U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the United Nations to boast of his foreign policy record, inflating his role at times, and lash out at the world body. He warned Europe it faces ruin from 'double-tailed monster' policies on migration and green energy.
The Associated Press
Eighty years ago, representatives of 50 countries gathered in San Francisco to solve a problem that had just killed 60 million people and left much of the world in ruins.
The root of that problem, many delegates declared, was a type of nationalism – one based on ideas of “homelands” and racial purity, which sought to define fellow citizens of other religions and skin colours as “invaders” to be subjugated or eliminated, and countries deemed racially inferior as targets for conquest or mass deportation.
“It is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps than it is to kill the ideas which gave them birth and strength,” then-U.S. president Harry Truman said in his closing speech. “The decent peoples of the earth must remain determined to strike down the evil spirit which has hung over the world for the last decade.”
Their solution was the United Nations, established at that conference in October, 1945. To make a long story short, the UN didn’t succeed in striking down the evil spirit of racial nationalism. But it did render those concepts taboo on the international stage – even if you were practising apartheid or ethnic cleansing at home, you didn’t promote the idea at the General Assembly or try to re-establish it as a global ideology.
Which brings us to Donald Trump’s speech on Tuesday.
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Many delegates were simply relieved that Truman’s successor didn’t mark the anniversary by withdrawing his country from the UN or its organizations, or endorsing Vladimir Putin’s conquest of democracies (in fact, he reversed his position on Ukraine on Tuesday).
What they got instead was an hour of often incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness rambling. Most of it was ostensibly devoted not to anything international but to telling countries how they should run their domestic affairs. Specifically, the need for countries to slay the “double-tailed monster” of green energy and immigration.
The first half of that equation was transparent nonsense, easily ignored. But the immigration part was not really about migration policy at all, but rather a detailed elucidation of an ideology that has not had a significant place on the world stage since the 1930s, one aimed not just at newcomers but also at neighbours and fellow citizens from minority backgrounds.
“Your countries are going to hell,” he told the General Assembly, if “proud nations” don’t “prevent their societies from being overwhelmed by people with different customs, religions, with different everything.” He warned: “If you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail. … You’re destroying your heritage.”
To make it clear that he wasn’t just talking about immigrants, Mr. Trump randomly lashed out at Sadiq Khan, the long-serving Mayor of London, who he baselessly accused of imposing “Sharia law.” Mr. Khan, an Englishman by birth and culture, has governed in a strictly secular fashion, and in fact came to office by denouncing the perceived antisemitism of a previous mayor. But Mr. Trump was making a larger point: fellow citizens like Mr. Khan aren’t one of “us.” They’re replacing us.
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Those UN remarks often duplicated the language of the so-called “great replacement” theory, a racist-right concept which posits a Jewish conspiracy to “replace” white Christians with immigrants of other colours and faiths. Even a few years ago, this idea was to be found only in ultra-fringe media such as The Daily Stormer and in the manifestos and statements of terrorists, including the Christchurch mosque and Pittsburgh synagogue mass murderers. Mr. Trump and his circle have returned these concepts to the international mainstream.
Two days before his UN address, the President delivered an exuberant speech lauding one of the most successful popularizers of the great replacement concept, Charlie Kirk. Although Mr. Kirk’s murder was a horrifying act of political violence that deserved condemnation from all quarters, the President went further, suggesting that the victim’s ideas should be celebrated in a national holiday. Among the most prominent and oft-repeated of those ideas was the conspiracy that Jews control media and education, and that the rise of racial-equality laws in the 1960s was a mistake.
Mr. Trump has spent his second term championing concepts from the racist right, including, several times, the concept of “remigration” – a policy of “returning” residents and citizens of non-majority backgrounds to their supposed ethnic and racial homelands, the suggestion of which was considered too extremist for the ultra-far-right Alternative For Germany party.
Now the U.S. State Department has announced plans to open an “office of remigration” devoted to mass deportations.
So Mr. Trump did not destroy the United Nations on its 80th anniversary, to the relief of many. Instead, he may have caused more lasting damage by resurrecting the very ideas it was created to oppose.