AMERIKAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Arrogance Has Been on the Table by the US for a Very Long Time

Vijay Prashad

 June 3, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Vijay Prashad was interviewed by K. Swaminathan, Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front (TNUEF), Tamil Nadu, India, May 2026.

 K. Swaminathan: What is the fundamental difference between the wars waged by hereditary monarchs in the past to expand their kingdoms and the wars waged today by democratic governments against other countries?

Vijay Prashad: Hereditary monarchs reported largely to themselves and not to their own populations, although they could not fight wars that did not have some popular support and benefit. But there was no real need to inculcate support for these wars and there was no equality amongst peoples, so no expectation that they would have any input for the wars. After the emergence of a democratic consciousness, governments that claim to be democratic must provide governance that addresses the needs of the people and provides benefits to the people. Theoretically, decisions are not to be made by governments without the mandate or consent of the people. What happens, however, is that governments – in the name of national security or international terrorism – wage wars without seeking the mandate or consent of their populations, and so these wars are only made ‘popular’ through the manipulations of the press and of public opinion. That makes most of these modern imperialist wars ‘undemocratic’.

KS: Today, the United States is responsible for most of the wars taking place around the world. What are the reasons behind America’s military offensive? What advantages does the United States gain from these wars?

VP: The United States has attempted to manage a world system to the advantage of multinational capital, rooted in the United States and its Western allies (including Japan and South Korea). The system allows these firms to go into the Global South, steal resources and labour for under their value, and use these regions as markets for substandard industrial goods. The use of the dollar as the international currency has also allowed the US to create wealth out of nothing and to dominate countries by their reliance upon the dollar system. It is to defend this system that the US by and large goes to war, trying to break the will of any part of the world that defies the US agenda. By pain of war and sanctions, the US attempts to impose its view of the world on the rest of the planet. That is the reason for these wars.

KS: How does the United States construct false narratives for wars? How does the United States grant itself the authority of being the ‘world’s policeman’? How does this authority become accepted or legitimised?

VP: The United States has been losing its grip on various aspects of modern life, such as control over technology and raw materials. But it maintains its control over information through control over the infrastructure for news media (cables, satellites, platforms) and through the content delivered over them (particularly for international news). It is through this control that the US can argue that its view of the world is ‘normal’ and that others are defined by the US. However, this has been gradually changing through the failure of the US to be able to control every narrative, such as over the genocide by Israel of the Palestinians and by the US illegal war on Iran.

KS: What are the political, humanitarian, and economic impacts — both on the people of West Asia and globally — of the ongoing wars in Gaza and Iran?

VP: First, there is the genocidal language and practice of the Israeli and US actions in West Asia. Israeli officials speak bluntly about the genocide, and Trump says that he wants to wipe out Iranian civilisation. These kinds of statements are illegal but routine from these countries. And second, they are realised in the actions of Israel and the US to destroy civilian infrastructure and to kill civilians – all illegal under international law. The wars result in economic chaos, particularly the attack on Iran, but this does not directly bother Washington, which seeks to create chaos as a way to disrupt the peaceful economic development of the large BRICS+ states, allow their own populations to bear the cost of the crisis, and then in the long run reestablish their own power over the world system.

KS: The Trump administration claims that the United States and its allies have severely damaged Iran’s military and strategic infrastructure. How much truth is there in these claims?

VP: It is impossible to know accurately the status of the war machines because in a time of war, this is information that everyone either exaggerates or denies. But Iran continues to defend itself, so that itself is a refutation of Trump’s statements.

KS: A section of the global media often portrays Iran as a politically unstable country and frequently reports on public dissatisfaction and protests against the government. What is the current mood among the Iranian people?

VP: No country in the world is without its own contradictions, and no country has a population that is totally happy with the government. So, protests in Iran are not an illustration of instability by itself. In fact, after all this bombardment, the government remains in charge. An unstable country would have collapsed under the weight of the bombs. The illegal US-Israeli war has in fact brought the people of Iran together to resist the imperialist attack.

KS{ To what extent has Donald Trump’s return as President intensified military aggression and diplomatic arrogance?

VP: We must be careful not to personalise the US government. There is a structure in place. But the structure can afford different strategies. Trump is certainly far more aggressive in language and tone, but not necessarily in policy. Arrogance has been on the table by the US for a very long time.

