Trump is a problem but Capitalism is THE problem

 

While political, media and other mind managers all but blame the arrogant rich boob currently occupying the subsidized housing in DC for everything from WW2 to the Korean, Vietnam and Civil wars, global and especially American capitalism has entered a stage of more danger to life in general than at any previous time in history. The assault on nature and weaponization of markets cannot continue if humanity, let alone America, is to survive.

 

At the end of the Second World War a republican president warned of the dangers of a military industrial complex taking over the country and leading us to ruin. That has come to pass and probably in worse ways than Eisenhower or his speechwriter might have imagined.

 

This nation officially began with an invasion and take over of most of a continent, the murder and economic enslavement of most of its population and continued to become a dominant imperial power, especially since the end of the Second World War, which was the period of Eisenhower’s warning. Since then our War Department – commonly called a Defense Department, which is like calling a rape crisis center a Love Department - has spent trillions of dollars dominating major parts of the globe, all the while with its hired influencers selling that as democracy, peace and humanitarian politics, the way a mass murderer might claim to be defending its victims.

 

Most Americans are programmed to see foreign efforts to improve the lives of their people as conspiratorial and murderous plots to deny us our freedom to love our pets while hundreds of thousands of our people have no place to live. And the bloody assault on the source of our lives, nature itself, continues long past the point of being the job of marketing and private investment, but that is what has been running the world since at least the 19^th century and now in the 21^st humanity must wrest control from minorities who have ruled for far too long and create a real and not rhetorical democracy to turn the world and all people from a path leading to devastation to one offering salvation for all and not just some.

 

A tall order to put it mildly and given the enormity of the problem for humanity and not just one or another nation or religion or identity group, the need to come together and act as humans and not simply market consumers obsessed with individualism as foundation for the social mass murder of warfare becoming more obvious even with idiotic word games to cover its brutality with cosmetic language.

 

Thus we have “rules of war” that treat the insane acts of mass murder as normal parts of nature as ordinary as tides coming in or out and the sun rising and setting. This dates back to the beginning of minorities ruling majorities with kings, emperors, queens and empresses acting as gods or special chosen people in whose hands wisdom and insanity were placed lest ordinary people create democracy before the word if not the concept existed. Royals at one point sat on hilltops watching armies slaughtering one another with rules not to hurt anyone who wasn’t chosen to murder or be murdered. Supposedly great religions were created and rationalized to carry out these holy wars, but with some revolutionary religious leaders calling for peace and love among all people and thus echoing our “pre-historic” – before minorities took control –origins in hunter gatherer people who performed in democratic and communistic fashion and were eventually replaced by alleged holy royalty for living such silly notions.

 

Now we have supposedly well educated people with doctorates in mass murder deciding on proper and improper ways of blowing brains out and burning to death “the enemy” and all the while claiming this murderous filth has a foundation in morality and intelligence and is the only way to solve problems whether real or alleged. Noisy neighbors? Kill them.

Think you were short changed at the market? Blow it up and kill everyone there. Such idiocy makes great sense to the moral degenerates who preach, plan and have others carry out wars by mostly convincing innocent people that if they don’t murder this enemy selected by formally educated fiends who wear high fashion and perform low morality, we’ll all die in our sleep or worse burn in hell which has been prepared by a god who, um, loves us all.

 

So we have some murderers labeled war criminals because they don’t slaughter in accepted fashion while others are said to be committing genocide, which somehow differs from usual mass murder by threatening everyone instead of just all people. People who allegedly suffered genocide in world war two are now charged with performing genocide in Palestine/Israel. In both cases thousands were murdered with the murderers convinced they were/are doing the right thing. When the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed 200,000 people was that genocide and a war crime? Of course not. American rulers believe themselves the real chosen people of god and so teach their subjects. But when Hamas killed a thousand Israelis this was genocide to some and a war crime while retaliatory violence, which slaughtered far far far more, is only genocide to some folks, self-defense to others. And of course rape is simply an economic form of dating with no dinner or movie and getting right to the sex at no expense. Such thought degeneracy makes war seem logical and necessary to leadership that might find brain cancer a sign of good health.

