After the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington D.C. by an Afghan national, who arrived in the U.S. on a special programme granted to those who aided the CIA in their efforts to “stabilize” Afghanistan for all those years, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the government would be “permanently pausing” (by a remarkable stretch of the English language, of course) “migration from all Third World countries.” He had in mind particularly Somalia, which he described as “a decadent, backwards and crime-ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country.” In contrast, he described Honduras, where his habit of election interference peaked in its brazenness, as a “beautiful country” whose “smart people” would normally reject the left-wing presidential candidate Rixi Moncada in the recent election, and instead pick Tito Asfura, who is “standing up for democracy, and fighting against Maduro.”
Apparently, "smart people" of "beautiful countries" are expected, at least by Trump, to get behind those leaders who are willing to fight against “narco-terrorists” like Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, for example. The U.S. itself is leading in that fight, in fact, mostly by bombing fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela, on the unfounded allegations that they were en route to the U.S. with tons of drugs onboard. The pretext of “narco-terrorism” is obviously ridiculous, but to make it even more so, Trump has decided to “pardon” the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had been extradited to the U.S. and convicted there of “drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy,” sentenced to 45 years of prison.
Crucially, the unflattering category of “backwards nations” had never previously included European countries, at least until recently, when Trump chose to adopt a very aggressive policy to push them to self-reliance. Fearing total abandonment, the governments of Europe have been trying almost everything to earn the empire’s favors back – this is most remarkable when European social democrats try their best to firmly embrace Trumpism. A Labour lawmaker in the U.K., Mike Tapp, could say, for example, that “we must identify and address any links between ethnicity, religion and culture – and child rape.” Or the chancellor of the Exchequer from the same party, Rachel Reeves, could declare once again that she would “always be a friend of Israel.”
In fact, even in their foreign policies with regard to Latin America, Europe has been determined to show its absolute loyalty to the U.S. dictates, primarily to keep the old status quo. The Nobel Peace Prize committee’s decision to give this year’s award to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, a loyal servant of the empire who has made countless promises to the “masters of mankind” to gain their support, was really Europe’s sign of goodwill with this aim in mind.
Yet, the U.S. would never be satisfied until total and shameless subservience is put on full display. A former government employee, who happens to be the wealthiest individual in the world, Elon Musk has utilized his platform X for hysterical calls for the abolition of the EU. For Musk, this was necessary to cure the decadence of Europe and to prevent its seemingly inevitable fall. This, except that there was another reason too, which was that Musk had recently been fined for 120 million euros by the European Commission – a sin so grave that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had to intervene, calling it “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.”
In the old paradigm, which Europe desperately wishes back, the enemies of the empire would be nominally the enemies of democracy, freedom and capitalism; and they would be backward nations, or ones that need liberating from an evil tyrant for some finely defined reason. Now, there seems to be another useful tool in the toolbox, so to speak, or another enemy, which is defined by “free speech” and “censorship” in general, and perhaps followed inevitably by an intrusive spread of the former, like that of democracy in the past.
