Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Autocrats R Us
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Consider this a small reminder that you can get a signed, personalized copy of Rebecca Gordon’s superb American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes by visiting the TD donation page and contributing $100 ($125 if you live outside the USA). Available there as well: Frostlands, the second volume of John Feffer’s riveting Splinterlands series of novels, and Alfred McCoy’s prescient In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, among other books. Do check it all out and, while you're at it, keep this website floating above the Trumpian waves. Tom]
It started with “Fort Trump.” Last September, while visiting the White House, Polish president Andrzej Duda only half-jokingly suggestedthat very name for the new U.S. base he was proposing the Pentagon set up in his country (and was offering more than $2 billion to support). In other words, he grokked this American president perfectly. If it works for golf courses, why not forts? And perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the administration of the man who had long promoted friendlier relations with Russia now seems to be forging ahead with Fort Trump, ensuring that thousands more U.S. military personnel will be stationed near the Russian border.
And Duda wasn’t the only foreign leader to note a presidential proclivity for spreading that name far and wide. What about, for instance, giving it to an Israeli community to be built in the once-Syrian Golan Heights that Donald Trump only recently ceded to his old friend Bibi Netanyahu? The Israeli prime minister, as the New York Times reported, recently suggested that “he would ask his government to approve naming a new Jewish settlement in the Golan Heights for President Trump, in appreciation of the American leader’s proclamation recognizing Israel’s authority over the long-disputed territory.”
There might, in fact, be quite a future in such gestures. For instance, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon points out today while taking us on a whirlwind tour of the latest upheavals in the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, the president only recently countermanded his secretary of state by making a personal call to Libyan warlord Khalifa Hifter and offering his support for the general’s push to take his country’s capital, Tripoli. Obviously, the least Hifter could do in return, should that city fall to him (still a question mark), would be to rename it Trumpoli. It not only makes sense, but fits perfectly with the famed U.S. Marine Corps hymn(“From the gates of Mar-a-Lago to the shores of Trumpoli...”)
Ah, the glories of a president who likes to see his name writ in vast golden letters across the planet! Think about that as you embark on Gordon’s tour of parts of that same globe where other autocrats have already found themselves imperiled for their “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Tom
It started with “Fort Trump.” Last September, while visiting the White House, Polish president Andrzej Duda only half-jokingly suggestedthat very name for the new U.S. base he was proposing the Pentagon set up in his country (and was offering more than $2 billion to support). In other words, he grokked this American president perfectly. If it works for golf courses, why not forts? And perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the administration of the man who had long promoted friendlier relations with Russia now seems to be forging ahead with Fort Trump, ensuring that thousands more U.S. military personnel will be stationed near the Russian border.
And Duda wasn’t the only foreign leader to note a presidential proclivity for spreading that name far and wide. What about, for instance, giving it to an Israeli community to be built in the once-Syrian Golan Heights that Donald Trump only recently ceded to his old friend Bibi Netanyahu? The Israeli prime minister, as the New York Times reported, recently suggested that “he would ask his government to approve naming a new Jewish settlement in the Golan Heights for President Trump, in appreciation of the American leader’s proclamation recognizing Israel’s authority over the long-disputed territory.”
There might, in fact, be quite a future in such gestures. For instance, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon points out today while taking us on a whirlwind tour of the latest upheavals in the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, the president only recently countermanded his secretary of state by making a personal call to Libyan warlord Khalifa Hifter and offering his support for the general’s push to take his country’s capital, Tripoli. Obviously, the least Hifter could do in return, should that city fall to him (still a question mark), would be to rename it Trumpoli. It not only makes sense, but fits perfectly with the famed U.S. Marine Corps hymn(“From the gates of Mar-a-Lago to the shores of Trumpoli...”)
Ah, the glories of a president who likes to see his name writ in vast golden letters across the planet! Think about that as you embark on Gordon’s tour of parts of that same globe where other autocrats have already found themselves imperiled for their “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Tom
Spring Stirrings and Misgivings
Of Autocrats and Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa
By Rebecca Gordon
“Al-Shebab,” said my student Jerry early in the fall 2010 semester. “We’re calling our small group al-Shebab. It means ‘The Youth.’” From his name alone, I wouldn’t have guessed his background, but he was proud of his family’s Egyptian roots and had convinced his classmates to give their group an Arabic name.
As usually happens when the semester ends and my dozens of students scatter, Jerry and I lost touch. The following April, however, we ran into each other at a rally organized by students at my university to support the Arab Spring. Like many others around the world, I’d watched transfixed as brave unarmed civilians faced down riot police on the bridges leading to Cairo’s Tahrir Square. I’d celebrated on February 11, 2011, when the corrupt and authoritarian Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak resigned as the military took control of that country.
Jerry’s eyes sparkled when he saw me. “Isn’t it amazing?” he shouted. Yes, it was amazing... until it wasn’t.
This spring, eight years later, there has been a new set of popular uprisings in northern Africa, from Algeria to Morocco, to Sudan. Let’s hope they have more lasting success than Egypt’s Arab Spring.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
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