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Category: United States

  • Trump’s Gaza “Peace” Plan: A Cruel Joke in a Conflict and Peace Illiterate World


    “The Throne of Peace is Now Empty and the UN Cancelled” • AI-generated image by Jan Oberg

    The UN Security Council adopted a U.S.-drafted resolution on November 17, 2025, endorsing Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan. It authorised an International Stabilisation Force (ISF), backed a transitional governing body called the “Board of Peace”, and declared that conditions may now exist for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and eventual statehood. The vote passed 13–0, with Russia and China abstaining. This is UN SC Resolution 2803.

    This goes against everything the UN stands for. Of course, China and Russia wisely abstained. They want no involvement and co-responsibility with this fake peace plan and are smart enough to see that it will never lead to true peace.

    I ask myself – did the Trump Regime give the UN its death knell yesterday? It remains to be seen, but the consequences will be devastating and, tragically, associated with the name of its otherwise decent S-G, who has been completely outmanoeuvred.

    On October 14, the China Academy and its editor, Mimi, of “China Roughly” conducted the interview below with me, which begins with my harsh criticism of this nonsensical, absurd, and unacceptable way of making peace.”Peace.” No wonder the video title: “Trump’s Gaza Ceasefire Plan Was Hilarious from the Start – Best US Joke Ever.”

    I call it a joke, and I will add that, if this has anything to do with peace, there is no need for political satire anymore. This is a satire on peace, intellectualism, international law and political ethics.

    Quick and simple reasons for that:

    • A party to a conflict can not be a mediator or peacemaker; it has to be a neutral third party. The US has been on the side of Israel all the time and is the leading enabler of its genocide.
    • A war criminal and habitual international law-violator cannot be a mediator or lead a peace process; Trump and his suggested “peace” board member, Tony Blair, both have that status, albeit being non-convicted.
    • The conflicts that lie under and cause the unspeakable violence in Gaza, characterised by words such as apartheid, historical injustices, asymmetry, nuclearism, occupation and Zionism, as well as Hamas militancy, are not analysed or addressed. The underlying conflict, not the surface violence, is the key to solving a conflict. This “peace” plan is pure symptom treatment.
    • The larger conflicts in the Middle East region that this conflict is part of are not addressed.
    • The whole project smacks of contemporary colonialism – we Westerners put ourselves up as those who shall run Gaza, and we have decided that it shall be demilitarised while we say nothing about Israeli militarism, occupation and nuclearism.
    • There is no understanding of this particular type of a-symmetric conflict which requires different approaches from symmetric conflicts.
    • All involved parties have not been addressed with three simple but fundamental questions: What do you think this conflict is about? What do you fear most and what future would you prefer or accept to live with – from which a mediator begins to look at possible arrangements and various possible futures.
    • There is no idea about consultations leading to a negotiation table. It is all done from outside by an incompetent, impossible “mediator” who has snatched the conflict from the weaker party.
    • Professional peace-making would build economic and other relations into a plan in such a way that the parties to a conflict would see it as more advantageous to cooperate than to fight each other in the future. There is no mention of anything like that, and of course, there will be more violence and no peace.
    • Professional peace-making would have utilised the world’s most experienced peace-making machinery, namely the United Nations. Instead of experienced, principled, trained and neutral UN peacekeepers and other UN elements drawn from around the world, this plan will deploy personnel from countries with a special political and/or economic interest that have no training in peacekeeping – perhaps, God forbid, even NATO countries.
    • A professional peace-making would have focused on post-violence processes and institutions such as forgiveness and reconciliation, a truth commission, security sector reform, de-militarising all sides, and discussing how schoolbooks, culture and cooperative projects could help the parties to live with what has happened and, slowly but surely, become partners in a process leading eventually to peace, stability and cooperation among all parties.

    One could go on and on.

    The fact that the UN Security Council has passed this cynical, miserable humbug “peace” resolution and virtually all parties and media call this a peace plan speaks volumes of the world’s peace illiteracy, of its peace and overwhelming endorsement of militarism.

    That the UN Secretary-General goes along with this sidelining of his organisation and the defilement of everything the UN stands for only adds to the tragedy.

    *****

    And why is true peace, as predictably as tragically, now dead?

    Because people of low intelligence and/or being uneducated in conflict understanding prefer violence to non-violence.

    Because we have no peace education, no peace academies, no university-level peace research and public education. Because media, politics and research have cancelled, tabooed and disappeared peace, by and large, since the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of Yugoslavia – that is, the ravaging of the US-led unipolar world that is now coming to its end, also with this resolution.

    Because not a single government leader has an adviser who knows the slightest about alternatives to militarist “solutions” – knows about mediation, peace-making and reconciliation – as a science and an art.

    Because kakistocrats and the MIMAC – the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex – see all problems as something to use a hammer on because they only have a hammer in the toolbox.

    Because peace requires creativity, knowledge and empathy – which are no longer characteristic of, or needed in, foreign policy- and security policy-making.

    I am sure that with this Las VeGaza “peace” plan, Trump will be a high-ranking candidate for the 2026 NATO-aligned Nobel Peace Prize – that is, if it doesn’t finally decide to give it posthumously to Adolf Hitler…

    PS The countries of the Security Council that made this fatal decision are: The US, Russia, China, France, the UK (all permanent members) + Algeria, Denmark, Greece, Guyana, Pakistan, Panama, Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia and Somalia – in other words, mostly countries that will follow orders from Washington. As mentioned, China and Russia abstained.

    *****

    The post Trump’s Gaza “Peace” Plan: A Cruel Joke in a Conflict and Peace Illiterate World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sheer Wickedness: Genocide in Gaza is Enabled by “Global Complicity,” Says UN

    A new report, ‘Situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967’ by Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and her team in accordance with Human Rights Council resolution 5/1, concludes that “the ongoing genocide in Gaza is a collective crime, sustained by the complicity of influential Third States” and is “facilitated through Third States’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection and, in some cases, active participation”.

    It is not an opinion piece but a carefully researched, factual work. And it paints a sad picture of the depth of depravity to which ‘civilisation’ has sunk. The UN should have presented this information as soon as the truth was known and when it might have concentrated global minds in good time.

    Better late than never, the report pulls no punches and tells the international community what they should already know about lawfully resolving the long-running Israel problem and restoring to the Palestinians their homeland and rights to self-determination. Now there is no excuse for ignorance in the corridors of power.

    The report is a long-ish read, but worth it. Most of the key points are lifted from it and listed here.

    • On 9 October 2023, immediately after Israel announced a tightened siege on Gaza, key Western leaders expressed support for the “self-defence” of Israel – unwarranted under article 51 of the UN Charter. President Biden repeatedly cited unsubstantiated reports of “beheaded babies”. British opposition Leader Keir Starmer defended Israel’s right to cut off water and power to civilians.
    • By 20 October 2023 international law experts, genocide scholars and human rights organizations had warned of impending genocide. On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice confirmed the serious risk of genocide in Gaza, giving rise to States’ obligations to prevent it and to punish incitement, commission or complicity.
    • Post-October 2023, the United States used its veto in the UN Security Council seven times, controlling ceasefire negotiations and providing diplomatic cover for the Israeli genocide. The US was not acting alone. Abstentions, delays, and watered-down draft resolutions reinforced the diplomatic protection and political narrative Israel needed to continue the genocide. The United Kingdom maintained alignment with the US position until November 2024.
    • By May 2024 the ICC Prosecutor had sought arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials, and Third States had “actual or constructive knowledge” of the ongoing international crimes they had failed to prevent, triggering a heightened responsibility on their part to act.
    • In July 2024 the ICJ determined the illegality of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and its obligation to withdraw totally, unconditionally and as rapidly as possible. The UN General Assembly subsequently declared that the occupation must be dismantled by 18 September 2025. Israel has failed to do so.
    • On 16 September 2025, the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, reaffirming the obligations of all States to prevent genocide, to cease committing and/or aiding and assisting genocide, and to punish those perpetrating and/or inciting genocide.
    • The ICJ’s ground-breaking ruling on the illegality of the occupation has yet to bring change. On 18 September 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution ES-10/24, reaffirming the binding nature of the Court’s legal obligations and formulating a roadmap to end the occupation by 17 September 2025 through diplomatic, economic and legal measures which States have yet to implement.
    • More States have declared recognition of the State of Palestine since October 2023, but with restrictive conditions (e.g., concerning governance, territorial integrity, political independence and demilitarization) that are incompatible with the very essence of self-determination and out of line with international law.
    • Since October 2023 only Belize, Bolivia, Colombia and Nicaragua have suspended diplomatic relations with Israel, and only Bahrain, Chad, Chile, Honduras, Jordan, Türkiye and South Africa have downgraded their relations with Israel.
    • Prolonged political and diplomatic support by influential Third States enabled Israel to initiate and sustain its assault on the Palestinian people. In the past two years their complicity has muted the urgent calls for action and obscured the web of political, financial and military interests at play. The longstanding failure to address flagrant violations of international law by Israel – threatening international peace and security – has normalized and deepened relations with it, entrenching oppression, domination and erasure.
    • Many States have sought to undermine the ICJ’s arrest warrants, and at least 37 were non-committal or critical, signalling intent to evade arrest obligations. The United States imposed sanctions to paralyse the Court; the United Kingdom threatened its funding, while Prime Minister Netanyahu travelled freely across European airspace.
    • On the other hand the Hague Group initiative, which includes Colombia, South Africa and 13 other States, have committed to enforce six concrete measures against Israel. 21 other States joined the third meeting of the Group in New York on the fringe of the 80th Session of the General Assembly. But despite their efforts Israel still holds its UN credentials.
    • On 30 September 2025, many States, including Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and the UAE, endorsed the “Trump Plan” despite its failure to even mention ending the occupation, ensuring accountability and providing transitional justice; and despite its imposition of imperial foreign governance for Gaza which, even if temporary, further undermines Palestinian self-determination.
    • The United States has financially and militarily supported Israel since its creation. The 60-year strategic partnership has been underpinned by a legislated commitment to ensure Israel always has a “Qualitative Military Edge” over its neighbours, US military cooperation, a steady supply of military and economic aid and preferential access to US military sales. $3.3 billion/year in military financing plus $500 million/year for missile defence are guaranteed until 2028.
    • US support to Israel has escalated since 7 October 2023. The Biden Administration announced it would request an additional $14.3 billion for Israel and in April 2024 this passed Congress as a $26.4 billion package. Israel was later exempted from the Trump Administration freeze on military aid.
    • The UK has also played a key role in military collaboration with Israel. From its bases in Cyprus, the UK has enabled a crucial US supply line to Tel Aviv and flown over 600 surveillance missions over Gaza throughout the genocide, sharing intelligence with Israel. Flight numbers and durations, often coinciding with major Israeli operations, suggest detailed knowledge and co-operation in the destruction of Gaza, extending beyond “hostage rescue”. Furthermore, Israeli soldiers are trained at the UK Royal College of Defence Studies.
    • In addition, thousands of citizens from the United States, Russia, France, Ukraine and the United Kingdom, among others, have served in the Israeli military since October 2023. Few have been investigated, and none prosecuted for crimes in Gaza.
    • States frequently deploy two arguments to justify arms trade with Israel: such arms are said to be either “defensive” or “non-lethal”. The Arms Trade Treaty does not recognize either distinction, but requires a holistic assessment of how all arms, parts and components will ultimately be used. Given that the occupation of Palestinian territory is an ongoing unlawful use of force in violation of the UN Charter, nothing Israel does there can be understood as “defensive”.
    • Israel profits from the decades-long occupation – and now genocide – by expanding its range of weaponry and surveillance systems ‘battle tested’ on the captive Gaza population. The value of its arms exports increased by 18 percent during the genocide.
    • Attempts by civil society aid groups to break the siege by sea have been unlawfully intercepted by Israel in international waters – amid silence and inaction by Third States.
    • No trade or economic agreement signed with Israel since 1967 has been suspended – States having largely avoided their legal obligations. Other countries have increased their trade with Israel during the genocide, including Germany, Poland, Greece, Italy, Denmark, France and Serbia, as well as Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco.
    • The EU–Israel Association Agreement makes human rights and democratic principles an “essential elements clause”. However, these principles remain unfulfilled, the EU being determined to preserve business-as-usual despite evidence of Israeli violations of the terms of the agreement. The proposal of the European Commission to cancel core trade preferences on 37 percent of Israeli exports to the EU still awaits approval.
    • Energy trade has often been subject to embargoes aimed at bringing countries in line with their international legal obligations. In the case of Israel, only Colombia, which banned coal exports to Israel in 2024, has acted. The European Union and Egypt have continued to import gas from Israel through the Eastern Mediterranean Gas pipeline, which illegally passes through the sea adjacent to the Gaza Strip, violating Palestinian sovereign rights. In August 2025 Egypt expanded its partnership with Israel through a $35 billion natural gas deal.
    • Ports known to have facilitated the trans-shipment to Israel of F-35 parts, weapons, jet fuel, oil and/or other materials include Türkiye, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Greece, Morocco and the US. Airfields in Ireland, Belgium and the United States also support transfers. Many ports facilitate Israeli gas exports, including via the EMG Pipeline to Egypt.
    • So it is clear that the genocide in Gaza was not committed in isolation, but as part of a system of global complicity. Rather than ensuring that Israel respects the basic human rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people, powerful Third States have allowed violent practices to become an everyday reality and continue to provide Israel with military, diplomatic, economic and ideological support. The horrors of the past two years are not an aberration, but the culmination of a long history of complicity.
    • Their disregard for international law undermines the foundations of the multilateral order painstakingly built over eight decades. Justice must involve accountability and reparations: restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition, by Israel and by the Third States that have supported its crimes. The power structures that enabled these crimes must be dismantled.
    • Third States’ acts, omissions and discourse in support of a genocidal apartheid State are such that they could and should be held liable for aiding, assisting or jointly participating in internationally wrongful acts.

    Recommendations

    At this critical juncture, it is imperative that Third States immediately suspend and review all military, diplomatic and economic relations with Israel. The report insists that States step up to their responsibilities. No State can credibly claim adherence to international law while arming, supporting or shielding a genocidal regime. All military and political support must be suspended; diplomacy should serve to prevent crimes rather than to justify them. Complicity in genocide must end.

    The Special Rapporteur, in her recommendations, urges States to:

    (a) Exert pressure for a complete and permanent ceasefire and full withdrawal of Israeli troops;

    (b) Take immediate steps to end the siege on Gaza, including deploying naval and land convoys to ensure safe humanitarian access and mobile housing before winter;

    (c) Support the re-opening of Gaza’s international airport and sea-port to facilitate aid delivery.

    States must recognize Palestinian self-determination and justice as essential to lasting peace and security, and therefore:

    (a) Suspend all military, trade and diplomatic relations with Israel;

    (b) Investigate and prosecute all officials, corporates and individuals involved in or facilitating genocide, incitement, crimes against humanity, war crimes and other grave breaches of international humanitarian law;

    (c) Secure reparations, including full reconstruction and return;

    (d) Co-operate fully with the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ);

    (e) Reaffirm and strengthen support to UNRWA and the UN system as a whole;

    (f) Suspend Israel from the United Nations under Article 6 of the UN Charter;

    (g) Act under “Uniting for Peace”, in line with General Assembly resolution 377(V), to ensure that Israel dismantles its occupation.

    To this I would add suspending the United States – or at least showing America the red card – and relocating UN headquarters away from US territory.

    And any resolution brought to the Security Council for a mandate to resolve the Gaza+West Bank situation must, of course, conform strictly to international law. There is no sign of that so far, nor will there be, I think, as long as the international community allows the US to seize and keep “transitional authority”. The big unanswered question is, what gives Trump of all people the right to assume leadership in engineering peace and reconstruction?

    Yet Trump’s plan, as per Resolution 2803, is accepted by the Security Council 

    So, what are we to make of the UN Security Council’s adoption of Trump’s ‘peace’ plan in the light of the UNHRC’s report on Third States’ complicity?

    The Council welcomes the scheme announced by Trump on 29 September. The first phase established a fragile ceasefire, the release of hostages and detainees, a partial withdrawal of Israel Defence Forces and increased humanitarian aid. But there is no peace. And no real ceasefire. And humanitarian aid is still cruelly withheld.

    The second phase calls for Hamas to disarm, further Israel Defence Forces withdrawal, the deployment of the Israel Security Forces and the creation of an interim technocratic government under a ‘Board of Peace’ before eventual Palestinian Authority control. The plan predicts a 20,000-troop enforcement mission next year.

    The Board of Peace (BoP) is to be established “as a transitional administration” in Gaza that will coordinate reconstruction efforts and the resolution authorizes the BoP to establish a temporary International Stabilization Force (ISF) in Gaza “to deploy under unified command acceptable to the BoP”. Countries will contribute personnel to the force “in close consultation and cooperation” with Egypt and Israel.

    The Security Council has five permanent members: China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and ten non-permanent members elected for two-year terms by the General Assembly. They are currently Algeria, Denmark, Greece, Guyana, Pakistan, Panama, Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, and Somalia. The resolution was adopted by 13 votes with Russia and China abstaining.

    Algerian Ambassador Amar Bendjama stressed that genuine peace in the Middle East cannot be achieved “without justice for the Palestinian people who have waited for decades for the establishment of their independent State.”

    According to Reuters the UN ambassadors of Russia and China complained that the resolution does not give the UN a clear role in the future of Gaza. Russia’s Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya said the Council was in essence “giving its blessing to a US initiative on the basis of Washington’s promises,” and “giving complete control over the Gaza Strip to the Board of Peace and the International Stabilization Force (ISF), the modalities of which we know nothing about so far”.

    China’s UN Envoy Fu Cong also said after the vote that the draft resolution is “vague on many crucial issues” including the scope and structure of the ISF. And China’s Foreign Ministry said that the US-drafted resolution did not fully demonstrate Palestinian governance and the two-state solution. “There is ambiguity in the key issue of post-war arrangement of Gaza in the US resolution, and important principles of the Palestinians governing Palestine and the two-state solution have not been fully demonstrated. This is different from China’s consistent position. That’s why China didn’t vote for it.” Beijing supports the UN Security Council on “doing what is necessary to promote a ceasefire, de-escalating the humanitarian crisis, and restarting reconstruction. China will continue to take constructive measures and be responsible, and support Palestinian people in the just cause of resuming their legitimate rights.”

    The Palestinian Authority issued a statement welcoming the resolution, and said it is ready to take part in its implementation. Diplomats said the Authority’s endorsement of the resolution last week was key to preventing a Russian veto.

    Hamas repeated that they will not disarm and argued that their fight against Israel is legitimate resistance, potentially pitting themselves against the international force authorized by the resolution. “The resolution imposes an international guardianship mechanism on the Gaza Strip, which our people and their factions reject.”

    Trump celebrated the vote as “a moment of true historic proportion” in a social media post. “The members of the Board, and many more exciting announcements, will be made in the coming weeks.”

    Netanyahu said that Israel remained opposed to a Palestinian state and pledged to demilitarize Gaza “the easy way or the hard way.”

