With the recent unsealing of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the world is now learning just how corrupt and rotten our world leaders, actors, wealthy people and politicians really are. The files also confirmed what we suspected all along: that Jeffrey Epstein was operating with ties to Israeli intelligence, gathering compromising dossiers on the rich and famous. This revelation underscores a disturbing truth about the depth of foreign influence in American politics.

For decades, the United States has been Israel’s most devoted ally, providing billions in aid that makes us complicit in its ongoing conflicts with its neighbors and the systematic destruction of Gaza. The most recent joint US-Israel attacks on Iran — carried out without a declaration of war by the US Congress — only reiterates that fact. Our collective karma is becoming much heavier, with Americans now being hated in many parts of the world. This interventionist pattern, however, is not limited to the Middle East. In addition to Israel wars with its neighbors throughout its history, our own country has been meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations worldwide.

This is especially evident in Ukraine, where American dollars have helped fuel an ongoing war – displacing tens of millions of people and killing millions of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and civilians alike. While we have been critical of our own disastrous foreign policy, what we failed to fully grasp is the extent to which our own internal and external policies are now being actively influenced by the very nations we support.
​
We have all witnessed the relentless negativity and ridicule directed at President Donald Trump during his first term. Much of it, undoubtedly, originated from our own domestic media and the Democratic Party. However, foreign leaders have also joined the chorus of ridicule, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky being a notable example. Now, in President Trump’s second term, we are seeing a disturbing escalation: nationals from Ukraine are actively meddling in American politics, attempting to shape our domestic discourse and foreign policy decisions.

First, Ukrainian Ambassador Olha Stefanishyna held a rally near the Capitol on February 5 urging Americans to do anything they could to influence Congress to “put the bill on the floor” allowing “Ukraine to defend itself”. She talks about wanting peace, while asking for more arms to continue a war that Ukraine cannot win! On February 21, the Ukrainian diaspora, the Embassy of Ukraine in the United States, and supporters from across America gathered at the Lincoln Memorial – mocking Trump and Putin and protesting the peace deal. Ukrainians imported protesters from New York, Philadelphia, Jersey City, and Raleigh by officially providing buses. Below are a few pictures from the rally in Washington, DC taken from social media.

These individuals were welcomed into our country with open arms. In return, they are disrespecting our leaders and actively conspiring to undermine their peace efforts for their own nation – all because our administration has finally said “no” to endless requests for funding their futile war efforts and lining their leaders’ big pockets.
​
This is not an isolated incident in Washington. Chicago, another city with a Ukrainian consulate, also had a rally on February 21, featuring prominent Jewish-Ukrainians and Democrats. It is a bitter irony to see them protest, seemingly forgetting that Stepan Bandera – the adored hero of the modern neo-Nazi Ukrainian regime – was responsible for the deaths of countless Jews and Poles during World War II.

San Francisco also held a rally on February 22 to commemorate four years of Russia’s advancement into Ukrainian territory, conveniently forgetting that Donbass region was at war with Ukrainian Army for nearly 12 years.
​
What we are witnessing is not spontaneous grassroots activism. It is an enactment of a coordinated directive from December 9, 2025 distributed the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC), Zelensky’s administration, and the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine). The goal is to launch an information war against American leaders who are directly involved in brokering a peace deal for Ukraine (Trump,  JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Stephen Whitkoff and Jared Kushner). According to recently surfaced documents, the plan involves hiring or bribing analysts, politicians, religious leaders and journalists in the US and EU to “prepare analytical materials, articles, and expert opinions that expose Washington’s peace initiatives as contrary to the interests of Ukraine and Europe.” It even calls to “organize peaceful protests or marches,” which we now see unfolding across our country. These plans reveal the sinister agenda of the Ukrainian government and its intelligence services to wage information warfare against the very nation that has been their primary sponsor. Is that the kind of gratitude we expected?

Here’s the translation of the document from the World Ukrainian Congress:

“December 9, 2025
To the Members of the UWC
Dear Compatriots,
The Ukrainian World Congress is observing with deep concern the recent trends in the foreign policy of the United States of America, which pose a direct threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. Statements and initiatives by the administration of President Donald Trump, particularly from key figures such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance, are creating a dangerous precedent for normalizing Kremlin aggression and ignoring the fundamental principles of international law.
In this regard, the Congress considers it necessary to intensify our joint efforts to convey information about the situation in Ukraine to the American and international community from a perspective favorable to us.
To this end, we deem it necessary to:
- Develop a comprehensive information strategy aimed at systematically criticizing the current course of the U.S. administration, which is dangerous for global security and for American values themselves.
- Establish and activate working contacts with reputable analysts, experts in international law, politicians, and journalists in the United States and the European Union who are open to objective dialogue.
- Prepare analytical materials, articles, and expert opinions that expose Washington’s peace initiatives as contrary to the interests of Ukraine and Europe.
- Organize public events—roundtables, conferences, and open discussions—involving prominent scholars, cultural figures, and religious leaders to discuss the futility of the shuttle diplomacy conducted by U.S. Special Envoy Stephen Whitkoff and Jared Kushner, who holds no official position in the U.S. administration.
Organize peaceful pickets or marches near official American embassies and representations to express our concern.
The Ukrainian World Congress will provide the necessary financial and organizational resources to implement this strategy, including support for independent media and expert groups.
Thank you for your attention.
Respectfully,
UKRAINIAN WORLD CONGRESS
Pavlo Grod
President”

The plan’s audacity is breathtaking, but it gets even more bizarre. Their scheme goes as far as to call for public ostracizing and for “correctio fraterna” – fraternal correction practiced in the Catholic Church – to publicly scold Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, and other Catholics of the Trump’s team. Ukrainian leaders have decided that these officials “have violated a whole series of truths from Catholic social doctrine” and that “under the leadership of Donald Trump they have taken positions that are not in line with Catholic moral teachings.” It is rather ironic that this judgment is coming from a country that banned the Russian Orthodox Church, detained or killed its clergy, and continues to persecute religious believers. These mentioned plans were published by Ukrainian opposition blogger Anatoliy Shariy with the actual screenshots and this note:

“Attention!
According to my information, the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, under the direct command of the Service’s first head, General Oleh Sinyansky (he left his post long ago but continues to “work”), is preparing a special operation against Rubio and Vance.
The Foreign Intelligence Service plans to provoke a so-called “public admonition.”
An analysis has been conducted for this purpose, and the Service plans to recruit a number of American and European Catholics and politicians. Some of them will be recruited “blindly.”
This is the Foreign Intelligence Service’s analytical report on this topic.
“Correctio fraternal” is a Christian practice in which one Christian publicly rebukes another Christian for acting in an unchristian manner.
I want you to understand that this is a fully planned special operation by the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine.
The document lists the names of those planned to be recruited.
The operation is planned for the near future.”

Note: A full translation of these screenshots is posted in an appendix below.
​
This is how the Ukrainian leadership under Zelensky – who was already publicly humiliated for his rude behavior at the White House last year – is making efforts to disregard our laws on freedom of religion and separation of church and state. They attempt to influence our top politicians and our next elections by criticizing and ostracizing them, all while using our American money received from the Biden Administration to sponsor protests, riots and media frenzies against the Trump Administration!

We urge the American public to take note of these facts. We must make a clear statement against foreign interference in our internal affairs. It is time to demand that the Trump administration investigate these blatant attempts by foreign governments — whether it is Ukraine, Israel, or the United Kingdom — to wreak havoc among the American public. Their goal is to use American media and institutions to undermine our current leadership and discredit them in the eyes of the people. As if the Epstein files weren’t enough to disillusion us with global corruption and satanic practices, we now must contend with our supposed allies trying to orchestrate a soft coup against our government. Our nation’s working class already has far too many pressing social and economic issues to deal with without this kind of foreign meddling. And with the latest attacks that Trump authorized against Iran to appease Israel, he has just made himself — and us, regular Americans — primary targets for all those who suffer from or disagree with the blatant behavior of the US and Israel.


