Voyage of the Damned: Blowing Up Boats and Breaking Down Bullshit

Voyage of the Damned
Blowing Up Boats and Breaking Down Bullshit

Jim Kavanagh

Thug Life

The Trump administration campaign of killing boatmen in the waters near Venezuela, part of its larger project of regime change aggression against the country, breaks, and blatantly defies, the most fundamental principles of American and international law. It’s a crime, and all of its perpetrators, from the grotesque thug Hegseth, to any sub-thug Admiral, to any officer, airmen or seaman who pushes the fatal button, to the ur-thug commander-in-chief who encourages and is responsible for it, should be prosecuted and imprisoned.

Proudly exhibiting videos of small, unarmed, civilian boats far from and unable to reach American waters being blown to bits under the entirely unproven and entirely irrelevant claim that they were transporting drugs, killing at least 87 people so far, including  men who were clearly surrendering with their hands in the air and survivors clinging to wreckage, is not a good look. I hope the families of those killed, some of whose bodies have washed ashore, find a venue through which they can bring criminal charges against and/or sue the shit out of the United States Government and any and all of its personnel involved.

The thuggery here Is so blatant, and its perpetrators so stupid, that it’s elicited unwanted attention and reaction, including explicit discomfort from a Congress that’s for decades been extraordinarily and cowardly reluctant to impinge on Presidential war-making prerogatives. There’s been a congressional viewing of a double-tap video showing “two survivors, shirtless, cl[inging] to the upturned hull” of a wrecked boat before being blown up by a second strike ordered by Adm. Frank M. Bradley. According to the account of “two people with direct knowledge of the operation” cited by the Washington Post (and kinda-sorta challenged by others), Bradley was following a spoken directive by  Pete Hegseth to “kill everybody.” Predictably, Republican congressmen like Tom Cotton found the action “righteous” while Democratic congressmen found it “disturbing” and “troubling,” although they “declined to weigh in” on whether this strike actually “constituted a war crime.”

Speaking for the administration, Vice President J.D. Vance made clear the Trump administration’s contemptuous indifference to any consideration of American actions in relation to “war crime” and other such standards:

War crime, schmor crime. You can’t really think we bother about such things.

Of course, the whole debate about a double-tap second strike avoids and obscures the main point: Any strike on small, unarmed, civilian boats far from and unable to reach American waters is illegitimate on every level. It’s no more legal or ethical to blow up people in boats in the Caribbean you claim are carrying narcotics than it is to shoot down a guy on the street corner you claim has drugs in his pocket. Nobody with a brain takes this seriously. The whole blatantly deceitful boat-strike campaign is pure murder, part of a larger, blatant regime-change campaign against Venezuela that is pure imperialist aggression.

https://x.com/AdHaque110/status/1995816543884542075?s=20

Disobedient Spirits

One of the more contentious moments in all this came with the short video done by six Democratic lawmakers (Senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Chrissy Houlahan, and Maggie Goodlander), all of whom were military or intelligence officers. Speaking “directly to members of the military and the intelligence community,” they warned them that “this administration is pitting our uniformed military intelligence community professionals against American citizens,” and reminded them that: “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our constitution.”

This admonition that military and intelligence personnel “can” and “must” refuse illegal order, provoked fury from Trump, who called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” although it’s a well-known, black-letter element of the Uniform Code of Military Justice—as his own Attorney General, Pam Bondi, wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court: “Military officers are required not to carry out unlawful orders, It would be a crime to do so.” (my emphasis).

Indeed, Pete Hegseth himself knows and has clearly stated this legal standard: “The military’s not gonna follow illegal orders…If you’re doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that. That’s why the military said it won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander-in-chief. There’s a standard. There’s an ethos.”

It’s just one of those standards that, once you get in power, you don’t give a shit about.

Nonetheless, we should recognize that it’s quite radical for sitting lawmakers to make such statements. When soldiers start disobeying orders en masse—which is exactly what the Democratic six are urging US soldiers and sailors to consider doing—things get seriously out of hand. Entire units and missions start to collapse under constant threat of mutiny. The last time mass refusal of orders happened seriously in the U.S. armed forces was in Vietnam, and it inevitably developed into situations where orders were refused with the toss of a grenade.

And that’s exactly the kind of thing you should expect and accept when an illegal order to commit a war crime or crime against humanity is issued, whether for a specific incident or a whole campaign—i.e., an imperialist aggression in Vietnam or Venezuela.

More pointed responses to the Democratic six are along the lines of “What illegal orders are you suggesting our troops have to disobey? Please don’t pretend you’re giving an abstract lesson in civics. You are former military and intelligence officers who obeyed every order you were given without question and have decided now to emphasize the necessity of disobeying illegal orders, in a discourse framed with urgency about what “this administration” is doing. Everybody knows you’ve got something specific in mind. Say it.

