Watching the spectacle of US President Donald Trump’s supporters breaching the Capitol on January 6 in an effort to stop the Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 elections, I was reminded of a line in Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness. This is about Mr Kurtz, a British colonialist, who goes native and rogue and a little mad after he gets to Africa, with lethal consequences for the Africans. What I recalled was that “all Europe [had] contributed to the making of Kurtz”. In the same vein, I feel that all America contributed to the making of the “very American riot” on January 6, to quote Patrick Gathara’s January 8 oped for Al Jazeera. Indeed, I suspect that all America was complicit in the making of Trump himself.
(USA) Trump and un-Americanism (Asma Barlas, Al Jazeera)
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