Appendix: Translation of screens from the post from Anatoliy Shariy
“Public Admonition for Rubio and Vance
In addition to Rubio and Vance, you can also take into account other Catholics in the Trump administration, of whom there are more than a third, such as Sean Duffy, Secretary of Transportation, and others.
1. The Catholic Church has such a practice as correctio fraterna - fraternal admonition. The practice is based on several Bible texts, the main one being the Gospel of Matthew: If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his faults face to face. If he listens to you, you have gained a brother. 16 If he doesn’t listen, take one or two people with you, so that every matter is observed by two or three witnesses. 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell the it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even from the church, let him be as a Gentile to you and a tax collector (Mt 18: 15-17). The principle of applying this admonition is as follows: if the transgression/sin was private in a relationship, then the admonition is private; if the offense was public, then the admonition is public (St. Thomas Aquinas).
2. Such public admonition was applied to Nancy Pelosi (https://sfarchdiocese.org/letter-to-priests-of-the-archdiocese-on-the-notification-sent-to-speaker-nancy-pelosi/) by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, so that Pelosi would withdraw her promotion of abortion policy, and until that time she was not allowed to receive Communion in the Catholic Church. Such admonition was also applied to Pope Francis by approximately 200 Catholic theologians after the release of the document Amoris Laetitia, which contained a number of statements in disagreement with Catholic doctrine (https://www.correctiofilialis.org). In the case of admonishing the Pope, the practice is called correctio filialis – filial admonition.
3. Based on the described practice, it would be worth organizing similar admonition for Marco Rubio and J. D. Vance (and possibly other Catholics on the Trump team) who declare that they are practicing Catholics and are active pro-lifers (opposing the right to abortion). Under the leadership of their leader Donald Trump, they have violated a number of truths in the Catholic doctrine, such as: 1) distortion of the truth (e.g., claiming Ukraine started the war), and 2) the unity of virtue (a Christian must be consistent in his virtues in all areas, and while Rubio and Vance zealously fight against abortion in the United States (for the lives of millions of unborn children), they are at the same time passively allowing genocide to be committed against millions of Ukrainians by stopping military aid, etc.). There is a precedent of Donald Trump being admonished by the Father Jason Charron, a priest of the American Greek Catholic Church, in Crisis Magazine (https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/a-priests-warning-to-trump-regarding-ukraine). This is the same priest who opened a Trump rally with a prayer.
4. Such admonition should be organized in several directions by various people independently from one another and not simultaneously, because this could raise suspicion of a planned and coordinated action.
- The Synod of Bishops of the UGCC (Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church) may appeal to the Apostolic See with a request to intervene and issue such an admonition. It is possible that Blessed Sviatoslav will agree to write such a request, but I do not know how well this may work. The Pope could have written such an admonition, because he does not like Trump, but the Pope is now in serious health condition and is almost incapacitated. Instead, international affairs are being run by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who is known for his pacifist sentiments and ties with China. Concerns remain about what is being sold to Ukraine. In short, I think that first the synod, or individual bishops, should write admonitions directly to the mentioned persons (Rubio and Vance) and publish them in all available English-language media (in particular, LifeSite, The Pillar, https://crisismagazine.com, and popular secular media). Then we can contact the Vatican with a similar request. If the Vatican refuses, at least the position of the Ukrainian dioceses will be on record.
- The Conference of Bishops of the RCC (Roman Catholic Church) may be able to join the Synod if they lead the initiative. The Roman Catholic hierarchs, however, will not risk writing something like this to the leaders of foreign nations. From the list of individual bishops, you can approach Vitaliy Kryvytskyi (Kyiv) and Bishop Pavlo Honcharuk, who heads the Kharkiv-Zaporizhia diocese, where the combat operations are taking place.
- You can try to engage the frontline bishops’ dioceses separately: Bishop Pavlo Honcharuk (RCC, Kharkiv-Zaporozhye Diocese), Bishop Jan Sobilo (RCC, Kharkiv-Zaporozhye Diocese), Bishop Vasyl Tuchapets (Exarch of Kharkiv, UGCC), Bishop Maksym Ryabukha (Exarch of Donetsk UGCC).
If the above directions work, then thank God, although I have little hope.
The following direction may be the most profitable and influential:
- A letter of admonition from hierarchs and Catholic theologians, philosophers, and publicists from all over the world. At the present moment, it is very likely that the letter will be signed by the following individuals:
1) Father Jason Charron, Pennsylvania, famous preacher, the speaker who blessed Trump before the election and prayed for Donald Tramp at the rally when an attempt on his life had been made (https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/a-priests-warning-to-trump-regarding-ukraine).
2) George Weigel, famous publicist, thinker, biographer of St. John Paul II (it can be noted in the letter that Rubio and Vance’s positions differ from those of John Paul II and Ronald Reagan). Here is his position on the war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine: https://credo.pro/2023/08/354092.
3) Professor Dariusz Kowalczyk, Dean of the Faculty of Theology at the Gregorian University in Rome.
4) Fr. Prof. Dariusz Oko, famous Polish theologian, philosopher, professor at John Paul II University (Krakow).
5) Prof. Roberto De Mattei, church historian, professor at the University of Rome, known in conservative Catholic circles, takes a pro-Ukrainian position 1) (YouTube link; https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2024/04/towards-global-war-ducunt-fata-volentem.html?m=1).
6) Professor Jakub Grygiel, professor at rhe Catholic University of America, co-author of the U.S. defense strategy (2017).
7) Prof. Jerzy Szymik, University of Silesia.
You can try to involve the following:
8) Raymond de Souza, a well-known pro-lifer from Canada, publicist in English-language publications, Catholic authority figure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_J._de_Souza).
9) Brant Pitre, an American theologian, belongs to the top 10 authors of 2024 in the USA. His books have been translated into Ukrainian.
10) Christopher West, American theologian, conservative, head of the Institute of the Body of Theology (he has students from Ukraine).
11) Father Mike Schmitz, a well-known speaker and preacher at Catholic conferences and on TV.
12) Scott Hahn, one of the top theologians, has influence on J.D. Vence, founder of the of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology (his participation would be invaluable).
13) You can try to include in this admonition Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone (San Francisco; here is his video where he prays the Rosary for peace in Ukraine - YouTube link).
14) Bishop Joseph Strickland who was dismissed by the Pope Francis but still has great influence in conservative circles in the United States and has rather supported Ukraine. In short, it is worth trying to reach him ( https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/twitter-mass-and-prayer-us-bishops-unite-behind-ukraine).
15) It would be ideal if Robert Barron joined the initiative, an influential American conservative bishop (he has 1.5 million followers on his YouTube channel).
16) I think that Greek-Catholic hierarchs serving in the United States can join the initiative, Metropolitan Archbishop of Philadelphia Borys Gudziak (may have close ties with the Clinton family and Democrats, but in general, as an American UGCC Catholic, he is associated with conservative Catholicism),
17) Bishop Venedikt Alekseychuk, Chicago.
18) Cardinal Mykola Bychok, UGCC Australia.
5. I think that in order to write such an admonition and attract the right people, a working group should be created. This will help with contacts in particular.
6. After starting the admonition itself, you can think about open letters from intellectuals (preferably conservatives), like Douglas Murray, Timothy Snyder, etc.”

Originally published on substack.com/andyreedspolitics.
​Photo (public domain) from Trong Khiem Nguyen.

Hello, my name is Diomer Lopez. I am a Venezuelan student in the Russian Federation, studying international relations. I was born in Caracas and lived there for 25 years. I am a young man devoted to the ethical, moral, and socialist values​​of the homeland of Bolívar and Chávez.

​I am one of those fortunate enough to be a beneficiary of the comprehensive cooperation agreements between Venezuela and Russia, the fruit of Comandante Chávez's strategic vision. This scholarship is not just a personal achievement; it is a historical responsibility: to represent my people, their culture of resistance, and their revolutionary project. I am here to share the views of a generation committed to defending Venezuela's sovereignty and fighting for a multipolar world.

What was your immediate emotional and intellectual reaction when you first heard about the U.S. military operation that captured President Maduro and bombed Caracas?
 
My first reaction was panic and profound grief. Most of my family lives in Caracas, along with millions of my Venezuelan brothers and sisters. I thought of the children, the elderly, and ordinary people who simply want to live in peace. This is a cowardly aggression that sets a terrible precedent in the history of our America.

It is painful to see how imperialism, driven by a thirst for resources and hatred for our sovereign project, sows death among a peaceful people who have provoked no one. Watching from afar as your land is bombed and your constitutional president—a leader of Nicolás Maduro's stature—is torture.

​He is a symbol of resilience, a man of the people whom the empire underestimated but who now stands as a martyr to national dignity. His kidnapping and that of our comrade Cilia Flores is a crime against humanity. The blood of fallen Venezuelan patriots and brave Cuban employees cries out for justice.

Can you describe the mission and core values of your organization, and how these inform your response to international crises like the Maduro abduction and Caracas bombings?
 
We are more a collective than a formal organization: Venezuelan students in Russia, children of the Bolivarian Revolution. Our mission is clear: to obtain an excellent academic education in order to serve the people and the homeland; to strengthen fraternal ties between Venezuela and Russia; to be voices of the truth about our process.

Our values ​​are the legacy of Bolívar, and Chávez: sovereignty, anti-imperialism, social justice, international solidarity, and the unconditional defense of the self-determination of peoples. Therefore, our response to this aggression is firm and decisive. This is not simply an attack on Venezuela; it is an attack on all peoples who dare to be free.

We condemn the kidnapping of our leaders and the criminal bombings as a flagrant violation of international law, driven by the same genocidal Monroe Doctrine that imperialism is reworking today.

It has now been one month since this incident has taken place, what are your feelings now compared to the first day?
 
The pain hasn't disappeared, but it has transformed into a firm resolve. The initial panic has given way to organization and struggle. Venezuelans are a peaceful people, but also possess an unwavering strength forged over years of resistance.

Today, more than ever, we are activating all mechanisms of peaceful, diplomatic, and militant denunciation. We continue to demand the immediate and unconditional release of President Maduro and an end to aggression. We do not harbor hatred, because hatred does not build; we cherish a revolutionary conviction: we will not allow Venezuela to be turned into a bombed-out backyard.

We believe in peace diplomacy, but also in civil-military-police-popular unity, which is stronger today than ever. Our hope is militant, and our confidence that we will return to our historical course is absolute.

What actions are you taking as a student in Moscow to raise awareness about the ongoing situation in Venezuela?
 
Mobilization and unity among Venezuelan students and friends of Venezuela in Russia are crucial. We have organized discussion groups, cultural and political events, and solidarity gatherings at the Venezuelan Embassy in Russia. We are disseminating truthful information, countering the virulent media campaign.

We are collaborating with fraternal organizations like the Komsomol and Russian anti-imperialist groups, explaining that what is happening in Venezuela is a rehearsal for what the empire plans against all sovereign countries. Our actions are to demonstrate, by example and by word, the essence of Venezuelans: a dignified, cultured, united, and deeply revolutionary people.

How do you view the response from Russia, China and the Global South/BRICS nations to these events?
 
The response from Russia, China, the BRICS countries, and the Global South was firm, clear, and commendable. They unanimously condemned the aggression as an illegal act and a dangerous return to the law of the jungle in international relations.

They demanded the release of President Maduro and respect for Venezuela's sovereignty.

This position is no accident; it embodies the multipolar world we are building in opposition to Washington's unipolar hegemony. It demonstrates that Venezuela is not alone, that it has strategic allies who understand that defending Caracas is defending the sovereignty of each of their own countries. This is a common front against 21st-century neocolonialism.

What conversations are happening among students and activists in Moscow about Venezuela’s crisis? For example, your collaboration with the Komsomol
 
The discussions are deep and strategic. Together with Komsomol and other groups, we analyze how the attack on Venezuela is the spearhead of an imperial offensive aimed at recolonizing Latin America and halting the advance of a multipolar world. We discuss how this aggression, if left unchecked, could escalate into a global conflict, threatening world peace. Concrete solidarity is also being strengthened, from political statements to information campaigns.

My collaboration is based on providing the living testimony of a young Chavista, explaining the popular essence of our Revolution and the brutality of aggression, thereby strengthening the bridges of shared struggle between our peoples.

What strategies or events have you found effective (or not) in raising awareness on your campus or social network about Venezuela’s situation?
 
The most effective approach is to combine emotional truth with political analysis. On social media, share direct testimonies from Venezuela, images of destruction and popular resistance, along with clear geopolitical data and explanations. In-person events at universities featuring testimonies from Venezuelan students, documentaries, and open debates have a profound impact.

Using cold language or simply repeating slogans is ineffective. We need to appeal to both the heart and the mind, showing Venezuela not as an abstract concept, but as a flesh-and-blood people under attack. As a young man from Barão, I know that people trust those who speak authentically, so my voice strives to be a bridge of truth.
 
How do you evaluate Delcy Rodríguez’s leadership and decisions since Maduro’s removal? What signals has her government sent to Venezuelans and the world?
 
First of all, it must be clarified: there was no "removal." There was the illegal kidnapping of our constitutional president. Comrade Delcy Rodríguez, faithful to the Bolivarian Constitution and appointed by President Maduro himself, has assumed the duties of the President of the Republic. Her leadership has been exceptional: firm, calm, and deeply Bolivarian. She has sent a crystal-clear message to the world: there is no power vacuum in Venezuela; there is unity between the command and the people.

