Lord of the Drones

 I have no patience whatsoever for the people who cite Obama's drone strikes as if these somehow excused or mitigated Trump's ongoing campaign of drone murder in the Caribbean and Pacific. Tu quoque is not a valid form of argument; and no precedent, however obscene, can normalize or relativize the fact that our government right now is blowing up civilian vessels in two of the world's oceans—murdering all their occupants—without even the pretense of there being armed actors on the other side. 

That said, it's probably a good exercise for me to occasionally look back and remind myself: Obama's drone strikes were also really bad—even if they were not exactly the same thing as what Trump is doing now. A poem by Heathcote Williams from that era, "Lord of the Drones: The President and the White House Fly," gave me that reminder that I needed, when I read it this week. 

Williams indelibly and viscerally describes what it would be like to be an Afghan or Pashto tribesman living amidst the constant whir and buzz of these robotic killers—a "dustbowl herdsman," as Williams puts it, deemed by the U.S. Secretary of State to be a threat to the global community. 

He reminds us that there was indeed a whole era of the human experience in which a Democratic president sent swarms of predator drones to hover ubiquitously and unsleepingly over the Afghan and Pakistani hinterlands—picking off here an "insurgent," there simply a child or elder who happened to get in the way. 

The horror of the scene is not unworthy of comparison with what our military is likewise doing to fishing villages right now in South America—which, as a recent New York Times article documents—have been depopulated and evacuated, because whole ancestral fishing communities on the coast are no longer willing or able to take to the sea, because they would have to ply their unforgiving trade under constant threat of annihilation from U.S. drones.

So, from January 23rd, 2009, the 44th President of the US gives orders

For hundreds of UAVs to hover above Afghan villages,

Where, with their artificial compound eyes, the drones spy on those below,

Aim Hellfire missiles at them, and burn them to death, Williams writes. 

Plainly, the evil we are committing in the Western hemisphere right now does indeed bear some sort of unwholesome family resemblance to what the U.S. military inflicted on rural Afghanistan and Pakistan just over a decade ago. 

For a long time, I have told myself: but Trump will forever be in a completely different moral category than all other presidents. Even if they too killed people or sent people to their deaths—at least they didn't mock them while doing it. Trump, I thought, has consistently demonstrated a level of depravity that is uniquely his own, because of the way he talks about his own brutality and its consequences—his total indifference to human life; his contempt for his victims; his sadistic "jokes" at their expense. 

Trump, after all, is the one who—at last year's annual Thanksgiving "turkey pardon"—"joked" about sending these unoffending fowl to a torture-prison in El Salvador (the point being that this is what Trump actually did to several hundred human beings at the start of his term). He is also the one who has repeatedly tittered sadistically at the thought—as he puts it—that "even the fishermen" in South America now are too afraid to take their craft onto the water and ply their humble livelihood, since the U.S. has been picking off civilian vessels and murdering their inhabitants for months. 

Here, surely, Trump is in a class unto himself. No matter how many people Bush or Obama may have likewise killed in needless wars—at least they didn't joke and cackle about it. At least they didn't take such obscene delight in the suffering of others. 

But then, Heathcote Williams reminds me of an incident from Obama's first term that I had gratefully and mercifully memory-holed somewhere along the way. This was the White House press correspondents' dinner in 2010 when Obama had made a "joke" about sicing his "predator drones" on the Jonas brothers if they happened to look at his teenage daughters funny. 

Here, surely, is a comedy routine worthy of inclusion in the hall of infamy alongside Trump's one-liner about shipping turkeys to El Salvador. Because the "humor," for those who think this sort of thing funny, derives here from the fact that Obama really was assassinating human beings with predator drones, without charge or trial, in other parts of the world. 

He warns the Jonas Brothers [writes Williams], “I have two words for you – Predator drones!

Then he adds theatrically, “You will never see it coming!”

The joke proves so popular that the President milks it, “You think I’m joking?”