    The UK Government, in a press release, said it voted for the resolution because it is “a critical means of implementing the Peace Plan for Palestinians, Israelis, and the region – turning the page on two devastating years of conflict, towards a lasting peace”. Charge D’Affairs in New York, James Kariuki, explained that the UK will continue working to build on this momentum so an International Stabilisation Force can be deployed quickly, support the ceasefire and avoid a vacuum being left which Hamas can exploit. He reiterated the importance of implementing the transitional arrangements set out in the resolution in accordance with international law, with respect to Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination, strengthened unity of Gaza and the West Bank, and empowered Palestinian institutions which enable a reformed Palestinian Authority to resume governance in Gaza.

    But adherence to international law in all this is sadly lacking so far. Third States’ complicity is still hard at work. When, if ever, will we see a UN-generated peace plan rather than a vanity project proposed by, and personally led by an avid enabler of the genocide who refuses to recognise Palestinian statehood?

    A Russian counter-proposal was rumoured to be circulating… what happened to that?

    The post Sheer Wickedness: Genocide in Gaza is Enabled by “Global Complicity,” Says UN first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Highest Form of Democracy: The Grassroots Campaign of Yves Engler

    The farce of Western regard for democracy has been revealed in several countries. Well known are the machinations of the Democratic National Commission to prevent the social democrat Bernie Sanders from becoming the leader of the so-called Democratic Party in the US. In the UK, there was the coalition of Labour Party insiders with Israeli Zionists who upended the elected party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Consider the Western support for the continuation of the corrupt government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy well past his democratic mandate; consider the abandonment of the presidential election in Romania when it appeared certain that frontrunner Călin Georgescu would win. The pretext given by the EU was that Georgescu is “a nationalist figure, known for promoting conspiracy theories, including anti-EU, anti-NATO narratives, and for previously expressing admiration for controversial authoritarian leaders. His rhetoric often echoed messages favoured by the Kremlin.” A candidate anathema to the EU, well, can’t have that. The solution was to just ban Georgescu from standing for election.

    Couldn’t happen in Canada? It already has. The candidacy of Dimitri Lascaris, the progressivist defender of Palestinian rights, for the Green Party of Canada leadership was torpedoed by the incumbent leader, a staunch Zionist, Elizabeth May.

    Yves Engler is a slim, bespectacled man who usually is seen wearing jeans, a button-up sleeved shirt or t-shirt. He looks like an everyday person. There is no pretentiousness. He looks like most of us. Engler epitomizes grassroots.

    Engler is a writer/author/podcaster. When he writes or talks, he speaks to the aspirations of everyday people. He eschews wars, racism, and poverty. He stands for the rights of Indigenous peoples, social justice, and protecting the environment.

    But the greedy hands that pull the levers that control the political scene are arrayed against him. The fear that Engler evokes among the political hierarchy causes them to try to destroy Engler’s campaign to become a revolutionary leader of Canada’s federal New Democratic Party (NDP), a party that has also been ravaged over the years by capitalism and Zionism. In so doing, the backroom elitists expose their adherence to democracy as being a Canadian value is, in fact, a farce.

    So it was to be expected that the anti-capitalist candidacy of Yves Engler would incur the wrath of the Establishment.

    On 3 October, Yves Engler for NDP Leader (Team Engler) released a full policy platform — crafted by 45 activists and researchers on the policy committee.

    Shortly thereafter, the NDP Establishment raised concerns. On 7 October, Engler reported on his strategy to protect democracy:

    the Chief Electoral Official for the leadership race suggested to the National Post and Toronto Star that we were violating the party’s rules by fundraising. It’s untrue, as explained here and here. In his statement to the corporate media the CEO said I’ve misled people by describing my candidacy as having not “yet been approved” even though I’ve stated in a dozen public forums that we have yet to submit to party vetting because we fear that a committee of three-party insiders will quietly block our thousand strong volunteer campaign.

    On 2 November, Engler declared his hope to win Hochelaga—Rosemont-Est for the NDP. It is a riding next to where the bilingual Engler lives in Montréal. Engler noted that the Electoral District Association (EDA) executive is sympathetic to his candidacy. A campaign goal of Engler is to “test support for abolishing billionaires, applying Canadian law towards Israel, bucking Trump on war spending, shuttering the tar sands and massively investing in co-op and public housing.”

    On 10 November, the Globe and Mail published an article that quoted Engler explaining, “party vetting is a threat to democracy. Differences of political opinion should be determined by the membership, not a three-person back-room committee. NDP members should be allowed to decide whether they support or oppose a candidate calling for the party to vote down a budget that plows tens of billions of dollars more into a military that is structured to assist the U.S. war machine.”

    Engler reported on 14 October:

    A rightist columnist recently labeled me “repellent” while a left-establishment commentator publicly proclaimed, “f*** Yves Engler”. Canada’s ideological apparatus is whipped into a frenzy over my multilayered challenge to Canadian foreign policy and my campaign’s activist anti-capitalism.

    On 14 November, an email from Engler stated,

    Ben Mulroney doesn’t like me. On his radio program Wednesday he called me an “agitator extraordinaire, troublemaker, rabble rouser, generally unproductive member of society, antisemite of the highest order … A toxic and terrible human being.”

    I guess Mulroney’s still mad I asked him in March for a comment on the killing of Palestinian children.

    Mulroney’s intemperate words spoke to the simplistic strategy to preclude candidates deemed unacceptable by the Establishment: ad hominem and lies.

    There have also been attempts to block Team Engler from campaign venues. CTV quoted the Sarnia mayor rejecting a bid to shut down the Team Engler event. Engler was quoted, “it’s those who promote apartheid and genocide that are the racists” not critics of Zionism. The Sarnia Observer reported that the Engler campaign campaign is “challenging genocide, militarism, and corporate power” while seeking to build a “bold, grassroots left alternative.”

    *****

    Engler is no weak-kneed Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn. The Establishment will do whatever it can to undermine a grassroots movement led by Engler. And whatever the outcome of the Team Engler campaign, this writer firmly believes that Engler will continue to stand and fight for everyday people. He will oppose poverty, capitalism, imperialism, and genocide. He has already been jailed by Montreal police for his social media posts criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. Engler is a candidate that will breathe new life into the moribund NDP and give more than just hope for progressivists.

    Disclosure: I have never met Yves Engler. I have communicated by email over the years. I am not and never have been a member of the NDP — nor any other political party for that matter.

    The post The Highest Form of Democracy: The Grassroots Campaign of Yves Engler first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Mechanical Mikey and the Theater of War

    If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs . . . . My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori  [It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country]

    – Wilfred Owen, Dulce Et Decorum Est

    On the morning of November 11, I was passing through Pittsfield, Massachusetts, heading north. The traffic was stopped as a Veteran’s Day parade headed south. It was a sight for a musing mind, so that is exactly what I did, sitting in my car watching the parade’s celebration of the patriotism of military veterans.

    I asked myself: What are they still marching for?

    I was once in the U.S. Marines but became a conscientious objector during the U.S. war against Vietnam and have opposed US militarism and wars ever since. I was brought up to be a patriot, and the marching men – mostly old – with their ancient rifles teetering on their shoulders as the season’s first snowflakes peppered their faces and the marching band drummed up a martial beat to counter the dreary morning, touched me in a melancholic and twisted way. They seemed to be barely holding on – but to what? I wondered – war, their youths, past bonds, a lost country, some meaning in once having a cause to fight for, the best times of their lives, false nostalgia, the joy of killing?

    Young, smiling, and excited 11-13 year-old girls ran alongside, handing out small American flags to any occupant of the halted cars who would open their windows. I was about to do so, despite a lifetime of rejecting the flag waving (but not the country) that has come to represent war mongering for me, but the cops motioned the traffic on. The marchers waved to the very few people scattered along the sidewalks who waved back. I drove on wondering why my heart opened to the marchers. It surprised me. Waves of conflicting emotions flowed over me.

    When I arrived at my destination, there was a television playing in the waiting room of the office. I took a seat and watched it, something I usually avoid. It was a History Channel program about U.S. soldiers killed and wounded in Vietnam, the Medevac helicopters flying into combat zones and medics evacuating fellow soldiers. Very dangerous work by courageous men. Hearing the program’s narrator blather on about patriotism as it showed gruesome pictures of bloodied and dead soldiers, erased any previous sentiment I felt about the parade marchers. Like the documentary, the parade typically did not mourn the millions of victims of the endless U.S. wars nor did it picture or in any way illustrate all the U.S. dead, wounded, and crippled soldiers. The marchers’ smiles were pasteboard masks concealing the grim reality of war.

    I felt rage rising in me, even as I admired the bravery of the evacuation teams bringing out their comrades. My blood boiled at the way the program was using bravery as a cover to continue to promote war, to say these soldiers had been defending their country and were therefore patriots when they were attacking another country over eight thousand miles away for the lies of son of a bitch politicians (LBJ and Richard Nixon, both of whom were elected as peace candidates) who always wage wars so easily, using the flesh and blood of young people as cannon fodder. Yes, the old lies told by jackals with smiling faces.

    I wanted to grab the politicians by their turkey necks and force their hands into the massive bloodied hole in an 18 year old boy’s entrails, to push their lying faces low to smell the blood and guts of their easy-going wars.

    I wanted to force them to drink their martinis sitting among the hundreds of slaughtered Vietnamese women, children, and old people in a Vietnamese village massacred in a U.S. “search and destroy” mission; force them to walk in their shiny shoes though the body parts in Iraq and Libya and Gaza and all the places soaked in blood by their decisions; make them spend their vacations locked up in the world-wide CIA torture black sites to listen to the screams of the victims.

    I could understand how young draftees could have been hoodwinked by the government’s lies about the wars, but I was still flabbergasted by how veterans could still march in support of America’s wars after all the lies have been exposed so many times, not just about Vietnam but Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Latin America, etc. An endless tapestry of lies told to support criminal wars, genocide, and the subversion of countries around the world. In the words of  the English playwright Harold Pinter: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.”

    When I was earlier sitting in my stationary car, I felt as though I was sitting in a front row seat in a theater, watching a play. Then I realized that I was doing exactly that, and that the annual march was a reenactment of war’s death march – “the theater of war” – and the old soldiers were still playing their parts – but now as survivors – to remind the audience of the dead and their “sacrifices” for the flag, a reminder meant to celebrate wars while the band played on.

    The little wind-up mechanical tin toy soldier I was given as a toddler –  a World War I (the “Great War”) doughboy that I called Mechanical Mikey after the neighbor who gave it to me – reminds me of the theatrical nature of child’s play, wars, the military, and their parades – all social life actually. The ways play is a way for adults to catch children in the social net of lies, imitation, and violence, not necessarily out of cruelty but ignorant love. And for the adults to play their parts of eternal innocents on the social stage where performing is de rigueur.

    Such child’s play is a dress rehearsal (etymology: to bring back the hearse) for death and a life of repeating the dead hand of the past, but no child would know this. Death is hidden in the play, the roles serving a distancing technique: “now back to real life.” I wonder if I was choking Mikey in this photo. His key was on his left side. Had I wound him up and then decided to stop him in his tracks as he marched across the rug? Was the boy aware at some level that some day he would be following the words of the singer Phil Ochs, I Ain’t Marching Anymore. I know Eddie became Eddy, a name change that suggested that a whirlpool was brewing down river.

    In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell writes the following: “Seeing warfare as theater provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of theater, he can perform his duties without implicating his ‘real’ self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place.”

    Those who march in military parades are acting out parts in a play that both repeat and prepare for the next show. The parade serves a double function, just as my toy soldier had a key for me to wind him up again and again to create a form of psychic socialization through repetition. The key being repetition. Repeat, Rehearse, Remember – do it again.

    Norman Brown puts it thus in Love’s Body: “Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the dance macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis, every soldier a living corpse.”

    Watching the parade and then the History Channel’s documentary, I realized I was watching live and taped versions of repetitive religious performances of sacrificial rituals of a mythic nature, similar to the election every four years of the U.S. president. They are two liturgies of the national religion rooted in war-making, lying, and an economy dependent on killing. But most people act as if they are not choosing to pretend such parades and television documentaries are about remembering and honoring past “sacrifices,” when they are endorsement for future wars.

    Likewise, the presidential elections serve to promote the illusion that the the next president will be different from his predecessor and will end the U.S. wars, which never end. The most recent example is the election in 2024 of Donald Trump, with some diehard Trump supporters continuing to believe in Trump’s irenic intentions despite his blatant betrayal of his antiwar promises, just like his recent predecessors Bush, Obama, and Biden. These men are elected to wage war, support the military industrial complex, and therefore the U.S. economy based on war.

    It does not matter which political party is in power in Washington, D.C. Their political platforms are meaningless; they are sops thrown to an electorate desperate for illusions, as anyone with a smidgen of historical knowledge would know. Yet many justify the ruthless war-making of the American empire and how it underlies the entire economy by arguing that the parties differ on domestic policies, which is often true. But the lesser of two evils is still the evil of two lessers and another form of bad faith, for the domestic economy, being dependent on warfare and funded by the politicians of both parties, is an economy of death. Harold Pinter said it truly in his Nobel Award Address:

    The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

    But as with every religion – maybe more so – as Dostoevsky said of conventional Christianity, such political belief also depends on miracles, mystery, and authority rather than freedom. The flight from freedom is commonplace, despite all the rhetoric that uses it to justify the wars and the war makers.

    The problem we are faced with is an issue of objectivity and reality wherein the public as audience suspends its disbelief in the theater of politics and war and plays its part as audience, as if war and politics were a Broadway show. It’s one big show with everyone in on the act. It is mass hypnosis, a passive surrender to what is perceived to be superior power. Ernest Becker, in his stunning book, The Denial of Death, when commenting on Freud’s work on group psychology and people’s tendency to abandon their judgment and common sense writes:

    Freud saw right away what they did with it: they simply became dependent children again, blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came to them under the hypnotic spell of the leader. They abandoned their egos to his, identified with his power, tried to function with him as an ideal.

    This is another way of saying that on the stage of social life few people choose to not play their assigned roles as obedient children to authority. It is a protection racket, what Jean Paul Sartre calls bad faith – mauvaise foi – and what Hemingway fictionalizes in his masterful story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.”

    Such bad faith can probably not be countered by an essay like this. Maybe Liam Clancy’s compelling version of Eric Bogle’s great song about a non-mechanical Aussie doughboy in WW I might pierce the heart and break the spell in a better way.

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  • War Dogs, War Prostitutes, War Mongers, War as a Zionist (ZIM) Weapon

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  • War Dogs, War Prostitutes, War Mongers, War as a Zionist (ZIM) Weapon

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  • The Gallery of Ghouls of Last Stage US Empire

    The face of last stage empire on display at a Mar-a-Lago event:

    The human psyche’s lexicon is imagistic in nature. The psyche speaks in visual metaphors. At empire’s end, the psyche becomes an artist of the absurd. Hence, the nature of the zeitgeist will be limned by means of fashion, form, and feature into emblems of the era.

    Pictured: “The Mar-a-Lago face” i.e., human beings transformed by Spiritus Mundi into (inadvertent) supernumeraries of a Gogolian theatre of the (cringe-inducing) grotesque.

    In contrast, the type of image above brings me solace, because, now, when I gaze upon my aging face, it seems as if its time-touched features are being drawn by the very hand of a redemptive force.

    *****

    More mingling amid confederacies of ghouls and galleries of grotesques:

    Pro-Zionist billionaires are among the High Dollar donors — thus are among the ownership class — that dictate the agendas of the US political class. Said billionaires have, as of late gone, on a buying spree of corporate media properties. Their gambit being, to enforce narratives that are a litany of pro-Israel lies e.g., foremost among them prevarication e.g., the denial of genocide perpetrated on the people of Gaza.

    With vast resources at their disposal their employ media operatives to intimidate and cancel critics, even for the most mild criticism of Israel. As a consequence, there has been a noxious return of antisemitic tropes regarding Jews as a whole e.g., as hidden, scheming controllers of the world.

    Are the vast majority of anti-Zionists antisemites? No. Are Nick Fuentes’ and his knuckle-dragging Groypers antisemitists? You can bet your jackboots they are.

    The greatest threat to power-devoid Jews such as myself in the coming years: the conflation of Zionism and Judaism by Israeli propagandists.

    Regarding Israel: A schism among the religious right:

    At present, we are witnessing a power struggle among death cultist Christian rightists between Christian-nationalists nativism-gripped xenophobes and Christian-Zionist End Timer zealots. The former’s ranks are comprised of young, online, Groyper types who are possessed by a Brown Shirt mindset while the latter are (far) older Jesus fetishist fantasists — who believe every Israeli transgression against humanity, from ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, to perpetual war on its neighbors, to prison guard rape gangs bring the sin-reeking earth closer to their humanity-loathing fantasy of End Times wrought salvation.
    End-Times Teachings. The Second Coming of Christ | by Aaron Freeman | Soul Journey Publication | Medium

    To what extreme degree does one have to hate and fear life in order to long for the entire earth to be destroyed in the name of the divine and perfect love by their Lord and Savior? From the life-loathing worldview of Christian fundamentalists, like an incorrigible child, the entire world must be whipped and punished until he displays a god-wrought purity thereby becoming deserving of the love of their demanding rage-prone Sky Father.

    Outright and florid insanity, right? These fanatics cannot even prevent their own denominations from (perpetual) sectarian schisms: Constantinople and Rome split; the Protestant Reformation true believers split from Papal autocrats; in the North American colonies, there unfolded constant strife and acrimony among the various Protestant sects, so much so that if the Founders had not intervened and proclaimed the fledgling nation to be a dominion of secularism, Puritan Massachusetts would have marched on and perpetuated ethnic cleansing on Quaker Rhode Island.

    The dismal trend continues right up to the present in which the Episcopal church has split into estranged sects between their liberal and conservative congregants and Southern Baptists have split between conservatives and conservative extremists.

    Unspoken in all the right’s Charlie Kirk ceremonies of beatification: Groypers trolled Charlie Kirk for years because they insisted his pro-Zionist proclivities translated into an impurity of faith with Christian-nationalist ideology.

    Groypers, Doxxing and Charlie Kirk's Death as a S***post | KQED

    Example of Nick Fuentes’ legion of Groypers’ shitposting rampage against Charlie Kirk.

    In essence, these spree killers in the name of The Lord have not changed their (blood-drench, intolerant) vestal garments of the mind. The split between Christian Zionists and Groypers anti-Zionists displays, once again, the propensity to schism.

    Conversely and in brief, the mind of a god capable of omniscience over all of Creation would be infinite thus unknowable. Poets, humbled by the vastness of it all, speak of inspiration as a psychical force bestowing “miraculous influence.”

    Within a single thing, a single shawl
    Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
    A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
    Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
    We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
    A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. 
    — excerpt from Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour — Wallace Stevens

    Regarding the proclivity of the Christian fundamentalist’s worldview for dividing into warring factions: The only miracle here is: the seemly infinitesimal number of pieces that such small minds are capable of being split into.

    Of minuscule minds and massive authoritarian longings:

    Remarking on the obsequious, servile mannerisms of Chinese president’s Xi Jinping staff, MAGA Dear Leader Donald Trump proclaimed, “I want my cabinet to behave like Xi Jinping’s staff. I’m demanding that. I want them sitting up like that, just nice and straight.”

