Opinion: The bottom line is that Trump speaks the truth about ‘s**tholes’

WHY was it fine for Barack Obama to call Libya a “s**t show” (which it is), but Trump calls Haiti a “s**thole” (which it also is) and the world goes nuts, asks Rowan Dean.

IS there a linguistic difference between the “arse end of the world” and a “s**thole”? That’s the bottom line, as it were.

Back in 1994, Paul Keating is said to have called a certain country “the arse end of the world”. Keating pretended it was a “geographical” term, but nobody believed him and the phrase has settled into the favourable folklore about the Keating era, with “Arse End of the Earth” being a key song in a popular and “ridiculously pro-Paul Keating” musical written about him. The luvvies clearly weren’t offended.

So, which ghastly country was Keating referring to in such an anally-descriptive way? Was it Haiti, Venezuela or El Salvador that he viewed as the “arse end of the world”? Somalia, North Korea or Uzbekistan, perhaps? No, it was our very own beloved Australia that the former PM from Bankstown described in such glowing terms. (Bankstown, of course, being that fragrant suburb of multicultural delights in western Sydney that in no way fits any such description).

I don’t really want to delve into the semantic differences between an “arse end” and a “s**thole,” so let’s for argument’s sake, just agree that Keating and now Donald Trump used toilet-based adjectival phrases in order to refer to a certain country.

Unless you were living in an outdoor dunny all of last week, you will be aware that Trump labelled immigrants from Africa, Haiti and El Salvador as coming from “s**thole countries”.

Yet, Barack Obama, when he was president, described Libya (whose descent into chaos he, Kevin Rudd, UK PM David Cameron and others helped accelerate) as a “s**t show”...with not a peep of protest from the luvvies.

It’s fine for Obama to call Libya a “s**t show” (which it is), but Trump calls Haiti a “s**thole” (which it also is) and the world goes nuts. Hypocrisy?

Or is it the context that’s the difference? The fact that Trump made his comments in reference to US immigration from dysfunctional countries?

Well, no. Lindsey Graham, a left-leaning Republican Senator who is frequently critical of Trump, said himself in 2013: “The people coming across the southern border live in hellholes. They don’t like that. They want to come here. Our problem is we can’t have everybody in the world who lives in a hellhole come to America.”

And that, of course, is the point. However distastefully, Trump was simply telling the politically-incorrect truth, as he always does. And it drives the Left into apoplexy because it is the truth at the very heart of what is wrong with the utopian dream of a world of open borders and so-called cultural “diversity” and “inclusion”.

In the Left’s viewpoint, we are all one big happy group of multicultural equals, and the only reason certain societies are plagued by corruption and violence is nothing to do with themselves but all because of “colonialism” and “discrimination”.

Yet, history shows us that socialists and Marxists, without fail, take potentially prosperous, functioning, aspirational societies where individuals might have had the chance of getting ahead, and turn them into ideological basket-cases and hellholes.

In parts of Africa, known as the “white man’s graveyard” in the colonial era, but since then possibly better described as the “black man’s and woman’s graveyard”, one post-colonial society after another has been decimated by corrupt, bloodthirsty dictators pedalling quasi-socialist, “anti-imperialist” claptrap to the detriment of their peoples’ freedoms and the destruction of their economies. For all its faults, the irony is that Rhodesia was arguably a preferable society for the average black citizen than today’s Zimbabwe.

South America is also a litany of failed experiments in collectivist rule, with countries like the once-prosperous Venezuela descending into a grisly hell of starvation and penury, thanks to a socialist leader and system that the Left here disgracefully eulogised at the time. And let’s not forget the Middle East, where Islamic fervour, fuelled by a toxic mixture of medieval fundamentalism, virulent anti-semitism and hatred of Christianity and the West’s successes, has seen country after country squander their colonial heritage and go from being potential Western-style aspirational and prosperous societies into ghettos of bloodshed, corruption and mass human rights abuses.

Sadly, there are far too many countries that can accurately be described as s**tholes. Most, if not all, ruled under the auspices of socialism, Marxism, anti-Westernism or Islamic fundamentalism.

The key point remains – it is not in America’s interests (or ours) to select immigrants from failed ideological societies rather than more Western-oriented ones. It has absolutely nothing to do with race. Trump was simply telling the truth, and using a pungent phrase to make a strong political point. As indeed Keating used to.

In Trump’s case, the Left go into serious meltdown about his language. In Keating’s case, they write a musical about it. Hypocrites? Naah, never.

Rowan Dean’s novel Corkscrewed is out now www.wilkinsonpublishing.com.au