EXCELLENT — Henry A. Giroux: US Attack on Venezuela is the Marriage of Colonialism and Gangster Capitalism

So incredibly well said. Horrifying and heartbreaking and infuriating! As always, thank you Henry Giroux! — Molly

 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.

https://www.henryagiroux.com/

EXCELLENT — Chris Hedges: America the Rogue State

Yet another excellent, illuminating, and chilling piece from Chris Hedges. And, yes, this is what breaks my heart — "The tragedy is not that the American empire is dying, it is that it is taking down so many innocents with it." I join countless others across our country and the world in sharing our deep grief, our outrage, and our profound solidarity and utter commitment to doing everything that we possibly can to stop this sheer devastating and brutal madness. — Molly

Murder Most Foul — by Mr. Fish

The evisceration of the rule of law at home and abroad solidifies America as a rogue state.

By Chris Hedges

The ruling class of the United States, severed from a fact-based universe and blinded by idiocy, greed and hubris, has immolated the internal mechanisms that prevent dictatorship, and the external mechanisms designed to protect against a lawless world of colonialism and gunboat diplomacy.

Our democratic institutions are moribund. They are unable or unwilling to restrain our ruling gangster class. The lobby-infested Congress is a useless appendage. It surrendered its Constitutional authority, including the right to declare war and pass legislation, long ago. It sent a paltry 38 bills to Donald Trump’s desk to be signed into law last year. Most were “disapproval” resolutions rolling back regulations enacted during the Biden administration. Trump governs by imperial decree through Executive Orders. The media, owned by corporations and oligarchs, from Jeff Bezos to Larry Ellison, is an echo chamber for the crimes of state, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, attacks on Iran, Yemen and Venezula, and the pillage by the billionaire class. Our money-saturated elections are a burlesque. The diplomatic corps, tasked with negotiating treaties and agreements, preventing war and building alliances, has been dismantled. The courts, despite some rulings by courageous judges, including blocking National Guard deployments to Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago, are lackeys to corporate power and overseen by a Department of Justice whose primary function is silencing Trump’s political enemies.

The corporate-indentured Democratic Party, our purported opposition, blocks the only mechanism that can save us — popular mass movements and strikes — knowing its corrupt and despised party leadership will be swept aside. Democratic Party leaders treat New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a flicker of light in the darkness — as if he has leprosy. Better to let the whole ship go down than surrender their status and privilege.

Dictatorships are one-dimensional. They reduce politics to its simplest form: Do what I say or I will destroy you.

Nuance, complexity, compromise, and of course empathy and understanding, are beyond the tiny emotional bandwidth of gangsters, including the Gangster-in-Chief.

Dictatorships are a thug’s paradise. Gangsters, whether on Wall Street, Silicon Valley or in the White House, cannibalize their own country and pillage the natural resources of other countries.

Dictatorships invert the social order. Honesty, hard work, compassion, solidarity, self-sacrifice are negative qualities. Those who embody these qualities are marginalized and persecuted. The heartless, corrupt, mendacious, cruel and mediocre thrive.

Dictatorships empower goons to keep their victims — at home and abroad — immobilized. Goons from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Goons from Delta Force, Navy Seals and Black Ops CIA teams, which as any Iraqi or Afghan can tell you are the most lethal death squads on the planet. Goons from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) — seen escorting a hand-cuffed President Nicolás Maduro in New York — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and police departments.

Can anyone seriously make the argument that the U.S. is a democracy? Are there any democratic institutions that function? Is there any check on state power? Is there any mechanism that can enforce the rule of law at home, where legal residents are snatched by masked thugs from our streets, where a phantom “radical left” is an excuse to criminalize dissent, where the highest court in the land bestows king-like power and immunity on Trump? Can anyone pretend that with the demolition of environmental agencies and laws — which should help us confront the looming ecocide, the gravest threat to human existence — there is any concern for the common good? Can anyone make the argument that the U.S. is the defender of human rights, democracy, a rule based order and the “virtues” of Western civilization?