KS: Although global finance capital has economically integrated the major capitalist countries and somewhat muted contradictions among imperialist powers, have Trump’s recent actions intensified contradictions between the United States and its NATO allies or other Western countries?

VP: I believe that the emergence of the BRICS+ states allowed the European bourgeoisie to seek new opportunities for itself through integration with Russia and China, for instance. This is what the US sought to control and reverse with the pressure campaign via Ukraine and through the new Cold War on China. So, yes, the US is seeking different ways to recover its hegemony over the European bourgeoisie through the means of pressure around NATO and around instability against BRICS+. Now, the European Union is suicidally going to not only continue and deepen its sanctions on Russia, but it will potentially start a trade war with China.

KS: What is the current position of NATO countries regarding the military actions being carried out by the United States in West Asia?

VP: The only NATO country to take a position contrary to the US-Israeli war on Iran has been Spain, and even there the government is under pressure. So, most of the NATO states are perfectly at ease with the illegal war.

KS: How do you assess the role of Russia and China in the present situation, as well as their diplomatic and economic relations with Iran?

VP: Russia and China are defensive, not offensive powers. They do not have the military capacity, especially the global footprint, to challenge the US in places such as Venezuela, Cuba, or even Iran. They are trying to defend themselves not to fight off the US attempt to establish its own hyper-imperialist power over the world.

KS: What impact will these wars have on countries in the Global South?

VP: The most immediate impact is that it has created food and fuel inflation around the Global South and has destabilised countries greatly. But secondly, these wars have placed on the table the old idea of imperialist defined sovereignty, namely flag independence: countries can be independent, but they cannot defy the United States. If they do, then they can be clobbered. This is a warning to the processes of sovereignty underway, such as the BRICS+.

KS: What is the current political situation in Latin American countries, especially in Venezuela? Has the new government in Venezuela taken a conciliatory position toward U.S. pressure?

VP: The government in Venezuela is in a tactical retreat to recover from the horrendous sanctions process inflicted by the US and because Venezuela does not have the means (political or military) to withstand the kind of war that the US and Israel have inflicted on Iran. This was a decision made by the political leadership to step back now to preserve their gains. How far this will impact morale in the country is to be seen. Whether these retreats continue will also need to be seen. The situation in Venezuela is in flux.

KS: To what extent are the Palestine issue and the conflicts involving Iran influencing global public opinion — especially among youth, workers, and democratic movements?

VP: Most young people who have an awareness about politics are heartsick about the genocide against the Palestinians. The issue with Iran is more complicated because the US has managed to define the government there as brutal. But over time, the US propaganda will suffer the biting reality of its own brutality. The Palestinians and Iranians as well as the Cubans are showing us what resistance is made of – the grit of national liberation in all three cases evident. We must study the power of national liberation movements and their hold on popular consciousness. Without that study, we will not be able to understand the resilience of the Iranian people or the Palestinian people or the Cuban Revolution.

What role should progressive, democratic, and anti-caste movements in countries like India play in opposing imperialist wars and defending world peace?

India’s people who seek dignity and justice in our own country must stand with others who also seek dignity and justice. US hyper-imperialism is contrary to dignity and justice. Our future is through our struggles and through our solidarity. Not through our surrender.

Even as wars and authoritarian tendencies are increasing globally, do you see possibilities for the emergence of new forms of international solidarity and people’s movements?

Yes, solidarity movements are growing globally. These have taken on different forms, whether direct solidarity (flotillas to Gaza, aid to Cuba) or political solidarity (governments and peoples sending messages to these countries). All of this is important. It must be increased. Working in the platform of the International Peoples Assembly, I see the impact that this solidarity has – you go to small towns in Cuba, and the act of solidarity gives them courage in their resistance. We must continue.

 

Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. His most recent book (with Grieve Chelwa) is How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa (from Inkani Books).

Do US War Crimes Doom the World to Endless War and Chaos?

The supposedly unlimited freedom of action attained by disdaining and trampling international law and institutions has proven to be a double-edged sword.


Anti-war demonstrators gather outside Downing Street on 26 June, 2019 in London, England, to call on the government to publicly oppose the escalation of conflict between Donald Trump’s administration and Iran and demand that military action is ruled out.
(Photo: Wiktor Szymanowicz / Barcroft Media via Getty Images)

Nicolas J.S. Davies
May 26, 2026

Common Dreams

On May 24, Iran rejected President Trump’s latest fake peace deal, confirming that he had misrepresented what Iran had agreed to and that the two sides are still very far apart, on nuclear enrichment, on control of the Strait of Hormuz, on peace in Palestine and Lebanon, and on lifting US sanctions, paying war reparations, and Iran’s $100 billion in frozen assets.

