John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY DON PITTS ON CBC NEWS
“Trump, not Canadian auto industry, may be the threat to U.S. national security
“Claim that Canadian cars threaten U.S. security was just one in a week full of destabilizing pronouncements”
Good summary of the insanity we are experiencing.
The United States, already, without Trump, has over the last couple of decades grown into a rather menacing and destabilizing actor in the world.
Two million people killed in the Middle East and millions more turned into hopeless refugees is not a blissful situation. Plus threats made towards a number of other counties, including Russia and China.
And a lot of that was the work of the man with the boyish smile, whom many still regard with nostalgia, as was the creation of an industrial-scale extrajudicial killing regime which has murdered several thousand legally-innocent people.
But I'm afraid horrors inflicted abroad - as I well recall intimately from the Vietnam era - never have quite the same impact at home - and that sadly goes pretty much today for Canada as it does for the United States - as acts affecting our people directly, even if those acts include only their pocketbooks and not napalm, white phosphorus, and carpet bombing.
So, Trump's crude voice, lacking any empathy except for guns and power, hits home, with his serious attacks on trade and stability.
I do think we can almost view him as a revolutionary force, and I don't mean that in a good sense. Real revolutions – such as the historic ones in France or Russia - are bloody and savage, howling times of human brutality bursting through the relatively calm surface of society. The romantic idea of them is just that, romantic.
It is a very dangerous combination we have. An American establishment, aware of its inevitable relative decline in the face of great new world competition, already determined to reassert its authority in the world by hyper-aggressiveness, is now married to a raving narcissist who cares about virtually no one.
And just think, today the United States spends almost a trillion dollars a year on its military - that's what it comes to if you take its regular military expenditure, as great as the rest of the planet at $700 billion and add hidden costs like veterans affairs and hospitals. That should tell us all something. A trillion dollars a year for death and destruction.
