US: A gods’ scourge or a decadent power?

When gods wish to punish us,“ Oscar Wilde says. “They answer our prayers”. “German deserved what they got” AJP Taylor says, “when they went around crying for a hero”. Either it was a scourge of gods or crying for a hero, the people of the US got Donald Trump, as their president, a perfect pathological specimen of a decadent society.

When the choice was between an executioner and a brutal slayer, there was not much for the people to choose between the two candidates.

The US is notorious for creating from professional to amateur murderers. From Jack-the- Ripper to Oswald/Jack Ruby— the latter was a Zionist Jew— the characters who allegedly killed JF Kennedy to regular school shooting, a norm in the US to McCarthyism when the ordinary citizens were assassinated either physically or financially for being associated to communism, the capitalist system first slayed the psyche before killing the soma.

The victims largely Is it a wonder that every Jack-the-Ripper is closely linked with the “Match Girls’ Strike”? It’s no coincidence, for history follows its dialectical course and no event is separate from the other.

Poverty harbors crimes but actual criminals are those who create the condition for the poverty and employ any means to curb or control the protests and strikes of the class-conscious proletariat through direct state oppression and by creating a fear of some unknown assassin who kills ordinary human beings to gratify his libidinal pleasure or sadistic impulse. Both are the products of a sick system.

Hollywood has a special knack for instilling fear in people’s hearts by making movies of serial killers who kill for attaining joy or to challenge the bourgeois status quo by a lone wolf adventurism, a negative way yet it shows the dissatisfaction with the system.

Another purpose of this futile but torture oriented, trigger-happy gung-ho style adventurism is to proliferate the idea of instilling insensitivity among the people by showing them on the screen which they suffer in their everyday lives. “The quantity of organized amusement is converted into a quality of organized cruelty” (Horkheimer).

The US presidents are the product of the same society. What can one expect from a settler- colonial state born after the annihilation of the native population with brutality? History is witness that all American presidents, including the so-called founding fathers, were slave owners and were obsessed by the Ku Klux Klan ideology with no guilt or shame. They killed the natives with impunity.

The “trail of tears” carried out by the then US president Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1831 caused thousands of natives’ death because of hunger, exhaustion and forced displacement.

The excuse was “manifest destiny” of the white race to occupy the native land beyond the Mississippi river. The land speculators were instrumental in the carnage and were the key beneficiaries as well.

Biden was no less a mercenary than Andrew Jackson. He encouraged the live streaming of the modern world’s biggest genocide of the Palestinians, supplying arms, information and technology to the apartheid entity to annihilate the native population.

Instead of “manifest destiny” the slogan was “Israel’s right to defend itself” while any threat to the apartheid entity was nowhere in the sight and the case was vice versa. Gaza is in ruins, not one third of its buildings have survived.

All hospitals, universities and institutions vital for human survival have been torn down to smithereens. The US’ new world [dis]order suspended all international laws including the verdicts of ICC and ICJ and the resolution of the UN.

Netanyahu the baby killer adjudged by the ICC is travelling scot-free. “The movement of this world” Marx says, “within its framework of laws is bound to be a continual suspension of law” and this is what the people of global south have been watching for the last 15 months.

Biden openly claimed himself a Christian Zionist. Marx was succinct again, “From the outset” he says, “the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is, therefore, the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again”.

Now either gods have heard the prayers of the US voters or their cry for a hero has been answered in either case they have found a populist businessman messiah.

The previous one had lost the capabilities of talking and thinking, but this one is a loudmouth incessantly loquacious demagogue who speaks tirelessly but thinks scarcely and that too after prattling.

It looks as if the present-day territory of the US is not enough for him. He wants to occupy Green Land, the Panama Canal, Canada, Mexico and Gaza by displacing 2.3 million Palestinians from their homeland turning it into a riviera under the command and control of Jared Kushner, his son-in -law.

He did not learn the lesson of Lebensraum from Hitler or Netanyahu; on the contrary, all of them have borrowed the page from Monroe’s doctrine.