Our reigning gangsters will accelerate the decline. They will steal as much as they can, as fast as they can, on the way down. The Trump family has pocketed more than $1.8 billion in cash and gifts since the 2024 re-election. They do so as they mock the rule of law and tighten their vice-like grip. The walls are closing in. Free speech is abolished on college campuses and the airwaves. Those who decry the genocide lose their jobs or are deported. Journalists are slandered and censored. ICE, powered by Palantir — with a budget of $170 billion over four years — is laying the foundations for a police state. It has expanded the number of its agents by 120 percent. It is building a nationwide complex of detention centers. Not solely for the undocumented. But for us. Those outside the gates of the empire will fare no better with a $1 trillion budget for the war machine.

And this brings me to Venezuela where a head of state and his wife, Cilia Flores, were kidnapped and spirited to New York in open violation of international law and the U.N. Charter.

We have not declared war on Venezuela, but then there was no declared war when we bombed Iran and Yemen. Congress did not approve the kidnapping and bombing of military facilities in Caracas because Congress was not informed.

The Trump administration dressed up the crime — which took the lives of 80 people — as a drug raid and, most bizarrely, as a violation of U.S. firearms statutes: “possession of machine guns and destructive devices; and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.”

These charges are as absurd as attempting to legitimize the genocide in Gaza as Israel’s “right to defend itself.”

If this was about drugs, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández would not have been pardoned by Trump last month, after he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to distribute over 400 tons of cocaine in the U.S., a conviction that was justified with far greater evidence than that which supports the charges levied against Maduro.

But drugs are the pretext.

Flush with success, there is already talk by Trump and his officials about Iran, Cuba, Greenland and perhaps Colombia, Mexico and Canada.

Absolute power at home and absolute power abroad expands. It feeds off of each lawless act. It snowballs into totalitarianism and disastrous military adventurism. By the time people realize what has happened, it is too late.

Who will rule Venezuela? Who will rule Gaza? Does it matter?

If nations and people do not bow before the great Moloch in Washington, they are bombed. This is not about establishing legitimate rule. It is not about fair elections. It is about using the threat of death and destruction to procure total subservience.

Trump made this clear when he warned interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Maduro’s kidnapping was not carried out because of drug trafficking or possession of machine guns. This is about oil. It is, as Trump said, so the U.S. can “run” Venezuela.

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said during a press conference Saturday.

Iraqis, a million of whom were killed during the U.S. war and occupation, know what comes next. The infrastructure, modern and efficient under Saddam Hussein — I reported from Iraq under Hussein so can attest to this truth — was destroyed. The Iraqi puppets installed by the U.S. had no interest in governance and reportedly stole some $150 billion in oil revenues.

The U.S., in the end, was booted out of Iraq, although controls Iraqi oil revenues which are funnelled to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The government in Baghdad is allied with Iran. Its military includes Iran-backed militias in Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces. Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, the UAE, India and Turkey.

The debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, which cost the American public anywhere from $4 to $6 trillion, were the most expensive in U.S. history. None of the architects of these fiascos have been held to account.

Countries singled out for “regime change” implode, as in Haiti, where the U.S., Canada and France overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and 2004. The overthrow ushered in societal and government collapse, gang warfare and exacerbated poverty. The same happened in Honduras when a 2009 U.S-backed coup removed Manuel Zelaya. The recently pardoned Hernández became president in 2014 and transformed Honduras into a narco-state, as did U.S. puppet Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, who oversaw the production of 90 percent of the world’s heroin. And then there is Libya, another country with vast oil reserves. When Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown by NATO during the Obama administration in 2011, Libya splintered into enclaves led by rival warlords and militias.

The list of disastrous attempts by the U.S. at “regime change” is exhaustive, including in Kosovo, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen. All are examples of the folly of imperial overreach. All predict where we are headed.

The U.S. has targeted Venezuela since the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez. It was behind a failed coup in 2002. It imposed punishing sanctions over two decades. It tried to anoint opposition politician Juan Guaidó, as “interim president” although he was never elected to the presidency. When this did not work, Guaidó was dumped as callously as Trump abandoned opposition figure and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado. In 2020, we staged a Keystone Cops attempt by ill-trained mercenaries to trigger a popular uprising. None of it worked.

