Contd.
Also Theodor Adorno....
Theodor Adorno and the Holocaust....
Today, hopefully there's the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Church as a moral force for good in the world. Sadly, Pope Francis is still hospitalised, Chomsky's voice has also faded due to age, and, after his bid for the White House, Cornel West's critiques seem to have diminished, or perhaps it's the calm before the storm. There's so much that we cannot cover day to day as we scavenge the media jungle :
For balance,
perhaps, Slavoj Žižek
What's missing: not some monkey, uncle tom, Sunday school "poetry" to be patronised by Robinson Crusoe - what's missing is powerful African voices occupying valuable space in the Western media jungle, telling it as it is.
Trump should be listening good and getting worried by this:
China Is Better at Capitalism Than the US and Trump's Tariffs Can't Reverse That
By the time Trump wakes up from any deep American stupor/delusions or illusions of grandeur ( Making America his alter-ego Great Again etc., China and Russia and Africa ( including North, Central, East, and South Africa) would have become best friends.
The Foreign Policy caption reads : Trump's Bible-Waving Idolatry Is Un-American
I remember that day so well; we followed it all on CNN. On June 1st, of the year 2020, after a short walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, there stood President-Elect Donald J Trump, a paragon of virtue, looking serious, holding a copy of the Holy Bible outside St. John's Church in Washington DC - for a photo op….
Fast forward to the first 55 days of his second term :
The national ideals articulated by Emma Lazarus
and enshrined in The New Colossus
all seem to be in abeyance, to have
clean disappeared. I got this video
from a Haitian, three months ago :
Trump plans to "Supercharge" Denaturalisation Program to Deport Legal Citizens
Here's Ralph Nader weighing in :
Stay Silent and Stay Powerless Against Trump's Tyranny , first gleaned from here :
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/157z5qwf52/
#Noam Chomsky on The Collapse of American Empire
Most of the doomsday prophets opine
that the American Empire is in decline
that, God forbid, it's only a matter of time
before Trump's America becomes a Banana Republic
One would have thought that Trump could have at least had some great ,visionary dream of annexing The Democratic Republic of the Congo and all the riches to be found therein
During his first term, not once did Trump visit any country in the Africa that his and our ancestors came from. It remains to be seen whether or not - God willing - he will visit Africa during his second term, or some time after that, before he kicks the bucket.
In an earlier generation, these are the kinds of moral issues that Reinhold Niebuhr and Hannah Arendt grappled with in connection with the historic Holocaust.
Right now, my fear is that maybe unbeknownst to all and sundry the US could be happily lurching on towards that dark era once experienced in Nazi Germany with the tailspin effects from Trump's protectionistic tariffs taking its toll on the American peoples' economy feared to soon to be in recession, and the American people, with the follow your leader and "I was only obeying orders" mentality, God forbid, following Commander-in-chief Trump to their perdition, just like the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin :
"From street to street he piped advancing,
And step for step they followed dancing,
Until they came to the river Weser
Wherein all plunged and perished"
marching happily backwards to that fateful morning when Hitler on waking up from his nightmare, was told that Germany's Fort Knox and all the banks were empty, in response to which unpleasant piece of information he asked with a voice like rolling thunder, "So, where is all the money ?" and like Blaise Pascal Trump's Chancellor / "Senior Advisor" Elon Musk answers, "The Jews, your majesty"
Monsignor, your questions are timely. The same questions are being asked by all of us, but above all, these are questions for the unfeeling perpetrators and oppressors on all the earth's continents and as the Day of Judgment approaches, not the day of judgement by the US Supreme Court studded by some hand-picked Republican buddies who could be all set to acquit him of every sinful felony, these are questions for Donald J Trump the self-proclaimed awesome leader of the free world and Nobel Peace Prize Aspirant to ponder with the main requirement that he must be sensitised and awakened to do the necessary introspection and the soul-searching, whereby to understand and therefore to revise both his definitions and understandings of the raison d'être his world's shithole countries and thereby arrive at a very tentative beginning of what could be called the healing and sanitary rehabilitation of his soul….in this vale of tears, unless he believes that on the Day of Judgement when the Almighty asks him, " Who are you and what was your mission on earth ?" in giving an account of his stewardship, he's only going to reply, "My name is Donald J Trump and my mission on earth was to make America great again My Lord, and that's the reason for the wall along the US-Mexico border, and the reason why I wanted to build the New Middle East Riviera in Gaza replete with Las Vegas style gambling casinos, nightclubs, brothels, grab 'em by the pussy, annex Greenland, Canada, Panama, bomb the hell out of the Houthis in Yemen and command Iran to stay out of it !" At which point the apparently still unremorseful and unrepentant Trump could well be asked by Jesus, "What should it profit a man to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?"
