Saturday, December 3, 2016

TOO - Sunic: Donald Trump and the American Counterrevolution, A.D. 2016 - Trump's "sudden emergence on the American political scene is a portent of gigantic world changes which ... can no longer be rolled back."





Sooner or later even the darkest cloud must have a silver lining. This poetic justice is a central theme in the seminal work of European literature, with the incarnate cosmic Evil, the satanic Mephistopheles, admitting to young Faust: “I am part of the Power that would always wish Evil, and always works the Good.” (1335-1340).
Donald Trump may have never read Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust, or for that matter studied the meaning of chance and necessity in Sophocles’ dramas. His sudden emergence on the American political scene, however, is a portent of gigantic world changes which, even if he decides to backpedal now, can no longer be rolled back. This time around, the first woman on Earth, the all-gifted, albeit credulous and unfortunate Pandora, is letting a good gene out of her box. The supreme irony of history is that the state of America, which has stood in European eyes, for two and half centuries, as a prime symbol of international plutocracy and a land of “free movement of goods and people” will be now first to ditch them one by one. A country, which after World War II played a crucial role in setting up different political regimes around the globe, from the UN to WTO, from the EU to TTIP, is now in the process of dismantling them one by one — to the great joy of millions of both implicit and explicit White Americans and Europeans. Aside from many White fortune- tellers and twitter warriors bragging now how they “knew that Trump was coming,” no one could have divined Trump’s earth-shattering rise to world political prominence. The twentieth century was an American century; the twenty first century will be again the American century — albeit in a reverse fashion. ...