Columns

Last Sunday this column was headlined “An American clown who turns tragedy into farce.”

For that I must apologise a thousand times. I was being more gentle than I should have been. After all, this little island of country of ours and its people had suffered weeks of hardships and deserved the empathy and goodwill of a sympathetic world.

So maybe President Trump was playing a few light operas and readying himself for an enjoyable evening on that new part of the White House, which now happens to be a beautiful dance floor where the pending world leader (as I have now been told) is tripping a quiet light fantastic and downing a French champagne, hardly à la Monsieur Macron, who is apparently averse to Trump’s so-called English, never mind what he passes off as French.

Personally, I could not stand what he also calls English, having got into quite a verbal tussle with a journalism teacher at their journalism institute at the University of Hawaii over the word ‘route’, which in American English (if that is English) is entirely different and provides misleading meaning.

Within a week of my accusing Donald Trump of turning tragedy into comic relief, he unleashed his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and let loose his dogs of war. Days before the World Economic Forum regularly held in Davos, where world leaders, academics, economists and leading businesses gather to see what they can pick up to enlighten themselves, there was a world assembly since a new battlefront was opening up.

But even before the gloves were donned, there was electric current in the air. One thing one might say for Trump is he has a sense of theatre. He was going to be at Davos. Not even a defective plane he was aboard that suffered some technical trouble could keep him away.

Even before the Air Force One that he still using can be replaced with a flying present for Donald Trump from the Emir of Qatar as promised sometime back could reach the new Emir of Venezuela with his world office in Washington he had ousted the incumbent president of Venezuela and abducted him and his wife and flown them in captivity to Trump’s home capital.

Those few days since last Sunday the world had changed so much that it seemed to be upside down. Not that it seemed as though President Trump had a timetable working so he could make maximum out of the days when the eyes of the world will be on him, even though back in the countries that the American Big Chief is targeting and are ready to focus his guns on.

Amid the gunfire, troop movements, and the uncertainty facing nations both large and small, the system change promised by newly elected governments—whether before or after elections—appears overshadowed by far more potent forces. These forces seem intent on expanding their own territories, resembling monolithic prehistoric beasts poised to swallow smaller states or render them extinct as independent, functional entities.

That is why what was said by Trump in Davos was built around it so much. Many will be wondering which existing nations will become victims of Trump’s ambition to conquer parts of the world that will make it an imperial power with bases all around the place that would recreate an old-world scenario.

The idea was thrown to us at the Hawaii seminars with thoughts of a new world order based on a new world culture until we shot it down after I took on a prof from Hawaii University who later quietly slipped away.

The difference between then and now is this. The university academics and others were putting forward theories based on peaceful spread of a world culture which I spoke against.

But what Trump stands for an entirely different civilisational that would be wrung by force or a gulag environment which is something like our own maestros planned in the re-write of some of our owns.

What is interesting in Trump’s Davos speech, which took a good 70 minutes, is his reference to Germany and the German language. He held out that if the United States did not enter the Second World War, some of those attending Davos would be talking German now.

It appears that Donald Trump has a strong aversion to the German language and German ancestry. Perhaps he forgets that his own grandfather, Friedrich Trump, was a German immigrant who came to the US from Kallstadt, Germany, in 1885, and so did his father, named Frederick Christ Trump.

Trouble with today’s Trump is that he forgets his ancestral past and also that he also followed his ancestors by taking to real estate dealing and so made the money that his father and forefather taught him.

We are also looking at the Board of Peace (BoP) that he wants to launch, claiming US$ 1,000,000,000 from each member as payment for three years. Trump has three years more as president, and then it is kaput unless he does some jugglery to amend the constitution and creep into the White House, one way or another.

That is not all. If he finds the United Nations, housed in New York from the inception, intervening in his efforts to conquer the world, it will not come as a surprise that he will stop members of the states who are members of the UN in New York from being denied entry permits to New York.

He has already withdrawn membership of US from various UN institutions and even several associations from private organisations.

A man who can do that, who has no humanitarian concerns is hardly likely to worry about human nature. Such is the type of human kind that is produced.

By the way I might add that British Prime Minister Theresa May was leaving the White House after an official visit I presume, he was just by her side. At one point he asked the British Prime Minister for her personal telephone number. She had flatly refused. So this Trump was effectively trumped.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor, Diplomatic Editor and Political Columnist of the Hong Kong Standard before moving to London, where he worked for Gemini News Service. Later he was Deputy Chief of Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London before returning to journalism.)