Iran’s conditions for a peace agreement are necessarily uncompromising, in response to the US record of using negotiations as cover for sneak attacks, and the charade of one-sided “ceasefires with Israeli characteristics,” in which the US and Israel routinely ignore and violate every ceasefire they agree to, including the present ones in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.

Since no agreement with the United States or Israel is worth the paper it’s written on, it’s hard to imagine an agreement that would really protect Iran from future attacks. Without a more radical change in US policy, the United States and Israel will keep attacking Iran, in open violation of the UN Charter, no matter what they all agree to.

The only effective ways Iran has found to protect its land and its people are to build strong military defenses, including the capacity for devastating retaliation, and to retain control of the Strait of Hormuz, regardless of the impact on the world’s oil and gas supply and the global economy. By attacking Iran, the United States and Israel forced it to defend itself and triggered a war that is reshaping the Middle East and possibly the world.

The final sinking of the neocon dream in the troubled waters of the Persian Gulf provides the US and the world with a historic chance to recommit to a more peaceful and democratic international order.

Losing this war is forcing the United States to finally start reevaluating the neoconservative tactics it has blindly substituted for a rational US foreign and military policy since the 1990s: sanction; threaten; bomb; kill; destroy; occupy; escalate; leave countries mired in violence and chaos—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Palestine and Lebanon—never admit defeat; never question American exceptionalism or superiority.

The systematic US disdain for the rule of international law that undergirds this policy appears to make peace impossible in today’s world. But the final sinking of the neocon dream in the troubled waters of the Persian Gulf provides the US and the world with a historic chance to recommit to a more peaceful and democratic international order.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has effectively exempted itself from the entire system of treaties, international laws and agreements that are supposed to govern international affairs, starting with the UN Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force between countries, and the Geneva Conventions, which protect civilians, prisoners-of-war and wounded soldiers and sailors from the impacts of war.

These treaties were drawn up and universally adopted in the wake of the Second World War, to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” as the UN Charter says in its preamble. President Roosevelt returned from his Yalta conference with Churchill and Stalin in 1945 to tell a joint session of Congress that they were designing the United Nations as a “permanent structure of peace.”

“It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed,” FDR told Congress. “We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join.”

The UN Charter codified and strengthened the age-old common law prohibition against international aggression, and the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy in the 1928 Kellogg Briand Pact, which German leaders tried at Nuremberg were sentenced to death for violating.

However, amid overblown Western triumphalism after the end of the Cold War, a new generation of US leaders, like Madeleine Albright and Dick Cheney, came to see the UN Charter and Geneva Conventions as obstacles to their ambitions to further expand US global power by more widespread and unrestricted use of military force.

Believing that the new imbalance in military power freed them from compliance with post-1945 treaties and conventions based on the hard-earned wisdom of past leaders in two world wars, the US and its allies unleashed their armed forces to attack and invade other countries, torture, rape and kill prisoners, and massacre civilians.

US officials assumed that the new military imbalance so greatly favored the United States that neither the UN, international courts, other powerful countries, nor even the entire people of the world could enforce the rules of international law and the laws of armed conflict on the United States if it chose to ignore them.

It is ironic, and deeply frustrating and confusing to US officials, to find out that what they hailed as a position of overwhelming power and impunity has led them to squander America’s day in the sun and waste the chance that its great good fortune provided to improve the quality of life for Americans and their neighbors.

The supposedly unlimited freedom of action attained by disdaining and trampling international law and institutions has proved to be a double-edged sword. There is no such thing as unlimited military power, short of the mass suicide of nuclear war. The idea that America’s virtually unlimited investment in weapons and war would give it the final word in every dispute was a mirage, as even Trump is now finding out.

As Americans reexamine the state of the world and the conflicts by which warmongering US leaders have tried to define it, it is obvious that war and military power do not lead to peace or prosperity, for Americans or anyone else. The more countries the Pentagon and the CIA take aim at, the more people they kill, and the more resources our leaders throw at them, the more other people all over the world rightly come to see the United States as a threat to their own lives and futures.

