I don’t know… I kind of find that thread pretty free of the larger historical context of European imperialism and racism. Trump most certainly isn’t from a country dealing with the historical legacy of specifically racist imperialism that had a direct impact on him, nor is he a victim of racial injustice in his own country, which would have been true of Black Africans. The thread starts with 1971, as if Ugandan history STARTS with Idi Amin’s actions, rather than his actions being made possible by history of the region. Amin feels free from historical context, in other words.
Greenberg’s statement on imperialism:
I’d argue that ignoring the larger historical context of Amin is just as intolerable as ignore European antisemitism and its role in the Holocaust, or the rise of theories about race and labor in justifying American chattel slavery. It’s a means of deflecting blame and greater understanding of how such violent events can happen in our world. It’s almost never about individuals acting against humanity, but of the larger historical context that allows for such anti-human actions. No one individual can kill thousands or millions of people, unless they have the historical ground work laid for them. Trump was able to have the children of migrants taken from them, because we live in a society where some large percentage of people already view undocumented immigrants as lesser than.
I don’t think you can take an individual and compare him to another outside of their distinct historical context, especially when the historical contexts of the two individual in questions differ so very much.
