Abducting oil
The US attacks Venezuela, exactly as it promised two weeks ago.
When travelling through Latin America I felt guilty that in the end I chose not to cycle into Venezuela, despite it being in the route of Ernesto Guevara that I was following. Ultimately the onerousness of visa application, and the propaganda — shoddy and excessive, but still eventually unnerving — of a country in collapse were enough to have me decide it not worth the effort only to revisit what were anyway just the final few pages of Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries. Still, I felt guilty about it, as if that coercive editing in my route mirrored the U.S. effort in its brutal sanctions to edit Venezuela out of its continent.
A year later and the U.S. has now bombed Venezuela and abducted its elected President, Nicolas Maduro. I feel a guilt also at reproducing the headline image of his kidnapping, for the image is composed and distributed precisely to achieve demoralisation, but still the blindfold, and the outstretched, cuffed hands, has about it something of the permanent attitude of violence with which the U.S. has always approached Latin America, and something of a Latin America that in response has still never quite learned how to respond in full to the brutality of its northern menace. U.S. Government statements now refer openly to “our hemisphere”. It is shameful that at the very least Brazil — a continent with double the U.S. population and an economy the size of a continent — allows itself to be in this position of subordination.
Not only has the U.S. bombed Venezuela, it now says it will seize its oil as its own. Nicolas Maduro has been abducted to New York where he will be tried as a “narco trafficker” in a U.S. court. It scarcely seems worth mentioning, when all around is such brazen absurdity, that his judge is to be a 92 year old Orthodox Jew, Alvin Hellerstein. Maduro is to be represented by Barry Pollack, the lawyer who acted on behalf of Julian Assange when the U.S. and British pursued and incarcerated him for reporting their war crimes in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan and beyond. The Israeli settler leader in occupied Palestine, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the U.S in the days before the attack on Venezuela was made, and despite an ICC arrest warrant on account of his being wanted for genocide. He met Trump, received a heroes welcome in a Florida synagogue, returned to occupied Palestine and then the attack on Venezuela was carried out. Yair Lapid, the leader of the so-called liberal, so-called opposition in Jewish-Israeli society, tweeted that the attack on Venezuela should be read as a warning to Iran. The U.S. grab at Venezuelan oil also — crucially overlooked — quite simply creates extra supply in the energy markets that can stabilise prices in the event of further aggression against Iran, and any resulting disruption in Gulf oil output. For now it is important to note the existing Venezuelan state architecture remains in place, albeit without Maduro, but clearly it has been compromised and all is uncertainty.
In the US-Israeli paradigm, who is in charge at this stage hardly matters, even if U.S. taxpayers have more reason to be aggrieved that they fund it all and would in many cases like for themselves the functioning society they subsidise for Jewish-israelis. The tail wags the dog, the dog is wagging its tail, the dog is happy when its tail is wagging. All that can be known is that we have a very problematic dog.
There is room for analysis of what is happening yet also precious little need. The U.S. is only behaving as it always behaved, even if with a lesser sense of the need of varnish. The U.S is also doing exactly what it said it would in its recent National Security Strategy Document; a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine that posits Latin America as the U.S. “back yard”.
It is important to remember, for all the helplessness it intends to instil, that the strategy has been arrived at as a result of growing U.S. weakness. Failure to dominate Russia in Ukraine; estimation that it is better not to attempt the same in China over Taiwan. Only Europe has been successfully subjugated, even if European populations see the game being played with them, and from Macron to Merz to Starmer, the U.S. is reliant on the most detested flock of spineless vassals in the continent’s history. Pedro Sanchez, alone in Spain, seems to see a Europe that looks to the world, and not only as a subcategory of Empire.
Domestically the U.S home front is fracturing. The cosmopolitanism of immigration that made the U.S. and is the only reliable basis for its social fabric is now seen as a threat. Nazism and civilisational nostalgia for an imagined White America is seen as the best remedy. The economy grows only on paper; mortality, morbidity and traffic fatality rates offer a better insight on the state of affairs and national mood. The demon is weak, but it will not die quietly. With its soft power gone, U.S. violence and military capacity grows in value. Some say the Jews control the world, others the infamous White Anglo Saxon Protestants, the WASPS that Trump so embodies. Whoever is right, the latter will now always have the alibi that it was the former who broke the rules of the twentieth-century game first and most egregiously. It will always be known in history that it was the Israelis carrying out a genocide in Palestine that took us over this edge, into whatever is coming, and until it can be fixed.