The Bolivarian government remains in place, united and fighting. Her message is one of institutional strength, loyalty to the captured leader, and unwavering defense of sovereignty. She has succeeded, as never before, in uniting the National Armed Forces, the militias, popular groups, and the entire Chavista people into a single resistance bloc. This is a practical demonstration that the Revolution is a collective project, not the work of a single individual.

How do ordinary Venezuelans you’ve spoken with (if any) perceive Rodríguez’s role — as a defender of sovereignty, a placeholder, or something else?
 
Venezuelan patriots, the overwhelming majority of our people, see in Comrade Delsi a leader in whom we have complete confidence at this historic moment. She is not a "temporary figure" in the weak sense of the word; she is an acting president who guarantees the continuity of the Bolivarian project amidst the storm. She is perceived as a fierce defender of sovereignty, a first-class diplomat now leading the fight from the front lines. She is the rightful heir, at this testing moment, to the trust placed in her by Chávez and Maduro. The people stand with her, working side by side, because they understand that her leadership is an essential part of defending the homeland.

What future do you see for the Bolivarian Revolution and Chavismo?
 
A future of victory and deepening. The Bolivarian Revolution and Chavismo are not phenomena dependent on an isolated event, no matter how tragic. They represent the organized consciousness of a people who have awakened. This aggression, far from ending us, has forged us. Chavismo will emerge from this ordeal stronger, more united, more radically committed to building 21st-century socialism.
We will continue, with Maduro freed or inspired by his example in captivity, to build the just, sovereign homeland and global power that Bolívar and Chávez dreamed of. The future is ours, because history and morality are on our side.

In your view, what are the core principles of the Bolivarian Revolution that remain resilient, even after such a dramatic geopolitical rupture?

Principles that will never fall: 

1) National sovereignty or death, a sacred and non-negotiable principle.
2) Anti-imperialism as a condition of freedom.
3) Social justice and preferential choice for the poor.
4) Civil-military unity as a pillar of national defense.
5) Latin American and Caribbean integration as an irreversible path.
6) Participatory and protagonistic democracy, not elite democracy.
7) Internationalist solidarity.

These principles are seared by fire into the collective of the Venezuelan people. Military aggression does not erase them; it transforms them into fighting slogans and reasons for existing as a free nation.

How do you define “Socialism of the 21st Century” as a concept, and how is it distinct from Chavismo and Bolivarianism in theory and practice?
 
Bolivarianism has a historical root: the struggle for independence, the unity of Gran Colombia, and social justice inspired by Simón Bolívar. Chavismo is the concrete, historical, and popular embodiment of this ideology in the context of neoliberal capitalism at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is a political and social movement, a leadership, and an emotional connection with the people that made the Revolution possible.
 
21st-century socialism is a strategic horizon, a blueprint for society that we are building on the foundations of Chavismo and Bolivarianism. It is our American socialism, non-dogmatic, nourished by participatory democracy, a diversified economy with public ownership, an ethic of the common good, and social ecology. In practice, Chavismo is the engine, Bolivarianism is the historical soul, and 21st-century socialism is the construct we are collectively constructing.

At a time, these ideologies were models for Latin American nations, and continental integration, going forward, can Venezuela reclaim its position as a continental leader?
 
Not only can, but must and will. This brutal aggression has once again placed Venezuela at the center of the battle for continental dignity. Our heroic resistance is already a beacon of inspiration for all the peoples of Our America.

Once we defeat this invasion and free our president, Venezuela will emerge not as a "leader" in the hegemonic sense, but as a people symbolizing the ability to defeat the most powerful empire. It will become the core of a new, more powerful wave of anti-imperialist integration, based on genuine cooperation, complementarity, and shared sovereignty. ALBA-TCP, CELAC, and Petrocaribe will be reborn with renewed vigor thanks to the Venezuelan example.

How do you balance academic demands and activist commitments while engaging with such a high-stakes geopolitical issue?
 
This is a daily challenge that I embrace with revolutionary discipline. My activism is part of my academic training. What I study in theory (international law, geopolitics, diplomacy), I live out in practice, defending my homeland. I organize my time strictly: mornings and afternoons for studying and working on my dissertation, evenings and weekends for political work, drafting communiqués, and organizing events. These are not separate spheres; they feed each other. Defending Venezuela in Moscow is the most sublime and ethical application of what I learn in the classroom. It is "doing" alongside "thinking," as Che taught us.

How will these events impact Cuba in the near future? US postures towards Havana are, to put it lightly, heated
 
The aggression against Venezuela is a direct blow to the heart of ALBA and a warning to Cuba. Imperialism dreams of overthrowing the Bolivarian Revolution, so it can then strangle and attack the Cuban Revolution with greater force. However, this action has had the opposite effect: it has strengthened the unbreakable Cuba-Venezuela alliance. Cuba, with its historical dignity, has redoubled its support and solidarity with Venezuela. Events prove that the struggle is one and the same. Instead of isolating Cuba, this crisis will demonstrate to the world the nobility of its internationalism and the baseness of the genocidal blockade supported by Washington. The near future will be a time of greater tension, but also of more active international solidarity with both sister revolutions.

How has engaging with this issue impacted you personally — emotionally, intellectually, or in terms of your future goals?

Emotionally, it was a crucible. I experienced sadness, anger, but also an indescribable pride in witnessing the resilience of my people. Intellectually, it was the most intense lesson of my life: I understood firsthand the brutality of imperialism and the sublime power of popular organization. This experience redefined my goals. I no longer strive simply to be a good internationalist or diplomat. I strive to be a soldier of the ideas of Bolívar and Chávez, a constant bridge between struggling peoples.

My personal dream is to return to a Venezuela living in peace, with its sovereignty fully restored and our President Nicolás Maduro liberated, to contribute all my acquired experience and, wherever needed, to continue serving the construction of socialism and the Great Homeland.

As our Eternal Commander said: “Until victory, always! We will live and we will win!”
​

This article by Jaime Ortega appeared in the February 2nd, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.
​
The bond between Cuba and Mexico is deeply rooted. Sympathy for the independence and revolutionary movements on the island is as old as the movements themselves. This sentiment was strengthened by the Mexican exiles, at different times, of the “three M’s”: Martí, Mella, and Marinello. They were joined by other figures such as Raúl Roa, who in his Return to the Dawn defined Morelos as “a great civil hero of Mexico,” Juárez as “great for being a hero, a revolutionary, and an indigenous person,” and Cárdenas as “the most formidable leader of the Mexican Revolution.”
​
In the Communist Party of Mexico, the figure of the Cuban [Julio Antonio] Mella was, of course, legendary. His assassination in the streets of the Juárez neighborhood made him an icon for communists in both nations. Benita Galeana’s testimony has revealed the clandestine and heroic way in which Mella’s ashes were smuggled out of Mexico in 1933. Meanwhile, in 1934, the Mexican section of the International Red Aid (IRA) worked alongside the League of Revolutionary Armed Forces (LEAR) and the Hands Off Cuba campaign, demanding non-intervention on the island, based on the similarity of the aggressions: in Mexico in 1914 and on the island two decades later. Other Cuban voices and writers made their presence felt in the Mexican cultural scene; one significant figure was Loló de la Torriente (cousin of the legendary journalist Pablo de la Torriente, who died in the Spanish Civil War), a frequent contributor to the newspaper El Machete.

However, of all the figures who shared a passion for solidarity with the Cuban people, General Cárdenas is undoubtedly the most important, and rightly so. It is not surprising that from 1936 onward, numerous expressions of friendship were extended from the island toward the revolutionary actions of the man from Michoacán, since by the time the general assumed the presidency, the Cuban Revolution of 1933 had already overthrown the infamous Gerardo Machado. An episode recounted by Ángel Gutiérrez, among others, in Lázaro Cárdenas and Cuba sheds light on the mutual commitment between the Cuban revolutionaries and the popular Mexican leader.
​
The most intense period was in 1938, when, following the oil expropriation, numerous articles appeared honoring and defending both the act and the Mexican President. In addition to Juan Marinello, well-known to Mexicans, Salvador Massip, José Luciano Franco, and Ángel Augier spoke out in defense of Mexican sovereignty. Franco stated that Cárdenas’s actions had broken “with the inferiority complex imposed on the countries of our America by financiers.” Words turned to action, and a group, including Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, head of the Friends of the Committee for a Tribute to Mexico, set about contacting the Mexican ambassador on the island. Marinello, for his part, approached Francisco J. Múgica to request that the president address the Cuban people. Múgica convinced his former comrade-in-arms, and Cárdenas agreed.

Thus, on June 12, 1938, a large rally in support of Mexico was held at La Polar Stadium in Havana, attended by thousands. Admission was 10 cents, and the proceeds were earmarked to support the expropriation, making it reasonable to assume that part of the nationalization was paid for with the sweat of the Cuban people. Cárdenas delivered a radio address from Tampico, stating that the “political and spiritual” autonomy of the Latin American republics would be crippled “if a concept of solidarity among their peoples is not affirmed.” Carlos Prío Socarrás, Lázaro Peña, and Marinello himself also spoke at the Havana stadium.

The Cuban rally was one of the most significant demonstrations in support of the oil expropriation outside of Mexico, and the island was among the countries that most strongly supported it in the face of the oil companies’ boycott.

It is no coincidence that, decades later, in 1961, a group of intellectuals—among them another friend of revolutionary Cuba, Revueltas—published an article in the newspaper Hoja Revolucionaria with the headline: “Not sending oil to Cuba is betraying the oil expropriation.”

The fact that General Cárdenas was no longer in power did not prevent him from expressing his firm support for the cause of the sister nation, a cause that found its epicenter in the Latin American Conference for National Sovereignty, Economic Independence, and Peace, which was attended by, among others, Vilma Espín.
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Many years after General Cárdenas’s death, in 1995, Commander Fidel Castro evoked the Michoacán native while attending an event in the Plaza de la Revolución, where he remembered him “struggling with his usual sobriety, deeply moved and with an exalted spirit. His speech was a torrent of revolutionary and Latin American fervor.” The fact that the two countries immediately south of the border with the United States had to undergo several revolutions to establish their sovereignty is indicative of the nature of their nationalism: defensive and united in the face of aggression.

Author

Jaime Ortega is the Director of Memoria, the Magazine of Militant Criticism, a researcher at UAM, the author of La raíz nacional-popular: las izquierdas más allá de la transición, and co-author of The Plebeian Roots of Mexican Democracy.

