A story lies buried in the archives of the Norwegian Nobel Institute. On 27 January 1939, Erik Brandt, a Swedish Parliamentarian, sent a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee. It nominated Adolf Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The letter claimed that Hitler, if left in peace, would pacify Europe and possibly the whole world. The last lines gushed: “Adolf Hitler is by all means the authentic God-given fighter for peace. Millions of people around the world put their hopes in him as the Prince of Peace on earth.”
The severe backlash saw Erik Brandt withdraw his nomination. Clarifying his position in Trots Allt, an anti-Nazi newspaper, Brandt wrote that the recommendation was meant to shame Hitler as an enemy of peace in the world.
Citing Hegel, Karl Marx began his essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” by stating that all facts and personages of importance in history recur twice. Marx added, “The first time as tragedy; the second time as farce.” Pakistan’s fawning platitude recommending President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize is touted as a diplomatic coup. History will record it as an infamy.
In his first term, Trump, like Arthur Balfour, gifted Netanyahu with the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Apart from lifting sanctions on armed Israeli settlers in the West Bank, he shifted the US Embassy to Jerusalem in violation of Security Council resolutions. Come the second term, he kept on aiding and arming the Gaza genocide that has seen the murder of nearly 57,000 Palestinians.
Israel has murdered an average of 30 children daily over the last 535 days. More than 93 percent of children in Gaza, about 930,000, are at risk of famine. Despite this, Trump is fixated on cleansing the devastated Gaza and converting it into a Riviera of the Middle East. Doing absolutely nothing to rein in the genocidal Netanyahu, he vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a critically needed Gaza ceasefire.
Trump hosted Netanyahu in the White House and threatened to sanction the ICC for issuing the war criminal’s arrest warrant. Global carbon emissions peaked last year. A KPMG and Kearney report termed it a turning point for global energy driven by rising geopolitical tensions. Trump accelerated global heating by stoking wars and walking out of international conventions and treaties.
Trump called Canada the 51st state of the US. He threatened to take over the Panama Canal and annex Greenland. Trump’s tariff war, like much else, rests on a fundamentally flawed diagnosis of America’s economic decline. It was not China but US robber barons who offshored manufacturing to low-wage countries. They made a killing at the expense of millions working on American production lines.
Himself a 3rd generation German immigrant, Trump’s anti-immigrant policy has detention centers that resemble WWII internment camps. Immigrants call them La Perrera – dog kennel in Spanish. Mothers are separated from their children. The youngest child taken from his parents at the US-Mexico border was Constantin Mutu, a 4-month-old baby.
Claiming to be the Prince of Peace, Trump walked out of Iran’s nuclear deal. This culminated in his ordering strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Netanyahu’s war on Gaza has killed over 28,000 women and girls. Netanyahu called his Trump-abetted strikes on Iran an attempt to rescue Iranian women.
After striking Iran, Trump declared an Iran-Israel ceasefire. Be the initiator or enabler of a war and then the harbinger of peace; this dichotomy lies at the heart of President Trump’s policies.
It saw NATO leaders agreeing to increase defense spending to 5% of their GDP. Up from 2%, this mammoth leap is worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually towards the tools of war. Trump, the Prince of Peace, claims it as his crowning achievement.
Bob Woodward, the Washington Post’s investigative journalist, uncovered and detailed the Watergate scandal in his book “All the President’s Men.” It went on to be an Academy Award-winning film. Woodward’s book “Peril” is his third in what is known as the Trump trilogy. The book reveals that, on 30 October 2020, General Mark Milley, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, called General Li Zuocheng, his Chinese counterpart. A second call to him was made on 6 January 2021, the day Trump supporters led a deadly riot at the US Capitol. In these calls, Milley assured Li that the US was not going to attack China. He also assured Li that if at all it did, he would be alerted.
Giving the reason, Woodward cites a transcript about Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking Milley about “the safeguards to prevent an unstable president (Trump) from launching a nuclear strike.” Woodward writes that Pelosi told Milley, “He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy.” To this, the general replies: “I agree with you on everything.”
In another Woodward book, “War,” Milley is quoted as calling Trump “fascist to the core.” No wonder, Trump’s second term’s first act was to have the personal security detail and security clearance of General Mark Milley revoked.
Alice Roosevelt, President Roosevelt’s daughter, described her father as the ultimate egotist “who always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.” Compared to President Trump, Roosevelt was a baby at narcissism.
Today’s unipolar world is increasingly reminiscent of the one decried by President Kennedy as a Pax Americana with its diktat – peace of the grave or security of the slave. Aggrandizing this mindset is being culpable in the committed atrocities. One is at a total loss as to how one can condemn the Gaza genocide and Washington’s blatant interventions yet glorify the enabler. A reality check is in order.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Mir Adnan Aziz is a freelance contributor.