The US Attacks Venezuela, Kidnaps Maduro

For oil and capitalism

The US invasion of Venezuela has begun.

Videos show bombs raining down on the capital city Caracas and four or five other locations across the country.

Unconfirmed reports say US marines are fighting Venezuelan troops dropped into the country via Chinook helicopters. If confirmed, this would suggest the US is moving forward with a decapitation operation against Maduro and his cabinet, designed to kidnap or kill.

(Update: Trump has just announced the capture of Maduro. Which means they’re going to drop a new head of state on Venezuela - Maria Corina Machado - and call it the restoration of democracy).

People are going to make this about Trump. But that will miss the point. The invasion of Venezuela isn't about Trump. It's about America.

Democrats will line up to support this. Any criticism will be over form, not content, over tactics, not strategy.

The support for the latest American invasion of a foreign country will be cross-party because the US is a despotic, oligarchic, fake democracy revelling in violence and imperial power.

This is just what that country does.

Obama was the first to declare Venezuela a ‘national security’ threat, a declaration which provided for emergency powers and set the stage for Trump’s lawlessness.

And in one of his final acts before leaving office, Biden raised the ‘bounty’ on Maduro to $25 million.

Literally Wild West stuff. A rabid empire.

Even progressive golden boy Mamdani, the furthest left you’re ever going to reach with the Democrats, has called Maduro a repressive dictator on more than one occasion. He’s the mayor of New York. He could have invoked this as a reason to say nothing. “My focus is not on leaders in Latin America that Donald Trump has a beef with, my focus is on New Yorkers.”

Easy!

But nope.

Because empire is a hell of a drug.

But Nate, Maduro is a dictator, a monster. And the invasion is wrong. Both can be true!

On Twitter/X, people on the supposedly anti-war, anti-imperial left, seconds after America pulled the trigger, decided this would be a great point to make. They decided, with innocent Venezuelan blood flowing, that repeating imperial propaganda made them Serious Commentators.

Honestly, if this is the level of consciousness the anti-imperialists are operating at, forget about ever seeing the end of empire and its violence.

“X is a dictator/monster,” has always been the line that helps create the architecture of justification for wars, invasions and imperialism. If you don’t know this, especially after two years of a genocide aided by atrocity propaganda based on the similar premise that “Hamas are dictators/monsters,” then you’ve really learnt absolutely fucking nothing.

If you’re repeating this imperial propaganda as the US invades its sixty-something country in the last seventy-odd years, then there’s really only two options. You either a. know what you’re doing, which makes you bad or b. don’t know what you’re doing, which makes you bad AND ignorant.

Let’s be very clear: the invaders are the monsters. The people who don’t speak your language and come from thousands of miles away to kill your friends, neighbours and fellow citizens, are the monsters. No ifs. No fucking buts.

This invasion is about resources and power projection. Stealing the oil and sending a signal to the continent about who is boss. Trump said it himself. As liberal commentators in The Guardian and New York Times were claiming it was “overblown” to say Trump’s focus on Venezuela was about oil, Trump stood in front of a camera and literally said it was all about the oil.

What he’s referring to is the fact that Venezuela, under Hugo Chavez, nationalised the oil industry, as the people had voted for, and removed concessions to oil fields from US oil companies. They did a socialism. And this, for capitalist America, has always been the gravest of sins. So yes, it’s about oil and, relatedly, the assertion of US-dominated capitalism as the only allowable economic system on the continent.

So at this point, after everything we know, everything we’ve seen, to believe this latest US invasion is motivated by values, by freedom or democracy or for justice against ‘monsters’ or whatever other bullshit liberals will convince themselves of, is not just absurd, but frightening. To still believe, at this point, that America are the good guys requires a mix of supremacy, racism, denial and cultural brain washing that is truly frightening.

But, with rhetorical slights of hand, criticisms over tactics not strategy, liberals will do just that. They’ll say that while they may not have gone about it exactly like Trump has, Maduro had to go. The country that has killed millions of people in the last few decades, that provided the arms and financing for a genocide, that does unspeakable horrors to civilian populations over and over and over again, will once again be cast as the righteous.

And as I wrote about a few weeks ago, the invasion of Venezuela demonstrates once again there is no such thing as international law:

There is US empire. There is imperial impunity. There is hard power. There are B-52 bombers. There are eight-hundred American military bases in eighty countries. There are strike teams. There are death squads. There is mass child killing. There is enforced starvation. There are genocides. There is apartheid. There are consequences for crossing the empire, consequences which are often cloaked in the language and justifications of international law. But concrete, enforceable, universalist international law that restrains violent state actions, regardless of the offender? Not a chance.

Another US invasion in our lifetimes.

The military-industrial complex unleashed yet again.

More dead people, after years of dead people, decades of dead people. People slaughtered in the most violent of ways by the most violent empire that has ever existed on planet Earth.

This shit is getting so boring, so old.

And Cuba might be next. Cuba is vitally reliant on Venezuelan oil. As John Mearsheimer has said, the Venezuelan strategy is partly motivated by Cuba, because Marco Rubio is congenitally obsessed with overthrowing Cuba’s socialist government.

So it might be Cuba next.

Or maybe, after Netanyahu’s visit to Washington last week and Trump’s warning to Iran, the bombs will start falling on Tehran (again).

The only thing that’s guaranteed is that there will be a next time.

Because this is empire.

Because this is America.

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