    Trump surrounds himself with sycophants. It's a terrible way to run a business – and a country

    He continued, “I never saw posture like that. I’ve never seen men so scared in their lives.”

    Yet MAGA-Reich soreheads wax psychotic about Zohran Mamdani’s coming reign of woke jihadist’s imposition of commie Sharia Law tyranny, all the while acting as Trump’s ambulatory testicle cozies due to their florid terror of drawing the petty-minded tyrant’s scorn.

    Forget the “great” part: Their true creed: Make Americans Graze Ass.

    With Trump’s poll numbers in free-fall we can expect the hyper-authoritarian compulsions of the US right to approach peak hysteria. In combination with Zohran Mamdani’s rise, for the first time in decades, the Zionist lobby and the oligarchic class have been subjected to profound and sustained, public pushback. Young people and the working class refused to be taken in by million dollar plus campaigns fomenting fear and slinging slander.

    Of course, the oligarchs and their press corp operatives are not done. Far from it. Power, in particular power structures that have managed to remain all but unaccountable, do not concede control with grace. In fact, they, as a general rule, will attempt to destroy what they cannot dominate. Thousands of Palestinian corpses stippled beneath the rubble in Gaza testify to the tragic truth of the matter.

    Not that there will come to pass ethnic cleansing and a genocidal campaign on the streets of New York City. But we will witness a full-spectrum campaign by the kleptocracy waged to undermine, paralyze, and generally render feckless Mayor Mamdani’s efforts at reform.

    The ink-stained General Jack D. Ripper[s] of New York Post promulgated this (risible) augury of what is to come:

    ​Yet by sustained resistance we can do more than hope that The City’s mayor elect’s resolve endures: Mamdani to the demagogic fear mongers and retailers in fear and slander:

    “We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.”

    Whether authoritarianism imposes itself as capitalism’s dictatorship of money or as Zionism’s ethno-nationalism or Christian-nationalism, we can gain resolved in the knowledge the seekers of absolute power, by their mania to control what is beyond control – i.e., the vastness and intricacies of life itself – are ripe with the seeds of their own undoing.

    The thoughts of the heart cannot be controlled nor dominated by their noxious will; moreover, the soul of the world is an indomitable order that will defeat all would-be conquerors.

    Emblems of last stage empire: Sleepy Joe meet the Narcoleptic Don.

    May be an image of the Oval Office

    ​Still amateur stuff, Donnie. You have surpassed Sleepy Joe but at this rate you will never make the fascist Big Leagues. Take note:

    “I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.” — Adolf Hitler​

    Out of the jaws of victory…well, we are talking about the Democratic Party:

    The shutdown ends. Dems, per always, collapse into their own corruption. The Democrats only talent: a knack for capitulation and betrayal of their base.

    The emerging storyline had been: Trump is in decline; the Democratic Party is entering into the initial stages of ascendancy. Yet Democrats, true to form, and in rapid order, put an end to the possibility.

    The takeaway: Republicans, accurately, regard their base as imbeciles and psychos. And Democrats do not regard their base at all. Caveat: There is a base to whose agendas they heed with absolute felicity: the economic elite and the Zionist lobby.

    And what of Dear Leader Trump (whose rise was enabled by corrupt Democrats)?

    Here the Democrats are consistent: On every occasion that Trump begins to collapse into his exponentially increasing brain rot — the dismal Dems leap into a political abyss of their own making and reveal to the world how the art of self-undermining is performed by experts.

    Schumer, Democrats Set to Cave in Shutdown Fight | The Fiscal Times

    There is the Mar-a-Lago face then there is the Democrats’ countenance of perpetual capitulation.

    Chuck Schumer, despite the glasses — emblematic of the Party’s elite — remains willfully myopic — yet Zohran Mamdani’s campaign presented a seminar insofar as the Democratic Party’s path forward.

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  • The Difference Between The US Empire And The British Empire

    The difference between people who supported the British Empire and people who support the US Empire is that those who supported the British Empire knew they were supporting an empire.

    Someone who supported the British Empire’s acts of mass military slaughter around the world did so because they supported the Crown and wanted His Majesty to civilize the godless savages and turn the whole world into his royal subjects. Someone who supports the US empire’s warmongering thinks they are doing so because Saddam is an evil dictator, because Gaddafi is an evil dictator, because Maduro is an evil dictator, because Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis are terrorists, etc.

    Supporters of the British Empire understood that enemies of the Empire were being killed because they refused to adequately submit to the King and his demands. Supporters of the US empire think the US and its allies are always attacking Evil Bad Guys in the name of spreading Freedom and Democracy, and if this happens to advance pre-existing geostrategic agendas and/or resource interests, then it is purely by coincidence.

    Supporters of the British Empire understood that they lived under an actual empire: a power umbrella comprising colonies, protectorates, dominions, mandates, and territories spanning the globe. Supporters of the US empire think it is entirely by coincidence that there is a giant cluster of nations that happen to move in near-perfect unison on all foreign policy agendas and continually wage war on nations that are not part of that cluster.

    The British Empire was entirely open about what it was. It would conquer a place, tell its inhabitants that they are now British subjects, and make them raise the Union Jack on their flagpole. The Western Empire, loosely structured around Washington, allows its member states to keep their own flags and pretend they’re sovereign nations while behaving in ways that are not significantly different from those of the subjects of the British Empire.

    The British Empire was open and unapologetic about pilfering resources from the darker-skinned populations it had conquered and using them to improve the lives of people in the imperial core. In the US empire, those resources are extracted in the same way, but under the cover of slogans such as “opening up markets,” “free trade,” and “globalization.”

    The British Empire was held in place by brute force and overt indoctrination. People were forcibly subjugated and then, over the years, educated to believe it served their interests to live under the Royal Crown, and if they tried to become independent, the redcoats would be sent in to remind them of His Majesty’s beneficence.

    The US-centralized empire is held in place by plenty of brute force as well, but its primary weapon is psychological manipulation. It has the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed, which trains the minds of its subjects to support all its various agendas of capitalism, militarism, imperialism, and global domination under the guise of news media, Hollywood productions, and Silicon Valley tech services. Disobedient nations find their information ecosystems awash with National Endowment for Democracy reeducation media informing them why their current government doesn’t serve their interests. If that doesn’t work, there will be a “revolution” which decades later the CIA will admit to having fomented and armed.

    The US empire is a larger, stronger, sneakier, bitchier, less honest, and more manipulative version of the British Empire. The British Empire told its subjects that they were the King’s property and must do as His Majesty commanded. The US empire subjugates people by tricking them into thinking they are free.

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  • Chaos: The Trump Doctrine for Latin America

    The US, under Trump, is unapologetically an empire operating without pretense. International law is for losers. A newly minted War Department, deploying the most lethal killing machine in world history, need not hide behind the sham of promoting democracy.

    Recall that in 2023, Trump boasted: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten all that oil.” As CEO of the capitalist bloc, Trump’s mission is not about to be restrained by respect for sovereignty. There is only one inviolate global sovereign; all others are subalterns.

    Venezuela – with our oil under its soil – is now in the crosshairs of the empire. Not only does Venezuela possess the largest petroleum reserves, but it also has major gold, coltan, bauxite, and nickel deposits. Of course, the world’s hegemon would like to get its hands on all that mineral wealth.

    But it would be simplistic to think that it is driven only by narrow economic motives. Leverage over energy flows is central to maintaining global influence. Washington requires control of strategic resources to preserve its position as the global hegemon, guided by its official policy of “full spectrum dominance.”

    For Venezuela, revenues derived from these resources enable it to act with some degree of sovereign independence. Most gallingly, Venezuela nationalized its oil, instead of gifting it to private entrepreneurs – and then used it to fund social programs and to assist allies abroad like Cuba. All this is anathema to the hegemon.

    Further pushing the envelope is Venezuela’s “all-weather strategic partnership” with China. With Russia, its most consequential defense ally, Venezuela ratified a strategic partnership agreement. Similarly, Venezuela has a strong anti-imperialist alliance with Iran. All three partners have come to Caracas’s defense, along with regional allies such as Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico.

    The US has subjected Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution to incessant regime-change aggression for its entire quarter-century of existence. In 2015, Barack Obama codified what economist Jeffrey Sachs calls a remarkable “legal fiction.”  His executive order designated Venezuela as an “extraordinary threat” to US national security. Renewed by each succeeding president, the executive order is really an implicit recognition of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution as a counter-hegemonic alternative that challenges Washington’s world order.

    The latest US belligerence testifies to the success of the Venezuelan resistance. The effects of asphyxiating US-led sanctions, which had crashed the economy, have been partly reversed with a return to economic growth, leaving the empire with little alternative but to escalate its antagonism through military means.

    The AFP reports “tensions between Washington and Caracas have dramatically risen” as if the one-sided aggression were a tit-for-tat. Venezuela seeks peace, but has a gun held to its head.

    Reuters blames the victim, claiming that the Venezuelan government “is planning to…sow chaos in the event of a US air or ground attack.” In fact, President Nicolás Maduro has pledged “prolonged resistance” to Washington’s unprovoked assaults rather than meekly conceding defeat.

    The death toll from US strikes on alleged small drug boats off Venezuela, in the Pacific off Colombia and Ecuador, and as far north as Mexico now exceeds 75 and continues to rise. But not an ounce of narcotics has been confiscated. In contrast, Venezuela has seized 64 tons of drugs this year without killing anyone, as the Orinoco Tribune observes.

    Russian Foreign Ministry’s María Zakharova quipped: “now that the US has suddenly remembered, at this historic moment, that drugs are an evil, perhaps it is worth it for the US to go after the criminals within its own elite.”

    On November 11, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, and its accompanying warships arrived in the Caribbean. They join an armada of US destroyers, fighter jets, drones, and troops that have been building since August.

    In a breathtaking understatement, the Washington Post allowed: “The breadth of firepower…would seem excessive” for drug interdiction in what it glowingly describes as a “stunning military presence.”

    Venezuela is now on maximum military alert with a threatening flotilla off its coast and some 15,000 US troops standing by.  Millions of Venezuelans have joined the militia, and international brigades have been welcomed to join the defense. President Maduro issued a decree of “external commotion,” granting special powers in the event of an invasion.

    The populace has united around its Chavista leadership. The far-right opposition, which has called for a military invasion of its own country, is more isolated than ever. Only 3% support such a call.

    Their US-designated leader, María Corina Machado, has gone bonkers, saying “no doubt” that Maduro rigged the 2020 US election against Trump. According to the rabidly anti-Chavista Caracas Chronicles, the so-called Iron Lady “is not simply betting Venezuela’s future on Trump, she is betting her existence.”

    The legal eagles at The Washington Post now find that “the Trump administration’s approach is illegal.” United Nations experts warn that these unprovoked lethal strikes against vessels at sea “amount to international crimes.”

    Even high-ranking Democrats “remain unconvinced” by the administration’s legal arguments. They’re miffed about being left out of the administration’s briefings and not getting to see full videos of the extrajudicial murders.

    The Democrats unite with the Republicans in demonizing Maduro to achieve regime change in Venezuela, but wish it could be done by legal means. The so-called opposition party unanimously voted to confirm Marco Rubio as secretary of state, fully aware of the program that he now spearheads.

    The corporate press has been complicit in regime change in its endless demonization of Maduro. They report that Trump authorized covert CIA operations as if that was a scoop rather than business as usual. What is new is a US administration overtly flaunting supposedly covert machinations. This is part of Washington’s full-press psychological pressure campaign on Venezuela, in which the follow-the-flag media have been its eager handmaiden.

    The AP reports that Jack Keane, when he served as a US Army general, instructed staff to “see reporters as a conduit” for the Pentagon. This was cited as a criticism of Trump after a few dozen embedded reporters turned in their Pentagon badges. Trump has called out the Washington press corps as “very disruptive in terms of world peace,” proving the adage that even a blind dog can sometimes find a bone.

    The Wall Street Journal opines: “Nobody in the [Trump] administration seems prepared to ask the hard questions about what happens if they do destabilize the [Venezuelan] regime but fail to topple it.” Political analysts Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies suggest the answer is carnage and chaos  – based on Washington’s past performances in Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Haiti, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, to mention a few.

    Foreign Policy’s perspective – aligned with the Washington establishment – is that regional fragmentation is at its highest level in the last half-century. Regional organizations have become dysfunctional –  UNASUR has been “destroyed,” CELAC is “useless,” and the OAS canceled its summit. The factionalism, Responsible Statecraft agrees, “marks one of the lowest moments for regional relations in decades.” Bilateral “deals” with the US are replacing regional cohesion.

    This is Latin America under the beneficence of Trump’s “Monroe Doctrine.” The alternative vision, represented by Venezuela, is CELAC’s Zone of Peace and ALBA-TCP’s development for mutual benefit.

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  • The Quiet Plot to End Progressive Government in Honduras

    Trump’s gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean grabs the headlines, while quieter moves to destabilize other progressive Latin American governments go unnoticed by corporate media. A key case is a plot that would create chaos enabling a neoliberal candidate to be declared victor, with Washington’s connivance, in Honduras’s elections on November 30.

    At stake is four more years of progressive government or – otherwise – returning to the neoliberalism that prevailed after the US-backed military coup in 2009. The electoral defeat of progressive parties in Ecuador and Bolivia earlier this year, and the uncertain chances of progressive candidate Jeannette Jara in Chile’s elections this month and next, mean that Honduras is a crucial test.

    Honduras has a history of rigged elections since the overthrow of Manuel Zeleya’s left-leaning government in 2009. The left was fraudulently denied power in 2013 and 2017, only winning in 2021 because Xiomara Castro’s majority was overwhelming. Although popular, Castro is constitutionally limited to a single term.

    Now that her successor, Libre party candidate Rixi Moncada, has only a narrow poll lead, the opposition sees a new opportunity to seize power by manipulating the election results.

    In theory, it should be no contest for Moncada, given the achievements of incumbent President Castro. Moncada is closely linked to her, having been the minister of finance and then defense in her administration.

    After inheriting broken health and education systems and soaring poverty in the wake of the Covid pandemic, President Castro has succeeded in reducing poverty levels from 74 per cent to 63 per cent in four years. In an unprecedented program of public investment, her government has built eight new hospitals and renovated over 5,200 schools. Not long ago Honduras was one of the world’s most dangerous countries, but in four years her government has cut the homicide rate to its lowest since 2013. Poor inner-city barrios, long afflicted by gang violence, now cope with thousands of returning migrants, fleeing US repression and needing jobs: Castro quickly created centers to give them government help.

    Honduras is still a country where Washington’s influence is very strong. While Castro has had a progressive foreign policy, cultivating China’s support, aggressively challenging Israel’s genocide in Gaza and building strong relations with the region’s progressive governments, she has had to be aware of the US embassy’s continuous efforts to undermine her.

    President Castro has also faced a divided congress and hostile mayors in many municipalities. The highly militarized police forces and the army have strong ties to the US. Further, a corrupt legal system and the abiding influence of Honduras’s oligarchic, very wealthy families who control much of the country’s industry, commerce and agriculture challenge popular rule. That Castro has secured her many achievements under all these constraints is remarkable.

    However, the opposition forces have come together in an attempt to deny a Moncada victory. Leaked audio recordings, which appear to be genuine, showed a leading member of the National Election Council conspiring with an opposition leader and a senior army officer to interfere with the transmission of election results during the likely heated atmosphere on the night of the count.

    By focusing on early results which would appear to indicate Moncada’s defeat, the plan is to repeat what happened in 2017. Then a premature announcement of the US-backed candidate’s victory was immediately endorsed by the US embassy. While supposedly independent election observers might call this out, some of them appear to have been planted by the opposition, and there are urgent calls for the observers themselves to be “observed.”

    A prequel of what might happen on the night of November 30 occurred on November 9, when the electoral council held a trial run of its system to collect and transmit voting tallies. The trial partially failed, leading to justifiable accusations from the Libre Party that a repeat of this failure on election night would create exactly the circumstances the opposition needs to execute fraud.

    The context of the US imposing its hegemony over Latin America is critical. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, in an interview about Trump’s massive military build-up in the Caribbean, notes that regime change is a “core tool of US foreign policy.” The overt military attacks on Venezuela and the more covert ones planned for Honduras are part of the same imperial game plan.

    Trump’s main target, Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, has been designated a narco-terrorist, with a $50 million bounty on his head. A possible secondary target, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro and his “cronies,” have just been sanctioned by the US for failing to curb drug trafficking. Needless to say, the allegations are a flimsy justification for Trump’s warmongering.

    An attack on Venezuela would further damage Cuba, long supported by Venezuela. The Trump administration is also considering imposing 100 per cent tariffs on US imports from Nicaragua, spearheaded by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

    The irony, if regime-change were to be successful in Honduras, is that it would likely restore the narcostate that existed prior to Castro’s presidency. This led to the notorious former president Juan Orlando Hernández being extradited to the US where he is serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking offences. The casualness with which electoral interference is being considered is just one of many examples that show up Trump’s war on narcoterrorism as a sham.

    The post The Quiet Plot to End Progressive Government in Honduras first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • US To Build Internment-Style Camps In Israeli-Controlled Gaza

    US President Donald Trump’s administration is advancing a controversial plan to build what US officials called “Alternate Safe Communities” for displaced Palestinians inside the Israeli-controlled areas in Gaza that make up half of the strip, The Atlantic reported on 10 November.

    According to The Atlantic, the initiative envisions a string of US-backed settlements for Palestinians screened and approved by Israel’s domestic intelligence service. Anyone – or their relatives – found to be affiliated with or supportive of Hamas would be barred from entry, effectively separating them from the majority still living under Hamas administration on the western side of what Israeli troops now call the “yellow line.”

    The post US To Build Internment-Style Camps In Israeli-Controlled Gaza appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • “Regime Change” in Venezuela Is a Euphemism for U.S.-Inflicted Carnage and Chaos

    For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that “regime change” brings freedom, that U.S. bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth—it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other U.S. interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow.

    As a U.S. armada gathers off Venezuela, a U.S. special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been flying helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) — the “Nightstalkers” — the same unit that, in U.S.-occupied Iraq, worked with the Wolf Brigade, the most feared Interior Ministry death squad.

    Western media portray the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter force for covert missions. But in 2005, an officer in the regiment blogged about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they swept Baghdad detaining civilians. On November 10, 2005, he described a “battalion-sized joint operation” in southern Baghdad and boasted, “As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees, my face stretched into a long wolfish smile.”

    Many people seized by the Wolf Brigade and other U.S.-trained Special Police Commandos were never seen again; others turned up in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they’d been taken. Bodies of people detained in Baghdad were found in mass graves near Badra, 70 miles away — but that was well within the combat range of the Nightstalkers’ MH-47 Chinook helicopters.

    This was how the Bush–Cheney administration responded to Iraqi resistance to an illegal invasion: catastrophic assaults on Fallujah and Najaf, followed by the training and unleashing of death squads to terrorize civilians and ethnically cleanse Baghdad. The UN reported over 34,000 civilians killed in 2006 alone, and epidemiological studies estimate roughly a million Iraqis died overall.

