A couple weeks ago, I wrote a blog depicting Marco Rubio as a quasi-tragic figure. I was intrigued by his fall from grace—the question of how a seemingly reasonable and idealistic person could have sold himself so basely to a right-wing would-be dictator who has nothing but contempt for our constitutional tradition.
Now, however, I realize this take was giving Rubio too much credit. He's not tragic. He's boring. He and the other members of this administration belong to the banal roster of history's other criminals, tyrants, butchers, and murderers—and there could be no duller sight. They are not worth a second glance.
The moral Rubicon here was really the disappearances and illegal renditions that this administration carried out to a black site prison in El Salvador. There's no going back from that. By their complicity in these lawless kidnappings—which delivered people without legal process—in brazen violation of a federal court order—to a place where officials knew they would be tortured and brutalized—possibly for the rest of their lives—with no prospect ever for a hearing, let alone release—every high-ranking member of this administration proved there is no upper limit on the despotic crimes of this regime to which they will gleefully sign their names.
So, don't spare them another thought—Rubio, J.D. Vance, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem—every one of them was not only willing to acquiesce to this policy of illegal rendition, torture, and lawless brutality. Every one of them also publicly celebrated these kidnappings. They crowed about them. They defended them viciously, when our federal courts tried to restore some semblance of due process and legality. Nothing could be more hideous; or more banal. Our country is run by the same stripe of insipid thug who staffed the concentration camps or the gulags, and then turned around to claim they were "just following orders."
There's nothing to see in all this. There's nothing to learn from all this. History has known plenty of such creeps and toadies before. They will reap their reward in the eyes of posterity. As Justice Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent on the Venezuela deportations case, history has even known plenty of other lawless regimes that kidnap people off the street and disappear them to black site dungeons from which they will never emerge to see the light of day. The people who carry out such policies—who allow themselves to be bribed so cheaply into becoming agents of evil—are not worth a second thought.
"Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, [...] One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!" as Robert Browning once wrote of the "Lost Leader." There is nothing surprising or intriguing about such spectacles. Many souls have been lost to despotic regimes in the past. History is nothing but a long list of wrongs to man and insults to the God who—some say—was made in his image. So blot out Rubio and the rest. Let them go down into the moral abyss of their own making. The only thoughts we should spare from now on are for the victims—not for the banal selfish motives of the perpetrators.
And there will be even more victims. The administration is already making plans to expand their program of illegal renditions to El Salvador into a full-bore network of offshore concentration camps. The mercenary Erik Prince is apparently pitching the administration as we speak on a proposal to run these gulags at a handsome profit. Trump has repeatedly floated the idea in public of rendering U.S. citizens to offshore detention camps as well; and this was not just him speaking off the cuff—a DHS official reportedly confirmed that such ideas were under consideration; and the administration's agreement with El Salvador expressly provides for this possibility.
Is there some reason to think, then, that what happened to 130 Venezuelan asylum-seekers a few weeks ago—innocent men who are now trapped in an unthinkable living nightmare—couldn't happen to you or your parents or your children? "Well, but they were noncitizens." Trump wants to do the same to citizens. "Well, but only to criminals." Keep in mind: Trump is actively trying to expand the boundaries of that category too—ordering DOJ this week to begin criminal probes into perceived critics—in this case, members of his own previous administration—based on no probable cause of any actual wrongdoing.
We are really only a few presidential signatures away, then, from actual gulags—sprawling prison camps where detainees are held with no legal recourse, and on purely political charges. If Trump approved Erik Prince's proposal, secured criminal convictions of perceived dissidents on bogus charges, and followed through on his oft-stated desire to deport U.S. "criminals" to prisons in El Salvador, we really will be living under a quasi-Stalinist scenario. It can happen here.
You may say: "But the courts would stop him!" Maybe, maybe not. But the fact the president expressly wants to try this—and that he has already done it to 130 innocent people from Venezuela, who came to this country seeking refuge from authoritarianism!—should be concerning enough.
Those are the people we should be thinking of now. The 130 people stranded in this nightmare. We should be asking ourselves every day how to get them out. Because until they are free, none of us is free. None of us is safe.
From now on, my thoughts will be with them—not dwelling on the insipid and one-dimensional psychology of the cowards, petty thugs, hired bravos and butchers who put them there—Rubio, Bondi, Noem, Vance, et al. Of all such mercenaries (and keep in mind that one of the key players here, Erik Prince, is a literal mercenary)—Hugh MacDiarmid already delivered the final verdict, in his poem "Another Epitaph on An Army of Mercenaries":
It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth a man's pride
They were professional murderers and they took / Their blood money and impious risks [...]
And what could be more common or less interesting in history than that? What does history show us more frequently than a set of weak and cowardly people accepting their pieces of silver in exchange for carrying out the hired murders of the rich and powerful? The only thing that redeems our world has nothing to do with such people as them. It is, rather—as MacDiarmid writes—the fact that:
In spite of all their kind, some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on Earth.
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