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Hiroshima Lives On – in Gaza
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Photograph Source: WAFA (Q2915969) – CC BY-SA 3.0
This year marks another solemn anniversary of the atomic bombings—80 years since the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over 120 national representatives gathered in Hiroshima this year to solemnly declare their pro-peace positions. Among them will be delegates from Israel and, for the first time, Palestine. The irony could not be starker: in just the past 20 months, Israel has dropped six times more explosives on Gaza than the U.S. dropped on Japan in 1945.
But unlike the preserved black-and-white images of Hiroshima, the scenes from Gaza are not historical—they are part of our daily reality. And if we dare to compare, the number of victims is not so different: those in 1945 mostly died instantly (along with those who endured agony before their last breath); those in Gaza die slowly—by bombs, bullets, starvation, or while trying to get some food.
The official American justification for the atomic bombings has never held up to serious scrutiny. We are told the bombs were necessary to force Japan’s surrender and end World War II. But even then—and certainly now—it is clear that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were test sites, chosen to showcase U.S. supremacy to the world. Richard Falk puts itrightly: “This use of atomic bombs against defenceless, densely populated cities remains the greatest single act of state terror in human history, and had it been committed by the losers in World War II surely the perpetrators would have been held criminally accountable and the weaponry forever prohibited.” The message was unmistakable: we are the masters of life and death. Other powers soon joined the nuclear club. The nuclear arms spiral never stopped.
If Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed in the name of ending one world war, what, then, are the people of Gaza—and now the West Bank—being destroyed for? The beginning of the next? Actually, some people believe we are already in a global war nightmare, but we are in denial.
A schoolboy in Hiroshima—great-grandson of a survivor—guides foreign visitors through the city’s tragic history. On camera, he sayssomething deeply moving: The most dangerous thing is to forget what happened long ago. What he doesn’t say—but what many of us adults whisper—is this: the danger is here. The memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are fading and they have become ceremonial symbols in front of which today’s war criminals—from Washington to Tel Aviv—shed crocodile tears.
Have we forgotten the horrors of nuclear weapons? Recent events suggest yes. Two global figures—Donald Trump and Dmitry Medvedev—flex their nuclear machismo on social media, leading to submarine deployments and heightened tensions near Russia.
But even more alarming are two events that could take us from theatrics to tragedy: Ukraine’s “Spiderweb” operation, targeting Russian nuclear facilities, and U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran’s civilian nuclear infrastructure. The first was a provocation—dangerous, reckless, and left unanswered only thanks to restraint in Moscow. The second confirms a disturbing logic: if a country wants to avoid being bombed, it must possess a nuclear deterrent. This is precisely the reasoning embraced by North Korea—and increasingly, Iran. Some experts already describe Iran as an undeclared nuclear state. Its strategic priority now seems clear: build a bomb. But indeed the U.S. attack on Iran has made the most compelling case for nuclear proliferation.
Just months before Hiroshima’s global commemoration, the Doomsday Clock ticks closer to midnight. And yet—what is the point of commemorations, speeches, and rituals when genocide unfolds in real time?
The horror of 2025 is not nuclear, but no less apocalyptic. Without dropping a single atomic bomb, a people can be tortured, starved, erased—with full impunity. In Gaza, the killing is not indiscriminate; it is deliberate, systemic, and unapologetic. In such a world, Palestine does not need just sympathy. It demands outrage, including immediate trade/economic embargo, sanctions and intervention.
Let’s remember a precedent the West proudly cites: In 1999, NATO, led by the U.S., launched a military intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—ostensibly to protect civilians in Kosovo. The action violated the UN Charter, yet was later reframed as a moral necessity. Chomsky coined the concept of new military humanism. Under that logic, NATO helped draft a new constitution and lay the groundwork for Kosovo’s statehood.
From this emerged the UN-supported doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P)—a vision of global order where sovereignty could be overridden to stop atrocities. It was the West’s post-Westphalian blueprint for humanitarian intervention.
So where is R2P now? As a professor, I could list countless books and papers lauding this doctrine. Yet today, not a single Western power dares to invoke it for Gaza.
Quite the opposite: you can kill civilians, destroy cities, and pursue a “final solution” with conventional weapons—and the world looks away. Governments remain silent, although I suspect most ordinary people (outside of Israel) do not support this slaughter.
Between Hiroshima’s ceremonies and the upcoming UN General Assembly, there is renewed talk of recognizing Palestine as an independent state. For a moment, it seems conscience stirs in the West, unable to stomach the daily horrors resembling Auschwitz or Hiroshima. But even this appears to be political theatre. By September, the bombing will likely continue—with no sanctions, no accountability, no end.
And let’s not forget: over 170 countries already recognize Palestine. So what? If they cannot enforce sanctions or intervene diplomatically—or even humanely—what good is recognition?
In truth, the global order cares more about trade, tech, and territorial alliances than it does about people being systematically erased. Even among Arab states, Palestinians are treated as a burden—an inconvenience to regional deals and diplomatic normalization.
The dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and the few survivors who still bear witness—can never rest while Gaza looks like it has suffered six Hiroshimas, and nearly a million people face starvation beyond return. What is a Palestinian state worth if there are no Palestinians left?
And what does it say about the Israeli state and military—armed, protected, and celebrated in the West—that it can bomb, starve, and invade neighboring countries without consequence?
As the anniversaries of August 6 and 9 pass, the global chorus will echo once more: “Never again.”
But the truth is sobering: The world has learned nothing from the most horrifying crime against humanity in modern history.
Hiroshima horrors still live in the cries from Gaza.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Norway to Propose Social Media Age Limit for Children
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France, Denmark, Spain and Portugal are considering similar policies.

