Matthew Carr's Blog, page 4

Hotel Bukele

La Prensa Gráfica Noticias de El Salvador

Many years ago, I interviewed two former leftist guerrillas in El Salvador who had recently become detectives in the national police force. It was an improbable transition, which followed the 1993 Chapultepec Peace Accords that brought the Central American civil wars to an end. As a consequence of this process, these dapper besuited ex-guerrilleros had become members of the security forces that they had spent their youth fighting.

The seeming turnaround was part of a reconciliation effort, supported by the United Nations, which aimed to wean El Salvador’s security forces away from a modus operandi that relied heavily on torture and executions.

My interviewees wanted to do things differently. They had received training from British and American law enforcement officers, and were fully-committed to the new civilian-based policing that they saw as essential to El Salvador’s democratic transition.

I was impressed by their idealism and dedication, but sceptical as to how all this would work out. Because even though the 12-year civil war was over, El Salvador was still a country where people were murdered every day in the course of robberies, or porque sí - for no reason at all.

With post-war demobilisation still underway, bank robberies were likely to be carried out by former combatants using rocket launchers and machine guns. And even then, there was the emerging problem of the maras - gangs - the most notorious of which was the Mara Salvatrucha 13 - a gang originally formed amongst Salvadoran migrants in Los Angeles, whose members had been deported back to El Salvador in 1992.

I’ve often wondered what happened to those two brave young detectives in the years that followed, as the gangs subjected El Salvador to levels of violence not seen since the civil war. Did they survive this maelstrom? Did they remain the good cops they wanted to be - protecting the community and conducting law enforcement according to democratic norms? Or did they succumb to the dark undertow of Salvadoran history, and slide into the brutality and violence of their predecessors?

After all, this was a country where a small oligarchical elite had always treated the rest of the population like serfs, and responded to any demand for change with extreme violence. In 1932, as many as 30,000 peasants were slaughtered by the security forces as punishment for rebellion - an event that Salvadorans remember as la matanza - the massacre. The dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who oversaw this bloodbath, was a theosophist and occultist, who held seances in his house, and once declared that it was ‘a greater crime to kill an ant than a man, for when a man dies he becomes reincarnated, while an ant dies forever.’

In the 1960s, one Salvadoran landowner had his workers shot because they had the temerity to complain that their lunches were served with rotten beans. In the early years of the Salvadoran civil war, the army, the National Guard, the Treasury Police, and an assortment of paramilitaries - most of whom were off-duty soldiers and police - killed and tortured tens of thousands of Salvadorans with complete impunity.

None of this seemed conducive to evidence-based detective work. And whatever happened to those two guerrilla-detectives, their country did not become the model of democratic governance that they hoped to build. By 2016, internecine gang violence had transformed El Salvador into the murder capital of the world. The violence reached a peak in March 2023, when 87 people were murdered in a single weekend.

That month, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele - the self-styled ‘world’s coolest dictator’, ushered in a state of exception in which 53,000 gang members and former gang members were arrested and locked up over a six-month period By 2024 the figure may have risen to 100,000, out of a population of just under six and a half million, and the murder capital of the world acquired a new reputation as the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

Most of these prisoners held in the 40,000-capacity prison complex known as the CECOT - Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (Terrorism Confinement Centre). As the name suggests, this was not a ‘prison’ in the sense that the term is generally understood. Though the CECOT’s detainees included some seriously violent men, many prisoners were simply arrested for ‘illicit association’, on the basis of their tattoos or their presence in a particular locality.

In theory, state prosecutors were expected to provide evidence justifying their arrest within four years, but in practice there were few formal charges, no determined length of sentence, and little or no possibility of rehabilitation. Prisoners were given identical shaven haircuts, white vests and boxer shorts, and slept on metal bunks, 100 to a room with two toilets, two sinks and no mattresses, under 24-hour surveillance with the lights permanently on. No family visits or contact with family members were permitted and exercise was restricted to half an hour a day in the prison corridors.

These prisoners included men - and some 7,000 women - who had once been gang members and left the gangs, and former gang members-turned-evangelical pastors who had been trying to persuade their former comrades to reject the gangs.

The Dumping Ground

Such distinctions were no longer relevant to a government that depicted criminals as terrorists, and used the prison system as a warehouse for whoever it wanted to put there. During a visit to ‘Latin America’s biggest prison’ in January this year, the CECOT prison director Belarmino García told journalists from the France 24 network that the inmates were ‘psychopaths who will be difficult to rehabilitate. That’s why they are here, in a maximum prison that they will never leave.’

Hundreds of CECOT prisoners will definitely never leave. According to the Anglican Church’s human rights organization Cristosal, 261 adults and four children have died in state custody since the introduction of the state of exception, as a result of ‘torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of people held in prisons…in conditions that sometimes caused death.’

In effect, the CECOT became the real life version of the Erewhon Prison in John Woo’s Face/Off, where the warden tells Sean Archer:

You are now the property of Erewhon Prison. A citizen of nowhere. The Geneva Convention is void here. Amnesty International doesn’t know we exist. When I say your ass belongs to me, I mean exactly that.

All this was popular with Salvadorans, as the murder rate fell and schools, streets and neighbourhoods became safe again. According to the International Crisis Group - a far more reliable source than the Salvadoran government - the drop in the murder rate was due not so much to the rate of incarceration, but to secret truce negotiations between Bukele and the leaders of the two major gangs - negotiations which Bukele has since denied ever took place.

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Few Salvadorans were bothered about how this outcome came about. In February 2024, the world’s coolest dictator won a landslide electoral victory, and today Bukele’s state of exception is still in place, and looks set to be permanently extendable.

Under Bukele’s ‘No Idleness’ policy, El Salvador’s prisons have become forced labour camps, where inmates work for nothing in textiles, manufacturing and agriculture. And now, in a world where terms like ‘illegal immigrant’, ‘terrorist’ and ‘criminal’ have become increasingly synonymous, Bukele has transformed El Salvador’s prison system into a national asset that other countries can take advantage of.

Before his election, Donald Trump often expressed his admiration for Bukele’s system, and earlier this month, the US sent 238 Venezuelans rounded up in Texas to El Salvador to be incarcerated in the CECOT. The Time journalist Philip Holsinger described how these deportees were greeted by ‘an ocean of soldiers and police, an entire army assembled to apprehend them.’ Following their arrival at the prison complex, the following horrendous scene ensued:

The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster.

The men were pulled from the buses so fast the guards couldn’t keep pace. Chained at their ankles and wrists, they stumbled and fell, some guards falling to the ground with them. With each fall came a kick, a slap, a shove. The guards grabbed necks and pushed bodies into the sides of the buses as they forced the detainees forward. There was no blood, but the violence had rhythm, like a theater of fear.

Inside the intake room, a sea of trustees descended on the men with electric shavers, stripping heads of hair with haste. The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.

The world’s coolest dictator celebrated these deportations with a typically gleeful video on X showing the deportees shackled and escorted by soldiers, accompanied a raucous musical soundtrack because, as I say, this is a cool dictator. Bukele boasted in his post:

The United States will pay a very low fee for them [the prisoners] but a high one for us. Over time, these actions, combined with the production already being generated by more than 40,000 inmates engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program, will help make our prison system self-sustainable. As of today, it costs $200 million per year…As always, we continue advancing in the fight against organized crime. But this time, we are also helping our allies, making our prison system self-sustainable, and obtaining vital intelligence to make our country an even safer place. All in a single action.

Naturally, Trump and his MAGA lackeys joined in the celebrations. The White House posted a mocking video showing shackled migrants being searched, accompanied by the Semisonic 1998 hit ‘Closing Time.’ Trump’s sinister press secretary Karoline Leavitt aka MAGA Goebbels - laughed in a press conference that this video was intended to encourage ‘illegal immigrants to actively self-deport, to maybe save themselves from being in one of those fun videos’.

Trump himself has now promised to give ‘Tesla vandals’ 20-year sentences for ‘what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla’ and jokes: ‘Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions.’

Though the Trump administration has called these deportees ‘monsters’ and gangsters, it has not provided any evidence for the crimes they were accused of. It has since emerged that some of the deportees had already signed papers agreeing to return to Venezuela. Families and attorneys have recognized clients and relatives, who they insist were not gang members. The gay man described by the Time journalist may well be the anti-Maduro activist client of the attorney Lindsay Toczylowski, who told NBC News: ‘We have no idea if there is any legal process by which we can challenge this, either in El Salvador or the United States. This is the grossest human rights violation I have seen.’

There is terrible historical irony here, which is likely to be lost on the ghouls who authorized these procedures. The US infamously supported and funded the succession of military and pseudo-democratic regimes that terrorised the Salvadoran population in the late 1970s and 80s.

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It was in the US that El Salvador’s most notorious gangs were founded, and then deported back to El Salvador. Now the Trump administration has sent unwanted immigrants from Venezuela to indefinite incarceration in El Salvador, and the world’s coolest dictator has accepted them in return for a few million dollars.

Guantanamo Bay was bad enough - and it should not be forgotten that many of those who now criticize Trump, supported detention without charge for the real or suspected terrorists who George W. Bush called the ‘worst of the worst.’ But at least Guantanamo was under US jurisdiction. As difficult as it was, lawyers could take up cases and fight for their clients.

There is no such possibility in the CECOT. The US are now removing foreign citizens from its national territory and delivering them to a country where there are no legal rights and no legal parameters, and no possibility of escape and where - according to the world’s coolest dictator - they will have to perform forced labour.

Bukele has also offered to incarcerate US citizens in El Salvador’s prison complex - an offer for which US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described himself ‘profoundly grateful…no country’s ever made an offer of friendship such as this.’

Indeed they haven’t, and the fact that the US is considering El Salvador as a destination for its own criminals is further evidence of the stunning descent of the world’s flagship democracy into the moral sewer.

The essential hallmark of fascism is institutionalised cruelty, but it takes time to make such cruelty acceptable to the populace. The abandonment of moral and legal standards may be slow and gradual - for a while - as the government or regime tests the waters and sees how much it can get away with. But there comes a point when the descent gathers speed, and previously unfathomable levels of cruelty can seem routine, normalised, and therefore limitless.

The El Salvador deportations show that the Trump regime has already reached this point. They are evidence of a collective moral collapse, from the top down, in which counter-terrorism, border enforcement, and militarized law enforcement have all converged.

Cristosal entitled its report on El Salvador’s prisons, ‘silence is not an option’. And silence cannot be an option in response to the thugs, bullies and cowards who are now running the US government, and who are leading their country into a new age of cruelty that echoes some of the darkest pages of twentieth century history.

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A Marriage Made in Hell

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At the end of this month, an unusual gathering is due to take place in Jerusalem, when representatives of various European far-right organizations are due to attend an International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, hosting by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry. These organizations include Spain’s Vox party, the Sweden Democrats, the French National Rally, and Hungary’s Fidesz party.

All of these parties have historic links to Nazism and/or fascism, and all of them have declared their strong support for Israel and their opposition to antisemitism, even though many of them contain members who have made antisemitic statements over the years. Take the Sweden Democrats. In 2022, the head of programming for the SDs television channel, mocked Anne Frank in an Instagram post in 2022.

Last year the SD leader Jimmie Akesson and four of his lieutenants co-signed an open letter declaring the party’s ‘zero tolerance against racism and extremism’. Yet one of Akesson’s co-signatories was Jörgen Fogelklou, the party leader in Gothenburg (on the west coast), who ran an antisemitic social media account in 2021 which described Jews as ‘the root of all evil’ (paywalled).

According to the Committee’s president Ulrika Knutson, the Sweden Democrats ‘strongly oppose it [antisemitism] when the issue can be used to attack political opponents and minorities, but are ‘much more lenient when it comes to statements within their own ranks’.

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The same could be said of many of the parties represented in Jerusalem this month. The Holocaust Remembrance Project (HRP) has accused Fidesz of ‘rewriting history to rehabilitate war criminals and diminishing its own guilt’, in presenting Nazi-affiliated wartime figures connected to the Horthy regime as ‘anti-communist icons’. Even though Horthy presided over the deportation and murder of tens of thousands of Jews, the HRP has accused Fidesz of portraying Hungarians as ‘victims of what they say was Jewish-supported Communism’, rather than as aiders and abetters of Nazi genocide.

