With Sanders gone and Hillary a guaranteed warmonger, Trump's appeal may broaden out of necessity.
First, let’s consider the estimable William Greider, a regular contributor to The Nation and author of Secrets of the Temple. He titled a recent article for the Nation,“Donald Trump Could be The Military Industrial Complex’s Worst Nightmare: The Republican Front Runner is Against Nation Building. Imagine That.” Greider’s article is brief, and I recommend reading every precious word of it. Here is but one quote: “Trump has, in his usual unvarnished manner, kicked open the door to an important and fundamental foreign-policy debate.” And here is a passage from Trump’s interview with the Washington Post that Greider chooses to quote: Trump talks about building infrastructure for the inner cities, especially better schools for African American children, rather than bombing people of color halfway around the world! That is hardly racism. And it is not how the mainstream media wants us to think of The Donald. Next, Glen Ford, the eloquent radical Left executive editor of Black Agenda Report, a superb and widely read outlet, penned an article in March 2016, with the following title: “Trump Way to the Left of Clinton on Foreign Policy – In Fact, He’s Damn Near Anti-Empire.” Ford’s piece is well worth reading in its entirety; here are just a few quotes :
Next, let’s turn to John Pilger, the Left wing Australian journalist and documentary film maker who has been writing about Western foreign policy with unimpeachable accuracy and wisdom since the Vietnam War era. Here are some of his comments on Trump:
The money quote is: “The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton.” When Pilger submitted his article to the “progressive” magazine Truthout, this sentence was deleted, censored as he reported, along with a few of the surrounding sentences. Such censorship had not been imposed on Pilger by Truthout ever before. Truthout’s commitment to free speech apparently has limits in the case of The Donald versus Hillary, rather severe ones. So one must read even the progressive press with some skepticism when it comes to Trump. Trump has also been noticed by the Left in Europe, notably by the sharp minded Jean Bricmont, physicist and author of Humanitarian Imperialism who writes here: [Trump] “is the first major political figure to call for ‘America First’ meaning non-interventionism. He not only denounces the trillions of dollars spent in wars, deplores the dead and wounded American soldiers, but also speaks of the Iraqi victims of a war launched by a Republican President. He does so to a Republican public and manages to win its support. He denounces the empire of US military bases, claiming to prefer to build schools here in the United States. He wants good relations with Russia. He observes that the militarist policies pursued for decades have caused the United States to be hated throughout the world. He calls Sarkozy a criminal who should be judged for his role in Libya. Another advantage of Trump: he is detested by the neoconservatives, who are the main architects of the present disaster.”And then there is Stephen F. Cohen, contributing editor for The Nation and Professor Emeritus of Russian History at Princeton and NYU. Cohen makes the point that Trump, alone among the presidential candidates, has raised five urgent and fundamental questions, which all other candidates in the major parties have either scorned or more frequently ignored. The five questions all call into question the interventionist warlike stance of the US for the past 20 plus years. Cohen enumerates the questions here, thus:
Cohen comments in detail on these questions here. Whatever one may think of the answers Trump has provided to the five questions, there is no doubt that he alone among the presidential candidates has raised them – and that in itself is an important contribution. At this point, I mention my own piece, which appeared late last year. Entitled “Who is the Arch Racist, Hillary or The Donald”? Like Cohen’s pieces, it finds merit with the Trump foreign policy in the context of posing a question. Finally, let us turn to Bill Blum, who wrote an article entitled, "American Exceptionalism and the Election Made in Hell (Or Why I’d Vote for Trump Over Hillary)." Again there is little doubt about the stance of Blum, who is the author of "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II", a scholarly compendium, which Noam Chomsky calls “Far and away the best book on the topic.” Blum begins his piece:
And he concludes:
I conclude with Blum’s words because they are most pertinent to our present situation. The world is living through a perilous time when the likes of the neocons and Hillary Clinton could lead us into a nuclear Armageddon with their belligerence toward Russia and their militaristic confrontation with China. The reality is that we are faced with a choice between Clinton and Trump, a choice which informs much of the above commentary. Survival is at stake and we must consider survival first if our judgments are to be sane. Source: Russia Insider;
Originally appeared at Zero Hedge |