Monday 10 July 2017

US: A sickness of the mind

For some time, the practice of inventing new words by suffixing nouns to fit a narrative was an amusing tool of the tabloid press.

I remember when anyone in the UK who bothered to learn French, was called a Francophile to signify that they were not as virulently anti-French as our Thatcherite press corps would prefer.

Some people even invent such self-descriptive words, so that those money grubbers who had little interest in their family or friends, would call themselves workaholics, not just as an excuse, but as though it were actually a good thing.

Having started as a trivial amusement, this construct then took a more sinister turn when people who refused to accept the demise of USSR, became jolly Russophobes, and were left to continue as though the Berlin wall remained and International Communism was still our greatest enemy. Those who feel this is just a harmless bit of fun, might like to ask the families of the dead and injured in Boston, what they think about Russophobia, or the survivors in Eastern Ukraine after US democratization attempts.

An even more insidious use of the form arrived when anyone who opposed Jihad, or reported on the gruesome history of Mohammedism, was called Islamophobic and also racist - thus another invention, the Race of Islam, arrived.

But, despite my scepticism, I have now relented, and accept that there is a real condition of phobia gripping America (and much of Europe too), and in it's latest and most blatant iteration should be called out for what it is; Trumpophobia.