AMERICA, as most of us call the United States of America, USA, is a big country with confusions that match its size. The latest is the presidency of Donald Trump, whose face knots delightfully when he issues another threat – it could be to the unborn.
Racism, genderisation of issues, in a country clawing itself back to global (ir)relevance by isolation, threats of war, lawlessness within a democracy almost summarise how Trump wants to ruin America.
His idea of “making America great again” is to exaggerate America’s global “victimhood” thanks to Presidents before him, in particular his predecessor Joe Biden, for whom he cannot find a word of praise. If Trump has the powers, he would expunge Biden from a list of American Presidents.
How Trump intends to make or mar America is only known to him. In a country with huge democratic credentials, Trump is busy ingraining his lawlessness into his version of democracy. Executive Orders provide perfect covers for Trump. He is already abusing them because some of the matters he glibly orders on are constitutional, and altering them would involve States, Congress, and the Supreme.
His Orders take immediate effect in the manner of a military officer hauling orders at a parade. Immigrants must leave. Some are at the borders trying to enter Americans. Would some children qualify as legal Americans while their parents and guardians may be sent out of America?
The judiciary is weighing in to order Trump’s steps.
When JP Clark wrote, America, Their America, his 1964 criticism of things American and the racism that hides under the cloak of its over-rated democratic practices, he made it clear that America was essentially about itself, thorned by racism in itself, and against others.
America, Their America, drew as much applauses as criticisms against Clark, whose studies at Princeton University ended abruptly, some believe, as a result of the vapid vortex of racism he countered. America, Their America is the product his Princeton days.
The deceit that American democracy spreads, blinds the world to the monstrous human rights records of the USA. America is built on the blood of the indigenous populations of what became North America, plus slaves taken mainly from West Africa. The remnants of those populations still suffer racism that has been blunted by the “successes” of attacks, massacres, genocides that keep them from the attention of the world. They have been pushed into forests and reserves.
Loads of literature abound on these human abuses that could have belonged to darker ages but still replicated in the way the United States treats others. Words fail to capture these atrocities. Latest accounts tend to minimise the mal-treatment of the indigenes of North America. They are even explained with excuses that diseases that arrived with Europeans, the new settlers, were responsible for the deaths.
Donald L. Fixico in, “When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of ‘Civilization’”, a 2018 publication, detailed a series of programmes of annihilation of indigenous peoples to create space for the new settlers.
“From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier – the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world – became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorise over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous people. By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained, a sharp decline from the estimated 5 million to 15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.
Doctrine of discovery described as an international law that authorised explorers to claim uninhabited land in the name of their sovereign when the land was not populated by Christians, had the imprimatur of the Vatican which only repudiated the Doctrine in 2023.
In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the bull Dum Diversas, which authorised King Afonso V of Portugal to “subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of
Christ”, and “reduce their persons to perpetual servitude”, to take their belongings, including land, “to convert them to you, and your use, and your successors the Kings of Portugal”, Brain Slattery noted in Paper Empires, his 2005 book.
In 1455, Pope Nicholas V issued Romanus Pontifex, which extended Portugal’s authority to conquer the lands of infidels and pagans for “the salvation of all” in order to “pardon … their souls”. The document also granted Portugal a specific right to conquest in West Africa and to trade with Saracens and infidels in designated areas. The Doctrine has been implicated in slave trade and colonisation.
While the Doctrine seemed to have ameliorated disputes in Europe, its introduction by US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) was disputed. Marshall’s formulation of the Doctrine gave the discovering nation title to that territory against all other European nations, and this title could be perfected by effective possession.
Trump’s threats to the rest of the world are not new to America which has run out of ideas about being the world leader, a title and role that has been vastly diluted by the contradictions of American democracy that places USA’s interests above global peace, and the steady gains of other powerful nations as the USA receded from involvement in global stability.
Americans chose Trump for reasons best known to them. They acted much like Nigerians in the choices we made since 2015. Trump wants to turn round an America tied to his strings, on his own terms. He has no time for the domino effect that is loading.
Didn’t the world watch as President George Bush invaded Panama City on 20 December 1989, in that operation that spanned over one month, to arrest Panamanian President General Manuel Noreiga, a CIA informant, when Bush was the CIA boss?
Noreiga was captured and jailed in America for charges that included threatening and killing American forces in Panama, narcotics racketeering, swinging relations with traditional enemies of Libya, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and members of the Warsaw Pact.
The Panama Canal that Trump says he will take over was also mentioned as Noriega’s sin.
Will the world watch again for America to occupy Panama City and determine the use of the Canal?
Trump feels nobody will stop him; nobody can stop. Morning Star Online, an English newspaper blazoned Trump’s return as President thus, THE RETURN OF THE VILLAGE IDIOT.
Finally…
SENATOR Sampson Ekong, Chairman, Senate Committee on Solid Minerals, has a solid recommendation that the Ministry’s capital budget of N9 billion be increased to ₦539 billion. The Naira has suffered!
INDICATIONS are that the Inspector-General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun, who would go down in history as the first IG not seen wearing dark glasses, has ordered that policemen (and women) should nor wear dark spectacles while in uniform. He may need to appoint an Assistant Inspector-General of Police to deal with the petitions that would flood his table over this matter.
SECURITY challenges across the country are multiplying daily. We would not panic. We, however, expect the security agencies to do more than telling us daily that new groups are being formed. It is simple economics – the insecurity economy is profitable; the businesses have to open more branches or new companies to reap the profits.
ISIGUZO is a major commentator on minor issues
