Calling War “Peace” and Genocide “Self-Defense” – Blog 81
21.12.2025
President Donald Trump is calling war “peace” in eight different conflicts, between pairs of countries whose names he sometimes forgets*. If you follow world affairs, you will know that there is not any real peace as a result of these peace “deals”. They are the advertising tricks of a falling empire.
As the US empire falls, and will continue to fall for the next decades, its violence becomes horrific and the cover-up of its own violence becomes absurd beyond the limits of the imagination. The naked Emperor just makes his vassals more and more slavishly admire his new clothes, sewn as they are from cloth so fine.
The leaders of European countries are chief fawners around the naked Emperor. And just behind them are the Arab hereditary dictators, and now our own country is going that way, too. As Bérenger put it he has to “res trankil” and “manz ku”. So, cower, he and Ramgoolam and the entire Cabinet do. Even back-benchers “res trankil” about the genocide, about selling Diego.
Trump calls Israel’s continued massacre of the Palestinian people a “ceasefire”. In this Trump “ceasefire” signed nine weeks ago, Israel has proceeded to kill 390 Palestinians and to injure over a thousand. Some ceasefire.
Sunday a week ago, an Israeli sniper shot a three-year old little girl, Ahed Tareq al-Bayouk, while she was playing near her family’s tent in Southern Gaza. Every day Israel kills five Palestinians, each with a name of their own, just like this little girl, all killed during a “ceasefire”. This is how war is “peace”. This is how genocide goes on and on as Israel the invader’s “self-defense”. And recently Hilary Clinton, who might have been President instead of Trump, says young Americans are against Israel’s genocide because they are ignorant of the context? It is precisely the context that makes young Americans know, accurately, that what Israel is doing is genocide. Occupation of a whole people, and then instead of following the legal obligation of caring for those Israel occupies, it commits genocide against them. Genocide accompanied by the theft of their land. That is the raw truth. For saying that and telling only the truth, using almost entirely Western sources, the fine thinker and best-seller writer Jacques Baud has been “sanctioned” by the European union. Sanctioned like Francesca Albanese, another fine thinker and United Nations rapporteur of extraordinary courage, was sanctioned by the USA. “Sanctioned” means made into a non-person. It means you cannot use your credit card, book in at a hotel, have access to your bank account, to name some of the restrictions. It can also mean you cannot enter or leave your own country. Exile to Siberia was what was done in the last Century. There is no debate or legal process today in the “West”. Dissidents are simply “banished” by the most arbitrary of “sanctions”. Governments no longer care what their people think.
All over the world, “the people” now oppose Israel’s genocide.
Their “Governments”, because of a lack of democracy, do not reflect this, and seem not, in the short run at least, to need to.
Mauritius is a case in point. This new Government withdrew Mauritius’ team due to give ICJ oral submissions against Israel for starving the children of Gaza. The parliamentary Opposition does not even criticize the Government for this. Nor do backbenchers. The mainstream press also covers this up. The people of Mauritius do not agree that Israel starves and otherwise kills children by the ten thousand on purpose. But the Government can avoid taking a stand at the ICJ, even though they have already paid the money for the legal team, even though there is a date and a time set for the Mauritian oral submissions.
Meanwhile, in Venezuela Trump calls peace “war”. In fact, what he is doing is plain murder, accompanied by intended theft of Venezuela’s oil reserves, number one in the world, and Venezuela’s ingots of gold reserves, number 26 in the world, a process already begun by the Bank of England that has seized two billion dollars of Venezuella’s gold assets.
Venezuela has not attacked, nor does it intend to attack, the USA.
This is known by everyone of the broad masses of the people in the world.
It is Trump that has declared war. And it is a weird war he has purported to declare: a war on “narco-terrorists”. First “terrorists” were made out to be like a “state” only called a “non-state actor” that, following the Twin Tower attack in 2001, it was suddenly “legal” to declare war on – even though they were not a country. The USA proceeded to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya to smithereens in its war on “terror”. It is easy to go to war against an abstract noun like “terror”. And the USA may end up bombing Iran again if Israel gets its way.
Anyway, then Trump needed an amended pretext for attacking Venezuela. Trump wants China and Russia out of Venezuela. That is his aim. It is made clear in his National Security Strategy document. So, though nobody associates Venezuela with “terrorism”, which the USA markets as a Muslim crime so Venezuela does not fit the bill, Trump finds a way to link Venezuela with terrorism. His argumentation, childish as it is, is this: Drug-dealers are simply declared “narco-terrorists”, a newly coined word, making an amalgamation of drug cartel owners and terrorists. So, with no evidence whatsoever, Trump conveniently declares President Maduro of Venezuela to be the head of a supposed drug cartel that is supposedly poisoning hundreds of thousands of Americans, killing them. This week Trump declared that drug-dealing is a “Weapon of Mass Destruction”, the pretext for the illegal war the USA declared on Iraq. Nerport-e-kwa.
In fact, the drugs problem in the USA, in particular the death-rate, is to do with the drug Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid used for decreasing pain and as an anesthetic. The “epidemic”, as it has been called, was begun by private medicine “pushing” the substance on people, after surgery or to help cope with back pain, etc, and who then became addicted, and ending up turning to the black market, and ruining their lives. And they still do. Illegal Fentanyl comes to the USA through the Mexican border from all over the world, but not via Venezuela.
