Ask Bucko

It is difficult to read the future, but it looks like we are entering a period of nihilistic destruction, led by people too immature to gauge the chaos and suffering they are wielding.

Aimé Césaire wrote, in his book Discourse on Colonialism in 1950,

“The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.”

It is hard to go past this quote. It certainly appears to be appropriate for the United States in the time of Trump.

Donald Trump has hijacked the American dream, and replaced it with unlimited arrogance, and a monumentally callous disregard for basically all forms of humanity, apart from his preferred cohort. They are White, Evangelical Christian, Males, with lots of Money, and no sense of history.

They are all so transparent because Trump and his followers are absolutely certain that there will never be a day of reckoning. They, through his protection, are completely convinced that they will never face accountability, because they wield ALL the power.

This is the way eight year old boys think. They live in a world without consequences, and they do not value anything beyond their sense of belonging. Trump and his cabinet are basking in the sunshine of the inner circle, and there is not one member of that circle who has not shrugged off his education, his culture, his conscience or his ‘humanity’.

There are women in the group, but to belong they must shed their own identity, and assume that of their peers. Because of the inherent misogyny of the cult, the women will eventually be weeded out, and replaced with testosterone fuelled cage-fighter types. I present Kristi Noem as an exhibit.

It is as if we never lived through the 1930s

Commentators are becoming wary of comparing Trump to Hitler. They see it as facile and lazy. But his attack on Iran has made crystal clear that he no longer believes that there is any limit to his power, and his ability to cause death and misery is so lacking in forethought or judgement that names like Stalin and Hitler inevitably spring to mind.

It used to be that the death of another human being was considered a last resort. There had to be a profound gain to be made to justify it. And yet Trump, the man whose main goal in life appears to be to amass untold wealth and to be universally admired, opens himself up to fear and dread, and a deep hatred throughout the civilised world.

Apart from his followers, and his co-accused, he deals death on an extraordinary scale. It seems that every action he has taken has been destructive of human life. Even his closing down of USAID has caused unimaginable numbers of deaths. Because his worst excesses so far are in the acts of omission, rather than commission.

Although much too sophistocated a concept for Trump, or his mindless apparatchiks, that happens through malign neglect, or the withdrawal of assistance for the neediest, or the most vulnerable, like starving children. It is writ large in removing soup kitchens in Sudan, or allowing his great friend Bibi Netanyahu to literally starve the entire population of Gaza.

Although impossible to calculate precisely, the figures showing the positive effect from 2001 to 2021, show that USAID programs were estimated to save between 4.1 and 4.7 million lives per year, including between 1.2 and 1.7 million children under five. Considering that the cuts to aid have virtually stopped all such assistance, we can safely guess an equivalent number of deaths.

That means he and Elon Musk between them will murder over 4 million living humans, every year they are in power, all in a search for notoriety and to project a ‘tough guy’ image to an unbelieving world. These are grown men with children of their own.

Of course he has caused many more deaths since that ongoing catastrophe. He has bombed civilian boats in the Eastern Pacific and the Caribbean open sea, for no reason beyond vanity; he has bombed Venezuela, Yemen, Iran (twice in two years), Syria, Nigeria, Somalia and Iraq. But wait, there is more.

He has an obviously deranged Secretary for War who seems to take orgiastic pleasure with each passing day, and an increasing body toll. Netanyahu and Trump are just getting started, though. Already Trump has been busted as having no exit strategy, and he is being subtly mainpulated by Israel, which apparently wants to turn Beirut, the original ‘Paris of the East’, into another Gaza. It looks like we need Jared Kushner to turn his ‘creative’ mind to making it a new resort.

If one looks at the United Nations Charter, it mandates the United Nations and its member states to:

• maintain international peace and security,
• uphold international law,
• achieve “higher standards of living” for their citizens,
• address “economic, social, health, and related problems”,
• and promote “universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion”.

Trump is a danger to human life

He has also taken a pickaxe to American civil society. He has caused untold misery to the very people who pick the fruit which feeds his people. He has terrorised American cities. He has made the climate crisis, which even his stupidest supporters know in their bones is happening, worse. He has made massive cuts to welfare, and he inflicts pain on anyone who has ever slighted him, over a long life, lived mainly on the shady side of business.

Of course he has also unleashed the lunatic Health Secretary, who doesn’t believe in vaccines, and has probably inadvertantly allowed childhood diseases like measles, and possibly polio, to re-invigorate. They all seem to have a thing about hurting children. Oh, I forgot. There is the spectre of Jeffrey Epstein, who also had a thing for hurting children.

By withdrawing from most of the organisations which assist the whole of our fragile civilisation, such as the World Health Organisation, the Paris Agreement, and countless others he has sacrificed America’s leading position in the world.

Whatever we thought of America’s excesses, if you dug past the vulgarity there was a strong beating heart, which actually led the world in providing practical solutions to the world’s problems. And now?

Now we are witnesses to the culmination of America’s decline. If Trump’s ruling passion is to be universally famous and popular, he has achieved the near impossible – he has united most of the free world in loathing and detesting him, and his ludicrous government, and the prevailing view is that millions pray daily, in each of their various religions, that he would die, and leave them alone.