Pardon me for suspecting that these CIA and military Dems are not at all ready to accept the radical consequences of what they are advocating. Do all or any of these six want to be a little more concrete and say whether the military—every single member from the Admiral down to button pusher, the mass refusal you need to challenge a criminal military campaign—must refuse orders to blow up small, unarmed, civilian boats far from and unable to reach American waters (a more “completely unlawful and ruthless” order than which it’s hard to imagine)? Or will they continue “declining to weigh in”? Are they interested in encouraging and engaging in urgent, ethical, constitutional action that might actually disrupt a war crime in progress, or in rhetorically demonstrating how ethically, and constitutionally, and impotently cowardly concerned they are in contradistinction to their Republican colleagues? How much of a shit do they actually give?

Alumni Relations

Which brings me to another example of oh-so-concerned “oppositional” discourse that hit closer to home for me: the December 5th NYT op-ed, “What Trump Is Really Doing With His Boat Strikes,” by Phil Klay. Klay is a former Marine and the winner of the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 for his book of short stories about war, citizenship, and faith. As the LA Times puts it, he’s a Marine who’s “become more of a philosopher.” He is also an alumnus of the high school I went to, and I was alerted to his op-ed through my classmates’ mailing list.

I’ve written about Regis High School before, in my essay on Anthony Fauci, also an alumnus. I’ll repeat a bit here, because it informs Klay’s work and my response. Regis is a unique institution. It is an academically selective, full-scholarship (tuition-free), all-boys Jesuit high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is widely considered the best Catholic high school (and one of the best overall) in the country. It gives a strong education, in my day literally classical—Homer and Caesar in the original Greek and Latin. It’s an education based on Catholic and Jesuit ethical values (which, of course, have changed over the years), and Klay is definitely engaged in an ongoing meditation on those values. It’s an education that, at its best, lays the foundation for logical and critical thinking, and prepares students for good liberal arts colleges and professional careers. For many middle-strata Catholic kids in New York—like this guy—it has been a life-changing experience. So, its alumni are unusually loyal, and proud and aware of each other’s accomplishments.

I caught a little more of the “critical” edge from that and subsequent education, and, as with Anthoy Fauci, my response to Klay’s column was less uncritical than the responses of my fellow alumni—such as, “Must read—not often do we get St. Augustine's advice in the New York Times!” and “Nothing less than what we should expect from a National Book Award recipient. Now if only the people reveling in Trump-sponsored gladiatorial matches would read it––and somehow internalize it.” 

Using a story from St. Augustine’s Confessions, Klay builds his essay on sharply and aptly analogizing the Trump administration’s “snuff films of alleged drug boats blowing up” to the Romans’ “cruel gladiatorial games” that made the spectators “drink in savagery” and “imbibe madness,” turning them into the moral monsters that initially repelled them. This, we must consider, is “what President Trump and his administration are doing to the soul of the nation,” how his “moral shaping of the electorate” will leave us with results “we will still have to reckon with once he is gone.” This, “the Trump administration’s celebration of death” pushes beyond legal and constitutional questions, and “even the Christian morality that would eventually push Augustine to formulate an early version of just-war theory.” It’s a “wounding of the national soul” that Klay finds “hard to watch.”

I’m right there with the “snuff film” critique of the Trump/Hegseth boat attacks; it’s the theologized fluff talk about Trump’s “wounding of the national soul” I find hard to swallow.

It’s fine and necessary to criticize the Trump administration for these crimes. It’s not fine to ignore—to deliberately and determinately fail to address and account for—the fact that, whatever “President Trump and his administration are doing to the soul of the nation,” that “soul” was ruined and damned long before Donald Trump came down the escalator.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, (both now Democratic Party favorites), Barack Obama, Hillary ”We came, we saw, he died. Ha, ha.”) and Bill Clinton, Madeline (*500,000* dead children “worth it”) Albright, Joe (“I am a Zionist”) Biden, etc. “morally shaped the electorate” and “wounded the national soul” to accept at-whim presidential assassinations, including double-taps.

What’s the point, besides demonstrating your theological-philosophical pretension finesse, of pinning the damnation of the American soul on Trump, who has yet to catch up with the body count of any of his forerunners?

I’ve characterized the present American polity a couple of times as a ship of fools. Even so, it was all-ahead-full for quite a while. But for some time now, under a succession of calamitous captains, we’ve been on a true voyage of the damned and, if we’re not blown out of the water (a real possibility), we will sink from the weight of the crimes we’ve committed against others and ourselves. If we even have time, we better figure out the personnel and baggage that got us here—all of it—and throw them overboard.