France’s National Rally was co-founded by a Waffen SS member and the paratrooper-torturer Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was convicted various times of Holocaust denialism. Vox’s members include neo-Nazis such as José Ignacio Vega Peinado, who served prison time in the 1990s for attacking and permanently disabling a professor at the University of Valencia. Yet Vox’s representative Herman Tertsch is one of the invitees who will be given the choice between guided tours to ‘Judea and Samaria’ (the West Bank, as the United Nations and much of the world calls it), or the Gaza border, followed by a ‘gala evening at the President’s Residence’.

This gathering is not as anomalous as it might seem at first sight. For some years now, the European far-right has removed overt expressions of antisemitism from its political program, and proclaimed its support for Israel as proof of the distance its various iterations have travelled from their predecessors.

In the 1920s and 30s, Jews were depicted by fascist organizations as the extraneous ‘cosmopolitan’ Other, and the conspiratorial hidden hand intent on world domination Beginning in the 1990s, the descendants of those movements began to identify Muslims as the primary threat to what they now call ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’.

To the ‘new’ nationalist far-right, Israel is the Jewish Sparta - a lone bastion of ‘the West’ on the frontline of civilisational conflict. These movements recognized that their ties to antisemitism excluded them from mainstream politics, and they also see antisemitism - narrowly defined as criticism of Israel - as a politically useful weapon to wield against the left and the new Islamic enemy.

This reorientation has coincided with the rightwards drift of Israeli politics, culminating in what is essentially a far-right settler government that no longer pays even lip service to the liberal - let alone socialist - pretensions of its predecessors. The result is a mutually-beneficial political relationship that has been strengthened since October 7 2023.

Both European far-right and mainstream conservative parties have fervently supported Israel’s genocidal destruction in Gaza, whilst also depicting pro-Palestinian protests as expressions of leftwing/Muslim antisemitism and anti-Jewish hatred.

In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) - a party whose leaders have described Nazism as a ‘blip in history’ - has made support for Israel and opposition to antisemitism central components of its political platform. As the Jerusalem Post noted, the AfD also promotes variants on antisemitic conspiracy theories such as the Great Reset and the Great Replacement:

While AfD doesn’t hesitate to condemn antisemitism on the left, it trivializes or even denies antisemitism on the right. While we don’t have airtight data on what motivates antisemitic acts, one thing is clear: right-wing extremism has always been one of the greatest dangers for Jews.

But for AfD, the anti-Semites are always on the other side. Anyone who is blind in one eye in this matter cannot credibly stand up for the safety of the entire Jewish community.

Such tendencies are not limited to the European far-right. In Argentina, Javier Milei - the man who once compared Argentina’s COVID-19 health pass to the yellow star worn by Jews in Nazi Germany - has converted to Judaism and embraced Zionism with a convert’s zeal. Like many of his fellow-travellers in Europe, Milei routinely invokes the ‘cultural Marxism’ conspiracy theory regardless of its antisemitic origins. He recently defended Elon Musk’s Nazi salute as an ‘innocent gesture’, and condemned his critics as representatives of ‘international wokism.’

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Compared to the Trump/Musk tandem, Milei exudes scholarly gravitas. One of Trump’s first executive orders in January authorized the attorney general to order universities and colleges to monitor and report acts of ‘pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.’

In February, the US Justice Department established a multi-agency ‘Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism’, which set out as its first priority the rooting-out of ‘anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.’ Earlier this month, Trump announced that he would cut funding for universities that allow ‘illegal’ protests, and prosecute and deport foreign students who participate. On Saturday 8 March, agents of the Department of Homeland Security arrested the Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, and announced his forthcoming deportation on criminal charges of abetting terrorism.

As Judith Butler has argued, Khalil’s arrest was part of a plan devised by the Heritage Foundation, which has published a list of 856 professors in the US and Canada, who it claims have ‘openly advocated or supported up to 63 different HSOs [Hamas Support Organizations]’.

Now the Trump government is wilfully conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and even terrorism. In his spurious attempts to defend Jews, Trump has also arrogated to himself the right to decide who is and who is not a Jew. During his election campaign, he suggested that Jewish Democrat voters ‘hate Israel’ and ‘hate their religion.’ Last week, he suggested that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was aligned with Hamas, and declared:

Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned. He’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.

Trump’s sinister gremlin-clown sidekick, Elon Musk, has also taken time out from accusing ‘of funding anti-Tesla protests, to retweet:

In the battle against antisemitism or any kind of racism, these are not people you want on your side, and they will never be on anyone’s side but their own. The same can be said of the Israeli government, which has weaponised antisemitism with a cynicism that easily matches its erstwhile allies, in order to provide a propagandist distraction from its genocidal war in Gaza.

Last month, Nissum Vaturi, the Deputy Speaker of Israel’s parliament and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud part told the radio station Kol BaRama:

Who is innocent in Gaza? Civilians went out and slaughtered people in cold blood. We need to separate the children and women and kill the adults in Gaza, we are being too considerate. No one in the world wants the civilians in Gaza, everyone is pushing them into Israel, they know that these are scum and subhumans.

Such statements are no longer as problematic as they might once have been, with US government officials reportedly considering Sudan, Somalia and Somaliland as possible destinations for Gazan Palestinians, in the event that Trump is able to implement his obscene plans for the depopulation of the Gaza Strip.

The Death of Liberalism

The problem that liberal critics of Trump’s madness have, is that Israel had already been given a carte blanche by liberal governments and institutions to inflict virtually limitless violence on Gaza, even before Trump took power. And this complicity was often accompanied by a very similar conflation of Palestinian protest with antisemitism and support for Hamas. In April, German police broke up a pro-Palestine conference in Berlin and prevented Yanis Varoufakis from entering the country to attend it.

Now, Columbia University has effectively colluded in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, and announced that it will expel and suspend pro-Palestinian students who occupied a campus hall last year.

If Columbia or any other university thinks that such shameful actions will placate the Trump government, they are likely to be very much mistaken. Through its enabling of Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza, American liberalism has not only paved the way for the destruction of the Palestinians and Israel’s descent into fascism: it has also helped to dig its own grave.

That antisemitism should become both the lubricant for America’s slide into oligarchical authoritarianism, is a jaw-dropping historical outcome in itself. And in these dire circumstances, it is not at all outlandish to find a gaggle of neo-fascists and ethnonationists taking part in panel discussions in Israel on subjects such as ‘double standards’ at the International Criminal Court, or ‘Antisemitism in academic and in public education’.

Nor, in this race to the bottom, is it surprising to find Israel making common cause with the descendants of movements responsible for the greatest crime ever committed against the Jewish people, in order to facilitate the destruction of the Palestinian people. And if Israel is using the 21st century’s neo-fascists to serve its own interests, the reverse is also true.

And when these born-again philosemites return to their countries infused with ethnonationalist fervour, they will continue to use antisemitism and ‘Hamas’ in much the way as Trump is using these terms - to attack immigrants and people of colour, and also to intimidate and silence their left/liberal opponents.

There was a time when very few people could have foreseen that the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ would be used in this way. But these are different times, and America will not be the only country in which liberal institutions discover - too late - that Israel’s new fascist friends are coming for them too.

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Guest post: The Return of the Heartland

It’s tempting, watching the 21st century’s liberal ‘world order’ going up in smoke, to reduce the ongoing mayhem to the pathologies of individual leaders and random agents of chaos. Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Because Putin is a megalomaniacal autocrat. Why is Trump threatening to annex Greenland and Canada and take over the Panama Canal? Because he’s a chauvinistic ignoramus trolling the libs.

But to paraphrase Marx, bad men make history in circumstances not chosen by themselves, and they also act in pursuit of geopolitical objectives not chosen by themselves. And even the worst of men may well pursue well-established strategic objectives in any given moment, whether to seize resources, control trade routes, create or defend zones of influence, or dominate geopolitical spaces considered essential to their national interests.

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To recognise that such logic exists, doesn’t mean that you have to accept or approve of its assumptions and premises. Just because Russia thinks that Ukraine should be a ‘buffer zone’, or America decides it needs to take possession of the Panama Canal, doesn’t mean that buffer zones, ‘backyards’, and ‘core interests’ are unchanging and inevitable. Nor does it necessarily mean that the leaders who pursue these goals are strategic geniuses.

But geopolitics is not a morality play. And an understanding of the strategic context in which imperialist and would-be imperialists make their calculations can often be more illuminating than reducing geopolitics to the machinations of evil men. And it can also explain how smaller states can fall victim to these machinations, and how geopolitical outcomes that seem to have come out of nowhere, actually follow strategic rationales that precede their often mediocre human instruments.

In this guest post, Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History of Imperial History at King’s College London, explores the legacy of the British geographer and geopolitical thinker Halford Mackinder, and the continued relevance of his famous theory of the Eurasian ‘heartland’ to Russia, Ukraine, and 21st century geopolitics.

HALFORD MACKINDER AND UKRAINE

The British geographer Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), is best known for an essay and a book, which constitute two of the foundational texts of geopolitics. Around 1900 he worried that Russia, in the age of the railway, was creating a continental power which made irrelevant Britain's maritime supremacy.

In his seminal essay ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’ (1904), he argued that the core of world history was ‘the world island’ of Eurasia plus Africa; within this a 'hinge' or 'pivot' lay where Europe entangled with Asia.

‘Inaccessible to ships’, he wrote, this island stretched ‘from the Pusstas of Hungary to the Little Gobi of Manchuria’, and contained ‘potentialities in population, wheat, cotton, fuel, and metals so incalculably great, that it is inevitable that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there develop’.

This was a threat: any power that controlled the core of the world island, in the age of the railway, would control the world.

In February 1919, in the midst of the peace talks after World War I, and in the midst of the Russian Revolution, he completed the manuscript of Democratic Ideals and Reality, in which he expanded his 1904 thesis, that Britain's strategic destiny, and indeed the dominance of Anglo-America in the world, ultimately lay in control of the destiny of ‘the hinge’.

In a chapter on 'The Freedom of Nations', Mackinder began with the resonant declaration: ‘Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World’.

But how could Britain control the hinge? It could not submit it to colonial control, like India, which Mackinder seems to have assumed would be British in perpetuity. The solution was to ensure that it was broken up into weak sovereign nations which would look to British power. To use the language which John Robinson and Ronald Gallagher offered in 1953, the strategy against Bolshevik Russia was a British 'informal empire' in Eastern Europe, exercised through new states like Poland, which would be a kind of continental Belgium for Britain.

It is striking, of course, that the question of Africa, which c. 1919, with the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia, was under European domination, did not excite his curiosity; self-government for him, as for Woodrow Wilson, was on offer only to some nations.

Mackinder caught the eye of men like Curzon and Churchill. In October 1919, astonishingly, he got a chance to try to implement his strategy, when he was appointed British High Commissioner for South Russia. After the Russian Revolution, and the defeat of Germany, Britain along with other powers intervened in Russia on the side of the counter-revolutionary ‘Whites’, in Churchill's notorious phrase, ‘to strangle the Bolshevik baby in its cradle’.

It looked good for a while, the Whites could count on 600,000 troops to the ‘Reds’ 450,000. In October 1919 they controlled all the great cities of Russia apart from Moscow and Petrograd. When Mackinder was dispatched in October to attach himself to the White generals in 'South Russia', it looked as if a new post-Czarist and post-Bolshevik political order was coming which Britain might control.

But it all unraveled, as the Bolsheviks fought harder, and formed alliances with anarchists (whom they would later betray, especially Nestor Makhno in Ukraine, but that's another story for another day). By 1920, Mackinder clung to the hope that the Whites with foreign help could at least beat back the boundaries of Russia, and he offered the map, in which he imagined the future geography of sovereignty in ‘the pivot’:

New sovereign states in 'White Russia', Ukraine and 'South Russia', now joined Poland and Romania, as the means of ensuring Anglo-American interests in 'the heartland'. By late 1920 and, definitely by 1921, however, Lenin's strategy of a USSR as a federal entity, within which, in theory, the nationalisms of Ukraine and Georgia, and so on, would have full expression, had won. Mackinder returned home to relative obscurity.

