© Eduardo Munoz / Reuters
It can't get more outrageous. US President Donald Trump stood in front of the United Nations and openly threatened unilateral war and genocide. It's a sign of the times that such criminal rhetoric is so casually spouted by the world's biggest military state.
When American leaders address the UN General Assembly, people are generally used to hearing a litany of falsehoods about world events and narcissistic deceptions over America's global role.
But when Trump made his debut speech on Tuesday, it marked, in addition to the usual American delusions, an unprecedented embrace of criminal militarism.The nadir in his 40-minute rant came when Trump said the US would "totally destroy" North Korea - if it threatened America or its allies. The qualifier is a threadbare legal justification. It's also just a cynical excuse for American aggression.
"The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea," said Trump. Mocking North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, he added: "Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime."
Trump also called for forceful confrontation - regime change - against Iran, which he vilified as a "corrupt, murderous dictatorship." He made similar veiled threats against Venezuela and its "socialist dictator" President Nicolas Maduro.
International war crimes lawyer Christopher Black said Trump's speech amounted to a stunning self-indictment. The Canadian-based attorney said the American president's words were a shockingly explicit repudiation of UN principles and international law on several counts.With regard to North Korea, Black said: "The US president is threatening aggression under the false guise of 'defense.' By openly stating the US will act alone to use military force is a violation of the United Nations' Charter.
Such unilateral use of military force is also a violation of the Nuremberg principles which condemned Nazi Germany for promulgating similar baseless justifications for its aggression."The lawyer also added that Trump's warning to "totally destroy North Korea is advocating the genocide of an entire people." Says Black: "Any military response to any attack has to be proportional - just enough to stop the attack. Trump's stated objective to wipe the North Korean state and its people from the face of the earth is the crime of genocide under international law."
It should be deeply troubling that the supposed leader of the world's most powerful country so openly and disgustingly makes a virtue of barbarism. As American writer Tom Feeley succinctly described Trump's diatribe at the UN: "An ignorant savage who spewed hatred all over the nations of the world."No wonder Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping opted to skip Trump's landmark speech. So too did German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It's amazing how anyone could sit through such torturous distortions.
In a sane world, someone should have slapped handcuffs on Trump and hauled him off to a criminal court.Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was also absent, while the North Korean ambassador walked out of the General Assembly chamber as Trump was taking the podium for his address.
When Trump declared his criminal intent toward North Korea there were audible gasps of disquiet among the hundreds of delegates. Several times during Trump's tirade, the White House Chief of Staff John Kelly
was seen covering his face with his hand or shifting uncomfortably in his seat. The body language spoke of shameful "embarrassment" - a word that Trump, ironically, used twice during his address referring disparagingly to others.
Anyone with a normal cognition of recent world events had to have cringed at almost every sentence uttered by Trump. It says something that the few delegates who appeared happy with Trump's harping included Israel's premier Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia - two actual rogue states that were unsurprisingly left out of Trump's harangue.Even the US media seemed embarrassed by the president's boorish and bloodcurdling tone.
Pundits on CNN were staggered by Trump's threats of annihilation toward North Korea. The
New York Times called it "a bellicose debut" while the
Washington Post said Trump's "bellicosity and swagger" was "an incoherent mess." Admittedly, those news outlets have been opposed to Trump's presidency all the way since his election. But there was a different quality to their reaction to his UN speech - one of aghast disbelief that an American president could be so uncouth and unabashedly criminal in what he was advocating.
Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif blasted Trump for "ignorant hate speech" which, he said, was unworthy of a considered response.
Zarif is right. The torrent of falsehoods and delusions that Trump verbalized are hardly worth rebutting in detail, so crass were they in their upside-down view of the world. It's so unhinged, it's beyond argumentation and reason.
But let's do a few illustrative choice quotes where irony is dead as a rock.
Trump said: "Rogue regimes represented in this body not only support terrorists but threaten other nations and their own people with the most destructive weapons known to humanity."
That's cloying, considering the recent
reports of the American CIA allegedly funneling $2.2 billion worth of weapons to terrorist groups in Syria to overthrow the elected government of President Bashar Assad. And considering that Trump in front of 193 nations was threatening North Korea with "total destruction."
Trump made a dig at Russia and China when he said: "We must reject threats to sovereignty, from the Ukraine to the South China Sea. We must uphold respect for law, respect for borders, and respect for culture, and the peaceful engagement these allow."