The kidnapping of Maduro begins another debacle. Trump and his minions are no more competent, and probably less so than officials from previous administrations, who tried to bend the world to their will.

Our decaying empire stumbles forward like a wounded beast, unable to learn from its disasters, crippled by arrogance and incompetence, torching the rule of law and fantasizing that indiscriminate industrial violence will regain a lost hegemony. Able to project devastating military force, its initial success lead inevitably to self-defeating and costly quagmires.

The tragedy is not that the American empire is dying, it is that it is taking down so many innocents with it.

Please go here for the original article: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/america-the-rogue-state

A NEW YEAR OF EMPIRE

Art by Latuff | Image source: @outsidersesp/X

With its violent military intervention into Venezuela – a country I used to live in – the U.S. has begun this year with entitled and undisguised imperialism.

By Tamara Pearson / znetwork.org

The unapologetic kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and of Celia Flores (not just a wife as the media refers to her, but also former head of the National Assembly) and killing of at least 40 Venezuelans aims to cement and normalize the U.S.’s standard operating procedure for international relations as violence and control. It will take Venezuela’s oil and the DRC’s tech minerals, and to hell with Global South self-determination, agency, and ownership.

I remember when I lived in Venezuela and we talked about what we would do if the U.S. attacked. We were already facing other kinds of attacks, including basic food shortages orchestrated by private companies, destabilization attempts, right-wing violence, and English-language mainstream media lies. The conversation particularly came up around elections, when the shortages and destabilization typically increased, and U.S. attacks felt less hypothetical.

Even then, though, we would balance the very real and long history of violent U.S. interventions in Latin America with skepticism. How could they kill innocent people and bomb what felt like to me the closest thing to paradise? Venezuela was never a utopia – there were mistakes and much work to do, but the Andean mountains were intensely green, the coastal waters a peaceful turquoise, the nights full of fairy fog that you could see drifting down the streets. The days were full of the laughter of the tiny children I taught as part of our participatory education project. We solved our own local problems as an organized community, turned empty lots into community gardens, and there was always, always, political debate and high political literacy. People knew their constitution, often by heart, knew the laws, and the news. Venezuelans had and have this infinite urge to dance, even on moving buses or after two-day long meetings. How could anyone consider destroying that world? It felt inconceivable. It didn’t make sense, and it still doesn’t.

Yet we all know that beautiful Gaza, with its beaches, shops, delicious zaatar bread, hospitals, books, and resilient people, has been turned into rubble and whole families wiped out. The U.S.-led destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq ruined people, communities and saw key cultural and archaeological sites irreparably damaged, and artifacts looted. I live in Mexico now, and here alone, the U.S. has used NAFTA and the so-called “War on Drugs” to militarize this beautiful country and systematically turn it into a vast grave (with 131,000 forced disappearances) and into an obedient neoliberal production line for nearshoring U.S. companies. So, in Venezuela, I guess we should have been less skeptical. Friends there messaged me on Saturday in shock, their ears ringing from the sounds of bombs. New year weekend wasn’t meant to be this.

However, throughout 2025, the U.S. had asserted itself more openly as global police chief at the service of big business. It “negotiated” (pressured) a “ ceasefire ” in the DRC which would give it access to the country’s highly sought-after tech minerals and metals and to security control, and it has supported Israel, bombed Nigeria, and killed Venezuelans with complete impunity. It closed its borders to refugees in violation of international law, and breached migrant and human rights within its own borders. It also bombed Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Somalia. It carried out or was partner to 622 overseas bombings in total, and also intervened in manipulative ways, such as Trump’s comments days before the Honduran election in November that led to the victory of the right-wing candidate he backed, or the U.S.’s role in the international “Gang Suppression Force” in Haiti.

While global institutions like the International Criminal Court and the UN have demonstrated their ineffectiveness at doing anything at all about the U.S.’s illegal sanctions against Cuba, the genocide in Gaza, or climate destruction, Trump has been able to fortify the U.S. as a force that actually decides international affairs.

