The American Peril

 Two days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Donald Trump in the midst of the ongoing war in the Middle East. 

What?! Assassinate our head of state in the midst of ongoing negotiations? 

Oh, you mean—exactly what we just did to them about four months ago? 

Look, this isn't to defend anything the Iranian regime is doing. Two wrongs don't make a right, and the Iranian Islamic Republic remains one of the most despicable governments on the planet. 

But it is to suggest that when you persistently inject violence and lawlessness into the world, you can't be surprised when people at some point try to retaliate in kind. 

There is something deeply sad about Donald Trump venting to the news media this week about how unfair and mean it is that Iran keeps attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz in the midst of a ceasefire. 

After all, he is the one who launched an unprovoked war against that same country in late February and deliberately killed several ranks of Iranian senior leadership in an act of lawless aggression that can only be called murder. 

Violence begets violence, my friend. 

I am reminded of the passage in Anatole France's The White Stone—a book that contains his best satirical dialogues on the subject of colonial warfare. 

At the time, the European and American press were obsessed with the specter of a so-called "Yellow Peril" from Asia. 

Anatole France reminds his readers that "For many long years have Asiatics been familiar with the White Peril. [...] We created the White Peril. The White Peril has engendered the Yellow Peril." 

Indeed, he writes—the only thing that seems to diffrentiate the "White Peril" from the "Yellow Peril" is that the latter appears infinitely milder and less intrusive in its methods. 

The Chinese do not send to Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg missionaries to teach Christians the Fung-chui, and sow disorder in European affairs. A Chinese expeditionary force did not land in Quiberon Bay to demand of the Government of the Republic extra-territoriality, i.e., the right of trying by a tribunal of mandarins cases pending between Chinese and Europeans. Admiral Togo did not come and bombard Brest roads with a dozen battleships, for the purpose of improving Japanese trade in France. [...] He did not burn Versailles in the name of a higher civilisation. The armies of the Great Asiatic Powers did not carry away to Tokio and Peking the Louvre paintings and the silver service of the Elysée. (Roche trans.)

So too, today—if we are asked to believe in the specter of an Iranian peril, we can only ask who created it. Who engendered this Iran Peril? 

Was it not American warplanes that bombed first? Was it not our government that was first to assassinate a sitting head of state in this conflict? 

If we are asked to speak of an Iranian Peril, what are we to say, then, of the American Peril? 

Hunter S. Thompson wrote at one point of "that dark, venal, incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise." 

The existence of that side of the coin—as Thompson well knew—does not negate the many other positive and admirable aspects of our country. 

But it exists nonetheless—it exists in a country that arrogates to itself the right to bomb, kidnap, and assassinate any foreign leader any time it wants to—but then seems to recoil with genuine shock and outrage when one of these nations tries to hit back. 

It is the side of our national character Harold Pinter saw when he wrote of "America's God." 

Anatole France detected this side of our character too, all the way back in 1905. He warned in a prophetic line: "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..."

And so it continues, well over a century later. The American Peril marches on...