The people and groups named appear to be a disparate bunch –
a renegade Republican President of the United States, a renegade ‘Freedom
Fighter turned plunderer of his people and a leader of one of the largest
religious organizations. Yet there are many similarities that need to be looked
at closely by anyone seeking to understand what is going wrong with our world.
Donald Trump is a president who is proud of his inability to
understand details of situations and the nuances that have enabled the world to
function effectively until recently. In his world, everything revolves around
him. Even truth is what he says it is. He has captured the populist imagination
of a group of people very much like him. They see everything in black and
white. They do not understand the other sides to each story, and they do not
want to understand them. Trump appears to be happy to lead his nation into a bigoted
ignorance, maneuvering his way through the facts, blaming others for what is
going wrong, ignoring what is clearly failing, in the blind belief in his own
incomparable abilities to bluster and blackmail every opponent, including
people who would like to help him to achieve the best for his people, into
submitting to his will. It is already clear that this President has taken the
international standing of his country several large steps backward. He is
willing to hand over dominance over, and influence in, the Asia Pacific region
to China, by backing out of trade treaties and negotiations which, in his
ignorance of the wider context, he describes in his usual exaggerated and
uncompromising terms as ‘the worst ever’. He is willing to alienate his country’s
closest allies in Europe by his oafish words and his false claims, that ‘they
must pay their share of the NATO budget, they must increase expenditure on the
military’, disregarding the fact that a large part of expenditure by, for
example, Germany, on elements that are not strictly military are designed to
avoid the situation that could easily turn those situations into pressing
military problems. Roman Herzog, the then-incoming German President, recognized
that the way to peace did not necessarily involve artillery and fighter jets
when he told the German nation that ‘we must take steps to resolve the problems
of Africa in Africa, because, if we do not, they will become European problems.’
Trump, notoriously ignorant in matters of history, does not understand that
view. In his eyes, military might is THE way to exercise influence in the
world. His background as a student at a military college goes a long way to
explain that shortcoming, yet other military men, such as President Jack
Kennedy and Senator John McCain, did not suffer from such a defective
understanding. They understood that prosperous friends will generally not be
willing to sacrifice that prosperity in order to gain a military superiority, a
situation which, at best, will be temporary, enduring only until the opponents,
fearing the threats contained in a military build-up and working to match that
military capability. They knew that a two-times overkill capability, coupled
with an active support of friendly countries, and countries that might become
friendly, is more than enough to maintain a status in which a potential enemy
could recognize that a military adventure would be a sure loss. They knew that
diplomacy, not unfounded bombast, was the only way to maintain a peaceful
world. They were also able to recognize that courting the association of
manifest enemies, to the detriment of proven friends, was to place their
country on a slippery slope to global catastrophe.
The fact that the Republican Party has, for so long,
tolerated the buffoonish antics of Donald Trump is a question that must raise
the suspicions among Party supporters about the leaders of the Party, who are
responsible for holding the excesses of the leading Party members in check and
forming the opinions of the Party rank and file. It appears that those leaders
are not willing to speak out against the most divisive and destructive man in
American politics since the McCarthy era.
Strangely enough, the rule of Jacob Zuma in South Africa
bears remarkable parallels to the rule of Donald Trump in the United States.
Like Trump, he had no hesitation in lying outright to suit his purpose. He had no
sense of shame in dividing the nation to achieve his nefarious ends. He had no
sense of the damage he was doing to the nation and to those who identified
themselves with him, needing only to achieve his personal objectives. Like
Trump, Zuma had no understanding of history, or of how the flow of it resulted
in the present and will result in the future. Like Trump, he had only the
barest understanding of the interrelationship of events, of how pushing here has the potential
to bring about a huge distortion there,
and he has no feeling of personal responsibility for the outcome of his
maneuvering, beyond the desire to achieve something for himself. Like Trump, he
relies on native cunning and animal instinct, not on understanding and careful
evaluation. Like Trump, he surrounded himself with sycophants and yes-men, people
who are always reluctant to stand up to the perceived excesses of their chief
in the interests of their personal benefit. Like Trump, he was always willing
to throw those ‘dear friends and trusted confidants’ under the bus when the
time came, and, like Trump, he was unable to comprehend that those people would
be just as willing to throw him under the bus when that became expedient in the
preservation of their own safety and comfort.