In his press conference Saturday, Trump said the U.S. would be selling Venezuelan oil. Though he laid the groundwork for the military intervention into Venezuela with evidence-free talk of drug cartels, bombing what were likely fishing boats in the second half of 2025, most people knew this was always about regaining control over the country with the largest known oil reserves. However, Venezuela also represents defiance. The U.S. has sanctioned the country for such behavior for over a decade, killing or contributing to the deaths of over 40,000 people in 2017–18 alone.

The U.S. doesn’t just treat the Global South as a resource buffet. In order to secure its access to the goods, it wants the countries’ governments at its beck and call. Venezuela, especially during the 2010s and through initiatives like CELAC, was playing a role of uniting Latin America against such dominance and towards independence and social and economic alternatives.

The bombing of Venezuela, beyond the oil itself, is about U.S. control over Latin America and part of a right-wing push back against movements, grassroots empowerment, and alternatives to violent capitalism. Beyond Bukele in El Salvador and Milei in Argentina, in 2025 the right wing also won in Bolivia, Honduras, and Chile. With Trump, these “leaders” are furthering racist, homophobic, sexist, and privatization agendas.

Normalizing empire and global human rights violations

Beyond the horrific event itself, the events of January 3 are part of a move towards normalizing a global state of danger, insecurity, human rights abuses, and disregard for international law. It does not matter what anyone thinks of Maduro; whether he won the 2025 election is an important discussion for another place and time. The U.S. has no right to determine the heads of other countries. It wants to be, but is not the world boss, and beyond that, has no moral standing to decide or control anything.

But Saturday’s move, as a continuation of U.S. policy in 2025, upholds military intervention as a solution to problems. It is a signal to wayward countries to obey. Such imperialism not only kills people, in the long term it perpetuates racist tropes of Global South countries that can’t run themselves, while legitimizing U.S.- and euro-centrisim that stipulates their monopoly on wisdom and democracy. Imperialism scares its victims into silence and submission and cements a global apartheid dynamic where some regions are politically and financially controlled, subjected to unlivable wages and to resource robbery. Through debt systems and trade and income inequalities, rich countries have drained US$152 trillion from the Global South since 1960.

The intervention machine is rigging the world for U.S. big business interests, at the price of Global South dignity and agency. For invaded and intervened countries, there are hidden impacts as well; lower self-worth and an unsubstantiated belief that one’s education, art, and inventions are inferior, disillusion with organizing and movements, and often, a need to migrate that is then met with rejection by those forces causing that need – as of course is the case with the U.S.

The Venezuelan people are not a threat. The country doesn’t even produce or traffic significant amounts of drugs.

In reality, much of the cruelty and harm globally is coming from the U.S. The Trump government and the U.S. elites are the ones committing human rights violations, shirking democracy by orchestrating coups like the one on Saturday morning and shirking legality let alone decency, by killing people in Venezuelan boats under the pretext of opposing drug trafficking, but without any trials or any proof. With each intervention like Saturday’s, the U.S. furthers its and Israel’s impunity for war crimes, abuses, and violations.

___________

Tamara Pearson is an Australian-Mexican journalist, editor, activist, and literary fiction author. Her latest novel is The Eyes of the Earth, and she writes the Global South newsletter, Excluded Headlines.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/a-new-year-of-empire/

The Horror of Trump's Press Conference From a Venezuelan Perspective

By Michelle Ellner / commondreams.org

I listened to the January 3 press conference with a knot in my stomach. As a Venezuelan American with family, memories, and a living connection to the country being spoken about as if it were a possession, what I heard was very clear. And that clarity was chilling.

The president said, plainly, that the United States would “run the country” until a transition it deems “safe” and “judicious.” He spoke about capturing Venezuela’s head of state, about transporting him on a US military vessel, about administering Venezuela temporarily, and about bringing in US oil companies to rebuild the industry. He dismissed concerns about international reaction with a phrase that should alarm everyone: “They understand this is our hemisphere.”

For Venezuelans, those words echo a long, painful history.

