By Henry A. Onwubiko
Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that then could I do the other-Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (Chapter xxxvi – The Quarter-Deck )
In September 1970 when Richard Millhouse Nixon was President of the United States, I lived with a republican family in California with other refugees -Koreans, Vietnamese, Biafran, and Souix Indian -with our delightful host, wife of an American Fighter Pilot killed in the Korean war; and we served to soothe the conscience of a troubled nation. Conscience is an open wound, says Uthman dan Fodio, only truth can heal it. We were admitted into Piedmont Junior High School in the bay area of Oakland. Kim and Marti were orphaned by the Korean war, while Tich and Anne-both Vietnamese – were on crutches because they were paralyzed by wounds from B-52 bombers. Tich had a plastic bag beneath his trousers that served as a urine reservoir which he emptied after school. Brenda, the Souix Indian who joined us from a reservation in either North or South Dakota was the only girl, and there was a look out for more.
At school every Monday morning, we followed other children to pledge allegiance facing the blood bedewed star spangled flag. At the weekends we remained glued to the long couch in the living-room to watch the latest products of Hollywood, America’s booming movie industry, such as The Wild Wild West, Mission Impossible, and Star Trek, while the widow received journalists and other visitors who snapped pictures of us like the recent ones of Donald Trump and Ivanka sandwiching the Chibok girls. Those movies always had their superstars- the Donald Trumps, Ronald Reagans, Captain Kirk of the space ship Enterprise, mimicking John F. Kennedy, and the John Waynes-all out to foretell of their second coming. They all repeatedly drummed the same message that the rest of the World-African, Arabs, Indians, Chinese, Latinoes and others-had zero option, than to bleed “from wherever” or bow as refugees under the Imperial diktat of White Nationalists, settlers, or cowboys as in The Wild Wild West.
The central lesson from The Wild Wild West is the pivotal role of arms as a supplement to the doctrine of White Supremacy in the subjugation and robbery of other peoples of the globe under an American led Western Imperialism. What would have been the fate of the Boers, White Settlers and Cowboys in Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Arab world without the superior arms of the West? This desire for the monopoly to bear arms both at home and abroad has been incorrectly attributed to the settler’s ingenuity to tame their government, and applauded as a “great” contribution to democracy. To guarantee White Supremacy over other immigrants, aborigines, slaves and refugees in the United States, the White Settler elevated his right to bear arms as the unamendable Second Amendment in the constitution of the United States. Donald Trump had appealed to this sentiment of White Nationalists when he made the right to bear arms his campaign slogan and solution to curb the incessant gun-violence often directed at other minorities. By advertising the freedom to guns, Trump was inadvertently calling to arms the very minorities – blacks, Latinos, and others – who –are threatened, and who question the capacity of a Trump government to protect them.
Just as President Trump intends to achieve social harmony and national security in the United States by making arms easily accessible, while boosting the profit of gun manufacturers, with the trick that the White Nationalist majority will become better armed to keep the Blacks, Indians, Mexicans Latinoes, Chinese, other later immigrants, and refugees under their control, so too does Trump seek a monopoly of violence in the entire globe to restore a disintegrating Western Imperialism under an America leadership, against a rising China, a free Russia, with zero option to other struggling and developing nations. Already Donald has raised his war chest to 1.1 trillion dollars, an increment of 54 billion dollars above his predecessor, making it the largest defence budget in the world. That should be enough to stockpile nuclear and non-nuclear weapons, make more wars, and create more refugees from the remotest armpits of the globe, only to reject them in future from settling in the United State and Europe, their primary cause. His first trip to Saudi Arabia and the client state of Israel had led to over 100 billion dollars in arm deals to protect Western Oil investments, encircle Iran, a developing regional power that Donald Trump and the West consider a threat to their investments and domination of the Gulf region. The arms are also to support the Zionist state of Israel and any resistance to Trump’s latest reactionary and belligerent one-state solution against the U.N. recognized two-state solution in resolving Palestinian occupation by Israel. The arms deal are also to actively demonstrate the Trump Administration’s unwavering commitment to Hydrocarbon Emission Technology, its consequent eco-catastrophe, and resolve to oppose the Paris Climate Accord. Even the strong global signal of resistance by North Korea, with its nuclear technology and the testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile, that can penetrate the United States, despite America and Japan’s, menacing military presence in its shores which suggest that humanity has entered an era where international disputes can no longer be resolved through wars due to the ubiquity of the most dangerous military technologies, seem to be ignored. Donald Trump is still propelled by the monomania of global domination through the supremacy of arms. He has hastened to deploy American THAAD missiles in South Korea under the pretext of containing North Korea, pretending that the world and many of his own citizens who lost their dear ones from the last Korean war or who were orphaned like Kim and Marti, suffer from propaganda induced amnesia, while threatening Russia, China, Vietnam, the Philippines and other Asian nations. Perhaps Kim and Marti and other Korean children who were brought for refuge in the U.S are now fully grown to be used as saboteurs in breaking the Korean armistice. Also Biafran and other African refugees in America and other Western nations can prepare to serve also as cannon fodder as Donald Trump’s plan unfolds, to links other CIA manipulated secessionist groups in African states for more civil wars. Therefore, American foreign policy under Trump is constituted chiefly of arm dealing, gun-cocking while wielding a big stick to restore Western privileges from a damnable, bloody and condemned past around the globe.
To announce to the world his exhumed antediluvian strategy on the role of arms in reviving a declining Western Imperialism, Trump detonated the world’s largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan. He followed this act by firing American Tomahawk missiles to destroy a Syrian airbase inside a sovereign state, under the pretext and unproven claim that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people. This allegation had met a stumbling block at the United Nations where Nikky Haley, the U.S Ambassador, determined to reverse the U.S. waning authority at the United Nations, threatened to cut financial aid and U.S contribution to the world body, but still could not convince a skeptical world recovering from the previous lie and propaganda by the United States, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the pretext it used to Invade sovereign Iraq and destroy its people.
Arms will also be the binding force and strength of a renewed American led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) global offensive under the stewardship of Donald Trump. All NATO members have already accepted the directive of dedicating two percent of each nation’s Gross Domestic Product for producing weapons not only for fighting terrorism but in their collective adventure to maintain their investments and ensure global Western domination. Their past incursion in Libya led to the destruction of Libya, the killing of Moamer Ghadaffi, the charismatic leader and foundation member of the African Union, yet the Trump Administration had not only passed an executive order preventing Libyan refugees from entering the United States, but other NATO nations have found it difficult also to welcome Africans fleeing the brutality of their air-raids, the dangers of crossing the Mediterranean sea where many have drowned in search of a safe refuge in Europe, branding them potential terrorists.
With a defense budget of over 1.1 trillion dollars, a disintegrating and discordant West is caught in the web of a world economic and financial crises that has challenged their innovation, productivity, supremacy and profligate life styles, in the midst of a wretched humanity, where the quality and value of human life and the environment is degraded in the interest of profit and the happiness of a few despite the world’s vast scientific knowledge that can end world hunger, communicable and most diseases, and solve many of humanity’s challenges.
Only what is profitable to a pitiful few determines what is produced and the degree of human progress.
Donald Trump stands with his immense war chest to uphold a reactionary, and rapidly fading past, when a progressive future for humanity is clearly within sight.