The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects. –George Orwell, 1984

We’re all in the shit together. –Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard, Brazil

Those of us who typically kick off the holiday with a seasonal viewing of Terry Gilliam’s Monty-Pythonesque, comically star-stuffed, dystopian film Brazil (1985), are likely to find the film – and the opening scene in particular – hits close to home this year. In a bleak low tech retro future when everything’s perpetually on the blink, it’s Christmas Eve and a family is gathered round watching A Christmas Carol. No sooner has Tiny Tim uttered his annual benediction “God bless us everyone,” when militarized jack-booted government thugs drill their way through the ceiling and, before the eyes of his traumatized wife and children, hood and drag away poor Archibald Buttle rather than the freelance heating engineer and suspected terrorist Archibald Tuttle, played by Robert De Niro.

I was reminded of that scene this summer when masked agents wrenched Columbia University Mahmoud Khalil from the side of his heavily pregnant wife Noor Abdulla, begging the question of whether the kidnapping wasn’t also calculated to induce a miscarriage. Needless to say, the party of the Right to Life and Family values should have been holding high level hearings and getting to the bottom of it all, but as the old saying goes, “’The Moral Majority’ is neither.” At least in the film they gave Mrs. Tuttle a receipt for her husband.

As some of us celebrate the story of a family of Jewish Palestinian refugees fleeing to protect their child from a tyrant, the fact that Noor Abdulla carried the baby to full term seems downright miraculous. And the same seems true of women who go on giving birth, giving love, amid the genocides in Gaza and Darfur, on the streets, in shackles, and in war zones and detention camps around the world.

The New Nanny State?

I thought of that scene from Brazil back in September seeing videos of the ICE assault on a Chicago apartment building in a historically Black neighborhood. A swarm of Black Hawk helicopters circled the building before agents rappelled down, kicking in doors, throwing flashbangs, tearing parents from children who were zipped tied together, held in “dark vans” or left out in the cold for hours in their underwear. As neighbor and witness Eboni Watson described it, “The kids was crying. People was screaming… I was out there crying …“’Where’s the morality?” Watson said she kept asking herself during the raid.’”

I’m guessing Eboni Watson wasn’t all that reassured when a DHS spokesperson later somberly intoned, “’For their own safety and to ensure these children were not being trafficked, abused or otherwise exploited, these children were taken into custody until they could be put in the care of a safe guardian or the state.’” As if DHS was suddenly the voice of reason, a veritable Mary Poppins, Nanny McPhee or Mrs. Doubtfire, schooled in the needs of children and ready to adjudicate safe and appropriate placements for them. Never mind that DHS Director Kristi Noem famously demonstrate her qualifications for higher political office under Herr Trump by recounting the ease with which she gunned down the family dog “Cricket” in a gravel pit for the capital crime of misbehaving during a pheasant hunt.

The idea of immigration detention creating safe spaces for children who’ve been deliberately separated from their families seems like delusional, self-serving pedophile logic in the best of times but more so under a president who keeps popping up in the Epstein photo dumps like a veritable Elf on the Shelf while apologists like Megyn Kelly parse the distinctions between degrees of child rape in ways that John Oliver aptly dubbed “pedophile math.”

And by the way, if you’re bracing this holiday to face off over turkey with your racist transphobic Fox-News-loving funny uncle, count your lucky stars you weren’t born a Trump because all the gold in the world can’t gild that spite-filled lily or mask the not so quiet desperation those folks must be suffering as they deck the halls with cyber Santas and stuff down their holiday foie gras. And you can bet that anyone with a modicum of sobriety at the White House Christmas party knows enough to keep their kids from straying anywhere near Santa’s lap.

Trump, Epstein, Colonialism, and “Thingification”

Trump’s repeated and obvious eroticizing of children –from his daughter Ivanka, to teen beauty contestants, and his description of Virginia Guiffre being “stolen” from Mara Lago by Jeffrey Epstein seems proof enough that Martiniquan statesman and writer Aime Cesaire wasn’t blowing smoke when he coined the term “thingification” in his essay “Discourse on Colonialism.” [W]herever there are colonizers and colonized face to face, I see force, brutality, cruelty, sadism [and] conflict,” observed Cesaire, enumerating qualities that the Orange Krampus and his assorted hangers on openly celebrate in themselves and each other.

And is it any surprise that they find clergy willing to conjure and celebrate a god with exactly those qualities? Never mind the whole “if you have not love” bit. If Jesus came back today, Trump’s Justice Department would be only too happy to dispatch him in a hail of bullets the way they did Cop City protester Tortuguita, or haul his longhaired-antifascist-Jewish-ass in front of Congress before shipping him off to ADX Florence, the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.”

The “imperial boomerang,” the colonial fallout that we’re up against that renders children’s bodies sexualized disposable commodities didn’t begin with Trump or Epstein, but with Christopher Columbus. But for the past five decades, Republican and Democrat administrations alike have siphoned off money for housing, healthcare and education to fatten Windigo war profiteers, the military industrial beast Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of in his 1961 farewell to the presidency. Money for public housing and the War on Poverty siphoned off to pay for the American War in/on Vietnam, for the “War on Drugs,” and “War on Terror,” for a world made red in tooth and claw to profit the rich.

The migration criminalized in the global north is the product of endless colonial violence, thingification, the exploitation of labor, land, and bodies. Climate change knows no borders, and today’s high-tech carbon intensive endless wars and the consumption that help fuel them, are in danger, kids, of burning down Santa’s workshop, and let’s just say that the melting of the permafrost doesn’t bode well for the future of his reindeer either.

Bullhorns, Trombones, and Whistles

So we need to defund the colonial war machine like our future and our children’s future depend on it. And the good news is that boycott, divestment, and sanctions against the U.S. and Israeli war machines are well under way thanks to organizations like the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and tools like the Boycott App make it easier than ever to identify complicit corporations.

We can take heart this year knowing that from Jenin to Eugene, Ramallah to Rome, New York to Chicago and LA, people of good will are organizing, striking, divesting, and pushing back, putting their jobs, lives, and bodies on the line for people they love and people they’ve never met, all of them bent on stopping fascism, genocide, and climate collapse in their tracks, all of us riding together on the same fragile, Mother-Loving Dust Speck. We can take comfort knowing that in the new year, friends and family, total strangers – from the tallest to the smallest – will be standing side by side in the streets, in their loafers and their cleats, with their bullhorns, and their trombones, and their whistles all blowing tweet, tweet, tweet. Oh, but the people and inflatables you’ll meet! And we can take comfort in the new year in knowing that all that NOISE, NOISE, NOISE, NOISE is the sound of the “old world …dying and a new one struggling to be born.” Peace out.

The preceding opinions most definitely do not represent the opinions of my employer Washington State University Vancouver. Thanks are due to Frann Michel, Mikel Clayhold, and Linda Cargill for reading and commenting on drafts. All errors are my own.

The post Wassailing in the Age of Endless War, ICE, and Epstein appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed