Well, the long-telegraphed Trump administration attack on Venezuela has finally come, and it was even more deranged, gratuitous, sadistic, pointless, futile, criminal, bloody and murderous than I had anticipated.
It has been clear for months at this point that Trump's goons would eventually move to attack Maduro. What I did not expect is that they would conspicuously snub Venezuela's democratic opposition in doing so—even though installing the properly-elected leadership of the country is the only move that could have given even a veneer of specious legitimacy to the action.
I did not expect that they would decide, immediately after kidnapping the Venezuelan head of state, to speak warmly of his second-in-command, even as she thundered against the United States for a criminal war of aggression.
I did not expect that Trump would casually announce that the United States was going to "run" Venezuela indefinitely, for the purpose of extracting its oil wealth—even as everyone with eyes could see that we had no troops in the country and that its existing state structure under Maduro's lieutenants appeared perfectly intact.
This led Marco Rubio yesterday to angrily accuse journalists of "fixating" on Trump's comments about running the country. (Oh you irresponsible journalists, you act like we should care about or believe anything this doddering lunatic in the White House says.)
What Trump had meant by "running" Venezuela, Rubio explained, was more that we would exert pressure on them through sanctions, the ongoing oil blockade, and the vague threat of military force.
In short—exactly what we were doing already.
So what appears to be emerging is a situation that looks exactly like the status quo ante, except minus Maduro.
Maduro's government appears safely in power. They will presumably continue to lock up dissidents and persecute the country's opposition party and other critics. Trump has made clear he does not care if they do so, and that his objection to Maduro apparently had nothing to do with his dictatorship or atrocities.
So if this was not about restoring Venezuelan democracy—what was this about? Trump said yesterday: "oil"—a jaw-droopingly crass answer. But also one that makes no actual sense. Crude oil prices are already too low for the comfort of American fossil fuel companies. We don't in any way need Venezuelan oil.
So probably the real answer is just the personalistic vendetta politics through which Trump sees the world. For him, humanity is divided into those who have dared to defy him, whom he regards as enemies, and those he sees as acceptable lickspittles who have demonstrated sufficient groveling and fealty.
Maduro was in the former camp, so he had to be destroyed.
In so doing, Trump overtly intends to convey a message to other leaders in Latin America—and around the world—who show too much independence, such as the elected leaders of Colombia and Mexico.
In short, Trump fancies himself the ruler of the world. Other leaders of other countries serve only at his pleasure. He can swoop in to remove them from office any time he pleases.
In the past few months at least, Trump has finally started to run up against some constitutional checks on his power here in the United States. He can't actually be the dictator of America he wants to be.
And so, he pivots to appointing himself dictator of the world. There are no effective constitutional checks, it would seem, on his ability to bomb foreign nations and abduct foreign leaders. And so, he proceeds to do so. Trump has never met a power he will not try to abuse to its outermost limits.
Obviously, this delusion of megalomaniac power on the part of the American presidency is not a new thing (though Trump has carried it to new level of crassness and unapologetic depravity, without even an ideological smokescreen of humanitarianism or democracy-building). The rest of humanity has been living under it for decades.
As Bertrand Russell writes in War Crimes in Vietnam—the last book he published in his lifetime—"until Americans on the Left challenge the right of the United States [...] to overthrow governments and to equate sordid economic exploitation with national interest [...] Goldwater and his fellows will reign, in effect if not in name."
"A distressing aspect of world politics," he writes slightly before this, "is the extent to which liberals and even socialists have accepted the basic assumptions of the large and powerful forces behind the Cold War."
"The role of the United States as a perpetual intruder in the internal affairs of other nations is taken as sacred. The right of the United States to interfere in countries, if the social and political policies of those countries are incompatible with private economic power, is happily accepted."
That might sound like almost a caricature of the motives of U.S. foreign interference—if Trump himself had not gotten up in the last few days to declare before the American public: yeah, we're doing all this because we want their oil.
Russell warns in the same book about the effect of all this exercise of unbridled, unchecked, lawless power on the American national character: "A population rendered cruel by wholesale slaughter will feel no restraint on practicing cruelties, by this time grown habitual, in any part of the world."
When we see people crowing about the violence and mayhem our government just pointlessly and criminally unleashed on the people of Venezuela, creating memes about "the Donroe doctrine" and picturing Trump straddling the Americas with his tie doubling as a phallic symbol...
Or when we see mainstream news outlets and commentators endlessly debating the "success" of the mission and praising the "audacity" of the early-morning abduction of a foreign leader, without ever questioning whether the U.S. government has the right to overthrow sovereign governments and kidnap foreign heads of state and bomb a civilian population without cause or provocation...
It's hard to escape the impression that the brutalization of which Russell warned has indeed occurred.
The writer who most deserves credit for foreseeing the direction all of this would take remains Harold Pinter. He diagnosed all the way back in the Bush administration that the American war machine was really just practicing a sort of phallic politics. The meme with Trump's tie, for instance—mentioned above—evokes nothing so much as Pinter's 2003 poem, "Democracy."
And then there's the crude triumphalism, which Pinter diagnosed as well—the crowing sadism of American foreign policy and military adventurism, which celebrates ourselves for the "audacity" of kidnapping a foreign president merely because we can, merely because (at least in the short term) we appear to have gotten away with it.
For this school-boyish racism, this juvenile sadism, this strutting and posturing and peacocking over the freshly prostrate corpses of our victims, Pinter's poem about the Gulf War, "American Football," appears eternally relevant:
Hallelullah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!
Hallelullah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.
[...]
Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.
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