Thus we have the feeding frenzy in response to Trump retweeting anti-Muslim tweets sent out by the far right political organization Britain First in the UK.
Though they are a small marginal group in the scheme of things, Britain First is known for being clever in its use of social media, working to achieve a ubiquitous presence that far outweighs its size or support. As such, they will no doubt be delighted at having achieved the tacit endorsement of the President of the United States.
Who would ever have thought that a few retweets could spark such a political crisis though? Indeed some are even speculating that the backlash could damage the much vaunted 'special relationship' between London and Washington; what with the President taking UK Prime Minister Theresa May to task in a separate tweet for daring to denounce him.
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And who would ever think the US would be led by president who's so far to the right he makes George W. Bush seem like Che Guevara?
But here's where we come to the swamp of hypocrisy in which Trump's liberal detractors are swimming. The sight of people who supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and NATO-backed regime change in Libya in 2011, involving the deaths and suffering of countless Muslims — men, women, and children — the sight of them excoriating Trump over retweeting the bile of an anti-Muslim hate group in the UK, is as nauseating as it gets.
Similarly with Brexit in the UK, which arrived as another symptom of the collapse of neoliberalism and disdain for the liberal class with which neoliberalism is inextricably linked. That neither Trump's election nor Brexit is the solution to the crisis of neoliberalism is (at least to me anyway) self-evident. But you cannot escape the righteous anger that ushered in both.
These people — these self-appointed liberal guardians of moral virtue — have the blood and despair of millions on their hands, yet still their hypocrisy and sense of moral virtue never ends.
In the UK the mainstream media recently went cock-a-hoop over Prince Harry's engagement to Hollywood actress Meghan Markle; this at a time when 4 million of the country's children are living in poverty, at a time when the country is shamed by one of the highest rates of pensioner poverty in Europe, and when thousands of families are facing a grim Christmas of foodbanks and homelessness, courtesy of the harshest austerity program of any advanced economy, one administered with the objective of breathing life back into the corpse of the aforesaid neoliberal model.
Not that I have anything against Prince Harry or the royal family. On the contrary, they are also victims of this anti-democratic, semi-feudal institution, forced to exist in a gilded cage and treated like exhibits in a veritable zoo, with their every gesture and word pored over by a baying media. The issue is that ostentation has its roots in poverty, which is why listening to UK politicians and commentators arguing against the evils of poverty out of one side of their affluent mouths, while at the same time fawning over the monarchy out of the other, is impossible to swallow without gagging.
Are we really to believe that this evermore facile and shallow liberal establishment holds the solutions to the crises they themselves have authored at home and abroad? Are we?
Our credulity only stretches so far.
Jean Jacques Rousseau once opined scathingly:
"The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing."
Though perhaps the eighteenth century French social theorist may be guilty of overstatement, he's got a point when his words are applied figuratively to the UK in 2017.
Anti-Muslim bigotry is poison. Lest we forget, it is Muslims who have borne the brunt of Western foreign policy in recent years; their lives upended first by the initial crime of military intervention, sold to them on the basis of ‘destroying their countries in order to save them', and then by the emergence of the Salafi-jihadi barbarism of Daesh and other terrorist groups in the wake of the resulting chaos and societal collapse.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria: no amount of contrived anger and indignation over Trump's retweets could ever come close to making up for what this Western liberal order has wreaked in the name of 'democracy'.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
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