Maybe Donald Trump isn’t as stupid as I thought. I’d hate to have
to admit that publicly, but it does kind of seem like he has put one over on
the liberal corporate media this time. Scanning the recent Trump-related news, I couldn’t help
but notice a significant decline in the number of references to Weimar,
Germany, Adolf Hitler, and “the brink of fascism”
that America has supposedly been teetering on since Hillary Clinton lost the
election. I googled around pretty well, I think, but I couldn’t find a
single editorial warning that Trump is about to summarily cancel the U.S.
Constitution, dissolve Congress, and proclaim himself Führer.
Nor did I see any mention of Auschwitz,
or any other Nazi stuff … which is weird, considering that the Hitler hysteria has
been a standard feature of the official narrative we’ve been subjected to for
the last two years.
So how did Trump finally get
the liberal corporate media to stop calling him a fascist? He did that by
acting like a fascist (i.e., like a “normal” president). Which is to say he did
the bidding of the deep state goons and corporate mandarins that manage the
global capitalist empire … the smiley, happy, democracy-spreading, post-fascist
version of fascism we live under.
I’m referring, of course,
to Venezuela, which is one of a handful of uncooperative countries that are not
playing ball with global capitalism and which haven’t been “regime changed”
yet. Trump green-lit the attempted coup purportedly being staged by the
Venezuelan “opposition,” but which is obviously a U.S. operation, or, rather, a
global capitalist operation. As soon as he did, the corporate media immediately
suspended calling him a fascist, and comparing him to Adolf Hitler, and so on,
and started spewing out blatant propaganda supporting his effort to overthrow
the elected government of a sovereign country.
Overthrowing the governments of sovereign countries, destroying
their economies, stealing their gold, and otherwise bringing them into the fold
of the global capitalist “international community” is not exactly what most
folks thought Trump meant by “Make America Great Again.” Many Americans have
never been to Venezuela, or Syria, or anywhere else the global capitalist
empire has been ruthlessly restructuring since shortly after the end of the
Cold War. They have not been lying awake at night worrying about Venezuelan
democracy, or Syrian democracy, or Ukrainian democracy.
This is not because Americans are a heartless people, or an
ignorant or a selfish people. It is because, well, it is because they are
Americans (or, rather, because they believe they are Americans), and thus are
more interested in the problems of Americans than in the problems of people in
faraway lands that have nothing whatsoever to do with America. Notwithstanding
what the corporate media will tell you, Americans elected Donald Trump, a
preposterous, self-aggrandizing ass clown, not because they were latent Nazis,
or because they were brainwashed by Russian hackers, but, primarily, because
they wanted to believe that he sincerely cared about America, and was going to
try to “make it great again” (whatever that was supposed to mean, exactly).
Unfortunately, there is no America. There
is nothing to make great again. “America” is a fiction, a fantasy, a nostalgia
that hucksters like Donald Trump (and other, marginally less buffoonish
hucksters) use to sell whatever they are selling … themselves, wars, cars,
whatever. What there is, in reality, instead of America, is a supranational
global capitalist empire, a decentralized, interdependent network of global
corporations, financial institutions, national governments, intelligence
agencies, supranational governmental entities, military forces, media, and so
on. If that sounds
far-fetched or conspiratorial, look at what is going on in Venezuela.
The entire global capitalist empire is working in concert to force
the elected president of the country out of office. The
US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Poland, the
Netherlands, Israel, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Argentina have officially
recognized Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, in spite of
the fact that no one elected him. Only the empire’s official evil enemies
(i.e., Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and other uncooperative countries) are
objecting to this “democratic” coup. The global financial system (i.e., banks)
has frozen (i.e., stolen) Venezuela’s assets, and is attempting to transfer them
to Guaido so he can buy the Venezuelan military. The corporate media are
hammering out the official narrative like a Goebbelsian piano in an effort to
convince the general public that all this has something to do with democracy.
You would have to be a total moron or hopelessly brainwashed not to recognize
what is happening.