Governments around the world face difficult choices between meeting the needs and aspirations of their own people or complying with the hegemonic and undemocratic demands of the United States.

After holding itself up as the champion of democracy and freedom for 250 years, the United States is only accelerating its own decline by wasting trillions of dollars, and what little is left of the world’s good will, on this failed, ill-fated bid for global imperial power.

When the United States rose to great power in the first half of the 20th century, its leaders were wise enough to recognize that exercising naked imperial power would not succeed in a world still fighting to free itself from the ravages of European colonialism. So FDR and his colleagues based the UN system on sovereign equality between nations, and created a framework for international relations that the whole world could agree to.

While the United States and Israel commit systematic and barbaric war crimes, presuming themselves immune from accountability, the world is slowly—too slowly—coming to grips with the international cooperation needed to enforce the “permanent structure of peace” that all countries have agreed to live by.

Like all legal and political systems, the success or failure of the UN system rests on whether the most powerful countries will agree to live by the same rules as the others. The veto is a poison pill that corrupts the system, as Albert Camus predicted when it was unveiled in 1945.

“If this report is accurate, … it would effectively put an end to any idea of international democracy,” Camus wrote in Combat, the underground French Resistance newspaper he edited. “The world would be ruled by a directorate of five powers… The Five would thus retain forever the freedom of maneuver that would be forever denied the others.”

However, the UN has developed the “Uniting For Peace” process, which allows the General Assembly to hold Emergency Special Sessions (ESS) on international problems when a veto prevents the Security Council from acting to resolve them. The General Assembly used that process to resolve the Suez Crisis in 1956, and it has been using it, albeit intermittently and inadequately, to address the crisis in Palestine since 1997.

In response to a request from the General Assembly in its Emergency Special Session on Palestine, the International Court of Justice ruled that the Israeli occupation is illegal and must end without delay. And so, the General Assembly passed a resolution demanding that Israel must bring “to an end without delay its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories… and do so no later than” September 2025.

Israel did not comply, so the General Assembly must take further steps, such as an arms embargo and an economic boycott. But it does have the means to do so and just needs to muster the political will.

While the United States and Israel commit systematic and barbaric war crimes, presuming themselves immune from accountability, the world is slowly—too slowly—coming to grips with the international cooperation needed to enforce the “permanent structure of peace” that all countries have agreed to live by, and on which the lives of millions of vulnerable people and the future of humanity depend.

While US leaders are finally realizing that they do not have the power to intimidate and conquer the whole world, the American people are gradually understanding that we have an even greater power, the power to refuse to fight their criminal wars, and to insist on making peace and cooperating with all our neighbors on this small planet that we all share.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Nicolas J.S. Davies
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist and a researcher with CODEPINK. He is the co-author, with Medea Benjamin, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
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Trump faces a 'humiliating' war defeat that could leave 'irreversible damage': analyst

Robert Davis
May 26, 2026

RAW STORY

Long-time journalist Dan Rather warned President Donald Trump in a new Substack essay on Tuesday that the president faces a "humiliating" loss in Iran, one that would leave "irreversible damage" in its wake.

Trump has claimed on multiple occasions that the U.S. is winning the war in Iran because the country's bombing campaigns took out Iran's top political and military leaders and have decimated Iran's nuclear weapons infrastructure. For instance, Trump claimed on Truth Social on April 9 that he had achieved a "real victory" in Iran because Iran "will never have a nuclear weapon."

However, Rather argued in his essay that Trump's explanation of how the war is going is "insulting your intelligence," referring to his readers.

"Anyone who claims victory in this disaster is insulting your intelligence," Rather wrote. "If — and this is a very big if — the United States can somehow return to the pre-war status quo, it would be a stunning reversal of present realities."

Since the war began, Iran has effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz to international trade. The waterway accounts for about 20% of the global energy trade, and energy prices across the U.S. and Europe have increased significantly over the last 12 weeks of war.

"Significant and near irreversible damage has been done," Rather wrote. "The Middle East is forever changed because of Trump. Our allies now look upon us with suspicion at best, derision at worst. Relationships are strained to the point of breaking throughout the region and Europe. Allied trust is gone, while in Iran the regime remains in control."

World leaders seem to be "grinning" because of the war, Rather argued, and the war has also seemed to embolden Iran's regime to stall as long as possible.

"Iran looks to be very much in control, and therefore, much of the world will see this as an embarrassing if not humiliating defeat for Donald Trump. Russian and Chinese leaders are grinning," he wrote.

"At this juncture, Trump is trapped. He has no good options. Nonetheless, he will try to spin a win," he added.

MEXICO

When the Swamp Things Surface

Troy Nahumko

 May 15, 2026

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Image by Mitchell Luo.

Dispatches from the Terminal Ward of the Western Echo Chamber

From the Edge of the Confirmation Bias Abyss

Something is cosmically wrong with the primordial ooze.

For years, decades, maybe longer, maybe since the first cable news anchor discovered that outrage was more profitable than information, a certain subspecies of political creature has been evolving in the lightless, pressurized depths of the ideological swamp. Deep down there in the fetid dark, nourished by the warm thermal vents of their own inane certainties, surrounded by the bioluminescent glow of sycophantic media organs pulsing in perfect, validating unison, these things have evolved. Better said, mutated. They have developed thick, rubbery hides impermeable to fact. Extra organs capable of converting contradiction into confirmation. Their eyes evolved sideways, like deep-sea squid, capable only of detecting praise and televised applause.

They are, in their natural habitat, magnificent in a terrible sort of way. Like watching weaponized algae bloom under a Pentagon microscope.

The problem, and it is a problem of almost Biblical grotesquerie. is what happens when they surface.

Because occasionally, through some malfunction of the billion-euro life-support aquarium of television producers, party handlers, pollsters and think-tank necromancers, these creatures breach. They claw their way up through the layers of sedimented delusion, through the thick strata of favorable polling, friendly broadcast hours, handpicked audiences and yes-men with law degrees, and they emerge, gasping, blinking, hideously unprepared, into what the rest of us have been living in all along: the actual, unfiltered, indifferent, merciless world of reality — that ancient, badly managed wilderness where consequences still roam free.

And Jesus Christ, the light.

You can see them recoil from it. The pupils dilate. The mouth opens. The whole magnificent apparatus of bubble-adapted physiology suddenly, catastrophically, encounters the one thing it was never designed to process: feedback. Real feedback. Not the warm, synthetic, nutritive kind that says yes, you are right, you are brilliant, they hate you because they fear you, but the cold, hard, ancient feedback of a universe that does not know their name and does not care about their brand.

The emperor is not merely naked. The emperor, exposed to daylight for the first time, is revealed to be not merely unclothed but anatomically improbable. Covered in the barnacles of accumulated falsehood. Trailing long tropes of ideological seaweed. Blinking those enormous, useless, dark-adapted eyes at a sun that has no interest whatsoever in their narrative.

What follows is always spectacular. Always, in a way that combines the horror of a car crash with the pure aesthetic pleasure of watching hubris detonate in slow motion, magnificent.

Let us take the field notes, one specimen at a time.

Specimen A: the Mar-a-Lago strain. Creatures so thoroughly marinated in televised nationalism that they emerged genuinely believing Iran was waiting for the right American strongman to straighten the place out like a casino acquisition. That Cuba, after sixty years of embargo and intervention, would gaze upon the latest emissary of the Monroe Doctrine and say: yes. Finally. Salvation in a red tie and motorcade. The creature surfaces. The world declines the offer. The creature calls them ungrateful.

Specimen B: somewhere in the Brexit nostalgic badlands of the English Tory shires, now Reform, the parade of bubble-adapted politicians who emerged from their hermetically sealed world of empire-adjacent fantasy to discover, with genuine howling astonishment, that the European Union was not going to fold under the awesome force of British exceptionalism, that Ireland would not dissolve its border on request, that forty years of economic integration could not be unwound in eighteen months without consequence, and that the rest of the world had, peculiarly, continued to exist and form opinions during the years these creatures had been marinating in their own mythology. The creature retreats. The creature calls them globalists.

But for sheer, crystalline, museum-quality grotesquerie, for the specimen that makes the naturalist set down his field notebook and simply stare, we must turn to Mexico City. First week of May, 2026. Because what unfolded there was not merely a political miscalculation. It was a masterwork. A perfect, terrible, unforgettable emergence event.

