Touching the humanity of the American public

Venezuela's president sits in a US jail, having been abducted by a military invasion. There is no doubt that what the US has done violates the UN Charter as well as any number of international laws. How did Trump pull it off?

Maybe he was just being an imperialist like his predecessors. According to research at Boston College, the US has attempted regime change 72 times since World War II. A little less than half were successful. Most notable overthrows include: Iran, Guatemala, Congo, South Vietnam, Brazil, Ghana, Chile, Panama. Haiti, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Honduras, Libya, and Venezuela. Thousands have perished in these assassinations and coups. And millions more have been slaughtered in the decades of human rights abuses that have inevitably followed.

How is it that the citizens of our democracy have let these war crimes go on for 80 years? Is it just ignorance, which our schools, political parties and mass media are only too willing to perpetuate? Our nation's billionaires have bought up most sources of actual information, so we can't expect too much help there.

What may finally shame the US public into action is the blatant genocide our government is waging in Palestine. There is no attempt to hide the 20,000 children who have been murdered. We can see the rest in their makeshift tents, without food, water, or electricity. The US is the driving force behind the worst bloodbath of the 21st century. Maybe that will finally touch the humanity of the American public.

Fred Nagel

Without Ethics or Empathy

Donald Trump has always considered himself above the law. Much of his bravado comes from his mentor and father figure, the infamous lawyer of the McCarthy Era, Roy Cohn. A man without ethics or empathy, Cohn could be counted on to always take the low road. He never admitted to being wrong, and invariably counter attacked when his misconduct was exposed. He worked tirelessly to get gays fired from their government position, all the while being a closeted gay himself. He died of AIDS, after having been disbarred for unethical and unprofessional conduct.

Few international leaders have been influenced by a more conniving person than the likes of Roy Cohn. Only Hitler had a worse gang of sycophants. Goebbels, the Minister of German propaganda, considered lying to the public a form of art. Goring, was notorious in his theft of fine art and jewelry, much of it stolen from his Jewish victims. And Himmler ran the SS, the group responsible for the "Final Solution."

Surrounding oneself with liars, thieves and miscreants makes one vulnerable to making terrible decisions. Hitler tried to conquer the world in a mixture of racism and poor judgement. And it looks like Trump may do the same. He has threatened almost every US ally with military invasions. He has sent his fleet of aircraft carriers around the world to prove his dominance and masculinity. From the genocide of the Palestinian people to the war crime of threatening other sovereign nations, Trump is a clear and present danger to life on Earth.    

Fred Nagel

 

Faster than anyone could have guessed

The US attack on Venezuela takes us back to the 1930s, when a pretentious and histrionic buffoon somehow become the head of the most powerful military in Europe. He claimed that other sovereign nations (Austria, Czechoslovakia, and finally Poland) really belonged to him and his Third Reich. Somehow Germany's richest industrialists (Krupp, I.G. Farben, Siemens, BMW, and Volkswagen) were there to fund his dream of making the Germanic race great again.

So is Trump now moving in a similarly dangerous direction? Like many authoritarians, Trump has moved much faster than anyone could have guessed. He has destroyed freedom of speech on most college campuses with his demands that criticism of the genocidal state of Israel is antisemitic. His Billionaire buddies have bought up a great deal of the nations' newspapers and TV stations (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdock, Marc Benioff, Larry Ellison, and John Henry). He has taken control of ICE, a private army paid for by the public. And Trump has greatly benefited from the weakest and most corrupt of any modern day opposition party. They are all on the same Israeli payroll.

Now the tyrant is making his list of the next countries to attack. He wants the military to increase its budget by half a trillion next year. And ICE has begun shooting protesters and calling them terrorists. We don't really need to understand the rise of fascism in the 30s. The takeover and destruction of our precious democracy is already upon us.

Fred Nagel

Military empires end up destroying their own people.

The United States is in a time of transition, from democracy to imperial rule. Of course, the overthrow of Venezuela was a long time coming. Trump wasn't the only president to shred international law and proclaim that anything the empire wants is fair game. No, our two party, one military industrial complex has been waging illegal wars for years.

Trump's overthrow of yet another country, however, is without the usual nuance or pretense. Perhaps he doesn't have the vocabulary to say things in more than one way. The US wants all the world's oil, so it is willing to destroy the Middle East to get it. Israel is our partner in crime, and no slaughter of the Palestinians is too much. No subterfuge here.

One change in US imperialism is the level of profiteering that our president is willing to take part in. He will be building gambling casinos on the bones of six million Palestinian people. A Gilded Age charnel house.   

Another aspect of this different direction seems even more dramatic. The rest of the world has come to expect naked imperialism from our country, so there is little change in their expectations. The "land of the free" will continue taking what it wants. No, this transition is about who runs the empire once it has committed itself to crimes against humanity. Like various authoritarian regimes in the past, the US will now be run by its billionaire class, freed from all the complexities of representative democracy. Welcome to a fascist America.