Klay makes a nice point about the result of 9/11: “Something dangerously seductive. America had found moral purpose again.  We can forget everything else, including why and how it happened, and embark on our purposeful and righteous campaign as the good guys, fighting the War on Terror.  Everyone, Phil Klay first of all, recognizes how disastrous that was. Substitute “Donald Trump” for “Terror” and you’ve got the liberal attitude since 2016, with at least the same level of righteous certitude.  How’s that working out?

Here's a couple of Obama’s extra-judicial, extra-territorial assassinations—aside from the murder of a 16-year-old American boy who “should’ve had a more responsible father”—per Amnesty International: “On a sunny afternoon in October 2012, 68-year-old Mamana Bibi was killed in a drone strike that appears to have been aimed directly at her.” And:2 “Earlier, on 6 July 2012, 18 male laborers, including at least one boy, were killed in a series of US drone strikes in the remote village of Zowi Sidgi. Missiles first struck a tent in which some men had gathered for an evening meal after a hard day’s work, and then struck those who came to help the injured from the first strike. Witnesses described a macabre scene of body parts and blood, panic and terror, as US drones continued to hover overhead.” Et. al. 

But we did not see those assassinations and double taps because, under Obama, “The USA…refuses to release detailed information about individual strikes.”  We didn’t see them because Obama and his “priest”/consigliere John Brennan were not as stupid as Trump and Hegseth to show it and boast about. Not as stupid, but no less culpable.

We didn’t see it because the Democratic-aligned media did not make sure you saw it and did not make a case out of it, but, rather, wrote positive, appreciative stories in Phil-Klay terms about the Augustinian angst of these morally complex protagonists.

The “priest” reference is not flippant. In 2012, the New York Times did a revealing  portrait of Obama and Brennan’s intimate pas de deux executing deadly extrajudicial and extraterritorial drone strikes via their Tuesday Kill List meetings. It was a relationship saturated with the same kind of theological and moral anguish, in exactly the same terms, that Phil Klay embraces. Obama was “A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.” John Brennan was “a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the president’s attempt to apply the ‘just war’ theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict...Guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama …signs off on every [drone] strike.”

Isn’t it so much better, didn’t it leave the soul of the nation unwounded, when, unlike the crude and stupid duo of Trump and Hegseth, the educated, erudite team of Obama and Brennan conjured up a “blessing” from Christian philosophers before blowing up civilians in distant lands? That’s the kind of morally anguished and self-aware leadership we Americans, and the Mamana Bibis and Venezuelan fishermen of the world, are missing.

Of course, with the hectic pace of operations and all, the Obama-Brennan disputationes had to be rather brief, since Obama “approves lethal action without hand-wringing.” Obama, you see, is “a realist who was never carried away by his lies own rhetoric. Instead, he was already putting his lawyerly mind to carving out the maximum amount of maneuvering room to fight terrorism as he saw fit.”

“Lawyerly mind” (or perhaps “Jesuitical”), “carving out [from “just war” theories] maneuvering room.” Isn’t that precious? In other words, all the theologizing moral anguish was bullshit cover for Obama acting as the dedicated, deadly American exceptionalist and imperialist and Zionist (‘cause that’s a huge part of Iraq, et. al.) that he was, that Trump is, and that anyone whom the ruling class permits to become the American president will be. It’s not “the Trump administration” that started imperialist America’s “celebration of death.”

No Favorite

Obama’s extrajudicial, extraterritorial assassination policy indisputably paved the way for Trump’s boat attacks, just as Obama’s 2015 designation of Venezuela as an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States" paved the way for Trump’s (or whoever’s) possible military attack.

Here’s what I wrote about this, in a 2013 essay, when Jesuit Fr. Joe McShane, then president of Fordham University—John Brennan’s and my undergraduate alma mater—awarded Brennan an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters against the protest of  otherwise “morally shaped” students and former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern, also a Fordham alumnus (OMG, it is a Jesuit conspiracy!):

Because of the precedent Obama and Brennan have set, such decisions are going to continue to be made by one or two persons in a room as they see fit…These two men, that is, have taken a definitive, and probably irreversible, step in transforming the American President into an Emperor. But, of course, as long as he has a priest by his side, that’ll be OK.

Obama set the soul-wounding precedent that Trump is following. Now, the Trump administration is showing Americans their snuff videos of boats being blown up, hoping, as Klay worries, that some of its base will “imbibe the madness.” And some do, though it seems far from a net political benefit. Then, the Obama administration hid their kill shots from Americans, and its base was quite content not to see them, while blithely accepting their deadly result.