 

Among the successful divide and conquer strategies carried out by rulers and their servants is the separation of majorities into minority identity groups, never so dangerous than at the present. All men supposedly act out power over women but rules of war spare women and children, making killing them an alleged war crime depending on who is doing the murdering and this proves that men are superior just by being men and thus the only ones to be murdered in “legal” slaughter. Of course. Now humanity has been further divided into racial, sexual, tribal and psychopathological groups making it necessary to extoll the wonders of some minorities while carrying destruction of majorities dangerously further than ever.

 

The system of minority rule capital helps perpetuate its domination by setting humans against other humans and thereby preventing majority rule in material reality while singing hosannas to it in dreams, prayers and legends. It thus becomes more important to have, say, trans gay Jews of color in positions of responsibility to rulers than to have cooperating people arranging material reality without regard to skin tones, sexual preferences, religions or ethnicity so as best to assure survival and better lives for all.

 

Now insane leadership in Israel joins with insane leadership in America –they’ve been intimately running this nation for quite some time – to threaten war on Iran while our continuous war on Russia that began in 1917 and stopped only briefly so it could play the major role in defeating Nazi Germany which America still claims as its heroic triumph. And of course the suffering of America in that war, with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, vastly surpassed that of Russia- then the Soviet Union, which suffered a measly 25 million dead.  Any nose picking moron mathematician can clearly see the proof in those numbers. The continuous madness of war conducted as some heroic statement of goodness forced into murder because of evil others has lasted much too long, gone far too far, and must be stopped or all of humanity will suffer as millions have and continue too, but now victims may number in the billions and involve us all.

 

This will further the already happening mass murder and possibly bring us under control and force the rest of the world, led by China, Russia and Iran and followed by a majority of the world’s people, to join into united action against a failing empire led by increasingly lunatic forces which threaten all of humanity and not just America.

 

We need to wake up and smell the bullshit before we wind up eating-drinking-breathing and otherwise absorbing even more than we already have, act like a democracy and not just talk about it, and transform material reality before we are destroyed by it under the control of lunatics who think private profits in war are what makes humanity great. One or another near imbecile in the white house won’t make a difference as long as we treat earth as real estate and humans as consumer peasants. The same market research surveys that lead us to poling places to vote for lesser evils, if at all, find that overwhelming majorities of people support radical changes to bring better lives to a majority of humanity but still, at least in America, tolerate overwhelmingly powerful consciousness control that teaches subservience, obedience and escapism only affordable to a shrinking population of the affluent while great masses sink further into debt and poverty. This, while capital rapes nature in pursuit of profit, which makes humanities loss more dangerous every day.

 

America doesn’t just need a new president but a new congress and especially newer parties to replace the capitalist demublicans and republicrat groups which serve different aspects of the private profit meat grinder that guarantees minority wealth and growing majority danger. The availability of potential communications among people via electronic means is presently totally dominated by minority wealth and serves the interest of private property which is sustained by public loss. Those electronic means are far more available than the electoral marketplace and should be transformed on the way to creation of real democracy before murderous hypocrisy makes it too late for anything but surrender. Victory for humanity is necessary and achievable and never so possible and there is no time but the present to begin that work.

The Alien Presence Is Capitalism

"The demonization of the forces of change, agents of alien ideologies, traffickers in cocaine, Marxism, and other drugs, requires the previous flushing out of historical memory. In reality, the alien presence in America is capitalism (emphasis in original), which was not invented by Manco Cápac or Moctezuma, but imposed from outside and above by sixteenth-century invaders from Europe. The Conquest commercialized American life, imposed the so-much-in-exchange-for-so-much, while the Church proffered by divine order the law of profit and the law of fear: if you obey your reward will be in heaven; if you disobey hell will punish you. On the other hand there is no older tradition in America than the communitarian mode of production and way of life (emphasis in original). In addition to being the oldest tradition, the community is also the most persistent and the most obstinately vital, despite having suffered unceasing persecution for the last five centuries. It may well be said, then, that socialism comes from within and from below, from the most authentic and profound depths of the memory of our lands. 

 

"In the same sense, it's worth mentioning that democracy was not a novelty that the barbarous Indians received from the European monarchies or from its civilized Inquisition (emphasis in original). Outside of Cuzco and Tenochtitlán, which were centers of hereditary despotism, the chronicles of the epoch describe revealing anecdotes that took place in a number of places: the Indians asked who elected the king of Spain or the king of England, because they elected their leaders in assemblies - in which women, it should be said, also expressed their opinions and voted."

