Some Thoughts On Trump.

 

       I don't as a rule write about individual leaders, I view them all just as necessary cogs in the capitalist juggernaut, assistants to the financial Mafia, get rid of that economic system and the leaders will probably disappear with the system. I am, however, a great admirer of Frankie Boyle, a Glasgow comedian, I love his style of humour, and his outspoken manner, and though he is expert at making people laugh, he also makes people think, and he is not afraid to make his views known. This latest piece by him sums up a lot of what most of us are thinking.

        It’s impossible to imagine what it’s like to be killed in a nuclear explosion, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I think it will probably involve being blasted over quite a large distance, and at a surprising height, while simultaneously having all your skin burnt off. I know we think of it as being an instant death, but there’s every chance that there will be a few seconds where you’ll be sailing out of your local school catchment area, at a height of about a hundred feet or so, as some sort of screaming skeleton. Maybe you will get to see your family melt before the blast picks you up, and your final memory will be of their faces devolving into cubism. Or maybe it’s more like being smashed to pieces by a wave of rubble. After all those years of driving into town to go to work, or go shopping, your city centre will finally be coming to you, moving at several thousand miles an hour, and hotter than Venus in July.
        Donald Trump got himself into yet another war of words with North Korea after they test fired a missile that went over Japan. In a war of words you do not want to be on Trump’s side: a man who speaks like he’s on shuffle and has a smaller vocabulary than an upturned calculator. It’s incredible to see the US take the moral high ground about, of all things, nuking Japan. Bear in mind that Japan is a country that specialises in wooden buildings with paper walls. It’s odd to think that as millions of people hunkered down in their paper houses during a potential nuclear attack, they were still safer than the many thousands of people in the UK living in high rise social housing.
Trump is like a fat bee bashing around inside a greenhouse repeatedly failing to understand why the world doesn’t work as he thought it did. The chances of this unrepentant lunatic starting World War III are surely very high. Often, when I hear Trump talk even the most egregious garbage about wanting to strip people of their healthcare, or exile children, I’m actually just glad that he’s talking about the future, weighing his words like I would those of a possible suicide.
This is a man who obsesses over winning, and uses success as his single metric for evaluating humanity, who has become the key player in a game which it is impossible too win. Who would win in an all out conflict with North Korea? My best guess is a guy in Tokyo who knows how to catch and roast rats, who owns a shopping trolley and has the entrepreneurial flair to get out into the smoking rubble of his city and begin trading his rodents on sticks for essential items. A UN expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations told the media that Trumps latest intervention on sanctions was, ‘an exceedingly silly thing to say’. We can only assume he’s had that statement prepared for the last two years and since writing it has thought about pressing the send button a couple of hundred times a day.
          Trump isn’t a military man, and salutes troops in a way that makes Benny Hill look like Stalin. I hate the way that “draft dodger’ is thrown at Trump as an insult. I mean, if you want to insult a guy who looks like God twisted some haemorrhoids into a balloon animal, why pick one of the few moments that he behaved rationally? Some take comfort in the fact that a triumvirate of US generals have essentially annexed military policy. In many ways, the concentration of power into the hands of Generals Mattis, Kelly and McMaster is the only thing worse than Trump.
           It’s impossible to have been in an institution like the US army your whole life without having internalised a worldview that believes complex international relationships are best handled through the medium of high explosives. In their own way, their worldview will be as limited as those priests who live in the catacombs under the Vatican who can see in the dark and have five hundred words for a child’s bottom. The US military view is one that sees existence as a permanent war for resources. A huge reason for elite climate change denial is that it collapses the American worldview. If you allow that climate change is real, the war for resources is two dying men in a locked room fighting over a live hand-grenade. It’s also a worldview of permanent escalation. In the aftermath of a college shooting, we always laugh at the wing-nut who calls for more guns on campus. Yet that’s actually a pretty tight metaphor for US foreign policy, one where the US is both the wing-nut, and the shooter.
          If I might make one suggestion to the North Koreans, please don’t drop bombs indiscriminately upon the USA. There are specific targets you should hit that would upset the President the most and, luckily for your bombing crews, they’ve all got his name written on them in fifty foot high letters.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Here, There, The Thoughts The Same.

 

Our smart bombs bringing democracy to the Middle east.

        Hi all, I'm back after a break away from the normal routine, it does wonders for you mind, clears out some fixed ideas that you're not too sure why they are fixed in the first place, gives birth to new ideas, you wonder why you never thought of them before. No matter where we hide, the destruction and misery that is capitalism continues. However, in my case, no matter where I escape to, the focus is always the same, unnecessary injustice, avoidable misery, implemented poverty, and the horrors of the power struggles that spawn avoidable wars, with all their attendant suffering, trauma and countless violent deaths of innocent bystanders, and what we can do about them. These are all symptoms of the festering disease, born of the cancerous marriage of the nation state and capitalism.

       Capitalism is blind, irrational, and destructive, it will race towards the precipice, unwilling and unable to stop before the edge, it is only after it has crashed does it pause to see how to modify itself, to continue on its course of total destruction. To allow this to continue will obviously lead to the destruction of everything, from climate, environment and human civilisation. To hope for anything else from this system is naive in the extreme.