On Friday, the Norwegian government said it plans to submit a bill to parliament this year to introduce an age limit for children using social media.

RELATED:

Spanish President Defends Imposing Regulations for Minors on Social Media

Under the proposed legislation, children would be allowed to use social media from Jan. 1 of the year they turn 16. Technology companies would be responsible for verifying the age of young users when they log in.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said the government plans to submit the bill before the end of the year, adding that the legislation is aimed at safeguarding children’s digital lives.

“We are introducing this legislation because we want a childhood where children get to be children,” Store said. “Play, friendships, and everyday life must not be taken over by algorithms and screens.”

Trump’s “New Dawn for Cuba” Regime Change
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The administration figures Cuba will be an easier nut to crack than Iran.

The Trump administration has declared a two-week deadline on Cuba to release two “high-profile” prisoners, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Castillo Pérez (aka Maykel Osorbo), described as dissident artists from the San Isidro movement (Movimiento San Isidro, MSI). Alcántara is described as a performance artist from the El Cerro neighborhood of Havana, while Pérez is known as a musician and author of Patria y Vida (Homeland and Life), a work described as a rallying cry for Cuban dissidents.

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“With provocative performances that have seen its most prominent figures parade through Old Havana waving American flags, and through flagrant displays of contempt for Cuban national symbols, San Isidro has antagonized the authorities, triggering frequent detentions of its members and international campaigns to free them,” writes the journalist and filmmaker Max Blumenthal.

Pérez was arrested in 2021 and convicted of public disorder and crimes against state security. Otero Alcántara was arrested numerous times for performing in violation of Decree 349, a Cuban law mandating artists obtain prior permission for public and private exhibitions and performances. Osorbo was sentenced to nine years in prison and Otero Alcántara received a five year sentence.

“The Cuban State does not recognize the political nature of these convictions and continues to construct common criminal cases to prosecute them and keep them imprisoned,” Anamely Ramos González, an academic curator who worked with Otero Alcántara and Osorbo, told Freedom House.

Freedom House, the CIA, NED, and USAID in Cuba

Freedom House is a US-government funded regime change operation linked to the CIA.

“Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy stress their commitment to freedom of thought and democracy, but both cooperated with a CIA-organized propaganda operation in the 1980s,” the late Robert Perry of Consortium News wrote in 2015.

Under the Reagan-Bush administrations, Freedom House advanced the foreign policy objectives of the United States in Central America, including the support of death squads linked to the ARENA party in El Salvador and “championing Contra leaders like Arturo Cruz, and serving as a conduit for funds from the National Endowment for Democracy [NED].”