At the turn of the millennium, Russia teetered on a precarious geo-political edge. A nation scarred by the wild 1990’s, grappling with whether to cling to the chaotic promises of neo-liberal reform, or reclaim echoes of its ironclad Soviet resolve. The economy was a rotting corpse, being feasted upon by oligarchs, whose loyalty to Moscow’s interests was dubious. Russia had just endured a decade of hyperinflation, privatization scandals, financial collapse in 1998, and the borders of the USSR fractured into 15 squabbling republics with their own regional wars. Enter, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, an enigmatic former KGB officer who reveres Yuri Andropov and Peter the Great as equals. The Yeltsin-era oligarchs dismissively call Putin a ‘grey blur’, unremarkable, unthreatening, yet he was relentlessly ascending.

Putin's climb was a masterclass of political maneuvering, Deputy Mayor in St. Petersburg, where he navigated corruption and reform under Anatoly Sobchak, then director of the FSB in 1998, restoring discipline to the security services, briefly Prime Minister in 1999, and finally acting president on New Year's Eve 1999, when a weary Boris Yeltsin abruptly resigned. Putin’s swift election in March 2000 was sealed by a decisive military campaign in the Second Chechen War, which projected strength and order amid the chaos. Russians woke up, and for the first time in over a decade, they had faith in the future.

One of his earliest and most symbolic acts as president struck at the heart of Russia's fractured identity: the restoration of the Soviet-era state anthem, composed by Alexander Alexandrov in 1944 and long associated with Joseph Stalin's era. The tune, majestic, stirring, unmistakably martial, had been discarded in 1990 by Yeltsin, who replaced it with Mikhail Glinka's wordless ‘Patriotic Song,’ a 19th-century instrumental piece meant to evoke pre-revolutionary Russia without communist baggage. But Glinka's melody never resonated, failing to inspire a nation adrift. In December 2000, Putin pushed through legislation to revive Alexandrov's music, but with fresh lyrics by Sergei Mikhalkov, the very poet who penned the original Soviet words in 1943 and revised them in 1977.

The new verses spoke of a ‘sacred’ Russia, vast and enduring, ‘protected by God,’ blending patriotic fervor with subtle nods to tradition while purging references to Lenin, communism, or the ‘unbreakable union.’ The move ignited fierce debate. Communists cheered the return of a familiar rallying cry; many ordinary Russians, polls showed, favored it for its emotional power.

Yet liberals and Yeltsin loyalists decried it as a step backward, evoking ‘Stalinist repressions’ even if the words were sanitized. The ailing former president Boris Yeltsin, in his first public criticism of his handpicked successor, reacted with quiet dismay. When a reporter asked if he had known of Putin's plans, Yeltsin shook his head. Pressed for his thoughts on the revived anthem, he offered a single, loaded word: ‘Krasnenko’ —reddish, a sly evocation of the Bolshevik ‘Reds’ and a subtle jab at the creeping revival of Soviet shades. In this one act, Putin signaled his vision: not a full return to the past, but a selective reclamation, fusing imperial symbols (like the retained tricolor flag and double-headed eagle) with Soviet strength to heal a divided nation.

It was a masterstroke of symbolism, setting the tone for an era where order, pride, and continuity would trump the raw uncertainties of the Yeltsin years. Russia, under its new helmsman, was charting a course neither fully West nor East, but unmistakably its own.Yet it must be emphasized: the yearning for restored Soviet prestige and stability was not a mere top-down imposition, but a profound grassroots aspiration among ordinary Russians.

As the red banner was solemnly lowered over the Kremlin on December 25, 1991, replaced by the tricolor of a new Russia, the dissolution of the USSR felt like a profound national trauma to many. Just nine months earlier, in the landmark March 17, 1991 referendum, an overwhelming majority had voiced their desire to preserve the union. With an 80% turnout across the nine participating republics, 76.4% of voters (over 113 million people) affirmed the preservation of the USSR as a ‘renewed federation of equal sovereign republics,’ one guaranteeing human rights for all nationalities.

This was no coerced outcome; it reflected a genuine public sentiment that the Soviet Union should evolve and modernize, not evaporate. Russians, along with millions across the multinational state, did not crave a return to ‘Stalinist repression’ or rigid central planning in its harshest form. They yearned for reform: abundant consumer goods on store shelves (ending the chronic shortages of the late Brezhnev era), peaceful détente with the West after decades of Cold War tension, and technological leaps to rival global powers.

Perestroika and glasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev had kindled hope for exactly that, a revitalized socialism with a human face. At first, it appeared the Gorbachev-Yeltsin tandem might deliver. Yet disillusionment set in almost immediately. The Belovezhka Accords, signed in secret by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus in December 1991, unilaterally declared the USSR dissolved, overriding the referendum's clear mandate without further public consultation.

For millions, this felt like an elite betrayal. The ensuing ‘shock therapy’ under Yeltsin, rapid privatization, price liberalization, and market opening, unleashed hyperinflation (peaking at over 2,500% in 1992), factory closures, unpaid wages, and a plunge in living standards. Pensioners scavenged for food, once-proud industrial workers faced unemployment, oligarchs amassed fortunes through rigged auctions of state assets. This chaos fueled enduring nostalgia. Independent polls by the Levada Center, tracking sentiments since the early 1990s, consistently show a majority regretting the USSR's collapse, peaking at 75% in 2000, dipping to a low of 49% in 2012 amid economic recovery, but climbing again to around 63-66% in recent years.

Respondents cite the loss of a unified economy, social guarantees (free healthcare, education, jobs), and superpower status.

In the wake of economic devastation and national humiliation, Russians turned decisively to the ballot box, overwhelmingly backing candidates who promised to reverse the chaotic course of radical neo-liberal reforms and restore a sense of order, dignity, and social protection. Such as in the December 1993 parliamentary elections, held just months after Yeltsin's violent standoff with the old Supreme Soviet, a crisis that saw tanks shelling the White House in Moscow. Voters delivered a stunning rebuke to the pro-reform forces: Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), a bombastic outfit blending populist rage with imperial nostalgia, shocked the world by capturing 22.9% of the proportional vote, emerging as the largest single party bloc with 64 seats.

Zhirinovsky, the fiery showman who had already placed third in the 1991 presidential race with nearly 8% of the vote, railed against corruption, crime, and the loss of superpower status, vowing to protect "ordinary Russians" and reclaim lost territories.Close behind were the resurgent communists, with Gennady Zyuganov's Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) securing about 12% and 48 seats. Pro-Yeltsin blocs like Russia's Choice limped in with just 15.5%.

Two years later, in the December 1995 Duma elections, the tide turned even more decisively leftward. The CPRF, now a disciplined opposition force channeling widespread nostalgia for Soviet-era stability, triumphed with 22.3% of the proportional vote and a total of 157 seats, nearly 35% of the chamber, making it the dominant faction in a parliament increasingly hostile to Yeltsin's agenda.

Zyuganov, a shrewd ideologue who blended Marxist rhetoric with Russian patriotism and admiration for China's gradualist reforms, positioned the CPRF as the voice of the dispossessed: pensioners hit by hyperinflation, workers facing unpaid wages, and citizens yearning for guaranteed jobs, healthcare, and national pride. He criticized "shock therapy" as reckless, reportedly questioning how Russia could compress into mere years what had taken advanced capitalist nations like the United States a century to achieve. Zyuganov advocated a ‘measured’ path, state control over strategic industries, social welfare restoration, and inspiration from Deng Xiaoping's China rather than blind Western imitation.

He also dangled the dream of Eurasian reintegration: not a forced Soviet revival, but a voluntary union of equal republics, echoing the unfulfilled promises of Gorbachev's New Union Treaty while appealing to those mourning the USSR's abrupt dissolution.

By early 1996, with the CPRF commanding parliament and polls showing Zyuganov as the frontrunner, the presidential election loomed as a potential turning point. In the first round on June 16, Zyuganov took 32%, narrowly trailing Yeltsin's 35%. The runoff on July 3 became a fierce referendum on the 1990s: Yeltsin, bolstered by oligarch-funded media blitzes framing the choice as ‘reforms or red revenge,’ eked out victory with 53.8% to Zyuganov's 40.3%.

Allegations of irregularities, media bias, vote manipulation in regions like Tatarstan, and oligarch influence swirled, but Zyuganov ultimately accepted the results.

These electoral surges were unmistakable evidence of the Russian people's profound desperation: a cry for stability amid plunging living standards, for the restoration of state benefits eroded by privatization, for reclaimed superpower prestige in a world where Russia felt diminished, and for renewed faith in a collective future rather than the atomized uncertainties of wild capitalism. The groundswell from below, not elite machination, created the political space for a figure promising disciplined renewal, one who would soon emerge to harness this longing without fully reverting to the communist past.

To communists, nationalists, and ordinary citizens alike, the towering figure of Joseph Stalin resonated deeply in the turbulent post-Soviet years, a symbol not of unalloyed terror, but of unyielding strength in an era when Russia felt weak and adrift. Stalin's own grandson, Yevgeny Yakovlevich Dzhugashvili (1936–2016), a retired Soviet Air Force colonel and fierce defender of his grandfather's legacy, emerged as a vivid embodiment of this reverence.

Living between Russia and his ancestral Georgia, Yevgeny became politically active in the 1990s, positioning himself as a vocal Stalinist. In the 1999 State Duma elections, he featured prominently as one of the leading faces, often listed third on the federal ticket, of the radical ‘Stalin Bloc – For the USSR,’ a coalition of hardline communist groups including Viktor Anpilov's Labor Russia and the Union of Officers.Despite the electoral disappointment, Yevgeny's visibility underscored a broader trend: Stalin's image, officially denounced by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 and further marginalized under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was undergoing a profound grassroots rehabilitation. Independent polls by the Levada Center, tracking public opinion since the late Soviet era, reveal Stalin consistently topping lists of Russia's "most outstanding" historical figures.

The Russians were famished for that same ironclad resolve, they wanted their country to be pushed into the future, for a bright and vibrant future to be in the present, no longer a fairy tale promised by faltering and sickly authorities. Stalin's enduring appeal, carried in banners through Red Square and etched in public memory, laid bare a society's profound yearning: not for tyranny's return, but for the certainty of greatness restored.

Vladimir Putin's presidency swiftly delivered on the Russian public's deepest cravings for order, strength, and reclaimed dignity, outpacing Gennady Zyuganov's resurgent Communist Party in electoral landslides that underscored a national pivot toward disciplined renewal over nostalgic revival. In his first term, Putin secured reelection in March 2004 with a commanding 71.3% of the vote, dwarfing the Communist candidate Nikolai Kharitonov's meager 13.7% (Zyuganov sat out the race, endorsing a proxy). Eight years later, returning for a third term in March 2012, Putin captured 63.6%, again relegating Zyuganov to a distant second with just 17.2%.

These margins reflected not rejection of communist ideas per se, but endorsement of Putin's pragmatic fusion of state authority and market stability, delivering what Zyuganov promised without the ideological and historical baggage.