 

 

-----Eduardo Galeano, "We Say No - Chronicles 1963-1991," pps. 216-17 

Israel's 77th Birthday: Recalling A History of Horror

Zionist efforts to remove the Palestinian Arabs from their land long predated Hitler's rise as a historical figure. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson's King-Crane Commission reported back from the region that, "No British officer consulted by the Commissioners believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms . . . only a greatly reduced Zionist program should be attempted . . . and then only very gradually initiated." The Commissioners called for a serious modification of existing plans for unlimited Jewish immigration culminating in Jewish statehood. Regarding Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration, which had promised the Jews a home in Palestine, King and Crane wrote: "A national home is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish state nor can the erection of such a Jewish state be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities." At the time, "existing non-Jewish communities" were Christian and Muslim Arabs constituting 93% of Palestine's population.

 

During the course of the King-Crane Commission's inquiry, Jewish representatives had not concealed their ultimate hope of dispossessing the Arab inhabitants of Palestine by various forms of purchase, in spite of the fact that ninety percent of the latter were completely against surrendering their land to the Zionist project. "To subject the people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land would be a gross violation" of Wilsonian principle, the Commissioners wrote, "and of the people's rights, though it be kept within the forms of law." Leaving aside the dubious equation of Wilsonian principle with self-determination, it is safe to say that overriding a 93% indigenous majority with whatever forms of pressure can hardly be described as an exercise in democracy. 

 

Sadly, the gross violation the Commissioners warned against occurred, and Israel was founded, but commentary in the U.S. has almost completely ignored the peculiar history behind the event. To wit: a largely irreligious people reclaimed land after an absence of two thousand years based on fantastical Biblical texts few of them believed in; Jehovah's carvings on a Tablet in the Bronze Age became the basis of Near East politics in the 20th Century; a "Jews-only" state bent on conquest and expansion was hailed as a model of democratic socialism with unique sensitivity to morality and human rights. Zionist leaders embarked on an "in-gathering" of the Jewish Diaspora and plotted the exodus of Jews from lands they had lived in for centuries while intoning the words Hitler had used in carrying out the Holocaust: "You are not a German, you are a Jew - you are not a Frenchman, you are a Jew - you are not a Belgian, you are a Jew." 

 

The heart of the problem was and remains a serious and deliberate confusion of nationalism with religion. Organized Jewry, a staunch supporter of separation of Church and State outside the Holy Land, condoned their union in Israel, demanding the loyalty of Jews everywhere, whether or not they identified themselves as such. Diasporan Jews supported Israel out of religious duty, though they may or may not have been aware of what Zionist ideology actually entailed. Jewish identity became the basis of Israeli citizenship, with political debate naturally centering on the vexing question, "What is a Jew?" Since Jews, like most people, have a mixed ancestry, Jewish supremacist myth-makers buttressed weak territorial claims with appeals to historical continuity, blurring distinctions between Hebrew, Israelite, Judean, Jewish, and Judaism, while forestalling recognition that these were different people at different times in history with different ways of life. Neither the Jews nor these varied forebears ever constituted a race or even a distinctive pure ethnic grouping, and since Judaism had been of declining significance for most Jews for some time, it quickly became clear that Jewish identity was to be as arbitrary as it was convenient for Israel to have it. Not surprisingly, only Palestinians can't belong.

 

Inevitably, Israel's birth was traumatic. In November 1947, a Washington-dominated U.N. passed a resolution awarding over 56% of the land of Palestine to 650,000 Jews, who represented just a third of the population and owned some 6% of the land. Britain, its empire near collapse, began withdrawing from its colonies the following Spring when its mandate over Palestine expired. As the British pulled out, Zionist armies attacked Arab villages, driving out roughly three-quarters of a million Palestinians in the process of forging a Jewish state with a sizable Arab minority, the latter forced to choose between exile and perpetual discrimination. 

