While we bide our time awaiting word of the funeral ceremonies for the American democratic republic, whose death occurred, as California columnist Joe Mathews clocks it, recently, aged 236, we can only flail randomly at the atrocities being perpetrated out of the White House.
When you pop your head up out of the foxhole for a look, sadly, it matters very little which way you turn your head. Chaos reigns. Not the fun kind. Shoot your service weapon in any direction in forlorn hopes of eradicating some part of the beast to temporarily help stave off the inevitable.
This week my short attention span for what’s awful was taken up by an entity that is not usually top of mind for me: the State Department. I don’t focus on our diplomatic missions abroad much these days.
But I do take a look at the numbers every year when State releases its annual report on the state of human rights around the world, because it’s interesting to know where the tyrants are — plus, you know, where to avoid.
And so it piqued my interest to see the story broken by NPR showing that the Trump administration had ordered the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor within the State Department to omit several former abuses from its index: persecution of LGBTQ people, violation of women’s rights, prison conditions and government corruption.
Wow. OK, then. Take that, gays, females. And take heart, jailers and plutocrats!
It is an insane edit to make to the criteria by which to grade human rights, but this is the expectation nowadays, since we live in the loony bin. It’s the kind of daily dish that can make an American oddly nostalgic for the relative normalities of, shudder, the first Trump administration. In ye olde days, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used the bureau to make his case for genocide by China against its persecuted Uyghur minority.
Current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who until he drank the Kool-Aid was among the Senate’s most ardent advocates for human rights around the world, is now cutting staffing to the human rights bureau and minimizing its importance. He calls it “a platform for left-wing activists” known for “their hatred of Israel.” Apparently because, shockingly, it called out Israel for not doing enough to protect civilians in Gaza, same as it calls out everyone else.
Rubio, Mr. Diplomacy, is copping to all this, and to his desire to “streamline” State so that it operates, right, “leaner and meaner.” That’s fine, and to be expected. But he’s denying the validity of a leaked 16-page memo, the alleged draft of an executive order, that toward Rubio’s end of cutting staffing at State by 50%, would radically minimize the U.S. presence in Africa.
The memo, reported by Bloomberg and The New York Times, says Rubio plans to close almost all of the United States’ Africa operations and shut down embassies across the continent.
From the London Telegraph: “One US diplomat described the draft to Politico as ‘bonkers crazypants,’ adding: ‘There’s a lot that could be reformed, but you could give infinite monkeys infinite typewriters, and they would come up with something better than that.’”
And that is because when the United States of America begins to minimize its influence on Africa at the same time as its administration says it doesn’t care about human rights, guess who sets their sights anew on the continent?
I’m not saying that first China, and then an emboldened Russia, should be blamed for taking advantage of the sudden vacuum. They may be evil, but they are not stupid. China has already spent billions there with its Belt and Road Initiative, and the White House is rah-rah on Russian imperialism.
Here’s what Pope Francis said of Africa in 2022: “We only see material wealth, which is why historically it has only been sought and exploited. Today we see that many world powers are going there for plunder, it is true, and they do not see the intelligence, the greatness, the art of the people.”
As this administration retreats from the world, say a little prayer that the rest of humanity remembers about America a few of the good times.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
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