The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
How Donald Trump and Elon Musk are tearing America’s most insidious instrument of domination
THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | The “reforms” to government spending by President Donald Trump and his newfound friend, Elon Musk, are the logical conclusion of the way “democracy” in America has evolved. America has, anyway, never been a democracy in the classical meaning of that word – a government of the people, by the people and for the people. On the contrary, it has, from its inception, been a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. The Trump-Musk systematic spending cuts are the ultimate expression of real American democracy. I applaud them because they remove the mask from America’s always disguised corporate kleptocracy.
Of course I can see how callous these spending cuts are. The more than ten thousand USAID employees who will lose their jobs are among the vulnerable people of that country. For most of them, their salary is the only source of livelihood from which they get their medical insurance, buy food, pay rent or their mortgage and car loan and send their kids to school. Even if I were to agree ideologically with Trump and Musk, I still think that to dismiss them summarily and suddenly, especially in a rich country with a limited social safety net, throws their lives into chaos and destitution.
Trump and Musk are not seeking to reduce public spending of US taxpayers. Instead, they are settling political and ideological scores. If anyone needed to reduce wastage of taxpayer money in America, the place to begin would not be USAID. Its annual budget of $40 billion is peanuts in America’s vast resource pool. The biggest wasteful spending in America is on defense, which in the 2025 budget, stands at $1.7 trillion. The other is on healthcare, especially its control by big pharma and insurance companies. The military-industrial complex feeds on a network of thousands of facilities at home and over 800 military bases abroad. It is used to bomb thousands of innocent people every year in America’s pursuit of global dominance.
It is difficult to see how America generally benefits from sustaining this vast empire of military bases. The pursuit of global dominance through ever-growing military spending increases global tensions and therefore the risks to America’s security. American media continually propagate the claims of the American state that their country is facing hostile and malevolent actors. America has over 35 military bases surrounding Iran but keeps claiming that the Islamic Republic is the one threatening the USA. Every year, America adds more military bases to surround China and then claims that China is the one threatening the US and her allies. American media, rather than challenge this official propaganda, only sing its chorus.
Neither does America’s everlasting war against “terrorism” make any sense. Since America launched its war on terror, the intensity of terrorism and the theatres of this war have all increased across the globe. As of September 2001, there were few cases of terrorism in the world. Today, a war that was limited to a few people and a few isolated places on earth has widened in scale and scope and continues to swallow more people and more countries into its never-ending circle. America’s war on terror has been the largest terrorism manufacturing enterprise.
Today, vast spaces in the Middle East and Africa have become literally ungovernable – from Syria to Iraq, Libya to Yemen, Gaza to Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan to Chad and the whole of the Sahel countries including Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali and Northern Nigeria thanks to America’s global war on terror. This is the only war that creates more war – a self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating maelstrom of disaster from which America’s vast military-industrial complex makes money. This is the real dragon’s head that Trump and Musk should be cutting when it comes to saving taxpayers’ money. It would also save the world from America’s oversized ambitions to dominate the globe. Yet they have chosen to rob ordinary American citizens and others of their meagre livelihoods.
Yet I am in support of closing USAID. Even though its contribution to America’s cultural imperialism and ideological hegemony is meagre, it is part of American soft power. It is part of the instrument for winning the hearts and minds of the unsuspecting people of the world, spreading the false narrative of America as a benevolent hegemon. America was spending $1.7 trillion bombing and killing people across the world. USAID was spending only $40 billion to convince the victims of this mass slaughter that their mass murderer is humane. The Trump-Musk spending cuts remove this human face from the carnage. I am not blind to the fact that America’s soft power has a large array of instruments – media, private foundations, the movie industry, churches, universities, think tanks etc. USAID has been a small weapon in a large arsenal of instruments of soft power. One part of the multi headed monster has been cut.
Soft power is the most insidious form of power, the most effective instrument of domination. Naked military force stimulates resistance. Soft power in form of ideas and beliefs is more effective. We are enslaved largely through our minds, what Antonio Gramsci called “ideological hegemony.” It is easy to stand in opposition to armed aggression than to ideological suasion because the former is crude and violent, the latter is subtle and seductive.
The most effective instrument of colonial domination was not its guns but its message. The colonialist claimed to seek our emancipation – administrative, economic and spiritual through the three Cs: Civilization, Commerce and Christianity. Yet the real aim was to rob our natural resources and exploit native peoples through forced labor, land alienation and extortionate taxation. Many colonized peoples believed colonialism was emancipation at the hands of a benevolent superior race. Without such epistemic violence, the colonial enterprise would not have succeeded for as long as it did. The same applies to America’s pursuit of global dominance.
Trump and Musk, in their desire to settle scores with their enemies on the imagined left, have ripped America’s most powerful instrument – cultural imperialism propagated by USAID. (I call it “imagined left” because America has not left at all, at least not in the Democratic Party). Now the people of the world will experience America in its raw form – selfish, violent, insensitive, aggressive, greedy and domineering. America’s soft power has always been used to mask these ills. The greatness of the Trump-Musk reforms is that they have achieved for the world what America’s enemies had failed to do – expose the nakedness of the emperor.
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amwenda@ugindependent.co.ug