Monsignor's questions are poignant and timely, however this is where some of the Africans - the endangered species that are still alive and domiciled in the United States , not exactly cowards ,but for self-preservation only are cautious or afraid of speaking up and speaking out , for fear of sharing the same fate as Mahmoud Khalil or being unceremoniously deported like the South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool ; and let's remind ourselves of what he said in part as recorded here - as South Africa's premier diplomat preaching truth to power on American soil, surely a breach of diplomatic protocol ?
I wonder how fearless fang Louis Farrakhan and The Defiant Lawyers with their brothers' keepers mentality are going to be weighing in on all of this.
In passing, I'd like to observe that Bo Göransson, former director of SIDA and later on Sweden's Ambassador to Kenya ( 2003 - 2006) was relieved of his ambassadorial duties because his host country charged him with unnecessarily interfering in the domestic affairs of the East African community. His " unnecessary interference" ? They saw Bo Göransson as waging a war, a moral crusade through his weekly anti-corruption columns in the widely circulated East African newspaper, "The Nation" Daily Nation" and "The EastAfrican" in which he once described corruption as" the system"
https://www.google.com/search?q=Daily+Nation%3A++Bo+G%C3%B6ransson
https://www.google.com/search?q=Bo+G%C3%B6ransson+articles+in+East+Africa+Nation
https://nation.africa/kenya/news/i-do-not-regret-stand-on-graft-insists-clay-500646
Lastly, the unasked question : How are African countries of the AFRICAN UNION and African countries with diplomatic missions reacting and responding to this kind of atrocity that was reported recently : Over 700 "Black people" killed in Morocco -surely not reacting at all, as if Africa and Africans are at the bottom of a dunghill known as humanity, but want to react, feebly when Trump says " shithole countries"
You get my drift?
Personally, there is no way I'm going to respect someone who does not respect me.
On Sunday, 16 March 2025 at 07:22:36 UTC+1 Obiora IKE wrote:And we note that twenty one countries ( near 50 percent) are African nations.Does this say anything to us as we listen and reflect ag the goings on?And Africa does not threaten anybody. So why 50 percent out of six continents?On Sat, 15 Mar 2025 at 7:29, Toyin Falola<toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
Draft List for New Travel Ban Proposes Trump Target 43 Countries
A draft circulating inside the administration lists three tiers of countries whose citizens may face restrictions on entering the United States.
By Charlie Savage and Ken Bensinger
Graphic by Allison McCann
Charlie Savage reported from Washington and Ken Bensinger from Los Angeles.
The Trump administration is considering targeting the citizens of as many as 43 countries as part of a new ban on travel to the United States that would be broader than the restrictions imposed during President Trump's first term, according to officials familiar with the matter.
A draft list of recommendations developed by diplomatic and security officials suggests a "red" list of 11 countries whose citizens would be flatly barred from entering the United States. They are Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen, the officials said.
Draft List of Proposed Travel Ban Countries
An internal Trump administration proposal lists the following countries whose citizens could face restrictions on entering the U.S. Some countries may change in any final order.
Credit: The New York Times
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations, cautioned that the list had been developed by the State Department several weeks ago, and that changes were likely by the time it reached the White House.
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Officials at embassies and in regional bureaus at the State Department, and security specialists at other departments and intelligence agencies, have been reviewing the draft. They are providing comment about whether descriptions of deficiencies in particular countries are accurate or whether there are policy reasons — like not risking disruption to cooperation on some other priority — to reconsider including some.