According to Blumenthal,

“the US government has spent millions of dollars to cultivate anti-government Cuban rappers, rock musicians, artists, and journalists in an explicit bid to weaponize ‘desocialized and marginalized youth.’”

The leaders of the San Isidro movement

have raked in funding from regime change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy and US Agency for International Development [USAID] while meeting with State Department officials, US embassy staff in Havana, right-wing European parliamentarians and Latin American coup leaders from Venezuela’s Guaidó to OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro.

USAID’s “Travelers Project,” which operated from 2009 to 2012, recruited young individuals from Peru, Venezuela, and Costa Rica. These individuals were tasked with running and participating in civic programs in Cuba. However, the project’s true objective was to secretly incite anti-government activism.

USAID’s “Cuban Twitter”

The agency is notorious for the creation of ZunZuneo, an internet social network and blogging platform, recommended by the State Department’s Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, and marketed toward Cubans.

In order to hide the source of the “Cuban Twitter,” Joe McSpedon, a US government official, and his team of high-tech contractors “set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company’s ties to the U.S. government.” In 2014, the US confirmed USAID was responsible for creating ZunZuneo (Cuban slang for a hummingbird).

At its peak, the project drew in more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions. But its subscribers were never aware it was created by the U.S. government, or that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes.

USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) met with State Department officials and US embassy staff in Havana, along with right-wing European parliamentarians and Latin American coup leaders from Venezuela’s Guaidó to OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro, Blumenthal continues.

Behind their branding as cosmopolitan intellectuals, renegade rappers, and avant garde artists, San Isidro’s has openly embraced the extremist politics of the Miami Cuban lobby. Indeed, its most prominent members have expressed effusive support for Donald Trump, endorsed US sanctions, and clamored for a military invasion of Cuba.

Miami Cuban Lobby

Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State and acting national security advisor, is a leading figure in the Cuban lobby. As a member of the Cuban exile community (although he was born in the United States and has never visited Cuba), Rubio has championed regime change on the Caribbean island.

The Cuban lobby historically ranks as one of the most powerful ethnic foreign policy lobbies in the United States, second only to the lobby in support of Israel, reports Drop Site News. According to Ed Augustin, a British journalist based in Havana, “dollar for dollar,” the Cuba lobby “surpasses even AIPAC.”

“Next we’re going to war with Cuba,” Trump announced on April 17, and added, while speaking at a Turning Point USA rally in Phoenix, Arizona, ”a new dawn for Cuba” is coming “very soon.”

Reports from April 14 indicate that the administration has discreetly instructed Pentagon officials and other government entities to enhance their readiness for potential military operations against Cuba, as per two sources knowledgeable on the matter, and a third individual who has been briefed on the situation.

“There have been reports that the Pentagon is preparing for military action in Cuba. Are those reports true? Is Cuba next?” Trump was asked during an Air Force One flight on April 18. “Well, it depends on what your definition of military action is,” the president responded.

Trump and Rubio point to Cuba’s failed economy while omitting the primary cause for the failure: a crushing US embargo, first imposed in 1958 following the Cuban revolution, supplemented beginning in 1960 by CIA-instigated acts of terrorism and sabotage against civilians and the Cuban military designed to overthrow Castro’s government. The embargo was imposed after Cuba nationalized American business, including oil refineries.

The CIA’s Operation Mongoose proposed a number of terror and sabotage plots, including instigating a “Communist Cuban terror campaign” in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and also Washington. Additional plots include sinking refugee boats, biological weapons aimed at starving Cubans into an uprising, and several attempts to murder Fidel Castro, most notoriously an effort to assassinate the Cuban leader with an exploding cigar. Operation Mongoose was officially authorized on November 30, 1961, by President Kennedy.

Republicans Demand Overthrow of Cuban Government

“Cuba poses a security threat to the United States,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez, a Florida Republican born in Havana, told Fox News. “President Trump has said, ‘enough is enough.’ We need Cuba to be democratic, free, and we need them to be a friend to the United States, not a foe.”

On the second day of the US-Israel Iran attack, Cuban-American Texas Senator Ted Cruz was interviewed by Fox News host Sean Hannity,

“In the next 6 months, we will see new governments in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran,” he declared, and characterized a potential fall of Cuba as “the most consequential geopolitical shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall, since America won the Cold War without firing a shot.”

