MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: Donald Trump: an US Trial of Absurd (Br)Exit of Internationalism

Quick reminder of Netanyahu's & Trump's criminal "peace plan" (1'46'')

The Americans like to boast about the United States being "the oldest democracy in the world".
Well not quite.
You will have to take that cliche with a pinch or two of salt for to swallow it you will have to disregard the genocide of Native Americans, the transatlantic slave trade, relentless warmongering around the globe, and the fact that most black Americans (voting rights act of 1965) and women (1920) could not vote until quite recently.
Be that as it may, the US institutions of liberal democracy, especially the legislative and the judiciary, are theoretically there to protect it against whims and wanton tyrannies that might threaten its executive branch.
The spectacle of Donald Trump's impeachment, however, makes one wonder.
What today we recall as "the Moscow Trials" were a series of show trials in the former Soviet Union in the late 1930s staged against Trotskyists and other "enemies" Joseph Stalin had deemed dangerous to his personal view of socialism. The defenders were charged with trying to subvert the Soviet Union and bring back capitalism.
On the surface nothing in Trump's impeachment trial at the US Senate resembles those dark years of the former Soviet Union. What we are witnessing in the US is democracy in action, isn't it?
The US president has been impeached by the House of Representatives, charged with abusing the power of his office to force a foreign country to investigate a political rival and obstruction of Congress. The impeachment was then sent to the US Senate for a trial and possible removal of the president from office. That is what the US constitution has wisely stipulated.
The senators were now to hear the case, evaluate the arguments, call in witnesses, and cast their votes. Democracy and the rule of law and thus justice would be served. After all Chief Justice John Roberts is presiding over the impeachment trial.
That would be the case if the two main factions of US politics, the Democrats and the Republicans, were actually interested in the rule of law and reason and serving justice rather than safeguarding their immediate and banal political interests.
A fair trial, an impartial jury and the calling of relevant witnesses Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is not interested in. He had already declared openly that "I'm not an impartial juror." His sidekick, Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham had also said openly: "I'm not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here" - promising he would do everything in his power to make the impeachment proceedings of the incurably corrupt Donald Trump "die quickly".
Stalin was probably not as remotely pleased with his henchmen back in the 1930s as Trump must be with his Republican comrades today. He will be acquitted and sent on his way to use this very show trial to his advantage in securing a second term.
Neither the Moscow Trials nor Trump's impeachment trial were after truth and justice. They were make-believe spectacles staged to suggest justice was being served when, in fact, it was being actively subverted.
The show will be used by Republicans to keep their grip on the White House and the Senate, to continue appointing conservative judges to the Supreme Court, to hold the reins of power in the three branches of government and to make the US the envy of xenophobic dictatorships around the globe.
But neither Russia, nor the US has any exclusive claim on such show trials.
Perhaps the prime example of all such show trials was in France during the Dreyfus Affair when, in one of the most notorious examples of European anti-Semitism, a Jewish artillery captain in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), was falsely convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans. He was then publicly humiliated and subjected to the most hateful venom.
In Iran, both under the Pahlavi regime and now under the Islamic republic, show trials have been the staple of political persecution, with the most famous case being that of Mohammad Mosaddeq after the CIA coup of 1953.
In China during the so-called "Great Leap Forward" (1958-1962) Mao Zedong also had his real and imagined political enemies rounded up and given show trials, with some sentenced to death.
More recently in Egypt, the trial of Hosni Mubarak and later Mohammad Morsi were integral to the counterrevolutionary mobilisation to prop up Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's military junta.
In Saudi Arabia, even more recently the so-called trial of the murderers of Jamal Khashoggi was meant to put an end to speculation about the top leadership's culpability in the murder of a dissident.
All of these show trials, from Stalin's and Mao's to Trump's, are reminiscent of the so-called Theatre of the Absurd, a genre of theatrical plays that emerged in Europe in the 1950s.
In the Theatre of the Absurd, playwrights deliberately use disjointed and meaningless dialogues and stage wayward apparition of plots to make a mockery of meaning and reason, very much on the model that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former White House Press Secretary, or better even Kellyanne Conway, senior counsellor to President Trump, use to defend their boss.
Indeed the absurd is on full show in Trump's trial: everyone knows that he abused his office to pressure a foreign country and yet in broad daylight, Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard professor of law on the president's defence team, stands up and says the US constitution does not say what the US constitution says, while McConnell puts together a whole political machinery to exonerate Trump and help pave the way for his re-election.
Trump's presidency and his impeachment are a theatre of the absurd on a global stage, except with real and calamitous consequences. There is no exiting this theatre.
We are all trapped in it and forced to watch a mockery of justice in which the organs of "the oldest democracy in the world" begin to devour themselves and the very idea of democracy is reduced to nullity.

