The people of the United States yearn for democracy
Venezuela, Trump, and the Imperial Boomerang
It was the height of the Iraq War, and I was in an English class with one of the best teachers I ever had. He was teaching us about war, politics, and lies, only he called them euphemisms. During that period the Bush administration would talk about “enhanced interrogation techniques” to throw a thin veil over their torture of detainees. Newspapers would write about an “uptick in the violence” to say that hundreds more people had died in Iraq. The term “waterboarding” was ubiquitous for a while there, and if not for that English class I wouldn’t have known that the United States was repeatedly drowning men it captured.
A great teacher helps wake you up to the world, and in that class much of my naivety was ripped away from me. The truth of CIA black sites and torture and endless war irrevocably shifted my assessment of my country, and a process of coming to terms to with the reality of our political condition began. Years later, when we finally left Iraq, and then Afghanistan, I briefly thought the US had collectively learned a great lesson. We are not the world’s police, we don’t have some inalienable right to invade nations around the world, and the vast majority of us want to close that chapter of our history.
Enter 2026. As a friend texted me Saturday morning “JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. NEW YEAR NEW WAR.” I can’t sum it up much better than that, unfortunately. New year, same shit. Another unjustifiable act of US aggression, one that is heightened by the egregious kidnapping of a foreign leader. And all of this is being done in the name of “narco-terrorism,” according to the Trump regime. You may wonder what exactly that recently devised phrase means, and the answer is that it’s two scary words put together. The answer is, it means nothing. It means you should be afraid. It means you should allow the fascist regime to proceed and not ask questions. It’s yet another lie justifying slaughter.
We’re killing people based on a euphemism again. Trump is of course claiming that most drugs imported into the US come from Venezuela, an obvious lie. This lie was rendered even more transparent than the usual bullshit from our fascist regime when Trump recently pardoned the former President of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted for helping move tons of cocaine into the United States. The “narco-terrorist” euphemism is nothing more than a half-hearted attempt to manufacture consent for a premeditated attack on Venezuela.
Of course there are real answers, like US oil companies donating millions and millions to Donald Trump. But the justification, the supposed reason for murdering people in fishing boats and in Caracas, is a mere ephemera, a wave of a hand, a meaningless phrase. This is what human life is worth to our fascist regime, what the lives of people abroad, and of people at home, are worth to the US government. These lives are tallies on a page, numbers on a computer — we’re governed by people who throw away life.
Trump of course says that the “Venezuelan people are free again,” implicitly telling us to ignore the lessons we’ve repeatedly learned about what comes next. We’re expected to believe that prosperity and stability are the next chapter in Venezuela’s future. The reality is infinitely bleaker. Every regime change war, and other US regime change efforts, have destabilized nations for years and often decades. Chaos, civil war, instability, and mass suffering are mostly likely to be the next phase for the people of Venezuela. We know this because we’ve seen this entire saga unfold before.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, none of this is new. We live in a nation haunted by its disregard for life. Across time there has been such a willingness, and at times an eagerness, to launch campaigns of war and death that we cannot be surprised to see how the violence ‘over there’ has come back home. We’re nearing the end of a long road. The people of the United States have tolerated mass death abroad, we’ve tolerated Presidents who lie to us about war and ignore the Constitution, we’ve grown comfortable handing more and more political power to the President, and now we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves with an authoritarian despot.
None of this started with Trump, instead what we’ve allowed for decades has led us to a moment where the President launches an illegal attack, doesn’t even tell Congress about it, and kidnaps a foreign leader. What we’ve allowed has led us into a regime that flouts the law, attempts to rig elections, and kidnaps our neighbors. Our fascist regime claims it will “run Venezuela” for an interim period, but the idea of our authoritarian regime helping bring democracy to another country is beyond farcical. We have nothing to offer any other country — we don’t even have anything to offer our own people.
When Aimé Césaire first described the “imperial boomerang” the three initial examples he used are a gestapo forming at home, prisons filling up, and the state suddenly having a torture apparatus. In Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire explains how the West was shocked by Nazism, but how to him and others living in European colonies fascism looked simply like the violence Europe has inflicted on others turned inward.
The United States has always lived by the notion that might makes right abroad. We’ve enforced our will on other countries, extracted what we want from countless nations, and treated people around the world as fundamentally insignificant. It’s no surprise that we’re ruled by people who have no regard for our lives, just as they have no regard for the lives of the people of Venezuela or any other nation.
Recent polling found that 70% of Americans would oppose the U.S. taking military action in Venezuela, and 75% said the Trump administration would need Congressional approval. We have no democracy to bring to other countries, because we don’t have a functional one here at home. While Rubio and some other figures pretend this is about stopping a tyrant or fighting communism, Trump, characteristically, has been blunt. American oil companies will soon “start making money for the country.”
It’s grimly refreshing to get the truth, to have a president who doesn’t have an interest in covering up the crimes of US imperialism. Trump lies constantly, of course, but he’s now repeatedly made clear that he doesn’t care much about masking the true nature of his interests, and the interests of his backers. They want to make money from Venezuela, just as they want to make money from every aspect of this presidency.
The other, even darker side of Trump’s willingness to be open about his war crimes is the stark reality that he doesn’t fear consequences. He knows that his authoritarian regime gets little to no pushback from Congress. He double-taps boats in the Caribbean, and faces no punishment. He bombs a sovereign nation without even informing Congress, let alone getting authorization, and knows they’ll do nothing.
Trump is the end-point of a process that can be traced back through George Bush and beyond. He’s not merely a rogue fascist, but the culmination of ceding of power to the executive, the refusal to punish US presidents for their war crimes, and the failure to build a real democracy. Césaire’s description of the “imperial boomerang” should look all too familiar now. The Gestapo is kidnapping migrants, the prisons are full, and nothing was done when the CIA torture program was uncovered twenty years ago. The US’s violence around the world has come back to haunt us, and Trump is attacking people at home and abroad. Whatever semblance of democracy we’ve had is crumbling before our eyes, and the people of Venezuela are paying the price, as are countless people right here in our own country.
That fantastic English teacher I had all those years ago during the height of the Iraq war has cancer now. I don’t know how long he has to live. Today, I can’t help but wonder what his future, and our future, would be like if we had a country that invested in curing cancer the way we invest in endless bombs. I can’t help but wonder what this county would look like if we invested in addressing climate change instead of launching wars for oil companies. I can’t help but wonder what life would look like for the people of Venezuela if their most powerful neighbor was a nation that invested in peace instead of relentless violence. We don’t need to go and free Venezuela. We need to free ourselves, and in the process we’ll help free the world. - JP
It seems to me Trump is taking the lead of Netanyahu, who without any accountability accomplished the worst crimes of crimes, attacking several sovereign nations in the process. I think Trump admired Netanyahu for that, and that's maybe one reason Trump supported Bibi as much as he did. Now, Trump is emboldened perhaps more than he ever was, and maybe even want's to out due Bibi, overconfident that there will be nothing to stop him.
“Narco terrorism” means the same thing as “antifa” - words that mean whatever Trump needs them to mean at the moment. It’s kinda like how quickly he figured out “national security” was the magic incantation that made his every desire become real.