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Mackinder's geostrategic ideas had massive influence over the next 100 years, however. They informed Nazi German grand strategy, the US decision to intervene in Europe during the Second World War, and the unfolding of the Cold War, in particular in places like Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan.

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they were central to the United States's grand strategy, as it formed close strategic relationships with the new post-socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and in ‘the Stans’ of Central Asia.

After 9-11, this grand strategy was deeply entangled with the ‘Global War on Terror’. Poland and Ukraine, notoriously, joined the United States, Britain and Australia in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It is clear also that China's ‘Belt and Road’ initiative, with its vision of a ‘new silk road’ of railways pushing across Eurasia to end in Germany owes some debts to Mackinder.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, of course, let us get this out of the way - a crime in international law, which in its implementation is attached to many other kinds of crimes. Putin is a tyrant who has crushed democratic opposition in Russia. But it is important to locate the Russian invasion relative to this strategic context. From their point of view: the United States has planted a ring of military bases in friendly states across Mackinder's ‘hinge’, on the immediate periphery of Russia, in order to keep Russia under perpetual threat.

There is a 'Russian imperialism' in Ukraine, but it is deeply entangled with how other, more powerful, imperial powers are operating.

That Russia views the claims to sovereignty of Ukraine with the contempt that the United States viewed the sovereignty of Panama or Iraq is, of course, unacceptable. But equally at odds with the hopes of most people in the 21st century world is Mackinder's liberal imperialist logic, with its programme for domination and exploitation, its devil's eye view of human beings as abstractions from space.

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The White House Shakedown

In his riveting fictional re-imagining of the political shenanigans behind the Anschluss, The Order of the Day, Eric Vulliard describes the meeting between the Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg and Adolf Hitler on 12 February 1938. Schuschnigg was the successor to Chancellor Dollfus, who had been assassinated by the Nazis in 1934.

Following this assassination, the ‘little Austrian despot’, as Vulliard calls him, continued to rule Austria as the nominal head of state, in the face of ‘hypocritical diplomacy, a mishmash of assassinations, blackmail, and blandishments’ from Schuschnigg’s German ally, aimed at undermining and ultimately ending his country’s independence.

At the February meeting, the hapless Schuschnigg was summoned to Berchtesgaden to meet the Fuhrer in his lair. Mining Schuschnigg’s own memoir, Vulliard describes how the Austrian chancellor tries to make pleasantries, only to be told by Hitler: ‘We did not get together to speak of the fine view or of the weather!’

When the flustered Schuschnigg tries to defend his ‘German-friendly policies’ over the years, Hitler swats away the façade of diplomacy:

‘Ah! So you call this a friendly policy, Herr Schuschnigg? On the contrary, you have done everything to avoid a friendly policy!’ he screams. And after another awkward attempt by Schuschnigg to justify himself, Hitler, in a rage, cranks it up a notch: ‘Besides, Austria has never done anything that would be of any help to Germany. The whole history of Austria is just one uninterrupted act of high treason.

Too late, Schuschnigg realises that he must submit to Nazi demands that will pave the way for his country’s annexation. As Vulliard puts it:

There was no question of density or decency. Here, there was only one framing that counted, only one art of persuasion, only one means of getting what you wanted: fear. No more allusive niceties, subtle forms of authority, or maintaining a friendly face. Here, the little Junker was quaking.

I couldn’t help thinking of that exchange on Friday, during a traffic jam on the M6 watching (as a passenger!) the staged encounter between Trump, Vance and their horrific entourage on one hand, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, on the other.

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There are important differences: Outwardly, the Hitler-Schuschnigg meeting obeyed the conventions of diplomacy and was held in private, whereas Trump and Vance staged their political ambush in the full glare of the cameras to send a message to their base, in a deliberate car crash that Trump – the former reality tv star – called ‘great television’.

Zelenskyy, unlike Schuschnigg, is not an authoritarian despot, but a democratically-elected former comedian-turned-politician who has found himself leading his country’s resistance to a criminal act of aggression by Vladmir Putin’s KGB-gangster clique.

The Ukrainian president also differs from Schuschnigg in that he is not a coward. Instead of quaking, Zelenskyy defended himself and his battered country - when he could get a word in edgeways - and pushed back against the bullying, gaslighting and infantile mockery from one of the most repugnant and despicable collection of politicians that America has ever put in the White House.

Future historians will undoubtedly be as aghast as many viewers were by the spectacle of a diplomatic encountered reduced to a scene from The Godfather or Goodfellas. Some may focus on Marco Rubio’s pathetic discomfort – a made guy reduced to a grimacing and silent moral invertebrate on the White House sofa.

Others may gape incredulously at the sight of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend, one of the few ‘reporters’ allowed to this sinister Corleonesi-like shakedown, berating the leader of a country at war for not wearing a suit. They may shudder at the sight of a president who once dodged military service because of a bone spur -and who has dismissed American soldiers who died in World War 2 as ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ - parroting Russian talking points and mocking Zelenskyy as a phoney ‘tough guy.’

They may well feel the kind of nausea that many of us felt at JD Vance’s grovelling attempts to ingratiate himself with the president he once called ‘America’s Hitler’, by gloating over Ukraine’s military weaknesses and demanding Zelenskyy’s gratitude. The Hillbilly Faust even had the gall to accuse Zelenskyy of ‘litigating’ the Ukrainian case to the American public, at a meeting that was clearly set up by Trump and Vance to humiliate and undermine him.

Despite the fake concern of these would-be peacemakers and dealmakers at the impact of the war on Ukraine, there was not the slightest recognition that Russia itself was responsible for the kidnapped children, the tortures and bombings, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, the massacres and executions. Insofar as Russia was mentioned at all, it was essentially to berate Zelenskyy for his irrational ‘hatred’ of Putin – the man who had ordered the invasion and destruction of his country.

It was all so brazen, shameless and ugly in its bullying, ignorance, dishonesty and infantile mockery, that even the likes of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph were roused to condemnation.

For the Russian government and media however, the Trump/Vance shakedown was cause for unrestrained celebration. Because Trump may or may not have been a KGB agent, but he and his clique have clearly been doing exactly what Putin wants them to do. First, they initiated peace negotiations, while sidelining Ukraine. Then they effectively blamed Ukraine for starting the war, and now they are blaming Ukrainian intransigence for preventing a ceasefire.

In the same week of the White House meeting, Secretary of Defence Pete Sexpeth (I think I have the spelling right), reportedly halted all offensive cyber operations and information operations against Russia – a breathtaking gesture that does not appear to require any reciprocity from Russia regarding its operations against the United States.

Unravelling the American Century

All this is astonishing enough. But to many observers, the White House meeting – following on from Vance’s Munich Security Conference speech – was another indication of the Trump administration’s gleeful destruction of the ‘world order’, and the system of alliances and mutual obligations that have enabled America to dominate the world since World War II.

In 1991, the US went to war with Saddam Hussein, in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Of course there were other reasons for that, as there always are. But the war was nominally fought in defence of the right to self-determination, with the aim of expelling the Iraqi aggressor.

Now, Trump and Vance have become apologists for a military aggressor that regards Ukraine as its strategic property, and last week they attempted to bully the victim of that aggression into accepting their terms, which also happen to be the aggressor’s terms.

None of this is normal, or at least what used to be thought of as normal. But last week’s clown car shakedown was not just a weird political accident; it was the product of a profound systemic failure that is rooted in American exceptionalism and appears poised to bring that exceptionalism to an end.

To those who wanted to look - and many didn’t - the cracks were already evident in 2001, when George W. Bush recklessly used the 9/11 atrocities as a pretext for unleashing limitless unilateral military action anywhere in the world. The likes of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Richard Perle were no less exceptionalist, unilateralist and downright arrogant than Trump and his gang, even if they paid lip service to America’s diplomatic alliances.

Some readers may remember the famous observation attributed to an un-named Bush official in 2004 to the journalist Ron Suskind, that journalists like him belonged to ‘what we call the reality-based community,’ who supposedly believed that ‘solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’

According to the anonymous aide:

That's not the way the world really works anymore…We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

This was the kind of arrogance that led the United States to invade Iraq, with all the catastrophic consequences that the world well knows. Now, reality has caught up with these empire-builders, and delivered their country into the hands of political gangsters who are more loyal to their country’s enemies than to its friends, and have no interest in allies, except those who can benefit them financially or complement their reactionary ethnonationalist agenda.

For the moment at least, the militarism has gone, but the Trump mafia still retains elements of the exceptionalism of its predecessors, in its maniacal claims to Greenland, its monstrous Trump Gaza fantasies, or its cynical attempt to turn Ukrainian suffering into American profit while imposing a one-sided peace on a besieged and traumatized country that has fought bravely and tenaciously for the right not to be Russian.

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To world leaders who accepted American ‘pre-eminence’ in the past, rode shotgun during American military adventures, or relied on American military power as a security guarantor, it has been difficult to recognize this evolution, and there are those who still cling on to diplomatic niceties, and refuse to say out loud what is now obvious.

It is not clear whether they are being diplomatic in treating Trump as a temporary aberration, or whether, after so many years of relying on America to provide the ‘free world’ with its firepower and economic might, they are simply too frightened and too disorientated to distance themselves from the ally-that-is-no-longer-an-ally.

In practice however, anyone with eyes can see what is happening. The outpouring of support and sympathy for Zelenskyy and Ukraine is a reminder of a larger public than the MAGA base that the Trump/Vance political freakshow was intended to appeal to.

It’s possible that some inadvertent good may come as a result of this debacle. The miniscule number of Republicans with a conscience may turn against a government that is harming their country’s own interests and empowering its enemies. Britain and Europe may develop new political and military relationships, and forge a new independence, in response to the emerging US-Russia rapprochement.

Such outcomes are not certain, and not without risks. It remains to be seen whether Europe has the political will to take responsibility for its own security. Rearmament may be intended as deterrence, but defensive preparations for war can also broaden and intensify wars in unpredictable ways. As Starmer has just demonstrated, the price for such preparations is too easily exacted from those who can least afford it.

Europe will have to step up rapidly to match the military aid and financial assistance that the Trump administration has now paused - the better to blackmail Ukraine into accepting its terms, which are also likely to be the Kremlin’s terms. Even if Europe manages to pick up some of the slack, it is not clear whether it can halt the political and military momentum that Russia has now acquired, in part because of Trump’s intervention.

American-European military assistance was intended to help Ukraine defend itself, and inflict unbearable losses on the Russian invaders that would compel them to withdraw from the territories they had occupied.

Three years later, the Kremlin gangster remains in charge, and despite massive losses, his armies are gaining ground. All wars end, with a complete victory for one side, or negotiations based on concessions and the realisation that neither side can achieve their initial objectives.

None of the countries that have supported Ukraine have known how to achieve victory, but nor have they known how to negotiate or on what basis. The result is a war that seems endless, and it is in this strategic vacuum that the gangster-politicians who now run the United States have kickstarted negotiations, albeit on their terms, and on the aggressor’s terms.

This is why the White House shakedown took place. In attempting to make Zelenskyy an offer he could not refuse, Trump’s brutal gambit has brought a new wave of sympathy for the Ukrainian president and his country, both amongst the general public and amongst Ukraine’s allies.

Yet still these allies appear unwilling to distance themselves - beyond the summits and photo opportunities - from an extremist administration that has clearly stated that it regards Europe as a greater threat to American interests than Russia.

No one saw that coming. And now, in this brutal new geopolitical world, it remains to be seen whether those who condemned the White House shakedown, can find the resolve - and the means - to help Ukraine, and chart a new course through a century that is no longer American, but has yet to become something else.

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Leaving On a Jet Plane

Last week, the White House posted what it called an ASMR video showing undocumented immigrants in chains being led onto planes. This spectacle - and no one will be at all surprised by this, provoked much hilarity from the world’s richest man, who commented on X: ‘Ha ha. Wow ‘.

