JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: EMPIRE OF HATE - TRUMP'S VILE CAMPAIGN OF HATE AGAINST CHINA – USING AMERICAN MISERY AND FEAR ABOUT THE PANDEMIC TO WIN RE-ELECTION, THE ONLY GOAL THAT EVER REALLY COUNTS FOR THIS COMPLETE NARCISSIST AND BELLOWING INCOMPETENT – CHINA’S REAL EVIL IS OUTCOMPETING THE UNITED STATES, AN UNFORGIVABLE SIN – USING HATRED AS A TOOL FOR RULING – JOE BIDEN WILL SUFFER THE UGLY OLD CHARGE OF APPEASEMENT AND MAY NOT BE ABLE TO OVERCOME IT – THE UGLY NOISES OF SMARMY SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM – INTERESTING NOTE ON THE REAL REASON FOR THE VIETNAM WAR – AMERICANS ARE EASILY MANIPULATED

John Chuckman

EMPIRE OF HATE


Trump has begun a new campaign of hatred against China.

It is new only in its intensity and nastiness. Trump from the start has used China politically, accusing it of many evil trade and business practices in an effort to squeeze concessions from it while telling the folks back home he is fighting for them, for more benefits to good old America.

The truth is that the only evil practice of the Chinese has been to outperform and outcompete the United States on many economic and business fronts. You simply are not allowed to do that to the “indispensable” nation, embarrassing its “exceptional” leaders. It’s a form of lèse-majesté.

While China has worked to make itself the world’s factory, turning out almost every conceivable kind of good and machine, sending them, peacefully, everywhere across the seas, America has pretty much stopped making anything except an unholy number of weapons it uses in its ceaseless wars. It sells them, too, as the world’s greatest arms merchant, larger than all the other large ones combined. It sells them in captive markets to allies it pressures into buying them, and it sells them to many of the world’s worst tyrannies who support its policies.

The attack on Huawei has been until now the greatest single campaign in a virtual war of misinformation, unfair pressure, and uncompetitive practices against China – going so far as intimidating allies against using Huawei’s world-beating 5-G technology. But the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic brings a dazzling new opportunity, one much richer in possibilities to whip up fear and hatred than mere suggestions of spying, suggestions always a bit limp since everyone who counts knows America spies on everyone continuously, through the insidious NSA and the American hi-tech and on-line industries.

It is an unexpected political blessing from heaven. Perhaps it’s all those evangelical prayers for him being answered? After all, he is, in his own words, “the chosen one.” It provides the means for that most important task of all, getting himself re-elected. Everything he has ever said or done as President, a great deal of it very shabby, is dedicated to that task. Here is a man, with nothing to say worth hearing and who has done almost nothing worth doing, who insists on staying center-stage. Narcissism is his deepest quality.

Now, it very much appears he’s going to make China and his version of what China is supposed to have done in the pandemic the central focus of his re-election campaign. In brief, he’s saying it is a Chinese disease and that it’s quite possible China created it in a bio-lab and that in any event China has lied every step of the way and failed in its responsibilities to the World Health Organization (WHO), the same WHO Trump has recklessly cut-off from funding at a time of unprecedented world need owing to their asserted complicity and accommodation of China.

It is hard to imagine a more confused and dishonest stitched-together crazy quilt of stories. You might think they would convince few of anything, serving only as further evidence of Trump’s recklessness and viciousness. But, no, remember this is America, a country that has been almost continuously at war for decades without most of the people ever having any idea why they fighting, spending astronomical sums of money to kill people and destroy places they know nothing about.

Truly, anything is possible in America, and its first P. T. Barnum President is fully aware of the fact and ready to use it on a great new purpose, his re-election.

I am being unfair to Barnum who was indeed a grand-scale huckster and is credited with saying “There’s a sucker born every minute,” but he wasn’t foul-mouthed, and there is no evidence that he hated entire classes of people (refugees, many immigrants, Muslims, and those like China who embarrass America by their success) or that he abused tens of millions afflicted with both illness and illegal sanctions (Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and others) or that he carried on killing in any number of places (Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and others) and supported others killing in still other places (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, and others) or that he promoted discord and distrust on a vast scale (China, Iran, Russia, and others).

When the United States finally finished its decade-long orgy of killing in Vietnam – having killed an estimated 3 million people and turned that lush country into a landscape of smoldering bomb craters and toxic deposits of Agent Orange and other chemicals – virtually no Americans even understood what it had all been about. Just vague stuff like fighting for democracy (in an artificially-created rump state run by dictators, but dictators loyal to America) and Old Glory, the very kind of stuff Trump likes to bellow about.

And there were great numbers of Americans who believed for many years that the evil Vietnamese communists secretly held still more American prisoners, without ever asking themselves “what would be the sense of a poor country doing that?” Paranoia and superstition held sway, and the believers constituted a large movement, and it even had its own flag, demonstrating convincingly how far Americans will go in their misconceptions and myths. America’s government made no serious effort to correct them because it had its own purposes in harnessing that hate and confusion against Vietnam.

As an aside, the real reason for the Vietnam War is nicely sketched by an anecdote from America’s last truly crass president, Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was given to many obscene behaviors behind the scenes, like carrying on discussions with aides or interviewers while taking down his pants and relieving himself on the toilet with the door wide open. In those days, you could count on the press not to report such things. Once, when asked at a meeting just why America was fighting in Vietnam, Johnson promptly unzipped his pants and pulled out his (ample) penis, pointed to it, and growled something to the effect, “That’s the reason, Son.” (Johnson at least had the one grace of not displaying his crassness to the general public, a quality entirely missing in Trump’s makeup).

So, Trump has very fertile ground for sowing seeds of confusion and hatred and resentment, and sow them he will. It even provides him with a weapon directly against Joe Biden. He can associate Biden with dealings in China and thereby being a kind of shill for the communists. I’m sure we’ll hear the word “appeasement” introduced into the campaign against Biden.

There’s nothing like good old-fashioned fear and uncertainty, as of a dreaded disease, to whip your political constituency to a frenzy. And that kind of stuff will arouse those outside your own natural constituency too. At the same time, there is the added benefit for Trump of diverting public attention from the clearest series of blunders, misdirection, and just plain falsehoods in his own handling of America’s portion of the world crisis.

There is even the added benefit of stirring up America’s large murky pool of fear of foreigners – a theme for him from the beginning with the mater of immigration and refugees and walls – and all the better if they’re foreigners who look different.

Hatred is very elemental. It doesn’t need or seek elaborate explanations. Hitler well understood that, as I think all tyrannical temperaments do, and he used it skillfully as a tool for ruling.

Trump already has an orchestrated effort underway with various officials, including the Pentagon, making ugly assertions or suggestions. The assertions and suggestions will never require any proof - they couldn’t provide any in any case. For effect they just need the fact of high-level officials making them, echoing and re-inforcing each other. It is is enough in a time of fear.

We even have one of Trump’s smarmiest political allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, making loony statements about how China owes us reparations for all the misery and cost they’ve caused. Even if the coronavirus arose in China originally, something still not proved, since when is it a practice to charge nations for diseases which happen to arise within their borders?

The idea is intellectually ridiculous, but to people out of work and maybe losing their homes and afraid, it has an obvious vicious appeal. It’s a well-crafted piece of hate.

It’s the kind of thing you expect from Lindsey Graham, a man who matched John McCain in his unthinking enthusiasm for war and bloodshed and special interests.