A few days later, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, appearing on Fox News, held up a “Free Cuba” baseball cap.

“If we get in a fight, I want to win it quick. I’m in Miami. You see this hat? ‘Free Cuba.’ Stay tuned. The liberation of Cuba is upon us. We’re marching through the world. We’re clearing out the bad guys. Cuba is next,” he promised.

Senator Rick Scott, also a Florida Republican and a former governor of the Sunshine State, advised against negotiation with the Cuban government and criticized congressional Democrats for visiting Havana.

“The Cuban people are marching in the streets and crying out against the illegitimate, communist rule that has stripped them of their freedom, liberty and basic human rights and dignity for more than 60 years,” he penned for the Miami Herald in 2021, neglecting to mention USAID, NED, and the CIA are behind much of the opposition to the Cuban government.

Trump and the Republicans are desperate to move on from the disaster of the failed effort to conduct regime change in Iran. Cuba, like Venezuela, presents far easier target for Trump. Cuba is on the verge of becoming a failed state with serious economic and social issues, including energy blackouts as a result of Trump’s oil embargo, and a staggering rate of poverty, most of it due to decades of a US-imposed embargo.

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Kurt Nimmo is a journalist, author, and geopolitical analyst, New Mexico, United States. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Visit the author’s blog.

War, Forever and a Day
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Who Gains and Who Loses in Trump's America

By Steve FraserApril 16, 2026
War against Iran. Kidnapping the president of Venezuela. Threatening to take over Cuba and Greenland. Plans to plunder the planet of its land, labor, and vital resources to feed the insatiable appetite of American capitalism are indeed afoot and, in the age of Donald Trump, U.S. imperialism is back with a particular vengeance. Not, of course, that it ever went away. In fact, it’s been there from the beginning.

After all, the United States was launched as an act of settler colonialism, dispossessing the New World’s indigenous inhabitants. President James Monroe issued what became known as the “Monroe Doctrine” in 1823, proclaiming the country’s exclusive right to determine the fate of the rest of the western hemisphere. Meanwhile, the slave trade and slavery constituted an imperial r**e of Africa by America’s planter and merchant elites.

And by the turn of the twentieth century, Washington had announced its “Open Door” policy, meaning it intended to compete for access to the world’s markets while joining the European race for colonies. It proceeded to do so by brutally taking over the Philippines in 1899, while the U.S. armed forces would make regular incursions into countries in Central America to protect the holdings of American corporations and banks. And the story that began there has never ended with bloody chapters written in Guatemala, Vietnam, most recently Iran, and all too many other places.

As the dispossession of indigenous populations and the enslavement of Africans suggest, the “homeland” (itself an imperial locution) has long been deeply implicated in the imperial project. Indeed, various forms of repressive military and police measures used abroad were first tested out against labor, Black, immigrant, and native insurgents. Rebellious immigrant workers in the nineteenth century were compared to “Indian savages” as local police and federal militia treated them with equal savagery. White supremacist ideology, nurtured at home, would then be exported to the global south to justify U.S. domination there. In fact, this country’s vaunted economic prosperity for so much of the last century was premised on its exploitative access to the resources of the global south, as well as its post-World War II hegemony over Western Europe.

Today, Donald Trump’s government exercises a reign of terror over our immigrant brothers and sisters, millions of whom are here because their homelands were economically despoiled by this country’s business and financial powerhouses. Homegrown resistance to our imperial adventures abroad has always been met by government repression, the stripping away of democratic rights, and the creation of a surveillance state.

In the Beginning

The United States was always conceived as an imperial project, its DNA infected from the outset.

The earliest settlers were simultaneously colonial subjects of the British and other European empires, and themselves colonizers exercising their dominion over indigenous populations. Native Americans — agrarian communities, hunting and trading tribes, seafaring and fishing societies — were systematically stripped of their lands, resources, and ways of life (not to speak of their actual lives) by the newly arrived settler colonials.

