People-Class Part II
A few years ago, in 2006, there was a first rate movie called The Last King of Scotland with the great black American actor, Forest Whitaker, playing barbaric Idi Amin Dada Oumee who destroyed the life of the Asian community in Uganda in the 1970s.
This great actor later appeared on the TV talk show, The Charlie Rose Show. Charlie Rose and Whitaker were discussing the movie and Rose denounces Idi Amin as the mad barbarian he was.
But Whitaker objects and says, “You gotta keep in mind, Charlie, that more than 90% of Ugandan commerce was in Asian hands and the situation was not viable.”
We have here a simple way of seeing our world more clearly since commerce is a cosmopolitan activity of business people whereas “ethnonational” considerations (expressed by Whitaker) are tribal and backward or inward looking and not conducive to cosmopolitanism.
Somebody once made the quip that the world, country by country, is divided into the tribal “ethnonational” Serbs (so to speak) in conflict with the “cosmopolitans.”
In this vocabulary Trump and Trumpism are “Serbian.” He will decide who is and who is not a “real American.”
Go back to our essay on the concept of “people–class” and all the attendant genocidal murders. (Uganda under Amin being the example we’re mindful of here).
Ethnonationalism (e.g., “Serbian” style anti-cosmopolitanism) is of course exactly what is at war with cosmopolitan or internationalist global trends and commercial chains which makes it nativist. Populism refers to that connected sense that the elites (in the worst case, “The Davos Crowd”) are trying to destroy the real people (e.g., “Trump’s America”) via their internationalist or cosmopolitan attitudes and behaviors.
Thus the movie The Last King of Scotland and the discussions it engendered are very “canonical” or educational in laying forth this “civil war” everywhere.
Thinking of a group as a “people–class” tells you that Idi Amin or Rwanda 1994 belligerence (i.e., ethnonationalism) is being stoked by politicians to create “hatred opportunities” like Trump did. Trump’s idea was to use hatred as a “wave maker” that he could ride. The Trump voters created a nativist/populist cult figure in Trump. He would protect them from the outside world and globalism by ethnonationalism.
Forest Steven Whitaker (born July 15, 1961) is an American actor, producer, director, and activist. He is the recipient of such accolades as an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a British Academy Film Award, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.
After making his film debut in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Whitaker went on to earn a reputation for intensive character study work for films such as Bird; Good Morning, Vietnam; The Crying Game; Platoon; Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai; The Great Debaters; The Butler; Arrival; and Respect. He has also appeared in blockbusters such as Panic Room, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as Saw Gerrera and Black Panther as Zuri. For his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the British historical drama film The Last King of Scotland (2006), Whitaker won the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Wikipedia