Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:53 pm
This is how we start our days now:
Just waking up. Are we at war with Mexico, yet?
— Ana Navarro (@ananavarro) January 27, 2017
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It is a legitimate question.
The last head of Soviet Russia, Former General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who gave us peace by making Russia less before Vladimir Putin tried to make Russia more by giving us war, was apparently in the same thought-space as Ana Navarro when he warned today that “it all looks as if the world is preparing for war.”
“Politicians and military leaders sound increasingly belligerent and defense doctrines more dangerous. Commentators and TV personalities are joining the bellicose chorus. It all looks as if the world is preparing for war.”
Gorbachev, by the way, like President Obama, has something Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin do not, and will never have: A Nobel Peace Prize. Putin was nominated in 2014. But he didn’t get it because Ukraine.
And there can be absolutely no doubt that if Donald Trump wanted a declaration of war that this is how he would do it, unilaterally and in violation of all accepted norms and without consulting anybody outside of Fox News.
We’ll just wake up one morning and see a tweet – if the bombs don’t wake us up first.
Ana Navaro got an answer, as it happens:
@ananavarro Stayed tuned. The war on Mexico comes right after the War on Truth. The War on Science follows. No commercial interruptions.
— RJ Palacio (@RJPalacio) January 27, 2017
There are wars and there are wars.
In the most recent dust-up, limited so far to words, Donald Trump had his feelings hurt by Mexico because he tried to bully them and they declined to be bullied and being made fun of rankled. So he took an ill-thought-out and outright stupid action as a knee-jerk reaction, one that was certain to bring even more ridicule.
Mexico won’t be the only country to hurt his feelings. Probably, his safe place in all this will be Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And Gorbachev pointed his finger at not just Trump, but at Putin, saying the two must go before the United Nations and say “nuclear war is unacceptable and must never be fought.”
Trump says he loves nukes. Wants to know why we can’t use them if we have them. Of course, he might deny that he ever said that tomorrow, if it becomes inconvenient that he ever said that, in which case like his 20 percent tariff on Mexican imports it will become “unsaid.”
The trouble with wars is that they can never be “unfought.” He can pretend he never said what he said, but you can’t take back a declaration of war. Or at least to date, in all of human history, nobody has ever said, “Ooops. My bad” and offered to shake hands.
This is how we start our days in the post-Obama world, not with thoughts of ending wars, but with warnings of new wars in the air.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
