The Special Relationship

 Trump's much-heralded "summit" with Putin in Alaska this week was a typically humiliating spectacle—specifically for Trump, but really for the whole nation. To be sure, a number of courageous Alaskans came to the event to unfurl Ukrainian flags and uplift messages of protest against the Russian dictator and his American stooge-in-chief. Rightly so. But all too many others conspired with Trump to roll out the welcome mat for a bloodthirsty mass murderer. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, 59% of Alaskans polled this week "said it was appropriate that Putin was invited to participate in the summit on U.S. soil." An outright majority of respondents—in short—saw no problem with bestowing the imprimatur of diplomatic legitimacy on Putin, or with treating him as a member in good standing of the international community—even as he continued to drop bombs on Ukraine during the very hours of the summit. 

I'm reminded of a bitter story Hugh MacDiarmid tells in The Battle Continues (his book-length poem of protest against the fascist atrocities of the 1930s). He recounts the experience of one concentration camp survivor who escapes captivity—only to kill himself days later. MacDiarmid explains the cause of his despair: He had not realised that the outside world / Was so indifferent—that ministers, men of honour, human beings / Shake hands with bloody murderers.

I can only imagine that many a soldier or civilian detained and tortured in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine right now would feel something similar—if they could see Trump grinning and shaking hands and strolling the red carpet with Putin on U.S. soil. The United States of America—which once claimed to support the struggle of countries like Ukraine for freedom from Russian aggression—now openly welcomes and fetes the man who is killing their people. 

If Putin's actions in Ukraine resemble rather frighteningly Hitler's in the Sudetenland or Poland in the 1930s—that would make Trump Neville Chamberlain at best. Is he not now offering to hive off more Ukrainian territory in a doomed and short-sighted effort at appeasement? At worst—though—it makes Trump into a sort of Marshal Pétain: a collaborationist puppet head of a state under occupation. Which means that we are no longer America, but Vichy America. 

After all, it was Putin's goons who intervened in the 2016 election to boost Trump's candidacy. It is Putin who has reaped one reward after another from helping install Trump in power. And Trump has primarily devoted his second term to trying to prosecute everyone in government who ever dared investigate Putin for doing so. As Koestler described in his book Scum of the Earth, Pétain likewise devoted himself in the early months of the Vichy regime to a similar purge of the civil service. 

And of course, in Putin and Trump's much-vaunted meeting, Trump managed to secure no concessions from Russia whatsoever. Instead, he merely reiterated his close affinity with Putin, repeating his line about "going through the Russia hoax together," etc., while Putin flattered Trump's pride with a political talking point claiming the war wouldn't have happened on his watch. 

While Ukrainians are still dying or being tortured in Russian prison camps—in short—Trump and Putin are performing mutual fellatio. 

As Harold Pinter once summed up the "special relationship" between Britain and the U.S. during the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq: 

The bombs go off
The legs go off
The heads go off [...]

A man bows down before another man
And sucks his lust

That seems to be the essence of Trump and Putin's "special relationship" as well. 

After Trump literally rolled out the red carpet for Putin—a "bloody murderer" if ever there was one, in MacDiarmid's phrase—I can only think of how Byron responded to the craven toadying he witnessed in Ireland upon the landing of the English king and ministers who had wrought so much murder and oppression on the island. Byron was disgusted by the spectacle, in short—and so should we be as well, at the sight of our collaborationist government licking the boots of our new overlords.

Sergei Lavrov—the Russian foreign minister—even reportedly sported a "USSR" sweatshirt at the meeting: a not-so-subtle means of suggesting that here—decades after the ostensible end of the Cold War—the Soviet Union had actually won after all. They had won by playing the long game. They didn't win on the battlefield, to be sure; but they won by infiltrating and corrupting our democratic institutions from within; by installing a Vichy administration in the White House. 

As Robert Burns once put it: 

What force or guile could not subdue

Through many warlike ages

Is wrought now by a coward few 

For hireling traitor's wages. [...]

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.