From the gaudy gold-leafed Oval Office – the centre of international squalor in diplomacy – Donald Trump, the idiot king, pronounced the American equivalent of a fatwa. Directed at the equally loathsome leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it warned against the execution of any opposition political figures involved in massive street protests which occurred over the last three weeks across Iran.
More than this, the septuagenarian draft dodger urged the people of Iran, young and old, to take to the streets to topple the regime of the ayatollahs.
Encouraged by Washington, street protesters had their ranks swollen by huge numbers of fellow citizens in the hope and expectation that decades of misrule by the Shia hierarchy would come to an end.
Reports from Iran indicate that many thousands of Iranian civilians have lost their lives in a brutal repression presided over by their supreme leader.
Quite how many have perished is unknown, but while there are political motives both for minimising and maximising the death toll, it seems that between 8,000 and 12,000 street protesters have been murdered by Iran’s security forces. Red lines imagined by the idiot king for action against Iran were well and truly exceeded before being washed away in blood. His statement that the US was “locked and loaded” turned out to be bombast.
Contrast this with the treatment by Trump’s own security forces of protesting citizens on the streets of Minneapolis at the same time. Having renamed the department of defence as the department of war, Trump has been seeking every possible pretext to deploy his army on the streets of America’s cities to confront and suppress disorder. Armed US security forces of one kind or another are patrolling the streets with menacing firepower.
Border forces have been deployed in the American heartlands – masked, camouflaged and bristling with firearms. Unmarked vehicles are snatching olive and dark-skinned Americans on streets, in workplaces, in shopping malls and outside schools. Babies born in the US are being forcibly separated from mothers. An American gulag of detention-for-profit centres has been built and financed by quick-buck Trump supporters. An Irish grandmother was detained for weeks on the basis that she had bounced a cheque more than 10 years ago, notwithstanding her official immigration status in the US.
A culture of fear has descended like a cloud on all immigrant community areas mostly populated by those who clean, sweep, launder, deliver, garden the homes of smug and comfortable supporters of Trump.
Those who in the past were encouraged to stand up against Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro – and fled to the US seeking protection from dictatorship in the belief and on the understanding that the US would protect them – have suddenly become a threat to America’s security. Now they face being rounded up by his thugs.
All my life, the US was generous to those who fled Cuba for Florida to escape Castro’s communist regime. Their likes now have become a threat to American security. The difference in the treatment of Cuba’s political expat refugees in the 20th century and those who still want to escape communist repression in Cuba is startling.
Volunteers for enrolment in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) receive cash bounties of up to $50,000. The vicious execution of Renée Good, a well-intentioned mother, a sometime poet and Christian minister, was immediately characterised with Trump’s approval as self-defence and lawful action to prevent her from weaponising her car as an instrument of terror.
That description was carefully composed in the bowels of the White House to blacken the name of Trump’s victim in the eyes of ordinary Americans. Trump’s responsibility in the murder of Good calls out to the heavens for justice. The savage minion who fired the shots will escape accountability and receive a full pardon from Trump to prevent any future reinvestigation.
The monstrous calumny designed to damnify Good was attempted again by the same administration in the case of Alex Pretti, a good man whose life was devoted to the public good, including the medical care of America’s veterans. After a thuggish assault perpetrated on him and after Trump’s thugs discovered that he was (lawfully) carrying a weapon as he lay on the ground, they took that unbrandished weapon from him and fired 10 shots at his body with the intention of killing him. His blood is on Trump’s hands.
We are only a quarter way into the term of this presidency. Are we condemned to watch this chainsaw-massacre political horror movie to its very end? In Ireland, a nagging thought endures. Who are the people who have nothing negative to say about Trump?
It was touching to see that, a week after Trump’s Greenland debacle, Declan Ganley tweeted the suggestion that the US might annexe the only remaining unclaimed territory in Antarctica, the strangely named Marie Byrd Land. How thoughtful.