Pope Francis, on the other hand, is an organization man. The
Catholic Church continues to hold onto the illusion that it is the
representative of God on Earth, that it speaks the words of God and is therefor
infallible in its pronunciations. It ignores at every turn the fallacy of this
view, disregarding the evidence, or, at best, explaining it as a ‘human
failing, excused in each case by a benevolent God. It ignores the long-held
Church belief that the Earth was flat, that it was the center of the Universe,
that only those baptized by itself were good enough to enter Heaven. It ignores
the brutality of the Spanish Inquisition, perpetrated in the name of the
Church. It ignores the constant stream of acts of inhumanity perpetrated by the
representatives of the Church against children, men and women over many years.
It ignores the fact that the Papacy, the very leadership of the Church, acting
under the authority of God, was the subject of a competitive tender in the
not-so-distant past, that favors of the Church were the subject of payments.
The present tour of Ireland by the Pope has shown itself very clearly to be
little more than a public relations exercise, planned to boost the flagging
membership of the Church in the face of the revulsion against its actions and
inactions. The Pope remains unwilling to confess the sins of which it has
clearly been guilty, to make public reparation to the thousands, possibly
millions of its adherents, for the gross misconduct of members of the Church.
The Pope would have the members of the congregation believe that such
misconduct was not known to the senior management of the Church. Such a claim
is disingenuous in the extreme. At the very least, the supposedly all-knowing God
which the Church claims to represent must have made the ‘indiscretions’ of the
clergy known to those at the top of the Church, even if it was possible for
those responsible for such a well-organized pattern of conduct to have hidden
it, in the face of the policy of ‘confession and forgiveness’ exercised by the
Church. It is hard to conceive of a situation in which a substantial number of
senior clerics, across many countries, could have succeeded in maintaining the
lie that had been exposed, over and over, by the people who had suffered at the
hands of the Church.
Yet the Pope continues to uphold the fiction that the
Catholic Church is the upholder of virtue and spiritual rectitude. He continues
to avoid handing over to the criminal prosecution agencies every single priest
and bishop suspected of sexual offences against those who entrust their
spiritual guidance to the Church. He prays to God for forgiveness for the sins
of the Church, yet he fails to pray to the members of the congregation for such
forgiveness. Of course, it is easy to pray for forgiveness for such heinous
behavior, when you, yourself, claim the right to dispense such forgiveness. If
the church were a formal company, the shareholders would long since have sold
their shareholding on the basis of being fed such obvious lies and
disinformation by the Directors.
What are the grossly obvious similarities between these
people and the organizations they represent? Some answers leap out of the
facts.
None of the persons in question truly believes that they are
responsible for their actions to the people they claim to represent. Every one
of them has an ability to interpret the events and their actions solely in
relation to themselves, twisting the facts to present a picture that they need
to show themselves in the right light. They all have an ability to manipulate
the views and beliefs of their constituency to their own ends. They all have
enormous power, a power that could as easily be used for good as for the evil
that has been their choice, and they all have a hunger for such power, to the extent
that they are willing to lie and twist their story to ensure that they are able
to hold onto such power, regardless of the views and advice of better people.
None of them is prepared to face the world openly, to confess that what they
are doing is against the interests of Humanity and of the world. None of them
is willing to accept the loss of their leadership role, and the power and
wealth (in their terms) that comes with it, in the interests of the greater
good.
Worst of all, each of these men and the organizations they
represent is willing to continue to inflict on the world the incalculable harm
that they have done in the past.
Perhaps the most glaring similarity is that none of these
men and their organizations have any discernible set of principles by which to
measure their actions and which can truly be said to be devoid of personal
interest or benefit. None of them is willing to stand up to wrong if there is
any possibility that they will be harmed by such a stand.
In the words of Jo Stevens (‘Connection’ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N1XTDYD):
“her dislike for Mr. Jenkins Jr. would not cause her to abandon that principle
now. That was what principles were for. If one felt free to abandon them at
will, it made no sense to have them at all.”
What is wrong with our world?
It seems that the crisp answer is that the people we allow
to represent us do not have principles that are understood and accepted by the
majority of us, and, by their example, we allow them to degrade the principles
that we as people consider important for civilization to work.
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