Kevin Barry is a hero of the Irish independence movement. He was a member of the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence (1919–21) against the British occupiers of Ireland. In 1920, he took part in an attack on a British supply truck. After a British soldier was killed, Barry was captured, tortured, and hanged. He was eighteen years old. There is a famous song about him, sung by more people than can be named here, but among them 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,
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. He tells the Iranians, deal or we’ll kill you. He 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.
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. However, Trump is more direct in saying out loud what former presidents hesitated to acknowledge, instead either keeping it hidden from public view, justifying it as self-defense, or employing subtler means of intimidation.
Invariably such 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 the 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 people, 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 so-called 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 their communities that this has caused and will continue to cause. Now, everyone who opposes this gang of criminals 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 United States 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. As Journalist and historian Nick Turse wrote recently (I have left Turse’s embedded links intact):
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.
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; secondary contradictions cannot be resolved until the primary contradiction 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 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.
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 whatever it is that the U.S. state and U.S. capital do in pursuit of capital accumulation and global power. This must be our primary 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, and 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 of 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 the U.S. government’s goal, 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 care one whit about Ukrainian lives.
Domestically, social democracy (a.k.a. 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 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’ll kill you” is capitalism’s default position. This will be so no matter what temporary changes might occur. We ignore this truth at our peril.