In other words, the Obamacan base was being fed not nasty snuff images but a constant stream of supercilious horseshit, and was, by that, “morally shaped” to “give the president his freedom of action…that we will still have to reckon with.” And if members of that base don’t recognize, renounce, and account for what their hero did, and what they did by cosseting that hero in their minds while limiting themselves to statements showing how culturally and morally superior they are to those in the other “base” who haven’t read Augustine and Aquinas, then they are just sad, sanctimonious, and politically debilitating hypocrites.

It's become the dominant, easy strategy of liberal commentators to pick loud, rhetorically crude reactionary targets to demonize, while explicitly or implicitly embracing the pernicious but rhetorically sophisticated liberal imperialists, who end up committing crimes both those liberal commentators and the reactionaries they disdain support.

The only thing different about the Trump administration is its crude, blatant, boasting about its imperialist violence. The Obama administration, like all U.S. imperialist administrations, was the same pig, with better lipstick, and deserves no less contempt for covering its porcine violence with deceitful moral pretensions. You will have no political credibility if you don’t acknowledge this.

Phil Klay, who I can’t say is naive, but who joined the Marine Corps in 2005, “because I thought military service would be an honorable profession,” and thinks that the Trump administration is only now “turn[ing] a noble vocation into mere thuggery” should maybe have relied less on the Christian theologians than the nation’s most-decorated marine, Smedley Butler, who knew over 90 years ago that being a marine meant being “a gangster for capitalism.”  Thinking on all that with my Jesuit training, I gotta wonder if there has been an order that more clearly called for Augustinian disobedience than the order to deploy to Iraq. Isn’t deployment the first order—in relation now to Venezuela, Iran, or Palestine—that we must call on all military personnel to disobey?

Klay is of the school that thinks Trump is “tarnishing” the uniform and “wounding the soul” of the nation by his proud broadcasting of the images of imperialist violence. I’m of the school that thinks it’s a good thing that arrogant crimes and the imperialist soul of the nation are shown to the world in all their naked glory. I think seeing that is more likely to encourage soldiers to refuse orders and the public to support that refusal. This is the beneficial Trump effect I wrote about here:

Trump is diminishing the aura of the presidency, and generally gumming up the works. As Rob Urie puts it: “The most public political tension now playing out is between those who prefer the veil of ‘system’ against the venal vulgarity of that system’s product now visible for all to see. What Mr. Trump’s political opponents appear to be demanding is a better veil.” Not I. The lipstick is off the "presidency" and the whole political beast it sits atop of. Good. Let's have no nostalgia for a time when a smooth operator was picking your pocket with a smile while you were transfixed by his mellifluous patter.

It’s not about Trump or Obama or St. Augustine. It’s about the imperatives of capitalism, imperialism, and Zionism that drive American policy. The last thing we need is theologized, morally anguished commentary that obscures those fundamental forces. The first thing we need is to drop our illusions and figure out how to fight and defeat those forces persistently attacking the citizens of the U.S. and the world from many directions and both American political parties.

Crimes of the boat-attack type have been a standard part of bipartisan American imperialism (that’s the category, not from St. Augustine) for as long as we have lived (You don’t have to go back to Smedley Butler. Has everyone forgotten Vietnam?). Until and unless oh-so-well-educated, philosophically astute Americans renounce their previous favored imperialist heroes who committed those crimes, they should not be surprised when their carefully targeted professions of moral disappointment and superiority will be widely perceived, with reason, as sanctimonious hypocrisy.

Really, please, get how much, and how many, people are put off by this. It doesn’t work!

So, let’s assume everyone’s good-faith desire to do something more than virtue signal by parsing the Constitution and/or the Church Fathers to show how much smarter and nicer one is than Donald Trump. I invite Phil Klay and the six Democratic “seditionists” who boldly and correctly denounce the Trump administration’s aggressions, to join me in explicitly calling for every American military officer or soldier to disobey any order to attack civilian boats, or to participate in any attack or invasion of Venezuela, and to accept, without reservation, whatever wounds to the soul, ego, ships, planes, or personnel of the armed forces of the United States that will necessarily inflict. While we’re at it, let’s also encourage disobedience to any order to participate in the insulting, colonialist, Trumpian ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza/Palestine or in any military action in support of Zionist colonialism.

Let’s all put ourselves on the line with the soldiers we are asking to—saying they must—disobey orders and disrupt the whole of the U.S. imperialist mission in Venezuela and Latin America (and, for good measure, the Middle East) with at least scores, preferably hundreds and thousands, of military resisters. That’s what will gum up the works which Trump, the current captain of the imperialist ship, along with a bipartisan congressional crew, is cooking up in the name of our nation, and that’s exactly what we must want to see, and help make, happen. Let’s, in other words, do what the logic of your purported ethical, constitutionalist position demands: encourage mutiny.

And, with all my Jesuit training, I don’t give a shit what St. Augustine calls it.

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