For those who don’t know, ASMR stands for ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ - a term used to describe the ‘brain massage’, ‘tingles’, pleasurable sensations, or sense of deep relaxation that some viewers supposedly experience watching certain YouTube videos.

I’m not one of those viewers, and I can’t see the attraction in the sound of stirring soup, whispering or crinkling wrapping paper. The White House deportation video has only clanking chains and jet engines to accompany the deportation of a faceless immigrant - a combination which, it jokingly suggests, will have the same pleasurable effect on a certain kind of viewer.

Sadly, they’re probably right, because in these depraved times there are many Americans who are likely to be entertained and perhaps soothed to see men and women who, as far as they are concerned, are criminal intruders rather than humans with any resemblance to their esteemed selves.

But it’s not only the government of United States of Dystopia that is tossing these shameful spectacles out to the masses. Over the last two weeks, the UK Home Office has been posting its own videos of immigrant deportations and raids, and handcuffed migrants being led onto planes.

Unlike Trump, Labour isn’t presenting these clips as entertainment. On the contrary, they are are intended to demonstrate the Labour government’s serious resolve to control ‘our borders’ - 19,000 deportations so far! Go us! - the better to fend off the political threat from Reform. Despite the difference in tone however, both the Trump and Cooper deportation videos are essentially a form of political theatre, intended to assuage public ‘concerns’ about immigration, while also seeking to win kudos for both governments through demonstrations of performative toughness.

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It’s dirty work, that comes naturally to a white supremacist president who came to power through some of the most brazenly racist language that any presidential contender has ever used to describe immigrants. In the UK, these video nasties are the work of a weak and increasingly rudderless government that use the more bureaucratic language of border enforcement to boast of its deportation achievements.

Some of the thinking behind these developments can be found in Keir Starmer’s ‘secret letter’ to his cabinet, that was leaked to the Sunday Times (paywalled} last week. In it Starmer told his ministers that:

Increasingly, politics is no longer built around a traditional left-right axis. It is instead being reimagined around a disruptor-disrupted axis. If governments are not changing the system in favour of working people, then voters will find someone else who does.

Inevitably, Starmer cited Labour’s attitude to immigration as an example of the party’s unwillingness to change the system:

Pure economic migration was confused with genuine concern for those fleeing persecution. We ended up treating all immigration as an untrammelled good. Somehow, politics ended up being too scared to say what is obvious — that some people are genuine refugees and some aren’t; that people coming here to work can be a positive, but that an island nation needs to control its borders.

It’s difficult to avoid the stale odor of Blue Labour exuding from this depressing, and artfully-timed leak, which is clearly aimed at a very particular type of voter. The ‘disruptor-disrupted’ trope is a startlingly shallow and politically-inane explanation for the rise of far-right and ethnonationalist politics, in the UK or anywhere else. The promise to ‘change the system’ is rich coming from a government that does not have the slightest interest in changing the system, and is clearly scared stiff of being seen to want to do that.

Then there is the lazy willingness to accept the ‘fake refugee’ cliché, without any analysis of the convergence between ‘pure’ economic persecution and those ‘fleeing persecution’. And finally, the strawman argument that ‘we’ treated ‘all immigration as an untrammelled good.’

Whoever that ‘we’ is, it hasn’t been the Labour Party. During the Blair/Brown years successive Labour governments whittered on about ‘social cohesion’ as the antidote to race riots and terrorism, and the public’s ‘concerns’ about immigration. At the same time, Labour allowed Accession 8 migrant workers to enter the country under EU rules in unexpectedly large numbers.

Nothing wrong with that. Most of these workers filled essential shortages. They paid taxes. They sent money back home which helped the communities they came from. Nevertheless the rightwing press - with an injection of UKIP rocket fuel - attacked Labour mercilessly for bringing Poles and Bulgarians to the pristine shores of Olde Englande.

At no point did Labour make the positive case for these migratory arrangements, or the (reciprocal) free movement rules that made them possible. Neither Blair nor Brown ever said that this was a mutually-beneficial process for both the ‘host country’ and the men and women who came to live and work here. At no time, did any Labour politician - at least that I can remember - openly recognise the value that immigration brought to British society, the way that Pedro Sánchez for example, is now doing in Spain.

It’s impossible to imagine a Labour government doing this. Rather than challenge xenophobic and evidence-free rhetoric about EU ‘health tourists’ and refugee ‘scroungers’ the Blair/Brown governments boasted of their ability to deport and detain undocumented migrants, just as Starmer’s government is doing now.

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This was followed by Ed Miliband’s pathetic ‘Immigration Controls’ mugs, which did him no favours and didn’t deserve to. And now, back in power, Labour continues to allow itself to be dragged rightwards on immigration, and continues to present deportations as a means of out-touching the likes of Farage and Badenoch.

Today, the UK is suffering from multiple, self-inflicted wounds, all of which emanate, in part, from its obsession with immigration. It has cut itself off from its main trading partner. It lacks NHS and social care personnel. Its higher education system - once of the best in the world - is crumbling financially, in part because of its stringent visa rules on foreign students.

It doesn’t have enough construction workers to carry out Labour’s much-vaunted housebuilding program, and it will not be able to get them without immigration. It doesn’t have EU workers to pick fruit, and so it has begun to bring in workers on even more restrictive contracts, which undermine their rights and their bargaining power.

This is not going to bother the Conservatives or Reform, but it ought to concern a nominally social democratic party that pays lip service to workers and working people. Labour’s deportation videos might get a few Sun headlines:

But it will never satisfy voters who vote for men like this:

Rupert needn’t worry, because Labour is already doing ‘Trump-style deportations’. Whether these spectacles will benefit Labour politically remains to be seen, but performative cruelty has nothing to do with ‘disruption.’ And Labour’s video nasties are merely another turn of the immigration doom loop in which this ‘small island’ appears perpetually trapped, and which has toxified its politics for too many dismal years.

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This Is Not a Drill

Close your eyes and think of a coup, any coup. What comes to mind?

Perhaps you are old enough to recall September 11 1973, when the Chilean army and air force attacked the Moneda palace in Santiago and killed the elected president Salvador Allende. Or the tanks and truckloads of soldiers that moved smoothly and reassuringly into position in Buenos Aires on March 24 1976, bringing to an end the chaotic and bloody reign of Perón’s widow. There was no fighting then; many Argentinians welcomed the military as a stabilising force, not knowing that the armed forces had already laid the groundwork for a secret campaign of torture and extermination that would plunge Argentina into the darkest chapter in its history.

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Or maybe you’ve seen the Brazilian Oscar nominee, I’m Still Here, which depicts the military coup that overthrew the government of João Goulart. All these coups were supported and to some extent facilitated by the American government - continuing a tradition that the US began with the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, and Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954.

Whatever happens afterwards, the initial phase of a coup usually contains the same elements: a military presence on the streets; roadblocks and ID checks; the seizure of tv and radio stations; the immediate suppression of democratic political institutions; emergency legislation to justify mass arrests and other exceptional measures. Some coups might have ‘spontaneous’ mobs or crowds to give them the appearance of popular legitimacy. Others, like the Franco-led putsch in 1936, require a civil war in order to prevail.

What is now unfolding in the United States is something entirely different. There are no soldiers, police, and paramilitaries. No mass arrests or concentration camps. No displays of force to cow the opposition.

On the surface, a normal, democratic transfer of power has taken place, regardless of the fact that the principal beneficiary of this transition is a convicted felon, who once attempted to overthrow the elected government that defeated him.

And yet, as a result of this process, some of the lamest, stupidest, cruellest, greediest, most fanatical, most rotten, contemptible and downright evil people in America have done to the American government what no American political party has ever attempted to do, and what few people would once have even imagined that anyone would dare to do. For the last month, the richest man in the world - in fact the richest man the world has ever seen - has embarked on the most destructive assault on the federal government in American history, using a team of software engineers, some of whom are not even out of their teens.

Ensconced on sofa beds in government buildings, Musk’s little men have gained unprecedented access to the Treasury’s expansive payment system, which is responsible for an annual budget of trillions of dollars. They have gathered data on millions of government employees, and have begun writing code on government computer programs. So far DOGE has dismantled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) - an achievement that Musk celebrated with all the savage sociopathic cynicism that we have come to expect from this obscene travesty of a human being:

Yes, he should have gone to the parties and entertained them with his dazzling wit. Instead, he preferred to take money from some of the poorest people on earth and then brag about it to his Nazi followers.

Musk’s dweeb hit squad has also imposed mass layoffs at the Education Department, the Small Business Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the US Forest Service and the National Park Service.

Amid this mayhem, there is a kind of sense. In shuttering the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Musk - a man with multiple conflicts of interest - has sought to eliminate the federal department which regulates banking, lending, and credit practices, and which also poses a potential obstacle to his own business interests, and to those of the tech bro mafia who stood gurning beside him at Trump’s inauguration.

DOGE has also gained access to the Federal Aviation Administration’s ‘rapid safety upgrades’ technologies, which aim to improve safety in the aviation sector - a sector in which Musk has a direct interest through his SpaceX company. The Muscovites are currently gathering personnel information at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at Medicare and Medicaid, at the Department of Energy, at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Veterans Affairs (VA).

Last week, the DOGE inbetweeners sacked between 300-400 nuclear weapons specialists at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), without realising what this department actually does. Musk’s vandals have since been trying to give them their jobs back, except that they don’t know how to locate many of them.

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Put that in your pitch for a Netflix series and you’d probably get rejected on the grounds that you’d been hitting the ketamine too hard, which according to rumour, is exactly what the world’s richest man has been doing.

For a country to place its collective fate in the hands of men like this, is the most extraordinary, jaw-dropping, barely credible folly imaginable. Yet not a single soldier or tank has been necessary to achieve this wild outcome.

No one elected Musk. Neither he nor his hirelings are subject to congressional accountability, and a Republican-dominated congress has no interest in seeking it. Latin American golpistas have generally relied on state forces to achieve their objectives. But this is a coup being carried out against the state - authorized by a flurry of executive orders from the criminal-rapist, crooked real estate magnate and reality tv star, who is now telling the dazed electorate that voted for him: ‘ He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.’

Someone should tell the crazed mandarin satan that this is not how democracy works, but don’t hold your breath.

According to WIRED, Musk’s team was recruited on online chatrooms last year. At least three DOGE staffers were recruited by Peter Thiel’s company Palantir, in the following manner:

In online chat groups linked to Palantir alumni and SpaceX interns, Musk’s space company, as well as in a Discord server associated with a military artificial intelligence program, the engineers said they were looking for people willing to spend six months in Washington, DC, cutting federal spending—which accounts for around a quarter of the US gross domestic product—by a third.

One of these recruits is a 19-year-old with the nickname Big Balls, who now occupies the position of senior adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology. Another of Musk’s bright sparks is a 25-year-old staffer, who resigned after tweets were discovered in which he bragged that ‘I was racist before it was cool’ and called for the tech sector to ‘Normalize Indian hate.’

That squeaky little eugencist has since been reinstated by Musk, who called for the journalist who revealed these tweets to be fired.

This is the mighty ‘crew of teenage mutant incels’, as Stephen Colbert calls them, who are defanging the FBI, trying to close down the CIA, and cutting millions from the education budget. All this in the country that raised the ‘national security state’ to a quasi-religious status during the Cold War, and introduced the US PATRIOT Act in order to deter the threat from foreign terrorism.

It’s less than a decade since Trump called Edward Snowden a ‘total traitor’ and a ‘disgrace’ for revealing the US government’s covert surveillance programs. Yet now, Trump and his minions smirk happily while a billionaire with political ties to America’s enemies decimates key government institutions and his pipsqueak army gathers data that neither he nor they are qualified to handle.

Snowden justified his whistleblowing on ethical grounds. The Trump/Musk gang has no such arguments. They are dismantling their own government in broad daylight, in order to create a libertarian environment favourable to Musk and his fellow-predators, while pursuing a vindictive culture war which is removing words like ‘women’, gender’, ‘lesbian’, ‘Black History’, ‘National American Indian Heritage’ and other manifestations of wokery from government websites.

