By Sean Reynolds, World BEYOND War, October 20, 2025

In light of the next day’s “No Kings” protests, which will undoubtedly fail to sanction President Trump’s moves toward war in Iran and Venezuela, I wrote up these notes for a peace group I work with on a recent interview I conducted for Iran’s PressTV. I was interviewed by journalist Ramin Mazaheri, all three of whose brilliant and vexing books I’d actually read before my first hint of personally encountering him. I didn’t have much space to bring in the left-right divide so obsessing the West, but it got in regardless.

In finally produced segment I was glad to hear back my wry comment that forever wars are anathema to Trump’s base “and hopefully the Democratic base as well!” since at tomorrow’s “No Kings” rallies, if my previous experience is any guide, I expect to encounter not the slightest antiwar (or antigenocide!) message outside a scattering of signs brought out by a few attendees, unasked.

My banner, tomorrow in Chicago, will read “Our War Money Kills Ukraine, Not One Penny More.” I’ll be standing outside of the rally. Were it a Republican shindig I’d focus on Gaza, since it’s the growing antizionist trend among young conservatives, not liberals, which seems capable of turning the Defund Israel demand from an urbane fashion gesture into a movement likely to really spare Palestinian lives, beyond sparing our entire world the dangers of a U.S.-Iran war. But for a Dem rally it’s the comparably apocalyptic horror which my parents’ generation rightly deemed unthinkable – the liberal-embraced adventure of a NATO-Russia hot war – on which I’ll want to focus precisely in hopes of mitigating the Iran and Venezuela conflicts.

I was glad the piece included my copious mockery of the lesser-evil Presidential option for whom, last November, so many anti-war voters concerned over Ukraine grimly voted. Humanitarians are few and far between even in ordinary life, and it’s long since serious empathy has survived any Democrat’s or Republican’s rise to the highest public office. Trump is, at least, a cynical con man and not a true-believing neocon: a self-devoted opportunist and not a future-focused fanatic intent on stamping our remarkably conservative planet with corporate-technocratic Western-sourced templates.

I didn’t lie observing that Trump prefers to attempt the assassination of rival leaders, often under cover of peace talks (as with Iran last June) seeking to avoid the protracted wars he knows he would find so burdensome to manage. After which it’s TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out and a rushed declaration of peace to get Trump next year’s prize; as if in the leadership of a nuclear-armed global pariah, timidity wasn’t a thing to be welcomed. Trump seems sincerely to fear dying in a nuclear war: for those of us whose obsessing moral commitment is to avoid killing in one, it’s hard to see the Cheeto’s lack of courage as a downside.

Trump seems correspondingly inclined to retreat into our hemisphere from potentially nuclear conflicts in the other, savaging neighbors like Venezuela and even deploying forces within the U.S. so as to seem tough without completing the apocalypse scripted for him in Eurasia. His voting base, without a doubt, fears both tyranny and civil war, and will tolerate talk of domestic troop deployments mostly in what seems to them, as the Jan 6th protests seemed, a defense of democracy rather than an attack upon it.

Tomorrow’s Chicago rally will focus on the few hundred National Guardsmen Trump has sent onto Chicago streets in support of a set of nationally popular federal laws that Trump’s base considers it wrong for the wealthier states to nullify. Liberals are right to lament the terrible suffering now facing decent and hard-working neighbors illegally here, and many full citizens caught up in the chaos besides. Conservatives consider the citizenship bond to be an indispensible contract that is much like a labor contract in there tragically needing to be stern penalties for the otherwise justly pitied (because so often desperate) willing to work outside of it.

At tomorrow’s rally many will be satisfied with self-pronouncements that tighter borders, by restricting the laissez-faire global flow of cheap labor, constitute fascism itself; whereas others will fear the brutality, and the future fascist danger, of using troops untrained in policing to enforce laws which America’s metropolitan wealth centers are making a bid, against the “fascist” preferences of the electorate, to block from being enforced.

I’ll be focused on antiwar, and praying that the Orange Narcissist, although pressured by bipartisan neocon fanatics to remake the world in America’s and Europe’s image, will for his own typically dingy reasons and to humor antiwar cries sometimes sounding loudest from his own base, sate bloodthirsty Washington with bluster, trolling, a mix of real and staged idiocy, and the bare minimum of actual gore allowed to the president of such a violently narcissist imperial nation.

I pray that, instead of Obama’s “kill list” updated weekly over years, Trump will stop at the grisly trophy of several score poor fishermen brutally murdered off the Venezuelan coast, and several score ethnically Venezuelan U.S. citizens sent – I can only pray, briefly – to the new Guantanamo prison bays we are renting in El Salvador.

I will hope that my Ukraine banner, in countering insane calls for a desperate, speciescidal grab for dominance in Eastern Europe, will be giving the Monster space to make a smaller murder-pageant of his Iran and Venezuela wars-in-preparation. I will remember the liberals’ Honduras coup and the unanswerable fact that martyred labor leader Berta Caceres didn’t want to come here and sample our ‘antiracist’ largesse. I’ll carry it against the longed-for day when, with the Petrodollar a distant memory, the entire Global South is at last wealthy enough, relative to a reduced and profitably chastened West, to turn _us_ away from its well-appointed (and sufficiently well-armed) gates, without getting called “fascist” for its trouble.

I can’t have a conscience cleansed of the blood of empire until there can be a left-and-right movement against war, against actual fascism like that of present-day Kyiv and Tel Aviv, and against the Lovecraft-blasphemous American nuclear arsenal, our obscene ambitious gamble with Every Genocide Committed at Once. I can’t be throwing the word “fascist” around at global _or_ domestic majorities, may liberals and conservatives both forgive me – and forgive me long enough to unite behind a world where countries like Venezuela can retain elected leaders not cynically ousted as ‘Kings’ by Western elites; where a very conservative species is spared from how fascism’s birthplace, the inventive, liberal, world-consuming West, has so long been tempted to rule.

Ukraine banner at a Jan 20 Trump Inauguration protest (Photo credit Sean Reynolds) ____________________________ Sean Reynolds travelled to Iran in 2019 as a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. He helps facilitate Chicago’s “No Iran War” coalition and is active with several antiwar groups.

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