When Trump was elected and Brexit happened, I felt amusement of some sort, mainly because after all that happened, we Rwandans do not take kindly to people who come here for a week and immediately seem to know better than us what’s best from us; worse yet, those who do not bother coming, just sit in their offices in London, Paris or Washington and write our destiny.
- ‘They will finally leave us alone now’, I thought to myself; ‘if they don’t I can properly laugh in their faces’; or my favorite: ‘to everyone who’s called me a Kagame – which I do not mind, I’ll call them Trump, Farage or Le Pen and see how they like that.
Alas my excitement was short-lived! I realize now that I am absolutely fine to live with the ignorance and narcissism, than with the damage that the two vices are about to cause to the entire world. For the first time, I am seriously worried about the possibility of World War III – God forbid, for I see Trump himself, the aides surrounding him and the media expected to hold them in check, are the least knowledgeable and honorable men and women in recent history. The US is basically Burundi now – with an atomic bomb.
They say Putin, Erdogan and Xi-Jinping are not democratic, but at least they are cultivated and sane. They know the history of humans, understand the world we live in and they are mature, so I doubt they would ever utilize the atomic bomb.
I look at Trump’s regime and the American media cheering it, I wonder if they live on the same planet as us? I wonder if they understand that when their planes drop bombs, normal people die; women, children, adults, etc., like you and I. I wonder if they think we are all part of the same human race, or if there are Black people and Latinos who count for less, Arabs and Muslims who do not count at all and they, the real humans, with a controller, using video game bonuses onto real human beings.
During the cold war, after repeated warnings by the USSR to Americans, asking them not to attack Cuba their ally, Nikita Khrushchev, then leader of the Soviet Union agreed to Castro’s request to construct missile launch facilities in Cuba and place nuclear missiles on the island. The year was 1962, the month, July. Historians claim that it is a US spy plane that spotted the missile launch facilities, but I think Cubans and Soviets wanted the US to see the missiles, indeed the plan was never to invade the United States, launch the missiles onto Florida and spark World War III, but simply to deter further US invasions to Cuba.
At the time, the President of the United States of America was John Fitzgerald Kennedy; it was seven years from the first man landing on the moon and the world was at its intellectual pick; it was the year when the computer was discovered, unlike today, when the most revered philosophers are Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg; walking cash machines…
It is said that ‘after a long period of tense negotiations, an agreement was publicly reached between USA’s JFK and USSR’s Khrushchev.’ The Soviets agreed to dismantle their weapons in Cuba and return them to the USSR’, all under the United Nations’ supervision, and in exchange, ‘the Americans made a public declaration and a public agreement never to invade Cuba again without direct provocation. Secretly, the United States dismantled all missiles, which had quietly been deployed in Turkey and Italy against the Soviet Union.’
None of this would have been possible today. Not with this US polity, nor this US media or these lobby groups, which are collectively in some sort of sinister trance on a totally other planet, asking for blood – and sand. No evidence is needed for anything nowadays, they make up reality, decide who is bad, what he has done or is about to do, totally out of the blue. In the beginning I thought Trump was a predator of the Media, I am slowly realizing, he is, like all his predecessors, a mere victim.
The American media and their so-called international watchdogs thrive on their country’s killing of innocents – or ‘bad people’; they see it as some kind of entertainment. What used to separate mainstream media from state’s propaganda machines was that one advocated for peace, the other justified wars. Today, there is no need for state’s propaganda machine anymore…
It doesn’t matter who used chemical weapons in Syria, Trumps spokesman doesn’t actually know what chemical weapons are, believes Assad is worse than Hitler; media has concluded it is the Assad regime that did, and are enticing Trump to carpet bomb Syria, then possibly Russia and North Korea. Making peace with Russia, less, just talking to Russians is seen as anathema while threatening war is glorified. It is practically impossible for the American president to make peace in these conditions. The first time Trump was praised by American media since his election, was when he ordered the release of 59 Tomahawk missiles on to Syrian cities, in response to chemical attack by, allegedly, Assad. From a media buffoon, Trump was reborn into an accomplished statesman, overnight. He was given a chance to describe the atmosphere he was in while he ordered the bombing of Syrians: ‘the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen.. in China.’
After repeated warnings to Americans, notably in an Op-Ed in the New York Times, if Putin believed Donald Trump had half the sanity of JFK, he would place missiles with the capability of destroying the US ships in Syria as deterrence; He doesn’t!
Another strange character is Kim-Jong-Un. He can’t help but test his missiles and alarm the entire region. If Xi-Jinping thought Kim could hear reason, he would reign in on him to refrain from escalate tensions; He doesn’t!
The world was used to having to contain one erratic leader at a given time; now there are two, they have their fingers on atomic bombs, they both like to show off and they know they have our full attention. One doesn’t have a media at all; the other seems to draw his insanity precisely from his media.
Now that the US has deployed a warship in the Korean peninsula, forcing a North Korea reaction with matching belligerence, the peace of this world lies in the hands of Russians and Chinese. Except they do not think Trump and Kim are morally or intellectually equipped to grasp the consequences of their actions, nor are they politically capable of pursuing the right decisions, namely the peaceful ones, over the popular ones, namely the war. These are surely going to be the longest four years in recent history, God help us…