Sunday 14 June 2020

look to this day graduates

Whilst not a word for word quotation of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the Munich Accords, agreeing to the annexation of the Sudentenland, for the sake of “peace in our time,” Trump’s vapid and vain commencement speech delivered to the graduating class at West Point Military Academy, cadets called back to attend in person placing themselves at their families at risk for catching and spreading COVID-19 does hit all the same points.
“It is not the duty of US troops to solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands that many people have never even heard of. We are not the policemen of the world. But let our enemies be on notice. If our people are threatened, we will never ever hesitate to act,” Trump intoned—an address written by Stephen Miller, an actual Nazi. The “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing” could perhaps refer to ongoing incursions in Donbass that recently caused Ukraine to concede and the equally recent announcement to reduce the number of troops stationed in Germany.