Sometimes their undoing was left to the silent workings of the marketplace. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the fur trade catered to the appetites of the world’s aristocracy — in Russia, China, and across Europe. Native American fur-trapping and trading societies entered into commercial relations with fur merchants like John Jacob Astor, the country’s first millionaire. But the terms of trade were always profoundly unequal and eventually undermined the viability of those fur-trapping communities.

Often enough, however, the colonizers resorted to far less “pacific” kinds of actions: military force, legal legerdemain, illegal land seizures, and even bio-warfare, as European-borne diseases nearly wiped out whole indigenous populations. The social murder of those peoples went on through the nineteenth century, from “the Trail of Tears” (the forced removal of the “five civilized tribes” from Georgia in 1830 on the orders of President Andrew Jackson) to the massacre of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890.

Imagine the United States minus that historic erasure.

There’s no way, since the very geographic borders we take for granted would be utterly different. Much of this country’s most fertile land, crucial water resources, mineral-rich deposits, as well as the industries that grew up around them using buffalo hides for conveyer belts and horses to pull street-cars (not to speak of the oil wells that made certain Americans so rich drilling in territory that once had been part of the Comanche empire) would have remained outside the “homeland.” Where would America the Great have been then?

Less tangibly, but perhaps more essentially, without that emotional elixir, the sense of racial superiority that still poisons our collective bloodstream and helps justify our imperial brutality abroad, that sense of being perpetually at war with savages — President Trump only recently called Iran’s leaders “deranged scumbags,”— who knows what this country might have been.

Slavery and Manifest Destiny

Of course, slave labor disfigured the homeland for centuries, thanks initially to the transatlantic slave trade conducted by the imperial powers of Europe and eventually the United States. Shipowners, merchants, bankers, slave brokers, and planters, backed by the authority of the Constitution, grew extraordinarily wealthy by kidnapping and plundering African peoples.

Wealth accumulated in the slave trade or thanks to slavery found its way into industrial development, especially of the textile industries that powered the earliest stages of this country’s industrial revolution. We may fancy the notion that such a revolution was homegrown, a manifestation of a kind of native inventiveness, but factoring in the imperial assault on Africa makes the homeland’s vaunted industrial miracle seem less miraculous.

Territorial acquisition is often a hallmark of the imperial quest. And so it was in the case of this country’s expansion into the southwest and west, sometimes by purchasing land, but all too often by war. In fact, the seizure of a vast region that today stretches from Texas to California — sometimes referred to as the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) — was actually an invasion driven by the appetites of the slave owners of the American South for fresh lands to cultivate. Indeed, the most avaricious leaders of the Southern planter class wanted to take parts of Central America to extend the reach of the slave economy, as one imperial adventure whetted the appetite for another.

The phrase “Manifest Destiny,” the rubric deployed by American politicians to explain away their predatory behavior as something fated to be, remains part of an in**ed American hubris. We, of course, make war and destroy only for the most idealistic motives: to save democracy, uplift the poor, hunt down demonic rulers, or bring the blessings of the American way of life to the benighted.

Exacerbated as well through the experience of conquest was a racialized ideology already deeply embedded in the country’s psyche. If, today, Donald Trump’s America is infected with an aversion to Latinos (not to mention African Americans), or immigrants of any non-White kind, look to the American imperial experience for its source. Earlier exercises in racism, including lynchings and church burnings in the Jim Crow South, became dress rehearsals for assaults on Muslims in our own moment of Trumpian paranoia.

Imperialism Without Colonies

Looked at from this vantage point, the American story turns out to be a serial exercise in imperial ambition. And yet, compared to its European competitors, the United States had precious few actual colonies.

True, after the Spanish-American War of 1898, it did run Cuba for a time, while establishing an unofficial protectorate over the Philippines (after waging a horrific counterinsurgency war there against a guerrilla independence movement). During that conflict U.S. forces mastered techniques — the establishment of concentration camps, for example — that they would deploy later against similar anti-colonial movements, particularly in Vietnam in the twentieth century.

Of course, the U.S. military also occupied various Central American nations — the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua, among other places — during the opening decades of the twentieth century, taking control of their government finances and so ensuring that they paid debts owed to American banks. That was the original version of what came to be known as “gunboat diplomacy” and is now being revisited. (Think of the recent capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife by the Trump administration.)