Central to this appeal was Putin's decisive taming of the Second Chechen War. Launched in 1999 amid separatist incursions and apartment bombings by Chechen militants. Even more resonant was Putin's confrontation with the Yeltsin-era oligarchs, widely reviled as ‘social parasites’ who had plundered national wealth through rigged privatizations, showing no loyalty to the motherland while millions sank into poverty. In the 1990s, figures like Boris Berezovsky pulled strings behind Yeltsin's throne, turning the president into what critics called a marionette.

Putin flipped the script dramatically. Shortly after his inauguration, in the summer of 2000, he convened Russia's most powerful tycoons for a pivotal gathering, accounts from participants like banker Sergei Pugachev place it symbolically at Joseph Stalin's preserved Kuntsevo dacha (also known as Blizhnyaya Dacha) on Moscow's outskirts, a site evoking the Soviet leader’s purges and absolute power.

There, amid the unchanged relics of Stalin's office and couch, Putin reportedly laid down the law: keep your amassed fortunes, ‘but stay out of politics and out of my way’. The message was unmistakable, state authority trumped private empires.

A parallel meeting on July 28, 2000, brought 21 oligarchs to the Kremlin, where Putin pledged no reversal of privatizations in exchange for their political neutrality. Most complied, transforming from kingmakers into a school of frightened fish. Defiers faced ruin: Berezovsky, the media and oil magnate who helped engineer Putin's rise, fled to exile in London by 2001 amid embezzlement probes. The starkest example was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man and head of oil giant Yukos. Convicted of fraud and tax evasion in trials, he spent a decade in prison. Yukos was dismantled, its prime assets absorbed by state-controlled Rosneft, reasserting government dominance over strategic energy sectors.

These moves struck a chord with a public long seething at oligarchic excess, polls consistently showed overwhelming approval for reining in the tycoons. Putin also prioritized rebuilding the Russian military, ravaged by underfunding and defeat in the First Chechen War. Increased budgets, professionalization efforts, and reforms aimed at modernizing forces restored another pillar of national prestige, signaling Russia's return as a formidable power.

In harnessing grassroots demands for justice, security, and strength, without fully dismantling markets, Putin forged a new compact: loyalty to the state in exchange for stability and pride. It was precisely the resolve Russians had hungered for, propelling his own enduring popularity with Russians.
Meanwhile, the reverence for Joseph Stalin has not faded but evolved into bolder, more public expressions, weaving his legacy deeper into the fabric of contemporary Russian identity. No longer confined to Communist Party rallies or academic debates, Stalin's image has appeared in unexpected sanctuaries: Orthodox churches and cathedrals, where frescoes and icons depict him alongside saints.

​Notable examples include controversial paintings showing the blind saint Matrona of Moscow blessing Stalin during World War II, a legend the Russian Orthodox Church deems unverified, or mosaics in military cathedrals placing him beneath the Virgin Mary with Soviet marshals. These depictions, often donor-funded and sparking outrage from church hierarchies and liberals alike, blend sacred iconography with wartime heroism, framing Stalin as a divinely inspired leader who saved Russia from existential threat.

Russians view him as the quintessential embodiment of national greatness, outpolling Peter I (the modernizer) and Pushkin (the cultural icon) in surveys spanning the 2010s and 2020s, with approval of his role reaching record highs around 70%. This revival carries the quiet but unmistakable endorsement of the Kremlin, which sees selective ‘Stalinism’ as a pragmatic tool for statecraft: mobilizing patriotism, justifying strong centralized rule, and equating past victories with present challenges. Since Putin's ascent in 2000, over 100 new monuments to Stalin, busts, statues, and plaques, have been erected across Russia, from regional towns to Moscow's metro stations, with the pace accelerating after 2014 and again post-2022.

The annual May 9 Victory Day parades on Red Square have grown ever more spectacular under Putin, evolving from modest 1990s events into massive spectacles of military might, featuring thousands of troops, advanced weaponry, and overt Soviet symbolism, red banners, hammers and sickles, and occasional Stalin portraits carried by participants. These ceremonies, blending imperial eagles with communist stars, reinforce a narrative of unbroken triumph.

To the average Russian, equating Stalin with Peter the Great feels natural, both are archetypes of resolute leadership that forged greatness from adversity, delivering prestige and security. This synthesis underpins the Kremlin's broader historical reconciliation: portraying the Soviet era not as an aberration, but as one illustrious chapter in a continuous millennium-spanning saga of Russian statehood, tracing back to the legendary Varangian prince Rurik, who in 862 founded the Rurikid dynasty at Ladoga (or Novgorod), laying the foundations of Old Rus'—the cradle of East Slavic civilization. In this seamless tapestry, tsars, commissars, and modern leaders alike are threads in an eternal story of resilience and sovereignty.

The image of Joseph Stalin has once again been optimized for the modern era of Russia, with the launch of Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine, Stalin evokes national defense against existential outside threats. Official narratives characterize the SMO as ‘finishing the fight our grandfathers started,’ a direct continuation of the Soviet Union's 1941–1945 battle against Nazi invasion. This rhetoric portrays the conflict not merely as denazification, eradicating Banderite neo-Nazism rooted in Stepan Bandera's collaborationist legacy, but as a broader defense of Russia's survival against a hostile West. Just as Operation Barbarossa in 1941 aimed at the USSR's annihilation, today's confrontation is depicted as encirclement by NATO powers salivating at Russia's potential downfall, with Ukraine as a proxy battlefield.

This linkage amplifies Stalin's wartime role as supreme commander, overshadowing his repressions while reinforcing themes of sacrifice and unity against fascism. Central to this worldview is the enduring concept of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians as fraternal East Slavic peoples, branches of a historic "triune" nation (Great Russians, Little Russians, and White Russians) whose bonds trace to Rurik’s old Russian state of 862 Rus. The 1991 Soviet dissolution is mourned as an artificial severance of this organic whole, with Ukraine's post-Maidan drift toward the West seen as a tragic mistake. Reintegration, restores what was lost.

As Winston Churchill warned in his June 18, 1940, House of Commons speech amid Britain's darkest hour: "If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future." In Russia's telling, embracing the past, its victories, its strong leaders, its undivided Slavic kinship, secures the future against division and defeat.

By 2020, independent Levada Center polling revealed that 75% of Russians regarded the Soviet era as the ‘greatest time’ in their country's history, a sentiment deepest among older generations who endured the 1990s' chaos, yet pervasive across society as a rebuke to that decade's hardships rather than a plea for communism's full return. The erection of new Stalin monuments has accelerated since 2022, with dozens added amid the conflict, busts in regional towns, reliefs in Moscow's metro, signaling a bolder public embrace of his legacy as victor and unifier. In 2025 alone, 15 Stalin monuments were built across Russia, not including smaller busts or facades which are also plentiful.

As 2026 dawns, Russia's selective reclamation of its Soviet past persists, with Stalin's shadow lengthening not as a call to revive socialism, but as a tool for historical reconciliation, satiating opposition through nostalgic symbols of prestige and unyielding resolve. Depicted as a ‘strong helmsman’ guiding the nation through storms, devoid of Marxist-Leninist or collectivist rhetoric, his image bolsters Kremlin statecraft amid the Special Military Operation's trials. Levada's 2025 poll crowns him history's most outstanding figure for 42% of Russians, while over 120 monuments now stand, including seven unveiled in May 2025 alone, like the Moscow Metro restoration at Taganskaya.

In Churchill's words, avoiding quarrels with the past secures Russia's future—eternal, undivided, and most certainly, great.
 

In 1935, in the midst of an era giving birth to the mass reproducibility of art, the German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin writes that what “withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” The uniqueness and authenticity of the original – which forms the fundamental basis of its “aura” – is spoiled when the mechanical reproduction of art is put in place. While such development does have a democratizing potential – one which was put to work by the 20th century world communist movement, which greatly brought culture to the mass of people through these means – in the capitalist West, the mass reproducibility of art and culture has been subsumed under the logic of profit, and hence primarily is found in the culture industry’s “pop” forms of constantly repeated flat “art.”

The logic of mass reproducibility and the loss of authenticity and originality that is conjoined to it is far from being limited merely to culture, of course. One can see the same process at play all across society. I wish to explore here the ways in which it is operative at the level of statesmanship.

With no reference to Benjamin’s work, but employed in a manner which overlaps with it, the term “aura” has become increasingly popular with the youth. “Aura farming” is a concept often employed to describe actions taken (and, of course, recorded) which increase the aura of the subject engaging in it – that is, which enhance their image as unique, original, and cool.

Some might be surprised to see that one of the most common usages of such concepts I have witnessed is in edits made of leaders of the multipolar world like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, and Ayatollah Khamenei.

With Xi you often see his iconic image riding in the Hongqi parade inspection vehicle, demonstrating the unique military might of the People's Republic of China.

With Putin it could be anything from him holding a puppy to him giving a speech calling out the Janus-faced character of the West’s discourse on human rights.

With Kim it is almost always the masterful edits of him inspecting his ballistic missiles.

And finally, with the Ayatollah Khamenei, his aura stems from a deep ascetic and spiritual presence captured by his lectures or discussions with the Iranian people.

In each case, the presence – the aura – of these great statesmen is felt, even by those from the regions of the world who’ve only been taught to see them as “evil pariahs.”

It is an interesting thought experiment to contrast the aura attached to these leaders with the replaceability of the Western ones. Western leaders, from the US to Europe and their puppets around the Western hemisphere, are thoroughly aura deficient. The edits the White House has recently made trying to make Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth look tough come off as cringe. Their attempt to “aura farm” on eroded soil produces only bad harvests – and the people can plainly see it.

The Western politicians, like the pop culture which predominates them, is mass reproducible. There is no aura in any of them – they are all unoriginal, inauthentic reproductions. Just as their productions of culture– subsumed under the logic of profit – only result in inauthentic and superficial art (postmodern art, the art which Fredric Jameson said embodies the cultural logic of contemporary capitalism), the statesmen produced have the same superficiality, depthlessness, and reproducibility.

While their form might change here and there, their common hollowness of originality remains. They are vehicles whose content is always the same – upholding the US-dominated world capitalist-imperialist order. The perfect metaphor for the Western politician is that of an M&M candy – the outside might have different colors, but internally they are all the same.

Creatively employing the framework developed by Benjamin helps us understand the disparities in aura between the Western leaders and the leaders of the multipolar world. Western leaders are embedded within the system of profit and debt-driven mass reproducibility, and hence, they have no aura. The leaders of the multipolar world, on the other hand, have had to take the revolutionary act – as Slavoj Zizek calls it – to break with the dominant order of U.S. super-imperialism.

