Happy New Year from Your Favorite Cassandra

As soon as I heard Trump declare fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction,” I knew the naval blockade of Venezuela wasn’t just posturing. The United States was getting ready to go in there with guns blazing and take that country.

No matter that Venezuela doesn’t manufacture or export the drug. No matter that no evidence exists that Venezuelan President Maduro is involved in drug trafficking. And, given that Trump just pardoned former extreme right-wing Honduran President Hernandez, who actually was serving a 45-year sentence, convicted in U.S. court on drug trafficking charges, no one should take seriously White House claims of concern about drugs flowing into the country.

As soon as Trump said, “we’re going to take our oil back,” I knew the coming annexation would signal a terrifying regression from centuries of civilizational norms.

And the mainstream media is already toeing the line.

Using verbal gyrations such as “not adhering to international rules instead of the most accurate phrase “violated international law,” or saying that President Maduro and his wife were “captured” instead of “kidnapped,” the corporate press is beginning the process of manufacturing consent for what will likely be the most barbaric, protracted act of conquest since Spain invaded South America in the 15th Century.

Already, network correspondents are busily interviewing disgruntled Venezuelan expats who, we are to believe, just organically erupted out into the streets in Florida to celebrate the U.S. attack on their sovereign nation of birth.

What comes next? Quite likely World War III. Russia and China urged the United States over a week ago not to invade. Their expansive investments in Venezuela are profoundly threatened now that the U.S. is going to “run the country” for an indefinite period of time.

I am, of course, frightened by the potential for unprecedented carnage, nuclear and otherwise, that would be unleashed by a global conflict in the 21st Century. The planet could end up a smoldering rock between Venus and Mars in a matter of hours. But, barring that outcome, I want to focus on the rapid changes that are on the cusp of shattering American democracy and reshaping civil society at large.

In previous fits of U.S. military adventurism, propaganda played a key role. In Iraq I, we watched as 15 year old “Nayirah,” supposedly a hospital volunteer in Kuwait, wept before Congress in October, 1990, as she described Iraq soldiers ripping infants out of incubators and leaving them on the hospital floor to die. It was a lie. She’d never been a volunteer and had never set foot in the hospital in question. Amnesty International reported that no such incident occurred.

She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States who had been coached for weeks by PR firm Hill & Knowlton to deliver an Oscar-worthy performance, complete with tears on command. Americans witnessed her artificial anguish live on CNN. President H.W. Bush repeated the story ten times over the next week. Congress authorized the use of military force.

No one was ever held accountable for the epic mind-fuck perpetrated on the American people. No one apologized for orchestrating an illegal psy-op that dragged dragged the country into a conflict that killed over 300 U.S. troops, wounded 1,000 and killed over 100,000 Iraqi soldiers.

And achieved nothing. Other than dramatically sever ties with the strongman, Saddam Hussein, who had been the U.S.’s go-to guy in Iraq since we installed him years earlier.

In Iraq II + Afghanistan, George Bush, Jr. in a succession sequel Shakespeare would have been ashamed to put his name to, the administration tried on justifications for war like it was trying on shirts at a thrift store until it found one that fit. Hussein was poisoning his own people with chemical weapons. The U.S. was concerned with the rights of women. Ethnic minorities, the Kurds (who we threw under the bus eventually, anyway) were in danger. Finally, General Colin Powell gave his own performance, this time in front of the United Nations, brandishing a small vial of white power (which might as well have been baking soda), claiming that Iraq was on the cusp of launching a nuclear weapon.

Again. All lies. We were not greeted as liberators. We destroyed a country, destabilized a region, caused the deaths of millions of Iraqi civilians, many of them children, and either got thousands of American soldiers killed or wounded, or exposed them to toxins resulting in Gulf War syndrome.

And while administrations changed, the logic of empire didn’t. In between the administrations of Bush Jr. and Joe Biden, President Obama largely reduced the torture of Iraqis in favor of drone-striking the fuck out of any potential “enemy combatant,” which is to say, males over the age of fourteen. Justification? Same basic reason he gave for not closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay — we’d radicalized the Iraqis so much, and they now hated us so much, that we really had to just continue the killing until all that was left was women and old men.