Picture the scene as it must have appeared from inside the bubble: Isabel Díaz Ayuso, President of the Community of Madrid, is the kind of regional politician the global reactionary right manufactures at scale these days — a telegenic culture warrior who has made her career converting every confrontation into content, every controversy into martyrdom, the Spanish-language answer to a type you will recognize immediately. Toast of the international right-wing think-tank circuit, idol of every outlet that runs historical revisionism as a form of competitive sport — this woman boards a plane at the considerable expense of the Madrid taxpayers (ten days, May 3 to May 12, a sovereign “business trip” of the kind that makes one wonder what the business was and who exactly was conducting it) and flies herself and her retinue to Mexico City with a sense of mission that could only be produced by years of breathing pure, uncut, ideologically filtered air.

She arrives accompanied by Nacho Cano, a faded Spanish pop star of the 1980s who has found, as faded pop stars sometimes do, that culture war is an excellent second act — impresario, author of a stage production about the Spanish conquest so aggressively tendentious it might have given pause even to the original conquistadors, who at least had the modesty to do their rebranding after the fact rather than before. Together, these two creatures have assembled an event and given it a name so staggeringly, so operatically tone-deaf that it deserves to be reproduced in full, to be savored in all its clueless grandeur:

Celebración por la Evangelización y el Mestizaje en México: Malinche y Cortés.

CELEBRATION. For the EVANGELIZATION.

In Mexico.

In 2026.

On the taxpayers of Madrid.

Diplomacy, as a discipline, continues to evolve.

They applied, and here is where the magnificence becomes almost unbearable, to hold this event in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico City. Which is to say: they looked at a building constructed on the ruins of the Templo Mayor — the ceremonial heart of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital — on the sacred ground of the civilization that Cortés systematically dismantled, and they thought: yes. This is the right venue for our celebration of the whole business. A gold and baroque tribute to the imposition that replaced what was demolished to build it. What better stage? At no point during this process did anybody appear to experience what medical science refers to as a warning sign.

The Archdiocese of Mexico City, demonstrating considerably more diplomatic instinct than the President of Madrid, determined the event had “ideological implications,” lacked the necessary permits, and declined, with what one imagines was some ecclesiastical throat-clearing, to host it.

At this point a normal political delegation would have reconsidered the optics. But normal political delegations generally avoid staging conquest pageants atop the graveyard of the civilization being conquered. Standards vary.

The circus relocated to the Frontón México. One imagines there were lanyards involved. Perhaps branded folders. Madrileño-themed margaritas. Certainly bottled water.

Outside, indigenous groups were already in the streets.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum — the first woman and first person of indigenous and Jewish heritage to hold the office — played a card with the calm of a woman who knows exactly what she is holding. She posted a document online. A royal decree. Valladolid, 1548. Carlos I of Spain, writing to the Royal Audiencia of New Spain. In it, even the Spanish Crown, never exactly a monastery of anti-colonial ethics, eventually found the excesses intolerable enough to document and command the liberation of the indigenous people enslaved by one Hernán Cortés, Marquis of the Valley. The document named the places: Tepeaca. Texcoco. Cuernavaca. Oaxtepec. Cholula. It described the branding of women and children with hot iron, the seizure of men for forced combat, the capture of people who had already made peace. It ordered that the living be freed, their children and descendants be freed, and that the decree be read aloud in the plazas and markets of New Spain.

That is the document they marched into Mexico to “celebrate.”

“Those who seek to rehabilitate Hernán Cortés and his atrocities,” said Sheinbaum, with an economy of language that would make a surgeon envious, “are destined to fail.”

Confronted with the protests, the cancellations, the cold wall of an entire country’s historical memory pressing back against her, Ayuso assumed her habitual role of victim, the martyrdom reflex firing like an immune response, later claiming her delegation had been forced into extraordinary security measures that included beach time. That they had been in danger. That anything could have happened. They did have sunscreen.

The creature, so magnificent in the depths, had surfaced. The daylight hit like a police flashlight. The creature was revealed.

And here is where the comedy develops its second, darker movement. Here is where the laughter catches in the throat.

A political scientist examining the wreckage might suggest quietly that Ayuso had been seeking this. That the confrontation with Sheinbaum, impossible through diplomacy — Ayuso leads a regional government roughly equivalent in federal standing to a US state governor, and Sheinbaum would simply have ignored her — was precisely the point. That the grotesque spectacle of colonial rehabilitation was a product, manufactured for consumption back home in Spain, where a certain base finds this kind of defiance not repellent but intoxicating. Not a creature emerging blindly from its bubble, but a creature deploying the appearance of blindness as a weapon.

