On Saturday, January 3, the American government launched an unprovoked, unjustifiable and illegal attack on the sovereign country of Venezuela, killed at least 80 people, bombed civilian and military areas, kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Adela Flores de Maduro; and brought them to the United States to try them and extort oil and other things from the remaining government officials. This imperialist aggression not only violates international law and the rights of the Venezuelan people, it also reflects an increasing move back toward colonialism and Europeans’ claim of divine right to conquer, forcibly convert and savagely “civilize” people who weren’t, they claimed, capable of ruling themselves after thousands of years of having done so before the advent of these imposter saviors.
Since its founding, the US has suffered from an acute addiction to myths, illusions and outright lies about the disastrous and decimating effects on the lives and lands of other peoples different and vulnerable. And it will not give them up easily, as evident by the recent attempts to eliminate Black Studies and other Ethnic Studies, the banning and burning of books, rewriting history and demanding the teaching of myths, lies and illusions as truth and history. But as Nana Fannie Lou Hamer taught, if we are ever to free ourselves and this country from its oppressive practices, we must stop its lying and end the system that lives and kills and justifies itself by lies.
Thus, in spite of Robert Frost’s poetic contention that “The land was ours before we were the land’s”, this is no more than a racist and rhetorical attempt to deny and erase the living presence and rightful claims of Native Americans, and intended or not, a perverse and pathetic effort to avoid the evidence and accountability for genocide. Likewise, God is not a real estate agent making deals, giving or promising White people other peoples’ lands and blessing them in their genocidal wars to conquer and exploit these lands and their peoples. In a word, regardless of the doctrines claimed and clamored, this is imperial conquest and plunder, not a gift, sign, signal or assignment of specialness and superiority from God. Thus, the Monroe Doctrine, which Trump attempts to raise from the dead, claimed the Western Hemisphere for American imperial plunder, warned continental Europeans away, and pretended interest in the independence of these countries, but actually dictated and degraded their lives and futures until resisted.
Given this addiction to myths, illusions and lies about its role in history, it is no wonder that the country’s illusion of a divinely ordained manifest destiny to conquer, control and plunder the lives and lands of vulnerable and different peoples would find its current iteration in the vulgar and vapid mouth and mind of the would-be Emperor of the Nordic North, Donald Trump. Lacking both skill and will to do the diplomatic disguised thing, Trump embraces outright thuggery, forming and presiding over a gangsta government, moving between cartel to corporate thuggery with perverse ease and enjoyment. Thus, without an iota of shame or shallow pretense of concern for the welfare of the Venezuelan people, he declares as a gangsta boss that he is going to run the country, take the oil and impose heavy penalties of life and death on anyone who does not cooperate, cower and come to terms with him.
Here it is important to note that Trump is not saying and doing these anti-human and anti-earth things alone, for he has abundant assistance, sanction and support, open and disguised. Indeed, he is simply the monster side of America, the morally hideous Mr. Hyde, periodically appearing in diplomatic disguise as Dr. Jekyll, talking about democracy, Christianity, freedom, justice and such, but eventually falling on all four and werewolfing the world. Indeed, it is his favorite position and practice, regardless of other nights and days on the town and turf.
It is clearly more comforting and convenient for the perpetuators, enablers, pundits and people who don’t want to think about the problems of the world and what the US is doing to it and its peoples to focus on some vulnerable scapegoat and shameless excuse for violating international law and the human rights of others. But genocide in Palestine, mass murder and resource robbery in the Democratic Republic of Congo, centuries of savagery against Haiti and all the other imperial plunder and crimes against heaven, humanity and the earth will not and must not go unanswered. Indeed, they will not remain absent from the hearts and minds of the people oppressed and in struggle nor anyone with minimum moral conscience. As Nana Dr. Martin Luther King taught, “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. But let’s be clear about this teaching; it depends on the oppressed and struggling peoples of the world daring to help bend that arc through righteous and relentless struggle.
Likewise, Nana Haji Malcolm taught, that regardless of the time and manner it takes, the chickens of history will eventually come home to roost. Moreover, if the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice and the chickens of history always come home, no morally sensitive and thinking person can doubt that there is still a just and heavy price to pay for the oppressors of the world. And whether that justice is reparative or retributive or both, we should not believe evil, injustice and oppression will reign unchallenged or unchecked forever. Surely, it is the people who will free themselves from oppression and injustices of varied kinds. We cannot count on the liberals who are on leave; the Democrats who voice concerns essentially about not being asked about imperial plunder rather than preventing and ending it; or the media reduced to discussing Trump’s twisted narratives, absorbing insults, and abandoning any demonstrations of a moral and professional commitment to question, criticize and oppose violations of life, rights and law.
Clearly, this calls for some hard choices in the midst of all kinds of disadvantages and dangers for daring to speak truth to the people and to power and to engage in righteous and relentless resistance on every level. These disadvantages and devastating effects include the loss of funding, favor, employment, freedom, security, and all things related. But I think here of those who rose up in resistance before us, not only in the Holocaust of enslavement, but also in the savagery of segregation and audaciously offered their life and death to the sacred cause of freedom and justice and other shared goods in the world. And I’m reassured that if we are to honor their legacy by trying as best we can to live it, then, we must believe, hope and do no less.