No wonder America’s enemies are laughing. And as for al-Qaeda and the Great Satan, well there’s no need to cut off the head of the snake when the snake is swallowing its own tail. Russia, the country which did so much to inject the culture war toxins into America’s mouldering body politic, also has particular reason to celebrate this outcome.

Last year, Russian media commentators were mocking the stupidity of Trump voters. This year, Russian state television is praising Trump for ‘cutting apart the Western world’ because of his ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine. This ‘plan’ looks set to give Putin everything he had asked for, while bypassing Ukraine - the victim of Russian aggression.

Last week, European leaders listened with stupefaction to an atrocious MAGA speech from the Hillbilly Faust J.D. Vance, who claimed that Europe was more of a threat to freedom and free speech than Russia. Vance coolly expounded Alexander Dugin talking points, collapsed the US-European alliance and abandoned Ukraine to its fate, with the arrogant insouciance of a man who knows he can say whatever the hell he likes without any consequences.

The problem - and it is a huge problem - is that he can, because too many Americans have been too frightened, complicit or lily-livered to call out this barking madness. Too many politicians and commentators have behaved like the punters at Westworld, who thought they were just fighting play-robots and re-enacting the same old fantasy scenarios, until the robots opened fire and started killing them.

European politicians are not entirely dissimilar. To his credit, the German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius excoriated Vance's lazy and dishonest arguments, and even John Major - Mr Gray Man himself - has raised his voice to condemn the good ‘ol boy with a hole in his soul.

But too many politicians continue to treat Trump and Trumpism as if they still lived in a world where the old rules apply. Too few seem unable or unwilling to recognise that the reason why Trump and his MAGA cult are aligning themselves with the Kremlin’s gangster-authoritarianism, is because they are gangster-authoritarians themselves, who share the same reactionary cultural/nationalist vision espoused by Kremlin ideologues like Dugin. This affinity explains the once-unlikely alliances that are now emerging, as a result of Trump’s sordid démarche to Putin. And it also explains how the Musk coup has been allowed to happen.

Trump’s voters may believe that the criminal-rapist is putting ‘America first’, but outside the cult, it looks a lot more like the collapse of an empire.

Some may argue that it serves America right. After all, how many countries have been invaded or attacked by America? Or had their political systems subverted or corrupted, and their governments overthrown by American-led ops? Now America itself is sinking into a vortex of political chaos, stupidity and delusion, and the incel coup is both a cause of that implosion and a consequence of the terrible judgement that made it possible.

Too bad, you might say. And good riddance. But the collapse of an empire is not the same as the collapse of a country - and a society. American neo-imperial decline is a welcome process, because the world doesn’t need empires, whether formal or informal. Nor is clear that this decline is taking place. The nineteenth century Manifest Destiny language that Trump and his mob are moronically and brutishly using regarding Canada, Mexico, Greenland - and Ukraine - suggests that reports of the empire’s death may be premature.

And the priorities that Vance presented to Europe’s stunned leaders last week is just the leading edge of an authoritarian-nationalist wave that threatens democracies across the world, and which is unrolling at precisely the time when the world needs collective solutions to collective problems.

The incel coup is already hurting and killing people, and it will hurt many more. The cancellation of US Aid has destroyed anti-trafficking efforts in the DRC; it has closed hospitals in the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh, and HIV clinics in Uganda. People are dying, and more will die, thanks to DOGE and Trump, and that is not a mistake - it is the result of a deliberate choice, which makes it evil.

Some Americans may not be bothered by this - for now. But they will also feel the consequences, as they lose firefighters, Medicare and Medicaid and social security, staff in their national parks, government regulators, aviation safety programs, schools, and cancer research programs.

This is class war acting under the guise of culture war, intended to strip American society to the bone. And this is what nationalism does - it rips the heart out of your country, transfers vast wealth to those who are already obscenely rich, and leaves you waving your flag and bleating about sovereignty or transwomen in the bathroom, while telling yourself how great you are and how you owned the libs.

Where this ends, we can’t yet say. The courts may yet force a constitutional crisis, in which the president has to choose between the law and constitution on the one hand, and his malignant agenda on the other. At that point, there will be a political crisis, in which Trump’s movement will implement the next phase of their ‘bloodless’ revolution, as the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts called the Project 25 ‘road map’ that Trump is essentially following.

Perhaps a movement will develop that will bring about the collapse of this deranged government. Or perhaps Trump will bring out police and soldiers. And then there will be dictatorship, civil war, or some kind of Orban-like repressive pseudo- democracy.

At this point, all possibilities are open, and yet too many politicians refuse to recognize it. Here in the UK, our timid and increasingly directionless government continues to imagine that the ‘special relationship’ is still special, and dreams of acting as a ‘bridge’ between America and Europe.

But this is not the bridge, this is the fateful crossroads and the fork in the road. This is the movement that must be opposed, resisted and quarantined within immovable red lines. Because make no mistake about it, these monstrous politics are coming here. And if Reform make any progress, then they will have their own dweebs and incels waiting to reduce Whitehall ‘waste’ in the way that Dominic Cumings has only dreamed of.

To prevent this, we need the broadest possible alliances. We need politicians with principles and integrity who know what they believe in and will stand up for what they believe in. We need journalists who will call a coup a coup, and lay off the sanewashing and the normalising and the ‘let’s just listen to both sides’ kumbaya trilling.

We need people who are prepared to resist, oppose, and condemn this cruelty, inhumanity, corruption and gross deceit before we are all dragged into the MAGA gutter. Such resistance needs to be individual and collective, legal, cultural, intellectual, political and moral.

We need to support Americans who are already doing this, and play our part in building these movements wherever and whoever we are. Otherwise, we might find the incels camping out in Whitehall, and the tech bros in Downing Street, advising Rupert Lowe or Nigel Farage, as they tear society to pieces in front of our startled eyes, while we stand waving flags and telling ourselves we got our country back.

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Gaza-sur-Mer

Fars Agency, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Gaza. I’m Donald Trump Junior, but you can call me Freddo.

Now I know that some of you guys have driven all the way from Tel Aviv, and others have flown into Trump International Airport in Khan Yhounis, and you’ll be looking forward to some sushi and a cold beer. I hope the air conditioning is to your satisfaction, because Gaza can be hot this time of year. I’m so excited to show you round the greatest construction site in the Middle East.

Over there on your left you can see the Trump Peace Hotel: 170 floors and tipped with solid gold - Burj Khalifa eat your heart out! And that’s the Trump End-of-Conflict Casino - high rollers only! That glass dome over there? That, my friends, is my sister Ivanka’s Wellness Spa - check out the infinity pool! And over there you can see the white sails of the Jared Kushner yachting club. Surfing, jet skis or just a day out with the kids - we’ve got you covered. Ignore the gas pipeline, just watch the current.

We’re now passing the golden statue of my father receiving his Nobel Peace Prize in Stockholm in 2026. What a moment! OMG!

Now some of you might remember a time when all this looked very different! But I can tell you that all remaining ordnance has been cleared in a joint US/IDF operation - and the body parts have gone along with the rubble. The guys on camels - hey don’t worry! They’re just actors - this is the Arab world, right? But I can assure you that there are no Palestinians in Gaza, because they are all living in the beautiful homes that my father gave them.

What we have here is an oasis of peace and pleasure where you can kick back on the beach and watch the sun go down, while you wait for the clubs to open.

Such was the vision - not exactly stated in these terms - that the gangster-president of the United States presented to an astounded world during last Tuesday’s joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu. Like a geopolitical jazz impro played by an ape, Trump riffed that the US would ‘take over the Gaza Strip’, ‘level it out’ and create an economic development that would transform Gaza into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East.’

After all, as the Great Man pointed out, ‘The Gaza thing has not worked; it’s never worked. It’s a pure demolition site.’ And as for the people who live there:

If we could find the right piece of land or numerous pieces of land and build them some really nice places … I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza, which has had just decades and decades of death.

Standing next to the man who has done more than any other single individual to inflict death and destruction on the people of Gaza, Trump told his audience how the US would work ‘with great development teams from all over the World’ to build ‘one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth.’ As for the Palestinians - a category that Trump seemed to believe included ‘people like Chuck Schumer’ - they would be resettled in ‘far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region.’

Few politicians have ever used the word ‘beautiful’ so often, without the remotest idea of what beauty is. Trump knows nothing about Gaza, and like everything else, he doesn’t care what he doesn’t know. But the smirking supplicant who stood beside him knew that this ape-in-a-geopolitical-china shop had effectively given Israel a green light to do exactly what he has always wanted to do - remove the Palestinians from Gaza and destroy once and for all the possibility of any kind of Palestinian state.

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This is why, on returning from the US, Netanyahu boasted that that he had secured ‘additional incredible achievements that can guarantee the security of Israel for generations’ and declared:

I am not exaggerating. I’m not overstating. There are opportunities here for possibilities that I don’t think we ever dreamed of — or at least until the last few months, they didn’t seem possible, but they are possible.

No wonder Netanyahu gifted Trump with a golden pager to commemorate last year’s attacks on Hezbollah - this touching memento of an operation which blew heads and faces off, blinded and maimed some 3,000 people was guaranteed to appeal to Trump’s vulgarity as well as his vanity.

Trump isn’t the first person to see the destruction of Gaza as a real estate opportunity. In March last year, Trump’s son-in-law and former Middle East adviser Jared Kushner hypothesized that ‘Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable…if people would focus on building up livelihoods.’ Kushner, like Trump, was clear that this objective could only be achieved by the removal of Gaza’s population:

From Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out [of Rafah] and then clean it up….I would just bulldoze something in the Negev, I would try to move people in there, I know that won’t be the popular thing to do but I think that’s the better option to do so you can go in and finish the job.

Out of power, Kushner’s opinions didn’t make much of a splash. But it’s another matter when these fantasies come spilling out of the mouth of the mad criminal-rapist who occupies the White House. Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace suggested turning Gaza into ‘Gaz-a-Lago’. Other commentators praised Trump’s lunatic proposal as an expression of visionary strategic brilliance and a breath of fresh air. David Friedman, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, hailed a ‘brilliant and out of the box creative and frankly the only solution I’ve heard of in 50 years that has the chance of actually changing the dynamics in that troubled part of the world.’

No one will be surprised to find Nigel Mosley-Farage in this chorus line of the damned. Asked what he thought of Trump’s proposal, the sycophant-in-chief replied:

I love ambition, the thought of a wealthy, wonderful, thriving place with well-paid jobs, casinos, nightlife... it all sounds very appealing to me.

‘Wealthy’ is the key word here, because wealth is the only thing the Trumps and Farages of this world have any any respect for, and there’s nothing that wealth can’t fix - or at least erase. Unlike Kushner, neither of them spelt out how two million Palestinians might be induced to leave Gaza and make way for the construction of this dystopian playboy pleasure dome.

Others were less reticent. The Israeli defence minister Israel Katz, claimed on X that ‘The people of Gaza should have the right to freedom of movement and migration’ - an offer that only applies to Palestinians wanting to leave Gaza - not to the Palestinians who were expelled from their land and have never been allowed to return to it.

This is the kind of freedom of movement that the Bosnian Serbs once gave to Bosnian Muslims and Croatians, and that Croatia later gave to the Krajina Serbs. In the same way, Trump’s ‘beautiful’ plans for the redevelopment of Gaza are the kind or real estate opportunity that the Romans might have taken advantage of after razing Carthage to the ground, or the Nazis might have considered after the destruction of Warsaw.

In a twenty-first century context, Trump’s proposals represent a form of urban renewal at the psychopathic edge. It’s disaster capitalism on steroids, that unproblematically contemplates the devastation of whole societies in order to construct desirable waterfront properties. As Omar Barghouti wrote yesterday, Trump’s proposal is:

Beyond depraved; it is sheer evil. It is a desperate attempt to normalize the commission of atrocity crimes and to achieve through US imperialist bullying what Israel’s military prowess has utterly failed to accomplish after 15 months of genocide.

