Amuta
The world will not be in a hurry to forget Donald Trump’s address last Thursday to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York. While UNGA addresses have become something of an annual ritual among world leaders, the occasional brilliant speech and touching rhetoric can sometimes touch the spine of a world frozen into boredom and inured by the all too familiar. Some years back, Thomas Sankara of Buekina Faso and Murtala Mohammed of Nigeria said unforgettable things to the world about Africa’s debt and poverty. But they are dead and so have their spirits.
In about 56 minutes of off script rambling and incoherent but sustained insult directed at the body, Donald Trump succeeded in one major respect: He monopolized the podium of global abuse and created an urgent nostalgia and even hunger for the great past star attractions of the annual UNGA speech festival. As Trump raged and fumed at nothing in particular and rained buses on the gathering, many in the audience may have searched in vain for the likes of Muamma Ghaddafi, Yasir Arafat, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Cuba’s Fidel Castro or even South Africa’s Nelson Mandela. These are men who over the years delivered addresses that spoke truth to the arrogant power of monolith American power. These were men who in their various addresses would have instantly rebutted and rebuffed Donald Trump’s insults on the spot and reaffirmed the universal verities of a shared world order ruled by mutual respect among nations and their leaders.
Instead, the hall was full of humbled rulers of nations most of whom had been lately gutted by the fire of new American tariffs and the rise of a virtual monarch in a nation that was once the beacon of global democracy and diplomatic civility. Gone was the drama and bravura of nations whose leaders loudly said “No” and were respected for doing so. Gone was the counterpoise of arguments about alternatives in a world full of options. In their place, the world television audience of millions was treated to a boring monologue by a depraved elocutor of lies and untested truths.
Respected world leaders were jolted by the packaged lies and systematic demolition and subversion of truths they had held dear for decades. First, the UN itself was verbally incinerated and reduced to no better than a jaded assembly of inert observers. Trump shamelessly recalled his earlier bid to renovate the UN towers and indicated that he has not forgotten or forgiven the world body for denying him that lucrative contract. He castigated the UN for a minor escalator glitch and a routine teleprompter outage. He used these negligible technical misfortunes to castigate the UN for inactivity or for ignoring his all too frequent autocratic requests and impositions. No minor detail was too tangential for his egotistical showmanship. The object of it all was to project the UN as the hallmark of the decadent inefficient world order that he was about to excoriate and and condemn.
When he finally delved into the main substance of his presentation, it was mostly to overturn the realities around which the world has been agonizing in recent times. He described climate change and the quest for alternative energies as scams that has taken other nations hostage. He opted for a return to the worst of fossil fuels and a jettisoning of research and expenditure on new energy sources. He took a wide swipe against China and other nations that have made strides in new energy research and investment. He wanted the world back in the era of coal, gas, diesel and environmentally degrading drilling for oil and hydrocarbons. For Trump, the trouble with the world energy situation is the shift in attention to clean energy. For him, the solution lies in a retreat to more oil drilling, new refineries, more gas guzzling cars on the roads and air polluting factories. Zit doesnot matter to himthat many American companies will go burst if the clean energy economy collapses. Trump gloated over ancient findings as if they were new discoveries. He closed his mind to the vast quantum of statistics and findings on the advantages of new clean energy. A man who finds Tylenol responsible for autism or who encouraged people to drink Lysol for Covid-19!
Perhaps Trump’s greatest disservice to the UNGA was his attempt to universalize his unpopular anti immigration policy and suggest it as a a requirement for the world. Already, America is boiling over his massive anti immigration raids and deportations. People who have spent more than two decades in the US are being rounded up and put in inhuman rendition flights and sent to countries that sometimes they have hardly known or seen. Children are being yanked away from churches, schools and malls and hurriedly deported or put in chains. A detention camp has been prefabricated and put in the middle of the Florida Everglades where those who venture outdoors are automatic victims of dangerous alligators and poisonous snakes. ICE agents are roaming the streets of major American cities in search of so -called illegal immigrants to arrest, torture, detain and deport. It is this new culture of serial inhumanity and intolerant violations that Trump was marketing to the world as the new route. Every nation unto itself and the abolition of borders.
Yet this is in a new world where technology has virtually abolished borders among nations. Globalization has created a world market and global demand for virtually everything and everyone. Internet for everyone. Google, Instagram, AI, Facebook, Tik Tok etc have
Become items in a universal global language that aims to market cell phones, computers, ipads, condoms and fizzy drinks to everyone wherever they live. Therefore, to wake up and impose barriers in this global village runs counter to the culture of globalization. Meanwhile the companies that have made the greatest profits from a global undifferentiated world culture are American. But they are now being forced to constrain their energies and markets to isolated nations separated by Trumpian tariffs and trade barriers.
No doubt, the world will resist this new order. But Trump will have done enough damage to our common humanity in a rather short time. He is encouraging nations to divide, live apart, suspect each other and live in antagonism. He is fracturing our bonded humanity.
An earlier infantileundertaking to end most wars has fallen flat on its nose. His cuddling of Russia is obvious even if he is pretending to impose sanctions on Putin, his business associate. His transactional approach to Ukraine wants to impoverish and perpetually indebt the country while pretending to promote peace. In the open, Trump pretends to oppose Israeli aggression and genocide all over the Middle East and in Gaza. He is already portioning and demarkting parts of Gaza which he is marketing as real estate, a new Middle East Riviera. The tyrant in North Korea rejected his idea of a North Korean tourism Riviera and replaced it with his own idea hence a cooling off in their relationship.
While Trump spoke to the UNGA last week about peace and openly about his hunger for the Nobel Peace Prize, he was busy funding wars, arming Israel, selling intelligence to Russia and undermining African countries that refuse to sell him strategic rare earth minerals. Deceit and trickery in the service of personal wealth and profit are the secret new weapons in the Trump armoury. All that is what Trump sought to disguise in his serial insult on the gathering of world leaders in New York last week. How much costume can disguise the devil?
