by Sean Reynolds, activist with CAPA and No Iran War
Once again I’ve been honored to appear in a segment on Iran’s PressTV, interviewed by journalist Ramin Mazaheri, all three of whose brilliant and vexing books I’d actually read before first encountering him. We discussed my country’s shameful buildup to war with Venezuela.
(I can’t link it here but do google “press.tv” and “Trump escalates aggression against Venezuela” to see me in all my wit and sheer animal charisma.)
I was glad to bash Trump, and glad Ramin included my wry comment that Trump’s base “and hopefully the Democratic base as well” despises forever wars, since at tomorrow’s “No Kings” rallies, if my previous experience is any guide, I expect to encounter not the slightest antiwar (or antigenocide!) message outside a scattering of signs brought by a few individuals entirely unasked.
I’ll bring a Ukraine banner. Were it a Republican rally I’d focus on Gaza, since it’s the growing antizionist trend among young Republicans, not Democrats, which seems capable of turning a Defund Israel demand from an urbane fashion gesture a movement able to spare Gazan lives, and spare our world the horror of a U.S.-Iran war. But for a Dem rally it’s the comparably apocalyptic horror of what my parents’ generation rightly deemed unthinkable – a hot NATO-Russia war – on which I’ll want to focus.
I was glad Ramin included my copious mockery of the lesser-evil Presidential option for whom, last November I (full disclosure!) grimly voted. Humanitarians are few and far between even outside higher office, and it’s long since serious empathy has surived a leader’s rise to the top of either U.S. party. Trump is, at least, a cynical con man and not a true-believer neocon: a self-devoted opportunist and not a future-looking fanatic intent on stamping our remarkably conservative planet with the West’s own corporate-technocratic template.
I didn’t lie observing that Trump prefers to attempt the assassination of rival leaders, often under cover of peace talks as with Iran last June, seeking to avoid the protracted wars he knows he would find so burdensome to manage. After which it’s TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out, as if in the leadership of a nuclear-armed global pariah, caution were ever an unwelcome thing. Trump seems sincerely to fear dying in a nuclear war: for those of us whose obsessing ethical commitment is to avoid killing in one, it’s hard to see the leader’s lack of courage as a downside.
Trump seems correspondingly inclined to retreat into our hemisphere from potentially nuclear conflicts in the other one, savaging neighbors like Venezuela and even deploying forces within the U.S. so as to seem tough without completing the apocalypse scripted for him to enact in Eurasia. His voting base, without a doubt, fears both tyranny and civil war, and will tolerate talk of domestic troop deployments only in what seems to them, as the Jan 6th protests seemed, a defense of democracy rather than an attack upon it.
Tomorrow’s Chicago rally will focus on the few hundred National Guardsmen Trump has sent onto Chicago streets in support of a set of nationally popular federal laws that Trump’s base considers it wrong for the wealthier states to nullify. Liberals are right to note the terrible suffering now facing decent and hard-working neighbors illegally here, and many full citizens caught up in the chaos besides. Conservatives consider the citizenship bond to be an indispensible contract, much much like a labor contract in there tragically needing to be stern penalties for the otherwise justly pitied (because often desperate) willing to work outside of it.
At tomorrow’s rally many will be satisfied by self-pronouncements that tighter borders, by restricting the laissez-faire global flow of cheap labor, constitute fascism itself; whereas others will fear the brutality, and the future fascist danger, of using troops untrained in policing to enforce laws which America’s metropolitan wealth centers are making a bid, against the “fascist” preferences of the electorate, to block from being enforced.
I’ll be focused on antiwar, and praying that the Orange Narcissist, although pressured by bipartisan neocon fanatics to remake the world in America’s and Europe’s image, will for his own typically dingy reasons and to humor antiwar cries sometimes sounding loudest from his own base, sate bloodthirsty Washington with bluster, trolling, a mix of real and staged idiocy, and the bare minimum of actual gore allowed to the president of such a petulantly imperial nation.
I pray that, instead of Obama’s “kill list” updated weekly over years, Trump will stop at the grisly trophy of several score poor fishermen brutally murdered off the Venezuelan coast, and several score ethnically Venezuelan U.S. citizens sent – I can only pray, briefly – to the new Guantanamo prison bays we are renting in El Salvador.
I will hope that my Ukraine banner, in countering insane calls for a desperate, speciescidal grab for dominance in Eastern Europe, will be giving the Monster space to make a smaller murder-pageant of his Iran and Venezuela wars-in-preparation, so that those countries alongside the entire Global South can strengthen themselves against the U.S. enough to approach that future for which the humane all so desperately long – in which the Global South is at last wealthy enough, relative to a far less wasteful and rapacious U.S., to turn _us_ away from its well-appointed (and sufficiently armed) gates, without getting called “fascist” into the bargain.
I can’t have a conscience cleansed of the blood of empire until there can be a left-and-right movement against war, against actual fascism like that of present-day Kyiv and Tel Aviv, and against the Lovecraft-blasphemous omnicide gamble that is the American doomsday arsenal. I can’t be doing with throwing the word “fascist” around at global or domestic majorities. May liberals and conservatives both forgive me long enough to unite for a world where countries like Venezuela can retain elected leaders not cynically relabeled and ousted as ‘Kings’ by our own elites; where a very conservative species is spared from how fascism’s birthplace, the inventive, liberal, world-colonizing West, has so long been tempted to rule.