Let’s be clear about the claims made. The president is asserting that the US can detain a sitting foreign president and his spouse under US criminal law. That the US can administer another sovereign country without an international mandate. That Venezuela’s political future can be decided from Washington. That control over oil and “rebuilding” is a legitimate byproduct of intervention. That all of this can happen without congressional authorization and without evidence of imminent threat.

To hear a US president talk about a country as something to be managed, stabilized, and handed over once it behaves properly, it hurts. It humiliates. And it enrages.

We have heard this language before. In Iraq, the United States promised a limited intervention and a temporary administration, only to impose years of occupation, seize control of critical infrastructure, and leave behind devastation and instability. What was framed as stewardship became domination. Venezuela is now being spoken about in disturbingly similar terms. “Temporary Administration” ended up being a permanent disaster.

Under international law, nothing described in that press conference is legal. The UN Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against another state and bars interference in a nation’s political independence. Sanctions designed to coerce political outcomes and cause civilian suffering amount to collective punishment. Declaring the right to “run” another country is the language of occupation, regardless of how many times the word is avoided.

Under US law, the claims are just as disturbing. War powers belong to Congress. There has been no authorization, no declaration, no lawful process that allows an executive to seize a foreign head of state or administer a country. Calling this “law enforcement” does not make it so. Venezuela poses no threat to the United States. It has not attacked the US and has issued no threat that could justify the use of force under US or international law. There is no lawful basis, domestic or international, for what is being asserted.

But beyond law and precedent lies the most important reality: the cost of this aggression is paid by ordinary people in Venezuela. War, sanctions, and military escalation do not fall evenly. They fall hardest on women, children, the elderly, and the poor. They mean shortages of medicine and food, disrupted healthcare systems, rising maternal and infant mortality, and the daily stress of survival in a country forced to live under siege. They also mean preventable deaths, people who die not because of natural disaster or inevitability, but because access to care, electricity, transport, or medicine has been deliberately obstructed. Every escalation compounds existing harm and increases the likelihood of loss of life, civilian deaths that will be written off as collateral, even though they were foreseeable and avoidable.

What makes this even more dangerous is the assumption underlying it all: that Venezuelans will remain passive, compliant, and submissive in the face of humiliation and force. That assumption is wrong. And when it collapses, as it inevitably will, the cost will be measured in unnecessary bloodshed. This is what is erased when a country is discussed as a “transition” or an “administration problem.” Human beings disappear. Lives are reduced to acceptable losses. And the violence that follows is framed as unfortunate rather than the predictable outcome of arrogance and coercion.

To hear a US president talk about a country as something to be managed, stabilized, and handed over once it behaves properly, it hurts. It humiliates. And it enrages.

And yes, Venezuela is not politically unified. It isn’t. It never has been. There are deep divisions, about the government, about the economy, about leadership, about the future. There are people who identify as Chavista, people who are fiercely anti-Chavista, people who are exhausted and disengaged, and yes, there are some who are celebrating what they believe might finally bring change.

But political division does not invite invasion.

Latin America has seen this logic before. In Chile, internal political division was used to justify US intervention, framed as a response to “ungovernability,” instability, and threats to regional order, ending not in democracy, but in dictatorship, repression, and decades of trauma.

In fact, many Venezuelans who oppose the government still reject this moment outright. They understand that bombs, sanctions, and “transitions” imposed from abroad do not bring democracy, they destroy the conditions that make it possible.

This moment demands political maturity, not purity tests. You can oppose Maduro and still oppose US aggression. You can want change and still reject foreign control. You can be angry, desperate, or hopeful, and still say no to being governed by another country.

Venezuela is a country where communal councils, worker organizations, neighborhood collectives, and social movements have been forged under pressure. Political education didn’t come from think tanks; it came from survival. Right now, Venezuelans are not hiding. They are closing ranks because they recognize the pattern. They know what it means when foreign leaders start talking about “transitions” and “temporary control.” They know what usually follows. And they are responding the way they always have: by turning fear into collective action.

This press conference wasn’t just about Venezuela. It was about whether empire can say the quiet part out loud again, whether it can openly claim the right to govern other nations and expect the world to shrug.

If this stands, the lesson is brutal and undeniable: sovereignty is conditional, resources are there to be taken by the US, and democracy exists only by imperial consent.

