No, I don’t mean the old Black Sabbath album. It’s what came to mind as a short take on Trump’s transfiguration from the bumbling dodo of the first term to the crazed sociopath we deal with today. Black Sabbath’s music was a pretense, a masquerade for the masses. Trump and his crew are all too real.
What’s going on in Chicago is indeed live evil―conducting warfare against the helpless, practicing Gestapo tactics on an invented enemy. Melissa Grant writes in The New Republic:
Now, with his brutal immigration crackdown in Chicago, Trump is using lies and propaganda as tools alongside the masked officers and the midnight round-ups. All this is meant to cover up the obvious reality that may still be too much for many people to accept: The president is trying to wage war on an American city.
Before a judge temporarily blocked the National Guard from being deployed in Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker spoke out in detail about what was happening. He talked about the now infamous raid on a South Side apartment complex,
absolutely terrorizing everybody in the building. There are about 130 people living there, a few of them being targeted, and everybody else—U.S. citizens, people with documentation who may not be U.S. citizens, and even undocumented people, who are not Tren de Aragua—who were held for hours and zip-tied. This is middle of the night: troops dropping—not really troops; they were agents—dropping from Black Hawk military helicopters onto the building, ransacking the place, breaking down doors and windows and so on. . . . Some of [these people] are very young children, totally traumatized, and they’ve been attacked like they were in Fallujah.
This came after the ICEhole goons shot and killed “an innocent guy who was dropping off his kids at daycare.”
The real terrorists, said the governor, are Trump and Stephen Miller, the thug who calls everybody a terrorist. And of course there’s the Secretary of War, the cretin Hegseth, who called hundreds of generals and admirals together to stress the importance of not being fat.
These people are playing war games with very likely real fallout. Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker:
It’s interesting that the long tail of the misguided wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should wind its way here, to a militaristic right-wing President who loudly denounced those foreign conflicts but means to treat American cities as war zones, and to a Defense Secretary who wants to do away with rules of engagement.
In fact for these people there are no rules. Four boats from Venezuela have now been bombed; how many killed? This is clearly a war crime. The Vice President remarked, “Don’t give a shit.” A writer for The Guardian sees the live evil at work:
When a state intentionally kills a person outside of armed conflict and without due process, it’s a form of murder. It’s already happening in the Caribbean Sea. Is that the path we’re headed down on the streets of our own cities?
P.S. A Chicagoan reports today on the continued violence.
John, It’s a good thing you live in Mexico and hopefully out of reach.
John, I cannot understand how anyone can read this, especially Pritzker’s description of that raid, while believing that even some of it is true, and not feel sick and want to do something. It seems that people who want to do something to stop it are going to have to take real personal risks.
Yes, especially the brave souls protesting in the streets.
Hogsbreath, phew. what an act he puts on parading on the stage like some crazed warrior. I thought it was so funny that he had to call back some of the National Guard as they didn’t meet the standards of fitness (flabby)…. It is all theatre–all of them every day. As you say, the entire operation is theatre of the absurd, but real. Lies. BS. People must push back! We are all sure that there will be some tragedy in Chicago–they will provoke same. Awful.
Hope to be in the streets 10/18. Hope there are young people there.