If the blinking is a performance, if the bewilderment is calculated, then we are not watching incompetence. We are watching something older and colder. Someone looking at a five-hundred-year-old wound, documented in the Crown’s own handwriting, and deciding it is useful. That the pain of Tepeaca and Cholula and the branded children of the Marquis’s campaigns can be converted, with the right staging and a friendly audience, into something approximating a political brand.

This is the question that will not leave you. Because the technology of the modern echo chamber is now sophisticated enough that its inhabitants can be simultaneously genuine and cynical — truly believing the parts that are comforting, performing belief in the parts that are useful, incapable even of distinguishing between the two because the distinction dissolved long ago in the warm bath of unquestioned consensus.

Are these creatures blind? Or do they simply find blindness convenient?

For the Mar-a-Lago strain, the calculation is obscene in its clarity: the crisis with Iran, the standoff with Cuba, the deaths and the sanctions and the regional chaos are not miscalculations, they are the product. Crisis is the content. The base requires an enemy, the enemy requires a crisis, and other people’s suffering pays the production costs. For Ayuso in Mexico: the indigenous protesters, the cold shoulder from the presidency, the diplomatic wreckage of a ten-day taxpayer-funded provocation, all of it converts, back in the studio audience of the Madrid echo chamber, into exactly the footage that feeds the machine. She was attacked. She was brave. She told the truth and they — the vague, conspiratorial they of every bubble’s mythology — couldn’t handle it. She is the perpetual victim.

The wound is not an obstacle to the performance. The wound is the performance.

But if you think the Mexico episode was a sufficient serving of historical irony, wait.

Nacho Cano, undeterred, apparently energized, in the manner of all true believers, by the hostility of the non-converted, has packed up his traveling snake-oil minstrel show, his revisionist historical pageant, his celebration of the warm and fuzzy aspects of civilizational demolition, and is bringing it to the land of the conquistadors, to Extremadura — the impoverished Spanish region that supplied a disproportionate share of the men who went to the Americas and whose noble families built their palaces on what those men sent home. To Cáceres. To a conference room in a luxury hotel where he will deliver his lecture on the glories of the conquest.

The hotel is the Palacio de Godoy. Curio Collection by Hilton.

The Palacio de Godoy was commissioned in 1548 by Francisco de Godoy Aldana, one of the principal lieutenants of Francisco Pizarro, the man who did to the Inca Empire approximately what Cortés did to the Aztec one. Godoy came home to Extremadura flush with the profits of that particular enterprise and built himself a palace. It stands in the UNESCO-designated old city of Cáceres, which is itself essentially a monument to the wealth that flowed back to Extremadura from the systematic dismantlement of pre-Columbian civilization. Every noble family crenellation, every carved escutcheon, every Renaissance courtyard, architectural residue of conquest.

And who restored the Palacio de Godoy? Who poured millions of euros into its rehabilitation and turned the conquistador’s house into a luxury hotel?

Scipion Real Estate. A Peruvian investment company. Founded by a man who had spent years working in Lima, who celebrated the project explicitly as a way of connecting Extremadura and Peru, who decorated the restaurant and suites with textiles from the Amazonian Peru his investor’s ancestor helped to subjugate. The hotel’s restaurant is named Mamay Aldana, after María de Aldana, Francisco de Godoy’s mother, an Extremaduran woman whose son helped Pizarro take Peru, and whose descendant’s palace was then restored and made into a luxury hotel by the money of the country that was conquered.

The wheel of history has, it appears, a sense of humor. A very dark one.

Into this baroque labyrinth of colonial irony, the five-star hotel built on conquest profits, paid for by Peruvian capital, in the ancestral lands of the men who went and took it, stride Nacho Cano and Juan Miguel Zunzunegui, fresh from their routing in Mexico City, to explain that actually, the conquest was fine. Better than fine. It was a celebration. It was evangelization. It was mestizaje — the message of hope and joy — and we should all be more grateful.

Zunzunegui, a Spanish writer and self-appointed philosophical defender of the conquest, who in Mexico asserted there was no conquest, “it was the birth of Mexico”, who questioned whether the whole business could properly be called a genocide, will stand in the house that Pizarro’s lieutenant built with Inca gold and deliver the same performance. Perhaps with the same slides. With the same absolute, serene, climate-controlled conviction that the evidence of the room around him, the walls, the courtyard, the very Peruvian money in the walls, does not constitute a rejoinder.

