So incredibly well said. Horrifying and heartbreaking and infuriating! As always, thank you Henry Giroux! — Molly
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US Attack on Venezuela is the Marriage of
Colonialism and Gangster Capitalism
By Henry Giroux
I watched the January 3rd nightly coverage on CBS and NBC of the U.S. assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and what I witnessed was not journalism but the choreography of propaganda. CBS, in particular, offered thirty uninterrupted minutes of state-sanctioned fantasy, anchored by a fawning interview with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, a man implicated in the killing of more than one hundred people at sea, killed without evidence, accountability, or due process.
Rather than interrogating power, the networks shifted seamlessly into spectacle. At no point did either network raise the most basic questions of legality, sovereignty, or international law. Instead, both newscasts trafficked in images of people dancing in the streets, staging public jubilation around what was, in fact, a spectacularized violation of both international and domestic law. Repressive imperial power has become visceral and ocular. It now works through the eye as much as through the gun. State terrorism is no longer merely enforced by violence, it is normalized and taught, rendered legitimate through a form of pedagogical terrorism produced and circulated by nearly the entire corporate media apparatus. What is taking shape is a new apparatus of colonial terror, where power, social media, and everyday life collapse into a single machinery of consent, training the public to see violence as spectacle and domination as normal.
There was no mention that the attack and abduction were condemned by the presidents of Mexico and Brazil, by international legal scholars, and by a widening circle of global leaders alarmed by the precedent being set. There was no scrutiny of the fabricated claims that Venezuela was plotting an invasion of the United States or serving as the epicenter of drug trafficking, assertions long discredited but endlessly recycled to justify imperial violence. Nor, crucially, was there any acknowledgment of Trump’s staggering hypocrisy: while declaring a war on drugs in the name of national security, he pardoned one of the most notorious narcotics traffickers ever prosecuted in the United States, Juan Orlando Hernández, described by prosecutors as a central figure in an eighteen-year operation that flooded the U.S. with more than 400 tons of cocaine.
Absent as well was any critical examination of Trump’s resurrection of the Monroe Doctrine, now stripped of even its earlier pretenses and refashioned as a doctrine of open coercion, colonial entitlement, and gangster capitalism. Missing entirely is any reckoning with the United States’ long history of intervention and coercion in Latin America. Beyond the familiar reference to Iraq, there are closer and more revealing precedents, including the largely erased invasion of Panama in 1989–90, when U.S. forces seized Manuel Noriega, a former intelligence asset, and staged his removal to the United States as a spectacle of imperial justice. This silence was not incidental; it functioned to protect the ideological framework that renders imperial violence normal and profitable.
This imperial aggression mirrors the logic of Adolf Hitler’s doctrine of Lebensraum, a racist and expansionist ideology that justified conquest, terror, and annexation in the name of national destiny. History does not repeat itself mechanically, but it does return with new uniforms, new slogans, and the same deadly imperial ambitions.
The danger could not have been clearer when Marco Rubio publicly threatened the governments of Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and other nations in the region, warning that they would face retaliation if they failed to submit to the Trump administration’s demands. This was a declaration of imperial intent, a signal that the United States now claims the right to decide which governments may exist and which must be eliminated.
Equally absent from the broadcast was any reckoning with the toxic reach of neoliberalism itself, despite the fact that Trump openly gloated over Venezuela’s oil reserves and made the astonishing admission that he intended to hand control of those resources to the largest U.S. oil conglomerates. This declaration was an open admission of support for the fusion of state violence, corporate plunder, and imperial entitlement. In that moment, conquest was no longer disguised as security policy; it was announced as a business transaction. Such candor would have forced George Orwell and Aldous Huxley to append new chapters to their warnings about dictatorship, chapters in which authoritarian power no longer bothers to conceal its motives, and where the extraction of wealth replaces ideology as the naked logic of domination.
During the Cold War, Charles E. Wilson, then the president of General Motors, famously told a congressional committee that “what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” Today, that logic has metastasized. We now live in an era in which what serves Chevron, ExxonMobil, and the oil and arms conglomerates is reflexively framed as serving democracy itself.
Seen through this lens, the central danger is not Trump alone, though he blatantly appears as the mafia gangster orchestrating the kidnapping of an alleged adversary. He is not the origin of this violence but its most grotesque symptom.
As Nikos Bogiopoulos makes clear next to the gangster Trump, “are their minions. The media artillery and their embedded parrots. Those who, in an attempt to “normalize” and “justify” gangsterism, are quick to point out to us the problems with human rights and democratic freedoms in Venezuela.” The deeper crisis is American imperialism at a stage so aggressive, so openly criminal, that it no longer feels compelled to cloak its ambitions in the language of diplomacy or democracy. In this moment, imperial power has chosen an uneducated fascist demagogue as its ideal spokesperson, a figure whose vulgarity mirrors the nakedness of the project he represents.
It is within this historical and political context that the world now witnesses a gangster-style assault on Venezuelan sovereignty, an armed incursion followed by the abduction of the elected president of a sovereign nation and his wife. This is not an aberration. It is imperial power acting without disguise, announcing that domination, plunder, and regime change are no longer covert operations but public policy.
Chris Hedges rightly argues that the US attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife has a larger significance because it “solidifies America’s role as a gangster state.” He writes:
"The kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife solidifies America’s role as a gangster state. Violence does not generate peace. It generates violence. The immolation of international and humanitarian law, as the U.S. and Israel have done in Gaza, and as took place in Caracas, generates a world without laws, a world of failed states, warlords, rogue imperial powers and perpetual violence and chaos. If there is one lesson we should have learned in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, it is that regime change spawns Frankensteinian monsters of our own creation. The Venezuelan military and security forces will no more accept the kidnapping of their president and U.S. domination – done as in Iraq to seize vast oil reserves -- than the Iraqi security forces and military or the Taliban. This will not go well for anyone, including the U.S."
What we are witnessing is fascism unbound, armed with military force and insulated by media silence. When mainstream media abandon their obligation to question power, to name crimes, and to defend democratic norms, they do more than misinform the public. They normalize lawlessness, launder violence, and prepare the population to accept the unthinkable as inevitable. This silence is not neutrality. It is complicity, and in an age of disappearing laws and vanishing lives, it is a complicity that history will recognize for what it is, an updated version of the worst horrors of the past.
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