    Iraq has never fully recovered—and the U.S. never reaped the spoils it sought. The exiles Washington installed to rule Iraq stole at least $150 billion from its oil revenues, but the Iraqi parliament rejected U.S.-backed efforts to grant shares of the oil industry to Western companies. Today, Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, India, the UAE, and Turkey—not the United States.

    The neocon dream of “regime change” has a long, bloody history, its methods ranging from coups to full-scale invasions. But “regime change” is a euphemism: the word “change” implies improvement. A more honest term would be “government removal”—or simply the destruction of a country or society.

    A coup usually involves less immediate violence than a full-scale invasion, but they pose the same question: who or what replaces the ousted government? Time after time, U.S.-backed coups and invasions have installed rulers who enrich themselves through embezzlement, corruption, or drug trafficking—while making life worse for ordinary people.

    These so-called “military solutions” rarely resolve problems, real or imaginary, as their proponents promise. They more often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability, and suffering.

    Kosovo was carved out of Serbia by an illegal US-led war in 1999, but it is still not recognized by many nations and remains one of the poorest countries in Europe. The main U.S. ally in the war, Hashim Thaçi, now sits in a cell at the Hague, charged with horrific crimes committed under cover of NATO’s bombing.

    In Afghanistan, after 20 years of bloody war and occupation, the United States was eventually defeated by the Taliban—the very force it had invaded the country to remove.

    In Haiti, the CIA and U.S. Marines toppled the popular democratic government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, plunging the country into an ongoing crisis of corruption, gang rule, and despair that continues to this day.

    In 2006, the U.S. militarily supported an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to install a new government—an intervention that gave rise to Al Shabab, an Islamic resistance group that still controls large swaths of the country. U.S. AFRICOM has conducted 89 airstrikes in Al Shabab-held territory in 2025 alone.

    In Honduras, the military removed its president, Mel Zelaya, in a coup in 2009, and the U.S. supported an election to replace him. The U.S.-backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez turned Honduras into a narco-state, fueling mass emigration—until Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife, was elected to lead a new progressive government in 2021.

    Libya, a country with vast oil wealth, has never recovered from the U.S. and allied invasion in 2011, which led to years of militia rule, the return of slave markets, the destabilizing of neighboring countries and a 45% reduction in oil exports.

    Also in 2011, the U.S. and its allies escalated a protest movement in Syria into an armed rebellion and civil war. That spawned ISIS, which in turn led to the U.S.-led massacres that destroyed Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria in 2017. Turkish-backed, Al Qaeda-linked rebels finally seized the capital in 2024 and formed a transitional government, but Israel, Turkey, and the U.S. still militarily occupy other parts of the country.

    The U.S.-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014 brought in a pro-Western leadership that only half the population recognized as a legitimate government. That drove Crimea and Donbas to secede and put Ukraine on a collision course with Russia, setting the stage for the Russian invasion in 2022 and the wider, still-escalating conflict between NATO and Russia.

    In 2015, when the Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement assumed power in Yemen after the resignation of a U.S.-backed transitional government, the U.S. joined a Saudi-led air war and blockade that caused a humanitarian crisis and killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis—yet did not defeat the Houthis.

    That brings us to Venezuela. Ever since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, the U.S. has been trying to overthrow the government. There was the failed 2002 coup; crippling unilateral economic sanctions; the farcical recognition of Juan Guaido as a wannabe president; and the 2020 “Bay of Piglets” mercenary fiasco.

    But even if “regime change” in Venezuela were achievable, it would still be illegal under the UN Charter. U.S. presidents are not emperors, and leaders of other sovereign nations do not serve “at the emperor’s pleasure” as if Latin America were still a continent of colonial outposts.

    In Venezuela today, Trump’s opening shots—attacks on small civilian boats in the Caribbean—have been condemned as flagrantly illegal, even by U.S. senators who routinely support America’s illegal wars.

    Yet Trump still claims to be “ending the era of endless wars.” His most loyal supporters insist he means it—and that he was sabotaged in his first term by the “deep state.” This time, he has surrounded himself with loyalists and sacked National Security Council staffers he identified as neocons or warhawks, but he has still not ended America’s wars.

    Alongside Trump’s piracy in the Caribbean, he is a full partner in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the bombing of  Iran. He has maintained the global empire of U.S. military bases and deployments, and supercharged the U.S. war machine with a trillion dollar war chest—draining desperately needed resources out of a looted domestic economy.

    Trump’s appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor was an incendiary choice for Latin America, given Rubio’s open hostility to Cuba and Venezuela.

    Brazilian President Lula made that clear when he met Trump in Malaysia at the ASEAN conference, saying: “There will be no advances in negotiations with the United States if Marco Rubio is part of the team. He opposes our allies in Venezuela, Cuba, and Argentina.” At Lula’s insistence, Rubio was excluded from talks over U.S. investments in Brazil’s rare earth metals industry, the world’s second largest after China’s.

    Cuba-bashing may have served Rubio well in domestic politics, but as Secretary of State it renders him incapable of responsibly managing U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Trump will have to decide whether to pursue constructive engagement with Latin America or let Rubio corner him into new conflicts with our neighbors. Rubio’s threats of sanctions against countries that welcome Cuban doctors are already alienating governments across the globe.

    Trump’s manufactured crisis with Venezuela exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy: his disastrous choice of advisers; his conflicting ambitions to be both a war leader and a peacemaker; his worship of the military; and his surrender to the same war machine that ensnares every American president.

    If there is one lesson from the long history of U.S. interventions, it’s that “regime change” doesn’t bring democracy or stability. As the United States threatens Venezuela with the same arrogance that has wrecked so many other countries, this is the moment to end this cycle of imperial U.S. violence once and for all.

    The post “Regime Change” in Venezuela Is a Euphemism for U.S.-Inflicted Carnage and Chaos first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Gaza: The Arsonist’s Laurels

    There is a peculiar, and telling, absurdity to the coverage of the Trump Administration’s agreement between Israel and Hamas. After entering office, this administration faithfully continued the efforts of its predecessor by providing the means Israel requires to conduct its genocidal campaign in Gaza. One could therefore be forgiven for thinking that leveraging this support to—at least temporarily—reduce the level of violence shouldn’t be considered praiseworthy. I hope this doesn’t sound hopelessly utopian, but I aspire to a state of affairs where withholding participation in mass murder is expected conduct, not something perceived to merit praise. Instead, the temporary suspension of a war crime is considered a diplomatic triumph. The arsonist is lauded for dousing the flames, while earlier exertions to maintain the kindling are forgotten.

    A casual glance at the American press reveals the rot. A Washington Post editorial tells us that in attaining the agreement between Israel and Hamas, “the president can fairly claim a generational accomplishment.” Michael Wilner, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, calls the deal “a significant U.S. diplomatic achievement that has ended hostilities in Gaza.” For those keen on seeing the distinct ways the Trump diplomatic initiative was applauded, the administration compiled a list of quotes from various news sources and political figures. It is a testament to the sheer volume of praise, and the utter poverty of its discernment.

    To appreciate the full cynicism of the performance, one need only glance at the earlier acts. Upon assuming power, this administration, with dreary predictability, continued to supply the props for genocide. During the presidential debate in June of 2024, Trump said that the aim of American policy should be to “let Israel finish the job” in Gaza; since he took office, this maxim seems to have guided his approach. American weapons—which Israeli officials have said their campaign is fully dependent on and could not continue without—are still being sent to Israel. They are then used with the stated intention of depopulating Gaza, with genocide being the methodology to achieve this.

    That the goal is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza cannot be doubted. The intention to remove the Gazan population has been attested to by a myriad of Israeli officials. It’s the motivation for the erasure of Gaza’s infrastructure. When addressing a committee in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament), Benjamin Netanyahu said that they were “demolishing more and more homes” so the Palestinians would have “nowhere to return.” The “obvious result,” as Netanyahu phrased it, “will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate outside the strip.” In March, the Israeli Security Council adopted a plan to establish a bureau within the Defense Ministry to oversee what they call the “voluntary departure” of Palestinians from Gaza.

    And our American President? He did not recoil from this horror, he embraced it with enthusiasm. He saw in this desolation the perfect site for a “Riviera of the Middle East.” He endorsed the ethnic cleansing campaign and made clear his desire, once the population was properly disposed of, for the United States to acquire control of the territory. Israeli officials were, quite naturally, elated. The minister of environmental protection identified Trump as an agent sent to effectuate divine will; she said, “God has sent us the US administration, and it is clearly telling us–it’s time to inherit the land.” Trump was apparently viewed as the antithesis of Moses, facilitating the removal of people from the promised land rather than leading them in. Netanyahu began identifying the implementation of Trump’s proposal to be among his “clear conditions” for ending the war.

    Upon entering office in January, the Trump administration managed to secure a brief pause in hostilities. Various conditions were agreed upon, including the release of hostages, the resumption of humanitarian aid, and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from some areas of Gaza. The Israelis at once began violating the deal, with the full acquiescence of the Trump administration. Aid was blocked from entering Gaza, Palestinians were still being killed by Israeli forces, and Netanyahu refused to allow the Israeli negotiating team to confer in good faith on how to move beyond the first phase of the agreement. When Israel unilaterally abandoned the cease-fire and resumed the slaughter, Trump and his officials deceptively blamed Hamas for the deal’s unraveling.

    This has been a recurring maneuver: in May, Hamas accepted the framework, which had been established by the Trump administration, for another ceasefire; the proposal was presented to the Israelis and was hastily disavowed. Administration officials then inverted blame for the plan’s failure,  castigating the Hamas’s behavior as “disappointing and completely unacceptable.”

    Trump’s efforts have achieved one objective: they have extended the genocide in Gaza and increased the number of its victims. He provided the weapons needed to maintain the slaughter, proposed his own plan for ethnic cleansing, diplomatically supported Israel when it sabotaged agreements to end the violence, vetoed United Nations resolutions calling for an end to the massacre, and sanctioned the International Criminal Court for issuing arrest warrants for Israeli officials. Now that he perceives his interests to have changed, he leveraged his support for Israeli violence to compel Israel’s agreement to a ceasefire—an agreement that could have been achieved long ago. Perhaps commentators at major news outlets could retain at least a modicum of integrity by not offering praise for this?

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  • US Human Rights Record Under Fire After Boycott Of UN Review

    On November 7, the US became only the second country in history – after ‘Israel’ in 2013 – to skip its scheduled Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the United Nations. (ISHR)

    The Universal Periodic Review is designed to promote and protect human rights in every UN member country.

    The UPR was established in 2006, and occurs every four to five years. Its aim is to review each of the 193 UN member states’ human rights record. The most recent review session took place on Friday, at the Human Rights Council in Geneva. There was no US representative present.

    This has shocked the international human rights community and also sparked widespread criticism and concern. The move ends nearly two decades of unbroken US participation, and comes at a time when there has been growing concerns over America’s human rights record.

    The post US Human Rights Record Under Fire After Boycott Of UN Review appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • War on Gaza


    The struggles for Palestinian liberation and climate justice are one and the same, according to Marwan Bishara. The eastern Mediterranean is one of the most climate-vulnerable places on the planet. Whereas worldwide temperatures have increased by an average of 1.1°C since pre-industrial times, in Israel/Palestine average temperatures have risen by 1.5°C between 1950 and 2017, with a forecast increase of 4°C by the end of the century for the 400 million people living in the region.

    Despite the majority of Middle East countries being signatories to the Paris Climate Accords, so far, their leaders have failed to meet the commitments made in the agreement. Moreover, oil-rich countries in the region continue to increase fossil fuel production. The United Arab Emirates chose to appoint the head of its state-run oil company as the president of the 2025 climate conference in Dubai (COP28), though even this farce pales in comparison to the hypocrisy displayed by their western counterparts. The US will be responsible for over one-third of all planned fossil fuel expansion through 2050. President Biden called climate change an ‘existential threat’ and announced the creation of a climate conservation corps at the same time as the US broke a record for oil production.

    This hypocrisy perfectly mirrors the long-standing response of affluent, and powerful, western nations to the Palestinian tragedy, which spout words of protest but continue to provide arms and fuel to the genocidaires. On climate change, they came up with deceptive concepts like carbon offset and carbon credit to evade meaningful action and a just, swift transition to renewable energy. On Palestine, they devised unworkable peace plans that only serve to deepen Palestinian oppression. Under President Trump this willful destruction of the environment will get far worse, as he denies there is any climate crisis at all, and chants ‘Drill, drill, drill’. On Palestine, Trump follows the will of Netanyahu, demanding the complete disarmament of Hamas, the surrender of the Palestinians’ legitimate resistance to occupation.

    US hegemony rests on two key pillars in the region and beyond. First, Israel as a Euro-American settler colony, which is an advanced imperialist outpost in the so-called Middle East. Israel is the number one ally of the United States and maintains US hegemony in the region and control of its vast oil resources. The second pillar is the reactionary oil-rich Gulf monarchies. The Palestinian cause is not merely a moral human rights issue, but is essentially a struggle against US-led imperialism and global fossil capitalism, i.e., a vital link in the struggle to save the planet. There can be no climate justice, no just transition to a way of life which doesn’t lead to an end to life, without dismantling the racist settler-colonial state of Israel.

    Blowback from Israel’s erasure of Palestine

    Equally cynical is Israel’s routine confiscation of Palestinian lands under the pretext of environmental conservation. This tactic, known as green colonialism, exposes Israel’s use of environmentalism to displace the indigenous population of Palestine and exploit its resources. Israeli green zones are primarily established to legitimise land seizures and prevent the return of displaced Palestinians, further entrenching a system of apartheid.

    There is only one planet Earth. Today, the climate justice movement calls not only for action to mitigate climate change but also for fundamental shifts in social structures that perpetuate the environmental crisis, addressing issues of social equality, distributive justice, and control of natural resources. Israel exacerbates the climate risks facing Palestinians by denying them the right to manage their land and resources, making them more vulnerable to climate-related events.

    Israel’s forest fires in recent years are all due to planting invasive species of fast-growing European trees—pines, cypresses, and eucalyptus—that overwrite Palestine’s identity. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) placed blue donation boxes in Jewish homes worldwide, collecting money to buy land (for the Jewish National Fund, which sell only to Jews) and plant these alien trees—claiming it was planting forests on “barren, desolate lands.”After the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist forces destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages, the JNF planted forests atop the ruins. Pine trees now grow where homes once stood in Al-Qabo, Allar, and Ein Karem.

    These forests are green graves, hiding erased villages and blocking refugees from returning. Fast-growing European pines, covering 40% of JNF lands, are ecological time bombs. Their oily needles ignite easily, fueling wildfires. Native olives and carobs—trees that Palestinians nurtured for generations—make up just 5% of JNF plots. This is not conservation. It is conquest, replacing resilient ecosystems with flammable monocultures. The aim is to efface all traces of Palestinian existence, and without concern for the environmental effects. It is ecocide, and utterly criminal.

    In the Naqab desert, the Yatir Forest—funded by overseas donors—displaces Bedouin communities under the lie of fighting desertification. Meanwhile, vineyards guzzling stolen water grow on stolen land, their wine marketed as a revival of ancient Judean roots. The truth? They are symbols of colonial theft, draining Palestinian wells dry.

    Even nature reserves serve the occupation. Israel bars Palestinians from farming on 70,000 hectares of ‘protected’ land, while settlers build roads and parks. Bulldozers clear olive trees to create ‘buffer zones’ for settler highways. This is not conservation. It is erasure, disguised as environmentalism.

    Some of the key issues

    * water, wastewater, and hygiene. Even before 2023, Palestinians in Gaza were restricted to water consumption levels well below the recommended minimum. The World Health Organization recommends 100 liters of water per day per person, yet, before the most recent war, Palestinians in Gaza had access to only 83 liters per day because of the occupation-driven lack of control over their own water resources. Under the current genocidal regime, this means close to no water at all. Even before the 2023 invasion of Gaza, Israel was denying spare parts for sanitation infrastructure. All sanitation facilities have been destroyed in Gaza. As a result, some tens of thousands of cubic meters of sewage are seeping into groundwater and flowing into the Mediterranean Sea every day—resources that are used by Palestinians and Israelis alike. Settlers use 6x as much water as Palestinians on the West Bank.

    * chemical and debris contamination from bombings; The debris situation in Gaza is unprecedented in several ways including: i) the extent of damage to the housing stock; ii) its geographic spread and spatial density across almost the entire territory of the Gaza Strip; iii) the quantity of debris generated; iv) the rate at which debris is being generated; and v) the expected extremely high levels of UXO [unexploded ordnance, i.e., military ammunition or explosive that failed to explode] contamination.

    Previous attacks involving munitions containing heavy metals, asbestos, and other hazardous materials have already contaminated the soil with high concentrations of cobalt and other metals.36 The bombing and use of bulldozers disrupted soil layers and burned (with temperatures of explosions as high as 2000°C), deteriorated, scattered, or completely destroyed the soil (including soil microorganisms). UNEP estimates that the approximately 40 million tons of debris will take 15 years to clear. Much of the land is poisoned and unusable for agriculture.

    * noise pollution; with an average of 1 bomb dropped every 10 minutes in Gaza, continuous drone and jet flights, rockets, bombardment from tanks and ships, and other military activities was noted to result in more than double the allowable limit which is the allowable limit for short periods [of 8 hours] not for months.

    * food insecurity; Most of Gaza’s remaining trees, including olive, pomegranate, and citrus orchards—essential not only for food and income but also for air purification and shade—have been completely uprooted. Cutting down olive trees is rampant now in the West Bank.

    * traumatic impacts of targeted environmental destruction. 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed in 1948, and millions of olive trees since then—some centuries old—bulldozed or burned. Settlers attack farmers during harvests, turning groves into war zones. This planned genocide is comparable to the genocide against natives an the buffalo slaughter in North America. This loss of connection to land and previous and future generations through olive trees is a traumatic experience, expressed in Palestinian literature and art. For example, Khaled Baraka, a 65-year-old Palestinian who was forced to flee his home, shared his anguish: These trees lived through my moments of joy and sadness. They know my secrets. When I was sad and worried, I would talk to the trees, take care of them … but the war killed those trees.

    The whole world suffers

    Palestinian climate activists fear that cooperation could be misinterpreted as normalizing relations before the conflict is resolved. It is a situation that Majdalani, of EcoPeace, has frequently faced in her own activism. There’s this pervasive sense of ‘we don’t cooperate with the occupier, it’s not the right political environment.’ But if we wait for the ‘right’ political environment, we will lose more land. We will have more people suffering water shortages, more farmers leaving their farms, and the crisis will continue. Unless something changes, all this is moot for Palestinians, as Greater Israel means they will most likely cease to exist, either through murder, starvation or deportation, and Israel will face all these problems without the people who actually love the land and would work most ‘fanatically’ to heal it. Israelis will use their foreign passports to escape the Hell they have created, leaving Israel to hardcore pseudo-religious fascists, a pariah state spreading its sickness, its poison across the world.

    Yes, the world. Genocide of Palestinians is a dress rehearsal for the collective West’s future treatment of climate refugees, argues Hamza Hamouchene, the North Africa programme coordinator at the Transnational Institute. Colombian President Gustavo Petro: genocide and barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the South because of the climate crisis. What we see in Gaza is the rehearsal of the future.

