We are not Living in Unprecedented Times

The myth of American democracy – why U.S. intervention in Venezuela should not surprise us

Ever since the United States launched strikes in Venezuela and abducted president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cecilia Flores on 3 January, many of us, including myself, looked on in shock as Trump, yet again, appeared to have done the unexpected.

However, we should not be shocked. To do so is to deny the existence of a past that is soaked with the blood of millions of those from the Global Majority; blood spilt time and again in the name of so-called democracy and freedom. These are not unprecedented times.

Furthermore, while President Donald Trump has undoubtedly become renowned for his inflammatory personality, his politics are not radical. His threats to intervene further in the Western Hemisphere and beyond as well as his plans to “run” Venezuela for many years until a “safe, proper and judicious transition” can occur is staunchly reminiscent of the principles which facilitated the founding and development of the U.S., regardless of how long-awaited Maduro’s dethroning may have been.

Indeed, Trump’s swift invocation of the Monroe Doctrine in defense of the raid on Venezuela blatantly reveals how the ideology guiding his policies are deeply rooted in American political history. It was this doctrine and the subsequent Roosevelt Corollary of 1904 that justified countless U.S. intervention campaigns in Latin America.

While we should not be surprised at what is happening today, we should be outraged. We should be outraged that the voices of the Global Majority continue to be silenced and their bodies paradoxically sacrificed in the name of their safety, according to those who hold the trigger.

If there is any silver lining to be found within Trumpian politics, it is that his policies are extremely transparent by nature, which is part of the reason why he continuously attracts mass attention domestically and abroad ever since he was first elected in 2016.

Where previous presidents have made more concerted efforts to dress up state crimes with strategically fabricated narratives, Trump’s criminal background and consistent lack of tact in public addresses and on the internet, in many ways, makes it easier to decipher the true guiding principles of the U.S.: white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy.

It is critical to remember that these systems - and their intersections - predate the U.S. and, if not for them, the U.S. would never have existed in the first place.

It was first the Europeans who flocked to the shores of the Americas with the conviction that their right to a “free” life was more substantiated than those who already inhabited the land they wanted. They told themselves the indigenous peoples were backward because they were different and, therefore, not fit to govern themselves.

It is this enduring belief in the Other’s inherent lack of the right to occupy their own body that birthed and continues to feed the U.S. we know today. Despite the U.S. government’s efforts to rebrand the Declaration of Independence as anything but the codification of the white man’s right to plunder and occupy Other lands and Other bodies, the fact remains: slavery, genocide, colonization, nuclear warfare, segregation, war and subsequent war crimes, human rights violations, anti-miscegenation (including the abandonment of mixed-race babies), forced assimilation and sterilization were and/or still are all justified by American “democracy.” Evidently, Others’ rights have always been inalienable not from themselves, but from the white man.

Yet, we are shocked when Trump begins deporting immigrants en masse like he promised, forgetting that a portrait of Andrew Jackson hangs in his Oval Office; that it has been a short 60 years since the Civil Rights Act was passed.

We are shocked when a white woman, Renee Nicole Good, has been shot dead by a member of law enforcement, forgetting that countless Others, including Keith Porter, have met the same fate before, often going unreported.

We are shocked when Trump kidnaps Nicolás Maduro and proudly declares his plans to control Venezuela’s oil reserves, forgetting that this is not the first time the U.S. has killed in the name of economic profit nor is it the first time Venezuela has been exploited for her natural resources and denied her sovereignty.

We are shocked when such atrocities continue to be committed regardless of which political party is in office, forgetting that the problem isn’t who holds the majority in Congress, but the fabric of American society itself. We don’t need to look very far into our present to see a parallel between our slave-owning forebears and the politicians whose pockets are lined with money from the NRA and modern slavery, the victims of which are slaving away in our prisons and across the Global South.

This is not to say that what is common should be accepted as normal, but merely that we should stop wasting our time remaining ignorant and focus more on making the abnormal – the blatantly inhumane – less common.

Although the U.S. is far from being a lone actor when it comes to denying the Global South’s right to govern itself, we are notorious for being an especially serial offender. An honest grappling with and wide condemnation of American imperialism would set an unprecedented precedent to other imperial states.

We are not living in unprecedented times.

Trump is not radical because he upholds the American status quo as opposed to challenging it. The only remotely radical aspect of Trump’s presidency is his lack of self-censorship when discussing blatantly imperialist foreign policies, making it increasingly difficult to ignore the truth of America’s white supremacist, patriarchal and capitalist idealism. He is little more than a more abrasive embodiment of the U.S.’s founding and guiding principles.

The sooner we acknowledge that Trump knows what he is doing and the kind of country he has been elected to lead, the better. Any outrage we feel at Trump’s ongoing behavior should not merely incite rage against his character alone, but against the legacy of the United States. To continue to digest our current events with blind bewilderment will only keep us further suspended in the great American delusion that would have us believe our oppressor and our liberator are one and the same.

True anti-imperialist solidarity means putting in the time and effort into learning a history beyond the ones taught in the classroom and in the media. It means uplifting the experiences of the Global Majority and actually listening when they speak. It means being ruthless in our calls to eradicate imperialism everywhere; cherry-picking which imperial powers are “bad” (i.e. Russia, China) is counter-productive and reinforces the false belief that some empires are benevolent. It means demanding our governments divest themselves militarily and economically from imperial terrorism in all sovereign states and “territories,” which are still owed their sovereignty. It means being prepared to give up any and all privileges we may currently enjoy from these empires.

If we do not seize this moment, when the writhing underbelly of the American empire is staring us right in the face, to, for the first time, truly grapple with the reality and not the fantasy of our past and present, then it is difficult to imagine a world where any hope of justice or collective liberation will prevail.

Only once we have the courage to acknowledge what is can we shape something different.