… Or We’ll Kill You
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Kevin Barry is a hero of the Irish independence movement. He was a member of the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence (1919-1921) against the British occupiers of Ireland. He took part in an attack upon a British supply truck. A British soldier was killed, Barry was captured, and then he was hung, after torture, in 1920, when he was eighteen-years old. There is a famous song about him, sung by more people than can be named here, but including Paul Robeson. One of the verses spells out what always underlies colonial and imperial rule: murder.
Just before he faced the hangman,
In his dreary prison cell,[d]
British soldiers tortured Barry,
Just because he would not tell.
The names of his brave comrades,
And other things they wished to know.
Turn informer or we’ll kill you
Kevin Barry answered “No.”
“Turn informer or we’ll kill you.” And kill him, they did. Fast forward to today and consider the current killer-in-chief of the United States, Donald Trump. He says to the Palestinians, leave or we’ll kill you. He says to Israel, we’ll support you when you kill them. His brother-in-murder, Bibi Netanyahu says, live and we’ll kill you. Israel kills without conscience. Doctors, nurses, journalists, peacekeepers, men, women, and children in countless numbers. Kids shot point blank in the head. Rape, torture, some unimaginably grotesque, and murder of prisoners, again including children. Trump and his predecessors gladly fund Israeli murder, and why not, the U.S. has long been the premiere murderer in the world.
Trump kidnaps the president of Venezuela and his spouse, and says, see, we’ll imprison you and we don’t mind killing hundreds in the process. He says to the men in boats he has bombed, too bad we had to kill you. He proclaims in his State of the Union rant that no one is fishing off the Venezuelan coast. He says to the Cubans, we’ll kill you slowly as we have for years, but we’ll kill you directly now, to get rid of you once and for all. He tells the Danes, we can get Greenland the easy way or the hard way. Everywhere in the world, Trump bellows that we can rain death down on you, whenever we want. We’ll blow up your ships and planes, even if you are China or Russia. Millions more are killed by illegal sanctions and blockades. Everywhere, death unending, along with relentless propaganda declaring that the true villains are those murdered!
U.S. actions in Iran make Mafia hitmen seem kindhearted by comparison. Thousands murdered, millions displaced. He tells the Iranians, deal or we’ll kill you. Destroy your entire civilization. Commit as many war crimes as possible. Those 160 or so schoolgirls killed by U.S. bombs? Collateral damage. Melania Trump says that the killings were for the future of Iranian children.
This imperial violence was not invented by Trump. It has been an integral part of this nation’s relationships with the rest of the world from its beginning. Consider the small nation of Laos during the War in Vietnam:
Laos: The Most Bombed Country on Earth
Between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped over 2 million tons of ordnance on Laos – equivalent to a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for 9 years. That’s more than was dropped on Germany and Japan combined during WWII. Up to 30% of the bombs didn’t detonate and remain in the ground today, killing an estimated 50 Laotians per year. The population of Laos at the time was roughly 3 million.
Imperial murder: the gift that keeps on giving.
While Trump is simply continuing what is standard U.S practice, he is more direct in saying out loud what former presidents hesitated to do, instead either keeping it hidden from public view, justifying it as self-defense, or employing subtler means of intimidation.
Invariably, these international atrocities boomerang back to the home country. However, this has taken some time in the United States. This is because the country was built on murder, torture, and horrendous exploitation and expropriation of Native peoples and Black slaves. The latter were told to work or die, succumb to rape or be killed. The former were nearly exterminated, and the rest were told to leave their homelands or die.
White persons, on the other hand, were too often willing accomplices to these predations, although the inferior position of white women was and still is profound. There were very positive “wages of whiteness,” and this is true even today, as shown by any metric one cares to use. Poor whites suffered at the hands of the state, but at nowhere near the level experienced by persons of color.
The drift toward fascism engineered by Trump and his close advisors and thousands of his followers represents the blowback that results from the global colonialism and imperialism practiced by the United States over many decades. Taking their cue from the Nazi playbook (which, in turn, was influenced by the U.S. treatment of native peoples and slaves), the second Trump administration has deepened executive branch control of the universities, the media, the legal system, the Congress, and the courts. The latter, especially the Supreme Court, have given the president extraordinary power to do what he pleases. His “Big Beautiful Bill,” in addition to greatly enriching the already extraordinarily wealthy, has allowed Trump and his fascist advisors like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon to create a paramilitary force of thugs, with almost unlimited funds, to intimidate, beat, arrest, and kill anyone who resists their unprovoked violence. These include:
+ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA): Protects critical infrastructure.
+ U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP): Manages borders and trade.
+ U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE): Enforces immigration and customs laws.
+ Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA): Manages disaster response.
+ Transportation Security Administration (TSA): Secures transportation systems.
+ U.S. Secret Service (USSS): Protects leaders and financial infrastructure.
+ U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS): Manages lawful immigration.
+ U.S. Coast Guard (USCG): Maritime safety and security.
+ Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC): Trains federal law enforcement.
