Trump-eting overseas Twitter handles: What’s the harm?
Retweets are *not* endorsements. *cough*
The Donald. Known as a part-time comedian when he’s not busy running the free world.
His comments last week didn’t quite make the news in the UK. The organged president inferred Elizabeth Warren was knowns as Pocahontas, at a military commemoration, celebrating Native American code talkers. But like any true professional, he bounced back from the lack of attention, with his retweets of Britain First’s videos claiming muslims were violent to white people.
The videos themselves are shocking, I’m not going to defend fanatics on any side of the spectrum. When we look at Jayda Fransen, Britain First, we see a woman who’s made her way to the top of a party aiming to ethnically clean the UK.
As someone who was brought up muslim, I lived my formative years under the discourse of the “War on Terror”, I know the feeling of choosing to “be vegetarian” rather than admitting you only eat Halal meat, and taking off my head scarf every time I left the doors of the local mosque.
Maybe I’m missing the point, but reading about The Left and Liberal citizens’ disdain and horror, felt, well… anti-climatic.
I think it’s too late. Thanks David Lammy, Jeremy Corbyn (and even Amber Rudd to an extent) but your words were just a little too late to have any clout.
Where were you when Britain First held their first rally? Whenever international politicians have made islamophobic or xenophobic remarks you have said you don’t get involved in international affairs.
It’s no coincidence that after years of interventionist foreign policies, we’ve seen the rise of the far right in Europe, Geert Wilders (NL), Marine La Pen (FR) and Jörg Meuthen (DE), looking to roll back the frontiers of the state, and focus on neo-nativism, and so, putting the indigenous population of their lands first. But even when we joined wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other proxy wars in the Middle East, we on the left those centrally aligned in politics, said it was an interference that would be short lived. We turned a blind eye to why the defence budgets in our countries rose as more and more civilians were blown to pieces in a world that became more and more connected.
The connection is part of the problem. By underestimating the reliance we have on the rest of the world, we’ve made an opening for politicians like Donald Trump, to make political statements like these, and to have impact. Couple this with the muffling of alternative voices, we’ve shot the temperature gauge on what is “allowed” in a PC, Liberal society which now divides us in two. Being united is not the same as being homogenous, but it’s being equal. Dominant theories should prevail too, but to refuse to argue with contenders takes me think of a post-Orwellian world that I’d rather avoid.
I see the rise of The Donald to be a backlash to the increasingly interconnected world we live in, where previously more than three quarters of it was deemed to be “the other” based on narratives we spoon-fed our nations. If we’re to live in a more connected world, but in a world with louder, less Liberal voices, we ought to get used to tweets like these, and challenge the debate not the debater. Britain First and its likes will always exist now, swallow it, we caused this.
