In the rest of the world … Stop right there. When I talk about “the rest of the world”, what I mean – as would any white supremacist European settler colonialist – are places other than Western Europe, North America and the Antipodes. So, as I say, in the rest of the world, if an opposition candidate – Alexei Navalny, Aung San Suu Kyi – is overthrown, and/or assassinated, and/or charged, and/or convicted, or in any other way disqualified from running for or holding public office, our assumption is this disqualification was the illegitimate exercise of raw political power. Even if we could, do any of us bother to look into the details of the candidate’s charge and/or conviction or other way of being disqualified from running for or holding public office? Of course not. So put yourself in the position of anyone in the rest of the world looking at what’s happening to Donald Trump. Would she be attending to the minutia being rehearsed by CNN and MSNBC? Or would she simply assume, as we do vis a vis similar happenings in her country, that Fox is telling it like it probably is? In fact one can imagine that, if she’s a supporter of the candidate being similarly disqualified in her own country, she is attending to and dismissing the minutia being offered in her own country to justify that disqualification.

So what does this tell us about the prosecution of Donald Trump? Not a damn thing! We go with what we know, because we have no choice. And what we know is that America is not like Russia or Myanmar. But what we also know – or if we don’t we should – that people in the rest of the world have no way of knowing that, any more than we have of knowing that Russia and Myanmar are not like America. So a little perspective on perspectives might not go amiss.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy

Tags: Alexei Navalny, Aug Sun Suu Kyi, Donald Trumnp, Myanmar, Russia