Might doesn’t make right

Five years ago, we ran an editorial following the January 6, 2021, siege of the US Capitol by MAGA faithful, egged on by a president who couldn’t accept he lost the election. The headline? “Good riddance to Donald Trump.”

Well, it didn’t exactly turn out that way, and the past week or so was chock full of reminders of that harrowing reality, the anniversary of January 6 being just one instance.

This is very bad, it almost goes without saying, since the whims of the US still have ramifications throughout the globe. The ways in which he is using power are dangerous, despotic, and reflective of a very flawed view of what strength is.

But it also reveals something about America, “leader of the free world,” that was there all along – to put it mildly, that it’s a lot less special, as far as countries go, than it would like to think.

After all, if American democracy is a god-given gift, how did it lead to two terms of Donald Trump, who seems to have run for president just to stay out of jail, and succeeded?

Colonial governments on Turtle Island have spent centuries propagating a myth, one that for many Canadians and Americans is almost a religious one, that Western capitalism and democracy is ordained to lead the world into a just future – despite the hypocrisies enumerated in our pages each week and well known to students of history.

Perhaps it is this tenet of faith that makes far too many in North America accept the abduction of another country’s president as just another day at the office.

Like it or not, in today’s world every corner of the globe is interconnected, and that means nothing is done in a vacuum. Something isn’t right just because America did it, and if the justification is truly that might makes right, that’s a weak position indeed, because in this vision of the world, everybody loses – nobody stays mighty forever.

Something like the US’s move to arrest Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro inside his own country on drug charges shows an alarming hubris that is all but guaranteed to come back and bite the globe – to say nothing of the current sabre-rattling against Greenland, which was colonized by Denmark but is Inuit.

It’s all part of a dangerous game, but with one so-called norm violated after another, at what point will the majority of the voting public wake up and see that the myth of Western civilization is just that – a myth?

Meanwhile, the truth of North America is well known to people the founding fathers didn’t exactly have in mind when they said they believed all men are created equal. Take the imperial concept of manifest destiny, for instance, which gave the United States the moral justification it needed to swallow up vast territories, committing genocide against Indigenous peoples in the process.

That attitude has persisted throughout the centuries.

Meanwhile, implementing regime change in Latin America is nothing new for the US, but rarely has its meddling been so brazen.

And the United States has never been shy to go to war for oil. But whereas previous presidents had the good sense to lie about it, now the man at the top can’t be bothered to hide whose interests he is working for. (Speaking of those interests, this week Trump pulled out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a key climate agreement signed in 1992.)

Back in 2021, when January 6 happened, we reflected on the way Trump spun his supporters into a fervor, claiming the election was stolen from him and whipping them into violence on his behalf.

A watchdog report later revealed that Capitol Police had been instructed to restrain themselves in their response to the white, right-wing crowd who were coming for Congress. That lot smashed windows, kicked their feet up on desks like they owned the place, and terrorized the people inside, with mortal consequences.

It wasn’t lost on us back then how differently protesters are treated when they are Indigenous or Black or when their cause is racial justice, and it’s not lost on us now. We’ve seen this double standard in Canada, too.

It’s terrifying to see the US reduced to a warzone from within, with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) patrolling American cities looking to implement fear and oppression on behalf of the state.

But there is a whole machine backing it up. The reality of Trump’s America is that it’s not just one man. It’s not just the president but the politicians who support him no matter what, the judges who excuse him, even the ordinary people who are too short-sighted to care. It’s the enforcement apparatus. It’s even the media, in some cases, thanks to money run amok.

Look at the hand-picked editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, who recently spiked a 60 Minutes story that revealed how migrants are being treated after ICE steals them from the streets and ships them to inhumane prisons in countries to which they’ve never been.

That leads us to the gut-wrenching incident this week in Minneapolis, not far from where George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in 2020, where an ICE officer shot 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good dead in broad daylight for trying to get away from their terrifying encroachment on her vehicle.

It’s all on tape, but in this age of propaganda, Trump and his secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who oversees ICE, are claiming this murder was committed in self-defense despite all evidence to the contrary and even disparaging the victim, sending a message to Trump’s enforcers that they’ll be protected.

The mayor of Minnesota called that story bullshit, and it is.

So maybe the veil is finally pierced on the divinity of the US of A. Knowing this serves to embolden other bad actors around the world, that’s a scary thing. We can only hope that what’s happening will invite a hard look at reality – a recognition that justice isn’t a fate, it’s a fight.

TED Staff