As a Venezuelan American, I refuse that lesson.

I refuse the idea that my tax dollars fund the humiliation of my homeland. I refuse the lie that war and coercion are acts of “care” for the Venezuelan people. And I refuse to stay silent while a country I love is spoken about as raw material for US interests, not a society of human beings deserving respect.

Venezuela’s future is not for US officials, corporate boards, or any president who believes the hemisphere is his to command. It belongs to Venezuelans.

---

Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK. She was born in Venezuela and holds a bachelor’s degree in languages and international affairs from the University La Sorbonne Paris IV, in Paris. After graduating, she worked for an international scholarship program out of offices in Caracas and Paris and was sent to Haiti, Cuba, The Gambia, and other countries for the purpose of evaluating and selecting applicants.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/the-horror-of-trumps-press-conference-from-a-venezuelan-perspective/

EXCELLENT — Oliver Kornetzke: I Refuse a War in Venezuela—No More Blood, No More Lies, No More Ecosystems Sacrificed on the Altar of Oil and Profit

WOW!! Thank you for this, Oliver Kornetzke!! So well articulated, expansive in scope and awareness, and wisely connecting the dots that are essential, absolutely essential!, for us to know, absorb, and act upon out of the consciousness of a higher good for all of life on this beautiful hurting planet Earth that is our home. — Molly

What Truly Upsets Me...

What truly upsets me is not only the immense and needless human suffering that the pursuit of oil has already caused—and will continue to cause—at the hands of a small minority of greedy, cynical, short-sighted parasitic human beings—mostly men. It is also the catastrophic environmental damage and irreversible loss of biodiversity that an illegal war for oil against Venezuela would inflict. Human suffering is tragic and immediate; ecological destruction is often quieter, slower, and often ignored—but it is just as devastating, and far more permanent.

Venezuela sits at one of the most ecologically important crossroads on Earth. It lies at the northern edge of South America, where the Amazon Basin, the Andes, the Orinoco River system, Caribbean coastal ecosystems, and vast tropical rainforests converge. Although these systems are most often described as functioning like a single organ—such as “the lungs of the planet”—they are more accurately understood as a planetary-scale regulatory system, a biological engine that moderates climate, redistributes energy, and sustains life far beyond its borders.

Forests in this region slow the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere by locking it into wood, roots, and soils over long periods of time. Just as importantly, they operate as a massive water-recycling system. Trees pull water from the ground and release it into the air as water vapor, forming vast plumes of moisture that rise into the atmosphere. These moisture flows are carried by prevailing wind patterns and jet streams, seeding rainfall across much of South America and extending into Central America, the Caribbean, and parts of North America. When these forests are degraded, this atmospheric moisture supply weakens, leading to drier conditions and more extreme weather far from the source.

The Orinoco River and its tributaries amplify this global influence. The river delivers enormous quantities of freshwater and nutrients into the Atlantic, altering ocean salinity and surface temperatures. These changes affect regional ocean currents, which in turn influence weather systems, hurricane formation, and rainfall patterns across the Caribbean and the eastern seaboard of North America. River outflows also fertilize marine ecosystems, supporting fisheries that sustain millions of people far beyond Venezuela’s borders.

Together, land, air, and water systems in this region act as a stabilizing force within Earth’s climate. They help regulate heat distribution between the tropics and higher latitudes, dampen temperature extremes, and reduce the intensity of droughts and floods. Disrupting this system does not produce isolated damage—it sends cascading effects through atmospheric circulation and ocean dynamics, altering weather patterns, water availability, and food security across large portions of the globe.

The biodiversity of Venezuela and its surrounding regions is beyond staggering. A single hectare of tropical rainforest can contain hundreds of tree species, thousands of insect species, and vast communities of fungi, bacteria, and microorganisms—often more biological diversity than exists across entire temperate countries. What makes this diversity so valuable is not just the number of species, but the depth of specialization among them. Each species represents a unique solution to problems life has been refining for hundreds of millions of years: how to resist pathogens, how to regulate internal body chemistry and temperature, how to detoxify poisons, how to store energy, how to survive drought, flooding, nutrient scarcity, and other extremes.

