Pax, Trump-Hegseth remix: America's gun laws, dehumanisation and double standards have been its ticket to virtue

The US strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school building in Minab, Iran, on Feb 28 is what's called 'collateral'. It's also known as 'Shit happens' when applied to places that don't look like Miami, and where people don't look like they'll be getting Mar-a-Lago Club membership anytime soon. 165-175 Iranians were killed, mostly girls aged 7-11. But for most of the world - and not just the Western world - that kind of 'Shit happens' all the time in that neck of the woods.

Just off the top of the collective hive mind, when on Dec 16, 2014, Taliban terrorists stormed Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, killing at least 150 people, including over 130 schoolchildren, all you had to do after a cathartic shake'n'sigh was use the conversion rate of that time and figure out how many dead Pakistanis would amount to, say, American or Israeli lives. Then, you can realise that it's just a blip in the ocean of time. Mass killings, we figure, happen in these places all the time where the same kind of people are both perps and victims.

Just as the 300-plus death toll caused by a 10-min blitzkrieg across Lebanon on Wednesday underlined the fact that for Israel to agree to cease fire, it first needed to set fire to a place that's 'used to' being on fire. Surely, 'unexpected' horrors - like, say, the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, in Colorado, which resulted in 16 deaths, including that of the two 12th-grade (White!) student-shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold - are far more horrible worldwide when they happen in the peaceful climes of the US?


The only country to have actually dropped nuclear bombs on civilian populations - twice! - has, over time, fashioned itself as the world's pacifism-by-force coach. The sermon is delivered with three notes: constitutional gun-love, cultural dehumanisation, and the fine art of double standards.


Also Read | 'Only reason they are alive is to negotiate': Trump warns Iran as Vance flies to Islamabad for peace talks

Lock & Load: The Second Amendment, that rousing illogic of the right to bear arms - in case baddies come bearing arms - has been scaled up to atomic proportions. If every citizen is incomplete without a firearm, then every nation worth being deemed a nation is naked without a nuclear arsenal. Ergo, Israel (with its Holocause-and-effect Zionists) semi-secretly stockpiling is kosher. But Iran (with its mad mullahs) doing the same in response to Israel's stockpiling is haraam.

The logic is pure cowboy-Crusader theology: 'good guy with gun' becomes the 'responsible democracy with nukes'. And just as the good guy often shoots first, the good democracy reserves the right for strategic deterrence - the AR-15 scaled up to megatons, with the safety catch permanently off for the right side.

Them/Those: Then comes dehumanisation. Pete 'No Quarter, No Mercy' Hegseth is the most vocal of the Trump regime's alchemists turning 'people' into 'expendable things'. Muslim West Asians are converted to 'enemy mass', their humanity dissolved to make their dissolution a fumigation.


Also Read | US Vice President Vance warns Iran not to ‘play’ US en route to Pakistan for ceasefire talks


Jews in Nazi territory were not the only ones aware of this moral magic trick. In Rana Dasgupta's magisterial new book, After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of World Order, he writes about an Elbridge Colby, captain in the US army, who, in 1925, tried to define a set of principles for future American wars against 'savage tribes':

'To a fanatical savage, a bomb dropped out of the sky on the sacred temple of his omnipotent god is... an indication of the relentless energy and superior skill of the well-equipped civilised foe... [T]he loss of life is probably far less than might have been sustained in prolonged operations of a more polite character. The inhuman act thus becomes actually humane, for it shortens the conflict and prevents the shedding of more excessive quantities of blood.'

This is Pax Trump-Hegseth.

We're OK, You're Not OK: Iran's command structure is manned by 'irrational' zealots. Apparently, the Mar-a-Lago lot aren't. North Koreans are comic-book villains. But, apparently, Trump should be counterintuitively admired for a method deeply buried in his madness.

Trump and his ethno-strategically- aligned allies are virtuous for doing what others are villainous for doing or attempting. Stockpiling nuclear weapons? Wise deterrence if you're Jerusalem, reckless provocation if you're Tehran. Testing missiles? Strategic necessity if you're London, destabilising madness if you're Beijing. Their child's tantrum is 'spirited'. But the neighbour's kid is 'out of control'.

And so the curtain rises, again and again, on the same performance: the usual gunslingers of OK Corral recoiling in horror to find a Smith & Wesson in the hands of an Apache.

But, then, the Civil Rights Act, signed into law by Lyndon Johnson on July 2, 1964 - that prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal - needed a cathartic outlet. Exactly a month later, Johnson announced that he was not 'committing American boys to fighting a war that I think ought to be fought by the boys of Asia to help protect their own land'. It's another matter that he didn't get an off-ramp - until Richard Nixon took over his war and job.