Lipman on Trump: “The Emperor has no clothes”

“The Emper­or has no clothes.

“Don­ald Trump’s announce­ment on the Par­is Cli­mate Agree­ment is an attack on human­ity. We spend too much time in the Travel and Tour­ism sec­tor repeat­ing the same man­tras about our sec­tor being a force for good.

“Today, we have a clari­on call to put our money where our mouth is and use our strength to res­ist plan­et­ary bullying.

“It’s time to stand up to actions designed to bene­fit the rich few at the cost of every­one else.

“We should stand behind French Pres­id­ent Macron’s clear call to stay the course on the Par­is Cli­mate Agreement.”

A former top exec­ut­ive at the Inter­na­tion­al Air Trans­port Asso­ci­ation (IATA), World Travel & Tour­ism Coun­cil (WTTC), and the United Nations World Tour­ism Organ­iz­a­tion (UNWTO), Geof­frey Lip­man is now Pres­id­ent of both the Inter­na­tion­al Coali­tion of Tour­ism Part­ners (ICTP) and the Green Growth Trav­el­ism Insti­tute (GGTI), as well as a Vis­it­ing Pro­fess­or at Has­selt Uni­ver­sity, Bel­gi­um and Vic­tor­ia Uni­ver­sity, Australia.

The Emperor has no clothes!?

The Emper­or’s New Clothes is a short story writ­ten by Dan­ish author Hans Chris­ti­an Ander­sen about two weavers who prom­ise an emper­or a new suit of clothes. They say the suit is invis­ible to those who are either unfit for their pos­i­tions, stu­pid, or incompetent.

When the emper­or parades before his sub­jects in his new clothes, no one dares to say that they don’t see any suit of clothes. They fear that they will be seen as unfit, stu­pid, or incompetent.

Finally, a child cries out the obvi­ous: “But he isn’t wear­ing any­thing at all!”

Illus­tra­tion by Vil­helm Ped­er­sen (1820 – 1859) via Wikimedia

As an idiom, the use of the story’s title “the Emper­or’s new clothes”, refers to some­thing widely accep­ted as true due to an unwill­ing­ness of the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion to cri­ti­cise it or be seen as going against pop­u­lar opinion.

Cli­mate change skep­tics might use it to mock sci­entif­ic con­sensus. Oth­ers may use it to mock polit­ic­al correctness.

Lip­man said of Trump: “The Emper­or has no clothes.”

This idiom, which recalls the boy’s unin­hib­ited call, is often used when an obvi­ous social or polit­ic­al truth is widely denied des­pite clear evid­ence, espe­cially when that deni­al is pro­claimed by a lead­er or the government.

Source: Wiki­pe­dia.