These solutions are encoded in biological structures, enzymes, and chemical compounds that humans cannot fathom alone nor invent from scratch. Many modern medicines already originate from rainforest organisms—antibiotics derived from fungi and bacteria, cancer treatments based on plant alkaloids, antivirals inspired by microbial defense mechanisms. Beyond medicine, biological systems have informed advances in materials science, engineering, and energy efficiency, from water-repellent surfaces to lightweight structural designs. Countless species in these ecosystems have never been studied at all. When an ecosystem is destroyed, these possibilities do not merely diminish—they disappear permanently, often before science even knows they existed. This is not simply an environmental loss; it is the irreversible erasure of biological knowledge, innovation potential, and future human resilience.

Oil extraction and war always magnify destruction. Infrastructure such as pipelines and access roads slices continuous forests into isolated fragments, breaking ecological connectivity. Once fragmented, populations become smaller, more vulnerable to disease, and less genetically diverse, accelerating extinction even without direct clearing. Roads open previously inaccessible regions to logging, mining, and poaching, triggering cascading waves of exploitation that extend far beyond the original disturbance. Oil spills introduce toxic hydrocarbons into soils and rivers, poisoning fish, amphibians, insects, and the microbial communities that form the foundation of aquatic food webs. These toxins bioaccumulate, moving up the food chain and ultimately affecting human populations that depend on these waters for their food and drinking supply.

Unlike human infrastructure, ecosystems cannot simply be rebuilt once destroyed. A rainforest is not merely a collection of trees; it is a finely layered system composed of soils, root networks, fungi, insects, plants, animals, and climate interactions that evolved together over immense timescales. Soil itself is a living system, built slowly through the accumulation of organic matter and microbial activity. When forest cover is removed, soils often erode or chemically degrade, making regrowth increasingly difficult or impossible. Once these feedback systems collapse, the environment can shift into a fundamentally different and far less productive state.

Life on Earth took approximately 3.8 billion years to reach its present level of complexity. Multicellular organisms required hundreds of millions of years to evolve, diversify, and stabilize. Tropical rainforests emerged over tens of millions of years under relatively stable climatic conditions, shaped by continental drift, long-term rainfall patterns, and evolutionary competition among species. Rivers carve landscapes over geological time, creating floodplains, deltas, and wetlands that coevolve with the organisms living within them. When such systems are destroyed in decades—or in some cases, days—they cannot be meaningfully recreated within any human or technological timeframe. No technology, no artificial intelligence, and no amount of money can replace an ecosystem assembled through deep time. Once lost, it is gone not just for generations, but for the foreseeable future of life on Earth. In short, gone forever.

I understand that oil is embedded in modern society—from fuels to synthetic fibers to plastics. But none of these are prerequisites for existence. Humanity lived for tens of thousands of years without oil extraction, and civilization flourished long before fossil fuel dependence. To argue that oil is indispensable is to confuse modern convenience with absolute necessity. What is truly indispensable is a stable climate, clean water, fertile soil, and diverse living natural ecosystems. Once those are gone, no level of technological sophistication can ever compensate.

We exist on one small planet orbiting an ordinary star in an unremarkable corner of a vast universe. Earth is not a grand cosmic centerpiece; it is a thin, fragile layer of life clinging to the surface of a rock, suspended in an infinite cosmic expanse that is overwhelmingly empty and hostile. Every breath we take, every drop of water we drink, every ecosystem that feeds and stabilizes us exists within this narrow margin where physics and chemistry happen to allow life at all. As far as we know, this is the only place in the universe where that has ever occurred.

Even if life exists elsewhere—and we do not yet know that it does—it is separated from us by distances so vast that they are effectively meaningless to human survival. There is no refuge beyond this planet, no escape route, no second Earth waiting in reserve. There is no backup system. Everything humanity has ever known—every culture, language, work of art, scientific discovery, and human relationship—exists entirely here. Once this environment is destabilized beyond recovery, there is nowhere else to go.