The echo chamber has not merely followed them home. It has checked in. It has been given a room with a rooftop bar and views of the Extremaduran countryside.

Which brings us to the word at the twisted center of this entire carnival. Not conquest. Not mestizaje. The word is evangelization, and it is worth pausing here to look at it directly, without flinching.

Evangelization. The gift of the faith. The introduction of the one true God to the benighted millions who had, through some cosmic administrative oversight, been left entirely alone for forty thousand years by a deity who apparently only remembered their existence in 1519, when he dispatched the appropriate delivery mechanism in the form of smallpox, steel, and a man from Medellín with a financial interest in the outcome.

Let that settle for a moment.

The argument — delivered with a straight face, in a luxury hotel, in the twenty-first century — is that it was a good thing to arrive among people who had built cities, mapped the stars, developed writing, raised temples, cultivated maize and chocolate and political philosophy, and inform them that their entire cosmological framework was wrong, that the gods worshipped across a hundred generations were demons or hallucinations, and that the correct deity — who had, strangely, shown no previous interest in the Western Hemisphere despite his alleged omniscience — was now available, at sword-point, for immediate subscription. And if the conversion was imperfect, if the newly baptized retained inconvenient attachments to their previous metaphysics, well. There were instruments available to address that. There were always instruments.

This is what evangelization means, stripped of the festival lighting and Nacho Cano’s production values. The imposition of a Bronze Age creed, assembled in the Iron Age Levant, refined in the courts of Constantine, weaponized in the Inquisition, upon people who had committed no offense against it beyond existing on the wrong side of an ocean. The favor being commemorated is the favor of being informed, under duress, that you have been theologically overlooked and incorrect from birth and that your correction is now non-negotiable.

The narcissism required to frame this as generosity is not merely breathtaking. It is, in the clinical sense, remarkable. The grandiosity of the self-image that can look at that history, the iron, the fire, the children of Cholula, and arrive at the word celebration.

That is not historical revisionism. That is a personality disorder with a press office.

You can debate the balance sheet of colonialism, and there is a balance sheet, however ugly the math. You can acknowledge that Spain built universities, that mestizaje eventually produced a civilization of genuine complexity and beauty, that history is not a simple story. None of this requires you to perform amnesia about the branding irons.

What you cannot do, what no honest engagement with the record permits, is call it a celebration. The word is not a position. It is a symptom.

And so the show comes to Cáceres. The creatures dry themselves off, shake the primordial ooze from their extremities, adjust their lanyards, and check in to the Peruvian-funded palace of the man who helped take Peru. The rooftop bar has panoramic views. The Amazonian textiles in the suites are tasteful. The irony hangs over the whole enterprise like carbon monoxide — colorless, odorless, quietly lethal to anyone left in the room too long.

The walls know what they are. The walls were built on what they were built on. The money that restored them came from where it came from. The wheel turned, as wheels do, with the bleak, grinding, impersonal humor of things that do not require our permission to be what they are.

The creatures will not feel it. They never feel the ground shift. That is what the ooze is for.

But the documents survive. They always survive. A royal decree, Valladolid, 1548, sat in an archive for nearly five centuries and surfaced, with perfect timing, on a phone screen in Mexico City. The children of Cholula are not a rhetorical inconvenience to everyone. To some people they are a memory that requires no maintenance because it was never allowed to become a memory in the first place.

Down they’ll go, eventually. Back into the pressurized dark. Back into the warm thermal vents of their own certainties, the bioluminescent pulse of the approving apparatus, the perfect, sealed, nutritive darkness where the light cannot find them and the documents cannot reach them and those same children of Cholula are just a rhetorical inconvenience that someone else will deal with.

And the ooze will close over them like it always does.

Patient. Warm. Waiting for the next emergence.

Troy Nahumko is an award-winning author currently based in Spain. His recent book, Stories Left in Stone, Trails and Traces in Cáceres, Spain was published with the University of Alberta Press. As a writer and photographer he has contributed to newspapers and media such as The Globe and Mail, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Toronto Star, The Irish World, The Straits Times, Lonely Planet, Khaleej Times, DW-World, El País, SUR in English and HOY.