thing through to the very end. Riiiiiiiiiight.

The gruesome circus of blind power shall continue. Given all this, people have the nerve to be aghast at Trump? Really? I would end by quoting Chomsky again: “Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it!”