Trump and History
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here at Steve's Café where I like to chat about things that interest me and get reactions from people.
As you know, I have my other channel where I talk about language learning. You can always go there if you want to listen to me talk about language learning or speak in other languages. Today, I want to talk about Donald Trump's place in history and talk a little about history because, as you know, history is something that I find fascinating.
I think the whole Donald Trump phenomenon will go down in history as a time when lots of Americans went mad and people will be counted on how they reacted.
I'm talking about leading figures like this Governor Christie and now John McCain who have come out supporting Trump. I think the person that we see in Donald Trump is extremely unpleasant, unreliable and unpredictable. He will say anything. He is tremendously vindictive and says very nasty things about his opponents, says nasty things about other people, very thin-skinned, very ignorant about policy and history. That's fine, but his ignorance doesn't seem to prevent him from making the wildest statements about how he's going to fix the economy by sticking it to the Chinese and the whole idea that you sort of negotiate from power. It doesn't work; I knew that in business very early.
There was a period when British Columbia had the wood that everybody wanted.
I can remember in the seventies representatives from B.C. would come to Japan and have a very arrogant approach to the Japanese. The basic principle was if you want our wood this is how you're going to get it. Well, subsequently, all kinds of other competitors came into the Japanese market and now the British Columbia coastal industries that were once the kings are now in disarray. So that doesn't last very long, in fact, long-lasting relationships in business, in anything, depend on finding common ground, common allies and friends. It's not a matter of, as he put it, I believe in compromises, as long as I get my way. He's a thoroughly odious person, totally unfit to be President of the United States.
I think there's just some kind of a mad hysteria that has grabbed the Americans, which is not unlike what has happened in many countries.
I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler, not for a moment, but vast numbers of Germans, because they felt they had been stabbed in the back in the First World War, things weren't going well economically and it's not fair, came behind this guy. I think many of the senior industrialists thought that once he takes power we'll be able to control him and they weren't able to control him.
We see this mass hysteria in many places, I mean Pol Pot.
Talk about the Cultural Revolution in China, apparently Dung Chow Ping visited the United States sometime in the seventies after he had come back to power and he was sitting beside Shirley MacLaine. Shirley MacLaine told him, oh, you know, when I was in China I met this professor who said that he was so grateful to Mao for having sent him to the countryside to learn from the peasants and Dung Chow Ping said he was lying. But there you had this mass hysteria in China called the Cultural Revolution.
I'm not comparing the scale of the hysteria in the United States to Nazi Germany or the Cultural Revolution, but it's a bit like that because it doesn't make sense that such an obviously unfit person should get the support of so many people for the position of President of the United States.
There are a lot of negatives about Hillary Clinton, but the persona that I see on television -- she doesn't have the nastiness, she doesn't say ridiculous things.
She seems human. I don't agree with her unconditional support for trade unions, particularly public sector trade unions, but as I person I think I could live with her. I won't agree with all of her policies. In any case, I don't vote down there, but this whole idea of history and how we look back on history.
Now, of course, the 8th of May is the official ending of the Second World War in Europe and the 9th of May is Victory Day in Russia and they parade all their latest missiles and weapons.
We are biggest and toughest and we can beat everybody up is kind of their message. It wasn't recently, but I saw a film clip of Putin saying that Russia would have won the war without Ukraine. How can you say something so stupid? Who knows, but what's the point of saying something like that. That's like Trump saying if Hillary were a man she'd only get five percent of the vote. Those are perfectly gratuitous and stupid statements. We could also say without Ukraine Russia would have lost the war.
Speaking of commemorations, I don't in Russia they commemorate the 17th of September, I think it was, when the Soviet Union invaded Poland to combine with Hitler in the dismemberment of Poland and then from there go on and take the Baltic states and invade Finland and so forth.
So we're very selective in our memories of things.
I'm a great believer in international collaboration on history.
I see the Poles want to rewrite their history now. I think it's a good thing. I don't agree with a lot of the sort of bending over backwards to apologize that we see in Canada, like the Komagata Maru and stuff like that. I think statements of great apology for events that happened 100 years ago is a bit over the top, but I think there should be lots of historians, possibly from different countries, participating in analyzing what happened in history so we can maybe get a somewhat objective picture of what happened.
At the other end, we have the cynics who say history was always written by the victors.
Well, that's not true. The losers have their history and there are differing points of view. It's a bit like all of these conspiracy theories where everything is bad, history is all lies and the bankers are all crooks, all of that kind of stuff which isn't true.
Ultimately, if you saw my video earlier about the laminated beam, the more we disperse decision making, points of view, power, the better off we're going to be, the more democratic we are.
Not necessarily in the sense of just voting, but in the sense of having a decentralized and pluralistic society where different views are tolerated the better. Therefore, getting back to Trump, the aggressive attempt to silence other people's points of view is a bad, bad omen and I sincerely hope that he becomes a disaster for the Republican Party before he becomes a disaster for the United States and the world economy.
Thanks for listening, bye for now.