 

The fundamental injustice in the new state was rooted in the divorce of citizenship from territoriality. Jews around the world had rights in the Jewish state, but there could be nothing like full human rights for non-Jews and only the most limited progress towards a just society. The Jewish National Fund purchased lands on behalf of the Jewish people, from which non-Jews were necessarily excluded. According to official Israeli figures 92% of the state's surface prior to June, 1967 was restricted to Jewish use - in perpetuity. Palestinians had no claim on the land they had lived on for centuries.

 

Israel acted to guarantee a permanent Jewish majority while establishing the exclusivist institutions that statist Zionism called for. A huge effort was made to attract the Jewish Diaspora to Israel, while expelling as many Arabs as possible. Jews were ceaselessly reminded of the dangers of anti-Semitism and the hopelessness of assimilation. At the same time, and long before Menachem Begin and the Likud bloc took power, Israel's Labor Party gradually incorporated a supranationalist "Greater Israel" movement into its program, preaching expulsion to the Arabs, fear to Diasporan Jews, and reflexively accusing anti-Zionist Gentiles of anti-Semitism.

 

The Zionist triumph placed a borderless Jewish island in a sea of angry Arabs. Expansionism and new frontiers were its by-products, and war was quite inevitable.

In the seventy-seven years since Israel came into existence as a Jewish state it has not only taken hold of the land but also the structure of opinion and commentary in the West, in such a way that the Palestinians have been quite literally obliterated as a people with any claim to rights or historical continuity. At the same time, the history of Israel that has produced this appalling result has likewise been obliterated, especially in the United States. It is nearly impossible to find mainstream commentary referring to Israel's assassinating children at will, bulldozing homes, bombing schools and hospitals, uprooting orchards, arresting, deporting, and torturing anyone posing a "threat" to Jewish supremacy, and locking an entire people in a giant, outdoor cage. On the contrary. Everything is carefully filtered through the lens of "little Israel," victim of eternal anti-Semitism, in which Palestinians are congenital terrorists yearning to kill Jews, especially children. The fact that Israel introduced terrorism against civilians to the region, that it originated in conquest, that it has repeatedly invaded and occupied its neighbors, and was instrumental in instigating the blood-drenched disaster in Iraq, never rises to perceptibility in the U.S. media or in American political discourse. In the official optic Israel bears no responsibility for "terrorism" and is, in fact the victim of the peoples it occupies and kills.

 

Every media comment about Hamas or Hizbollah or Iran invokes a cartoon-like fantasy of total despotism, infantile rage, and savage violence, all targeted at "us," the good people who save Jews from gas chambers and otherwise pursue our charmingly harmless lives in a world devoid of illegitimate authority and oppression. Never is there the slightest hint that "extremist Islam" caused us absolutely no harm until Washington backed Jewish supremacy over Arab lands, overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran (1953), planted permanent military bases near the holiest sites of Islam, and murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children with economic sanctions. And all this was before the neo-cons engineered the invasion and dismemberment of Iraq.

 

 
Seventy-seven years on it is more than time to recognize that "little Israel" is a permanent disaster fully capable of ringing down the curtain on the entire human race. Racist, nuclear armed, violently delusional, it seeks in the name of "security" to destroy any and all resistance to Jewish domination. Though success on these terms is impossible, the attempt to succeed can only yield a succession of unprecedented horrors.

Russia, the Defeat of Nazism, and the Collaborationist West

 On May 9 Russia welcomed twenty-seven heads of state from around the world to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the conclusion of the Great Patriotic War, which ended in victory over the Nazis, one of the greatest achievements in Russian history, and one that would make any nation justly proud.

 

The United States likes to portray the defeat of Nazism as a glorious U.S. achievement, with a nod to British, Canadian, Australian, French and a few others for their supporting roles. This ignores the central fact that the Wehrmacht had been ground nearly to pulp by the time the U.S. invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944, an event that 80 years of Hollywood fantasies have attempted to transform into the key battle of the war. In reality, however, this much-delayed opening of a second front in the European war occurred when Hitler's troops had been reduced to mostly children and old men, the military-aged soldiers having perished in gargantuan numbers on the Eastern front. Tens of millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians were also killed there, a large majority deliberately starved by Hitler, who looked to eliminate Slavic peoples and re-populate their territories with a civilized master race of "Aryans."

