Venezuela, Greenland and the Global Coming Out of the Asshole Society

22/01/2026

Dear friends,

Things are an absolute shitshow right now on the world stage, I mean, it’s properly kicking off. Venezuela. Greenland. The war criminals Putin and Netanyahu in a new "Board of Peace". Trump in Davos as "the new sheriff in town": what the fuck is happening in the world? Many commentators are talking about the "end of the rules-based international order", but that's obviously not an analysis, it doesn't explain what's actually happening, it just states what no longer exists. And let's be honest: this supposed "order" was only ever order for some, and the "rules" never had universal validity, they protected some, while leaving others exposed. Nostalgia, as Canadian Prime Minister Carney quite rightly said in Davos, is not a strategy.

Trump in Venezuela: shameless imperialism

And what does the new world political situation actually look like right now if we view it without the spectacles of privileged European nostalgia?

First, Venezuela: of course Trump invaded Venezuela for the oil, he said so clearly and explicitly (of course he also wants to distract from the Epstein Files, has to, because of MAGA and the midterms, but that's another story), but Bush also invaded Iraq for the oil, he just didn't say it quite so explicitly. The difference between then and now doesn't lie in what happened, but in how it was justified. Bush Junior still felt compelled to justify the invasion of Iraq in the language of universalist humanism, and to send Colin Powell to the UN General Assembly to lie to the world that Iraq possessed and was about to deploy weapons of mass destruction. Trump, by contrast, world champion of performative shamelessness, has absolutely no problem saying that what he's doing in Venezuela is about oil, and he's not ashamed either, rather he's delighted about publicly broadcast meetings with oil company executives where it's all about extracting and dividing up Venezuela's oil wealth. How did he put it in the first campaign? “I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue, and people would still vote for me.”

If you've been following my work for a while, maybe even read my book, something might be ringing a bell right now: "Hang on, we know this already: both behave like shit, but one talks about human rights and universalism, the other is proud to behave like an imperialist pig..." Exactly: that's the difference between the “sublimation society” (Verdrängungsgesellschaft) and the asshole society: "The sublimation society has to try to justify (its behaviour) in the language of universalist humanism. The arsehole society, by contrast, has made it a principle not to have to explain, and certainly not to have to justify itself."

What shocked us about Venezuela wasn't the fact that the US attacked a country alone, without international support (btw: even "international support" from one's own allies doesn't legitimise an illegal invasion), that they kidnapped the head of state, that they installed a pliable government, because they've been doing exactly that for over 150 years – mostly with the explicit or at least tacit support of the rest of the rich world (cf. Iran 1953). What shocked us about Venezuela was the nakedness of the American imperialism (aka “Pax Americana”) on display there: of course we know it exists, and somehow we also know that our by global standards very comfortable ("imperial") mode of living is somehow connected to it – but to engage in such brazenly open imperialism, as if we hadn't been pretending to the rest of the world for decades that we're now oh so reformed from our colonial and imperialist past? No no no, we don't think that's ok, we enlightened Europeans, we "moral superpower", we... well, we like our imperial violence the way we like our servants at Downton Abbey: they should always be there, but never be seen.

Trump outside Greenland: suddenly we're "the Others"

And what's so shocking to us about the Greenland story? Obviously not the fact that the world's most powerful country wants to incorporate territories located near it, or that state borders are shifted through violence or political pressure: we act as if this never or almost never happened within our beautiful "rules-based international order", but if we compare the fate of the Kurds with that of the Kosovars, for example, it becomes clear that certain groups can draw new borders through force of arms. If the group gets on well with the global powers, a way will be found to set up a state for them (for instance, after the Yugoslav war a whole series of states were newly created), whilst the Kurds have been fighting for their own state for decades but aren't allowed to have one because that doesn't fit into the current geopolitical constellation, and they simply don't have allies anywhere at the very top of the international system. A fact that's being made painfully clear again this very week, where armed group A (in this case the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) has allies in the international system, and is therefore allowed to free IS members, whilst armed group B (the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Defence Forces) has no such allies, and can therefore be shot down, even though they were for ages the only ally of "the West" in the region.

No, what shocked us about Trump's discursive assault on Greenland wasn't the fact that a powerful country wants to shift borders without the consent of a less powerful country. What shocked us was the fact that imperialism is now directed at Us. That the rules that usually applied to "the Others" are now supposed to apply to Us as well. Do you remember the strange debate when it came to putting Netanyahu on trial? The ICC's chief prosecutor quoted a statement by a ‘senior Western official’ who summed up this hypocrisy perfectly: from the perspective of the rich world, the International Criminal Court is ‘meant for Africa and for rogues like Putin,’ not for the West and its allies. Well said, anonymous Western official, well said.