Because Trump and his acolytes lack the moral conscience to even know what evil is, they are able to articulate possibilities that more genteel politicians would never say out loud. Indeed, the brazen cynicism, inhumanity and downright geopolitical madness of these fantasies has provoked a storm of outrage from many of the same governments that allowed Israel to kill 62,000 people and injure 111,588, according to the most recent figures by the Gaza Health Ministry.

Last week Dropsite News published a horrifying article by Abubaker Abed, a Palestinian from Deir al-Balah camp, describing a walk through northern Gaza for the first time in fifteen months.

The picturesque buildings and cafes along the coastline where I used to go are all gone—they have simply vanished. Al-Aqsa University, where I should have graduated from in 2024, lay in ruins. All that remained were some torn books and broken chairs. The buildings that were still standing were burned and partially destroyed, their foundations fragile. There were no lights anywhere.

Returning to northern Gaza, Abed described scenes of barely-imaginable devastation:

As people tried to move back into their houses, Israeli forces were burning everything around. The piles of rubble were like mountains blocking our sight. The skyline was darkened by plumes of black smoke from fires set by the Israeli troops, presumably as they were withdrawing from their stations. The camp should be renamed the city of rubble. That is what it has been reduced to. A nuclear bomb dropped on the camp wouldn’t have caused this much damage.

This is the ‘demolition site’ that Trump described. But unlike the members of the ‘international community’ who are now criticising him, Trump was not in power when it was actually being demolished.

They were the ones who provided Israel with diplomatic cover, and in some cases, with weapons. They responded to the mass killing of civilians and the systematic dismantling of Gaza society with silence or furrowed brows. They supported or refused to condemn an Israeli turkey shoot that was unconstrained by the laws of war or humanity and makes no strategic or political sense.

In January, the outgoing Secretary of State, Tony Blinken warned that ‘Hamas, or something just as abhorrent and dangerous, will grow back’ in Gaza without a ‘post-conflict plan and a credible political horizon for the Palestinians.’

When was there ever a ‘post-conflict plan’? Blinken accused Hamas of having ‘cynically weaponized the suffering of Palestinians’, but who inflicted that suffering? How did the ‘international community’ think that Gaza would be rebuilt, when virtually every institution that holds Gaza society together has been destroyed? What agency did it think it would take the place of UNRWA, which Israel has now banned from the Palestinian territories? What ‘political horizon’ did its members expect Palestinians to embrace, after Israel had killed their relatives and neighbours, and destroyed their schools, hospitals, homes, and mosques?

Yesterday, Trump told reporters once again that he was ‘committed to buying and owning Gaza’ and invited his audience to think of Gaza as a ‘big real estate site’ that the US was ‘going to own.’ Once again he promised that this ‘demolition site’ would be ‘reclaimed. It’ll be leveled out, and fixed up. There won’t be anybody there. Hamas won’t be there.’

According to US intelligence, Hamas has gained 10,000-15,000 fighters since the war - easily replenishing the fighters it lost during the conflict. Many of these ‘Iran-backed fighters’ as Reuters calls them, will be young men - and women - whose families and houses were annihilated. Many will be traumatized. All of them will know who killed their families, friends and neighbours - they don’t need to be ‘Iran-backed’ to know that. Israel, backed by the ‘international community’, has turned Gaza into a Stalingrad.

If Trump wants Hamas to disappear, then Israeli troops will have to fight for every inch of the rubble they have created, or use weapons that will make Gaz-a-Lago uninhabitable even for the property developers even as they set the Middle East on fire.

In his Dropsite News dispatch, Abubaker Abed wrote:

I am still in northern Gaza—sleeping inside the wreckage of one of my friends’ homes. The rain is torrential and threatens to waterlog us at any point. Israeli drones are buzzing overhead. The nightmare hasn’t ended. I am desperate for a cup of clean water here, for a plate of food. Donald Trump should know that these living conditions are better for me than living in a castle anywhere else in the world.

Neither the gilded ape who is promising to ‘buy’ Gaza, nor his sycophants and minions will ever understand the meaning behind these words. He has no understanding of the dreams and hopes of a brutalized people who the world has tried for more than a century to erase. Tragically, and unforgivably, many of the governments who do understand these dreams and hopes have no interest in realising them either.

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Pity the Poor Immigrant

Last Wednesday, among the blizzard of savage, vengeful and reactionary executive orders emanating from the White Supremacist White House, the criminal-rapist president of the United States instructed the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to detain 30,000 ‘criminal illegal aliens’ at the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay.

This executive order was issued on the same day that Congress passed the Laken Riley Act - named after a Georgia nursing student murdered by an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant in February, 2024 - which authorized the detention of any migrant arrested or charged with an array of crimes, ranging from theft to assault and murder.

Trump’s depiction of undocumented migrants as murderers, terrorists and rapists was a central theme in his electoral campaign. So on one level both the Laken Riley Act and the Guantánamo executive order were another sinister demonstration of his determination to halt the immigrant ‘invasion’ at America’s southern border - a commitment supported by twelve Democrats who also voted for the act.

Most Americans - and indeed, much of the wider world - associate Guantánamo with the lawless or grey legal practices initiated by the Bush administration in 2002, which enabled the detention of some 780 Muslims without trial and even without charge. 15 detainees remain at the ‘foreign’ military facility where the US government was able to evade international and even national legal norms for more than two decades.

In effect, Guantánamo became a twenty-first century variant on the ‘state of exception’ identified by philosophers and political theorists from Hannah Arendt to Georgio Agamben, whereby states strip certain categories of human beings of their human, national or civil rights and transform them into stateless people to whom anything can be done with impunity.

Historically, this phenomenon tends to occur under the pretext of national security ‘emergencies’, from the Reichstag fire and the ‘Mau-Mau’ insurrection in Kenya, to 9/11 and the ‘war on terror.’ This is why the criminal-rapist who currently occupies the White House has described illegal immigration at the US-Mexico border as an ‘emergency’ in order to justify a range of exceptional measures that include the proposed deportation of 12 million men, women and children.

Trump’s depiction of Guantánamo as a holding centre for migrant detainees who ‘are so bad, we don’t even trust their countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back’ is a both a response to this ‘emergency’ and a symbolic message intended to confirm its seriousness to the MAGA citizenry.

The Worst of the Worst

In 2002, Donald Rumsfeld described Guantánamo as a detention centre for terrorists he called the ‘worst of the worst.’ Now, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says that the Migrant Operation Center will house ‘the worst of the worst’ migrants.

Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth - a former guard at Guantánamo during the ‘war on terror’ - has similarly described Guantánamo as ‘the perfect transit point to temporarily house the worst of the worst until we move them back to their home countries, who, as President Trump has made it very clear, better be prepared to take them robustly and soon.’

Words like ‘until’ and ‘soon’ are clues to the dire consequences of the criminal-rapist’s executive order. According to Hegseth, the Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo will act as a holding centre for migrant detainees, while their deportation paperwork is processed and arrangements are made for their repatriation.

Neither Hegseth or anyone else knows how long this process may take, or by what legal norms it will be conducted, and it is difficult not to conclude that no one in Trump’s monstrous administration particularly cares.

The tragedy is that few of Trump’s supporters are likely to care either. Because if migrants are murderers, thieves and rapists, or criminals simply by virtue of having crossed the US border without documentation, then why should anyone in this brave new white supremacist world be bothered by what happens to them?

So given the low moral and intellectual calibre of the officials overseeing this operation, the Guantánamo Migrant Operations Center is likely to resume its place in history as an offshore detention centre, where certain categories of unwanted and undesirable people are held indefinitely, at the mercy of state agencies operating outside legal parameters.

It’s tempting, at first sight, to see this development as another indication of the criminal-rapist’s fascistic drift. But this is not the first time Guantánamo has been used for similar purposes. In the early 1990s, both the Bush and Clinton administrations used Guantánamo as a processing centre for undocumented Haitian and Cuban migrants intercepted at sea - reaching a peak of 45,000 detainees in 1994.

As the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) noted last year, the Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo Bay has long served as an ‘offshoring’ centre, where refugees are ‘detained indefinitely in prison-like conditions without access to the outside world and trapped in a punitive system operated by the Department of Homeland Security.’

It is the tragedy of our times that such practices have become normalised by democratic governments across the world, particularly amongst western democracies.

Though not many people saw its anomalousness at the time, the Clinton administration’s use of Guantánamo as a migrant holding centre coincided with a period of history in which the United States, along with most western governments, celebrated the advent of a ‘borderless’ world as one of the great political gains from the collapse of Soviet power.

In those euphoric days, it was easy to be seduced by these utopian visions of the free movement of money, goods and people. Since then, a two-fold and seemingly contradictory process has unfolded. On the one hand, the world has become more ‘borderless’ in economic, financial and human terms. 24-hour supply chains connect raw materials and production centres, to markets from one end of the world to the other. Governments are made and sometimes brought down by political forces using de-territorialized digital technologies. These same technologies enable migrants to cross national borders in search of work, higher salaries or protection.

Where the rise of the nation-state - with its customs and tax regimes, its state education and welfare systems based on ‘imagined’ national communities - once coincided with ‘national’ capital accumulation, post-Cold War networks of production and capital flows tend to connect cities rather than nations, and corporations and individuals rather than governments.

These developments have inevitably made national borders more porous.

At the same time, global imbalances in power, wealth and lifestyle have increased the numbers of ‘surplus people’ who cannot be accommodated by the economic systems within their national borders, and who are also more closely connected through technology, information and transportation routes to countries beyond these borders than ever before.

War and conflict has increased the numbers of people living outside their countries of origin - a tendency that is likely to increase in the coming decades. As the geopolitical strategist Parag Khanna argues:

We have wealthy countries across North America and Europe with nearly 300 million aging people and decaying infrastructure — and roughly 2 billion young people in Latin America, the Middle East and Asia who are capable of caring for the elderly and maintaining public services. We have countless hectares of arable farmland across depopulated Canada and Russia, while millions of African farmers are driven from their lands by drought. There are countries with sterling political systems yet few citizens, such as Finland and New Zealand, but also hundreds of millions of people suffering under despotic regimes or living in refugee camps. Is it any surprise that record numbers of people have been on the move?

No surprise at all. And yet, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, governments across the world have sought to ‘manage’ or prevent these migratory movements through punitive border enforcement policies generally targeted at poorer immigrants from the global south.

In the same period, the nature of the border has changed. Border enforcement is no longer limited to ‘walls’ and fences equipped with militarised surveillance technologies that transform the lack of a visa into a justification for violence and even death.

Today, borders include both ‘internal’ borders that prevent refugees and economic migrants from obtaining any foothold in the countries where they end up, and ‘externalised’ border controls that attempt to prevent migrants from even leaving their own countries by enlisting foreign governments in policing migration routes.

Twenty-first century border control also includes Guantánamo-style ‘offshoring’ policies. And as cruel and vicious as the Trump administration’s enforcement policies are undoubtedly are, there is not that much difference between what he and his minions are preparing to do, and what previous American administrations have already done. The European Union has its own migration Guantánamos in Libya and Niger. Australia did the same at Nauru and Manus Islands, and the UK attempted to do it in Rwanda.

Again and again, right and even left-of-centre governments have introduced hard border enforcement policies either because they actually believe in them, or because they think that pretending to believe in them will fend off the political threat of the far-right.

Rarely has there been any serious attempt at an international level to reassess this approach to immigration, and consider whether there are more humane and mutually-beneficial ways in which migrant-receiving and migrant-producing countries might work together to construct a world in which undocumented migrants are not punished or ‘left to die’ simply because they wish to live and work outside their own national borders.

In 2018, the United Nations adopted a ‘Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration’ (GCM) which it described as ‘the first intergovernmental agreement, prepared under the auspices of the United Nations, to cover all dimensions of international migration in a holistic and comprehensive manner.’

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This non-binding agreement was intended to pave the way for a new form of migration governance ‘that puts migrants and their human rights at the centre and that provides a significant opportunity to strengthen human rights protection for all migrants, regardless of status.’

