STATES OF MATTER. Insignificant others

Given the low bar he has set, a “presidential” appearance for Donald Trump was a mere matter of an hour’s semblance of coherence. Among the priorities he identified in an end-February address to the US Congress, was an agency for victims of a particular category of crime. Showing a love for laboured acronyms shared with others of a similar bent, Trump named the agency VOICE, or Victims of Immigrant Crimes Engagement.

The problem here is simply that crimes by immigrants of all shades are a tiny sliver of the total — indeed close to vanishing point — when adjusted for their number within US population. This was one among the shaky props of an executive order Trump issued in revision of one that earlier banned travellers from seven countries of predominantly Muslim faith. Yet, even in modified verbal camouflage, Trump’s “Muslim ban” failed to clear the constitutional principle of the “disestablishment” of religion in law and policy.

The floundering US president may have exerted an influence across the Atlantic, where an ideological soulmate — with a tonsorial style to match — was expected to emerge a decisive player in general elections to the Dutch parliament. Geert Wilders of the Freedom Party finally fell far short, though he did succeed in pushing mainstream discourse right-ward. After years celebrating multiculturalism, the Netherlands’s main parties had begun restoring values such as faith and identity to their campaign rhetoric.

There is an inchoate sense of European malaise at the state of the system built over seven decades. But Trump is a walking testament to the folly of entrusting crisis management to the agents of chaos.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel, now rising in esteem as the last-standing guardian of liberal global values, won an easy victory in a regional election, a possible bellwether for September’s federal parliamentary vote. And in France, centrist independent Emmanuel Macron is favoured to harvest the mainstream vote and win against Marine Le Pen of the racist National Front in the second round of the presidential election, after shared honours in the first.

Mainstream politics has perhaps gained a fresh lease, but only by changing its basic premises. Terms like “scum” and “vermin” may come naturally to the likes of Le Pen and Wilders, but are very akin to the rhetoric that Nicolas Sarkozy, then an ambitious French minister of the interior with open intent to assume the presidency, used when riots broke out in an immigrant quarter of Paris in 2005.

David Cameron’s dire warnings of “migrant swarms” inundating Britain as he campaigned in the 2015 general election could have been borrowed from the racist UK Independence Party. Well before he called the Brexit referendum that triggered his ignominious resignation as Prime Minister, Cameron had conceded the ideological battle.

The logic of administration has been unsubtly and irreversibly affected. On March 22, a car veered off the road in the vicinity of the Westminster Parliament building in London and ran over a number of pedestrians. The driver then emerged holding knives and stabbed a duty policeman in a manic frenzy. Three pedestrians and the policeman were reported dead.

An information embargo was swiftly enforced, but eyewitnesses had by then identified the assailant as a dark-skinned man with a beard. That was sufficient to trigger a torrent of speculation about possible links with the Islamic State (IS), which the shadowy militia eagerly stoked with demonstrably bogus claims of responsibility.

After much unexplained delay, the Westminster assassin was identified as a 52-year-old born in Britain to a white Christian mother and christened with a name of solid Anglo-Saxon provenance. Had he had not had a midlife change of faith and adopted Khalid Masood as his name, his rampage would have been put down as a deranged act. Masood had indeed, at various points since growing to adulthood, been apprehended for violent criminal conduct, and also, at some point, placed under surveillance by the external intelligence agency MI6.

The Westminster attack happened exactly a year after a far more destructive rampage through Brussels by native Belgians. A number of the marauders were eliminated in the course of the attack and a few of the plotters picked up afterwards. Ousama Atar, a Belgian of 32 years, is still at large and believed to be in Syria, fighting for the overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad regime, an endeavour that has the official foreign policy imprimatur of the European Union.

Meanwhile in what is regarded as a normal crime, James Jackson, a 28-year-old white nationalist took a bus from Baltimore to New York on March 17 and stalked the streets to identify a target on whom to expend his animus. In three days he found a 66-year-old black living in one of the poorer quarters of the city and mercilessly stabbed him to death.

Normal too perhaps, were the US air strikes on Mosul in which 200 or more civilians were killed. The US expressed remorse and claimed it was acting on Iraqi government directions. Iraq blamed the IS, which it said, had maliciously placed a van packed with explosives in the path of civilising US munitions.

Immigration serves today as a lightning rod for the resentments boiling over in western societies. It is a safe bet that invasions and the plunder of homes and habitats in other parts of the world will never come under the scanner. Neither will the proliferation of white supremacist groups with overt agendas of hate, or the normalisation of racist rhetoric.

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