Columns

For the last couple of months, I have been trying to unravel the thinking process—if that is what it is—of that cacophonous and egregious president of the United States, Donald Trump. If it was just his convoluted and confused talk that has caused so much bother, one might excuse him. After all, he is an American, and they have this habit of making things stand on their heads.

Trump made quite a hash of his first term as president, even to the point of letting loose some armed and adventurous dogs of war to attack Capitol Hill because he disputed the presidential election results.

It seemed the American people—thankfully not all of them—considered Mr Trump another Alexander the Great and deserved to rule the nation for another term.

And they voted for him a second time, never mind he had been convicted more than a dozen times and is a felon. Now he believes he is not only ready to rule the Western hemisphere but also fit to govern the world. Mediocrity, like greatness, can come from anywhere—like too much meddling and muddling in real estate—Greenland, Denmark and Canada to boot.

The problem has always been whether one can believe in what he says, whether he really believes in his own idiosyncrasies, how long he will maintain what he said without turning it on his head and whether he is any better than an inverted pyramid of piffle.

As I write, the Israeli cabinet seems furious over news Trump announced without a word to the Israelis first about a decision to stop the conflict with Lebanon. It is this kind of unilateral action that not only annoys other allies but makes it harder for anybody else to anticipate what Trump will say or do.

With Trump’s mouth working faster than his brain, things turn crazier by the day. I thought the possibility of a more permanent pause to the clash of arms seemed a done deal; it appeared that the monarch of the White House had other plans afoot to punish a few recalcitrant allies who, by now, were fed up with his antics.

Personally I was hoping he would take a trip to the Stone Age, where he wanted to send the entire Iranian civilisation, and leave this civilisation. But he won’t resist his own, which he claims is registered only in his mind, wherever that is.

In a way his eccentricities do create a fast-moving comic opera which sometimes makes one forget occasions that one has looked forward to eagerly and recall how such superpowers like the US and its acolytes tried to misdirect thinking those from the Third World were easy meat to twist and turn into their crooked shape.

I refer to the Vietnam War, which I had followed or was made to follow in 1966, shortly after the US entered the fray just one year after war broke out in Indochina. Four years or so later I was following the war from a closer distance, given large portions of American garbage by media ‘specialists’ in Hawaii or on the American mainland.

The intellectual food was virtually just the same, be it West Berlin or Hawaii. The only difference was the accent of those who worked the propaganda route—a few pro-Western journalists from the Pacific, South East Asia and one Australian; the rest of the bunch were easy to take and would leave for home convinced that the US would not only win the war against poorly armed Vietnamese troops but also carry the message of Western superiority.

So in the summer of 1966 I was at a West Berlin Journalism Institute, virtually touching the East German-built Berlin Wall, a piece of communist construction that became the centrepiece of Western propaganda for tourists and malleable journalists from Asia returning home convinced that behind the Iron Curtain were loads of nasties determined to destroy the ideological four.

Along with me was another Sri Lankan journalist, Rex de Silva, from a more recent newspaper from another media group, whom I did know at the time but came to know well enough to give me much-needed support against a battery of well-immersed journalists, if not in Western culture, at least in some of their common sermons.

It did not take more than a week to realise that we were scapegoats to a well-tuned prop machine from the moment we were planted in a building opposite “Checkpoint Charlie”. The resting place, as it were, was written in German, which in English read ‘Berlin Institute for Mass Communication in Developing Countries’. That gave the play away. We did not carve it on our chests.

Rex, who was my junior in the profession, and I had a chat and decided on a way forward. Every Monday one of us, in rotation, had to present a commentary on the previous week’s news. That session was chaired by the director of the institute, Horst Sheffhold – if my spelling is correct – after 60 years, which is just a year after the US “Vietnam War” began with President Lyndon. B. Johnson started to pour US combat troops into Vietnam after the US Congress paved the way for President Johnson to declare war.

I wish Rex de Silva had still been alive. If he were here today, he would recall how I went to take on the director after he came on to support one of the Thai journalists whose commentary was turning out to be a plate full of anti-communist, anti-Moscow invective and completely one-sided.

So I took him on to set a report round and balanced, but Director Sheffhold stepped in, in defence of the Thai writer. But that did not stop us third-world scribes, who were seen as untutored journalists who should learn some lessons, except that we turned it on our supreme teacher.

It ended when the director was napping. It was finally the day after the final part of the written exam was over. This exam paper had been set by Stefan Gansiger, the deputy editor on the Berliner Morgen Post, the city’s morning paper from the Axel Springer group.

The director called to us one by one to inform them of the results. When it came to my turn, Dr Sheffhold said that I had received 30 marks out of 30. He said he would deduct one mark, reducing me to 29. I said it was not fair because I was the only participant who completed the paper with full marks. The director told me he was reducing one mark for my handwriting. I insisted he could not do so.

“Why can’t I reduce one mark for your handwriting?” His tone of authority was quite obvious. Like Donald Trump, he did not hold all the cards.

“Well, because I did not write. I used a typewriter.” It was a crushing blow to the director standing by the door to the office. And so the end of course was the newspaper I was to edit and Rex was to lay out and print. I suppose it was too embarrassing to take.

Anyway, it is on a wall in my study along with other awards from different places. And the letter that deducts one mark is hanging prominently.

But this is not the end of the Vietnam War story. The Berlin episode was when the war started. As the war was coming to its end, we were at the East-West Centre at the University of Hawaii campus studying what we would call the Last Days of Pompeii with the US preparing to surrender.

It would seem a more honourable thing to do than the ham-fisted attempt at a Trumpian clawback.

(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.)