The following year, these commitments were adopted by all 193 UN member states in the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. This declaration was widely condemned in right and far-right political circles, which variously claimed that it was intended to ‘enforce multiculturalism’, and overrule both national immigration policies and the principle of national sovereignty.

Not much else is to be expected from these quarters. Since then, the GCM has been largely left to wither on the vine. As the Mixed Migration Centre (MMC) noted last year, objective 7 of the Compact committed signatories to saving migrant lives. Yet 2023 was the deadliest year on record - with nearly 8,600 deaths worldwide. The MMC also observed that:

the most volatile and vulnerable spaces seem to be at the highest levels of government. In this year of elections, when nearly half the world’s population head to the ballot booth, migration is widely being used as one of, if not THE, primary wedge issue, purposefully utilized by political parties across the spectrum as a very effective divisive tool.

This ‘wedge issue’ was crucial to getting Trump elected. It has been the key issue in the horrifying rise of the AfD in Germany, of the French National Rally, of Vox in Spain, and Reform in the UK. Again and again, mainstream governments have responded to reactionary nationalism with demonstrations of performative toughness that are not that different to what Trump is proposing.

And these developments also point to another possibility - that resistance and opposition to Trumpism and its associated movements cannot be based around punitive exclusionary policies that treat immigrants as criminals. To oppose Trumpism - and ultimately to defend democracy - must mean defending and siding with the victims of the immigration policies that define undocumented migrants as the universal scapegoats of a revitalised white supremacism that is leading America to moral collapse.

What is needed is an entirely different approach, based on solidarity and a recognition of immigration as a global reality that cannot be walled-off or shunted away into ‘offshore’ detention centres where the law no longer applies.

Some may base their pro-migrant politics on universalist notions of human rights and freedom. Others may prefer what Parag Khanna has called ‘cosmopolitan utilitarianism’ in which ‘We should realign our geographies to bring maximum welfare to current and future generations… States make their own decisions, but more migration is very much in the national interest.’

Whether this transformation is based on the national interest or on wider philosophical and and political premises, it needs to happen.

If it doesn’t, we will never escape a world in which the richest men on earth persecute some of the poorest, while simultaneously asset-stripping governments that get in their way. It’s a world in which post-World War 2 attempts to establish an international community of values are effectively dead, while fascism and the far-right return to the mainstream, using migrant emergencies and ‘invasions’ to justify permanent national security regimes.

If national sovereignty means nothing more than the ability to deport anyone, anywhere, for as long as any state sees fit, then the ‘new’ Guantánamo facility will merely become one more of so many already-existing dystopias that begin at the border and ultimately engulf the countries that created them.

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Your Own Personal (MAGA) Jesus

Every picture tells a story, and the images of the Trump crime family and the Vances listening to Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde tell a bleak story of America’s descent into the Hellmouth. Their assembled faces might have appeared in some Renaissance portrait, let’s call it I Bastardi. There is Trump’s lynx-like scowl, the downturned mouth and the imperious raised eyebrows, the dim incredulity that some lowly cleric would have the temerity to call him out in a public forum.

Next to him his equally sinister wife - a grim nod to Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, tight-mouthed and resentful, oozing the same sociopathic malevolence as her husband, or perhaps she is merely thinking of her grifting cryptocurrency. And then the furrowed brow of JP Vance - a faint smile, half-way between disdainful irony and how dare she?

This hillbilly Faust probably attended enough sermons in his Kentucky youth to know that he has sold his soul to the devil for the rock bottom price of a vice presidency and Peter Thiel’s cash, but is he bothered? Is he hell.

Around them the infamous Trump brood: a grotesque medley of highlights, pampered stony-faced privilege, suspicion and predation. There is Tiffany half-pouting, as you do in church, and Eric grasping to understand what is actually happening around him, as a female (female!!) bishop dares to hold up a mirror to his family’s cruelty and venality, with these powerful and stirring words:

In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They…may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.

These words were a direct response to the Executive Order which Trump had issued the previous day, declaring:

America’s sovereignty is under attack. Our southern border is overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics that harm Americans, including America.

This invasion has caused widespread chaos and suffering in our country over the last 4 years. It has led to the horrific and inexcusable murders of many innocent American citizens, including women and children, at the hands of illegal aliens. Foreign criminal gangs and cartels have begun seizing control of parts of cities, attacking our most vulnerable citizens, and terrorizing Americans beyond the control of local law enforcement. Cartels control vast territories just south of our southern border, effectively controlling who can and cannot travel to the United States from Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have tragically died from drug overdoses because of the illicit narcotics that have flowed across the southern border.

To deal with this ‘invasion’, Trump is preparing to send the army to the border, rescind refugee applications, withdraw citizenship from the children of ‘aliens’ who were born in the US, and unleash what may well prove to be the largest deportation operation in American history. Bishop Budde’s description of American immigrants who ‘may not be citizens or have the proper documentation’ as neighbours, members of different faiths, taxpayers and workers, was a direct riposte to the dehumanizing caricatures that have made this onslaught possible.

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Very few politicians, either in the United States or Europe, have ever made such a forthright defence of immigrants and immigration in the face of far-right populism. Most politicians are too frightened of accusations that they are ‘soft’ on immigration to speak out like this. And the fact that Bishop Budde’s appeal for mercy was couched in Christian terms had very particular implications for a president and a movement that believes that God and Jesus are on their side.

This month, Congress was treated to the gross spectacle of the Defence Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth - the AI incarnation of the generic white supremacist sexual predator/alleged rapist - bleating piously about his ‘lord and saviour, Jesus’, when presented with documented allegations of sexual assault.

MAGA Republicans love Jesus, and they think that Jesus loves Trump. But the Jesus they believe in is not the Jesus that I was taught to believe in as a child. That Jesus preached compassion, empathy and solidarity with the poor and the sick, the marginalized and the excluded. The MAGA Jesus is more likely to be a white alpha male Chuck Norris, toting an automatic rifle and a handgun, ready to blow away migrants crossing the Rio Grande.

Just Google the words ‘Gun Jesus’ and you can see these memes, AI-generated images and artwork in all their tawdry eye-popping madness. Some MAGA supporters think that Trump is Jesus. Last year, Marjorie Taylor Greene compared the presidential candidate to the man who was ‘murdered on a Roman cross’ in her response to the Stormy Daniels trial guilty verdict.

If Jesus had cheated on his wife and paid a porn star hush money to keep quiet about it and then falsified his business records to conceal that transaction, there might be some merit in this comparison. As the trial should have made clear, Trump is not the messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy. Yet many of Trump’s God-fearing supporters still believe, as TV evangelist Hank Kunneman put it last year, that in a battle between good and evil, ‘There is something on Trump that the enemy fears: it's called the anointing.’

As a non-believer who received a Catholic education, I can only gape in slack-jawed horror and amazement at such a gross perversion of Christianity, and I suspect that the priests and nuns who taught me would have felt the same disgust.

Trump has clearly begun to believe this gibberish himself, or has at least recognized its usefulness. During his campaign, he also suggested that he was ‘chosen’ and ‘anointed’ by God to save America, and that divine intervention saved him from an assassin’s bullet. In his inaugural address, he told his audience ‘I felt then, and I believe even more so now, that my life was saved by God to make America great again.’

At the same ceremony, with Biden and Harris looking on helplessly, the Reverend Franklin Graham praised God for Trump’s comeback. ‘When Donald Trump’s enemies thought he was down and out,’ the man of the cloth proclaimed, ‘you and you alone saved his life and raised him up with strength and power.’

This ought to be pass the sick bag time, but all this ol’ time religion has clearly gone to Mangolini’s head, so much so that he too could be heard babbling about the ‘power of God’s love’ at a National Prayer Breakfast this month as if he actually believed it.

A more crazed and dishonest perversion of the Christian faith has not been seen since Flannery O’Connor’s con artist Hoover Shoats fleeced punters to fork out a dollar to join the ‘Holy Church of Christ Without Christ’ in Wiseblood.

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You don’t have to be a Christian to find these depraved God-spouting, Trump-worshipping charlatans repugnant and shameful. But shame is beyond this movement and its leader, who did not like the version of themselves that Bishop Budde presented to the world. And so Trump denounced Budde as a ‘nasty’ bishop and a ‘Radical Left hard line Trump hater’ and called on her to apologize.

Trump’s vapid minions immediately went on the attack with him. Lorenzo Sewell - the preacher who delivered the benediction at Trump’s inauguration and compared Trump Martin Luther King - called Budde a ‘heretic’ and accused her of delivering a ‘demonic message.’

The Episcopal Diocese’s social media account was overwhelmed with posts calling on Budde to resign. One Fox News host called her ‘Satan.’ Sean Hannity condemned a ‘disgraceful prayer full of fearmongering and division’. Hannity’s accusation could be levelled more credibly at Trump’s Executive Order. But what do these people care? Like Trump himself, they lie as they breathe, and they do it so naturally and so consistently that you wonder if even Jesus could save them.

One Republican congressman called for Budde to be ‘added to the deportation list’ - the default solution to every far-right problem. The Daily Wire claimed that ‘hell exists for people like Mariann’, because pleading with a president for mercy is what gets you into Hell nowadays. Naturally, the Daily Mail joined in with attacks on the ‘woke bishop’ and her ‘wild lecture.’

To her credit, Budde has not backed down, and has refused Trump’s call to apologize. And now the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has condemned Trump’s decision to allow immigration officials to enter schools and places of worship as ‘contrary to the common good’, arguing:

Turning places of care, healing, and solace into places of fear and uncertainty for those in need, while endangering the trust between pastors, providers, educators and the people they serve, will not make our communities safer.

This statement has aroused the wrath of the ‘heartbroken’ Catholic, J.D. Vance, who has accused the bishops of faking humanitarianism in order to access funds that help to ‘resettle illegal immigrants.’ If there’s anyone who knows about fakery and grifting, it’s Vance. And you don’t have to be a Christian to recognize the disingenuous and sordid hypocrisy of these pious MAGA con men, who use religion to give themselves a lustre that they don’t deserve, and then turn on their own religious leaders when their fascistic cruelty is called out.

Bishop Budden knew what the response to her appeal for mercy would be, but she did what she believed her religion expected her to do: she defended those who will be at the receiving end of MAGA extremism. Once again, you don’t have to be a Christian to do this, but in order to understand the calamity that is unfolding in America, you do need to be able to distinguish between those who use religion as an alibi and a shield, and those who represent the universal principles that are common to all religions and which also transcend them - justice, fairness, solidarity with the weak, the marginalised and the defenceless.

That is what the ‘woke bishop’ called on the president to do, and her moral courage should act as a rallying cry to all those who oppose this dire authoritarian movement and its army of charlatans.

And as for those who are attacking her, they are exactly how Jesus once described the Pharisees, ‘like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.’

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At the Court of King Don

In the 1981 film Mephisto, based on Klaus Mann’s novel of the same name, Klaus Maria Brandauer plays the German stage actor Hendrik Höfgen, who collaborates with the Nazis in order to become a theatrical superstar. Höfgen starts his career as a frustrated and ambitious provincial actor. He sings, dances, and even forms a left-wing theatre company, which forces him to go into exile when the Nazis come to power.

But Höfgen also longs for stardom, and so when the Nazis invite him back to Germany to head the National Theatre and reprise his famous role as Mephisto in Goethe’s Faust, he eagerly accepts, abandoning his wife, his left-wing friends, and all the principles that he supposedly lived by.

Mann based his novel on his former brother-in-law, Gustaf Gründgens. Like Höfgen, Gründgens flirted with Communism, fell into disgrace when the Nazis came to power, and then went on to enjoy a stellar career under Nazism, thanks to the patronage of Hermann Göring and his actress wife Emmy Sonneman. Like Höfgen also, Gründgens mesmerized Goering with his portrayal of Mephistopholes in Faust, and was appointed director of the State Theatre as a reward for associating himself with the regime.

Mann wrote his novel in 1936 in order to ‘analyse the abject type of treacherous intellectual who prostitutes his talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth’ but his warning is also applicable to our own times. Because in every age, political monsters are always enabled by ‘abject types’ who pave the way for their ascent.

