Body Count

 How many people did the U.S. government just kill in our recent, undeclared war in Venezuela? 

The Trump administration has made clear, in so many words, that they don't care. They made sure to emphasize that no American lives were lost in the fighting. There was no death on "our side," as Trump put it bluntly, a few hours after the incursion. 

They pointedly declined to express any opinion on the number of Venezuelans who might have lost their lives. The message was clear: they don't care. They don't see those lives as having any weight or significance. 

Bertrand Russell wrote in 1967 of the "racist underpinning of the American world-view," which showed only silent indifference to the deaths of alleged "Vietcong," but absolute outrage at any hint or suggestion that U.S. forces might be culpable of war crimes in Indochina. 

It would seem that racist worldview is still very much with us. 

The Venezuelan government, meanwhile, has estimated as many as 100 casualties from the invasion. 

Those of us interested in the humanitarian consequences of war will of course want to know how many of these were "civilian" casualties. And it appears that several of them, at least, were indeed non-combatants—at home in their apartments when they were smoked into oblivion.  

But it's also worth pausing for a moment to think about the humanity of those "combatant" dead as well. Even if they were in uniform when they died; even if they came from Cuba; does that mean that their lives had no value? Or that there was any justice in their ruthless annihilation? 

I get that acting as a security detail for a vicious strongman—as Maduro undoubtedly was—is not a very noble profession. Perhaps some of these men had blood on their hands. Maduro's regime (most of which is still in charge in Caracas, with Trump's blessing!) is estimated to have arrested and tortured hundreds of dissidents. 

But it seems equally likely to me that many of the security guards that U.S. troops apparently mowed down, in the early hours of January 3, were just people hired to do a job. People with families and kids they were trying to support. 

And the U.S. government killed them in an unprovoked act of cross-border aggression, without congressional authorization—indeed, without any justification under U.S. or international law. 

Even if they were wearing uniforms, then—they were not combatants in a lawful war. Their own country had not declared war on the United States or in any way attacked us. And so—as a host on a podcast I was listening to the other day rightly asked—doesn't that make killing them an act of murder? 

    Ez fer war, I call it murder,--

      There you hev it plain an' flat;

    I don't want to go no furder

      Than my Testyment fer that;

—as James Russell Lowell puts it in the Biglow Papers. 

The New York Times reported yesterday on Cuba's reception of the remains of 32 of its citizens who were killed on January 3—many of whom had apparently been working as part of Maduro's security detail. 

Here, then, is another highly unsympathetic regime—the Cuban dictatorship. 

But, when one of their generals received the remains of these dead men, he sounded a note of infinitely more humanism than the supposedly "democratic" leadership of our country was able to muster. 

Whereas Trump and Hegseth crowed about the U.S. "victory," with their usual schoolboyish sadistic glee and triumphalism—this Communist general asked us to reflect for at least one moment on the human lives that these men lived, before they were gunned down in an undeclared, unannounced, illegal war. 

"The enemy speaks euphorically of high-precision operations, of elite troops, of supremacy;" he said. "We, on the other hand, speak of faces, of families who lost their father, their son, their husband, their brother."

As Harold Pinter once wrote, in his poem "Death"—which he read memorably as part of his Nobel Lecture, in protest against the Iraq war (another quite similar act of unprovoked U.S. aggression): "Who was the father or daughter or brother

Or uncle or sister or mother or son

Of the dead and abandoned body?"

But maybe those Cuban soldiers were terrible, cruel men? Maybe each one of them, to a man, had signed up to serve a brutal dictator because he ideologically supported Maduro's goals of suppressing and persecuting his own citizens? 

Maybe. 

Or maybe—as Thomas Hardy once put it, in "The Man He Killed"— "He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,

            Off-hand like — just as I —

Was out of work — had sold his traps —

            No other reason why.

           "Yes; quaint and curious war is!

            You shoot a fellow down

You'd treat if met where any bar is,

            Or help to half-a-crown."