Donald Trump

Trump regurgitates British myths in his Saudi Conference speech.

Churchill's Karma1 Comment

Anyone with half a brain cell knows that Saudi Arabia shares the same ideology as ISIS and al-Qaeda. Anyone knows that only last year candidate Donald Trump rightly condemned Hilary Clinton’s proximity to the Saudi Arabian ruling clan while at the same time supposedly being a champion of women’s rights. Yet here he was in the capital of jihadism on his visit abroad as President lecturing Muslims on the need to combat extremism in a land were public floggings and executions are a norm. Where campaigners for freedom of speech are met, if they’re lucky, with prison sentences.

But for a moment let’s put aside Trump’s brass-necked and sickening hypocrisy. Early in his speech he regurgitated this myth about the founding of the Kingdom that demands unpacking:

“King Abdulaziz, the founder of the Kingdom who united your great people. Working alongside another beloved leader — American President Franklin Roosevelt — King Abdulaziz began the enduring partnership between our two countries.”

Firstly, the notion that AbdulAziz ‘founded’ the Kingdom is mythic nonsense. The British actually founded the Kingdom and AbdulAziz was merely their puppet. When AbdulAziz expanded into the Ha’il region (in the north) it was because the British drove him there because the then rulers, the Rashidis, rejected the British Empire’s advances to be another puppet. The British even sent in reinforcements for AbdulAziz to capture the region. Continue reading →

Detoxing ‘Bretix Britain’ with ….Donald Trump

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To varying degrees both the Donald J. Trump and Brexit electoral victories were based on scapegoating minorities considered to be a threat to the Western natural order. For Trump, Mexicans and Muslims were the villains of the piece in his “Make America Great Again” campaign for the Presidency of the United States of America. For British Brexiters, scapegoating was encapsulated in the slogan of “Take Back Control”. This slogan was largely aimed at the bureaucrats in Brussels who mythically had taken control of Britain and the east European migrants who have legally arrived recently in the U.K. As others have pointed out there were similarities in the two campaigns with both rooted in the new (mostly right-wing) populism sweeping some western nations.

Another similarity was the violence the two campaigns unleashed. Admittedly the tensions at Trump rallies were successfully contained and never reached the level of the British Brexit campaign were a British legislator or Member of  Parliament, Jo Cox, was brutally murdered with the assailant yelling “Britain First” and “keep Britain independent” (slogans popular with extreme right) as he shot and knifed his victim 15 times.

This is where the similarities end because as can be seen by the Continue reading →