But at least, in the past, the U.S. supplied its voters and the world at large with some kind of reasons for our aggression, however propagandistic or transparently bullshit they were.

Not now though. Not really. The Trump administration throws lame excuses out there for the violence he’s exporting, not caring whether or not anyone believes them. This is the behavior of an extreme authoritarian confident that he is entitled to complete dictatorial powers. And when such a head of state ceases to care what his subjects believe, things are on the verge of getting dangerous in the homeland for anyone who dares object, or even question, the actions and motives of the chief executive.

The U.S. has a pretty dismal history of protecting free speech during wartime. From jailing leafleters to deporting mouthy immigrants to outright shooting college students in Ohio, the vast majority of wartime administrations have sicced the Justice Department, local police, and the military on protesters in the streets, in academia, and on the printed page. The coming crackdown will be all that and more on steroids.

How do I know?

Well, if you read my piece on the security memo sent out by Attorney General Pam Bondi last month, you’ll remember that the White House is calling for dossiers to be opened on individuals and groups termed as vaguely as “anti-American” or “anti-police” or “anti-capitalist.” While the memo also targeted entities with extreme ideologies supporting transgender and immigrant rights, I now believe that these inclusions were more to get the MAGA base rabidly enthusiastic for the cherry on top of this totalitarian sundae:

Paying cash rewards to citizens who spy and inform on their neighbors and families.

The intelligence and law enforcement sectors have been ordered to comply. That’s right, Your Friend the Policeman (Frances R Horwich, 1953) is coming for you. Make no mistake — the growing fascism is going to go way beyond Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” While the memo carefully avoided using the word “dissent,” vocal opposition to U.S. war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of international law will be monitored, investigated, and crushed.

How do I know?

A few years ago, in the “beautiful village” of Williamstown, the police department created dossiers on dozens of local activists all on its own (we are to believe), and only ceased when a whistleblower outed this anti-democratic, Orwellian practice. While new leadership is in place in the Williamstown PD, why would we assume that it would put up much, if any resistance, to such a directive coming directly from the Oval Office? They won’t.

Other police departments around Western Massachusetts, populated largely by right-leaning officers and commanders, show their disdain for the protection of constitutionally guaranteed right on the regular, meaning that one of the most (questionably) progressive areas in the country will be subject to the exact methods of repression as communities in the reddest of red states.

There will be reported arrests. There will be disappearances. There will be investigations that make the House UnAmerican Activities Committee look like a social club. Families and communities will be split apart.

Of course, things might not go, probably won’t go, from zero to sixty in four seconds on the dystopia scale. Plenty of societal punishment awaits those of us who get out of line: job loss, blacklisting, funding denial, housing precarity…

Not arrests yet — pressure. The slow squeeze.

And this administration will divide and divide and divide and conquer until Americans are too terrified to speak up. Intelligence agencies (more likely their contractors) will sift through social media looking for thoughtcrime posts. Professors will be fired and ostracized. Activists on the street will face increasingly brutal suppression, probably up to, and including, live fire.

To many of you, this will all sound like a paranoid fever dream. I get it. You grew up on the same “School House Rock” version of America that I did. Your history classes painted this Land of the Free in the best possible light, excusing centuries of atrocities with an optimistic, “Well, we wouldn’t do Manifest Destiny the same way today!”

But we would. We are. Right now in Palestine. Right now in Africa. And right now in Venezuela. The fact that “independent” Senator Bernie Sanders called on Trump to ask Congress for a formal Declaration of War before continuing the annexation of a sovereign country that poses zero threat to the U.S. demonstrated how utterly fucked we are.

But I’m going to dig in at the local level to do what I can to protect basic human rights here at home and show how violations at the local level are the trickle down fascist impulses from above. I will do this work as long as I can. I will continue until I am disappeared, as I fear many independent journalists will be very soon. I will continue until this fucking tyrant is deposed and a liberty-respecting administration takes its place, or, as the entire world fears as it holds its collective breath, the nuclear missiles are launched and the home of Raytheon and General Dynamics is bombed back to the Stone Age. Our silence increases our own vulnerability.

Independent journalism is one of the few weapons against off-the-rails tyranny left that still works.

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