Classic communicative action The sign of a broken sword G.K. Chesterton takes place during the fictional 19th-century armed conflict between Britain and Brazil. In a run against charismatic Brazilian General Olivier, a division of 800 British infantrymen commanded General St. Clare. An Englishman led the regiments into a reckless attack on Brazilian positions, resulting in his men having suffered dense losses and being forced to surrender.
Olivier released the prisoners to freedom, but shortly afterward, St. Clare's body was found hanging in a tree with a broken sword around his neck. Many years later it turns out that as a British officer in India and Africa St. Clare committed torture, adultery and corruption, and the culmination of his career was selling English military secrets to Brazilians. Major Murray, 1 of St. Clare's subordinates, discovered his betrayal and demanded his resignation. The calculating St. Clare murdered him, after which he gave the order to carry out a doomed attack “to hide 1 body under a pile of corpses.” Shortly after the Brazilians left, British soldiers discovered the fact and lynched St. Clare.
One might think that Israel's conduct present is the exact other of St. Clare's: focusing on 1 body (or respective – on Hamas fighters) to hide the pile of corpses of Palestinian civilians. This is not the case. The Israeli government does precisely what St. Clare does, with 1 crucial difference. By putting a pile of Palestinian bodies down, he wants to hide 1 body: a body of judaic identity.
Most Jews in Israel were caught up in genocide, and in a fundamental sense they commit collective suicide, abandoning the spiritual greatness of their identity. Isn't that what Trump does? The body he's trying to hide is the corpse of American freedom and democracy.
When writing these words, I can already hear the reactions of the left: was “freedom and democracy” in the Western edition not false and hypocritical from the very beginning? Is it not that present we see this fact just coming out? I think this is simply a simplification, and if we take it as a starting point, it can cost us dearly.
Our morality is not only hypocritical (it has been so before, possibly always), but in the face of the war in the Gaza Strip it has lost even the hypocritical dimension of its facade – it has truly already become only A facade behind which there is no fact about herself. Following this lead, Arundhati Roy said over a year ago that if the Gaza bombing continues, “the moral construction of Western liberalism will cease to exist. We know she was always hypocritical. But even then, she gave us any comfort. Now this calmness disappears in front of usIt’s okay. ” It is crucial here that despite hypocrisy (or, why not, due to it and due to it), the liberal moral façade gave us at least "certain comfort."
So what replaced this “moral construction of Western liberalism”? Despite our reluctance to do so, we must give the devil what is due: Donald Trump has late won a series of victories. The U.S. ultimate Court has restricted the power of national judges, giving him the free hand of power by means of regulations; his “Great, beautiful bill“ turns the imagination of the MEGA movement into legal reality; anti-immigration measures will include even those with legal position in the US and with legal employment. He humiliated Europe, which had submitted to his demands: to increase defence spending, to abandon all dreams of unilateral designation of Palestine and to follow the example of the US on the mediate East conflict. Finally, he managed to impose a ceasefire on Israel and Iran.
What did Trump do to accomplish that? He abandoned the dream of his movement to focus on U.S. home politics and not interfere in world-wide conflicts, and took on the function of a global peacemaker who will not hesitate to impose peace through bloody bombings. Trump does not even effort to pretend to be equal among equals or that he is acting as an impartial judge. Who is he, then?
"Last week, NATO's yearly summit made a breakthrough decision to drastically increase defence spending – but the intimacy between president Donald Trump and NATO Secretary Mark Rutte focused all her attention. erstwhile Trump compared the sides of the conflict in the mediate East to “beating 2 children on the school field”, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte laughed at him: “And then Daddy has to usage his sharp tongue sometimes to stop” — reported CNBC service at the end of June.
Among the broken-up children who deserve a spanking from a harsh, yet kind father, Rutte forgot to include himself – or alternatively the most crucial figures in the EU: European countries agreed to increase military spending by 5% only after a strong reprimand of "Datusia". Unfortunately, this increase does not service European autonomy, but promotes even greater US dominance. And so Trump took on a fresh function in the planet arena: a global father defending peace with a mix of praise and violent pressure, including bomb terror. His actions are characterized by a tendency to whims and quirks, he is not bound by common diplomatic norms or even the rule of specified decency; he mixes folk wisdom with occasional vulgarism, all of which under the name of pragmatic realism.
And it is not Trump that is abruptly disgraced, but all those who, like Rutte, willingly enter the function of unruly teenagers waiting for fatherly discipline and abandon the only position they should now take, and so leaders demanding a policy based on the rule of equal dialogue. Just remind me how Trump and Vance humiliated Zelenski during an infamous gathering at the White House: there Trump played the function of an angry father, reproving Zelenski for allegedly not wanting peace. Shortly after this play, Zelenski desperately humbled himself before the authority of his father and assured that he loved Trump and the full United States.
I hatred to mention the hit of my youth years, Daddy Cool 1976, performed by Boney M. as an excellent example of a musical work that continues to haunt with its stupid and repetitive embodiment jouissanceAnd the more you effort to get him out of your head, the more frequently he appears in it – in my opinion it is Trump's best musical portrait.
Daddy Trump openly prefers 1 kid to another (he threatens to turn Tehran into ash), basing business decisions on subjective preferences (he lowered duties for Britain due to the fact that he likes it), although it must be admitted that erstwhile he forced a truce between Israel and Iran, he showed any flexibility by allowing the opponent to hold his face. He thanked Iran for informing the U.S. in advance of the attack on the military base in Qatar, so that it could evacuate soldiers and prevent fatalities – despite all rhetoric about the unconditional surrender of Iran Trump realized that if Iran is to come out of this situation face-to-face, he should be allowed to carry out 1 last attack for which he would not be punished.
So the fact is that Trump, as he says himself, does not want to start conflicts, but ends them. However, even if he adds another "triumph" to the list, playing the function of a whimsical global peacekeeper daddy, he will encounter clear limitations erstwhile his adversaries yet reject the individual of a demanding father. Trump now promises to bring peace to the Gaza Strip – but does he have anything to offer the Palestinians that would delight Israel? erstwhile it comes to Ukraine, with specified an opponent as Putin, the only possible option for Trump is to exert even more force on Zelenski or completely abandon the peaceful role. About China, with which Trump is fighting a real economical war, I will not even mention it.
The problem is that Trump's position as a pragmatic peacekeeper, his efforts to solve problems as if it could be done through realistic business negotiations, is artificial: its coordinates are pre-designated by the full strategy of eminently political decisions and exclusions. As was the case with Iran: pragmatic negotiations are only the reverse of the request for unconditional surrender.
As a Daddy Cool Trump announces a planet without clear rules and fundamental ethical principles; a planet in which the pretender has control over the violent fighting of children among himself is at the same time a capricious and unpredictable ruler. In summary, our planet is becoming more and more like a madhouse where the strongest patient has taken control and is playing doctor.
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She translated Anna Opara from English.
