Daily Times

Strange are the times we live in. On a world scale there is an unforeseen instability, turmoil and discontentment. This is more so in the world’s largest economy and the mightiest military power. Ever since Donald Trump became the president of the US there been hype in xenophobia, misogyny, anti Muslim chauvinism, travel bans and discrimination against minorities. However the reaction of the US establishment and the deep state is most telling. His haphazard bombast in this ‘Circus de Trump’ has laid bare the US state’s corruption, foreign aggressions, mass domestic surveillance, its façade of democracy and diplomatic hypocracy.

Sixty ‘national security experts’ including the alleged ISIS terrorist fraternizer John McCain in a highly publicized open letter counselled America that Trump would “diminish our standing in the world making us far less safe.” However even after assuming the office of the president, Trump has kept up his rhetoric and ridicule of the Washington clique that is the citadel of US imperialist power for long. He obliquely attacked the policies of US aggressions around the world and the atrocities they committed in the garb of freedom and democracy.

In an interview with Fox news network’s Bill O’Reilly when asked about why he respects Putin who was “a killer?” Trump said, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got lot of killers. What, do you think our country is so innocent? I think our country does plenty of killing also.” When the US security chief attacked him, Trump retorted back, “I’ll tell you how good our military is doing under Michael Hayden and people such as this. We’ve been fighting wars in the Middle East for 15 years, 18 years… for four or five trillion dollars, we don’t know what we’re doing, we don’t know who we’re fighting, we’re arming people that we want on our side, we don’t know who they are. When they take over a country they’re worse than people they depose. Give me a break!”

Western media houses considered ‘impartial’ with our intelligentsia and politicos presenting them as sacrosanct, honest and faultless bearers of truth have been ferociously exposed by Trump for their bias and dishonesties, calling them ‘fake news’. But this proved the point that the left and Marxist writers and activists in Pakistan had been making for decades about the lies and deceit of the imperialist media networks and the deceptive role they play to confuse and distract the masses in their struggles against the system.

But above all Trump ridiculed US imperialism’s notorious spy agencies such as the CIA for their deliberate leaks to the media against him. The role of these agencies in the mass genocides from Indonesia to Honduras and the counterrevolutionary insurgencies from Afghanistan to Egypt are well known.But the NSA, FBI and other agencies spying domestically on the ordinary people intruding into their private lives have exposed them in full glare.

US imperialism’s policy of divide and rule to colonise nations abroad has been used domestically to perpetuate their rule. A reactionary US banker and speculator of the last century J.P. Morgan had bragged during the Great Depression: “When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of [crony] capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us.”

The disaffection of the US working classes is simmering robustly. The latest antics of the ruling elite constantly serves up to preoccupy, hypnotize and enmesh the bewildered masses are no longer working. The elite’s programmed brainwashing suddenly finds itself in serious jeopardy if an unruly and wild outsider like Donald Trump gets elected as the President of the United States. Even the Catholic Pope in the Vatican slammed Trump insinuating he was “not Christian.” Trump termed it “disgraceful for a religious leader to make such a comment,” quickly pointing out the hypocrisy that “the Vatican City has a wall around it — built to keep the Muslims out.”

Mainstream analysts deliberately miss out the economic, military, social, diplomatic and political decline of the largest imperial empire in history. The rise of Donald trump is the manifestation of the malaise that has set in the American system, state and the society. Barak Obama bailed out the corrupt and extortionist banks and financial companies in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. The US debt ballooned to a record 19 trillion dollars. It was the US workers that had to bear the burdens of these losses. The rich have become richer and the poor the poorer.

The American masses led by the youth came out in the magnificent Occupy Wall Street Movement against these vultures in 2011, but without a revolutionary leadership this was bound to dissipate. The mass discontent exploded on the political plane during last year’s election campaign with the rise of Bernie Sanders, a candidate who openly espoused ‘socialism’ as the way out of this excruciating crisis. When the Clinton clique and the Democratic Party’s bureaucracy slavishly following the dictates of the US bourgeois and out manoeuvred Sanders with blatant rigging, a large section of the people retreated from the political arena temporarily. However other sections in their frustration and hatred against the ruling system voted Trump.

Trump is no revolutionary but a reactionary unstable bourgeois with large stakes in real estates and casinos among others. Instead of addressing the underlying problems he end up aggravating the crisis and accelerating the decline of US imperialism. However the oppressed and exploited working classes and the poor of the US can only achieve a salvation through a socialist revolution. Such a development would be the greatest event of human history after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. It will prove Trotsky’s prophesy that, “American revolution will be the foundry of the (glorious) future of mankind.”

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail