Total Blockade

 I was just writing the other day on this blog about Bertrand Russell's critique—in his 1963 book Unarmed Victory—of the Kennedy administration's policy of blockading Cuba. It seemed very relevant to Trump's policy of shutting off oil shipments to Cuba today. 

I didn't realize when I wrote the piece, however, how painfully relevant it would also shortly become to Trump's policy toward Iran. Indeed, Kennedy's Cuba blockade has become the news media's go-to point of reference for the last time the United States imposed a total blockade on another country. 

This is undoubtedly an act of war, thus a violation of the supposed two-week ceasefire Trump declared with Iran last Tuesday. It's also an act of war directed primarily against a civilian population. It is a blatant attempt to starve and besiege the 93 million people of Iran in order to put pressure on their government. 

I think the world would be responding much more forcefully to such a siege if Trump hadn't already set the bar so low. We are still breathing a sigh of relief that he didn't drop a nuke on the country or try to wipe out civilian targets with bombs, as he repeatedly threatened to do. 

But now he is simply trying to starve Iran's civilians in a war of attrition. Let's not lose sight of how mad and immoral that is too. There is no excuse under any system of international law or morality for imposing collective punishment on a civilian population—whether by bombs or enforced starvation. 

As John Maynard Keynes put in—in condemning the blockade the victorious Entente imposed on Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, as well as the ruinous reparations they exacted from Germany: "nations are not authorised, by religion or by natural morals, to visit on the children of their enemies the misdoings of parents or of rulers.”

Indeed. But that's exactly what Trump is doing. I suppose he feels entitled to decide the life and death of Iranian children and civilians because he appears to think he is a literal God. Yesterday was also the day, after all, that he posted an AI-generated image of himself as Christ, laying on his hands in order to effect miracle cures. 

"But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter," as Thomas Hardy writes in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. 

With his image depicting himself as Jesus, Trump truly does seem to think of himself not only as God's chosen or anointed, as he has indicated in the past—but as God himself. "I AM GOD AND KING AND LAW" as Anarchy and Murder describe themselves, in Shelley's The Masque of Anarchy (the Trumpian all-caps are in the original.)

To which we ordinary mortals can only say, with Louis MacNeice: "Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he's God / come near me."

If Trump is a god, he is the "God" depicted in Isaac Rosenberg's poem of that name: 

In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,

Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!

His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls.

The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat

To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,

On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,

He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.

That is what he is now doing to the maimed civilian population of Iran. Despite promising at one point that this was a war to "free" them—now he is lying on top of their country, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.