What is doubtless is that the two most dominant colonial outgrowths of Europe now share so openly in the same methods. The U.S. says it will take Venezuela as lightly as the Israelis do Syria, Lebanon, or one more neighbourhood in Jerusalem, Palestine. One of the few methods of Zionist influence over US policy that has not been recoded as a “trope” is that the U.S. may simply now admire the unashamed pursuit of apartheid and conquest the Jewish state so openly practises, for it harkens back to the days of the frontier when the U.S. — unencumbered by civil rights, Emancipation, or even a concept of nationhood — could behave howsoever it wished. Better times.
The danger now is that people are browbeaten out of speaking plain truths of the Zionist component in the duo because such comment — media influence, rich oligarchs, political control — has been placed off-limits by the catalogue of “tropes” indistinguishable in what they describe from that truth we are now witnessing. Never seemingly has clarity of speech been so urgent and yet found in such short supply. Writing is a comfort because the words, once written, stay still, allowing for at least a temporary respite in the movement from which one can take one’s bearings.
The regular media stenographers all continue undettered in their waltz, their craving for the rules they follow to be meaningful rules. “What basis does this have in international law?” asks one liberal pundit before venturing an answer. Others ask if Russia or China might, after this, perhaps not respect the U.S. and European concern for international law.
It is strange to consider how much people are paid to write such things after so long, after all that we have seen. Like lost children, looking round a house for a family that forgot them and already left on holiday. The state of affairs is worse because so many in the public followed and trusted them for so long; many still do, just as it is hard for addicts to stop sniffing glue. The more corrupt, the best, and most loyal stenographers individualise the categorically institutional and cultural imperialism of the U.S. into just one man — “Trump” — every bit as much as they individualise 77years of murder and Jewish supremacy in Palestine as simply a question of “Netanyahu”. Anything to stop people seeing that the system itself must be stopped.
The U.S. organs of power are not so confused as their narrators. Canada will be next. Greenland, Denmark will be next. Colombia will be next. Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first socialist president, so says Donald Trump, is “sick”. The “cartels” in Mexico are out of control; the US will have to take a look at that. The rate and pace of announcement and threat is commensurate with a need to spread chaos and demoralisation. Muslim-majority countries and all those dubbed “Middle East” have an advantage in the proximity of the Iranian statement “Death to America (sic)” because having these words in one’s consciousness means these countries understand that the beast can die, that it is natural and permissible to want the beast to die. This is a sentiment that Latin America — for all the deaths and death squads and pillage and bombs that the U.S. has inflicted upon it — is yet to master.
As with the Israelis, the brutality is precisely the point. A blindfolded Maduro is shown strapped-in as he is flown to stand trial at the seat of the Empire that is really just a mafia boss. Likewise we still see the bodies of the Palestinian children killed, the Jewish soldiers parading skulls, lingerie, or Palestinian men stripped to their pants. Empire must always instil defeat; where it instils anger, or even hate, Empire fails. Carried in a van through streets of New York, footage shows U.S. mafia guards open the door to reveal Nicolas Maduro in transit. The watching members of the cult consume the spectacle greedily and with that chant — USA! USA! USA! — that makes the whole world shudder. Rest assured that millions of them will still be chanting those letters as the U.S. finally goes over the edge. For the more refined cultists, those who get their news in the New York Times, we are told that Nicolas Maduro was elected illegitimately (he wasn’t), so that their brains can un-hear the President who has already said it is, in fact, about oil. Some in the US need only spectacle, others want to see it in written form, to flatter their vanity if not improve their prospects or alter the truth of it all. Still more wait on rescue, but are unsure so far of from where it will come.
By each route we reach the same place. The North American colony is shallow, artificial, and the only true culture that ever existed on those lands was genocided centuries ago before being shut away on reserves. As a consequence, what is left is brittle. When it is not confronted then it can proceed to spread, indeed and like any pathogen, it has to, but if it meets hard obstacles, it splinters, and it breaks.