bigOfeature

WAR IS PEACE

+ + + + +

TO DONATE TO BigO, USE SKRILL

As of now, we have stopped all restarts of older shows to reduce the cost of running the site. Readers who can donate towards the cost of the site, please open a Skrill account.

If you can afford to donate, please open a Skrill account. We don’t use much but we can’t run on empty.

Readers who wish to contribute to BigO will now have to use Skrill (click here). We are no longer able to use PayPal to receive donations. Register an account at Skrill. To make a payment, use this e-mail address as recipient’s e-mail address in Skrill. Looking forward to hearing from you.

+ + + + +

JUST TO LET YOU KNOW
To reduce spamming, the BigO website is going through Cloudflare. What it does is scan your browser to ensure the visitor is not a spam. Do not be alarmed as this usually takes only a few seconds. Email us if you still have difficulty accessing the BigO site; or playing or downloading the tracks. If you know a better way of reducing spam, do let us know.

+ + + + +

Yet another agonizingly, mystifying move by the Donald, this time in Jerusalem. The President seems determined to reduce American hegemony to make “America great again”. Inside its own four walls, that is. By Gilad Atzmon.

No one has utilised the Orwellian dictate that ‘War is Peace’ better than Donald Trump. In Orwell’s1984, the Party maintains stability at home by waging constant war elsewhere.

Some contend that the American president is ‘illiterate’ and ‘ignorant.’ Others argue that it is his intellectual skills that are limited. I have read some negative assessments of the President’s mental condition. But no one can really dispute Trump’s achievements. Against all odds, Trump became president. Despite relentless efforts to evict him from office, he has managed to cling to the White building. He regularly makes unpredictable, unpopular decisions that make no sense to most reasonable, intelligent people. He communicates with the world by means of snippets and tweets. Yet miraculously, he prevails.

For a person who allegedly hasn’t read an entire book in his life, Trump has managed to achieve quite a lot. How does he do it? What goes on in his mind? War is Peace appears to be at the core of Trump’s survival strategy. War is Trump’s comfort zone.

From his first day in office, the American president has not missed an opportunity to threaten global conflict. He provoked Iran, he enraged North Korea and now he aims to upset the Palestinians. The ostensibly deprived North Korea was highly functional in countering American aggression. It took Kim Jong-un’s engineers only a few months to present ballistic capability that could reduce American cities to dust. North Korea is too dangerous for Trump. As a regional superpower, Iran is also not an ideal enemy. Trump needed to launch a new battle against a substantially weaker foe. The Palestinians made the perfect antagonists.

War in Palestine is peace of mind in Washington. This seems to fit the Trump doctrine. But are the Palestinians really ideal for the role? Israeli commentators believe that Arab and Muslim leaders won’t side with Palestine. The risk is that the Arab and Muslim masses react very differently. The situation could quickly become volatile. And the crucial question that Americans must ask themselves tomorrow morning is how Trump’s ‘War is Peace‘ makes ‘America Great again?’ It doesn’t. This is simply a survival tactic on Trump’s part. It benefits Trump and Trump alone.

As far as I can tell, Trump is doing a great job obliterating what is left of America’s world hegemony. Give Trump another year in office, assuming that the planet can take it, American prestige and influence will shrink to none. Some may well argue that this alone makes Trump a positive force in contemporary world politics.

Note: Gilad Atzmon writes on political matters, social issues, Jewish identity and culture. Gilad is a British Jazz artist and author. Gilad was born in Israel in 1963 and trained at the Rubin Academy of Music, Jerusalem (Composition and Jazz). Visit gilad.co.uk.

+ + + + +