Germany was enough for the Germans but not for the colonial Germany that wanted its share from the British French nexus. Being European he began in Europe. Austria was the first followed by Czechoslovakia presented on the golden platter by the British premier Neville Chamberlain to Hitler in “Munich betrayal” while the Czech president Edvard Benes was left out in the waiting room guessing in how many parts his country was divided into. Soviet Union alone wanted to help the Czechs, but both Poland and Romania refused to give way to the Red Army.

However, it isn’t 1938 nor even 2016 when Trump licked the taste of power for the first time. Though repeating history, he has done identical to Ukraine what Chamberlain did to the Czech. The entire agrarian land of Ukraine has already been under the control of Monsanto and other American corporations.

Now Trump has his lusty gaze fixed on 350 billion $ worth minerals. On one hand, he is negotiating the Ukraine’s future with Putin on the other if he gets the control of Ukrainian minerals, he is prepared to support the dying state in its war against Russia. If the mineral wealth has not already been the part of Donbas area conquered by Russia, Zelensky will be foolish to accept Trump’s offer of handing over his country’s last remaining wealth to the empire that bled its people not to win a war for it was never in that position but to bleed Russia at the cost of Ukraine to control former’s assets.

Whereas Biden destroyed the Nord Stream to deprive the Germans of cheap gas to stall its industry, Trump is asking the Europeans to contribute 5% of their GDP to NATO for their security.

US the most highly indebted country of the world surviving through its military might and massive printing of $ is being challenged on the latter front. No doubt the US $ is still a dominant currency for international trade but a sizeable chunk inspired by BRIC Plus is diverting its trade from the $ to Renminbi or trading in their own currencies, hence making the US $ to sink and so its hegemony.

Ironically, it was Russia who started this diversion zealously once its assets were frozen by the empire, and now the objective conditions have forced Trump to sit beside Putin in a weaker position.

If Trump thinks that a Kissinger policy of 1970 can be repeated, either he is naïve or extremely desperate.

The Sino-Russian alliance is unshakable and at its peak.

Russia will never barter a reliable partner with a weathercock, responsible for killing 70-80 thousand Russian soldiers, including a few generals, and attempting to make its economy shriek. The way the US vice-president had dealt with his European allies with sheer contempt has left no possibility for the Russians to change their minds in favour of the US.

China under Mao in the 1970s was one of the poorest countries of the world, but in the last fifty years the situation has drastically changed.

The massive accumulation of wealth under the command economy has made it a leader in fifty-seven cutting edge technologies out of the sixty-two. Its Deep-Seek AI has caused a trillion $ loss to the American stock exchange in a day at the very moment when Trump in the company of his oligarchs was taking the presidential oath. For Trump, China is the biggest threat to the US hegemony, as referred by Micheal Rubio in many speeches and Trump wants to create a breach between Sino-Russian relations but akin to all his political gimmickries, he will flunk in this attempt too.

Trump’s attempt to impose 10% tariff on Chinese products is backfiring. The trade balance had always been in favour of China to the tune of 367 billion $ until 2022. China can divert its export to several other agrarian countries but the US working class will be deprived of many cheap products such as coal, agricultural machinery, laptops, mobile phones, T V sets, refrigerators, toys, sport equipment, and furniture.

While China can find several buyers of its cheap commodities, but Americans can only rely on Europe to buy its expansive capital-intensive products. Trump has imposed or threatened to impose a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada. This further indicates the rate of loss of profit the US capitalists are going through. Their products are incapable of competing with the world market.

Another important question worth posing is, for how long the Israeli entity will continue to receive the unconditional gift of ammunition from the US? The million $ tax cut given to the parasitic class of the US by reducing the food stamps and medicine to the children suffering from cerebral palsy is bound to come back as a scourge to the Trump administration.

No one knows if he will be able to complete his tenure or not. Titanic has so many holes which cannot be plugged by the capitalist mode of production. It’s bound to crash; the question is when?

Copyright Business Recorder, 2025