Whose Tyranny Is This, Anyway?
United States
January 2026
Chatty families sidestepped scattered rubbish from drunken midnight fireworks on the way to the final days of the Christmas market when the year’s newest alarming headlines arrived in the daily doomscroll. Another week would pass before dismantling of light fixtures and sound systems, and by that time we’d already seen dizzying updated footage of citizens in strife, streets packed, body bags, and dismissive propaganda from the spin rooms circling, calibrating, reticulating, multiplying, around the globe. Religious affiliations aside, it’s disquieting that a holiday celebrating, among other things, peace on Earth and goodwill toward men might be so quickly supplanted by weapons aimed at men as they streamed, screaming and pleading, prodding and clawing for decency into the public square.
Is it 2027 yet?
I’m outside looking in, like most, just as I have been to the provocations by Netanyahu and Putin, but my view has a strange hue. Through benign happenstance I find myself uncomfortably adjacent to what’s unfolding this New Year, each deadly in its own way – the violent extraction of Maduro, the protests and retribution in the streets of Iran, the pointed yet comically unprofessional bullying by ICE (or “border enforcement” or whatever they’re calling themselves now…) in Minneapolis. Many of my family members live there. Some of my friends are from Iran. And Venezuelans, amidst extensive challenges in their own lives during COVID in Barcelona, hosted me selflessly for a period of months.
“No es tiempo de Jacuzzi!” they would joke, mocking Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor as president of Venezuela who had been dead for a decade, but whose prescription to his constituents facing the symptoms of economic malfeasance such as a lack of water or energy involved limiting their showers to three minutes – one to moisten, one to lather, one to rinse. Together they had effectively exiled themselves in Spain to escape these woes of this present rendition of the Bolivarian Republic which only seemed to gradually worsen day by day. They sent back care packages of rice and beans and intentionally low-value trinkets to family on occasion in recognition of their new relative affluence even as they squeezed each euro through vegan diets and cohabitation in a creaky flat whose narrow windows aimed to enhance their own station in life. For “Yampi” (Jean-Pierre, whose parents arrived in Venezuela from Lebanon) it meant practicing medicine in Barcelona after approval of his credentials. His younger brother was also working in health care. Alexis taught experience-focused lessons for elementary school children, emphasizing outdoor play, respectful social interaction, and building fundamental life skills. Obviously these became largely online lessons during COVID. Though sanguine about their circumstances, they had left Venezuela for a reason: life became untenable.
A familiar, if more doctrine repression was the backdrop for Mohadeseh, Sahra, Adrina, and Shabnam to leave Iran. Less about a tightening grip of an economic vise at the time, it was plainly personal that these women left to study in Germany for the opportunity they assumed they would never have. “We do not have freedom in my country for my entire life,” Mohadeseh expressed on a rare clear, above-freezing January day near Munich. She’s secured an internship at a landscape architecture firm, not in her area of training or a language she speaks fluently. But it’s a fate she and the others accept, alongside the obligatory rekindling of new social ties all-but-required of migrants in a foreign land. They’re no strangers to closely following news from the Middle East as Iran sits squarely in the crosshairs of several regional powers and the US. The economic isolation worsened by sanctions risks further destabilization as Iranians become desperate facing shortages that come more frequently. “I hate that stupid nuclear thing!” Shabnam once raged, emphatic that it is not worth the suffering it causes to daily life for the population. Following US elections in 2024, all agreed that the outcome would certainly be worse for them than for me, a point I couldn’t deny. It was affirmed by missiles whizzing over the Gulf a few short months later, provoking several hours of deep distress among these women whose lives were already stretched thin.
So to see Minneapolis protesters beneath frigid overcast skies, their enraged voices billowing frosty clouds of steam as fat (often) men (mostly) in sepia tactical vests (usually) wreak purposeless chaos like deputized mall cops with a nativist chip on their not-as-white-as-you-might-expect shoulders, I’m challenged whether thousands dead in the streets of Tehran during an internet “pause” or the millions starving or jailed from economic catastrophe and suppressed opposition in Caracas bears comparison. Is there mass carnage in the US as a result of these actions? No. Not yet, anyway. But the callous mutilation of human dignity is no less obscene. “The fascism is palpable,” my cousin observed wistfully. “Like COVID, but being attacked by our own government.” No doubt my Venezuelan and Iranian colleagues might say the same. A mistake in geopolitics is assuming the enemy of my enemy is my friend, more than ever if the US invites itself to the party. A nation once prone to predictably overpromise and underdeliver – if there’s one thing we’ve perfected it’s effective marketing – Uncle Sam now bumbles from the Golden Throne to Air Force One in mercurial lust, with no one the wiser toward what boorish delusional shine he covets any given hour. Except oil. “You think Russia and China were here for the arepa recipe?” one chamo chided in a viral video following Maduro’s kidnapping and removal, as if he were speaking to the dozen or so remaining voters in the US who naively expect military action to be morally justified under this or any rapacious regime. But the Iranians I know do see a personal vindication. To have a US military strike remove their leaders would be “wrong, but…maybe it will finally cause a change, because I don’t see any other way.”
One thing is certain: all of us deserve better. The conceit for humanity which motivates these provocations and tyrannical actions at the behest of dastardly meatheads not only shames the positions they hold but denigrates the citizens they supposedly represent. The protagonists in these unique tales unfolding globally share the same toxic sludge flowing through their veins where blood normally nourishes healthy hearts and minds. As crucial as visual protest must be against thuggish brutality, it sidesteps an essential fact: these men are sociopaths and cowards. Appealing to ethos will never convince them because they never matured to manifest or receive such reality. They render harm because they otherwise feel nothing at all.
Acquiescence to power rests on predictability and compliance. So don’t. Trample them with resolute tenderness of standing arm-in-arm in solidarity with your neighbor. Berate them by brandishing the boldness of your heartfelt restraint. Stream out of your offices, away from your desktops, dispose of digital deliveries, to outnumber them in forthright vocal outrage to fill shared spaces proclaiming an end to state sanctioned cruelty. Siphon their revenue, suffocate their sales, sacrifice your salary to the extent possible for the sake of steadfast dignity and to the detriment of this crass chokehold, this lurid absence of self-esteem parading as authority. The mark of conviction is not what we do for pay, but what we do for no compensation whatsoever. Stop work. Leave. Perhaps depart for elsewhere with funds in tow as countless before us have done. Lambast the lunatics in the language of cash flow and the evacuation of human value to elsewhere to remind them of our worth, only that they might be overpowered by the lingering stench of their arrogance. Remind them this tyranny is ours and we are worthy to dispose of it as civilly, willfully, and voraciously as they might never have imagined. We – Venezuelans, Iranians, Minneapolitans – all are worthy of this and more. Remind these bastards it is so.