Goodbye To The Pretence

Peter Hitchens writes:

Goodbye to all that then. Goodbye to the pretence that we have morals about foreign policy and disapprove of those who force their will on sovereign countries. Goodbye to the idea that free men and women stand up to bullies to preserve our freedom.

And goodbye to all the pious humbug about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which so many politicians and media figures, from Nato enthusiasts to the sort of people who wear Make America Great Again baseball caps, claimed to disapprove of. But they didn’t really. They just objected when Russia did it.

They had mostly proved this already, by their ‘see no evil’ response to the lawless, Western-condoned overthrow of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. But because most people, to this day, do not know how Mr Yanukovych was toppled, they got away with that.

Donald Trump has imposed his will on Venezuela through the use of naked state force. As far as we can discover, dozens of Cuban and Venezuelan members of president Nicolas Maduro’s palace guard died trying to defend him, though we have been shown no film of the combat.

Also injured in the struggle was Mrs Cilia Maduro, who was paraded in New York with a bruised face and sticking plaster on her forehead, and who complained to a judge of a suspected broken rib.

I wonder if any of the American special forces supermen who took Senora Maduro into custody will get a medal for tackling this dangerous Caracas tigress. Perhaps the hero of this particular skirmish is still in hospital.

Nobody of any importance dares to oppose or criticise Mr Trump outright for what is obviously a breach of the basic rules of civilisation. Nor does anyone (including Mr Trump) know where he will strike next.

That is why the great men and women of democratic Europe now mumble and quibble about the President’s shameless putsch in Caracas, but do not condemn it outright as they would have if Vladimir Putin had done something similar.

Mr Putin, smirking into his sleeve, humorously allows his Foreign Ministry to denounce the action as an ‘act of armed aggression’, ‘unacceptable violation of sovereignty’, and a breach of international law. But just you wait and see what the Kremlin says to any American official who in future condemns Russia’s Ukraine invasion.

President Trump has himself called his own action ‘one of the most precise attacks on sovereignty’, at his triumphal press conference last Saturday. So even his most servile apologists of all kinds can’t claim it wasn’t such a thing. And what a ludicrous event it was. It is almost impossible to like, on any grounds at all.

Even on its own terms it pays a huge, lasting price for a very small achievement. He has replaced an awkward Marxist despot with a servile Marxist despot, and to hell with the people of Venezuela.

The actual leaders of Venezuelan democracy are still out in the cold. Nobody really knows what happens if acting president Delcy Rodriguez is not obedient enough to pacify Mr Trump and his whim of iron.

President Trump’s fulminations about Maduro’s alleged drug trafficking are comically hypocritical. A few weeks ago, he pardoned the ex-president of Honduras, Juan Hernandez, who had been serving 45 years in an American prison.

US prosecutors had said he was a central figure in a huge drug-trafficking scheme that sent hundreds of tons of cocaine into the US, and a Manhattan jury convicted him. Mr Trump apparently believes that this was a ‘set up’ by his predecessor, Joe Biden.

Nobody really knows what happens if acting president Delcy Rodriguez is not obedient enough to pacify Mr Trump and his whim of iron.

Is Mr Trump any more concerned about drugs than he is about democracy or aggression? Probably not. Only three weeks ago, he greatly weakened US federal laws against marijuana, despite growing mountains of evidence linking this drug with incurable mental illness, and violent crimes committed by those it has driven crazy.

And if Mr Trump objects to rigged elections so much, perhaps he might get his special forces to pay a visit to his friend Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, an oil despot and US ally. Azerbaijan recently ethnically cleansed thousands of Armenians from disputed territory, with some cruelty.

Mr Aliyev’s elections are famous for their absurdity and dishonesty, the most striking being the occasion in 2013 when the results (a government victory, amazingly enough) were leaked before voting had even started.

Meanwhile the big garbage bins at the back of the White House are full to overflowing with discarded morals. These were once kept carefully polished and displayed in the Oval Office.

Now they are forgotten and covered in eggshells, soggy cereal, Styrofoam burger containers and coffee grounds, waiting to be carted away to landfill or thrown into some furnace.

I often wonder if Donald Trump has been sent into the world to teach us all a lesson we seem to need very badly. That lesson is that, if we worship human power and wealth, and make up the rules to suit ourselves, anarchy and death will come storming and yelling into our midst.

The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats, in his bitter, cruel poem, The Second Coming, suggested that our new pagan age was witnessing the birth of a thuggish god of wealth and power and luxury, perhaps better-suited to our desires than Christianity has been. Yeats asked: ‘What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’ In words which always haunt me, he described it as having ‘a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun’, words which somehow come to mind quite often these days. Who do they remind me of?

And we must ask whether this new Trumpised United States, on which this unprecedented President imposes his will more and more, is beginning to embody his nature and character at home as well as abroad.

I do not think any open-minded person can look on film of the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis without a shudder. Did the man who fired those shots think he was doing the will of his President? Should such things happen in a law-governed country?

We are seeing something quite new in the world, born out of what has often been justified frustration, but no less ugly and menacing for that.