I'd go a step further: deep in the subject construction of "white Europeans" and their descendants in the genocidal white settler colonies lies the fundamental assumption that there's a good, strong, clever, enlightened, progressive, let's say it, civilised "Us", and a bad, weak, stupid, backward, let's say it, underdeveloped "the Others". And the rules we set up were never there for everyone: they were there to impose limits on the Others, and to protect Us. This means that Trump isn't just breaking the rules of the post-WWII repression consensus that allowed "the West" to simultaneously feel morally good AND enjoy the benefits of imperial exploitation, but also that he's directly questioning our central identity construction: he's showing us that we're now "the Others" too, and that's roughly like showing a grand bourgeois that he's poor, has no status, and you could punch him in broad daylight in the middle of 5th Avenue without him being able to sanction you for it. It's not really our fears about the future that are unsettling us here (we don't even realise how much all this will change our lives) – it's the feeling that the world has come apart at the seams, because We are suddenly no longer Us but the Others. That's genuinely extremely confusing when you've grown up in a world where this distinction is one of the most important pillars of your own reality.

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Trump as the rich worlds ”Id”

I've already said that one of the basic principles of an "asshole society" is not having to explain itself, not having to justify itself, not accepting any limitations on the absolute freedom of action of privileged actors. And since Donald Trump sometimes seems less like a real person than the projection of all the fears and pathologies of privileged people, I'm going to treat him analytically exactly like that: seen this way, Trump is the "It” (“Id” in Freud's sense, but “It” in Stephen King's sense too) of the rich world, he's what happens when overprivileged people feel too restricted, shamed, and not-treated-according-to-their-exalted-status for too long, when privileged people want to free themselves from every shackle that has been imposed on them (from their perspective, of course, illegitimately) by the rabble: "Trump said the only constraint to his power as president is 'my own morality, my own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me'."

If an asshole society is based on accepting no boundaries, no rules and laws, then Trump is the asshole society made flesh, and the fact that he's currently projecting his energies into geopolitics because of his domestic unpopularity leads to the global coming out of the asshole society, mirroring the process I analysed for Germany in 2023 (the "society" in question is the international system itself). And a coming out is fundamentally the self-liberation from and self-unshaming vis-a-vis norms that are imposed "from outside" but are quite seriously taken by the liberating subject: a process that feels powerful and empowering, regardless of whether I'm carrying it out "from below" or "from above", whether a subaltern subject is liberating itself from a relationship of domination, or a dominant subject is affirming it and saying "no, there are no universal rights, I'm better/worth more than you". NB: the coming out feels like liberation because it represents a step towards a life that feels more "authentic" and "truer" than what was lived before.

And if what I've written above is correct, then one of the reasons why Europe is currently reacting to Trump in such a shocked and incoherent way is that the appearance of this walking psychopathological projection means we're confronted with our own "id", our own maniacally laughing clown Pennywise living in the drainage system of the rich world: with what we are in practice – late-imperial, immoral shithole societies that actually convince themselves that one or two per cent economic growth, that 100,000 new "good industrial jobs" or "cheap driving, meat and flying for everyone" is more important than global climate protection, which until recently still meant "the survival of the Others" – but don't want to acknowledge in discourse. Trump is the Mr Hyde to Europe's Dr Jekyll, but remember: they're actually the same man.

The end of our rules-based world

The formerly leading (in the sense of "hegemonic") state of the global North is coming out of the closet on the global level, and is admitting for the first time since sometime before the Second "World War" what it is, what it wants to be: in the case of the US an exterminatory settler project whose basis has always been the destruction and subjugation of other worlds. But the US only stands pars pro toto for the European-imperial project that subjugated one half of the world and massacred the other half for over half a millennium. And now We too are in the sights of the imperialism that only the Others used to be at the receiving end of. That's quite confusing and fundamentally also very shameful, and is therefore of course primarily sublimated.

What's being sublimated? That we too now live in a world where the narrative of universal human rights is shown to be bullshit, a bit of window dressing that we allowed ourselves to have wrested from us when, after the destruction of our own world in the Second World War – as I said, we usually destroy the worlds of others without problems, but the imperial centres really can't have it coming that close as it did in WWII – in a moment of weakness we legally acknowledged and enshrined what Europe had officially emphasised for several centuries but never lived: that all people have equal rights, regardless of who they are, where they live, whom they love. Where things are also taken away from Us privileged Europeans, just as we've been taking them away from the Others for centuries. That now we too live in a world that can break down, or rather, can be broken. That not everything always gets better.

Trump hasn't destroyed the rules-based world. He's destroyed our rules-based world, and in doing so has shown us that we're nothing special, that we too belong to the Others. In doing so, Trump has also destroyed a bit of us, because being Us, not the Others, that's the core of the European-imperial superiority construction.

I'm not grateful to him for it, but perhaps it'll help us see things a bit more realistically.

HAAAHAAAHAAA, just kidding. If what I've written is correct, European repression is now going to increase massively, the foreign policy debate is going to get even more stupid.

With late-imperial sublimation greetings,

Your Tadzio