Eh, this sanctimonious advice from the leader of a country that has subverted the sovereignty and borders of more nations than any other in history, including that of Ukraine where Washington violently installed a neo-Nazi regime in February 2014. American aerial bombing of numerous countries simultaneously, including Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, is a curious "respect for borders, sovereignty, and law."Trump talks about the "scourge of rogue regimes" without a hint of self-awareness about his own country's depredations or of its Israeli and Saudi allies. He said: "The scourge of our planet today is a small group of rogue regimes that violate every principle on which the United Nations is based. They respect neither their own citizens nor the sovereign rights of their countries."
Finally, perhaps the crowning absurdity was this: "The United States of America has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world, and the greatest defenders of sovereignty, security, and prosperity for all."
Trump's predecessor Barack Obama and other US presidents were also remarkable for their skill at spouting similar distortions and delusions. In that regard, Trump's bravura nonsense was more of the same ridiculous "American exceptionalism."
But setting Trump's speech apart was his flagrant embrace of criminal militarism as a matter of US foreign policy, and his nauseating invocation of genocide in a war on North Korea.
Reader Comments
If the persona is reacted to as real the trojan payload operates successfully. For the lie operates through the emotional reaction of personal judgement that only 'sees' and reacts to the form-meanings' that mask hidden intent or undercurrent communication or indeed programming.
The conditioned identity is a programmed sense of survival under threat. Generally agreed definitions of self, society and world operate this sense of holding order. The deceit learns or adopts the forms of self, society and world-view only for the purpose of undermining and manipulating or falsely framing thought, communication and witness to the world.
The wish to dominate thought, communication and outcomes in the world is itself a thought that disrupts and distorts communication such as to then perceive and believe a world in terms of denied self-specialness that cannot have what it wants - and believes itself deprived of - by open desire and endeavour but must lie and deceive to 'steal' from others by appealing to their sense of self-specialness and lack, feeding it with gratifications and illusions to then capture the mind - the market - the indebtedness - the powerlessness - and the asset to be used, discarded or remodelled as the drive to 'power' dictates.
Listen to - feel - the undercurrent and read the 'body language' from a point of observing reactions rather than embodying their payload as if your own thought, word and world.
Beneath the mask of conditional 'love' is conditional hate that the mind seeks to mitigate and 'justify' under narrative assertions of a self unfairly treated or unjustly attacked.
While we 'see' these operating outside ourself - we suffer subjection and reaction in rage or under terror, in heartbreak or shame of powerlessness that becomes the loss of human consciousness to a mechanically operated golem. If you are willing to give up consciousness, the deceiver is willing to use it to deny consciousness - as the condition in which private fantasy can prevail over true - for that is its father - and there is no truth in it, so it has no belonging in true being.
However, the re-cognition of who you are NOT, becomes the rewakeniing to who you Are - within the intimacy and embrace of the movement of being - that no 'forms' or 'conditions' can define or substitute for.
Use the exposure of the lie to release your own sympathetic correspondences. For nothing 'presses your buttons' but they are your 'trigger points of reaction'.
Read Trump as a SOTT - and allow that the true being beneath the masks of hate-rejection and the masks of the appeal for love or validation - is beneath such distortions and at its essence free of them. Or participate in hate and seek validation in lies. It's a choice that becomes natural and choice-less in the light - hence.... anything to keep you in the darkness that conflict invokes.
But equally - anything to keep you in wholeness of being such that division does NOT rule out love of true being.
One sacrifices truth (it Own) to 'survive' in terms of self-defined power. The other yields up the illusion of control for the power of true alignment. It's like the story of Job or Jesus - but not interpreted through fear.
A mind of choice made freedom seem conflicted - for a poor choice brings a poor result and a sense of lack and loss that became a basis for war as the only 'choice'. A mind cannot be locked in a 'choice' excepting blindness to its OWN choosing under guise of blaming and attacking Other. So bringing our 'choice' to the light of a true willingness is allowing light into our mind - and this is a Shifted Recognition of the activity of mind - while the activity occurs. And automatically aligns to wholeness - such as current willingness can accept. Transcending (integrating and embracing personae) is not a personal attainment - but the release of the personal illusion to a synchronicity of purpose and fulfilment.
How does this 'work out' or apply in a world gone mad (revealed in its insanity)? It clearly DOES NOT. Are you in a world of y/our own making? or is even this within the true movement of being - movement - because your are Moved thereby - not from 'without' but in a sense through you to your fellow beings - and to your world and reflecting and responding TO your recognition. Behold - it is truly Good! - not alloyed or better than or idolised as a sense of a personal 'short-circuit' or narcissism in image. Wholeness is ever new - but seems deceiving to the attempt to grasp at image and form and make it
your Home. Conditions are always change - and even seeming static conditions are changing perspective within their forms. Look to where the incoming messengers are blocked, denied, aborted, distorted, subverted and fitted to your 'thinking'! And let the false framing yield to an expanded perspective. If you want to.