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How One of My South African Friends Views the USA [1]

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Date: 2025-09-14

I was conversing recently with one of my South African friends about Kirk’s murder and Trump, and got this interesting comment. My friend is not all that political though he does pay some attention to what is going on in the world, and back in the day he was a white South African who opposed Apartheid.

You see this all over the west: the real problem isn't this or that policy, but the self-evident complete lack of any principles whatsoever. Left, right or center, everyone has to some extent gone populist, and there is virtually no internal consistency based on principle rather than on whatever the flavor of the moment is.

That is why us folks here in the world's shithole countries are increasingly thinking of brushing up our Mandarin skills. There's a new overlord in town. He's not a nice guy, but at least he has yet to bomb, invade, destabilize, arrange coups or aid and abet open genocide in other countries...:-)

I ask myself this: why should my country have a close relationship with the West? There used to be two main reasons: economic and principled. Whatever you may have thought of the west, it was the major economic power in the world, so you sometimes held your nose and dealt with them, because it was to your own advantage. Well, that economic advantage is now rapidly going away.

Now we may say, yes, but don't we have a set of shared values? That used to be the case: freedom, human rights, liberty, free speech, democracy... those are good reasons to stick with your friends even if they go bankrupt. But alas, the West has largely lost its claim to any moral superiority whatsoever.

So nowadays, here in the developing world, we watch with wry amusement as Trump sits in his office, barking out orders to the rest of the world, and shaking his fist in impotent rage. Two recent examples were particularly amusing: first, he orders Brazil to stop prosecuting Bolsonaro. Well, Bolsy just got hammered with a Mandela (i.e. 27 years in prison). Then he orders India to stop buying Russian oil. India politely advised him to go fuck himself, so he institutes massive tariffs on India, which repsonds by, er, making peace with its erstwhile opponent China, and the two of them now form a truly formidable power block.

One could deal with it, but at the same time as he orders India to stop buying Russian oil, he plays best pals with Putin, so on whose side is he really? It's pretty obvious that one simply cannot make ANY deal with him; whatever he agrees to today, he'll walk back on tomorrow. Whatever else you may think of the Chinese, at least they're kind of consistent...

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