For America’s European allies, a nightmare fallout of the Orlando massacre by a homophobic Muslim American of Afghan origin would be the schismatic Donald Trump’s victory in November riding upon a wave of anti-Islamic populism.
The deranged and barbaric actions of Omar Mateen, 29, have triggered fears that an electoral wave in favor of Trump could trigger similar deluges in several key allies, including Britain, France and Germany, that would destabilize both the European Union and NATO.
Lone-wolf or not, he did follow the al Qaeda and Islamic State’s instruction to all terrorists to announce allegiance whatever the other reasons for their acts. This, Mateen did in phone calls to the police.
Islamic terrorism and American and Western reactions to it are feeding an atmosphere of violence that is infecting countless people down to the marrow.
Terrorists use spectacular violence to provoke extreme reactions and many Americans and Europeans are willfully swallowing the poison of their narrative.
Trump has built a new enterprise based on fear of violence and angrily violent solutions to that fear. His spirals have defeated not only challengers in the Republican primaries but also instilled fear in the most experienced Republic leaders who should know better, including the Speakers of the House and Senate and the head of the Republican National Committee.
The Trump victories do not stem from his political or leadership acumen. They emerge from the palls of fear gnawing at large sections of voters angry about economic and social changes that flew out of their control long before Islamic terrorism bared its teeth in America.
Now the great Republican Party that earned global admiration over centuries stands to become a laughing stock of conservative peers across the world because its seasoned leaders are bowing to Trump as their protector against decline.
Instead of stalwart Republican values tempering Trump’s irrationally vulgar exuberance, his values are infecting the party’s leadership.
It is as if power were worth acquiring at any cost under pretense that Hillary Clinton is too much of a prevaricator to be entrusted with governing America, regardless that her credentials outmatch all others.
Trump’s bold untruths and blankness on most matters are held to be lesser harms than Clinton’s fuzzy veracity and occasional opacity.
This is what the savagery of violence and fear of it can do to people. It changes them into risk-averse wraiths in quest of shelter in gloomy grottos.
They seek saviors, even if among snake oil enchanters like Trump or the Caliph of ISIS, who wants so desperately to escape from realty that he stages spectacularly brutal assassinations in futile yearning for life as it was among a few hundred isolated people in two remote desert villages 1,400 years ago.
Mateen shed the malaise of his small town American skin by murdering and wounding dozens of innocent revelers in cold blood in a desperate bid to imagine community with a greater cause preached by a mad man forced to cringe incognito in the lost-lands of Iraq and Syria.
His hero cowers every minute awaiting America’s stealth drones, Russia’s monster tanks or assault by a mercenary masquerading as a turbaned bearded acolyte. If a lone-wolf can create havoc in Orlando, so can one in Raqqa.
Meanwhile, Europeans watch as deer paralyzed by a Hummer’s headlights. Marine Le Pen snarls and claws as she plots to eat Francois Hollande for breakfast in the 2017 elections; David Cameron loses sleep over to be or not to be European while Brutus’ many cousins lurk daggers drawn; Angela Merkel, rescued from the Soviet heel in East Germany, wrings hands over resurgent dogmatists and neo-Nazis; while proud descendants of Greek and Roman empires wonder how to survive the colors of unrelenting immigration from Africa and the Middle East.
Almost everywhere in America and Europe, hardworking and rational nurturers of productive families are wallowing in anger at how speedily they are being disrupted and left behind by globalization, technological change, the digital economy and growth bereft of decent jobs.
Enter Trump, ISIS and Mateen – all warped along a common thread of how to make fear and anger yet more blind while steadily inuring all of us to bloody spectacles wrought by psychopaths.
Trump’s kingdom of fear, Clinton’s realm of miasma and Europe’s continent of plaintive muddle may set the rest of humankind on course to fragmentation and decline toward the epoch before warring peoples came together in rules-based nations and international community.
Unless, of course, Clinton reincarnates as deserving of trust by November instead of just being one-eyed amid the blind. (By Brij Khindaria)
GFaphic by Sceptre – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2126002