Despite this reality, we humans are actively dismantling the only life-support system we will ever have. We are trading long-term planetary stability for short-term profit, exhausting ecosystems that took millions of years to form in exchange for decades of material excess. This destruction is not accidental, and it is not evenly shared. It is driven largely by a small number of powerful actors whose wealth insulates them from the immediate consequences, even as those consequences are pushed onto future generations and the world’s most vulnerable populations. This is ecological suicide—and societal suicide—rebranded as economic necessity and sold as inevitability. But it is not inevitable. It is a choice. Our collective choice.

We must find every possible way—not merely as Americans, but as human beings—to stop the needless destruction of both human life and the natural world in the pursuit of oil and wealth. Any rational advanced species with even a minimal instinct for self-preservation would recognize that destroying the systems that sustain it is pure madness. Stewardship is not an abstract moral ideal or a luxury for prosperous times; it is a practical and essential requirement for survival. To protect biodiversity, forests, rivers, oceans, and climate systems is not to sacrifice human progress—it is to make our progress possible at all.

We were never meant to grind this planet down to exhaustion. We were meant to learn how it works, to recognize the limits that make life possible, and to protect the delicate balance that allows those limits to hold. Every stable climate, every fertile river basin, every forest and reef that still stands is not an obstacle to human progress—it is the precondition for any future worth having.

The question before us is not whether we have the intelligence or the technology to change course. We already do. We understand how ecosystems collapse, how climate systems destabilize, and how quickly damage becomes irreversible once critical thresholds are crossed. We know what must be protected, and we know what must be phased out. What we lack is not knowledge, but the collective will to act before delay becomes denial and denial becomes collapse and death.

This is the defining test of our species. Not whether we can extract more, consume faster, or grow wealthier for a brief moment in time, but whether we can stop ourselves before it is too late. Whether we can look clearly at the consequences of our actions and choose restraint over greed, cooperation over short-term profit, and life over destruction with inertia. This is a desperate plea to end the madness—not tomorrow, not after one more quarter of economic growth, but now—while precious forests still stand, rivers still flow, and the systems that sustain all of us can still be repaired.

This plea is not radical. It is not new. It is not secular, partisan, or ideological. The call to understand the world, respect its limits, and care for it is a core tenet of every moral framework worth subscribing to.

In Christianity, humanity is called to stewardship—to “tend and keep” creation, not to exhaust it. Creation is described as good, deliberate, and entrusted, not disposable. In Judaism, the principle of bal tashchit explicitly forbids needless destruction, extending moral responsibility not just to people but to land, trees, and resources. In Islam, humans are described as khalifa—guardians or trustees of the Earth—accountable for how they protect balance—mizan and avoid corruption—fasad. In Hindu and Buddhist traditions, the natural world is inseparable from moral action; harm to ecosystems is harm to the interconnected web of life, and restraint is a virtue essential to wisdom. Indigenous moral systems across the world—from the Americas to Africa to Australia—center responsibility to future generations, often measured in centuries, and definitely not quarterly profits.

Even outside religion, the same principle holds. Enlightenment humanism, secular ethics, systems theory, and environmental philosophy all converge on the same conclusion: complex systems must be understood and respected to endure. Stoicism teaches restraint and harmony with nature. Utilitarian ethics recognizes that destroying the foundations of life maximizes suffering. Scientific realism makes the point unavoidable—physical limits are not beliefs, and ignoring them carries consequences regardless of ideology.

To care for our shared home is not in conflict with faith, reason, or morality. It is foundational to all of them. Any creator worthy of the name would want care for what was created. Any moral system that values life, continuity, and responsibility demands it. To argue otherwise is not conviction—it is contradiction: a rejection of the very teachings, principles, and values so often claimed in word but abandoned in action.

Preserving the only home we will ever know is not an act of idealism or sacrifice. It is the most practical, urgent, and universally grounded responsibility we share. If we cannot unite around this—across religions, philosophies, and cultures—then the failure is not one of belief systems, but of our willingness to live by them.

I refuse a war in Venezuela—no more blood, no more lies, no more ecosystems sacrificed on the altar of oil and profit.

— Oliver Kornetzke