    In the first two months of the genocide in Palestine alone, the CO2 emissions by Israel were greater than the annual emissions of more than 20 nations in the global South…. Half of those emissions are due to the transport and shipping of weaponry by the United States, which shows the deep complicity in genocide and ecocide in that part of the world, and how even the high seas are not immune from Israeli crimes.

    Clearly, what is necessary now is implementation of the grassroots world campaign Boycott, Divest, Sanction and an energy embargo of Israel. Colombia has shown the way when they stopped the export of coal to Israel and more recently banned all trade with Israel and expelled all Israeli diplomats. We need the same thing from South Africa. We need the same thing from Brazil, who provides around 10% of crude oil to Israel. We need the same thing from Nigeria, from Gabon, Russia and Azerbaijan that still provide fossil fuels that are being used to massacre Palestinians—to fuel genocide, displacement, to fuel infrastructure of dispossession, to fuel the F35 bombers and AI infrastructure that kills Palestinians every day.

    Petro:

    Why have large carbon-consuming countries allowed the systematic murder of thousands of children in Gaza? Because Hitler has already entered their homes and they are getting ready to defend their high levels of carbon consumption and reject the exodus it causes. We can then see the future: the breakdown of democracy, the end, and the barbarism unleashed against our people, the people who do not emit CO2, the poor people.

    It is not just a genocide. A lot of analysts and researchers have been coming up with terms such as urbicide, domicide, epistemicide, ecocide. How about holocide, which means the utter destruction of the social and ecological fabric of life in Palestine?

    Asad Rehman from War on Want and Friends of the Earth: We’re seeing now also the same ‘walls and fences’ narrative that Israel has used in terms of the West Bank and Gaza and Palestine, now being exported all over the world… the same technologies are being transplanted all around the world. And already Israel is saying, ‘This is battle-tested weaponry. This is battle-tested surveillance’ and already… selling it to some of ‘our’ despotic regimes. That’s why we need a new internationalism, with the trade union movement at the forefront of building and rebuilding a global anti-apartheid movement.

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  • The United States Continues Its Attempt to Overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

    Children play on the beach during a security deployment in Anzoátegui, Venezuela, 19 September 2025. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    Since early September, the United States has given every indication that it could be preparing for a military assault on Venezuela. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research partnered with ALBA Movimientos, the International Peoples’ Assembly, No Cold War, and the Simón Bolívar Institute to produce red alert no. 20, ‘The Empire’s Dogs Are Barking at Venezuela’, on the potential scenarios and implications of US intervention.

    In February 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez travelled to Havana to receive the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s José Martí Prize from Fidel Castro. In his speech, he likened Washington’s threats against Venezuela to dogs barking, saying, ‘Let the dogs bark, because it is a sign that we are on the move. ’ Chávez added, ‘Let the dogs of the empire bark. That is their role: to bark. Our role is to fight to achieve in this century – now, at last – the true liberation of our people.’ Almost two decades later, the empire’s dogs continue to bark. But will they bite? That is the question that this red alert seeks to answer.

    The Sound of Barking

    In February 2025, the US State Department designated a criminal network called Tren de Aragua (Aragua Train) as a ‘foreign terrorist organisation’. Then, in July, the US Treasury Department added the so-called Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s sanctions list as a ‘transnational terrorist group’. No previous US government report, either from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) or the State Department, had identified these organisations as a threat, and no publicly verifiable evidence has been offered to substantiate the claimed scale or coordination of either group. There is no evidence that Tren de Aragua is a coherent international operation. As for the Cartel de los Soles, the first time the name appeared was in 1993 in Venezuelan reporting on investigations of two National Guard generals – a reference to the ‘sun’ insignia on their uniforms – years before Hugo Chávez’s 1998 presidential victory. The Trump administration has alleged that these groups, working with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government, are the primary traffickers of drugs into the US – while providing zero evidence for the connection. Moreover, reports from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the DEA itself have consistently found Venezuelan groups to be marginal in global drug trafficking. Even so, the US State Department has offered a $50 million reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest – the largest in the programme’s history.

    Members of the first cohort of the Tactical Method of Revolutionary Resistance (Método Táctico de Resistencia Revolucionaria, MTRR) course smile after completing training at the Commando Actions Group in Caracas, Venezuela, October 2025—credit: Miguel Ángel García Ojeda.

    The US has revived the blunt instrument of the ‘War on Drugs’ to pressure countries that are not yielding to its threats or that stubbornly refuse to elect right-wing governments. Recently, Trump has targeted Mexico and Colombia and has invoked their difficulties with the narcotics trade to attack their presidents. Though Venezuela does not have a significant domestic drug problem, that has not stopped Trump from attacking Maduro’s government with much more venom. In October 2025, the Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado of the Vente Venezuela (Come Venezuela) movement won the Nobel Peace Prize. Machado was ineligible to run for president in 2024 largely because she had made a series of treasonous statements, accepted a diplomatic post from another country in order to plead for intervention in Venezuela (in violation of Article 149 of the Constitution), and supported guarimbas (violent street actions in which people were beaten, burned alive, and beheaded). She has also championed unilateral US sanctions that have devastated the economy. The Nobel Prize was secured through the work of the Inspire America Foundation (based in Miami, Florida, and led by Cuban American lawyer Marcell Felipe) and by the intervention of four US politicians, three of whom are Cuban Americans (Marco Rubio, María Elvira Salazar, and Mario Díaz-Balart). The Cuban American connection is key, showing how this political network that is focused on the overthrow by any means of the Cuban Revolution now sees a US military intervention in Venezuela as a way to advance regime change in Cuba. This is, therefore, not just an intervention against Venezuela, but one against all those governments that the US would like to overthrow.

    A woman holds a rifle during a security deployment in the Petare neighbourhood of Caracas, Venezuela, 15 October 2025. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    The Bite

    In August 2025, the US military began to amass naval forces in the southern Caribbean, including Aegis-class destroyers and nuclear-powered attack submarines. In September, it began a campaign of extrajudicial strikes on small motorboats in Caribbean waters, bombing at least thirteen vessels and killing at least fifty-seven people – without offering evidence of any drug trafficking links. By mid-October, the US had deployed more than four thousand troops off Venezuela’s coast and five thousand on standby in Puerto Rico (including F-35 fighter jets and MQ-9 Reaper drones), authorised covert operations inside the country, and flown B-52 ‘demonstration missions’ over Caracas. In late October, the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group was deployed to the region. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s government has mobilised the population to defend the country.

    A woman from the Peasant Militia (Milicia Campesina) holds a machete during her graduation as a combatant from the MTRR course, October 2025. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    Five Scenarios for US Intervention

    Scenario no. 1: the Brother Sam option. In 1964, the US deployed several warships off the coast of Brazil. Their presence emboldened General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, chief of the Army General Staff, and his allies to stage a coup that ushered in a twenty-one-year dictatorship. But Venezuela is a different terrain. In his first term, Chávez strengthened political education in the military academies and anchored officer training in defence of the 1999 Constitution. A Castelo Branco figure is therefore unlikely to save the day for Washington.

    Scenario no. 2: the Panama option. In 1989, the US bombed Panama City and sent in special operations troops to capture Manuel Noriega, Panama’s military leader, and bring him to a US prison while US-backed politicians took over the country. Such an operation would be harder to replicate in Venezuela: its military is far stronger, trained for protracted, asymmetric conflicts, and the country boasts sophisticated air defence systems (notably the Russian S-300VM and Buk-M2E surface-to-air systems). Any US air campaign would face sustained defence, making the prospect of downed aircraft – a major loss of face – one Washington is unlikely to risk.

    Scenario no. 3: the Iraq option. A ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing campaign against Caracas and other cities to rattle the population and demoralise the state and military, followed by attempts to assassinate senior Venezuelan leadership and seize key infrastructure. After such an assault, Nobel Peace Prize winner Machado would likely declare herself ready to take charge and align Venezuela closely with the US. The inadequacy of this manoeuvre is that the Bolivarian leadership runs deep: the roots of the defence of the Bolivarian project run through working-class barrios, and the military would not be immediately demoralised – unlike in Iraq. As the interior minister of Venezuela, Diosdado Cabello, recently noted, ‘Anyone who wants to can remember Vietnam… when a small but united people with an iron will were able to teach US imperialism a lesson’.

    The commander general of the Bolivarian National Police, Brigadier General Rubén Santiago, holds a rifle with a sticker of Chávez’s eyes during a security deployment in Petare. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    Scenario no. 4: the Gulf of Tonkin option. In 1964, the US escalated its military engagement in the Vietnam War after an incident framed as an unprovoked attack on US destroyers off the country’s coast. Later disclosures revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) fabricated intelligence to manufacture a pretext for escalation. The US claims it is now conducting naval and air ‘training exercises’ near Venezuelan territorial waters and airspace. On 26 October, the Venezuelan government said it had received information about a covert CIA plan to stage a false-flag attack on US vessels near Trinidad and Tobago to elicit a US response. Venezuelan authorities warned of US manoeuvres and said they will not give in to provocations or intimidation.

    Scenario no. 5: the Qasem Soleimani option. In January 2020, a US drone strike ordered by Trump killed Major General Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force. Soleimani was one of Iran’s most senior officials and was responsible for its regional defence strategy across Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan. In an interview on 60 Minutes, former US chargé d’affaires for Venezuela James Story said, ‘The assets are there to do everything up to and including decapitation of [the] government’ – a plain statement of intent to assassinate the president. After the death of President Hugo Chávez in 2013, US officials predicted that the project would collapse. Twelve years have now passed, and Venezuela continues along the path set forth under Chávez, advancing its communal model whose resilience rests not only on the revolution’s collective leadership but also on strong popular organisation. The Bolivarian project has never been a one-person show.

    China and Russia are unlikely to permit a strike on Venezuela without pressing for immediate UN Security Council resolutions, and both routinely operate in the Caribbean, including joint exercises with Cuba and global missions such as China’s Mission Harmony 2025.

    A member of the Juventud Socialista de Venezuela (Socialist Youth of Venezuela) shows a coin given to graduates of the MTRR course during a security deployment in La Guaira, Venezuela, October 2025. Based on the methods of Vietnamese General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the MTRR course is designed to train people with no prior military experience for possible guerrilla warfare. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    We hope that none of these scenarios come to pass and that the United States takes its military options off the table. But hope alone is not enough – we must work to expand the camp of peace.

    Originally published on  Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

    The post The United States Continues Its Attempt to Overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The United States Continues Its Attempt to Overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

    Children play on the beach during a security deployment in Anzoátegui, Venezuela, 19 September 2025. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    Since early September, the United States has given every indication that it could be preparing for a military assault on Venezuela. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research partnered with ALBA Movimientos, the International Peoples’ Assembly, No Cold War, and the Simón Bolívar Institute to produce red alert no. 20, ‘The Empire’s Dogs Are Barking at Venezuela’, on the potential scenarios and implications of US intervention.

    In February 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez travelled to Havana to receive the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s José Martí Prize from Fidel Castro. In his speech, he likened Washington’s threats against Venezuela to dogs barking, saying, ‘Let the dogs bark, because it is a sign that we are on the move. ’ Chávez added, ‘Let the dogs of the empire bark. That is their role: to bark. Our role is to fight to achieve in this century – now, at last – the true liberation of our people.’ Almost two decades later, the empire’s dogs continue to bark. But will they bite? That is the question that this red alert seeks to answer.

    The Sound of Barking

    In February 2025, the US State Department designated a criminal network called Tren de Aragua (Aragua Train) as a ‘foreign terrorist organisation’. Then, in July, the US Treasury Department added the so-called Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s sanctions list as a ‘transnational terrorist group’. No previous US government report, either from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) or the State Department, had identified these organisations as a threat, and no publicly verifiable evidence has been offered to substantiate the claimed scale or coordination of either group. There is no evidence that Tren de Aragua is a coherent international operation. As for the Cartel de los Soles, the first time the name appeared was in 1993 in Venezuelan reporting on investigations of two National Guard generals – a reference to the ‘sun’ insignia on their uniforms – years before Hugo Chávez’s 1998 presidential victory. The Trump administration has alleged that these groups, working with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government, are the primary traffickers of drugs into the US – while providing zero evidence for the connection. Moreover, reports from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the DEA itself have consistently found Venezuelan groups to be marginal in global drug trafficking. Even so, the US State Department has offered a $50 million reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest – the largest in the programme’s history.

    Members of the first cohort of the Tactical Method of Revolutionary Resistance (Método Táctico de Resistencia Revolucionaria, MTRR) course smile after completing training at the Commando Actions Group in Caracas, Venezuela, October 2025—credit: Miguel Ángel García Ojeda.

    The US has revived the blunt instrument of the ‘War on Drugs’ to pressure countries that are not yielding to its threats or that stubbornly refuse to elect right-wing governments. Recently, Trump has targeted Mexico and Colombia and has invoked their difficulties with the narcotics trade to attack their presidents. Though Venezuela does not have a significant domestic drug problem, that has not stopped Trump from attacking Maduro’s government with much more venom. In October 2025, the Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado of the Vente Venezuela (Come Venezuela) movement won the Nobel Peace Prize. Machado was ineligible to run for president in 2024 largely because she had made a series of treasonous statements, accepted a diplomatic post from another country in order to plead for intervention in Venezuela (in violation of Article 149 of the Constitution), and supported guarimbas (violent street actions in which people were beaten, burned alive, and beheaded). She has also championed unilateral US sanctions that have devastated the economy. The Nobel Prize was secured through the work of the Inspire America Foundation (based in Miami, Florida, and led by Cuban American lawyer Marcell Felipe) and by the intervention of four US politicians, three of whom are Cuban Americans (Marco Rubio, María Elvira Salazar, and Mario Díaz-Balart). The Cuban American connection is key, showing how this political network that is focused on the overthrow by any means of the Cuban Revolution now sees a US military intervention in Venezuela as a way to advance regime change in Cuba. This is, therefore, not just an intervention against Venezuela, but one against all those governments that the US would like to overthrow.

    A woman holds a rifle during a security deployment in the Petare neighbourhood of Caracas, Venezuela, 15 October 2025. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    The Bite

    In August 2025, the US military began to amass naval forces in the southern Caribbean, including Aegis-class destroyers and nuclear-powered attack submarines. In September, it began a campaign of extrajudicial strikes on small motorboats in Caribbean waters, bombing at least thirteen vessels and killing at least fifty-seven people – without offering evidence of any drug trafficking links. By mid-October, the US had deployed more than four thousand troops off Venezuela’s coast and five thousand on standby in Puerto Rico (including F-35 fighter jets and MQ-9 Reaper drones), authorised covert operations inside the country, and flown B-52 ‘demonstration missions’ over Caracas. In late October, the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group was deployed to the region. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s government has mobilised the population to defend the country.

    A woman from the Peasant Militia (Milicia Campesina) holds a machete during her graduation as a combatant from the MTRR course, October 2025. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    Five Scenarios for US Intervention

    Scenario no. 1: the Brother Sam option. In 1964, the US deployed several warships off the coast of Brazil. Their presence emboldened General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, chief of the Army General Staff, and his allies to stage a coup that ushered in a twenty-one-year dictatorship. But Venezuela is a different terrain. In his first term, Chávez strengthened political education in the military academies and anchored officer training in defence of the 1999 Constitution. A Castelo Branco figure is therefore unlikely to save the day for Washington.

    Scenario no. 2: the Panama option. In 1989, the US bombed Panama City and sent in special operations troops to capture Manuel Noriega, Panama’s military leader, and bring him to a US prison while US-backed politicians took over the country. Such an operation would be harder to replicate in Venezuela: its military is far stronger, trained for protracted, asymmetric conflicts, and the country boasts sophisticated air defence systems (notably the Russian S-300VM and Buk-M2E surface-to-air systems). Any US air campaign would face sustained defence, making the prospect of downed aircraft – a major loss of face – one Washington is unlikely to risk.

    Scenario no. 3: the Iraq option. A ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing campaign against Caracas and other cities to rattle the population and demoralise the state and military, followed by attempts to assassinate senior Venezuelan leadership and seize key infrastructure. After such an assault, Nobel Peace Prize winner Machado would likely declare herself ready to take charge and align Venezuela closely with the US. The inadequacy of this manoeuvre is that the Bolivarian leadership runs deep: the roots of the defence of the Bolivarian project run through working-class barrios, and the military would not be immediately demoralised – unlike in Iraq. As the interior minister of Venezuela, Diosdado Cabello, recently noted, ‘Anyone who wants to can remember Vietnam… when a small but united people with an iron will were able to teach US imperialism a lesson’.

    The commander general of the Bolivarian National Police, Brigadier General Rubén Santiago, holds a rifle with a sticker of Chávez’s eyes during a security deployment in Petare. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    Scenario no. 4: the Gulf of Tonkin option. In 1964, the US escalated its military engagement in the Vietnam War after an incident framed as an unprovoked attack on US destroyers off the country’s coast. Later disclosures revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) fabricated intelligence to manufacture a pretext for escalation. The US claims it is now conducting naval and air ‘training exercises’ near Venezuelan territorial waters and airspace. On 26 October, the Venezuelan government said it had received information about a covert CIA plan to stage a false-flag attack on US vessels near Trinidad and Tobago to elicit a US response. Venezuelan authorities warned of US manoeuvres and said they will not give in to provocations or intimidation.

    Scenario no. 5: the Qasem Soleimani option. In January 2020, a US drone strike ordered by Trump killed Major General Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force. Soleimani was one of Iran’s most senior officials and was responsible for its regional defence strategy across Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan. In an interview on 60 Minutes, former US chargé d’affaires for Venezuela James Story said, ‘The assets are there to do everything up to and including decapitation of [the] government’ – a plain statement of intent to assassinate the president. After the death of President Hugo Chávez in 2013, US officials predicted that the project would collapse. Twelve years have now passed, and Venezuela continues along the path set forth under Chávez, advancing its communal model whose resilience rests not only on the revolution’s collective leadership but also on strong popular organisation. The Bolivarian project has never been a one-person show.

    China and Russia are unlikely to permit a strike on Venezuela without pressing for immediate UN Security Council resolutions, and both routinely operate in the Caribbean, including joint exercises with Cuba and global missions such as China’s Mission Harmony 2025.

    A member of the Juventud Socialista de Venezuela (Socialist Youth of Venezuela) shows a coin given to graduates of the MTRR course during a security deployment in La Guaira, Venezuela, October 2025. Based on the methods of Vietnamese General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the MTRR course is designed to train people with no prior military experience for possible guerrilla warfare. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    We hope that none of these scenarios come to pass and that the United States takes its military options off the table. But hope alone is not enough – we must work to expand the camp of peace.

    Originally published on  Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

    The post The United States Continues Its Attempt to Overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The United States Continues Its Attempt to Overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

    Children play on the beach during a security deployment in Anzoátegui, Venezuela, 19 September 2025. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    Since early September, the United States has given every indication that it could be preparing for a military assault on Venezuela. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research partnered with ALBA Movimientos, the International Peoples’ Assembly, No Cold War, and the Simón Bolívar Institute to produce red alert no. 20, ‘The Empire’s Dogs Are Barking at Venezuela’, on the potential scenarios and implications of US intervention.

