June 19, 2020
Facing Uncomfortable Facts
When the White House was besieged by the power and fury of George Floyd protesters, President Trump wasn’t hesitant in labeling the agitators “domestic terrorists.” It is a significant expansion of the term “terrorism,” which was hitherto restricted and weaponized to stigmatize Muslims. It sheds a sorry light on how a scourge, which indiscriminately ravages innocents, can be politicized to drive a hidden agenda.
Such was the pressure exerted by the protests that it stoked internal divisions within the White House. US Defense Secretary Mike Esper publicly opposed Trump’s wanting to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would deploy active duty US troops into American cities.
Pakistan has been hammered over the decades for its Praetorian proclivities. But when US civil disobedience spread nationwide, the impulse and the reaction to it was not too dissimilar. Similar, too, was a crude exploitation of religion by the President deploying the Bible as a prop in a photo op in front of St John’s Church just outside the White House.
It was reminiscent of the Bible passage from the Book of Daniel: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.” Indeed, when the Coronavirus and the racial unrest converged, as it has now, the US power structure has been found wanting. It underscores the necessity to face uncomfortable facts.
In the early 1960’s, martyred civil rights leader Malcolm X had forewarned an inevitable ‘clash’ if glaring social inequity and power disequilibrium were not redressed.
There has been global outrage in UK, Finland – which is a homogenous white country – and Greece, too. Ironically, there were demonstrations in Denmark, which 15 years ago besmirched itself by unleashing inflammatory and dangerously provocative anti-Muslim caricatures. In Sydney, Australia, protests centered on the abuse of native Aborigines.
Instructive to watch is a remarkable eight-part docuseries, “The Test,” which is a behind-the-scenes inside look at how the Australian cricket Test team rebuilt itself in 12 months after the Cape Town ball-tampering fiasco, which led to the barring of their top three batsmen. Their coach, Justin Langer, relentlessly instilled in his men pride in representing their country, on-field decorum, and self-evaluation. He even brought the Australian squad to the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey, where so many Australian young men perished while battling Turkish defenders in 1915, led by then Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal. On a broader level, the lesson was that self-improvement and self-growth doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It has to be preceded by self-scrutiny and self-correction.
In 20 years, Pakistan has made five tours of Australia, playing 14 Test matches and losing all 14. A damning statistic. To cite Talleyrand (1754-1838), a French statesman under Napoleon, “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”
During a Washington meeting with Benazir, I asked whether multiple ousters from power corridors triggered a review whether her and PPP policies were a contributory factor to their ongoing predicament. From her reaction, I gathered it hadn’t.
In my time in Washington, I have observed US intelligentsia and think-tanks frequently floating foreign threats, thereby justifying bellicosity abroad. This time, however, former Defense Secretary General Mattis and other leaders of the military elite establishment have called their commander-in-chief a divider-in-chief, and a threat to the US Constitution. An unprecedented step.
America today is a timely reminder of what President Abraham Lincoln foresaw 160 years ago: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
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