I
watched the January 3rd nightly
coverage on CBS and NBC of the U.S. assault on
Venezuela and the kidnapping of President
Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and what I
witnessed was not journalism but the
choreography of propaganda. CBS, in particular,
offered thirty uninterrupted minutes of
state-sanctioned fantasy, anchored by a fawning
interview with Secretary of War Pete
Hegseth,
a man implicated in the killing of more than one
hundred people at sea, killed without evidence,
accountability, or due process.
Rather
than interrogating power, the networks shifted
seamlessly into spectacle. At no point did
either network raise the most basic questions of
legality, sovereignty, or international law.
Instead, both newscasts trafficked in images of
people dancing in the streets, staging public
jubilation around what was, in fact, a
spectacularized violation of both international
and domestic law. Repressive imperial power has
become visceral and ocular. It now works through
the eye as much as through the gun. State
terrorism is no longer merely enforced by
violence, it is normalized and taught, rendered
legitimate through a form of pedagogical
terrorism produced and circulated by nearly the
entire corporate media apparatus. What is taking
shape is a new apparatus of colonial terror,
where power, social media, and everyday life
collapse into a single machinery of consent,
training the public to see violence as spectacle
and domination as normal.
There
was no mention that the attack
and abduction were condemned by
the presidents of Mexico and Brazil, by
international legal scholars, and by a widening
circle of global leaders alarmed by the
precedent being set. There was no scrutiny
of the fabricated claims that Venezuela was
plotting an invasion of the United States or
serving as the epicenter of drug trafficking,
assertions long discredited but endlessly
recycled to justify imperial violence. Nor,
crucially, was there any acknowledgment of
Trump’s staggering hypocrisy: while declaring a
war on drugs in the name of national security,
he pardoned one of the most notorious narcotics
traffickers ever prosecuted in the United
States, Juan
Orlando Hernández,
described by prosecutors as a central figure in
an eighteen-year operation that flooded the U.S.
with more than 400 tons of cocaine.
Absent
as well was any critical examination of Trump’s
resurrection of the Monroe Doctrine,
now stripped of even its earlier pretenses and
refashioned as a doctrine of
open coercion, colonial entitlement, and
gangster capitalism.
This silence was not incidental; it functioned
to protect the ideological framework that
renders imperial violence normal and profitable.
This
imperial aggression mirrors the logic of Adolf
Hitler’s doctrine of Lebensraum,
a racist and expansionist ideology that
justified conquest, terror, and annexation in
the name of national destiny. History does not
repeat itself mechanically, but it does return
with new uniforms, new slogans, and the same
deadly imperial ambitions.
The
danger could not have been clearer when Marco
Rubio publicly threatened the governments of
Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and other nations in the
region, warning that they would face retaliation
if they failed to submit to the Trump
administration’s demands. This was a declaration
of imperial intent, a signal that the United
States now claims the right to decide which
governments may exist and which must be
eliminated.
Equally
absent from the broadcast was any reckoning with
the toxic reach of neoliberalism itself,
despite the fact that Trump openly gloated over
Venezuela’s oil reserves and made the astonishing
admission that
he intended to hand control of those resources
to the largest U.S. oil conglomerates. This
declaration was an open admission of support for
the fusion of state violence, corporate plunder,
and imperial entitlement. In that moment,
conquest was no longer disguised as security
policy; it was announced as a business
transaction. Such candor would have forced
George Orwell and Aldous Huxley to append new
chapters to their warnings about dictatorship,
chapters in which authoritarian power
no longer bothers to conceal its motives, and
where the extraction of wealth replaces ideology
as the naked logic of domination.
During
the Cold
War, Charles
E. Wilson, then
the president of General Motors, famously told a
congressional committee that “what was good for
our country was good for General Motors, and
vice versa.” Today, that logic has
metastasized. We
now live in an era in
which what serves Chevron, ExxonMobil, and the
oil and arms conglomerates is reflexively framed
as serving democracy itself.
Seen
through this lens, the central danger is not
Trump alone, though he blatantly appears as the
mafia gangster orchestrating the kidnapping of
an alleged adversary. He is not the origin of
this violence but its most grotesque symptom.
As Nikos
Bogiopoulos makes
clear next to the gangster Trump, “are their
minions. The media artillery and their embedded
parrots. Those who, in an attempt to “normalize”
and “justify” gangsterism, are quick to point
out to us the problems with human rights and
democratic freedoms in Venezuela.” The deeper
crisis is American imperialism at
a stage so aggressive, so openly criminal, that
it no longer feels compelled to cloak its
ambitions in the language of diplomacy or
democracy. In this moment, imperial power has
chosen an uneducated fascist demagogue as
its ideal spokesperson, a figure whose vulgarity
mirrors the nakedness of the project he
represents.
It
is within this historical and political context
that the world now witnesses a gangster-style
assault on Venezuelan sovereignty, an armed
incursion followed by the abduction of the
elected president of a sovereign nation and his
wife. This is not an aberration. It is imperial
power acting without disguise, announcing that
domination, plunder, and regime change are no
longer covert operations but public
policy.
Chris
Hedges rightly argues that the US attack on
Venezuela and the kidnapping of Maduro and his
wife has a larger significance because it
“solidifies America’s role as a gangster
state.” He
writes:
The
kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás
Maduro and his wife solidifies America’s role as
a gangster state. Violence does not generate
peace. It generates violence. The immolation of
international and humanitarian law, as the U.S.
and Israel have done in Gaza, and as took place
in Caracas, generates a world without laws, a
world of failed states, warlords, rogue imperial
powers and perpetual violence and chaos. If
there is one lesson we should have learned in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, it is that
regime change spawns Frankensteinian monsters of
our own creation. The Venezuelan military and
security forces will no more accept the
kidnapping of their president and U.S.
domination – done as in Iraq to seize vast oil
reserves -- than the Iraqi security forces and
military or the Taliban. This will not go well
for anyone, including the U.S.
What
we are witnessing is fascism
unbound,
armed with military force and insulated by media
silence. When mainstream media abandon their
obligation to question power, to name crimes,
and to defend democratic norms, they do more
than misinform the public. They normalize
lawlessness, launder violence, and prepare the
population to accept the unthinkable as
inevitable. This silence is not neutrality. It
is complicity, and in an age of disappearing
laws and vanishing lives, it is a complicity
that history will recognize for what it is, an
updated version of the worst horrors of the
past.
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