 

U.S. mind-managers have dispatched this Russian agony to Orwell's memory hole, along with the suffering of the Chinese, who lost about half as much as the USSR (but still an enormous total) on the battlefield, in horrendous camps, and in "scientific" laboratories that treated them like experimental rats. British, French, and American losses, especially civilian deaths, were but a tiny fraction of these. 

 

The ferocity of the battles fought in Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk defy description, and are well beyond the West's impoverished moral capacity to even begin to apprehend. Three million Nazi soldiers invaded the USSR with the launching of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.*  This represented eighty percent of the German Army, almost all of whom were either killed, captured, or wounded over the subsequent three years. Meanwhile, the USSR not only fought the invading Germans, but also ardent Nazi-supporters in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, along with other European countries that facilitated German military operations and replaced fallen German soldiers in battle.

Both Churchill and FDR accepted that it was the USSR that defeated the Nazis. Western supplies helped, but it was the heart and determination of the Red Army that brought the Nazi beast down.

After the war, the Western powers obscured this story with a fanciful tale of being the most heroic human rights champions in history. But it was actually the Red Army that shot anti-Semites while Western myth-makers re-invented the Jew-haters as anti-Communist freedom fighters worthy of admiration.

Renewing the Cold War it had initiated in 1917 in reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution, Washington imposed a "cordon-sanitaire" in order to erradicate Communism in Western Europe, a broadly-defined demon class that included major elements of the wartime anti-fascist resistance and trade union movements while those who had accommodated Nazism or gone into hiding faced no such exclusion.

Today's inheritors of collaborationist Europe have re-doubled their attacks on Russia with economic sanctions and anti-Russian "human rights" tribunals, all in the name of a "never again" anti-genocide crusade that lacks even the slightest pretense of concern for Israel's ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people. 

 

Our problems go far beyond Donald Trump.

 

 

*Harry Truman stood up on the Senate floor the following day and recommended that the U.S. role in the war should be to help the Russians when Germany was getting the upper hand and Germany when Russia had the advantage, thus helping eliminate both populations to the greatest extent possible. 

Source:

"Victory Day: Rescuing the Truth," La Jornada, May 10, 2025 (Spanish)

For more on the U.S. role in WWII, see:

 

"How The U.S. Really Reacted To Nazism," Legalienate, 8/20/17

"75th Anniverary of the Defeat of Nazism," Legalienate, 5/9/20

"Mythology and Reality in World War II," Legalienate, 8/15/10

"False Savior - FDR," Legalienate, 4/15/09

U.S. Troops In Mexico?

President Donald Trump has offered President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico U.S. troops to help combat organized crime in Mexico. The offer came in a recent phone call between the two heads of state, and the offer was sharply rejected by Sheinbaum, who reminded the U.S. president that "we can share information but we are never going to accept the presence of the U.S. Army on our territory."*

 

Trump is doubling down on militarizing the handling of drug trafficking, assigning all blame for the fentanyl crisis to China and countries south of the U.S. border with Mexico. He has declared the drug cartels "terrorist organizations," and equates drug trafficking and illegal immigration with military invasion, i.e., outright war, which gives him wartime powers, or so he believes. In line with this, he's cutting $163 billion from budget allocations for education and social services, raising military spending $375 billion, and flooding the border with U.S. soldiers, all part of an effort to accelerate his mass deportation campaign. 

 

Attempting to solve the complex problems of drug trafficking and consumption as though they were features of a Hollywood action movie susceptible to easy solution by generous doses of gratuitous violence is beyond ludicrous. As the late Edward Said observed, Hollywood productions are a form of science fiction with relevance to no one's actual life, which is why the Hollywood-like "war on drugs" has had no discernible impact on eliminating the drug trade, though it has contributed substantially to horrifying bloodshed and major human rights violations. Recall that under the U.S. Army's two-decade long occupation of Afghanistan heroin trafficking soared to record levels.

 

In official Washington, political thinking about drugs and almost everything else has yet to reach beyond adolescent fantasy.

*In the war of 1846-8, the United States invaded Mexico on the false pretext of self-defense, robbing half its national territory, which later became California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, half of Texas and Colorado, and bits of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.

Sources:

 "U.S. Troops In Mexico: Not Now, Not Ever," La Jornada (Spanish), May 4, 2025

John Gibler, "Mexico Unconquered, - Chronicles of Power and Revolt,"(City Lights, 2009) p. 121

 

 

50th Anniversary of the End of the Vietnam War

 After two decades of savage U.S. efforts to impose imperial control over South Vietnam, the effort collapsed in April 1975.

 

Columns of refugees and routed troops packed the roads twisting out of the hills and rubber plantations toward the marshy flatlands around Saigon. Barefoot villagers, bands of soldiers with their boots rotting off, lost children wailing for their parents, parents screaming for their children, wounded men caked with dried blood and filthy bandages, creeping trucks, buses, and herds of water buffalo, oxcarts lumbering along on wooden wheels, all paraded past the wreckage of burned-out tanks and scattered corpses rotting in the fields by the roadside, fleeing the advancing bombs and shellfire announcing Ho Chi Minh's imminent victory. 

 

At the U.S. Embassy, a desperate crowd of Vietnamese interpreters, army leaders, bartenders, colonial bureaucrats, and stool pigeons, rushed the gates waving letters from American employers, stateside lovers, or distant American acquaintances who used to know someone in their extended family.  

 

Saigon was no more.*

To General Thieu and his henchmen, President Ford offered sanctuary in the United States. To the young Americans who had not been able to bring themselves to kill for such gangsters, he offered the choice of permanent exile from the U.S. or imprisonment. On the Vietnamese people he imposed a trade embargo, a veto on their entry into the United Nations, and a refusal to negotiate the unresolved issues of the war.  

The imperialist credo was thus fulfilled: those who have been arbitrarily punished, are punished anew. 

After two decades of Western terror, retribution deaths were near zero. The much predicted Communist bloodbath did not materialize, and Hanoi created nothing worse than re-education camps for those who collaborated with the U.S. in killing millions of their fellow Vietnamese. 

This remarkable display of restraint passed unnoticed in the U.S. media, which preferred to denounce Communist indoctrination methods. Those who Washington employed to engage in wholesale torture and massacre of their countrymen were portrayed as innocent victims forced to endure the agony of political lectures. 

The hundreds of thousands of orphans, junkies, prostitutes, and maimed survivors the U.S. left in its wake, whom the Vietnamese somehow had to rehabilitate as they struggled to overcome a shattered economy, devastated ecosystem, and demolished social order, were ignored and quickly forgotten.**

 

As for the meaning of it all, the New York Times remained utterly clueless: 

 

"There are those Americans who believe that the war to preserve a non-Communist, independent South Vietnam could have been waged differently. There are other Americans who believe that a viable, non-Communist South Vietnam was always a myth . . . A decade of fierce polemics has failed to resolve the quarrel."

Of course, while the war raged, Americans surged into the streets in record numbers to protest that the U.S. had no business meddling in the internal politics of Vietnam, regardless of the prospects for "success." This position, re-iterated endlessly at rallies, protest marches, and teach-ins, was never heard in official circles, nor was it ever given a hearing on the editorial pages of the New York Times.

U.S. hands off other countries.

To the Times' editors, these words were incomprehensible.***

 

U.S. military and government leaders were no more insightful. A U.S. Air Force general said that the important lesson of the war was that, "We could have won the war if political factors had not entered in," perhaps a reference to the failure to use nuclear weapons, which both the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations had considered doing. Secretary of State Dean Rusk blamed the "loss" of Vietnam on the "impatience" of the American people, adding that a future Vietnam-style war would require censorship. "You can't fight a war on television," he lamented. General Maxwell Taylor contended that success required the banning of dissent, counseling that any president would "be well advised to silence future critics by executive order."

 

With millions killed and Indochina in ruins, President Ford urged Americans to forget. "The lessons of the past," he implausibly advised, "have already been learned . . . and we should have our focus on the future."****

Sources:

*Marvin Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young and H. Bruce Franklin, eds., Vietnam and America: A Documented History, (Grove Weidenfeld, 1985) pps. 266-70; Michael Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse, (Random House, 1969) pps. 206-7

 

**Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, (South End, 1979) pps. 28-9 

 

*** Raphael Salkie, The Chomsky Update: Linguistics and Politics, (Unwin Hyman, 1990) pps. 131-2 

 

****Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima To Watergate (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 389 

  

Empire's End: Trump Endorses Sending U.S. Citizens To Banana Republic Gulag

"Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."