Before the referendum of 2016, there was a slogan about Brexit painted in large white letters on a red gable wall in the Tigers Bay district of Belfast, with a union flag below, which reads: “Vote Leave EU. Rev 18:4.”

The biblical reference is to a verse in the Book of Revelations that reads: “And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.”

These seemed to be compelling reasons for leaving the EU and about as truthful as many other reasons advanced by those in favour of doing so. The verse cited is, in fact, more pertinent to the issue of resisting a large and oppressive international organisation than the muralist may have realised. Revelations is filled with mysterious references to monsters, such the “beast from the land” and the “beast from the sea” who has “seven heads and 10 horns”. But experts consider these weird creatures to be coded hostile references to the Roman Empire and to Roman Emperors who were persecuting the early Christians, of whom the author of Revelations was one, in Asia Minor at the end of the first century AD.

The Belfast muralist has finally got their way as the UK escapes from the supposedly diabolical clutches of the EU. Leavers consider today to be one of liberation and Remainers lament a self-inflicted disaster that they see as being against the flow of history. But in both cases, this is a very west European view that gives a very partial and misleading view of recent history: if we include the eastern side of the European continent from the Atlantic to the Urals over the past 30 years, the trend towards the greater integration within the EU is more than counter-balanced by disintegration to the east.

The break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1990s are seldom considered to have any lessons for the EU: the Soviet Union was believed by much of the rest of the world as an evil empire and Yugoslavia similarly as a sort of mini evil empire, the demise of both being both inevitable and a good thing.

But the forces favouring disintegration that broke up the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have ominous points in common with those now threatening the EU. Fairly or unfairly, people outside the decision-making hub in Moscow, Belgrade and Brussels felt that their wishes were being ignored and power monopolised by unrepresentative elites at the centre. Local politicians rode a nationalist wave, claiming that all sorts of good things would happen once self-determination had been achieved.

In some cases, these promises were kept; in others they were soon discarded and forgotten, at least by those who made them. In many senses, we have long been living in an era of disintegration without quite realising it, as multinational federations break up and international organisations, such as the UN and World Trade Organisation (WTO), fragment or become moribund. President Emmanuel Macron was lambasted for describing Nato as “braindead”, but it is scarcely alone. This trend is obscured because academics and politicians in western Europe have tended to be enthusiasts for the EU and for the integration of nation states, as if there was no chance of a shift in the opposite direction. Timothy Less, of the Centre of Geopolitics and Grand Strategy at Cambridge, formerly a diplomat at the Foreign Office specialising in eastern Europe, points out that there have always been plenty of expert institutions in Europe “focusing on integration, but very few study disintegration”. Along with others with experience of eastern Europe in recent decades, he is sceptical about the prospects for the EU surviving the permanent crisis stemming from the diverging national interests of its members.

The nation state is being re-energised because multinational entities like the EU failed to cope successfully issues like immigration, deindustrialisation and globalisation. But the process of disintegration happens within as well as between states, producing winners and losers in close proximity to each other. In the UK, the referendum and two general elections highlighted the political and economic split between metropolitan cities plugged into the global economy and the hinterland around core urban areas. The gilets jaunes in France draw on a similar pattern of support, as does Donald Trump in the US.

A central question for both the UK and the EU post-Brexit is whether or not this impulse towards disintegration will continue, or whether it will be counterbalanced by a contrary trend towards consolidation. The Brexit crisis fostered the growth of nationalism in England and Scotland, as well as of nationalist/Catholic and unionist/Protestant nationalism in Northern Ireland. The Scottish National Party leaders were jubilant at their success in the general election in December as were Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland, encouraged by the Tories abandoning the DUP and proposed tariff barrier down the Irish Sea.

But the break-up of the UK may be further off than many believe at the height of the crisis because a strong Tory majority makes Scottish and Irish separatism less of a practical possibility. The SNP might have been better off avoiding a general election and keeping a weak minority Tory government in office, whose feebleness would have further disillusioned Scots with the union. In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein is very much a constitutional party these days, looking for Irish unity to be delivered by demographic change and a border poll.

As for the EU, it has looked strong when negotiating with weak UK governments, but in other tests of strength, such as defending the nuclear deal with Iran from demolition by Trump, it has been pathetically ineffectual. For all its commercial clout, it appears incapable of withstanding pressure from the US, Russia and China. The decay of multinational institutions and alliances may not lead to an apocalyptic crisis, as the author of Revelations foretold, but it will certainly produce a more dangerous world.