Truth 4 Trump

Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” promotes the ostensibly innate human desire to strive to reach the highest position possible. Condemning the “slavemorality” promoted by Christianity, his subversive ideas instead favoured the Graeco-Roman self-celebration of anthropomorphic Gods.

Such ideas were later adapted, and ultimately parodied, by Adolf Hitler, and largely influenced the lethal ideologies of the Third Reich. These dogmatic ideas promote the destruction of anything that goes against achieving this life, including firing your acting attorney general if she disagrees with your policies. On Holocaust Memorial Day 2017, President Trump signed an executive 90 day ban prohibiting people from seven Muslim-majority countries, including refugees from war-torn Syria, from entering the US. This, seems to be a harrowing echo of the 1930s, when America closed its borders to immigrants during the Second World War. Additionally, the omissive statement from the White House on this day commemorated the “innocent victims” of the Holocaust. These statements have been largely criticised, arguing that, although people with disabilities, homosexuals, and vocal dissenters of Nazi Germany’s ideologies were persecuted and executed, the Nazi regime was fundamentally rooted with the goal to wipe out an entire race of, specifically, Jewish people. To ignore such a factor is not only insulting, but profoundly disconcerting when one considers the wave of alternative-right support throughout the United States, and what the word “truth” has come to mean in the modern world.

The term “Orwellian”, referring to the characteristics of George Orwell’s writing and in particularly the dystopian state illustrated in “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, has never been used as much as it is currently. Nearly 70 years after the book was published, the similarities particularly regarding the rewriting of the past in order to fit with the political ideologies of the present appear to be paralleled in the White House’s implicit erasure of the Jewish community’s suffering. Ultimately, the Orwellian phrase that, “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future” is under no threat of becoming a platitude. Instead, it is an accurate description of the current climate we are living in - a period where history is able to be manipulated and, essentially, erased by those in power if it goes against a political agenda. A President relying on post-truth and appealing to popularity and emotion in order to justify his actions and opinions is treacherous to a society already in divisive times. For Donald Trump, the concept of truth is, ironically, subjective. Truth, therefore, does not mean fact, and epitomises the coherence theory of truth: a set of propositions are true if they cohere with the already-held beliefs within a community. Without making gross generalisations, Hegel’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis thought - combining an original idea with an opposing idea to produce an amalgamation of both perspectives - hasn’t seemed to create a pragmatic harmony, but only an oscillation between far-right-bordering-on-fascism and far-leftbordering-on-communism. Comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness”, defined as the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true. Colbert, satirising the misuse of appeals to emotion as a rhetorical device, alarmingly foreshadows the very views held by the 45th President. Olivier Weber, a French to English translator, expressed the difficulty of translating Trump’s colloquial and infantile oration. When Donald Trump asserts he’s going to build a “beautiful wall” to keep out the “bad hombres”, the translation, “Trump will build a wall to stop immigration” loses the initial juvenility that perplexes English speakers. Nietzsche predicted an eventual dystopia due to the perpetuation of the “herds’ empty values”. When a leader as dangerous as Trump is able to rewrite history to fit an anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT, and intolerant agenda there will be individuals who, as Nietzsche foresaw, will blindly follow. Sophie B (Upper Sixth) WHEN A LEADER AS DANGEROUS AS T RUMP IS ABLE TO REWRITE HISTORY TO FIT AN ANT I-MUSLIM, ANT ILGBT, AND INTOLERANT AGENDA THERE WILL BE INDIVIDUALS WHO, AS NIET ZSCHE FORESAW, WILL BLINDLY FOLLOW.