Tag Archives: observation of an ex pat

My overwhelming emotion in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is despair.

My crushing depression is not caused just by the attempted assassination. It has been triggered by the host of events that led up to and followed the shooting in Pennsylvania.

It started with the Republicans thirst for power at any price. Between 1933 and 1995 they were the minority party in the House of Representatives for all but four years.  Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich had the answer. He embraced wedge politics by unjustifiably labelling Democrats as “traitors,” “communists,” or “un-American”. Republicans were “patriots,” and the only “true Americans.”

It worked. Republicans have held the majority in the lower house for 22 of the past 30 years.

Then in 2009 along came the Tea Party with its demands for lower taxes, a reduced national debt and federal budget and decreased government spending.

The Tea Party was followed in 2015-16 by Donald Trump. He married wedge politics to the populism of the Tea Party. At first the Republican old guard opposed him. Then he started to win with a mixture of wedge rhetoric, scapegoating, and dangerously over-simplified answers to complex problems.

After winning the presidency in 2016 he set himself up not as the leader of the Republican Party but as THE Republican Party. If you wanted to secure the Republican nomination for an elected office you first had to pledge fealty to The Donald and his increasingly right-wing policies. If you refused you were branded a RINO (Republican in Name Only) and destined—in many cases—to fail at the first hurdle.

Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 should have been the end of the cult of Donald Trump. It wasn’t.  He kept it alive by donning the mantle of victimhood and claiming– without a shred of evidence—that the 2020 election was stolen by Biden and that he was the real winner. On January 6, 2021, a mob incited by Trump’s lies and rhetoric stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to thwart the peaceful transfer of power.

White-haired Dutch politician Geert Wilders hates the label far-right. Neither is he particularly fond of being called an extremist or fascist.

Wilders also dislikes Islam, the Koran, the EU, asylum seekers, and most foreigners in general. He is the avowed leader of the “Counter-Jihad Movement.”

He has been in and out of Dutch courts on hate charges; was banned for several years from Britain, Germany and Austria and has a permanent armed police guard to protect him from assassination. Wilders has attacked the Koran as a “fascist book”, Mohammed as “the devil” and Islam is a “retarded culture.”

He does have likes. They include: Vladimir Putin, Margaret Thatcher and Israel. He is less keen on France’s Marine Le Pen and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. On Donald Trump he is ambivalent. He approves of Trump’s anti-Muslim and America first policies, but questions his honesty and claims to have won the 2020 elections.

The leader of the Dutch Freedom Party also wants to turn back the clock to 1830 and reunite the Netherlands with the Flemish-speaking region of Belgium.

Wilders political beliefs are important because he is in line to be the next Prime Minister of the Netherlands. And as one of the founding members of the European Community the Netherlands has an outsized voice in the EU and beyond.

His premiership is not guaranteed. The Netherlands has a proportional representation system and a leader needs an outright majority of the 150-seat parliament to form a coalition. Wilders this week won the most seats—37– but the other main parties have either point-blank refused to serve with

The United States is facing a major question: Does political support trump the rule of law?

There is no doubt that Donald Trump has political support from a large proportion of the American population. He is virtually a shoe-in for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Whether or not he is guilty of one of any number of crimes is immaterial to his base of supporters. Trump represents small government libertarian-minded conservative America. The values that he has come to embody are seen as more important than any number of words in any number of law books.

He has the support “of his people” and that lifts Trump to the far edge of the reach of the long arm of the law. Any attempt to argue otherwise, or to enforce the law, is jackboot Nazism and an establishment conspiracy to thwart the will of the people.

Given that many of Trump’s people are gun-toting Second Amendmenters, using the law against the former president risks the serious danger of violence.

Attorney General Merrick Garland is all too aware of the need to balance political reality with the rule of law. Donald Trump is a special case. No person is above the law, but realpolitik means that some people are on its edges. If the Department of Justice—or anyone else—is going to take any kind of legal action against the former president then it must be totally convinced of his guilt well beyond a reasonable doubt– and then some.

Worried about energy prices? Well, you should start worrying more about the empty bread bin.

Twenty-nine percent of the world’s grain comes from Ukraine and Russia.