This act, or, to put it in the terms employed by Alain Badiou, this event, is a rupture with the fabric of the world of profit-driven mass reproducibility. Hence, it stands with uniqueness, originality, and irreplaceability. This is where the aura comes from – the revolutionary stance, or break, they perform to the established order. Xi, Putin, Khamenei, Kim, Traore, Diaz-Canel, Ortega, Sheinbaum, Maduro, etc. all have aura because of their position – in relation to the dominant social order – as revolutionaries.

The cost of alignment with the dominant order today, then, is aura deficiency. No amount of “hard edits” can overcome this lack. Aura carries with it a presence which manifests itself precisely through a tangible absence. It cannot get easily pinned down, as you could, for instance, a fashion item. This is why it cannot be cheaply reproduced by the imperialists; aura is the terrain of an authentic rupture.

​Aura is a mark of originality and authenticity, and in today’s world, the only statesmen with it are those that have taken the courageous risk, the revolutionary act, to break with the order of global capitalism. The only true way to aura farm today, then, is by being the revolutionary which breaks with the levelled unremarkableness of capitalist pop mediocrity.

Michael Parenti (September 30, 1933–January 24, 2026) is no longer with us, yet his legacy lives on in the sharpened minds and awakened consciences of innumerable comrades throughout generations rather than in marble monuments. Surrounded by family, he softly entered what his son Christian described as "the Great Lecture Hall in the Sky" at the age of 92. This image is appropriate for a man whose life was one never-ending, thrilling lesson on the anatomy of power.
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Parenti was born into a hardworking Italian-American family in New York City, and he carried the bonds and wounds of his upbringing with him like a compass. His earliest teachers were ethnic marginalization and economic precarity, which sowed the seeds of a class consciousness that would blossom into a lifelong, unreserved Marxist critique. With the thoroughness of someone who knew the academy's gates were guarded by individuals he would later expose, he obtained the formal credentials; BA from City College, MA from Brown, and PhD from Yale. But instead of protecting him, academia quickly revealed its true nature. He was deemed too hazardous for tenure tracks due to his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War, which included a vicious beating by state troopers at a solidarity demonstration at Kent State. Blacklisted, he refused to back down or make concessions. Rather, he opted for the more difficult path: self-reliance, modest living, and direct interaction with workers, students, and organizers in lecture halls, community centers, and union halls away from ivory towers.

Parenti's oratory and prose were weapons of uncommon accuracy; they were sharp, lucid, and infused with a caustic wit that might disarm before it destroyed. He exposed the American pluralistic façade in Democracy for the Few, exposing a system designed to channel public energies into consent rituals while protecting elite privilege and property. He maintained that power flows upward from concentrated capital rather than downward from votes, making elections a controlled spectacle rather than a true struggle.

His media criticisms in Inventing Reality and Make-Believe Media were remarkably ominous of our current information battles. He contended that corporate media serve as ideological shock troops rather than impartial arbiters, creating narratives that legitimize empire, vilify resistance, and hide class conflict under layers of amusement and selective outrage.

However, Blackshirts and Reds may be the piece that most conveys Parenti's intellectual bravery. He ventured to defend the historical record of socialist initiatives against persistent propaganda during a time when anticommunism had solidified into uncontested doctrine. By contrasting the structural brutality of capitalism, colonial plunder, genocides, proxy wars, economic strangulation, with the beleaguered successes of communist nations in literacy, healthcare, gender parity, and poverty reduction, he rejected simple analogies. His perspective was fundamentally materialist: encirclement, sabotage, and invasion were the causes of shortcomings rather than any intrinsic weakness in collectivism. The bedrock underlying liberal convictions shifts as you read it.

Parenti was as relentless in his criticism of imperialism. The Face of Imperialism, To Kill a Nation (about the breakup of Yugoslavia), and Against Empire all connected American interventions to their basic economic logic: resource control, alternative suppression, and unrelenting growth. Privatization campaigns and market victories were concealed by "humanitarian" pretexts; opposition was pathologized as savagery, and Western crimes were forgotten.

His scope encompassed ideological religion (God and His Demons), cultural hegemony (The Culture Struggle), and ancient history (The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome). However, his lectures, those renowned performances were what really brought his theories to life. They transformed complex theory into lively conversation with their dramatic flair, humor, and fierce clarity. Decades later, the "Yellow Parenti" discourse about Cuba's revolution and videos analyzing capitalist logic or media manipulation continue to circulate like digital samizdat, sparking minds.

Gabriel Rockhill's insightful Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, which painstakingly traces how parts of the "theory industry" in the imperial core have been shaped, subsidized, and guided by powerful capitalist interests, foundations, and state apparatuses to domesticate radical thought, highlights the stark contrast between Parenti's authenticity as a Marxist scholar and the frequently hollow edifice of much contemporary Western left intelligentsia. A pattern emerges from Rockhill's archival excavation: some well-known individuals and schools, despite providing incisive critiques of power, continue to live comfortably within elite institutions, their work subtly reoriented toward culturalist concerns, anti-communist reflexes, or democratic illusions that divert attention from militant class struggle and defense of real socialist projects.

For many on the revolutionary left, Noam Chomsky is a prime example of this conflict. Chomsky is praised for his critiques of American imperialism and media propaganda, but his analysis often falls short of a full-fledged Marxist commitment, eschewing systematic class analysis in favor of anarchist-infused moralism while retaining a strong anticommunist stance toward the Soviet Union, and other socialist experiments under siege. His decades-long institutional position at MIT in the midst of the military-industrial-academic complex he criticizes raises ongoing concerns about the material circumstances that allow for such prominence. Claims of unwavering independence are further undermined by rumors of compromising affiliations, most notably documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein's circle. This suggests a man who, despite his academic prowess, navigates elite networks in ways that Parenti resolutely resisted.

Parenti, on the other hand, represented an integrity that went beyond these allowances. Due to his anti-Vietnam activities, he was barred from mainstream academia and opted for proletarian exile over compromise. He did not accept foundation funding or endowed chairs, nor did he temper his support of communism's historical victories in the face of persistent propaganda. His Marxism, which was based on materialist rigor, class primacy, and solidarity with the global South's anti-imperial movements, was a lived practice rather than an intellectual stance. Parenti named names, unapologetically defended beleaguered revolutions, and addressed the working class directly in language devoid of jargon but full of dialectical clarity, while others hedged or abstracted. According to Rockhill, he opposed the "imperial theory industry," which transforms radical energy into benign criticism; instead, Parenti's writings provided movements with instruments for revolutionary change as opposed to never-ending deconstruction.

Parenti's genuineness, which is unbought and unbowed, made him a unique lighthouse: a Marxist whose research benefited the downtrodden rather than the appearances of elite opposition. Parenti's life and body of work continue to serve as a warning and an encouragement to recover Marxism as the science and art of emancipation rather than as cultural capital in an intellectual environment where many "critical theorists" flourish by criticizing everything but the systems that uphold their own privilege.

Parenti's integrity, which is almost archaic reluctance to compromise, was what distinguished him. He stayed unwavering despite being marginalized by institutions, censored but never silenced, and accused of heresy on Yugoslavia and other fronts. He was not seduced by think-tank sinecure, and his message was not weakened in the name of respectability. He was always kind and never condescending, speaking directly to the downtrodden and anchoring Marxism in real-world situations rather than intellectual ideas.

His influence on modern Marxism is immeasurable. Parenti emphasized the importance of class, the materiality of empire, and the need to preserve socialism's historical balance sheet at a time of fractured identities and postmodern evasions. In the midst of triumphalist "end of history" myths, he resurrected rational defense of communism, gave anti-imperialists intellectual armor against propaganda, and modeled revolutionary popular education as a practice of liberation.

Parenti's departure is felt as a hole in clarity in the accolades that are flooding in, from Ben Norton calling him one of the finest thinkers of the U.S. left to Vijay Prashad repeating Christian's heavenly metaphor to activists and intellectuals worldwide lamenting a voice for the working class. However, his writings, books that analyze, lectures that motivate, and concepts that never go out of style, remain.
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As he anticipated, the fight goes on. As he suggested, we begin the process of transcending the system we face by comprehending it. Even if Michael Parenti's voice has faded, we may still hear its echoes. Comrade, rest in power. In the phrases we carry forth, the lecture hall awaits your return.

The global left is mourning the death of Michael Parenti, the influential Marxist scholar, historian, and public intellectual whose work exposed the mechanics of capitalism, imperialism, and ideological power with unmatched clarity. Parenti passed away on January 24 at the age of 92, leaving behind a body of work that shaped generations of scholars, organizers, and anti-imperialist movements across the world.

For decades, Parenti stood apart from mainstream academia and political life, refusing to dilute his analysis or bend his language to liberal respectability. He wrote not to impress institutions, but to arm people with understanding.

Working-class roots, uncompromising politics

Born in 1933 in New York City to a working-class Italian American family, Parenti often said that his political commitments were grounded not in abstraction, but in lived experience. Class was not something he discovered in theory; it was something he grew up inside.

He earned a PhD and taught political science and history, but his outspoken Marxism and anti-imperialism meant he was steadily pushed to the margins of elite academia. Rather than retreat or conform, Parenti chose independence: lecturing widely, writing prolifically, and speaking directly to union halls, community centers, activist spaces, and international audiences.

He lived modestly, avoided think-tank careers and corporate funding, and kept his private life largely out of the public eye. He was a husband and a father, including to journalist and political analyst Christian Parenti, but he never cultivated a public persona rooted in biography. What mattered to him was the work.

Exposing the class nature of "democracy"

Parenti’s most enduring academic contribution was his systematic critique of liberal democracy under capitalism. In his landmark book Democracy for the Few, first published in 1974, he argued that capitalist democracies are not neutral systems open equally to all, but class-structured states in which economic power overwhelmingly determines political outcomes.

He showed how elections, courts, media, and state institutions consistently serve the interests of capital, while popular demands are managed, diluted, or suppressed. Democracy, he argued, is tolerated only so long as it does not threaten property relations.

"Power is not evenly distributed in society," Parenti wrote. "Those who own and control the productive wealth tend to dominate the political life of the nation."

The book became a formative text for students and activists worldwide, prized for its clarity and refusal of liberal illusion.

​Imperialism without disguise

Parenti was equally influential for his work on imperialism and US foreign policy. In books such as Against Empire and To Kill a Nation, he dismantled the idea that Western wars are motivated by humanitarian concern or democratic ideals.

Instead, he traced intervention, sanctions, and regime change to material interests: control over resources, labor, strategic territory, and global markets. He showed how human rights discourse is selectively deployed, how compliant client states are shielded from scrutiny, and how resistance is pathologized as extremism.

One of Parenti’s most quoted observations remains painfully current: "The essential function of imperialism is not to civilize or democratize, but to maintain a global system of inequality."
His analysis helped anti-war and anti-imperialist movements reject moral distraction and focus on structure rather than spectacle.

