The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
THOSE of us that have assumed post-political understandings of democracy and its opposite, tyranny, will find my reference to Donald Trump as a tyrant strange.
I must deepen the paradox and state that the USA itself holds a definition of democracy and practice of it that allows it to democratically practice tyranny in the globe.
As part of his campaign for the US presidency, Donald Trump promised to “make America great again.” He was going to achieve this by putting American interests first in his domestic and foreign policies. Under pressure of impeachment and an impeding election, Trump must not just demonstrate but actually dramatise his American jingoism.
The assassination of popular Iranian military leader, General Qassem Soleimani on the 3rd January became one such spectacle where Trump performed his Americanism. Among many voices of scholars, journalists and other pop-analysts, Trevor Noah the comedian, tellingly captured the world’s imagination with a video clip that he foregrounded with an announcement that in 2011, a certain Great Wise Man predicted the attack on Iran.
In the video clip a Donald Trump that was then a distant presidential aspirant boisterously announced that then President, Barack Obama, would attack Iran to bolster his chances of re-election because he had no negotiation skills and had to attack Iran to impress Americans.
Now we all know that Obama did not attack Iran and still got a second term in office. So Trump is on trial. It is actually Trump that as President has brought the USA and Iran closest to a full-blown war that might destabilise the whole of the Middle East if not the entire world. In Trump the desires and fears of the American Empire have collapsed together with the ego of a venal tyrant. Tyrants are always like that, individuals that create tyrannical systems or are produced and enabled by tyrannical systems and structures. In that respect, Trump is indeed making America great.
In actuality, Trump’s roughshod walk over world affairs and international relations is a symptom of the decline of the USA that has enjoyed leadership of the world, effectively, since 1945. As an individual politician, tyrant, bully and extremist in words and in deeds, Trump is a perfect metaphor of the character and conduct of the USA in world affairs.
Trump’s now infamous “alternative-facts” world of politics accurately mirrors the fact-free manner in which the USA walks over other countries in pursuit of its economic and political interests. In public rhetoric and other politically correct performances decent Americans and other Europeans are disgusted by Trump’s latest actions. Yet in political logic, Trump is presently the truest American that is acting to the scripts of great America.
True America is publicly ashamed but privately proud of Trump. That is what tyrants are; they are heroes to an elite part of the population that feeds fat from their venal works.
Great Americanism and the Logic of Trump
The aspiration to make and keep America great at the expense of the truth and humanity has always been there, well before we knew there was Donald Trump. In 1948 a man that was correctly called the “Veteran State Department Official of the United States of America,” George Kennan, in a Memo declared that “we have 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6,3% of its population — our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.” Kennan’s was the true Great Americanism that profited from economic and political dominance of the United States of America in the Globe, undiluted vampiric jingoism.
This was the same era when Dwight Eisenhower referred to Iran as “strategically most important part of the world” for America, for its oil wealth and position in the rich pickings of the Middle East. In 1945, in the pronunciation of its Grand Area Strategy, the USA counted Iran as the Fourth Pillar of Influence in the Middle East, not to be embraced and related to in peace but to be conquered, dominated and controlled.
A free Iran is a threat to Great America and that is the mathematics of geopolitics in the present world.
True to the dream, in 1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the democratic government of Muhammed Mossadeq, a fiercely nationalist iraqist Shah, and installed a puppet and client leader. A pro-American government of Iran was only to be overthrown in the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 by the popular masses of the former Persia that eventually became the Iran of today. Since then; there has been no formal diplomatic relations between the USA and Iran. Iran and the USA, up to today relate through their friendly and convenient proxies, Pakistan representing Iran in the USA and Switzerland standing for the USA in Iran. It is actually credit to Iran that as early in the ages as 1856, it is the Shah of Persia, Qajar that sent an envoy to the America that only reciprocated in 1883 by appointing one Samuel Benjamin as a special representative of America in Persia.
America has always looked at Iran with greed, anger and much envy so much so that when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini replaced the American puppet in power in 1979 he called America in religious language as “the Great Satan.” That language of damnation reflects just how the masses of Iran experienced and understood American imperialism and domination.
When the deposed puppet was given asylum in the USA the students movement in Iran was so enraged that for 444 days they held hostage diplomats and staff in the American embassy in Tehran. The CIA engineered a rescue operation that they called Operation Eagle Claw on the 24th of April in 1980; the operation failed and America lost eight men. Iran and Iranians have not been forgiven for defeating the Eagle of Empire. Empire is a meticulous keeper of grudges.