Russia, Belarus and Ukraine have banned the export of all grains as a direct consequence of Putin’s War. And, because of our interconnected world, when there is a shortage of one type of grain it has a ripple effect on every other.

Commodity brokers are now predicting shortages and high prices not just for wheat but also for rice, millet, rye, maize, barley, oats and sorghum. This is on top of a 50 percent increase in prices in just six months caused by a 20 percent lower than usual harvest because of climate change issues.

Then there is the impact that less grain will have on livestock production as just about every farm animal needs commercially produced grain. Everything from chicken nuggets to fillet steak is going up.

Vegans and vegetarians will be no better off. Add to the above scenario that all grain and vegetable crops are likely to be hit by a lack of fertiliser as 18 percent of the world’s potash comes from Belarus. That means lower yields and higher prices for everything that grows in the ground.

Every week I do a programme for American radio. It is an hour-long midweek discussion of world affairs. The other half of the discussion is dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporter Lockwood Phillips. I am the loony London liberal, and I am assured that a large number of radios are splattered with rotten tomatoes every time my dulcet tones waft over the air waves.

The Heartland Theory and its corollary discipline of geopolitics was all the rage in the twentieth century.

It emerged from the morass of nationalism to dominate diplomatic thinking right through the Cold War. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union it sunk slowly over the political horizon as nationalism was gradually replaced by globalism governed by an internationally agreed set of laws enforced by a largely – but not completely– altruistic United States.

A Victorian geographer called Halford Mackinder was responsible for the Heartland Theory. He unveiled it in 1904 at a packed meeting of the Royal Geographical Society. He argued that advances in railways in other land transport meant that British-dominated sea power would be replaced by land power.  And that whomever controlled the territory from Eastern Europe to China would control the “heartland” of Eurasia. Furthermore that whomever controlled the heartland controlled what Mackinder called “the world island”which encompassed all of Europe, Asia and Africa; and whomever controlled the world island controlled the world.

In the 1920s’s Mackinder’s ideas were picked up by the German geopolitical academic Karl Haushofer who became an adviser to Adolf Hitler. Hitler and Haushofer fell out over Hitler’s racial policies, but the heartland theory became the blueprint for German expansion. During the Cold War the Americans adopted it to justify the policy of containing the Soviet Union which it thought was pursuing the Heartland dream in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and China.

The collapse of the Soviet Union rendered the Heartland Theory redundant—for a time. It has been revived again by developments in the two Eurasian giants China and Russia.   China’s Belt/Road initiative could have been taken straight out of Mackinder’s book. Its railway links from Shanghai to London and its heavy investment in Africa can easily be viewed as a pre-emptive bid to gain control of the “world island” of Europe, Asia and Africa.

In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church called them heretics. They were excommunicated or burned at the stake.

Hitler branded them Jews or Jew lovers and sent them to labour camps or to the gas chambers. During the Cold War era they were derided  as the intelligentsia. In the Soviet Union they were pulled out of their positions as teachers, journalists  and scientists and despatched to Siberian Gulags. In China they were given a little Red Book and sent to “re-education camps”. In Cambodia they were murdered.

Why? Because these people sought answers by asking questions.  They challenged the accepted wisdom peddled by ideologues and entrenched interests.  They fought against false facts and simplistic prejudice-based solutions which used the time-honoured scapegoat method as a solution to social problems.

Nowadays such people are dismissed as “the elite”. They tend to live in cities because urban areas are the perfect incubators for the exchange of ideas and information. So, they are called the “urban elite” or “metropolitan elite”. Their opinions are dismissed even though they have devoted years of their life to study and travel and learned the value of working with different nations, races and cultures. They base their decisions on facts backed up by science, logic and mathematical proofs.

The problem is that this intellectual –“elitist”—approach to life’s problems is increasingly banging up against the brick wall of the “gut instinct” coupled with a deep-seated faith, strong prejudice and a growing fear of identity loss.  The result is a tendency of a growing number of people to dismiss the opinions of the expert elite because they clash with their “feelings”. As leading Brexiteer and Britain’s current Environment Secretary, Michael Gove, said during the Brexit campaign: “Experts? The public are sick of experts.”