Who to Blame: “Donald Trump” or the “American People”?

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 28 Dec 2020

Anthony Judge | Laetus in Praesens – TRANSCEND Media Service

Let’s Get Real Clear on Any Responsibility for Imminent Global Disaster

Produced in a period of imminent war and global disaster. You will hear of wars and rumours of wars… (Matthew 24:6). The earlier variant dating from the mid-term period of the current presidency has been amended to include reports at the end of that presidency:

Clarification

Donald Trump is the duly elected President of the USA — elected by the American People according to well-defined electoral procedures. It is currently irrelevant whether those procedures are in any way in question. They have yet to be revised — if that is feasible and desired by the American People. Trump is therefore the legitimate representative of the American People. He is variously acclaimed and recognized as the leader of the world’s greatest superpower.

It follows that the unprecedented media coverage of “Donald Trump” is fundamentally misleading, if not deliberately so. Why is it that? Who is rendered innocent thereby? Appropriately so? Who is weaseling out of any responsibility? Plausible deniability? Culpable deniability? Scapegoating? Should the American People take ownership of “Donald Trump”?

In this exercise in clarification, mention of “Donald Trump” in titles of a selection of articles in the media is replaced by “American People” — for whom Trump is merely the current mouthpiece in political, legal, executive, and public relations terms.

Blame-game: Collective Mea Culpa? You Must be Joking ! Them is to blame, Not us!. A variant of the above “methodology” could be applied to the far more controversially sensitive issue of “Israel” and “antisemitism”. Given the question of whether any form of criticism of Israel can be construed as antisemitic, critical references in the media to “Israel” could be explored by replacing the word with “the Jewish People”. (Response To Common Inaccuracy: Israel Critics are Anti-Semites, Anti-Defamation League; Why is Criticism of Israel considered Antisemitic, Jewish Federation of Sarasota-Manatee, 15 October 2020; Jasmin Zine, et al, Criticizing Israel is not Antisemitic — it’s academic freedom, The Conversation, 16 November 2020). The approach could offer an alternative perspective on the relation of “the Jewish People” to Palestine.

Beyond the issues of “anti-Trump” and “anti-Israel”, the clarification offered by the remarkable London Declaration on Combating Antisemitism (2009) merits generalization, as argued separately (Elaborating a Declaration on Combating Anti-otherness — including anti-science, anti-spiritual, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-socialism, anti-animal, and anti-negativity, 2018).

Personification: Should personification of “Donald Trump” be more fruitfully recognized as a metaphor for something more subtle and insidious? This is implied in the argument of the eminent economist Kenneth Boulding, also an American:

Our consciousness of the unity of self in the middle of a vast complexity of images or material structures is at least a suitable metaphor for the unity of group, organization, department, discipline or science. If personification is a metaphor, let us not despise metaphors — we might be one ourselves (Image: knowledge in life and society, 1956)

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Anthony Judge is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment and mainly known for his career at the Union of International Associations (UIA), where he has been Director of Communications and Research, as well as Assistant Secretary-General. He was responsible at the UIA for the development of interlinked databases and for publications based on those databases, mainly the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential, the Yearbook of International Organizations, and the International Congress Calendar. Judge has also personally authored a collection of over 1,600 documents of relevance to governance and strategy-making. All these papers are freely available on his personal website Laetus in Praesens. Now retired from the UIA, he is continuing his research within the context of an initiative called Union of Imaginable Associations. Judge is an Australian born in Egypt, a thinker, an author, and lives in Brussels. His TMS articles may be accessed HERE. (Wikipedia)

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