Pues viva la democracia

 In just the first six months of this year, Trump has started two baseless wars of aggression on opposite sides of the globe—in both cases against admittedly authoritarian governments that the administration claims to disapprove of. 

You might think, among all this needless carnage, that one possible silver lining might be that the U.S. would at least make common cause with Venezuelan and Iranian dissidents and political prisoners, in whose name these wars were ostensibly fought. Weren't we going in to "liberate" the people from their oppressive governments, after all? 

Didn't Trump promise Iranian protesters that "help is on its way"? 

Six months in, we know exactly what Trump's brand of "help" looks like. Many of his cruelest acts as president have been aimed against Venezuelan and Iranian refugees—people, that is, who face persecution in their home countries precisely because they refused to submit to the same unjust regimes that the United States claims to oppose. 

It was Venezuelan asylum-seekers—people who voted with their feet against Maduro's dictatorship—whom Trump put on plane flights in the dead of night to a torture-prison in El Salvador, at the start of his second term. 

And it is an Iranian refugee—someone who had even received protective orders from a U.S. court—whom Trump recently deported to the Central African Republic—an impoverished war zone subject to State Department travel warnings, with a Putin-aligned government that may refoule this refugee to Iran. 

And it does not end there. 

Right now, Trump's government continues to encircle the island of Cuba in an attempt to starve its people into submission—all ostensibly because we oppose the island's authoritarian government. 

Yet it was a Cuban refugee—that is, someone who fled that very regime—who died in ICE detention earlier this year, after federal agents allegedly choked and pinned him to the ground. 

I thought of his case when I read Arthur Koestler's account of a death in the French internment camp where he was confined at the outbreak of World War II. A group of Spanish refugees who escaped Franco's fascists had ended up behind barbed wire in this camp. One of them had carved an inscription on a wooden cross honoring a comrade who died in detention: 

"Adios, Pedro. Los fascistas wanted to burn you alive but the French allowed you to freeze to death in peace. Pues viva la democracia." 

Koestler goes on to observe, with well-justified bitterness, that the French government had apparently decided "that the first thing to do in a war against Hitler was to lock up all the notorious anti-Hitlerites." 

So too, the U.S. government, in its infinite wisdom and mercy, has apparently decided that the first thing to do in a war against Maduro is to lock up all the anti-Maduro asylum-seekers; that the first thing to do in a war against Castro is to lock up all the anti-Castro refugees; that the first thing to do in a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran is to lock up all the Iranian dissidents who manage to reach our shores. 

And not just to lock them up—as we have seen—but in some cases to kill them; to deport them to torture-prisons where they are beaten and confined for four months without contact with their families or attorneys; and to send them to a Putin-friendly war zone from which they may be shipped in turn back to the clutches of their persecutors.

Here too, Koestler's experience in the French concentration camp is all too reminiscent. "Paragraph nineteen" of the Armistice treaty that Vichy France signed with Hitler, he writes, "provided for the extradition of any German-born subject the German authorities asked for—in other words, the handing over of anti-Nazi refugees to the Gestapo." 

Likewise, the U.S. government handed anti-Maduro refugees over to Maduro—before deposing him—and now they appear to be seeking a workaround to U.S. Convention Against Torture protections, in order to send an Iranian woman to a country that may in turn deport her back to her persecutors in Iran. 

Pues viva la democracia. 

Or, as E.E. Cummings once sardonically and immortally put it: 

so rah-rah-rah democracy

let's all be as thankful as hell

and bury the statue of liberty

(because it begins to smell)