The draft proposal also included an "orange" list of 10 countries for which travel would be restricted but not cut off. In those cases, affluent business travelers might be allowed to enter, but not people traveling on immigrant or tourist visas.
What you should know. The Times makes a careful decision any time it uses an anonymous source. The information the source supplies must be newsworthy and give readers genuine insight.
Citizens on that list would also be subjected to mandatory in-person interviews in order to receive a visa. It included Belarus, Eritrea, Haiti, Laos, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Turkmenistan.
When he took office on Jan. 20, Mr. Trump issued an executive order requiring the State Department to identify countries "for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries."
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He gave the department 60 days to finish a report for the White House with that list, meaning it is due next week. The State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs has taken the lead, and the order said the Justice and Homeland Security Departments and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence were to assist with the effort.
Spokespeople at several agencies declined to comment or did not respond to a request for comment. But the State Department previously said it was following Mr. Trump's order and was "committed to protecting our nation and its citizens by upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process," while declining to specifically discuss internal deliberations.
The Times and other news outlets reported this month that Afghanistan, which was not part of Mr. Trump's first-term travel bans but fell to the Taliban when the U.S. withdrew its forces in 2021, was likely to be part of the second-term ban. But the other countries under consideration had been unclear.
It is also not clear whether people with existing visas would be exempted from the ban, or if their visas would be canceled. Nor is it clear whether the administration intends to exempt existing green card holders, who are already approved for lawful permanent residency.
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The Trump administration this past week said it had canceled the green card of a Syrian-born former Columbia University graduate student of Palestinian descent, Mahmoud Khalil, because he had led high-profile campus protests against Israel's war in Gaza that the government says were antisemitic, setting off a court fight over the legality of that move.
Some of the countries on the draft red and orange lists were sanctioned by Mr. Trump in his first-term travel bans, but many are new. Some share characteristics with the earlier lists — they are generally Muslim-majority or otherwise nonwhite, poor and have governments that are considered weak or corrupt.
But the reason several others were included was not immediately clear. Bhutan, for example, was proposed for an absolute ban on entry. The small Buddhist and Hindu country is sandwiched between China and India, neither of which were on any of the draft lists.
The proposal to sharply restrict, if not outright ban, visitors from Russia raises a different issue. While the Russian government has a reputation for corruption, Mr. Trump has been trying to reorient U.S. foreign policy in a more Russia-friendly direction.
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A decision to include Venezuela could also disrupt a nascent thaw in relations that has been useful to Mr. Trump's separate efforts to deport undocumented migrants.
The proposal also includes a draft "yellow" list of 22 countries that would be given 60 days to clear up perceived deficiencies, with the threat of being moved onto one of the other lists if they did not comply.
Such issues could include failing to share with the United States information about incoming travelers, purportedly inadequate security practices for issuing passports, or the selling of citizenship to people from banned countries, which could serve as a loophole around the restrictions.
That list, the officials said, included Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Vanuatu and Zimbabwe.
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During Mr. Trump's first term, courts blocked the government from enforcing the first two versions of his travel ban, but the Supreme Court eventually permitted a rewritten ban — one that banned citizens from eight nations, six of them predominantly Muslim — to take effect. The list later evolved.
Soon after he became president in January 2021, Joseph R. Biden Jr. issued a proclamation revoking Mr. Trump's travel bans, calling them "a stain on our national conscience" and "inconsistent with our long history of welcoming people of all faiths and no faith at all."
Mr. Trump's executive order in January said he would revive the bans in order to protect American citizens "from aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes."
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Edward Wong contributed reporting from Washington.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. More about Charlie Savage
Ken Bensinger covers media and politics for The Times. More about Ken Bensinger
Allison McCann is a reporter and graphics editor at The Times who covers immigration. More about Allison McCann
A version of this article appears in print on March 15, 2025, Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Draft List Proposes Travel Ban on Citizens From 43 Countries, Officials Say. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | SubscribeSee more on: State Department, Donald Trump
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