Some do it for fame, money, access or relevance. Some do it for power, and some do it because they adore the monster or sympathize with his goals.

Since November, there has been a long procession of squeaky bath-toy Mephistos looking to jump into Trump’s scummy bathwater. Some have talent, others clearly don’t, but all of them hope to gain something from the criminal rapist-in-chief’s less than august presence. It’s difficult not to see Liz Truss, pathetically posing in Washington with a MAGA cap, without thinking of her as a supplicant at the Corleone wedding, pleading for vengeance and justice against the woke lettuce that prevented her from saving Britain.

And then there is Nigel Mosley-Farage - the oily Cerberus at the gates of our political hell - and Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, and even the ludicrous Laurence Fox, who all went to Washington in much the same way as some nuns once went to Lourdes. As abject as these types are, they are not Höfgen/Gründgens, who at least had principles - for a while.

This rabble never did. Like Charlie Kirk, these are men and women without honour, acolytes and courtiers, who will say that TikTok should be banned one day and then call for it to be opened, depending on what Don Mangolini tells them.

The same, it seems, can be said of the billionaires who have kissed the Trumpian ring in the last few months, and who were also present yesterday to pay homage to the criminal rapist-in-chief.

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These people may not have the mesmerizing allure of Hofgen’s Mephisto, but they do have a lot of money and power, which Trump admires, and they admire it too. All of them, along with the millions of voters who brought Trump back from the political dead, know exactly what he was and is: a rapist and sexual predator, a sociopath, a dishonest crook and a convicted criminal, who would quite likely have ended up in court and probably in jail for illegally trying to overturn an election, had he not won this one.

But winning, in our corrupt age, is what counts, and increasingly, it’s the only thing that counts. The corporate capitulation to Trumpism had already begun even before the election. But now the tech bros are queuing up to ingratiate themselves with a government that some of them paid for and partly own.

Amazon has given a whopping $40 million to Melania Trump for a documentary to be directed by Brett Ratner - the previously-disgraced director accused of sexual harassment and misconduct by six women back in the day - but hey, who is bothered about that kind of stuff any more?

Hasn’t Muck Zuckerberg more or less eliminated Facebook’s entire content moderation teams because too many companies have become ‘culturally neutered’, and the world needs more ‘masculine energy’? And how about Bill Gates. Wasn’t he the nice one? The philanthropist who wants to use his vast wealth for the common good? Who once called out Trump’s ‘dangerous’ attempt to defund the World Health Organization during the pandemic? Who Trump’s henchman Roger Stone and many others accused of creating the pandemic for his own financial gain? - that Bill Gates?

Once upon a time, according to the New York Times, (paywalled), Gates made an audience laugh by mocking the then-president’s inability to distinguish between HIV and the sexually-transmitted infection HPV. Last December, Trump tweeted that Gates had asked to come to Mar-a-Lago - a claim dismissed as ‘bizarre’ at the time by outside observers. But it turns out that Gates did make that pilgrimage and had an ‘intriguing’ and ‘impressive’ dinner with Trump, which convinced him that the man he had once mocked was ‘energized and looking forward to helping to drive innovation.’

Like their predecessors, even the most philanthropic twenty-first century corporations with the scent of oligarchy in their nostrils will always go to where the money is. If diversity capitalism is profitable, they might support it, and if not, not.

The Great Leap Backwards

This is why, according to the Financial Times, the ‘2020 corporate rush to support social justice causes after the murder of George Floyd by a policeman’ has now produced a headlong rush for the exit door in which:

Companies are scrapping diversity, equity and inclusion departments, cutting their support for racial diversity charities, and dropping out of climate change groups. They are also scrubbing anything that could be perceived as “woke” from public statements, corporate documents and advertising.

Now, according to the FT, ‘Some Wall Streeters also feel able to embrace making money openly without nodding to any broader social goals,’ and ‘bankers and financiers say that Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed against “woke doctrine” and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people.’

Now - hallelujah! - they can do all the offending they like:

‘I feel liberated.’ said a top banker. ‘We can say “retard” and “pussy” without the fear of getting cancelled…it’s a new dawn.’

It’s not difficult to guess what other words this anonymous ‘top banker’ and his pals would like to use. This Great Leap Backward is not limited to bankers and CEOs. Take the recently-knighted Niall Ferguson. In an article in Bloomsberg News back in January 2021, the Republican Party’s favourite expatriate historian appeared to have stumbled into an unusually principled position, when he attributed the assault on the Capitol to a mob ‘whipped into revolutionary fervor by President Donald Trump’.

Ferguson condemned Trump’s attempt to ‘overturn the result of the presidential election he lost, using mafia tactics…as well as cynical “lawfare”.’ He noted that Trump ‘egged on the mob’ and defended them afterwards’, and he declared unequivocally that these actions ‘clearly violated his oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.’

Trump was out of power then, and seemingly headed for the garbage heap of history and possibly to jail, which may partly explain Ferguson’s indignation at a ‘coup, putsch, autogolpe — take your pick’, instigated by a man he denounced as

a demagogue and a would-be tyrant whose disregard for the rule of law and encouragement of sedition and insurrection have, very fortunately for us all, been thwarted by his own incompetence.

Harsh words. And historian that he is, Ferguson also suggested that the January 6 assault was worse than Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, which ‘didn’t happen in the national capital and it wasn’t inspired by either the German chancellor or the president.’

Since then, things have changed. As early as last October, in an article in the Daily Mail, Ferguson predicted that Kamala Harris would lose the election, and offered the following mea culpa:

I admit it: I was wrong about Donald Trump. I thought on January 6, 2021, when rioters stormed the Capitol, that his political career was at an end. The reality is that, regardless of how recklessly he behaved that day, the Democrats have failed to persuade around half of likely voters that his conduct revealed him to be a Hitler-like threat to democracy.

Ferguson went on to suggest, as Trump and his supporters and minions had done before him, that the Department of Justice’s attempts to bring criminal convictions against the former president were politically-motivated:

Trump himself may have little respect for lawyers and generals. Who can really blame him after nearly four years of 'lawfare' – politically motivated litigation designed to discredit if not to jail him – and multiple political attacks by generals he fired?

Such declarations earned Ferguson an invitation to Trump’s celebration party in Mar-a-Lago, where he described Trump’s ‘beatific air’, danced to YMCA, and happily depicted Mangolini ‘at the height of his power…in his own palace, surrounded by adoring courtiers and supplicants.’ The veneer of ironic detachment cannot conceal the fact that Ferguson himself is now a courtier, if not a supplicant. In an interview with the Times (paywalled), it turns out that January 6 2021 was not comparable to the Beer Hall putsch after all. Why? Because:

We were all treated to a theatrical event with an amateur cast that really one would be stretching the English language to call a coup or even an attempted coup. With the passage of time, one realises that that episode really belongs, along with the George Floyd riots, in a chapter called The Madness of the Pandemic. The lockdowns created an atmosphere of near collective madness. Things were pretty crazy on both sides.

That ‘both sides’ again, because weren’t we all a little crazee back then? Except, as Ferguson himself once pointed out, not all of us were crazy enough to attack the Capitol building and prevent the certification of an elected president. The publication of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution case makes it clear, even if Ferguson doesn’t, that the assault on the Capitol was motivated by something more than a pandemic-induced fever dream.

Smith distinguished between hardscrabble politics and criminal behaviour: he believed that Trump was guilty of the latter, and that he would have been convicted of illegally trying to overturn the 2020 election if he had not been elected.

But Ferguson could care less, and the same could be said of so many others who once found many faults in the criminal rapist-in-chief, and now see only power, victory, and a ‘mandate.’ As the former BBC US correspondent Jon Sopel recently argued in the Independent,‘Teflon Don has dodged justice - it’s time for the rest of us to get on board’.

Though Sopel admitted that the Smith report was ‘likely to be true’, he asks ‘what is to be gained by continuously relitigating the arguments that have torn America apart’, before mocking - not Trump - but the Special Counsel:

I do not doubt that the Jack Smith report is an important document and record of Trump’s discreditable attempts to cling to power after the 2020 election. But there is a danger that those who want to wave this report around – six days away from inauguration – are like the Japanese soldiers who hid in the dense Burmese jungle, unaware that the Second World War had ended.

This is the kind of journalism that gives journalism a bad name - a lazy moral and intellectual capitulation that has the unmistakable whiff of Weimar about it. And the fact that it comes from a supposedly liberal journalist now ‘freed’ from the BBC to host his own podcast really does explain, in a way, how the criminal rapist-in-chief got away with it.

The Trump Whisperers

But even Sopel’s lame offering pales in comparison the British Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s volte face. There was a time when Lammy called Trump a ‘neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath,’ a ‘serial liar and a cheat’ and a ‘tyrant in a toupee’. But that was then, and this is now. And yesterday, Lammy told Radio 4 that the ‘most of the world is glad he’s back’, and gushed about the ‘extended dinner’ that he attended with Trump last year:

The Donald Trump I met was a man who had incredible grace, generosity, very keen to be a good host, very funny, very friendly, very warm about the UK, our Royal Family, Scotland.’

Some may see this unctuous grovelling as a diplomatic attempt to uphold the national interest, but I can’t help feeling that it is really has more to do with self-interest.

Klaus Mann once warned of ‘the coming catastrophe. It will be like nothing that has ever happened. Everything will be swallowed up…Everything that exists will fall apart.’ The election of the criminal rapist-in-chief may not result in a catastrophe on the same scale that Mann and his generation lived through, but as Trump and his pals prepare to career recklessly across our burning world, it would be foolish to rule that possibility out

His election sends a message to every would-be authoritarian, to every crook, cheap pick-up artist and sexual predator, to every trigger-happy cop and border guard, that there are certain categories of people to whom ‘you can do anything’, as the Great Man once put it, and certain crimes and abuses that you will get away with.

When these expectations become normalised, politics ceases to offer even the possibility of a route to the common good, and very notion of civic virtue, even as an aspiration, is called into question. America is now fully embarked on this course, in part because of the willingness of so many craven apologists, from the humblest voter to the richest billionaire, to normalise what should not be normal, to sanewash the criminal rapist-in-chief no matter what he does.

It is not normal that an outgoing president should have to issue ‘pre-emptive pardons’ to protect appointed officials and generals from prosecution by his vengeful successor. It is not normal that a man who tried to overturn a national election is allowed to win another in order to protect himself from prosecution. The cowardice and collusion that simply ignores such things or even embraces them is as much a manifestation of our corrupt and depraved political times as the man who stood yesterday in front of the building that his supporters once attacked, and might have attacked again, if he had not won.

The people who made these choices have their reasons. But David Lammy is wrong: there are millions of us who do not want Trump and government-by-billionaire, who want to preserve our common planetary home, not burn it down while Elon Musk sends rockets to Mars. We still exist, those of us who believe that politics either has a moral component or it is nothing, that a criminal-rapist should not become a figure of admiration and adulation just because he won a ‘mandate’, and that truth is preferable to lies.

We should not allow ourselves to be seduced and gaslit by the bath-toy Mephistos. We don’t have to abandon every principle or belief we ever had just because so many are willing to do the same. We don’t have to accept the world that ‘Teflon Don’, MAGA and the tech bros are preparing to shove down our throats.

We do not have to grovel at the feet of the criminal rapist-in-chief, even if so many others clearly do. And even at this grim moment, when Trump and his filthy crowd want to drink our tears, we should not cry, not even give them the pleasure. And we should stand with those Americans who oppose him and who still dream of a better America, and with those who will come under attack over the next four years.

It might be easier to disengage and turn away, but we would be ill-advised to do that. In this country a weak and politically inept Labour government is in Trump’s sights. Lammy and the would-be Trump whisperers like Peter Mandelson have gained nothing through their grovelling. If the worst comes to the worst, we might see Farage as prime minister, and Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate as MPs.

Sounds mad? Not after yesterday. And if this comes to pass, there will be no shortage of ‘abject intellectuals’ willing to cheer them on.

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