What is happening has nothing to do with America … the “America”
that Americans believe they live in and that many of them want to “make great
again.” What is happening is exactly what has been happening around the world
since the end of the Cold War, albeit most dramatically in the Middle East. The
de facto global capitalist empire is restructuring the planet with virtual
impunity. It is methodically eliminating any and all impediments to the
hegemony of global capitalism, and the privatization and commodification of
everything.
Venezuela is one of these impediments. Overthrowing its government
has nothing to do with America, or the lives of actual Americans. “America” is
not to going conquer Venezuela and plant an American flag on its soil.
“America” is not going to steal its oil, ship it “home,” and parcel it out to
“Americans” in their pickups in the parking lot of Walmart.
What what about those American oil corporations? They want that
Venezuelan oil, don’t they? Well, sure they do, but here’s the thing … there
are no “American” oil corporations. Corporations, especially multi-billion
dollar transnational corporations (e.g., Chevron, ExxonMobil, et al.) have no
nationalities, nor any real allegiances, other than to their major
shareholders. Chevron, for example, whose major shareholders are asset
management and mutual fund companies like Black Rock, The Vanguard Group, SSgA
Funds Management, Geode Capital Management, Wellington Management, and other
transnational, multi-trillion dollar outfits. Do you really believe that being nominally
headquartered in Boston or New York makes these companies “American,” or that
Deutsche Bank is a “German” bank, or that BP is a “British” company?
And Venezuela is just the most recent blatant example of the
empire in action. Ask yourself, honestly, what have the “American” regime
change ops throughout the Greater Middle East done for any actual Americans,
other than get a lot of them killed? Oh, and how about those
bailouts for all those transnational “American” investment banks? Or the
billions “America” provides to Israel? Someone please explain how enriching the
shareholders of transnational corporations like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed
Martin by selling billions in weapons to Saudi Arabian Islamists is benefiting
“the American people.” How much of that Saudi money are you seeing? And, wait,
I’ve got another one for you. Call up your friendly 401K manager, ask how your
Pfizer shares are doing, then compare that to what you’re paying some
“American” insurance corporation to not really cover you.
For the last two-hundred years or so, we have been conditioned to
think of ourselves as the citizens of a collection of sovereign nation states,
as “Americans,” “Germans,” “Greeks,” and so on. There are no more sovereign nation states. Global
capitalism has done away with them. Which is why we are experiencing a
“neo-nationalist” backlash. Trump, Brexit, the so-called “new populism” … these
are the death throes of national sovereignty, like the thrashing of a
suffocating fish before you whack it and drop it in the cooler. The battle is
over, but the fish doesn’t know that. It didn’t even realize there was a battle
until it suddenly got jerked up out of the water.
In any event, here we are, at
the advent of the global capitalist empire. We are not going back to the 19th
Century, nor even to the early 20th Century. Neither Donald Trump nor anyone
else is going to “Make America Great Again.” Global capitalism will continue to
remake the world into one gigantic marketplace where we work ourselves to death
at bullshit jobs in
order to buy things we don’t need, accumulating debts we can never pay back,
the interest on which will further enrich the global capitalist ruling classes,
who, as you may have noticed, are preparing for the future by purchasing luxury underground
bunkers and post-apocalyptic compounds in New Zealand.
That, and militarizing the police, who they will need to maintain “public
order” … you know, like they are doing in France at the moment, by beating, blinding, and
hideously maiming those Gilets Jaunes (i.e., Yellow Vest)
protesters that the corporate media are doing their best to demonize and/or
render invisible.
Or, who knows, Americans
(and other Western consumers) might take a page from those Yellow Vests, set
aside their political differences (or at least ignore their hatred of each
other long enough to actually try to achieve something), and focus their anger
at the politicians and corporations that actually run the empire, as
opposed to, you know, illegal immigrants and imaginary legions of Nazis and
Russians. In the immortal words of General Buck Turgidson, “I’m not saying we
wouldn’t get our hair mussed,” but, heck, it might be worth a try, especially
since, the way things are going, we are probably going end up out there anyway.
C.
J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political
satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)
and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23, is published by Snoggsworthy,
Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.