This day last week Senator Aodhan O Riordan appealed to members of the Oireachtas to boycott the Independence Day reception at the US embassy in Dublin on July 3. Every member of the Oireachtas received an invitation. O Riordan said it was unthinkable to drink champagne and eat sausage rolls to celebrate July 4 with the horrors at the Mexican border continuing.
He didn’t get much support from the Irish government. The taoiseach said it was more important to engage with people you disagreed with. Yeah right. We’ve all heard this argument before. The pathetically weak Theresa May used exactly the same language last week when asked to condemn what Trump was doing and to cancel his July 13 visit. She wouldn’t, even though it’s now going to cost vastly more millions involving thousand of police to fend off the protestors in twenty-two demonstrations the ego maniac will attract.
One policy a British government ought to know is that appeasement doesn’t work. President Macron tried it, fawning all over Trump in Paris. Did it make any difference? Nope. Macron flew to Washington to ask Trump not to introduce tariffs on EU steel. He was ignored. At least Angela Merkel has the guts to treat Trump to a piece of her mind when she’s not treating him with the contempt he deserves. She’s treated no differently from those other craven crawlers like May and Macron and Varadkar.
Why don’t they follow the example of Americans opposed to Trump and his contemptible lackeys? You wouldn’t know it from TV news here but the most vociferous and effective opponents of Trump are Americans. It was protests from Americans that stopped Trump in his tracks and made him reverse his inhuman policy of ripping young children from their parents and then lying that it was a law brought in by the Democrats. His cronies in government are still separating children but just more sneakily.
Before Trump did his U-turn border guards had torn 2,300 children from their mothers and fathers between May 5 and June 9. US officials including the mayor of Brownsville, Texas where hundreds of kids are sweltering in 32 degree heat say many will never be reunited because border guards didn’t bother to take details of their parents and how could a Spanish-speaking two-year-old tell anyone who she is or who her mother is? Meanwhile parents have been flown hundreds, in some cases thousands, of miles away to detention centres prior to deportation. Trump’s latest idiotic pronouncement is that they should be deported immediately, ‘no judges, no courts’. His ignorance of the American system is extraordinary.
Meanwhile in a fortuitously appropriate move the US has pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council. It would be too ridiculous even for this American government to be castigating places like Saudi Arabia for human rights breaches when they only execute people just like the US but nowhere in the world systematically slings thousands of children, some barely able to talk, into detention centres never to see their parents again.
In past times politicians kowtowed to the US for fear they might lose financial aid or business. There’s no need to worry about that any more. With Trump’s ‘America First’ slogan harking back to isolationism, xenophobia, slavery, white nationalism and fascist overtones of 1940-41, there’s going to be no more financial aid or business available. Trump is pulling up the drawbridge. Look on the bright side. Who would want to travel to a country where a majority of Republican voters still support Trump and think he’s doing a great job?
So if you know anyone who's going along to the US consulate in Belfast to scoff canapes, why don't you suggest they raise Trump's border policy as well as the behaviour of American governments in the last twenty years legitimising kidnap, torture, murder around the world.
Perhaps they could also ask why America needs 800 military bases outside the US?
Guests may not realise it, but views expressed at such events are often noted and passed up the line. So this is a chance to let the Americans know what people really think about Donald Trump and the cruel separation of families. Have another sausage roll.