    In February 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez travelled to Havana to receive the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s José Martí Prize from Fidel Castro. In his speech, he likened Washington’s threats against Venezuela to dogs barking, saying, ‘Let the dogs bark, because it is a sign that we are on the move. ’ Chávez added, ‘Let the dogs of the empire bark. That is their role: to bark. Our role is to fight to achieve in this century – now, at last – the true liberation of our people.’ Almost two decades later, the empire’s dogs continue to bark. But will they bite? That is the question that this red alert seeks to answer.

    The Sound of Barking

    In February 2025, the US State Department designated a criminal network called Tren de Aragua (Aragua Train) as a ‘foreign terrorist organisation’. Then, in July, the US Treasury Department added the so-called Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s sanctions list as a ‘transnational terrorist group’. No previous US government report, either from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) or the State Department, had identified these organisations as a threat, and no publicly verifiable evidence has been offered to substantiate the claimed scale or coordination of either group. There is no evidence that Tren de Aragua is a coherent international operation. As for the Cartel de los Soles, the first time the name appeared was in 1993 in Venezuelan reporting on investigations of two National Guard generals – a reference to the ‘sun’ insignia on their uniforms – years before Hugo Chávez’s 1998 presidential victory. The Trump administration has alleged that these groups, working with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government, are the primary traffickers of drugs into the US – while providing zero evidence for the connection. Moreover, reports from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the DEA itself have consistently found Venezuelan groups to be marginal in global drug trafficking. Even so, the US State Department has offered a $50 million reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest – the largest in the programme’s history.

    Members of the first cohort of the Tactical Method of Revolutionary Resistance (Método Táctico de Resistencia Revolucionaria, MTRR) course smile after completing training at the Commando Actions Group in Caracas, Venezuela, October 2025—credit: Miguel Ángel García Ojeda.

    The US has revived the blunt instrument of the ‘War on Drugs’ to pressure countries that are not yielding to its threats or that stubbornly refuse to elect right-wing governments. Recently, Trump has targeted Mexico and Colombia and has invoked their difficulties with the narcotics trade to attack their presidents. Though Venezuela does not have a significant domestic drug problem, that has not stopped Trump from attacking Maduro’s government with much more venom. In October 2025, the Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado of the Vente Venezuela (Come Venezuela) movement won the Nobel Peace Prize. Machado was ineligible to run for president in 2024 largely because she had made a series of treasonous statements, accepted a diplomatic post from another country in order to plead for intervention in Venezuela (in violation of Article 149 of the Constitution), and supported guarimbas (violent street actions in which people were beaten, burned alive, and beheaded). She has also championed unilateral US sanctions that have devastated the economy. The Nobel Prize was secured through the work of the Inspire America Foundation (based in Miami, Florida, and led by Cuban American lawyer Marcell Felipe) and by the intervention of four US politicians, three of whom are Cuban Americans (Marco Rubio, María Elvira Salazar, and Mario Díaz-Balart). The Cuban American connection is key, showing how this political network that is focused on the overthrow by any means of the Cuban Revolution now sees a US military intervention in Venezuela as a way to advance regime change in Cuba. This is, therefore, not just an intervention against Venezuela, but one against all those governments that the US would like to overthrow.

    A woman holds a rifle during a security deployment in the Petare neighbourhood of Caracas, Venezuela, 15 October 2025. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    The Bite

    In August 2025, the US military began to amass naval forces in the southern Caribbean, including Aegis-class destroyers and nuclear-powered attack submarines. In September, it began a campaign of extrajudicial strikes on small motorboats in Caribbean waters, bombing at least thirteen vessels and killing at least fifty-seven people – without offering evidence of any drug trafficking links. By mid-October, the US had deployed more than four thousand troops off Venezuela’s coast and five thousand on standby in Puerto Rico (including F-35 fighter jets and MQ-9 Reaper drones), authorised covert operations inside the country, and flown B-52 ‘demonstration missions’ over Caracas. In late October, the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group was deployed to the region. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s government has mobilised the population to defend the country.

    A woman from the Peasant Militia (Milicia Campesina) holds a machete during her graduation as a combatant from the MTRR course, October 2025. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    Five Scenarios for US Intervention

    Scenario no. 1: the Brother Sam option. In 1964, the US deployed several warships off the coast of Brazil. Their presence emboldened General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, chief of the Army General Staff, and his allies to stage a coup that ushered in a twenty-one-year dictatorship. But Venezuela is a different terrain. In his first term, Chávez strengthened political education in the military academies and anchored officer training in defence of the 1999 Constitution. A Castelo Branco figure is therefore unlikely to save the day for Washington.

    Scenario no. 2: the Panama option. In 1989, the US bombed Panama City and sent in special operations troops to capture Manuel Noriega, Panama’s military leader, and bring him to a US prison while US-backed politicians took over the country. Such an operation would be harder to replicate in Venezuela: its military is far stronger, trained for protracted, asymmetric conflicts, and the country boasts sophisticated air defence systems (notably the Russian S-300VM and Buk-M2E surface-to-air systems). Any US air campaign would face sustained defence, making the prospect of downed aircraft – a major loss of face – one Washington is unlikely to risk.

    Scenario no. 3: the Iraq option. A ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing campaign against Caracas and other cities to rattle the population and demoralise the state and military, followed by attempts to assassinate senior Venezuelan leadership and seize key infrastructure. After such an assault, Nobel Peace Prize winner Machado would likely declare herself ready to take charge and align Venezuela closely with the US. The inadequacy of this manoeuvre is that the Bolivarian leadership runs deep: the roots of the defence of the Bolivarian project run through working-class barrios, and the military would not be immediately demoralised – unlike in Iraq. As the interior minister of Venezuela, Diosdado Cabello, recently noted, ‘Anyone who wants to can remember Vietnam… when a small but united people with an iron will were able to teach US imperialism a lesson’.

    The commander general of the Bolivarian National Police, Brigadier General Rubén Santiago, holds a rifle with a sticker of Chávez’s eyes during a security deployment in Petare. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    Scenario no. 4: the Gulf of Tonkin option. In 1964, the US escalated its military engagement in the Vietnam War after an incident framed as an unprovoked attack on US destroyers off the country’s coast. Later disclosures revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) fabricated intelligence to manufacture a pretext for escalation. The US claims it is now conducting naval and air ‘training exercises’ near Venezuelan territorial waters and airspace. On 26 October, the Venezuelan government said it had received information about a covert CIA plan to stage a false-flag attack on US vessels near Trinidad and Tobago to elicit a US response. Venezuelan authorities warned of US manoeuvres and said they will not give in to provocations or intimidation.

    Scenario no. 5: the Qasem Soleimani option. In January 2020, a US drone strike ordered by Trump killed Major General Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force. Soleimani was one of Iran’s most senior officials and was responsible for its regional defence strategy across Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan. In an interview on 60 Minutes, former US chargé d’affaires for Venezuela James Story said, ‘The assets are there to do everything up to and including decapitation of [the] government’ – a plain statement of intent to assassinate the president. After the death of President Hugo Chávez in 2013, US officials predicted that the project would collapse. Twelve years have now passed, and Venezuela continues along the path set forth under Chávez, advancing its communal model whose resilience rests not only on the revolution’s collective leadership but also on strong popular organisation. The Bolivarian project has never been a one-person show.

    China and Russia are unlikely to permit a strike on Venezuela without pressing for immediate UN Security Council resolutions, and both routinely operate in the Caribbean, including joint exercises with Cuba and global missions such as China’s Mission Harmony 2025.

    A member of the Juventud Socialista de Venezuela (Socialist Youth of Venezuela) shows a coin given to graduates of the MTRR course during a security deployment in La Guaira, Venezuela, October 2025. Based on the methods of Vietnamese General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the MTRR course is designed to train people with no prior military experience for possible guerrilla warfare. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    We hope that none of these scenarios come to pass and that the United States takes its military options off the table. But hope alone is not enough – we must work to expand the camp of peace.

    Originally published on  Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

    The post The United States Continues Its Attempt to Overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The United States Continues Its Attempt to Overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

    Children play on the beach during a security deployment in Anzoátegui, Venezuela, 19 September 2025. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    Since early September, the United States has given every indication that it could be preparing for a military assault on Venezuela. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research partnered with ALBA Movimientos, the International Peoples’ Assembly, No Cold War, and the Simón Bolívar Institute to produce red alert no. 20, ‘The Empire’s Dogs Are Barking at Venezuela’, on the potential scenarios and implications of US intervention.

    In February 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez travelled to Havana to receive the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s José Martí Prize from Fidel Castro. In his speech, he likened Washington’s threats against Venezuela to dogs barking, saying, ‘Let the dogs bark, because it is a sign that we are on the move. ’ Chávez added, ‘Let the dogs of the empire bark. That is their role: to bark. Our role is to fight to achieve in this century – now, at last – the true liberation of our people.’ Almost two decades later, the empire’s dogs continue to bark. But will they bite? That is the question that this red alert seeks to answer.

    The Sound of Barking

    In February 2025, the US State Department designated a criminal network called Tren de Aragua (Aragua Train) as a ‘foreign terrorist organisation’. Then, in July, the US Treasury Department added the so-called Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s sanctions list as a ‘transnational terrorist group’. No previous US government report, either from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) or the State Department, had identified these organisations as a threat, and no publicly verifiable evidence has been offered to substantiate the claimed scale or coordination of either group. There is no evidence that Tren de Aragua is a coherent international operation. As for the Cartel de los Soles, the first time the name appeared was in 1993 in Venezuelan reporting on investigations of two National Guard generals – a reference to the ‘sun’ insignia on their uniforms – years before Hugo Chávez’s 1998 presidential victory. The Trump administration has alleged that these groups, working with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government, are the primary traffickers of drugs into the US – while providing zero evidence for the connection. Moreover, reports from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the DEA itself have consistently found Venezuelan groups to be marginal in global drug trafficking. Even so, the US State Department has offered a $50 million reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest – the largest in the programme’s history.

    Members of the first cohort of the Tactical Method of Revolutionary Resistance (Método Táctico de Resistencia Revolucionaria, MTRR) course smile after completing training at the Commando Actions Group in Caracas, Venezuela, October 2025—credit: Miguel Ángel García Ojeda.

    The US has revived the blunt instrument of the ‘War on Drugs’ to pressure countries that are not yielding to its threats or that stubbornly refuse to elect right-wing governments. Recently, Trump has targeted Mexico and Colombia and has invoked their difficulties with the narcotics trade to attack their presidents. Though Venezuela does not have a significant domestic drug problem, that has not stopped Trump from attacking Maduro’s government with much more venom. In October 2025, the Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado of the Vente Venezuela (Come Venezuela) movement won the Nobel Peace Prize. Machado was ineligible to run for president in 2024 largely because she had made a series of treasonous statements, accepted a diplomatic post from another country in order to plead for intervention in Venezuela (in violation of Article 149 of the Constitution), and supported guarimbas (violent street actions in which people were beaten, burned alive, and beheaded). She has also championed unilateral US sanctions that have devastated the economy. The Nobel Prize was secured through the work of the Inspire America Foundation (based in Miami, Florida, and led by Cuban American lawyer Marcell Felipe) and by the intervention of four US politicians, three of whom are Cuban Americans (Marco Rubio, María Elvira Salazar, and Mario Díaz-Balart). The Cuban American connection is key, showing how this political network that is focused on the overthrow by any means of the Cuban Revolution now sees a US military intervention in Venezuela as a way to advance regime change in Cuba. This is, therefore, not just an intervention against Venezuela, but one against all those governments that the US would like to overthrow.

    A woman holds a rifle during a security deployment in the Petare neighbourhood of Caracas, Venezuela, 15 October 2025. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    The Bite

    In August 2025, the US military began to amass naval forces in the southern Caribbean, including Aegis-class destroyers and nuclear-powered attack submarines. In September, it began a campaign of extrajudicial strikes on small motorboats in Caribbean waters, bombing at least thirteen vessels and killing at least fifty-seven people – without offering evidence of any drug trafficking links. By mid-October, the US had deployed more than four thousand troops off Venezuela’s coast and five thousand on standby in Puerto Rico (including F-35 fighter jets and MQ-9 Reaper drones), authorised covert operations inside the country, and flown B-52 ‘demonstration missions’ over Caracas. In late October, the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group was deployed to the region. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s government has mobilised the population to defend the country.

    A woman from the Peasant Militia (Milicia Campesina) holds a machete during her graduation as a combatant from the MTRR course, October 2025. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    Five Scenarios for US Intervention

    Scenario no. 1: the Brother Sam option. In 1964, the US deployed several warships off the coast of Brazil. Their presence emboldened General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, chief of the Army General Staff, and his allies to stage a coup that ushered in a twenty-one-year dictatorship. But Venezuela is a different terrain. In his first term, Chávez strengthened political education in the military academies and anchored officer training in defence of the 1999 Constitution. A Castelo Branco figure is therefore unlikely to save the day for Washington.

    Scenario no. 2: the Panama option. In 1989, the US bombed Panama City and sent in special operations troops to capture Manuel Noriega, Panama’s military leader, and bring him to a US prison while US-backed politicians took over the country. Such an operation would be harder to replicate in Venezuela: its military is far stronger, trained for protracted, asymmetric conflicts, and the country boasts sophisticated air defence systems (notably the Russian S-300VM and Buk-M2E surface-to-air systems). Any US air campaign would face sustained defence, making the prospect of downed aircraft – a major loss of face – one Washington is unlikely to risk.

    Scenario no. 3: the Iraq option. A ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing campaign against Caracas and other cities to rattle the population and demoralise the state and military, followed by attempts to assassinate senior Venezuelan leadership and seize key infrastructure. After such an assault, Nobel Peace Prize winner Machado would likely declare herself ready to take charge and align Venezuela closely with the US. The inadequacy of this manoeuvre is that the Bolivarian leadership runs deep: the roots of the defence of the Bolivarian project run through working-class barrios, and the military would not be immediately demoralised – unlike in Iraq. As the interior minister of Venezuela, Diosdado Cabello, recently noted, ‘Anyone who wants to can remember Vietnam… when a small but united people with an iron will were able to teach US imperialism a lesson’.

    The commander general of the Bolivarian National Police, Brigadier General Rubén Santiago, holds a rifle with a sticker of Chávez’s eyes during a security deployment in Petare. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    Scenario no. 4: the Gulf of Tonkin option. In 1964, the US escalated its military engagement in the Vietnam War after an incident framed as an unprovoked attack on US destroyers off the country’s coast. Later disclosures revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) fabricated intelligence to manufacture a pretext for escalation. The US claims it is now conducting naval and air ‘training exercises’ near Venezuelan territorial waters and airspace. On 26 October, the Venezuelan government said it had received information about a covert CIA plan to stage a false-flag attack on US vessels near Trinidad and Tobago to elicit a US response. Venezuelan authorities warned of US manoeuvres and said they will not give in to provocations or intimidation.

    Scenario no. 5: the Qasem Soleimani option. In January 2020, a US drone strike ordered by Trump killed Major General Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force. Soleimani was one of Iran’s most senior officials and was responsible for its regional defence strategy across Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan. In an interview on 60 Minutes, former US chargé d’affaires for Venezuela James Story said, ‘The assets are there to do everything up to and including decapitation of [the] government’ – a plain statement of intent to assassinate the president. After the death of President Hugo Chávez in 2013, US officials predicted that the project would collapse. Twelve years have now passed, and Venezuela continues along the path set forth under Chávez, advancing its communal model whose resilience rests not only on the revolution’s collective leadership but also on strong popular organisation. The Bolivarian project has never been a one-person show.

    China and Russia are unlikely to permit a strike on Venezuela without pressing for immediate UN Security Council resolutions, and both routinely operate in the Caribbean, including joint exercises with Cuba and global missions such as China’s Mission Harmony 2025.

    A member of the Juventud Socialista de Venezuela (Socialist Youth of Venezuela) shows a coin given to graduates of the MTRR course during a security deployment in La Guaira, Venezuela, October 2025. Based on the methods of Vietnamese General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the MTRR course is designed to train people with no prior military experience for possible guerrilla warfare. Credit: Rosana Silva R.

    We hope that none of these scenarios come to pass and that the United States takes its military options off the table. But hope alone is not enough – we must work to expand the camp of peace.

    Originally published on  Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

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  • Things Are Shitty Because We Are Ruled By People Who Want Things To Be Shitty

    Which sounds more likely: (A) that things are bad because the population keeps organically voting for policies which just so happen to hurt ordinary people while benefitting the rich and powerful, or (B) that things are bad because the rich and powerful want things this way?

    Does it seem more likely to you that (A) the democratic process consistently leaves people unable to advance basic human interests because the population always organically splits itself into an exact 50–50 deadlock that leaves everyone unable to get anything done long term, and that this deadlock always just so happens to land on a status quo that serves the interests of the rich and powerful, or (B) that the rich and the powerful artificially created this status quo via manipulation?

    You don’t need to know anything at all about politics or parapolitics to see that (B) is the most likely explanation for why things keep getting worse for everyone besides the rich and powerful. Your own basic reasoning and understanding of human behavior will tell you that there’s no way democracy is working as advertised if things keep getting worse and worse for ordinary voters while billionaires and empire managers keep getting everything they want.

    Things are shitty because we are ruled by people who want things to be shitty. Once you awaken to this undeniable reality, you will inevitably find yourself growing more and more radicalized.

    Our rulers want nonstop war and genocide. Our rulers want obscene levels of inequality. Our rulers want the public to be poor and struggling. Our rulers want people to be getting dumber, sicker, and more miserable. Our rulers want the unrestricted industry that’s killing Earth’s biosphere. Our rulers want us to have vapid, unedifying mainstream culture. This dystopia looks more or less exactly how they want it to look.

    Our rulers want war, militarism, and genocide to be the norm because military force is one of the critical ways by which they dominate the planet, control resources and trade routes, and prevent foreign states from trying different systems and establishing a different world order. Waging and preparing to wage war has the added bonus of also being extremely profitable.

    The plutocrats want inequality to continue because it’s what allows them to live as modern-day monarchs. When money is power and power is relative, you’re going to see the people with the money making sure they have as much as possible while everyone else has as little as possible, because if everyone is king, then nobody is. They want the public to have just enough spending money to keep the wheels of capitalism turning, without having enough money to do things like fund political campaigns or buy up media influence. The poorer everyone else is, the more powerful they are.

    Our rulers want us to be stupid, misinformed, distracted, sick, struggling, and suffering, because if we all had enough time, information, and mental acuity to form an understanding of what’s going on in our world, things would get mighty guillotiney real quick. They have a vested existential interest in keeping us all in a mental fog of propaganda, diversion, ignorance, illiteracy, and psychological dysfunction.

    Our rulers want companies to be free to destroy our planet’s ecosystem, because offloading the costs of industry onto the environment is the only way to steadily increase profits. So long as they’re free to fill the air with pollutants, fill the oceans with plastic, clear the rainforests, incinerate biodiversity, and poison people’s drinking water at the expense of other people and other organisms, corporations can continue to grow and to maximize value for shareholders.

    An alliance of corporate and state power has emerged to advance these agendas in the service of the few who benefit from them, while the rest of humanity flounders in suffering and toil. They use mass media propaganda, campaign donations, lobbying, and other influence operations to ensure that this remains the case. The more you learn to spot the signs of these dynamics and the more clearly you perceive them, the more urgently you see the need to end this way of being.