+ Federal Protective Service (FPS): Protects federal facilities
The current budget of these agencies is enormous, with ICE alone getting roughly $80 billion. Imagine the damage to human beings, their homes and vehicles, their communities, that this has and will continue to cause. Now, it is everyone who opposes this gang of criminals who is at risk of brutal arrest, random violence, imprisonment, torture, and death. No one who protests, in any way, is immune to harsh treatment: Black, white, immigrant, native born, men, women, children, no one. Everyone has seen the murders in Minneapolis, where being a white woman or man did not preclude being murdered. Just as the U.S. says to people in other countries, obey or we’ll kill you, now it says the same thing to its own people, all of them. Journalist and historian Nick Turse writes (I have left intact in the quote the links Nurse added.)
Killing, wounding, threatening, or investigating observers are just some of the many abuses and violent tactics of immigration officers in the era of Donald Trump. Others include brutally beating detainees, employing banned chokeholds, or spraying chemical irritants on protesters. They also have carried out arbitrary and unlawful arrests and detentions, fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades into crowds, and shattered the windows of vehicles.
As the U.S. Congress debates this funding, with a government shutdown preventing funding for these agencies, Democrats have agreed to fund all but ICE. Rather than agreeing with this, with the likely result that ICE would get money already in the pipeline but would be subject to more oversight, Republicans proposed $70 billion in additional ICE funding. With these funds, ICE can be even more lethal.
What should the response be to these perilous circumstances? In his essay, “On Contradiction,” first delivered as a lecture in 1937, Mao Zedong argued that there were principal and secondary contradictions. The resolution of the secondary contradictions will prove difficult if not impossible, unless the primary one is resolved. Today, if we look at the world through the lens of Mao’s essay, which would be the same in this case as that of Marx, the primary contradiction is between the power of the United States and the subordinate position of the rest of the world, but especially those nations in the Global South. Whatever contradictions exist within, say, Indonesia, for example, that between Indonesian capitalists and Indonesian workers cannot be permanently resolved until the primary contradiction is resolved. That is, for there to be the possibility of creating a world built upon substantive equality in as many spheres of life as possible, the power of the United States must be eliminated. This means the defeat of the U.S. state and the monopoly capital upon which it relies and with which it is intertwined. This is not to say that radical change is impossible in the Global South. Great strides were made by the Soviet Union, and the same can be said for China, Cuba, Vietnam, and with the communes in Venezuela. However, the United States has waged relentless war on many fronts—economic, political, cultural, psychological, and military—against every one of these countries. Consider that just as North Korea, under its national hero, Kim Il Sung, was rebuilding the country along socialist lines, the United States and its puppet government in the South, waged a vicious war against the North. Every city in the North was leveled with bombs, and worse was coming until the Chinese Army, ragtag and freezing, stopped the U.S forces in an effort that deserves the word “heroic.”
For those living in the United States who see the necessity of radical change, there is a duty to devote whatever time and effort we can to contesting everything the U.S. state and U.S. capital do in the pursuit of capital accumulation and global power. This must be our basic concern, because we are in the source of the primary contradiction. We must steadfastly oppose everything the United States does with respect to the Global South, whether it be tariffs, blockades, sanctions, hundreds of military bases aimed at U.S. “enemies,” threats of violence, direct military interventions, indirect wars as in the war in Ukraine, the enormous buildup of nuclear weapons: everything without exception. At home, we must take the same stance. Oppose all that the U.S. state and U.S. capital do that oppresses workers, those who are not white, women, gay and transgender persons, all that degrades the environment: everything.
The corollary of these positive actions is that there are some things we should not do. This is best stated in terms of false equivalences. For example, Russia does not equal the United States. It is not an imperial power, and its goal is not to achieve an empire or to build military bases around the world. The same is true for China. Iran is not Israel or the United States, Nicolás Maduro is not Trump. If some say that China is an imperial power or that it committed genocide in Xinjiang, or that it created the COVID-19 virus, they simply reinforce the hatred of China fomented by the U.S. government. If they feel compelled to denounce Maduro as they say that they oppose the kidnapping, they give support to exactly what the U.S. government wants, which is the end of the socialist trajectory of Venezuela. If they focus single-mindedly on the perfidy of Russia, they end up supporting a war that, in reality, is one fought by the United States and NATO against Russia, neither of which cares one whit about Ukrainian lives.
Domestically, social democracy (aka democratic socialism) is not socialism, nor will it ever be. Opposing social democracy is not Stalinism, nor does declaring oneself a communist make a person a “tankie” or whatever epithet the social democrats hurl at them. Mass protests, such as those in Minneapolis, are critical right now. I hope such revolts against incipient fascism continue and deepen. But don’t imagine that success won’t depend upon the creation of a truly radical movement.
Do this, or we will kill you is capitalism’s default position. This will be so no matter what temporary changes might come to be. We ignore this truth at our peril. And one final point: those resisting imperial and colonial power have every right to employ violence. For example, Israel had no right to occupy Palestine, to steal land, to establish settlements, to bomb other countries, to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, all have the right to violently oppose the Israeli state. And the U.S. state as well. Just ask yourself, who are the world’s real terrorists?
This is an updated and revised version of an essay that first appeared at MR Online.
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