We Condone Mass Murder, But You Don't Talk About It, Donald!

     President Donald Trump, often described in the press as "being less than truthful," or "bending the facts,--a spineless way of avoiding the word liar--is definitely honest when it comes to expressing the traditional and institutionalized cruelty of U.S. foreign policy.  In just the last few days, he's offered a White House visit to President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, said it "would be an honor" to meet with Supreme Leader of North Korea Kim Jong-un, and has praised seventh U.S. President Andrew Jackson, claiming he would have prevented the U.S. Civil War.
     This last comment, given in a radio interview, has inspired numerous wasted hours of American news commentary.  Trump, given to speaking out of his ass most of the time (anyone who's observed him carefully over the years should know this), has mastered the tactic of manipulating the news media.  Throughout the sixteen months of his ultimately successful presidential campaign, he was in the habit of saying outrageous things, provoking pointless reactions from pundits and anchorpersons, from newspaper and internet journalism.  Instead of saying, "The man's full of shit, an endless stream of shit," and moving on to covering the important news of whichever given day, journalists spent most of their time writing and talking about the political clown with the too long clown's necktie and the funny haircut.
     Trump's statements about Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder who died in June 1845, fifteen years before the engagement at Fort Sumter that began the Civil War, reveal a typical Trumpian level of ignorance that should surprise no one; yet, newsmen and newswomen these past few days have spoken at length with historians about the "true history" of Andrew Jackson, about the actual causes of the Civil War and the Confederacy's states' rights question as they sought to maintain slavery in a country, as a whole, where that controversial and execrable, but lucrative, practice, was not an institution in the Northern states.  (I remember that basic information from U.S. History class when I was fourteen years old.  Trump, presumably, was exposed to the same information when he went to high school, but now has either forgotten it or chooses to remember it differently, for the sake of satisfying the racists comprising some of his political base).
     Because President Trump brought up President Jackson, there has been a great deal of Jackson-bashing on the news of late.  In Russia, the equivalent would be journalists bitching about Ivan the Terrible instead of Vladimir Putin.  I suggest that Trump's tactic consisted of bringing up a long dead president (a rather controversial one at that), so that now, because Trump said some inaccurate shit about not only Jackson but the Civil War, the news media must focus for several days on how horrible a human being Andrew Jackson was instead of how horrible a human being Donald Trump is.
     If this intellectually dishonest criticism of Trump's "praise for authoritarians and dictators" simply ended on American shores, with Jackson serving as an example of a "killer president who owned slaves," it would be less contemptible than the further step these journalists and pundits (and the politicians offering opinions on the subject) have taken when they attack Trump for reaching out to the President of the Philippines and suggesting it would be an honor to meet with Kim Jong-un.
     Duterte, author of a drug war against his own people, characterized by savagery and oppression, is without doubt an authoritarian brute.  An authoritarian brute, what's more, in charge of a country that houses U.S. military personnel, a country long used by America as a strategic player in the West Pacific region.  Duterte's war on drugs, bloody and horrible as it is, reflects other wars on drugs, including the one practiced (mostly on the poor and on Blacks and Latinos) in the United States.  Young Black men in this country have been decimated and disproportionately imprisoned in a "war" started in the 1970s, escalated in the 1980s.  As William S. Burroughs puts it in Gus Van Sant's great film Drugstore Cowboy,

     "Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized.  The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots.  I predict, in the near future, right-wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus."

     The purpose of war against drugs, the war against terror, is control and the seizing of greater powers, with increase to police, military, security; i.e. the world we now live in.  9/11 "Truthers" are not necessarily arguing from a crazy and impossible viewpoint.  For a government to kill 3,000 of its own people on 9/11 seems minuscule to me by comparison to the hundreds of thousands killed by the U.S. government in the Middle East since 9/11.  Politicians and those who pull the strings in unseen backgrounds are characterized by ruthlessness.  I read a story today in the Intercept dealing with Canton Fitzgerald, the firm that lost the greater majority of its employees on 9/11, its offices located between the 101st to 105th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, a doomed place to be that fateful morning.  Its CEO, after a long battle against American Airlines to secure a settlement not disclosed to the victims' families, pocketed approximately twenty-five million dollars after trying to secure the entire 135 million dollar settlement for himself.  If this man doesn't fit the definition of a scumbag, tell me what does.
     Former President Barack Obama, fresh from his signing of a sixty-five million dollar contract for a memoir, has just accepted a 400,000 dollar speaking engagement from Canton Fitzgerald; in other words, he accepted a speaking gig from the motherfucker who bilked the families of his own dead employees of millions of dollars after not even letting them know there was a lawsuit against the airline.
     Disgusting pieces of shit looking like human beings exist.  Donald Trump apparently admires some of them--he is one of them.  On the news of late, his honesty about Kim Jong-un and his expression of a willingness to meet with authoritarian anti-democratic leaders makes "liberal" voices on CNN and MSNBC, to name two networks, recoil in disgust as they lecture viewers about how the United States supposedly champions democracy in the world (it doesn't).  About how former presidents did not "coddle" dictators (they certainly did).  The U.S. supports authoritarian regimes because democratic movements in other countries spawn the spirit of independence, which can lead, as it did in Chile in the early 1970s, to President Allende nationalizing the abundant copper ore mines in his country, a metal required for the coming information superhighway.  President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ordered a coup d'etat against Allende, backing a military strongman, Pinochet, who oppressed and killed his people (for the United States and for his own retention of power).
     Ronald Reagan and George Bush the Elder both backed Saddam Hussein.  Bush in the 1970s employed Noriega of Panama as a CIA asset.  Osama bin Laden's Mujahideen received three billion dollars worth of military assistance from the CIA, while Kissinger supported Pakistan's ISI and also the arming of fundamentalist Muslims in Pakistan.  The ISI has been implicated, along with Saudi Arabian officials, in the crime of 9/11, secrets kept to this day by the U.S. government, which has been led by people like George W. Bush, whose family has had close business ties to the bin Laden family.
     Donald Trump's sin when speaking about authoritarian leaders is his honesty.  He doesn't conceal the sharp tip of the weapon of U.S. foreign policy that's been aimed at the world since the aftermath of World War Two.  Cold War thinking influenced by the nuclear-armed authoritarianism of the Soviet Union shaped this foreign policy--there is much blame to go around, but now, journalists claiming that the U.S. is a great lover of peace (while it bombs numerous countries and is still occupying Afghanistan after fifteen years) put us inside an Orwellian nightmare in which the government, supported by a compliant news media, tells we're not seeing what we're seeing, that, for instance, President Obama welcomed Egypt's dictator al-Sisi to the White House, where he "coddled" him with generous weapons deals; that Hillary Clinton declared Egypt's former dictator Hosni Mubarak a great friend of her family.  I suspect that if President Duterte were bombing Syria he would be praised in the U.S. journalism community.
     These same craven journalists are now willing to trash Andrew Jackson, who, admittedly, persecuted Native Americans (as have many other presidents, including up to the present day, what with government oppression at Standing Rock) and who owned slaves (as did the highly admired President Thomas Jefferson), and who was probably the usual type of son of a bitch who runs nations, something we should be very familiar with by now.
   
                                                                             Vic Neptune