              -----Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

 

President Donald Trump has endorsed sending "the worst of the worst" criminals (i.e., anybody he so labels, regardless of what the facts show) to a foreign gulag for life whenever he sees fit. Trump revealed this view during a meeting with Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele at the White House, where both men agreed nothing should or would be done to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who ICE agents kidnapped and mistakenly sent to Bukele's notorious mega-prison CECOT due to what they called an "administrative error" last month. Trump labeled Garcia a MS-13 gang member and Bukele gratuitously proclaimed him a "terrorist," though there is no evidence he was even a criminal, much less a political actor using violence to force changes in government policy. In any event, neither president sees any reason to try to correct the error and return Garcia to his life and family in the United States, so he continues to rot in a Salvadorean prison.

Trump's interpretation of presidential power to justify such outrages is the one U.S. presidents always use:  that we are at war with evildoers and so are obliged to toss aside trivialities like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In the latest iteration of this farce Trump has stripped away the rights of foreign workers, natural residents, and even naturalized citizens, with birth citizens soon to be persecuted for thought crimes, another venerable American tradition. When questioned about the legitimacy of his self-serving views, Trump asked without irony if there were any reason to regard U.S. citizens as a special class deserving of protection, regarding it as self-evident that once he labels U.S. citizens or anybody else "criminal," they deserve to be treated as sub-human. Clearly, the president sees no reason to acknowledge that U.S. law enforcement has the dual purpose of punishing criminal conduct and protecting individual rights, with the latter responsibility being the more important of the two, since without rights the state itself becomes boundlessly criminal, and no one can escape being victimized by its crimes on a constant basis. Indeed, the president may not even understand these responsibilities.

It is easy enough to mock Trump's buffoonish approach to governance, but this only misses the forest for the trees.* All of U.S. history shows that the law has only the most tangential relation to power, and is promptly cast to the flames whenever authority or profit is at stake. The USA really was founded on slavery and mass extermination, with the presumed legitimacy of the first written into the Constitution itself, and official justification of the latter codified (preposterously) in the Declaration of Independence as self-defense against "merciless Indian savages." It took the law centuries to ban slavery while a century-and-a-half later it still hasn't provided even the merest pretense of legal justification for the robbery of Indian lands, upon which the very existence of the United States depends. 

So president Trump should properly be seen as the culmination of a process of contempt for human rights, not an aberration from a tradition of upholding them. He is able to use ICE as his personal kidnapping force only because George W. Bush invented the agency out of thin air as part of his modest ambition to "rid the world of evil." He may get away with dispatching U.S. citizens to a foreign dungeon because Obama already got away with murdering a U.S. citizen on foreign soil. He can attract support for making America "great" again by seizing Greenland or annexing Canada because our schoolbooks and media mouthpieces have long taught us that U.S. conquest and expansion are by definition glorious.

In other words, bringing down Trump, which more and more people want to see done, may require that we repudiate the long tradition of Trumpism that preceded his rise to power, that is, if we really intend to get rid of arbitrary rule. 

 

After all, if George W. Bush could rig intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and then destroy Iraq on that false pretext, why can't Trump rig intelligence to show that Iran has nukes and later bomb Teheran? If McKinley could grab Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines, why can't Trump take Greenland and the Panama Canal? If John F. Kennedy could invade Cuba and Vietnam, why can't Trump invade Mexico?

Trump's rule by executive fiat is the consequence of what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim once identified as "anomie" - literally normlessness - a state of intellectual vertigo owing to a complete lack of coherent expectations regulating conduct. We have arrived at this state of affairs because a long line of U.S. leaders and their media propagandists have obliterated rationality with double-talk and lies, leaving Trump an intellectual black hole that allows him to "govern" by authoritarian impulse.

The only potential plus in all this is that power weakens as legitimacy erodes, and the whims of an ignorant narcissist are provoking massive discontent.

And thus the U.S. empire implodes with gathering momentum.

 

 *The Democratic Party, ever-eager to indulge yet another bout of Trump Derangement Syndrome, does not care about due process in principle any more than President Trump does, as their "always believe the woman" dogma clearly demonstrates. The two parties differ only in how to prioritize the groups treated with official contempt.