Threats against Washington

From political expediency, from ignorance of reality, from cases of collective psychosis or from a combination of all of these, for more than 200 years the political class and the media in the U.S. have resorted to issuing warnings about all kinds of external threats: imminent dangers, potential risks, strategic challenges or shadowy conspiracies capable of causing the collapse of the country and, by an extension which in the view of the empire seems natural, of the “free world” or of “world democracy.”

So-called “popular culture” — which is neither popular nor culture, but rather a commercial product — has found in these threats abundant raw material to generate symbolic attacks by vampires, invasions of space aliens, unmanageable plagues, catastrophic eruptions, devastating earthquakes, waves of the living dead, disastrous storms, apocalyptic meteorites and even alterations of the earth’s magnetic poles capable of killing off civilization.

And without resorting to symbolism, it also feeds on exaggerated or invented dangers to convert any plots that develop in any African country, Latin American nation or former Soviet republic into a causal mechanism for the end of the world.

Between the film production companies and the speeches of the State Department, a complex relationship has been established in which they feed off each other’s paranoia to maintain a permanent state of agitation and terror in sectors of the population of a country that, until as late as Aug. 29, 1949, the date of the first Soviet nuclear test, had lived free of serious threats on its continental territory.

During almost all of the second half of the 20th century, the threat of communism was Washington’s principal pretext for committing all manner of dirty tricks in countries that were far away or that lacked the slightest capacity to put the national security of the U.S. in danger.

With the brief exception of Cuba, which was compelled by characteristic U.S. hostility to partner with Moscow on the global geopolitical stage, other countries — including Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Congo, Guatemala, Chile and Nicaragua —were not able to become dangerous opponents of the superpower. But all of them, and many others, were at some moment declared to be “threats to national security” and were victims of armed interventions and coup plots hatched in the White House.

After the fall of the Eastern bloc, the next threats du jour were drug trafficking and Islamic terrorism. Both of these were quintessential U.S. inventions: The former started with sneaky prohibitionist policies for marijuana, which were then expanded to include cocaine and heroin production laboratories, and then to the unholy alliances of the U.S. government with the narcotrafficking mafias, above all, the Italians. Meanwhile, the second threat, Islamic terrorism, was hatched by the CIA and the Pentagon to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

In fact, it was the CIA that designed the transit routes for cocaine through Mexico under Operation Iran-Contra or Tehran-gate, during the Ronald Reagan administration. In later years, the Drug Enforcement Administration laundered money for the top leaders of Mexican cartels, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed the free passage of weapons of war headed to the cartels in Operations “Wide Receiver” and “Fast and Furious.”

As for Islamic fundamentalist violence, it is undeniable that their organizations (al-Qaida and the Islamic State group) found a perfect breeding ground in Washington’s interference in the Middle East and the Islamic world, including the sponsorship of the mujahedeens in Afghanistan, the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the promotion of the “Arab Spring,” and the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.

Today, along with fentanyl, the trendy threat is immigration, a phenomenon that not only shaped the current U.S. social structure, but which contributes significantly to U.S. GDP and makes up a substantial part of its competitiveness with European and Asian economies. But the xenophobic paranoia built up against foreign workers is so great that it won Donald Trump a large number of votes.

The thing is, “danger is other people,” the gringo governing class would say, parodying Sartre: Chinese, Russians, Iranians, Mexicans, Venezuelans and Cubans (even those who want to immigrate to the U.S.). And when an unbalanced native of Texas, trained by the U.S. Army and a U.S. citizen, slaughters 15 people and injures dozens more on a street in New Orleans, Trump spouts the nonsense that the problem is immigration.

But no. The mother of all threats is the mental health crisis that affects a good part of the population of our neighbor to the north, including its next president.