Trump, torture and a ‘Great’ America!

Donald Trump during campaign. Reuters

So, does torture work? Well, looking at it from another angle, it sure does, because it appears that whatever the new president of the United States is doing (which is torture of a different sort) results in outrage and anguish almost everywhere.

Obviously, some of his own staff are backing the president, which, I am sure, won't have any positive impact on their own image either.

I am trying to think what the world will remember of Trump and his times when he is no longer in office.  With protests all over the USA, presented to us via international media plus the ongoing global denunciation over the recent executive order, banning entry of people from certain countries, one has to say, maintaining objectivity, this guy has jolted the world.

Love him or hate him, you will recall this ascension to the one of the most powerful seats in the world for a long time.

One still cannot say with certainty if this is a stunt or not, but by doing what Trump had said earlier during the campaign, one thing is proved: he was not merely bluffing for votes to eventually take a sharp u turn post-election.

During a recent visit to Washington, I had the chance to have a long chat with a university graduated taxi driver from Bahrain who was in the USA to get a US passport.

His view on a bitterly cold winter morning which saw the first signs of sleet on the roads and countless cars overturned or veered off on both sides of the highway, were hardly elevating.

"The votes show that, inherently a lot of people are deeply antagonistic towards foreigners, migrants and refugees."

I am not going into that rather mouthwatering argument as to whether any other country's cyber operations had a hand in impacting the US elections or not.

That can easily be turned into a bestseller book or a Hollywood film by some canny writer or producer.

Instead, let's deal with reality: there's a person at the White House, who believes that banning people from entering USA, albeit for a certain period, can trigger his mission for achieving greatness.

He did say and keeps on uttering: let's make America great again!

This line may have spurred millions into voting for a particular candidate, but as a writer, I feel this to be a sentence lacking profundity and clarity.

America, meaning the general people, had always been great, or mostly great.

In times when the US foreign policy smacked of direct neo-imperialism, the common Americans did not have any qualms to protest against it.

They denounced intervention in Vietnam, united to put pressure on the Nixon administration to recognize the genocide committed in Bangladesh in 1971 and, today, when the government is taking a rather racist approach, are again coming out on the streets and to the airports to show that against those who fiercely espouse isolationism topped by xenophobia, there are others believing in inclusion.

Therefore, Trump cannot say he is here to make the people 'great'. That leaves the government and the foreign policy which, for a long period, has been anything but great.

As a first generation Bangladeshi post-independence, cannot recall a period when US foreign policy was termed benevolent or compassionate by any intelligent civil society section anywhere.

In the 70's, with the Cold War machinations at their zenith, the foreign policy seemed to have one objective only: control other nations by malleable inept rulers, often by tacitly endorsing repressive dictators.

Need I mention names?

In fact, from the early 20th century, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Iran, Chile have all had to taste the dubious 'greatness' of the foreign policy.

Problem is, society forgets fast and historical facts are seldom searched when assessing current day socio-political circumstances.

Using Bangladesh as an example, all throughout late 70s and 80s, the standard graffiti on the walls of public universities denounced unequivocally 'Markin shmarajjobad' (US imperialism).

An interesting read for all would be to find out how the deaths in the 1974 famine in Bangladesh could have been far less if Bangladesh was not cut out for aid.

Exporting jute to Cuba was not taken lightly by many; the lesson was taught with reportedly 1 million dead.

We never made the same mistake again!

Then, in the recent past, there have been invasions of other countries: in two cases, the ostensible reasons were to remove despots, in the other, it was to overthrow a barbaric regime that was trampling on human rights.

Again, these three trouble spots were created none other than the USA; just go to the Internet and the real tale of Frankenstein's monsters will be revealed.

By the way, intervention only made the world a worse place, triggering formation of radical groups which now threaten harmony everywhere.

So, the point is: US foreign policy was never something to be proud of.

Therefore, when someone says let's make America great again, are we to take that he means, striving to make the USA an imperial force of the past?

The problem with the Trump administration is that it tries to impose a blinkered outlook, avoiding to acknowledge any direct responsibility for the countless unrest and upheavals over the decades that have brought the world where it stands today.

A large section of the American people are aware of the skewed and diabolical foreign policy aspects, having firmly stood against them from time to time at international forums.

Today we see that spirit of moral conviction when the American people come out on the streets to renounce a policy of division, ordered whimsically, to uphold and re-assert the American value of inclusion.

This is where we find the greatness of the USA! Not from the administration and in its perverted rhetoric but in the simple but tenacious belief of the masses.

When a legal system issues a directive overturning the president's travel restrictions, we marvel at the sublimity of democracy.

America – if we take the country to represent the tolerant values of a large number of her people, had always been great, Trump cannot claim to increase/or salvage that.

What he can do is to reform the foreign policy, not to make it selfish and imperious, but genuinely humane.

Admit some mistakes and ask forgiveness for creating a lot of unnecessary mess – isn't that what constitutes the core of greatness?

Perhaps the 'again' needs to be cut out and the slogan should run: Let's make America Great!