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Beware Trojan horses.
Beware Trojan horses.
The news was welcome campaign fodder for US presidential hopeful Donald Trump. Referring to German chancellor Angela Merkel's open door policy on refugees from Syria, he commented in his usual rhetoric: "I don't know what the hell she is thinking".
Trump went on to say that he did not want to have "people coming in from migration from Syria (sic)" as these were aggressive young men who "look like they should be on the wrestling team". More dangerously still, Trump believed such people could act as terrorist "Trojan horses".
Trump's comments are in line with his vicious verbal attacks on Mexicans and other immigrant groups in the United States. But they betray his own family background. His grandfather, Friedrich Trump, a German, lived a migrant life in the US on the edge of illegality and rejection. During the World War I, he belonged to an immigrant group which was sweepingly labelled the "enemy within" or - in his grandson's parlance - a Trojan horse.
Comment: If the information in this article is accurate, can Trump even make the connection to his own family's past and how he makes himself into a hypocrite for speaking the way he does about the issues of immigration into the United States without acknowledging this. Also, it is doubtful he can see the same forces that stirred up WWI and drove his grandfather to have problems both in the United States and Germany are the same forces at play today pushing the world and its people to be divided and at each others throats with the associated and manipulated fear, anger and frustration.
Without seeing and understanding 'the man behind the curtain,' Trump if elected would be easily manipulated and pushed by these same forces to act even worse than he sounds on the election trail. He has no compassion for people, for humanity and the truth and so has the potential to become a monster rivaling histories worst examples.