    Truth and clarity pave the way to real revolutionary change. That’s why our rulers spend so much energy trying to obfuscate truth and clarity via propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, mainstream culture, AI, garbage education systems, and other forms of perception management. They’re doing everything they can to stop us from following the strings of our society’s ailments to the hands up above that are pulling them.

    They want us to be stupid, so we need to get smarter.

    They want us to be ignorant, so we need to inform ourselves.

    They want us to be uncaring, so we need to become more compassionate.

    They want us to be compliant, so we need to become disobedient.

    The world is a mess because our rulers want it to be a mess. So we need everything in us to be pushing in the exact opposite direction.

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  • The United States Violates The Human Right To Health

    Health care activists in the U.S. have a huge struggle to get the corporate media to take the human right to health seriously. The corporate media reports on some injuries and deaths, but their doom and gloom scenarios typically conclude nothing can be changed in this private, insurance-controlled system, which doesn’t work for the people.

    Despite the difficult time we’re in, with millions lacking access to health care, it’s an opportunity for health care activists to increase efforts for a public, not for profit, universal system in the U.S. One way is to use the international human rights system organized through the United Nations to broadcast our message to the rest of the world and to shame the U.S.

    The post The United States Violates The Human Right To Health appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • A Question of Needlessness: Selling Iron Dome to Australia

    The world of defence policy is truly another planet. There, budgets are given to astronomical burgeoning and bizarre readings. Threats can be invented or exaggerated. Insecurity can be inflated. Decisions for the next project supposedly more lethal and more effective than ever can be made with cavalier disregard to realities. And the next cockeyed, buffoonish idea can be given a run for other people’s money. Those other people are, as always, the good tax paying citizenry of a country.

    Australia has been doing superbly of late in this regard. It has given over territory and money to the United States, its appointed arch defender, so that the security of Washington’s imperium can be assured. It has done so in a manner suggesting advanced dementia, its politicians and strategists drivelling about the need to combat the barbarian yellow-red hordes to the north in a “changing security environment”.

    First came the AUKUS trilateral security pact with the US and the United Kingdom, which enshrines the costly fantasy of nuclear-powered submarines Australia may never get and certainly does not need. Nor is there an obligation on the part of the US to part with any, a prospect ever more unlikely given the failure of its own submarine base to keep pace with annual production. Let’s not even start on the prospects of an AUKUS-designed submarine, which will be lucky to make it to the construction stage without sinking.

    To itemise any number of foolish ventures and items being pursued by the Australian defence department would be injurious to one’s well being. This is largely because they keep coming in their risible daftness. Of late, the idea that Australia needs an anti-missile defence shield along the lines of Israel’s Iron Dome system is becoming more than a flirtation. And it’s being given a sense of frisson by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, the Israeli company responsible for implementing and maintaining it.

    The chance for Rafael to shine came at the Indo Pacific International Maritime Exposition, an event running from November 4 to 6. Its presence, along with the Australian subsidiary of Israel’s primary unmanned vehicle manufacturer Elbit Systems, had piqued activists from the Palestine Action Group (PAG), who gathered just before the opening of the exposition to protest that fact.

    A predictably muscular reaction from the New South Wales police followed. According to PAG organiser Josh Lees, they “immediately attacked” the peaceful gathering with pepper spray and horses. The NSW Premier Chris Minns, for his part, was enthralled by the economic prospects of the gathering: defence exports were there to be grown, deals to be made.  That these were with merchants of death was no big matter. “They’re not selling nuclear weapons … we want to see the industry grow.”

    For its part, Rafael had pulled out the bells and whistles. The company, according to its display, offered “an integrated, combat-proven portfolio that delivers end-to-end protection and impactful projection for Australia’s naval forces, ensuring freedom of action in Australia’s northern approaches and across vital sea lines of communication.”

    In an interview at the exposition, the company’s vice president of international business development, Gideon Weiss, hawked Iron Dome’s technology with salesmanship enthusiasm. “The perception that Australia is far and distant and isolated is completely untrue,” he remarked with stern certitude. “There’s absolutely no reason in the world why any Australian would think… that in a conflict, Australia would not be attacked.” The unasked question here is why Australia would make itself an appealing target to begin with. But Weiss did not break his stride: “Your enemies have a great arsenal of ballistic missiles, hypersonic ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and long-range UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]. Why wouldn’t they use them against you if they wanted to?”

    Asked whether the company’s message had bitten in Canberra, Weiss was assured. The “capability and the maturity of the technology” had been noted by Australia’s defence wonks and Rafael was always keen to focus on “sovereignty, about the Australian industrial context.” There was “infrastructure which to Australianise, if you will, these technologies.”

    The company has shown ample familiarity with the soil they wish to till. The Australian Defence Strategic Review of 2023 declared the need to “deliver a layered integrated air and missile system (IAMD) operation capability urgently. This must comprise a suite of appropriate command and control systems, sensors, air defence aircraft and surface (land and maritime) based missile systems.” The current program to develop a “common IAMD capability” was “not structured to deliver a minimum viable capability in the shortest period of time but is pursuing a long-term near perfect solution at an unaffordable cost.”

    Defence analysts called upon to comment on the matter are slavering. Jennifer Parker, a regular talking head on the subject, rues the fact that Australia can never, given its geographical size, be protected in its entirety. “Unlike Israel, where they can defend the entire country against missiles broadly … that’s not feasible for Australia because of our size.” Focus, she suggests, on the “critical infrastructure elements that we need to protect, like HMAS Stirling, Pine Gap and bases around Darwin, and design integrated air and missile defence around that concept”.

    The United States Studies Centre, an Australian outpost soddenly friendly to the military-industrial complex and the needs of the imperium, is also unrelenting about the need for a more expansive missile defence system. Peter Dean, senior advisor on defence strategy, cites “the lack of effective ground-based air defence and an Integrated Air and Missile Defence system” as “the most critical gap in the achievement of Australia’s strategic goals.”

    Another outfit most friendly to US interests, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, is also much in love with missile interception. “If we want to get serious about integrated missile defence,” ASPI senior analyst Malcolm Davis posits, “we need to have long-range, ground-based interceptor missiles that can handle threats like intermediate range ballistic missiles launched by China.”

    The next wasteful program of military expenditure looms happily on the horizon, leaving the question of need unanswered.  Weiss has good reasons to be optimistic that a train has been set in motion. “I wouldn’t want to name names,” he says with confidence, “but everyone knows us very well.”

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  • Major Collision or Fender Bender? Is MAGA Splitting over Israel, Anti-Semitism, and Neo-Nazis?

    FILE - Nick Fuentes, far-right activist, holds a rally at the Lansing Capitol, in Lansing, Mich., Nov. 11, 2020. Former President Donald Trump had dinner Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022, at his Mar-a-Lago club with the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who is now known as Ye, as well as Nick Fuentes, who has used his online platform to spew antisemitic and white supremacist rhetoric. (Nicole Hester/Ann Arbor News via AP, File)
    Will Tucker Carlson’s interview with far-right activist, Nick Fuentes, tear MAGA apart?

    Did Tucker Carlson’s softball interview with white supremacist Nick Fuentes ignite a full-blown MAGA civil war? Is the latest dust-up — over Israel and anti-Semitism — between powerful and popular conservative voices, another family feud or a marker of End Times MAGAism? Is it a head-on collision of merely a fender-bender? And, are rank-and-file MAGA supporters paying any attention to these inside-the-beltway gasbags?

    While we’ve seen this show before — conservatives with fangs out for fellow conservatives — political observers want to know: Is the current dust up over anti-Semitism in the movement, a deal breaker, an all-out game-changing power struggle?

    What’s really at stake isn’t just the movement’s flirtation with antisemitism, but who gets to define its future? Will it be  the nationalist, isolationist Carlson wing, or the older, neocon-aligned Shapiro faction.

    It didn’t start with Tucker Carlson’s interview with white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his podcast, in which Fuentes excoriated Daily Wire founder, [and conservative podcaster] Ben Shapiro and made inflammatory, anti-Semitic remarks about “organized Jewry.” That interview, however, poured lighter fluid on an ongoing simmering fire.

    According to Kyle Tharp’s Chaotic Era Substack, “Fuentes and his continued criticism of U.S. support for Israel (calling fellow conservatives ‘Christian Zionists’ with a  ‘brain virus’) drew condemnation from prominent GOP figures and Israel hawks like Senators Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell, as well as from [popular conservative radio host Marc] Levin and Shapiro.

    Tharp, whose timely newsletter is about politics, media, and online influence, noted that “The conservative fight over supporting Israel has been simmering all year, with top influencers like Carlson, Candace Owens, and Steve Bannon bucking Republican orthodoxy on the issue. The shift reflects both declining support for Israel among younger MAGA supporters and a shift in audience demand in online MAGA media. The data shows that Carlson and Owens, in particular, are winning – having grown their following and clout significantly this year, while pro-Israel voices like Shapiro have seen their audience growth stall in 2025.”

    “Republicans Denounce Tucker Carlson for Interview With Nick Fuentes, a White Supremacist” read the New York Times headline. The Bulwark, a consistently anti-Trump voice, called the interview “One of the Most Dangerous Interviews Ever in MAGA Media.” The Associated Press titled it report, “Controversy over Tucker Carlson interview reveals conservative movement’s conflict over antisemitism,” while the Wall Street Journal warned of “The New Right’s New Antisemites.”

    Politico’s Samuel Benson reported that Shapiro, titled a response episode of his show “Tucker Carlson Sabotages America.” Shapiro blasted Carlson on Monday, calling him “’the most virulent super-spreader of vile ideas in America,’ adding fuel to an incident that sparked a staff shakeup at the Heritage Institute.”

    Benson noted that “The podcast episode was received differently by two bastions of conservative thought: The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board condemned it, while Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts defended it, criticizing the ‘venomous coalition’ attempting to ‘cancel’ Carlson after the interview.”

    According to Benson, “Carlson’s interview with Fuentes came on the heels of other high-profile incidents of antisemitism on the political right. Last month, a nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel withdrew his nomination after bragging of his ‘Nazi streak’ in a text message; days earlier, POLITICO reported on a leaked group chat of Young Republicans who praised Hitler and joked about the Holocaust. The same week, a Nazi symbol was discovered hanging in a GOP congressional office.”

    Inquiring minds want to know: Will an increasingly distracted Donald Trump weigh in on this kerfuffle and can he demand, and achieve, a cease-fire? Or is the MAGA empire finally growing too unruly for its emperor?

    The post Major Collision or Fender Bender? Is MAGA Splitting over Israel, Anti-Semitism, and Neo-Nazis? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Elections Reflections

    Yesterday’s election results are tremendously positive and hopeful for democratic socialists, progressives, liberals and just plain democracy lovers. The Trump regime was soundly defeated in important elections all across the country. The people made history!

    But I woke up this morning wanting to reflect on the issue of elections, not so much from the standpoint of winners and losers but as a cultural/political phenomenon, how important they are on both personal and societal levels.

    As I’ve grown older I have been doing a lot of grassroots, person-to-person electoral work, door-knocking and talking to people for months leading up to and on election day. This year I did it exclusively in my town of Bloomfield, NJ, a small town of about 50,000 people, historically a white working-class suburb of Newark but now a very multi-racial, multi-cultural, mainly commuter town.

    I saw many thousands of these sister/brother/sibling townspeople over the last five days at early voting and election day voting sites. I was outside on the street for about 30 hours observing and interacting with this beautiful mix of people of different colors, languages and ages, all taking part in the USA voting process, standing in line together, talking with one another, sometimes exchanging hugs and handshakes with those they knew. Some were MAGA supporters and others were very much on the opposite end of the political spectrum, but I didn’t see or hear of any major conflicts or fights as we all stood in line to vote or interacted on our way to and from the polls.

    Then there were the parents bringing children, wonderful, energetic young children learning very experientally about democracy and election day, knowledge that will develop and deepen as long as this way, this special way of choosing government leaders, continues to be the USA norm.

    There were the old and disabled making their way, some very slowly and carefully, to get into the voting site. I am always inspired as I see these folk putting themselves out because they clearly believe it is important for them to do so, important to take part in this ritual of democracy. Several people yesterday couldn’t walk, were in wheelchairs that had to be pushed by others. They were determined to get into that polling site and do their part on this one day to keep democracy alive and well.

    As we know, the Trumpists want to destroy democracy, make the process of voting harder and harder, especially for Black, Latino/a and Indigenous people, students and low-income people—the working-class majority. They want to take us back to the days before Black people had the right to vote in the South, before the Voting Rights Act. They want Brown and Black people to feel so afraid and intimidated by ICE and the Border Patrol and other agents of repression that they stay in their homes on election day.

    I think they’re going to fail at that, overall. There are literally millions of us prepared to take risks to defend these sisters and brothers and to defend democracy. Over time, many of us understand that this democracy is in need of serious reform to become much more democratic through public financing of elections, ranked-choice voting, proportional representation and more.

    In the meantime, as we work with the democracy we have, let’s draw strength from what happened yesterday, not just on the big, national macro level—Trump Must Go!—but on the very local levels where the US American people once again showed that we, the people, not the billionaires, not the fascists, not the would-be kings, ultimately are the ultimate deciders.

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  • Venezuela’s Oil, US-led “Regime Change,” and America’s Gangster Politics

    The flimsy moral pretext today is the fight against narcotics, yet the real objective is to overthrow a sovereign government, and the collateral damage is the suffering of the Venezuelan people. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is.

    The United States is dusting off its old regime-change playbook in Venezuela. Although the slogan has shifted from “restoring democracy” to “fighting narco-terrorists,” the objective remains the same, which is control of Venezuela’s oil. The methods followed by the US are familiar: sanctions that strangle the economy, threats of force, and a $50 million bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as if this were the Wild West.

    The US is addicted to war. With the renaming of the Department of War, a proposed Pentagon budget of $1.01 trillion, and more than 750 military bases across some 80 countries, this is not a nation pursuing peace. For the past two decades, Venezuela has been a persistent target of US regime change. The motive, which is clearly laid out by President Donald Trump, is the roughly 300 billion barrels of oil reserves beneath the Orinoco belt, the largest petroleum reserves on the planet.

    In 2023, Trump openly stated: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil… but now we’re buying oil from Venezuela, so we’re making a dictator very rich.” His words reveal the underlying logic of US foreign policy that has an utter disregard for sovereignty and instead favors the grabbing of other country’s resources.

    What’s underway today is a typical US-led regime-change operation dressed up in the language of anti-drug interdiction. The US has amassed thousands of troops, warships, and aircraft in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The president has boastfully authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela.

    On October 26, 2025, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went on national television to defend recent US military strikes on Venezuelan vessels and to say land strikes inside Venezuela and Colombia are a “real possibility.” Florida Sen. Rick Scott, in the same news cycle, mused that if he were Nicolás Maduro he’d “head to Russia or China right now.” These senators aim to normalize the idea that Washington decides who governs Venezuela and what happens to its oil. Remember that Graham similarly champions the US fighting Russia in Ukraine to secure the $10 trillion of mineral wealth that Graham fatuously claims are available for the US to grab.

    Nor are Trump’s moves a new story vis-à-vis Venezuela. For more than 20 years, successive US administrations have tried to submit Venezuela’s internal politics to Washington’s will. In April 2002, a short-lived military coup briefly ousted then-President Hugo Chávez. The CIA knew the details of the coup in advance, and the US immediately recognized the new government. In the end, Chávez retook power. Yet the US did not end its support for regime change.

    In March 2015, Barack Obama codified a remarkable legal fiction. Obama signed Executive Order 13692, declaring Venezuela’s internal political situation an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security to trigger US economic sanctions. That move set the stage for escalating coercion by the US. The White House has maintained that claim of a US “national emergency” ever since. Trump added increasingly draconian economic sanctions during his first term. Astoundingly, in January 2019, Trump declared Juan Guaidó, then an opposition figure, to be Venezuela’s “interim president,” as if Trump could simply name a new Venezuelan president. This tragicomedy of the US eventually fell to pieces in 2023, when the US dropped this failed and ludicrous gambit.

    The US is now starting a new chapter of resource grabbing. Trump has long been vocal about “keeping the oil.” In 2019, when discussing Syria, President Trump said “We are keeping the oil, we have the oil, the oil is secure, we left troops behind only for the oil.” To those in doubt, US troops are still in the northeast of Syria today, occupying the oil fields. Earlier in 2016, on Iraq’s oil, Trump said, “I was saying this constantly and consistently to whoever would listen, I said keep the oil, keep the oil, keep the oil, don’t let somebody else get it.”

    Now, with fresh military strikes on Venezuela vessels and open talk of land attacks, the administration is invoking narcotics to justify regime change. Yet Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter expressly prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” No US theory of “cartel wars” remotely justifies coercive regime change.

    Even before the military strikes, US coercive sanctions have functioned as a siege engine. Obama built the sanctions framework in 2015, and Trump further weaponized it to topple Maduro. The claim was that “maximum pressure” would empower Venezuelans. In practice, the sanctions have caused widespread suffering. As economist and renowned sanctions expert Francisco Rodríguez found in his study of the “Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions,” the result of the coercive US measures has been a catastrophic decline in Venezuelan living standards, starkly worsening health and nutrition, and dire harm to vulnerable populations.

    The flimsy moral pretext today is the fight against narcotics, yet the real objective is to overthrow a sovereign government, and the collateral damage is the suffering of the Venezuelan people. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The US has repeatedly undertaken regime-change operations in pursuit of oil, uranium, banana plantations, pipeline routes, and other resources: Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), Chile (1973), Iraq (2003), Haiti (2004), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and Ukraine (2014), just to name a few such cases. Now Venezuela is on the block.

    In her brilliant book Covert Regime Change (2017), Professor Lindsay O’Rourke details the machinations, blowbacks, and disasters of no fewer than 64 US covert regime-change operations during the years 1947-1989! She focused on this earlier period because many key documents for that era have by now been declassified. Tragically, the pattern of a US foreign policy based on covert (and not-so-covert) regime-change operations continues to this day.

    The calls by the US government for escalation reflect a reckless disregard for Venezuela’s sovereignty, international law, and human life. A war against Venezuela would be a war that Americans do not want, against a country that has not threatened or attacked the US, and on legal grounds that would fail a first-year law student. Bombing vessels, ports, refineries, or soldiers is not a show of strength. It is the epitome of gangsterism.

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  • China’s Ten Noes: Sun Tzu Has Swallowed the Frog and Is Keeping His Smile to Himself

    In a conversation lasting one hour and forty minutes according to the Chinese stopwatch– “a long meeting” on President Donald Trump’s clock    —  President Xi Jinping first knocked the stuffing out of Trump’s warmaking threats, then forced him to beat a retreat behind a 12-month ceasefire with the man the Pentagon has designated its principal enemy but whom Trump praised effusively as “a great leader, great leader of a very powerful, very strong country…a tremendous leader of a very powerful country and I give great respect to him.”

    “Uh,” Trump told reporters on board his aircraft as it rocked in crosswinds flying eastward, “a lot of things we discussed in great detail. A lot of things we brought to finalization. A lot of finalization.” This was false.

