We Want Their Oil
The American Empire’s current emperor kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Sunday. But this is not something new under the sun for America. The USA has been kidnapping geopolitical rivals for show trials or imperial theatre since it abducted Philippine President Emilio Aguinaldo in 1901.
But this practice of state terror began earlier, with Native Americans, when U.S. forces seized Geronimo in 1886 to humiliate Indigenous nations and bring an end to organised resistance against colonialism.
What Trump has done is not new.
What people find terrifying about Donald Trump is that he behaves like the Penn & Teller of tyrants—revealing the mechanics of the trick instead of disguising it in euphemism.
“We want their oil.”
Donald Trump owns this part of the 21st century, just as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini owned their part of the 20th, because there was too much money to be made by supporting him, or the dysfunctional capitalist system that made him a colossus of influence.
It is unlikely that Trump will meet a fate like that of those two tyrants encountered in 1945. Trump will go like Louis the 15th because after him will be the deluge.
Except for the flood to come falling, his natural demise won’t usher in a new era of freedom and democracy, but a more sinister and efficient terror.
The West’s entitled class, which also comprises those who govern us, signed society’s death warrant by participating in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
That is what officially put an end to the rules-based order the Western World has depended on for prosperity and stability since the end of WW2.
Once that was done, appeasing Trump’s fascism and megalomania became inevitable.
Western governments’ gleeful entanglement in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians is because the entitled who run things in the West believe that the mass death of a civilian population has long-term benefits for the maintenance of their wealth and power.
They dispensed with even the pretense of law.
So the world will contend with a digital version of the divine right of Kings backed by the currency of might.
Once Donald Trump illegally bombed Iran’s Nuclear sites, he confirmed America was done with diplomacy, the way the 1930s dispensed with the League of Nations and international diplomacy after Mussolini invaded Abyssinia.
So, the kidnapping of Maduro should have been predicted by analysts the way a commuter knows when a cross-town bus will arrive at their stop.
The only diplomacy Trump will now employ is either gunboat diplomacy or diplomacy as deception before an actual war.
Since there was no pushback by his allies, domestic or foreign, after he bombed Iran, Trump is like a tiger that has tasted human blood. The American President’s lust for mayhem and regime change was whetted rather than sated.
He will murder foreign leaders much like Israel does now, which will invite the murder of Western allies by geopolitical rivals.
Trump will attempt and most likely succeed in taking Greenland. He spent the last 48 hours trolling his Western allies about annexing it.
Yet, outside of statements that Greenland is a semi-autonomous part of Denmark, none of these governments brought in the US ambassador for a dressing down over their President’s bellicosity.
It gives me the sense it’s a fait accompli.
It’s academic if he really needs to annex Canada.
Politically and economically, the nation’s elite will happily occupy the role of Vichy France to Hitler’s Germany as long as they are provided with the illusion of power and the substance of wealth.
But if it were annexed, it would go like Austria to Hitler in 1938 without a shot being fired.
My predictions are that Canadians, like those 1930s Austrians, would be the most fervent supporters of fascism and being citizens of the Empire.
How many Rubicons can Trump cross before everyone gets it?
He and the 1% made a desert of our world and called it peace.
The West isn’t at a crossroads.
It’s at its destination—Golgotha and each of us is now on the cross because of our leaders.
We can only hope that the fall of our Empire happens in a few years rather than over a decade of painful wars and despair not seen since WW2.
For the past eighteen months, I’ve been finishing The Green and Pleasant Land — the book my dad never had the chance to complete. It’s now finished and ready to find its audience. If you’d like a beta copy, just send me a DM.
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