Anti-anticommunism and historical honesty

In Blackshirts and Reds, Parenti confronted Cold War anticommunism as an ideology rather than an analysis. He did not deny repression or failure in socialist states, but he exposed how capitalist violence is normalized while socialist experiments are judged by impossible moral standards.

He insisted on historical comparison: asking why fascism is treated as an aberration while capitalism’s own mass violence, including colonialism, slavery, sanctions, structural deprivation, is rendered invisible or inevitable.

The book reopened serious discussion of socialism’s achievements in literacy, healthcare, women’s participation, and social welfare, at a time when such discussions were considered politically taboo.

Media, ideology, and manufactured consent

Long before "media literacy" became fashionable, Parenti laid bare the structural bias of corporate media. In Inventing Reality, he explained how ownership, advertising, sourcing, and elite consensus shape what is reported, how it is framed, and which voices are excluded.

He stressed that propaganda does not require overt censorship. It works through repetition, omission, ridicule, and selective outrage, teaching audiences what to ignore as much as what to believe.
This work made Parenti a cornerstone of critical media studies, especially among activists seeking to challenge war narratives and economic myths.

A scholar of struggle, not accommodation

What distinguished Parenti was not only what he argued, but how he lived. He never treated radical politics as a career ladder. He accepted marginalization rather than compromise and continued to speak plainly when euphemism was rewarded.

His lectures, many of which circulated widely online, are remembered for their warmth, humor, and devastating precision. He trusted ordinary people to grasp complex ideas without academic gatekeeping.

In doing so, Parenti helped bridge the divide between scholarship and struggle, restoring confidence in class analysis at a time when it was being hollowed out or replaced by moral abstraction.

An enduring legacy

Michael Parenti did not found a school or cultivate disciples. His influence traveled differently: through dog-eared books, shared lectures, study circles, movement spaces, and quiet moments of recognition when the world suddenly made sense.

At a time of renewed imperial violence, deepening inequality, and ideological confusion, his work remains unsettlingly relevant.

He once wrote: "The first step in the struggle for social justice is to understand the nature of the system we are up against."

For generations of working-class intellectuals, organizers, and scholars across the world, Michael Parenti helped make that understanding possible.

His voice is gone. His clarity remains.

Originally published on Amayadeen.net

Author
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Janna Kadri

By now everyone has read about the US criminal kidnapping of democratically elected Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, alongside the bombing of Caracas, Venezuela. Details are still being released as to how these events were allowed to happen. However, I would like to briefly reflect on three takeaways the Global South – the countries constantly struggling against US-NATO-Zionist imperialism – must learn from these events.

1.
Nukes are integral for sovereignty

This lesson should have already been learned in 2011, when Muammar Gaddafi’s government in Libya was overthrown. In 2003, Gaddafi announced the abandonment of his program to develop nuclear weapons. This allowed for a temporary lifting of U.S. and EU sanctions, and a brief “normalization” of relations. Expecting the “normalization” to have been anything but temporary was a folly. The U.S. empire is not in the business of treating other nations as equals. Its ends are to debt trap, control assets, and loot resources. It does not care for “international law,” nor “human rights,” nor “freedom and democracy” – even though it loves employing these catchwords as a front for regime change.

Would Gaddafi have been overthrown had he not interrupted the development of his nuclear program? Would the US-NATO even have considered overthrowing the Chairman had they sported a nuclear arsenal as a means of deterrence? I don’t think we must speculate here. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), or North Korea as the Americans call it, was on the same Neocon list of “dangerous and evil” countries which needed to be overthrown. Under the plans of the Project for the New American Century, the DPRK could’ve well received the Libya treatment. What was the difference in treatment between the two countries? I think a central component was that by the mid-to-late 2010s, the DPRK had developed the great antidote of full-fledge Western aggression: nuclear weapons.

Libya was overthrown, the tremendous advancements made in this nation – which became amongst the most prosperous in all of Africa – were demolished. Soon after the overthrow, as everyone now knows, things got so bad slave markets were erected around the country. The lesson is clear – without developing your defense system, one cannot deter Western aggression. Until this day, NATO and the U.S. are very careful of how they wage their war on Russia. They could not carry it out with the same boldness they used in Libya. They required a proxy – Ukraine – to not formally be considered the subjects carrying out the act. Had Venezuela sported the weapons system comrade Kim Jong Un shows off, it is unlikely that giant of the Seven Leagues – as José Martí called the U.S. empire – would have been as brazen in their attacks. We cannot forget what Mao taught us – imperialism is a paper tiger. It looks scary but give it a bloody nose and it will run.

2.
‘Stalinism’ was right 

The Western “left,” thoroughly rooted in what I have called a “purity fetish” outlook, has virtually defined itself through its rejection of what it calls “Stalinism.” Such a thing, however, does not actually exist. What does exist is Marxism-Leninism, a framework for successfully waging war against capitalist-imperialism. What the Western “left” have derided as “Stalinism” are the realist practices of protecting and constructing a revolutionary state, one capable of defending itself from enemies both internal and external.

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, an anti-communist himself, nonetheless makes an astute observation about the willingness of Marxist-Leninists – as well as conservatives – to reject liberal moralism and take responsibility for the difficult actions which have to take place for one’s political project to be defended. As he argues in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology:

“What a true Leninist and a political conservative have in common is the fact that they reject what one could call liberal leftist irresponsibility, that is, advocating grand projects of solidarity, freedom, and so on, yet ducking out when the price to be paid for them is in the guise of concrete and often “cruel” political measures. Like an authentic conservative, a true Leninist is not afraid to pass to the act, to take responsibility for all the consequences, unpleasant as they may be, of realizing his political project.”

The Western “left” derided Stalin for his brutal treatment of his opposition within the party, ignoring always the context of turmoil in which this often-treasonous opposition chose to challenge the ruling order of the revolutionary state. At a time when unconditional commitment and unity to the protection of the revolution was needed, “doubting was treason,” as the Chavista revolutionaries say today. History has shown that the revolutionary states that survive and thrive are those which are willing to get their hands dirty and be as brutal with internal opposition in times of crisis as is necessary. As Executive Chairman of the American Communist Party, Haz Al-Din, recently argued, “Venezuela proves the most brutal measures of Communist dictatorships to crush internal enemies were 100% justified. Ignore the crocodile tears for ‘victims.’ Hesitate, and they’ll snort/oink victoriously over your country’s corpse.”

Is this not precisely one of the central lessons to take from Venezuela, Bolivia, etc.? Why is bourgeois “democratic” formalism so fetishistically respected? If you have a treasonous opposition calling for the invasion of your country by Zionist forces, how could they possibly walk the streets of your country freely? Why was a Juan Guaidó or a Maria Corina Machado able to freely walk the streets of Caracas, travel abroad and return, when it was so clear that they were nothing but traitors to the homeland of Bolivar – individuals who wanted to return to a time when wealthy white Venezuelans were the privileged house slaves of American imperialism. This does not mean plurality is not allowed, but as Fidel Castro taught – within the revolution everything, outside of it nothing.

3.
We are in the era of civilizational blocs

Today, the nation state is being overcome as the nucleus of geopolitics by the civilizational state. Today geopolitics is determined by civilizational blocs. Only a meta-national civilizational unity of people who were divided artificially into tribal nations by western colonialism can stop the viciousness of a U.S. superimperialism in decline. Now is the time – more than ever before – for Latin America to return to the wisdom of Bolívar, Martí, and other revolutionary heroes that understood the essential character of a united Central and South America to deter U.S. imperialism. In this, the Chavistas, of course, are not to blame. Their whole revolutionary project has this lesson at its heart. Therefore, this third point is aimed at those other nations of the region which foolishly think they can have even a semblance of sovereignty without adopting the revolutionary Bolivarian civilizational unity proposed by the Chavistas. These attacks on Venezuela are attacks on the principle of sovereignty itself, and every country in the hemisphere is in trouble if steps are not taken to seriously construct a Pan-American civilizational and revolutionary unity.

This lesson must also be heeded by our anti-imperialist comrades around the world – from West Asia to Africa. Here – like the Venezuelans – the Alliance of Sahel States has the right idea. As Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Sankara, and all the great African revolutionaries taught, only through Pan-African unity can the motherland of Africa fully stand on its own two feet and throw off once and for all the shackles of Western imperialism and neo-colonialism. In China, as Professor Zhang Weiwei argues, the state itself is a civilizational state. Other analysts have argued the same about the Russian Federation. In West Asia – as in Latin America and Africa – the imperialists have been successful in dividing peoples who share a common civilizational unity. Such division of this essential civilizational pole must be overcome. In the era of civilization states and meta-state alliances – the nation state is not dead per se, it is simply reincorporated into a new dialectical intercourse where it stands as the secondary aspect, as Mao would call it, of the contradiction between nation and civilization. As a product of this period of transition, national projects must be crafted in harmony with, and cognizant of, the larger civilizational context of unity which must be created or enriched.

The countries of Latin America must take away the correct lessons from these events unfolding in Venezuela. In any moment, they too could be next. If they are alone and divided, they will be weak. At a time when anti-imperialist forces in the region have taken big hits (the loss of the Movement Toward Socialism party in Bolivia, the loss of the left in Honduras, the kidnapping of Maduro, etc.), it is more essential than ever to return to the teachings of the great Pan-American thinkers, who understood that without a broader civilizational unity, national sovereignty will always hang by a thread.

Seeing the events unfold over the last week, these three key points have kept recurring in my mind. These are intended to be comradely opinions and suggestions – not harsh critique and condemnation. My support for the Bolivarian revolution is unflinching, and if I seek to draw out certain lessons that I think could be taken away from difficult moments such as these, it is always in the spirit of seeking to protect the revolution from imperialist aggression and internal traitors, not kicking it when it is down.

I would like to close with a line from the Cuban revolutionary poet Bonifacio Byrne:

If my flag were ever torn into tiny pieces,
if one day it were reduced to fragments,
our dead, raising their arms,
would still know how to defend it.

This line, frequently repeated by Commander Fidel Castro, captures the spirit in which not only the national homeland must be defended, but also the broader context of Our America.

Rather than launching a military invasion that would provoke public backlash and congressional scrutiny, Trump is doubling down on something more insidious.

The loudest question in Washington right now is whether Donald Trump is going to invade Venezuela. The quieter, and far more dangerous, reality is this: he probably won’t. Not because he cares about Venezuelan lives, but because he has found a strategy that is cheaper, less politically risky at home, and infinitely more devastating: economic warfare.

Venezuela has already survived years of economic warfare. Despite two decades of sweeping US sanctions designed to strangle its economy, the country has found ways to adapt: oil has moved through alternative markets; communities have developed survival strategies; people have endured shortages and hardship with creativity and resilience. This endurance is precisely what the Trump administration is trying to break.