At the beginning of the previous century, Secretary of State John Hay developed a different approach to establishing American imperial hegemony, something less haphazard than those semi-colonial one-offs. In 1899, he announced an “Open Door” policy which, on the face of it, seemed eminently fair. The United States claimed that it sought equal access to markets, particularly China’s, that had previously been carved into exclusive zones by the great European powers.

Opening that door eventually led to American global economic dominance, not counting the part of the world controlled for about 75 years by the Soviet Union (in parts of which China is now dominant). U.S. economic preeminence after World War II, backstopped by the world’s most powerful military machine, proved irresistible, while functionally Europe became something like an American colonial possession under the auspices of the Marshall Plan and NATO. That door, in other words, was opened wider than Hays had ever imagined.

Mind you, his imperial perspective was trained not only on the outside world but on the homeland as well. By the turn of the twentieth century, this country’s business and political elites were worried that the domestic market for America’s huge industrial and agricultural output was fast approaching exhaustion. Periodic and severe depressions in the last quarter of the nineteenth century seemed like evidence of that.

What was needed, key Washington strategists came to believe, was an “open door” for U.S. commodities and capital investment globally. Such a policy would, they believed, not only ensure American prosperity but also dampen the chronic class warfare between the haves and have-nots that had raged in this country throughout the Gilded Age, threatening the viability of American capitalism.

From the close of the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century, many people believed that the United States had entered a “second civil war,” as the titans of industry (sometimes backed by the country’s armed forces) faced off against the mass strikes of working people and farmers trying to survive the ravages of a capitalist economy. Ever since then, this country would have been inconceivable without its various versions of “open door” imperialism to buoy up the home front and pacify the natives — that is, us.

Acting the role of the hegemon, while lucrative, is also expensive. Public money still pours into sustaining and enlarging the warfare state to ward off all challenges to American supremacy. (The Pentagon only recently, for instance, asked for another $200 billion for its war in Iran.) It does so at the expense of social welfare programs, while starving investment in productive activities like the development of alternative forms of energy and new infrastructure, housing, and rapid transit that would improve life for everyone.

At times, as in the case of the Vietnam War, the warfare state has engendered full-blown domestic economic crises. Vietnam led to punishing years of hyper-inflation followed by years of economic stagnation. Moreover, such war expenditures nearly collapsed the world’s financial system in 1968.

Today, we may be beginning to experience something similar as the global economy teeters on the edge of collapse thanks to Trump’s war on Iran.

Democracy and Imperialism

From the beginning, however, there was resistance to the homeland’s imperialism. Native peoples waged war. Slaves revolted. Mexicans became anti-imperialists. Abolitionists took on the slavocracy. The Spanish-American War elicited opposition from middle-class folk and public figures like Mark Twain. During World War I, thousands of anti-war radicals had their organizations raided and their newspapers shut down by government decree, while some were imprisoned and some deported. Similarly, government repression sought to quell the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s, culminating in the killing of four Kent State students in 1970.

Democracy and civil liberties, thought to make up the essence of the homeland’s civic religion, can’t survive the imperial drive. Today, violations of the most basic rights to free speech, privacy, a fair trial, and the right to vote are appalling and commonplace. Immigrants, often here because they couldn’t survive the ravages of American capitalism in their homelands, are treated like outlaws. The most basic constitutional requirement — the exclusive right of Congress to declare war — is ignored with impunity (and had been long before Trump took over). The imperial state, the surveillance state, and the authoritarian state are hollowing out what’s left of the democratic state.

Imperialism does massive and fatal damage abroad. The wars in Gaza and Iran are the latest bloodbaths for all to see. Less visible are the wages of imperialism at home. An equation might clarify the historical record: The Imperium = land, labor, resources, power, and wealth. The Homeland = cultural brutalization, dispossession, fear, misogyny, racism, repression, slavery, tyranny, and war.

Donald Trump turns out to be a purveyor of both imperialism (notwithstanding his promises to “stop wars” and refrain from “forever wars”) and its toxic outcome. Conjoined in his person is the perfect amalgam of America’s imperial history of aggressive aggrandizement and the ubermensch cruelty that history has instilled in the American psyche.

Copyright 2026 Steve Fraser

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.