Loyal laughter signals a reluctance to search out his meaning,

Unless it’s thought a joke that one in three killed by drones are civilians;

Or considered funny for Afghan children who “never see it coming”

There’s a crass sadism in President’s boasting about the power to kill anyone

While their drones kill the unknown; while they joke with the media.

Taking this unsavory tour down memory lane, again, can never minimize or excuse the horror of what Trump is doing now, has done.  If anything, it just reminds us of why it is so appalling—the carnage, the sadism, the innocent lives lost. 

But it does make me wonder if the leftists have not actually had a point this whole time that there is a deeper rot at the core of the whole American imperial project that predates Trump, and will last beyond him—and in the light of which he will be seen to have had far more continuity with previous presidents than either his supporters or his critics wish to acknowledge. 

When Trump's second term started, after all, the big fear for many people (myself included)—and the big hope for others!—was that he would break with all foreign policy precedent and spend the next four years appeasing Putin and undermining U.S. allies. And to be sure, there has been plenty of that over the past year (viz. his complete torpedoing of our hitherto warm relationships with Canada and Denmark). 

But many of Trump's very worst foreign policy decisions have been far less aberrant than that, and far more consistent with the typical themes of American imperialism over the last half-century. Many of his actions have been murderous and illegal, that is, in exactly the way that past U.S. wars and invasions have long been. 

Trump staged a coup in a Latin American country and kidnapped its head of state; he started an unprovoked war of aggression with Iran; he is currently encircling and blockading Cuba in order to starve it—these atrocities are standard patriotic fare, well within the bounds of the foreign policy consensus. Terrible as they are, they are the sort of thing any Establishment politician from the "Blob" might have done at any point in the last seventy years.

And so, I do wonder if what seems so exceptionally abhorrent about Trump will not fade with the perspective of time into a broader narrative of moral decay over decades—if that note of schoolboyish sadism and bullying that is omnipresent in Trump's speech will not be discerned too, by future historians, in the words of the presidents who came before him (Harold Pinter captured the note of it as far back as the first Persian Gulf War, in his satirical poem "American Football"—showing that Trump certainly did not conceive the style; even if  he brought it to a particularly monstrous parturition.) 

The evil we are confronting in Trump may, in the end, be less his individual character—as genuinely abhorrent as that has shown itself time and again to be—and more the evil in the heart of the American Empire. 

As Anatole France warned more than a century ago, in his book The White Stone: 

"Supposing even that Europe should become pacific, can you not see that America would become warlike? Following upon Cuba, reduced to the state of a vassal republic, Hawaii, Porto Rico, and the annexation of the Philippines, it is impossible to say that the American Union is not a conquering nation. A publicist of Yankee proclivities, Stead, has said amid the plaudits of the whole of the United States: ‘The Americanisation of the world is on the march.’ And then there is Mr. Roosevelt, whose dream is to plant the Stars and Stripes in South Africa, Australia, and the West Indies. Mr. Roosevelt is Imperialist and he sighs for an America mistress of the world. Between ourselves, he is planning the Empire of Augustus. He has unfortunately perused Livy. The conquests of the Romans banish sleep from him. Have you read his speeches? They breathe a bellicose spirit. ‘Fight, my friends,’ says Mr. Roosevelt, ‘and fight hard. There is nothing like blows. We are upon earth only to exterminate one another. Those who tell you the contrary are men without morality. Mistrust men who think. Thought enervates. ’Tis a French failing. The Romans conquered the world. They lost it. We are the modern Romans.’ Words full of eloquence, backed up with a navy which will soon be the second in the world, and with a military Budget of 40,500,000 francs!"

Who, seeing Trump's actions in Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela today, cannot recognize the terrible truth of Anatole France's prophecy? Who can say that Trump invented the style, when that great American president Theodore Roosevelt was already preaching and practicing the same imperialism, the same militarism, the same vulgar Nietzscheanism and Social Darwinism that Trump and his goons proclaim? Yes, our problem today is Trump; but it is not only him, but rather what he represents and embodies—the will to power of a world state that has arrogated to itself the privilege of conquering humanity.