Evil People in An Evil System Doing Evil Shit
Venezuela is the price of oligarchy (and not the last)
The US has extended its bombing campaign against Venezuelan fishermen to now bombing the country itself, and conducting a large military raid that kidnapped its president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife.
Why would something that’s illegal, wrong, and stupid happen? Because the calculus of people in power isn’t shared by normal (or moral) people.
Just three quick points:
We were already at war with Venezuela. I explained all this in a conversation with The Nation magazine’s Jeet Heer in October. Trump met no meaningful resistance when he dipped his toes in the waters of illegal war, so he kept going, goaded by enemy-of-global-order Marco Rubio.
What we’re doing in Venezuela is the price of oligarchy. Your cost of living keeps going up and your middle-class status keeps getting squeezed because you exist in a system that requires the US government to find reasons to perpetually bomb and invade foreign countries. No permanent war economy, no trillion-dollar war machine; no trillion-dollar war machine, no forever wars. And a permanent war economy, in turn, is oligarchy’s fix to its regime of wealth-hoarding that could otherwise not sustain itself amid declining growth (or a declining rate of profit).
Some people wondered why I wrote and talked so much about the National Security Strategy when it dropped a month ago. Because it presaged what’s happening! The NSS explicitly laid out an imperialist blueprint for Latin America, setting up this war and many more like it. Some of you will be too young to remember this, but the ’03 Iraq war was supposed to be the first of many regime change wars. That plan only collapsed because Iraq became a massive sinkhole for blood and treasure. If the costs of this Venezuela war end up remaining low, expect more illegal war against Cuba, Greenland, Panama, Mexico, and on and on. Indeed, in the same interview rationalizing his invasion of Venezuela this morning, Trump threatened the same against Mexico.
When I wrote my anti-war new year’s poem a few days ago, I was rendering a structural critique of American militarism, but I also had Venezuela specifically in mind. An Un-Diplomatic subscriber dared me to put the poem to a Mobb Deep beat—never threaten me with a good time:
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