Even the United Nations brokered Iran Deal of 2015 will not protect Iran from the hostility and aggression of the United States. Well before Trump falsely accused Obama of planning to attack Iran, Noam Chomsky insisted that the USA was determined to attack Iran. Speaking to David Barsamian of the magazine, Truthout, on the 18th of July 2019, Chomsky noted that Trump will attack Iran to bolster his political fortunes in 2020 by appeasing the American far-Right Wing that wants Iran dead and all its oil alive and available for exploitation.
Bush did not call Iran part of the Axis of Evil in the world for nothing. Iran stands in between the USA and its easy access to the fatty goods in the Middle East; accusations of exporting terrorism and plotting nuclear war-fare are a good excuse in mobilising Euro-American hatred for Iran, the true logic behind the rhetoric is Euro-American dominance in and control of the Middle East. American envy of and hatred of Iran and other anti-Empire states have given excuse to many tyrannical regimes in the world that conveniently claim that they are opposed and challenged because they are anti-imperialist, when they are what they are, tin-pot despotisms.
Trump: Spectacles of the Tyrant
In a beautiful and also very powerful book of 2002; Why Tyrants Go Too Far: Malignant Narcissm and Absolute Power, Betty Glad teaches us that tyrants are by nature extremists that take even the small things too far. Trump is taking all things too far in his spectacular performances of Great Americanism. The tyrant typically sees himself as some political messiah sent by the divine order to defend truth and greatness from dark forces. He tends to see his enemies and opponents as sinners to be destroyed and damned.
He does not only love power but he loves himself in power. What Ken Wilber has called “aperspectival madness” is a kind of consuming insanity of the tyrant. He sees no other truth except his opinions, passions and instincts. His opinions begin as certainties that defend him as right and correct in everything, but the certainties grow into mental prisons that block him from seeing any other truth. The tyrant is impervious to evidence of his madness and wrongs that is why almost all tyrants are perfect denialists. All tyrants and despots are one way or another mad people.
While all tyrants are what Doris Lessing described as “small terrified men” they tend to act big. They see themselves in civilisational proportions and planetary terms. When Trump says the USA will bomb 52 cultural sites of Iran he means religious shrines and heritage scenes of Persia, “some at a very high level and important to Iran and Iranian culture.” An attack which if carried out may pit the entire Islamic world against the Euro-American and Christian civilisations. He is itching for the infamous “clash of civilisations” that a scholar, and another Great Americanist prophet, Samuel Huntington, propounded.
In that way, Trump wants a kind of war of all against all in the world because he imagines himself a true messiah of good versus evil. Yet, in reality Trump like all other tyrant is a terrified little man whose bullying ways arise out of fear and inadequacy. The USA itself is insanely terrified of China and will box all shadows in hope to fend off the Dragon from the East.
The way Trump publicly speaks of American military power, describing the weapons in detail, is not only unpresidential anywhere in the world but it is also childish. He sounds like a school boy bully in the playground that boasts of powers he wishes he had to scare those that he fears. That his words make all Americans and other people unsafe and uncertain in the world does not only escape him; he just does not get it, he is too much of a tyrant to understand.
Iranian cultural sites and religious shrines will, according to Trump “be hit very fast and very hard.” The language of a coward and a terrified toddler is not concealed in the threatening language. It was going to be a true comedy if Trump was an individual speaking for himself but it is a real tragi-comedy because he speaks for an Empire and it is human lives and human history that he is playing about.
For leaders, thinkers and people of the Global South there is no need to take easy sides in sympathy with Iran or contempt of Trump and the USA. Sympathy and contempt are articles of post-political thinking and understanding. The Global South must side with liberation and another world where human life is free from victimisation by tyranny in white and black. We must oppose first the Trumps inside and amongst ourselves. That world which Trump projects, where war is a political language, where the idiotic tyrant that has no mental resources of engagement and relies on armies and weapons should be a primitive world to be ashamed of and shunned. The barbarism and weakness of relying on brute force to maintain power and dominance over the world is evil that should be given its true name as evil and also weakness and primitivism. Notably, he that runs to the barracks and the armoury when it is ideas and communication that are needed is a tyrant and an enemy of humanity, and must be called out as such.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of the Witwatersrand, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, in South Africa: [email protected].