The drug that does come from South America is cocaine. It is the drug used mainly by rich people in the USA. They sniff it for recreation. It does not, however, come from Venezuela, either. It comes mainly from Columbia, and satisfies a demand amongst rich people in the USA.
Why does Trump make up these lies, then?
He wants two things: control over Venezuelan oil, the biggest stock in the world, and he wants to maintain control even after the US company Chevron’s contract runs out in 2025. Yes, despite sanctions, Chevron is still exporting oil to the USA from Venezuela. What many people don’t realize is that, as Reuters reported on 25 August, a firm called “China Concord Resources Corp has begun developing two Venezuelan oilfields, planning to invest more than $1 billion in a project to produce 60,000 barrels per day of crude oil by end-2026”. That Trump cannot stand. So, Trump also wants to get China out of not just Venezuela, but from the whole of the Western Hemisphere. He wants total control over the whole of the “Americas” – from Greenland in the Arctic north through Canada, Mexico and other Central American countries, right down through South America, including through Venezuela, to the Southern tip where Argentina is near the Antarctic. And almost all Latin American countries main trading partner is none other than China. So, the stakes are high, and Trump’s chances of success in his mission to kick them out, low.
Anyway, in order to get his hands on the oil supply and to expel China from Venezuela, Trump had to make up a lot of lies to make it “legal” to vaporize any fisherman’s boat near the Venezuela Coast. No arrest, no charge, no evidence, no witnesses, no exhibits, no court case at all, let alone a judgment and a sentence. A political storm blows up in Washington, not so much about the immorality and illegality of this grotesque series of murders in the open seas, not so much the extra-judicial killings, themselves, but over the “last straw” for mainstream US politicians and media: when the USA’s armed forces, after watching two survivors of one such strike on a boat – two fishermen or drug-mules or maybe there were both, or neither, who knows? – as they slipped off a bit of flotsam, went under the sea, and came up again, and clung on again for life, were given an order “from above” to murder the two distressed mariners. This is a double war-crime.
This is the nature of the war Trump foists upon a peaceful Venezuela, already ruined by 20 years of US sanctions, and two or three failed coup d’états organized with CIA help. What is Venezuela’s crime? The people of Venezuela wanted, for the first time ever, to control their petrol wealth and use it to end poverty, which they did – until the sanctions hit. Two of our LALIT members went on an international brigade visit to Venezuela in July 2010, and gave a public report-back on how the people were organizing against the USA sanctions, against the Venezuelan oligarchs and against the gangs. It was before the death of Hugo Chavez who was leading this decolonizing revolution.
And Trump has left his European allies high and dry as they continue to war-monger against Russia like a team of demented lunatics from the Middle Ages. Unable to listen to what Russia is saying, unwilling to open diplomatic channels, unable even to read the battlefield reality to know what is happening to poor Ukraine, NATO’s “proxy” for supposedly overturning Putin, the Europeans now flail around because Trump is leaving them and Ukraine and even NATO high and dry. The latest word being used by European leaders about the situation in the war they are waging against Russia is that it is “bleak”. The EU voted against stealing Russia’s “sanctioned” money, and are footing the bill for Ukraine to supposedly go on fighting until the last Ukrainian. The only hitch is European countries haven’t got any money. They will supposedly buy arms from the USA, but the USA has not got enough production of arms to supply them. It is just as ludicrous as the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes all over again.
All this to outline the confusion of the USA’s foreign policy document.
But, today we went into this in detail to explain that Trump wants to consolidate the USA’s control over what they call the “Western Hemisphere”, to stop fighting against Russia that it prefers to draw away from China. All this so that the USA can better confront China when the time comes. Meanwhile, the USA wants out of its proxy war against Russia, and it wants out of the Middle East. So, some little conflicts can be expected between Trump and Netanyahu. But, as usual, whatever Trump himself wants, the “permanent State” in the USA is heavily controlled by its own pro-Israel lobby that is part of the Military-Industrial-Complex, and that relies for mass support on the Christian Zionists in the USA. In the USA, the Maga base, which overlaps with the Christian Zionists, has been splitting in two over the genocide: well over a half of people in this political “base” of the Republican Party have turned their backs on Zionism because the genocide since 7 October has exposed Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians since 1948. Mainstream figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, as well as the murdered Charlie Kirk, all turned against Israel. And it is precisely because of Jacques Baud’s exposure of this in his excellent, truthful, academically sound, heavily foot-noted work that the Zionist EU governments have had him “sanctioned”.
We need, here in Mauritius, to get the Mauritian Government to take distance from this falling Western Empire. The moment has come for this.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
NOTES:
* These pairs of countries are:
Armenia and Azerbaijan
DRC and Rwanda
India and Pakistan
Cambodia and Thailand
Serbia and Kosovo
Egypt and Ethiopia
Israel and Iran (after US-Israeli bombing of Iran)
and in Trump’s first mandate Israel and the Abraham Accords countries (UAE, Bahrain, Morocco)