       Frankie Boyle is a Glasgow comedian I much admire, as well as making us laugh, he uses his skill with words, to make us think, pointing at things with his own brand of humour and wit. Humour can be a great weapon against authority and its corrupt thoughts and decisions, and against the woven illusions, and smoke and mirrors, of that babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media. I repeat here his latest piece.

 Frankie Boyle

Yesterday at 10:37 ·

A column I wrote about Trump and Syria:
Nothing more perfectly embodies White America than a 70 year old golfer firing missiles at the Middle East from his country club. Some sticks in the mud probably expect a host of formalities to be gone through before attacking another country: a UN investigation, or congressional approval perhaps, but personally I'm just glad to see a guy with the temperament of a mistreated circus animal launching ballistic missiles on a hunch. It seems statesmanlike and decisive. It's difficult to tell what Syria's moderate rebels are really like, as journalists can't really be embedded with them, because they'd be beheaded. But I refuse to be cynical: there's every chance that Assad's end will see a peaceful, pastoral period for Syria once groups like Allah's Flamethrower and Infidel Abattoir get round the table and good-naturedly sort out their deep seated differences on the finer points of Islamic Law. Perhaps this is a period which Syrians will one day look back on and laugh, if laughter is still allowed.

Not only will Democrats support any war Trump chooses to start, they'll be outraged by any voters who hold it against them at the next election. Hillary Clinton called for the airstrikes immediately before they happened. We'd do well to listen to the woman who is the architect of modern Libya, where her neoliberal intervention introduced the principals of the free market with such clarity that the country now has several different governments competing for the right to kill everybody. Clinton was criticised for running a tone-deaf, aloof campaign but Democrats have rallied, pointing out that many people didn't vote for Hilary because Trump is a Russian spy, and people who didn't vote for Hillary are Russian stooges, and people who voted for Hillary but not very enthusiastically are also Russian stooges, and slowly but surely the goodwill has begun to return.
Personally, I think it would be great if Putin was controlling Trump. I'd love to think there was a rational, malevolent actor directing him rather than just a combination of his own blood sugar levels and the concept of vengeance. I honestly think we'd be in less trouble if he was being controlled by the dark wizard Thoth Amon, or if his body had been taken over by a sentient bacterial civilisation that was using him as a kind of Lifeship. I'm not saying it's impossible that Trump was moved by the plight of Syria's children, perhaps in the same way that Tony Soprano got really upset when that guy killed his horse, it's just that the balance of probabilities is that he doesn't care about them, even enough not to ban them from entering his country.
The Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said that the UK government had close discussions with the US over the few days running up to the attack and had been given "advance notice of the President's final decision". Odd then, that immediately after the chemical attack the Guardian cites Downing Street officials (on a tour of despots with the prime minister in the Middle East) who, when asked about military reprisals, said “nobody is talking about that”. Sort of makes you wonder if there's any contempt that can be shown by the US that will stop us drooling about our "special relationship" like we're some kind of stalker. I doubt the Americans see us as a valued ally. We're just somewhere that they stick a few missiles. My best guess is that they think of us in the way that we would think of a shed.
At the prospect of a war, the media reacted with the exuberant joy that I remember fights bringing to a school playground. War copy sells well, and is easier to write. A good way to get a handle on the media's attitude to conflict is to try to write a thousand words on a United Nations sponsored bilateral negotiation, then the same on a missile cutting a hospital in half. The Guardian exuberantly described the "pinpoint accuracy" of Tomahawks. I'm not sure accuracy is strictly relevant when you're delivering high explosives, the ultimate variable. In the West, we've never needed the military spectaculars favoured by Soviets and dictators; the news has always been our missile parade. On MSNBC the launch of the Tomahawks was repeatedly described as "beautiful". And there is a certain beauty at that point in their trajectory. Perhaps we should focus on some other point. It would be nice to see a shot of them ten seconds before they drop on their screaming victims. Or two days later when bodies are being pulled from the rubble. Maybe a shot from ten years down the line when the shell casings form part of a makeshift gallows, reflected in the glass eye of an implacable amputee warlord. Perhaps our whole fucked up attitude to war comes from only ever seeing our missiles taking off, only ever seeing our soldiers setting out.
Ignoring international law is bad for all sorts of reasons, not least because it's the same position as Assad's. Knowing that our own resolve is only strengthened when people attack us and expecting other people's to be weakened is suggestive of a kind of racism. Pouring arms and bombs into an intractable conflict means that you are happy for it to be prolonged and worsen. Britain's activities in the Middle East historically mean we almost can't imagine what a moral position might look like. We have a huge navy that we could use to pick up the thousands of Syrians, Libyans and others scheduled to drown in the Mediterranean this year, for a fraction of the cost of the bombs we've dropped on them. I wonder if those people know, clambering onto boats with their frightened children, many of whom have never seen the sea before and will never see land again, that we aggressively tune out images like this, should they ever reach us at all. That we see all these lives we could save as part of a chaotic, insoluble mess, better not thought about; we who focus so intently on the sleek, clear lines of bombs.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk