Porter’s Pensées

‘What does he know of England who only England knows?’ That quotation (from Kipling) has long resonated with me. Of course in Kipling’s case it was meant to direct people’s attention to his beloved Empire, which he believed (erroneously in my view) manifested the true essence of ‘England’, but was largely neglected in Kipling’s time. (See my The Absent-Minded Imperialists, 2004.)

But it could also be read in an entirely different way. If you are only interested in England, or in its history (my field), without knowing about other countries and their histories, then you deprive yourself of some of the context which might make more sense of ‘England’ than focussing on that country alone. Why was England’s development distinct from, for example, France’s, with whom she was almost bodily conjoined at one time? What was it about other European countries that made them different – or in some cases the same? How did England’s conjoined nations of Scotland, Wales and Ireland come into this? What did Britain learn from other European countries, and they from her? Then again: how was her development either similar to or – more often – different from those of extra-European countries, and especially the great civilizations of Africa, Asia and South America, over time? What can that tell us about her history, as well as theirs? – We can’t know, until we learn about the latter, in order better to understand ourselves.

In many countries history teaching is very parochial. I remember once in the USA a student telling me of a neighbour who seemed genuinely puzzled why he (my student) wanted to study British history: ‘America has the best history in the world’. (It sounds like Trump, doesn’t it?) So far as I know – and I have no up-to-date knowledge; I would be happy to be corrected  – American school and college history courses are still mainly focussed on the history of the USA, and on a somewhat heroic version of US History at that. I believe – although again without having researched it – that the same is true of most European countries; as it certainly is of Sweden, where I mostly live.

But it’s not generally true of British colleges and universities; for which I’m grateful, having been brought up on a diet of European, mediaeval and (marginally) world history there, with modern British history comprising no more than 25% of my studies overall. At university I took more courses in continental history than in British, and about a quarter in American. One of the courses on the syllabus (although I didn’t take it) was on British imperial history, which Kipling would have approved of; except that by that time it had come to be more of a history of the countries Britain had colonised, than of British imperialism itself. So students were introduced in this way to non-British, ‘alien’ cultures, which was all to the good. (Some of the critics of ‘Imperial history’ misunderstood this. It wasn’t imperialist.) My first teaching jobs were in university departments where, again, non-British subjects – mediaeval European, French, Dutch, German, Russian, American, South-East Asian, continental political philosophy – proliferated over ‘British’. I myself was very much a ‘British and Imperial’ historian; but I was in a minority. I approved of that.

I would go further. A proper consideration of any nation’s history should also compare it with speculative ‘alternatives’, or ‘What if’s. What if the Germans had won World War II, for example; or India had colonised Britain rather than the other way around; or the counter-Reformation had succeeded more widely; or the Neanderthals had won over homo sapiens; or (obviously) if Kamala Harris had won the US Presidential election of 2024? – This happens to be quite a popular literary genre just now, with ‘counter-factual’ novels, films and radio programmes coming up frequently, to satisfy the taste for it. For serious historians, however, it’s an equally important approach,

Because to know why something happened in history, we need to know why other things didn’t happen, and vice-versa; and to do that we need to have speculated, at least, about alternative scenarios. Not to have these imaginative points of comparison must limit our understanding of ‘real’ history to a bare recital, without ex-planation, of what actually happened. That’s why those who only study British, or American, or Swedish (or whatever) history cannot fully comprehend even those national stories. Their minds will be limited to their own nations’ experiences; with nothing to compare these to.

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Which brings me on – at last – to Science Fiction. For I’ve been a reader of this literary genre, on and off, from boyhood; usually rather shame-facedly, I must confess. It probably started with ‘Dan Dare’ in the Eagle comic, when I was ten. ‘Dan Dare’ was not the most cerebral kind of Sci-Fi, being mainly based, as I remember, on recognisable tropes from the time (just after World War II): space-ships looking like Lancaster bombers shorn of their wings, distant planets covered in very earth-like jungles, Dan himself effectively a public school-educated World War II pilot (and with a working-class Lancastrian batman to boot), space conflicts uncannily like the Battle of Britain, green-skinned villains owing much to Hitler, and with good always triumphing over evil (the Eagle’s founder and editor, Marcus Morris, was a Church of England vicar). But it occasionally made you wonder at what might be.

Other Sci-Fi authors do this more deliberately, by inventing whole societies – humanoid or non-human – which are clearly alien, and yet seem plausible, and so possible to empathise with. Many Sci-Fi films, stories and even comic books can do this; but my own favourite contributors to the genre are HG Wells (of course), Olaf Stapledon (he was a philosopher too), Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin (the greatest, in my view), and – quite recently – the amazing Chinese writer Cixin Liu. Douglas Adams (who incidentally went to my school) might also be included here, if he’d been a bit more serious. Star Wars, Dune and Star Trek also very occasionally have solid ‘alternative reality’ themes (‘It’s life, Jim,but not as we know it.’). And there’s more of this than you might expect in the SF ‘pulp magazines’ – Astounding SF, and the like – hidden among the spaceships, monsters, death rays and space heroes.

I have to admit that Science Fiction has not been the most comforting of my enthusiasms. It can be somewhat belittling, to be made constantly aware of the enormous – infinite? – size of the universe, and the multiplicity of alternative environments, societies and lives that it must embrace. It makes what I do, and what indeed we all do – even Donald Trump – seem petty: which is depressing, but perhaps also chastening. And – to get back to my main theme – it can provide yet another layer of context for whatever we’re engaged on at the time.

Another popular quotation from Britain’s age of Empire is: ‘Wider still and Wider may thy bounds be set’. That of course is a line from Land of Hope and Glory; not by Kipling, as it happens, but it could well be. Just like ‘What does he know of England’, it might also be adopted as the main theme of this post. To understand any country’s history, we need to trawl ‘wider’, beyond that country’s shores; to take in other countries, imagined countries, and even other worlds. ‘Context is all’.

The British Empire, as well as being a site of conquest, exploitation, racism and atrocity, also harboured pockets of idealism, good intentions, and – just occasionally – good outcomes. The best of these (apart of course from cricket) was the establishment of the ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’ – subsequently simply ‘The Commonwealth’ – as a repository for most of Britain’s colonies and dominions after their ‘liberation’. The Commonwealth was imbued with a number of ‘standards’, which were supposed to reflect British ‘values’, especially political ones; and which included democracy, self-government, human rights and anti-racism. Not all these ideals were lived up to (which was why South Africa left in 1961); but they always stood as an aspiration, at the very least, for all its 56 members.

Of course the original thirteen North American British colonies were never among that number, chiefly because they broke away too early to join. Canada was, however; indeed, fighting successfully to preserve its position in the old British Empire and then the Commonwealth, and to retain a portion, at any rate, of its ‘Britishness’, and of British ‘values’, against pressure from the United States. Australia is another Commonwealth nation that remained ‘British’ in many respects (cricket is one) after its de facto independence, although many Aussies might not thank me for saying it.

Which makes it interesting that it is these two latter countries that have recently given the clearest single-finger gesture to Trump, in the form of national election results which are seen as direct repudiations of his whole political, cultural and economic philosophy. In the Canadians’ case, of course, it was partly a response to his stated ambition to annex them to the US as its ‘beloved fifty-first state’. But there may also be some significant differences between their societies, which arose originally from their divergent post-colonial histories; with the United States embracing a new set of values to replace the ones Britain had left with them. These included rugged individualism, the frontier spirit, its gun culture, an ignorant populism, showmanship, and – of course initially – slavery.

So post-independence America became dominated by capitalists, cowboys and conspiracy theorists. Not that these were entirely absent from Britain – frontierism, for example, Ned Kelly, and colonial slavery, albeit at a distance from home – but to a lesser extent; and combined with other inherited values which are today considered rather ‘woke’. Could this at least partly account for the difference between Britain, the Commonwealth and Europe on the one hand, and Trump’s America on the other? Does it all go back to 1776? Might it have been different if the thirteen colonies had remained under the protective wing of the mother hen?

Just an idea; from an old imperial historian trying to make his subject relevant.

Can anyone any longer doubt the Fascist proclivities of the Trump administration? It is now even targeting West Point Military Academy, in its aim to force an uncritical and über-‘patriotic’ mindset on Army cadets.

And MAGA make themselves out to be the champions of ‘free speech’. – We need to read 1984 again. Orwell intended it as a warning; but here we are.

During the Corbyn era, the Labour Party’s alleged anti-semitism played a leading part in its electoral defeat in 2019. The accusation goes back a few years; although certainly not to the origins of the Labour Party, which was one of the main opponents of any kind of racism, and a major supporter of Jewish causes in the early 20^th century. Anti-semitism then was mainly the province of the political Right.

I first commented on modern Labour and ‘anti-semitism’ ten years ago: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/28/anti-semitism-and-labour/. I was a member of the party then, as I should acknowledge, as you may think it gives me an interest in defending it. But my arguments for objecting to this kind of demonization of Corbyn, in that post and in subsequent ones, still stand on their own merits, I would claim, and need stating again.

Especially, I would say, for me here in Sweden, where Vänsterpartiet is currently being tarred with the same brush as British Labour was then: see https://bernardjporter.com/2025/04/11/leftist-anti-semitism-in-sweden/. Last night the party held a ‘crisis meeting’ over this via Skype. (My line on the particular issue raised is that the offending MP should have resigned over it, whether she is a good MP otherwise or not. Her intervention was at the very least unwise, and leaves her party vulnerable.)

The reason I’m blogging on this today however is that the issue has resurfaced, in connection with recent accusations against universities, in both Britain and America, of not doing enough to combat anti-semitism among both students and faculty there. – Now, on the one hand, none of us should be surprised at any resurgence of anti-semitism today, in the wake of Netanyahu’s and the IDF’s blatant atrocities in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank. I remember the feelings in Britain against ‘the Germans’, as a people, being equally condemnatory for a few years after the Second World War and the opening of Auschwitz. (I think I shared these, as a very young boy.) Of course that was grossly unfair; but it was understandable. It’s easy to channel even righteous anger on to a particular racial group. In the present case some of the criticism of Israel may well express a pre-existing racial prejudice; but it’s important to realise that this isn’t always so. Netanyahu’s crimes are condemned by many Jews in Israel too.

Unfortunately not everyone shares this view. One of the difficulties stems from an  ‘IHRA working definition of anti-semitism’ (IHRA stands for the ‘International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’), which many reject as far too open-ended, but which is treated as holy writ by Israel’s very vocal and influential defenders (the ‘Israel Lobby’?) in Britain and America. (There’s an excellent ‘Wiki’ piece on the controversy over this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHRA_definition_of_antisemitism).

But what particularly struck me this morning was a radio interview with someone from the Israeli Embassy, which leant heavily on that controversial ‘definition’; and in particular took aim at a discussion by students of a recently-published book called Understanding Hamas, and Why That Matters (by Helena Cobban and Rami G. Khouri, October 2024). ‘You wouldn’t discuss a book called Understanding Hitler, would you?’ claimed the contributor, as her coup de grâce.  – Well, yes! We would, and do. There are many books trying to get to the bottom of Nazism, and were even during World War II. You need to understand your enemy in order to defeat him: as any general will tell you.

Beyond that, it’s surely every university’s main purpose to try to ‘understand’ everything. So the Israeli spokeswoman was implicitly attacking not only Hamas, or her perceived anti-semites, but also academics like me (I’ve researched many horrible things); and the whole function of universities, and even of education generally. That’s why I take personal umbrage at her intervention. And will continue criticising Israel’s bombing, starving and possibly now annexation of Gaza (as well of course as condemning Hamas atrocities), while continuing to support the many brave Jews and Israelis who criticise these horrors too.

Around 1900 the ‘science’ of Eugenics was invented by Francis Galton. It was taken seriously in Germany and the southern States of America in the 1930s – as well as in Sweden, as it happens. Not so much in Britain, however; where gross poverty among the working classes raised fears about the quality of the British-imperial racial ‘stock’, leading some to advocate ‘eugenic’ solutions – that is, euthanising the weak, or merely allowing them to die off, and encouraging geniuses to breed; but which were broadly discarded; in favour of the alternative approach, of strengthening the ‘unfit’ by means of social reform. Eugenics then became a no-no, too closely associated with Nazism and slavery to be a respectable academic or political line of thought.

With that historical precedent in mind, I’ve been disturbed by recent suggestions in America, mainly on the political Right, that eugenics might be adopted once again, this time as a national policy of racial recovery. You’ll know about Elon Musk’s sperm-spreading with carefully selected partners, on the assumption that he is particularly gifted in the ‘IQ’ department (which I’ve never accepted, by the way). But it goes further than this. Here’s the recent press report that filled me with particular horror this morning: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/04/maga-soft-eugenics.

So, here comes Robert Kennedy – that repository of all kinds of weird conspiracy theories, and currently Trump’s Health Minister – to bio-engineer the future American ‘master-race’. That’s MAGA with a vengeance. Don’t tell me that History never repeats itself.

The elections last Thursday were for local councillors and mayors (except one: a Parliamentary bye-election due to an MP’s resignation. That one went to Reform too).

I’m afraid I’ve never taken much interest in local politics, and so am not sure what the newly-elected councillors and mayors can do; but the followng Facebook post, by a organisation calling itself ‘Ripples’ (‘a progressive digital campaigning platform launched in 2020; registered non-profit and not supported by any political party’), may gives a few clues.

‘Their first acts in office? Reform leader Nigel Farage has declared that he wants to set up a Trump-style ‘DOGE’ in every council to make brutal spending cuts. He has warned anyone at a council “working on climate change initiatives or diversity” to seek “alternative careers”. Reform’s new mayor of Lincolnshire, Andrea Jenkyns, even declared that she wants to put refugees in “tents”’.

That’s for starters.

I’m comforting myself after last week’s earthquake by thinking that not all Reform voters were rabid right-wingers. Disillusionment with politics generally was clearly a factor, with Reform’s carefully cultivated anti-politics image drawing the disillusioned in. If there had been a new anti-establishment left-wing party with as much popular allure as Nigel gave to Reform, it might have taken some of those votes. (The leftish-wing Lib-Dems took some of them, but they’re still too ‘establishment’.) And of course a national election – due in Britain in about four years’ time – won’t necessarily reflect these local results.

Another encouraging bit of news has been the recent national election results from Canada and Australia; suggesting in both cases that Trump was a negative factor, alienating voters from right-wing, Trump-like policies. Let’s hope that as he goes on he’ll antagonise more and more people in the rest of the world; and hopefully in America too.

Still, I can see the lasting appeal of many of the common planks in the populist programme world-wide: its anti-wokery, its (often fake) nostalgia, its deep resentment of the clever people who are mocking it (Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’), its tribalism, its democracy (in a fashion), its appeal to the (false) god of ‘common sense’; – all this I feel I could share with the populists, if I weren’t as privileged as I am in so many ways. Add resentment of social inequality, of capitalist greed and of indiscriminate bombing to that list, and a left-wing populism might be as powerful as Trump’s and Farage’s versions clearly are.

Our new mayor of Hull – the boxer – seems a nice boy, and untrammelled by political dogma (https://bernardjporter.com/2025/05/02/a-mayoral-election/). Maybe he’s young enough to think again?

JD Vance clearly dislikes Europe generally; but he appears to harbour a particular animus against Britain. Recently he was reported to be insisting on her abandoning her ‘hate speech’ laws, as a condition for the US’s entering into a commercial treaty with her. (See https://www.advocate.com/politics/us-uk-trade-deal-lgbtq.) Remember also what he said about Britain in a speech to a ‘Peace Conference’ in Munich this last February, accusing her of imprisoning people for ‘silently praying’, outside an abortion clinic. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYHjv7QnLLw.)

This was in order to illustrate his main argument: which was that the chief danger to Europe currently comes not from Russia or China or the Middle East, or from domestic terrorists, but ‘from within’. More specifically, it comes from ‘liberals’ and the so-called ‘wokerati’, who are seeking to limit ‘free speech’ (and prayer), in Britain especially. It’s all a question of ‘values’, which he claims used to be held in common between America and Europe, but no longer are. This – Liberalism, in its European and British form – now poses an existential danger to ‘Western civilisation’, no less; which it should therefore be the first priority of the Munich Peace Conference to address.

OK, that’s debateable (possibly); but in any event for Vance to use a pretty minor – and misunderstood – cultural and legal difference between the UK and America to interfere with a trade agreement between them, seems disproportionate. That’s especially so when Britain might point to cultural peculiarities on the American side which are arguably more problematical, like the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, and many of Trump’s recent query-Fascistic Executive Orders. ‘Motes and beams’ come to mind.

This however illustrates one new element that has entered into both domestic politics and international diplomacy since the rise of the Right in recent years. Values have sometimes – although not too often – played a part in foreign policy, usually in support of boycotts against nations that are felt to have offended against international standards of ‘human rights’; but usually deployed from the Left side of politics, and opposed by the ‘Realpolitiker’ Right. If Vance’s suggestion that we in Britain should be excluded from American markets because of our domestic laws is taken up, it could signal the arrival of a whole new system of global trade; and indeed of the relations between our two peoples generally.

Well, my city’s mayoralty – a newly created one – has fallen to an ex-professional Olympic boxer (he won gold in the bantamweight class in 2012), who was a bit of a hero here in Hull, but so far as I know has had no political experience or serious political ideas. He was the right-wing Reform Party’s candidate, and was obviously chosen because of his local appeal, which brought him victory in yesterday’s election by a landslide.

On the other hand, the turnout for the election was under 30%; and his share of that only 35.8%. So this was hardly the major endorsement of Nigel Farage’s movement that he (and more neutral commentators) are claiming. In each of the elections that took place yesterday, Reform was competing against a number of parties, who between them will have ‘split’ the anti-Right vote. (The party I voted for was one of them.) With any other system of voting, Reform would probably have lost. But that’s what you get with ‘First Past The Post’ (see https://bernardjporter.com/?s=first+past). (You could say the same, incidentally, about last year’s British General Election).

The reasons behind this bizarre result are, of course, the low state in which traditional politics have fallen recently (’they’re all the same’); people’s political ignorance generally; and the trivialisation of the electoral process, which is seen as a popularity contest rather than a serious choice between serious politicians and their policies. Boris started this trend; now Nigel Farage is exploiting it. Hence Luke Campbell’s appeal to the good people of Hull and the East Riding.

Trump’s knowledge of his own country’s history is not very sound. If it were, he’d know that America tried to annex Canada once before, in 1812, and failed. This was because the Canadians resisted then, as they appear to be doing today.

Americans (that is, US Americans) sometimes refer to The War of 1812 as their ‘Second War of  Independence’; but that is nonsense. You might just as well call the present war in Ukraine a fight for Russia’s independence. (Indeed, there’s an argument for that.) Back in 1812 the Brits, with colonial and also native American help, were only fighting to save their bit of the North American continent. And it’s probably good that they did; otherwise we wouldn’t have present-day Canada to act as a counter-weight to the excesses of the Great Republic, and of its current President.

British imperialism is conventionally reckoned to have been a thoroughly bad thing. But in certain circumstances – usually when it mainly impacted on white colonial subjects – liberation from British rule, or from British protection, could have its downsides. Canada’s separation from the USA made little or no difference to its people’s ‘freedoms’ overall – British imperial suzerainty was a very light, indeed almost non-existent, burden; and it also meant that it preserved some British governmental and social institutions there, which are likely to have informed the Canadian people’s present sense of difference from their southern neighbours. Looking at Canada from over here in Europe, most of us – and not only her Commonwealth partners – are more likely to identify with her than with the USA. Canada’s Parliamentary system – I guess that government by ‘executive order’ would be next to impossible there – and its very different healthcare system, may be crucial factors here. Trump’s myopic, real estate-capitalist view of the world probably blinds him to these kinds of factors. And also perhaps to Canadians’ very unTrump-like ‘niceness’ (in my experience, anyway). But they will be crucial, I imagine, to Canadians’ reluctance to becoming his ‘beloved fifty-first State’.

Perhaps the USA could become Canada’s ‘beloved’ eleventh (or is it fifteenth?) Province’. That might stem the flow of Americans (Harvard academics, for example) currently fleeing there. When Harvard College was founded, after all, it was still British.

There’s very little more one can say about Trump. He must currently be the most famous person on the planet. (I imagine he revels in that.) Of course there may still be new Trumpian scandals to be revealed – kompromats, perhaps, going back to secret trysts in Moscow hotels years back, when he was touting for money from Russian oligarchs to save him from bankruptcy – but these would not surprise anyone, or damage his reputation among his supporters; who will probably dismiss them as ‘fake news’, or otherwise will have been inured to this sort of thing. After all, they’ve tolerated his known misdeeds until now. To the rest of us – probably a large majority of people world-wide – he’s obviously an appalling character: deeply dishonest, selfish, narcissistic, stupid, a liar, woefully ignorant, tasteless, illusionist, mean, over-sensitive, revengeful, hateful, insincere, amoral, instinctively criminal; and even (surely?) ridiculous; so much so, indeed, that it genuinely puzzles most of us outside America that that he could possibly have been voted in as President a second time.

The mystery of Trump and his appeal will be debated by historians for decades to come. Because the US is now so deeply divided – look at all the ‘comments’ on social media – we are far from any kind of agreement over why he is like he is, and why so many of his compatriots support him. Some think it’s rooted in Trump’s own personal psychology; others in local and contemporary cultural trends that he may reflect; while a third explanation is that he’s simply part of a global phenomenon: the American version of the ‘great reaction’ that is hitting almost every country now.

The psychological explanation is something that psychologists need to work on – not me. I have no expertise in this field. (If I had, I’d want to take a good look at his awful father, bearing in mind Philip Larkin’s famous line about parenthood.) But I leave that to others. – On the second kind of explanation – local and contemporary influences – I feel I have a little more purchase, having studied American history and lived and worked there at various times; and even before then having been brought up on ‘Western’ (cowboy) and gangster films and comic-books, which reflect an American popular culture that must have left its mark even on more modern minds. The pistol-toting range-rider, reclaiming vast wildernesses from the native American ‘savages’, and meting out rough justice to outlaws and Latinos, used to be held up as your typical American hero; until the ‘woke’ (or rather pre-woke) brigade, with their sentimental regard for the gun-slingers’ Amerindian victims, arrived to rub away some of our heroes’ sheen. ‘Individualism’ was a common virtue running through all of this, and indeed through American culture and society more generally; expressed best, perhaps, but also most tediously, in the novels of Ayn Rand. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2025/01/30/ayn-rand/.) This, together with male violence, plucky mothers; and of course guns.

Another contemporary cultural characteristic that will have influenced – and probably moulded – Trump’s personality was American capitalism; the ‘red in tooth and claw’ version that reached its apogee there and then, and which has dominated not only Trump’s personal upbringing (that awful father again), but American life and discourse more generally for at least two hundred years. All Trump’s words, actions, policies and ambitions are clearly rooted in what he learned as a real estate developer; the particular and least productive branch of the modern capitalist system that he is supposed to have excelled at, but might not have done if it had not been for all those Russian loans. I’ve not got around to it yet; but his famous early book The Art of The Deal (1987), albeit ghost-written, might be worth reading to see whether it gives as many clues as to what goes on in his mind as Mein Kampf did in Hitler’s case. Everything Trump has done in his first hundred days as 47^th President bears the mark of the ‘Dealer’; negotiating man-to-man with rivals and enemies to divide property – in this case international real estate – between them. To him, it’s as simple as that. The claims of democracy, principle, history, morality and justice don’t come into it; just as they wouldn’t if he were merely haggling over the price of a piece of land on which to build a new ‘Trump Tower’. It would depend solely on the material value of the property, its potential, and on the ‘cards’ that he and the other side held in their hands. (Remember that one of the early ventures he failed at was running a casino.)

It’s no wonder that Putin finds him so easy to manipulate, and that Trump has thrown in the towel with him over Ukraine. He can’t easily or profitably win that ‘deal’, and so the only sensible – businesslike – solution is to cash in his stake and withdraw. He’s done much the same over Gaza. At the same time he has appointed a score of his fellow billionaire capitalists to his cabinet, some of them real estate developers like him, who will have the same skills – but also the same limitations – as he has. In other words, he’s running the country as a business; and the last thing the CEO of any business wants is to be hedged about by ‘principles’, or beholden to a democracy. Hence his authoritarian and unconstitutional ‘executive order’ approach to governing in his first hundred days. It’s the capitalist coming through, again.

I made the point in my book Empire and Superempire, which compares British and American historical ‘imperialisms’, that they both followed broadly the same pattern, of economic dominance followed by annexation; except that America usually – but not invariably (viz. Hawaii and Puerto Rico) – avoided the annexation stage, at least overseas. That will no longer apply, however, if Trump’s wettest dreams come to pass, and he does a full-on ‘Cecil Rhodes’, by bringing Greenland, Canada, Panama and Gaza  under the formal protection of the Stars and Stripes. (Rhodes called his acquisitions ‘Rhodesia’. Is Trump swollen-headed enough to rename Greenland ‘Trumpland’?)

Lenin called this kind of thing ‘the last stage of capitalism’ – before, that is, the whole system’s collapse. The extreme Right-wing movements emerging all over the world just now, of which Trump’s is one, might be taken as evidence of exactly this: the final throes of a global capitalist system struggling to survive against the inevitable contradictions that are gnawing at it internally, provoking uncertainty and unrest, manifested in various forms of protest; of which ‘Populism’ and ‘Fascism’ are the two main ones – and ‘socialism’ might be another, although that’s not looking too likely just now. This sort of analysis would hugely expand the context in which to place and explain ‘Trumpism’, and the neo- or proto- or quasi-‘Fascism’ which it is now widely acknowledged to represent. But isn’t that a bit too ‘Marxist’ for comfort?