Worldwide Evil

Worldwide Evil

Trumpian tactics are now front and center in the highly contentious South African elections. Why? Because they’re so successful.

The leader of the most leftist party, the EFF, which while very radical and occasionally offensive in his criticism of its opponents has rarely deviated into outright lying. Julius Malema is now doing so, “stoking Trumpian fires of anger and violence in [his] supporters.”

According Branko Brkic, the founder and current editor-in-chief of one of South Africa’s most read daily publications, the Daily Maverick, Trump has twisted politics all around the world. He has demonstrated that truth matters less than rebel rousing in harnessing democracy.

Brkic’s Daily Maverick is left-leaning but has never supported Malema or the EFF, although he’s given them wide latitude to discuss their positions in his publication.

Now, he’s shutting one of them down.

Julius Malema last week started to castigate one of the country’s chief ministers, a rank-and-file “Public Enterprises” minister who many argue dragged his feet revealing all the criminal activities that the former president (since impeached) has since been charged with.

Malema ratcheted up the attacks against Pravin Gordhan from languid prosecutions to personal attacks based on race. Gordhan is Indian.

Malema called Gordhan “corrupt, a dog of white monopoly capital” and then started castigating Gordhan’s only daughter as well, flinging about patently untrue lies about her benefitting from government largess.

Gordhan today initiated criminal charges against Malema.

But that’s unlikely to jeopardize Malema’s rise in the polls which he’s engineered with his Trumpian attacks. Brkic believes it will actually enhance and solidify his support.

Truth doesn’t matter in an electorate which has been lied to for generations. Politicians’ promises are taken with a grain of salt by the more educated, but the less educated embrace them. When the promises don’t materialize, the electorate is humiliated and turns vengeful.

Brkic explains that the electorate are “forgotten people who lost life’s lottery and were further let down by the decades of rampant neoliberalism that didn’t care about the common man,” and this makes it ripe for evil manipulation.

The EFF couldn’t be more diametrically opposed ideologically to America’s alt-right, yet both employ the same tactics to consolidate their power.

It’s one thing to unfairly trick the electorate to grant you power. It becomes even worse when the techniques take on the organic evil life of their own:

“Cesar Altieri Sayoc, a small time Florida-man, [did not] wake up one day in a pure vacuum and decided it was a good time to bomb the people he had never heard of until a few years before, before Trump’s escalator descent into casual evil,” Brkic writes.

“Hillary Clinton? Yeah, he’d probably heard of her. Joe Biden? Possibly. George Soros? John Brennan? Kamala Harris? Give me a break.

“Trump may have weaseled his way out, mostly by injecting yet more madness into the news stream, but everyone knew it was his words, and his alt right echo chamber, which eventually translated into Sayoc’s action.”

Cesar Sayoc is the pipe bomb maker who sent deadly missives to more than a dozen high profile Trump critics who Trump had specifically singled out for vengeance in his public remarks.

Brkic’s purpose in his essay is different from mine in restating it for you. Brkic is trying to discredit the EFF. He’s no supporter of Gordhan’s imploding ANC, but he believes the EFF is too radical for government responsibility.

My purpose is to show how pervasively evil Trumpian actions have become … worldwide. And as I’ve often said, Trump is but a front for either a conspiracy or more likely, a successful cultural movement engineered by the American alt-right.

In South Africa Brkic hopes that the electorate will reject them. America embraced them. We’ll see how viable Brkic’s hope is.

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