    Worse for the Trump warfighting strategy, the Chinese have retained escalation dominance by making Trump’s concessions their pre-condition for China’s temporary suspension of their sanctions on rare earths exports and imports of US computer chips. For this, Xi offered to buy US soybeans slowly for $34.2 billion over four years – roughly half in tonnage, half in price over twice the interval that China had agreed to in the past.

    In General Sun Tzu’s ancient manual for warfighting, “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”. The old man also confessed his limitation: “there is an intelligent way to eat a live frog – I just don’t know what it is.” Xi just demonstrated the way to do it. Trump went down smiling.

    Xi has not yet telephoned President Vladimir Putin to brief him on what happened. After Putin’s meeting with Trump in Alaska on August 6, Putin telephoned Xi on August 8. “So far,” said Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, ”there is no such conversation in the schedule, but it can be quickly agreed upon if necessary,”

    The Russian state media have interpreted the outcome of the talks to be a “temporary ceasefire” achieved by not discussing the key economic and territorial war issues at all. “There have been no joint statements yet,” Tass noted, “and some of the most important issues of bilateral relations, such as Nvidia chips and advanced products, have remained unresolved.” Nothing was achieved, the official Moscow commentators think, in the US attempt to split Xi from Putin, and secure Chinese pressure on Russia to end the Ukraine war on US and NATO terms. “Ukraine came up, uh, very strongly,” Trump told reporters as he flew back to Washington. “We talked about it for a long time and we’re both gonna work together to see if we can get something done. Uh, we agreed the, the sides there, you know, locked in, fighting, and sometimes you have to let him fight, I guess. Crazy. But he’s gonna help us and we’re gonna work together on Ukraine.”

    The Russian state media have yet to notice that Trump is abandoning his attempt, through the Rosneft and LUKOIL oil trade sanctions of October 25, to stop China buying Russian oil. “There’s not a lot more we can do,” Trump replied to a reporter who asked if he and Xi had discussed his threat to sanction Chinese companies for buying Russian crude oil and petroleum products. “Uh, you know, he’s been buying oil from Russia for a long time. It takes care of a, a big part of China. And, you know, I, I can say India’s been very good, good on that, uh, front. Uh, but, uh, we, we didn’t really discuss the oil. We discussed working together to see if we could get that war finished. You know, it doesn’t affect China.”

    The post China’s Ten Noes: Sun Tzu Has Swallowed the Frog and Is Keeping His Smile to Himself first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • China’s Ten Noes: Sun Tzu Has Swallowed the Frog and Is Keeping His Smile to Himself

    In a conversation lasting one hour and forty minutes according to the Chinese stopwatch– “a long meeting” on President Donald Trump’s clock    —  President Xi Jinping first knocked the stuffing out of Trump’s warmaking threats, then forced him to beat a retreat behind a 12-month ceasefire with the man the Pentagon has designated its principal enemy but whom Trump praised effusively as “a great leader, great leader of a very powerful, very strong country…a tremendous leader of a very powerful country and I give great respect to him.”

    “Uh,” Trump told reporters on board his aircraft as it rocked in crosswinds flying eastward, “a lot of things we discussed in great detail. A lot of things we brought to finalization. A lot of finalization.” This was false.

    Worse for the Trump warfighting strategy, the Chinese have retained escalation dominance by making Trump’s concessions their pre-condition for China’s temporary suspension of their sanctions on rare earths exports and imports of US computer chips. For this, Xi offered to buy US soybeans slowly for $34.2 billion over four years – roughly half in tonnage, half in price over twice the interval that China had agreed to in the past.

    In General Sun Tzu’s ancient manual for warfighting, “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”. The old man also confessed his limitation: “there is an intelligent way to eat a live frog – I just don’t know what it is.” Xi just demonstrated the way to do it. Trump went down smiling.

    Xi has not yet telephoned President Vladimir Putin to brief him on what happened. After Putin’s meeting with Trump in Alaska on August 6, Putin telephoned Xi on August 8. “So far,” said Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, ”there is no such conversation in the schedule, but it can be quickly agreed upon if necessary,”

    The Russian state media have interpreted the outcome of the talks to be a “temporary ceasefire” achieved by not discussing the key economic and territorial war issues at all. “There have been no joint statements yet,” Tass noted, “and some of the most important issues of bilateral relations, such as Nvidia chips and advanced products, have remained unresolved.” Nothing was achieved, the official Moscow commentators think, in the US attempt to split Xi from Putin, and secure Chinese pressure on Russia to end the Ukraine war on US and NATO terms. “Ukraine came up, uh, very strongly,” Trump told reporters as he flew back to Washington. “We talked about it for a long time and we’re both gonna work together to see if we can get something done. Uh, we agreed the, the sides there, you know, locked in, fighting, and sometimes you have to let him fight, I guess. Crazy. But he’s gonna help us and we’re gonna work together on Ukraine.”

    The Russian state media have yet to notice that Trump is abandoning his attempt, through the Rosneft and LUKOIL oil trade sanctions of October 25, to stop China buying Russian oil. “There’s not a lot more we can do,” Trump replied to a reporter who asked if he and Xi had discussed his threat to sanction Chinese companies for buying Russian crude oil and petroleum products. “Uh, you know, he’s been buying oil from Russia for a long time. It takes care of a, a big part of China. And, you know, I, I can say India’s been very good, good on that, uh, front. Uh, but, uh, we, we didn’t really discuss the oil. We discussed working together to see if we could get that war finished. You know, it doesn’t affect China.”

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  • Taps

    Who will place coins on the sightless eyes of American democracy when the river Styx carries it to the door of Hades where Charon awaits his due to ensure a serene eternal rest? It has been a shameful/ignominious ordeal and a cowardly demise. This would be the last chance for an act of grace.

    Will it be Barack Obama, the aloof, laid-back observer perched on Cloud 9?

    Will it be the two boys from Brooklyn – Schumer & Jeffries – whose Houdini disappearing act erased the “opposition” from the nation’s political equation?

    Will it be the Bar Associations who temporized and equivocated in admitted fear of Trump lawsuits?

    Will it be the 5-star law firms who pimped themselves to pay an extortionist?

    Will it be the captains of industry whose civic conscience ends at the 19th hole?

    Will it be the wolves of Wall Street for whom “Our Thing” is the only thing?

    Will it be media moguls who spell news “Entertainment?”

    Will it be the haughty lords of IT who bow-and-scrape when their sovereign commands?

    Will it be the churchmen who exhausted their social conscience in pursuit of Woke?

    Will it be the AMA leadership whose 75-word “statements of concern” cut no ice where it counts?

    Will it be the craven university authorities who have mocked their ancient vow to preserve the academy’s integrity and dedication to Truth-seeking?

    Will it be the think-tankers whose torrent of verbiage missed the biggest story since the Civil War?

    Will it be the Publisher and Editors of The New York Times so steeped in the paper’s self-image as a buttress to an enduring Republic that they normalized a fatal pathology instead of crying havoc?

    Will it be the corps of stenographic faux ‘journalists?’

    Will it be the American Psychiatrist Association that trumpeted its irrelevance to public matters when it was most needed?

    BEST GUESS: The shade of the American Republic will be doomed to wander the bleak riverbanks for eternity for want of a pittance of remorse or shame.

    Perhaps John Roberts will sail in on a billionaire’s yacht to lead a choir of 6 in a chorus of Auld Lang Syne.

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  • Trump: Sincerity and Verisimilitude

    US president Donald Trump is apparently trying to burnish his Christian bona fides on Truth Social:

    If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, “guns-a-blazing,” to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities. I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!

    Secretary-of-war Pete Hegseth saluted his commander-in-chief:

    Yes sir.

    The killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria — and anywhere — must end immediately. The Department of War is preparing for action. Either the Nigerian Government protects Christians, or we will kill the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.

    Nigerian president Bola Ahmed Tinubu took exception to Trump’s and Hegseth’s depiction of internecine conflict in his country:

    The characterisation of Nigeria as religiously intolerant does not reflect our national reality, nor does it take into consideration the consistent and sincere efforts of the government to safeguard freedom of religion and beliefs for all Nigerians.

    Nonetheless, Trump the Savior doubled down, stating,

    Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. Thousands of Christians are being killed. Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter…. We stand ready, willing, and able to save our Great Christian population around the World!

    First off, any comments made by Trump and his yes-men/yes-women ought to be greeted with utmost skepticism. And the aphorism of “Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me,” ought to be rigorously applied.

    There are some questions that should spring to mind in judging the sincerity of Trump and his minions recent pronouncements.

    For instance, if Trump is so concerned about the plight of Christians in Nigeria, then where was this concern for the Christian segment of Palestinians killed “by [Jewish] Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”

    Elementary morality demands that ethnicity or religious allegiance should neither condemn nor exculpate a people purely by virtue of their birthright, inculcation, or even belief. We are all humans, and it is the actions of humans that speak louder than any words.

    Another question: If Trump claims a right to intervene in a purported religious conflict in far-off Nigeria, how does this relate to Russia coming to the defense of ethnic Russians under attack in next-door Donbass? Or is this moot, eclipsed by American exceptionalism?

    What about Trump inviting al Qaeda terrorist cum Syrian president Ahmad al-Sharaa to the White House on 10 November? Ahmad al-Sharaa’s rebranded Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is reportedly behind an “abominable massacre of Christians and Alawites in Syria,” as well as “heinous violence, including the indiscriminate murders of children and elderly” Druze Syrians.

    Now ask yourself, given just these three examples, how much verisimilitude should one extend to Trump’s concern for Christian Nigerians?

    Moreover, is this even about ethnicity and religious confession?

    Ask: What ties all these examples together?

    Oil.

    Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer. Russia is the world’s third largest oil producer. Trump already bragged about stealing Syrian oil. As for Palestine: “This genocide is about oil.” A report by UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) notes, “Geologists and natural resources economists have confirmed that the Occupied Palestinian Territory lies above sizeable reservoirs of oil and natural gas wealth, in Area C of the occupied West Bank and the Mediterranean coast off the Gaza Strip…. discoveries of oil and natural gas in the Levant Basin, amounting to 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas at a net value of $453 billion (in 2017 prices) and 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil at a net value of about $71 billion…”

    Why did Trump bomb Iran this summer? Because Iran is legally developing its nuclear program? Democracy Now! offers another reason: “‘It’s Always About Oil’: CIA & MI6 Staged Coup in Iran 70 Years Ago, Destroying Democracy in Iran.” And why is Trump currently blowing up fishing boats and positioning US forces threateningly around Venezuela? Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, with approximately 300 billion barrels.

    The self-declared peace president has promoted a cornucopia of fake news stories to gullible folk, disseminated disinformation, and openly bragged.

    The Solution

    Practice open-minded skepticism or risk shaming yourself.

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  • From Strip Mall USA, to Gaza, to Venezuela: An Architecture of Lies

    So begins the revolution in behalf of soul:

    The world is primarily and always an aesthetic phenomenon with which our animal senses and innate reactions are attuned.
    — James Hillman, Healing Fiction

    We tell white lies to avoid conflict or embarrassment. We tell ourselves wholly subjective tales in order to cope with crushing realities. Nations pull creation myths out of the ass of the nation’s collective unconscious. In the case of the Zionist ethnostate the (all too real) storyline has been banished, from the state’s inception, from the Israeli psyche.

    What does it do to the collective soul of a nation whose crimes against humanity go without consequence? It goes without saying, they are prone to perpetrate ever increasing criminality until they suffer the consequences of their actions. To wit, Israel will never be capable of living in peace with those who they deem outsiders.

    The worst aspects of the Zionist character have been rewarded e.g., as a militarist ethnostate that was created by acts of ethnic cleansing. Nations rise by believing their collective lies…that is, until said lies cause them to fall.

    Israelis know the fact. The quiet part spoken aloud is evinced by their actions: They are leaving Israel em masse. Tel Aviv’s Ashkenazi elite dispatch their children to live abroad. They detest the religious zealot death cults arrayed as agents of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories.

    The liberal elites of the Zionist state are mortified by the religious right. Why? The authoritarian lunatics are a glaring emblem of the true character of the state. Liberal Zionists shunt from their conscious minds the reality that they are complicit in the crimes by which the Zionist ethnostate was conceived and the awareness of the nation’s right-wing authoritarian death cultists are the inevitable embodiment of the state itself.

    This is the unspoken consequence of Israel’s crimes against humanity; withal, an ugly minded citizenry dwelling in a nation in which its very psychical architecture is a litany of lies.

    Untitled - Zdzislaw Beksinski - 1985; Poland

    Untitled (1985; Poland) by Zdzislaw Beksinski

    By repressing our reactions to the basic ugliness of simple details, like ceilings, by denying our annoyance and outrage, we actually encourage an unconsciousness that estranges and disorients the interior soul.
    — James Hillman, Healing Fiction

    With Hillman’s insight in mind gaze upon the hideous, ad hoc, hyper-commercialized griftscape of the US: the nation’s collective mode of mind is manifested in the extant wasteland, and is embodied by the shambling, crass, decaying-before-our-eyes figure of Donald J. Trump.

    The president’s brain has turned into rancid guacamole. Moreover, as an analog of the nation’s decline, Trump’s pronounced physical infirmities and florid mental decay have become a form of public spectacle.

    Trump:

    They have Jasmine Crockett — a low IQ person. AOC is low IQ. Have her pass the exams I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. They’re cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump. Let Jasmine go against Trump. The first couple questions are easy — a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe …

    Donald Trump cannot cover up all signs of decay and decline by indulging in his Versailles-adjacent rampage of theWhite House’s structure and decor, all in an attempt to cover up his Dime Store-level, located in a decaying strip mall, brain.

    From the US griftscape rises the president as grifter.

    From Wounded Knee, My Lai, Fallujah, and slaughtered-at-sea Venezuelan fishermen…rise US mass shooters; from the true believer lunacy of 18th Century tent-revivalist, religious zealots…rise present day, authoritarian, gun-worshipping, counterfeit Christians convinced their right-wing interpretation and governmental enforcement of Biblical laws will cause a New Jerusalem to rise from the crushed-to-compost republic beneath the feet of their trooping legions of Christian-nationalist zealots.

    depth is afforded by the surface, that is: the world is aesthetic presentation

    […]

    To walk right by an ill-designed building, be served and accept poorly prepared food, put on your body a badly cut and badly sewn jacket, to say nothing of not hearing the birds, not noticing the twilight, is to ignore the world. This state of ignorance, this anesthesia is largely the modern human condition,
    — James Hillman, City and Soul

    On display at MAGA rallies and Christian-nationalist megachurches we are witness to staged spectacles in which beauty has been all but banished. In Trump’s White House assault on the senses — by being pummeled by crass — we are buffeted by the aesthetic equivalent of pussy-grabbing.

    Grandeur is Beauty’s eternal dance with Time while grandiosity is but mental vapor in air.

    Trump is acting as a vessel of God only if the god in question is the 2nd Law Of Thermodynamics i.e., the ruling god of fascists e.g., “The Thousand-Year Reich” lasted a grand total of 12 years. The MAGA manifestation of end-stage empire embodies the permanence of Trump devoured Big Mac engendered flatulence.

    Ugliness turns us inward, away from the world [while, conversely] “beauty…returns our longing to this world.”
    — James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World

    An example of the latter (“beauty…returns our longing to this world.”) Palace of Justice by Mecanoo, Córdoba, Spain

    Soul flees when power besotted men evince an obsessive drive for total dominance over beauty. Moreover, there is a festering rot raging at the core of this vanity-blotted maniac as he revels over the destruction of the natural order of earthly conditions that allowed for the rise of — and is essential for maintaining human existence — on the planet:

    “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax,” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!”

    Are you feeling demoralized by the raging fuckwit forced upon us by the Empire Of Soul-Defying Fuckery? From the right we are slagged as a feckless “leftard” from the liberal class we are shunned for being a denizens of the “dirtbag left.”

    First, in regard to the latter: Dirt holds nutrients that sustain life on land. No wonder the sterile of ideas/desiccated of mind liberacrats of the Democratic Party bandy the ad hominem at those of us who notice their fecklessness borne of corruption. Embrace the term. Their reeking status quo is the compost wherein a new political ecosystem can grow and flourish. The beauty of this world rises from the dirt of the breathing earth.

    Regarding being perpetually pummeled into despair inflicted by feelings of powerlessness by the total dominance of capitalism and the soul-defying systems legion of rightwing bullyboy enforcers, from lowly, online rightist grifters and shitposters to ICE/militarized police state thuggery, James Hillman in Re-Visioning Psychology counsels:

    As long as we are caught in cycles of hope and despair, each productive of the other, as long as our actions in regard to depression are resurrective, implying that being down and staying down is sin, we remain Christian in psychology.

    Yet through depression we enter depths and in depths find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul, and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness. It reminds of death. The true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression. Neither jerking oneself out of it, caught in cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering it through til it turns, nor theologizing it — but discovering the consciousness and depth it wants. So begins the revolution in behalf of soul.

    So begins the revolution in behalf of soul.

    Few things are uglier than a flagrant lie. For example, Zionist origin stories that erase the very existence of the Palestinian people; and the noxious mythos of Christian-nationalist that warps the figure of Jesus Christ into an emblem of hyper-authoritarian tyranny and fastbuck grifting; then there is, every hate-rancid word uttered by Steven Miller and the jingoist palaver spewed by Pete Hegseth.

    Conversely, beauty broods like a dreaming seed in the hearts of those driven to risk calling out the false mythos churned out by domination-driven power. Hence we come upon the reason that resistance to violence waged against Gaza, Venezuela, and upon human beings slandered as “illegals” stands at the heart of things.

    The world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment of consciousness: by drawing attention to itself by means of its symptoms, it is becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality. The world is now the subject of immense suffering, exhibiting acute and crass symptoms by means of which it defends itself against collapse.
    — James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and The Soul of the World


    The Face of the City by Zdzislaw Beksinski

    Speaking of manic defense:

    We’re going to win so much, you’re going to get tired of winning. You’re going to say, ‘Please, Mr. President, I have a headache. Please, don’t win so much. This is getting terrible.’ And I’m going to say, ‘I’m sorry, but we’re going to keep winning, winning, winning…
    — Donald Trump

    At present, lies of the authoritarian mind are the dominating force of US political life because they are the last barriers, albeit shoddy, of defense erected against the knowledge of their (self-inflicted) undoing.

    Grandiosity becomes the stuff of dust. If there was an honest Christian or Tanakh-true Jew in their authoritarian klavern they would admonish their fellows thus:

    “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity” Ecclesiastes 1:2

    “He that loveth silver [or cryptocurrency scams] shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase. This is also vanity.” — Ecclesiastes 5:10

    In essence, the agendas of Trump and his gallery of hyper-obsequious, human testicle cozies, as well their schemes involving total dominance, are vapor in regard to the vastness of life. They will evaporate in the freedom of air.

    In time, their obsessive, all-consuming agenda of total control and absolute power will be the very vehicle of their undoing.

    In diametric opposition, the wounded dreams of the afflicted will create the living architecture of the order to come.


    Linxia National Grand Theater by DUTS design, Gansu, China

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