Rather than launching a military invasion that would provoke public backlash and congressional scrutiny, Trump is doubling down on something more insidious: total economic asphyxiation. By tightening restrictions on Venezuelan oil exports, its primary source of revenue, Trump’s administration is deliberately pushing the country toward a full-scale humanitarian collapse.

In recent months, US actions in the Caribbean Sea, including the harassment and interdiction of oil tankers linked to Venezuela, signal a shift from financial pressure to illegal maritime force. These operations have increasingly targeted Venezuela’s ability to move its own resources through international waters. Oil tankers have been delayed, seized, threatened with secondary sanctions, or forced to reroute under coercion. The objective is strangulation.
This is illegal under international law.

The freedom of navigation on the high seas is a cornerstone of international maritime law, enshrined in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Unilateral interdiction of civilian commercial vessels, absent a UN Security Council mandate, violates the principle of sovereign equality and non-intervention. The extraterritorial enforcement of US sanctions, punishing third countries and private actors for engaging in lawful trade with Venezuela, has no legal basis. It is coercion, plain and simple. More importantly, the intent is collective punishment.

By preventing Venezuela from exporting oil, which is the revenue that funds food imports, medicine, electricity, and public services, the Trump administration is knowingly engineering conditions of mass deprivation. Under international humanitarian law, collective punishment is prohibited precisely because it targets civilians as a means to achieve political ends. And if this continues, we will see horrific images: empty shelves, malnourished children, overwhelmed hospitals, people scavenging for food. Scenes that echo those coming out of Gaza, where siege and starvation have been normalized as weapons of war.

US actions will undoubtedly cause millions of Venezuelans to flee the country, likely seeking to travel to the United States, which they are told is safe for their families, full of economic opportunities, and security. . But Trump is sealing the US border, cutting off asylum pathways, and criminalizing migration. When people are starved, when economies are crushed, when daily life becomes unlivable, people move. Blocking Venezuelans from entering the United States while systematically destroying the conditions that allow them to survive at home means that neighboring countries like Colombia, Brazil, and Chile will be asked to absorb the human cost of Washington’s decisions. This is how empire outsources the damage. But these countries have their own economic woes, and mass displacement of Venezuelans will destabilize the entire region.

Venezuela is a test case. What is being refined now—economic siege without formal war, maritime coercion without declared blockade, starvation without bombs—is a blueprint. Any country that refuses compliance with Washington’s political and economic demands should be paying attention. This will be the map for 21st century regime change.

And this is how Trump can reassure the United States Congress that he is not “going to war” with Venezuela. He doesn’t need to. Economic strangulation carries none of the immediate political costs of a military intervention, even as it inflicts slow, widespread devastation. There are no body bags returning to US soil, no draft, no televised bombing campaigns. Just a steady erosion of life elsewhere.

Trump’s calculation is brutally simple: make Venezuelans so miserable that they will rise up and overthrow Maduro. That has been the same calculation behind US policy toward Cuba for six decades—and it has failed. Economic strangulation doesn’t bring democracy; it brings suffering. And even if, by some grim chance, it did succeed in toppling the government, the likely result would not be freedom but chaos—possibly a protracted civil war that could devastate the country, and the region, for decades.

Tomorrow, people in Venezuela will celebrate Christmas. Families will gather around the table to eat hallacas wrapped with care, slices of pan de jamón, and dulce de lechoza. They will share stories, dance to gaitas, and make a toast with Ponche Crema.

But if this economic siege continues, if Venezuelan oil is fully cut off, if the country is denied the means to feed itself, if hunger is allowed to finish what bombs are no longer politically useful to accomplish, then this Christmas may be remembered as one of the last Venezuelans were able to celebrate in anything resembling normal life, at least in the near future.

Polls consistently show that nearly 70 percent of people in the United States oppose a military intervention in Venezuela. War is recognized for what it is: violent, destructive, unacceptable. But sanctions are treated differently. Many people believe they are a harmless alternative, a way to apply “pressure” without bloodshed.

That assumption is dangerously wrong. According to a comprehensive study in medical journal The Lancet, sanctions increase mortality at levels comparable to armed conflict, hitting children and the elderly first. Sanctions do not avoid civilian harm—they systematically produce it.

If we oppose war because it kills, we must also oppose sanctions that do the same, more quietly, more slowly, and with far less accountability. If we don’t act against economic warfare with the same urgency we reserve for bombs and invasions, then sanctions will remain the preferred weapon: politically convenient but equally deadly.

Author
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Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK. She was born in Venezuela and holds a bachelor’s degree in languages and international affairs from the University La Sorbonne Paris IV, in Paris. After graduating, she worked for an international scholarship program out of offices in Caracas and Paris and was sent to Haiti, Cuba, The Gambia, and other countries for the purpose of evaluating and selecting applicants. 

A prominent global Marxist scholar recently went viral quote-tweeting a post cheering on the US’s imperial war against Venezuela, saying that “you are violating international law… you are on notice.”

While factually, of course, this commentator is correct, I think it is much more interesting to philosophically investigate the presumptions behind such a statement.

It is clear to anyone capable of seeing two fingers in front of them that the bellicosity the criminal US regime is demonstrating with Venezuela has nothing to do with narco-trafficking, and everything to do with Venezuela having the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Few people could be genuinely stupid enough to actually believe the formal reasons given for US foreign policy initiatives.

Geopolitical and economic motives lie behind any and all policies carried out by the United States. The neoconservative moral crusades to defend ‘American values’ are, of course, escapades to defend and expand the dominance of American finance capital.

My reader, I presume, knows this well, so I shall not labor on this point here.

What is, instead, much more ambivalent is how many of those critical of the US imperial regime come to relate to and treat international law.

In the last two years, the world has witnessed, chronicled on all of our phones, the brutal genocide of the Palestinian people. There could not be a greater surplus of images from Gaza which ought to chill the spines of anyone with an ounce of humanity.

In this time, ‘international law’ and its various institutions have condemned these actions, to greater or lesser degrees. From the South African-led International Court of Justice genocide case, to the International Criminal Court investigation of "Israel" for a slew of violations, from extermination to starvation and collective punishment, to UN General Assembly and UN Human Rights Council investigations and condemnations, there were hardly any stones of international law left unturned.

But what, my friends, was the result? Is Palestine saved? If so, was it ‘international law’ that did it? Considering the slew of Zionist violations of the ceasefire, I think it is not irrational to say that the answer to both is ‘No’.

And so, we must restate the question Fidel Castro made in his famous 1979 speech in front of the United Nations: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” Or, even further, what is the purpose of international law?
What good is international law and the institutions that claim to uphold it when one country and its lackeys can regularly violate it with impunity? When has the United States, "Israel", or — if I may be bold — the whole of the Western colonial-imperialist world, ever respected international law?

Is not the very system this 14% of the world, which foolishly considers itself to be the world as such, one premised on the violation of any sense of sovereignty? On the violation of any sense of ‘basic rights’ other than those of the capital-owning class which personify the system? Are the rights and freedoms here defended not precisely of the kind which have as a constitutive component the absence of any real rights, freedoms, or sovereignty for the bulk of humanity?

And so, let’s return to the prominent global Marxist scholar, which I would like to intentionally retain unnamed since my goal is not to mock them as an individual, but to ask some critical questions about a framework of thought he and so many critics of US imperialism share. My questions are the following: what is at stake in continuously invoking an ‘international law’ broken at will by the ‘usual suspects,’ to borrow an expression from Casablanca? Do you not feel the almost cartoonish naïveté of such invocation in the face of its continued irrelevance in shaping world affairs?

Is international law here not treated precisely as a fetish object? That is, as a reified entity that is ascribed mystical powers onto it, all the while ignoring the real global relations which shape its function? What weight, in the real world, does ‘international law’ have over the US empire’s constant violation of it?

It isn’t simply the case that international law isn’t working. That is too simplistic an understanding of the gap between the formally enumerated law and reality. We must, instead, see this distance, this gap, as constitutive of reality itself. International law under conditions of US hegemonism and super-imperialism is the global judicature that formalizes this system at the level of law, functioning as an integral mechanism of its reproduction. This is, frankly, emblematic of the Marxist understanding of how judicature is related to political economy. Bourgeois international law will always have a ‘gap’ between the enunciated ideals it formally upholds and the actual workings of an international order still dominated by capitalist-imperialism. This gap is not a mistake that can be fixed through reforms, it is constitutive of the system itself. It is a symptom, to put it in Lacanian terms, that cannot be removed without at the same time removing the system for which it is a symptom.

As within the nation, the struggle for rights, and the appeal to existing legal frameworks to defend their exercise, is an integral component of the class struggle. However, for Marxists, there should be no naïveté and infantilism involved in our analysis of the ultimate nature of these institutions, of what interests they serve to reproduce in the last instance. Central to the importance of waging the fight at this level is showing the mass of people its fundamental impotence in providing true, concrete freedom and sovereignty for the working and oppressed peoples of the world.

This is not accomplished when one naively finger-wags at the US, listing the slew of violations they’re actively committing to international law, and stating that ‘you are on notice.’ On notice, from whom? Who will hold the US accountable? This fetish-object of ‘international law?’ Will an army of the United Nations halt the US’s war efforts on the coast of Venezuela? Will international law be used to unite countries against this belligerent actor, pressuring it with global economic ostracization? If international law has failed to do any of this since its emergence, what good is it to make calls upon it today?

As a state, I can understand having to keep up the pretense of legal formalism, but for individual scholars, journalists, and critical thinkers, is this finger-wagging appeal to the hollow authority of a fetish-object really the correct way to proceed? Is it not as if one is appealing to the authority of a paper that the US has cleaned itself with, and left with all its filth on the floor?

International law will not save us. Treating international law fetishistically only buys into the ideological illusions constitutive of the system and its judicature.

Friends and comrades, it is foolish to expect a victory when showing up with a pen to a gunfight.

On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of uninterrupted diplomatic relations between Canada and Cuba.

Address by Arnold August, along with the presentation of his book Fidel Castro: la visión de un canadiense, delivered at the Parliament of Canada in Ottawa on December 3, 2025, at a meeting hosted by the Canada–Cuba Parliamentary Friendship Group

Paragraph delivered in French:
A sincere thank you to the co-chairs of the Canada–Cuba Parliamentary Friendship Group: Bloc Québécois MP Gabriel Ste-Marie from the riding of Joliette, and the Honourable Senator Judy A. White from Newfoundland and Labrador, for inviting me. It is always an honour to sit beside His Excellency, the Cuban Ambassador to Canada, Rodrígo Malmierca Díaz. Today, we gather to celebrate 2025 as the 80th Anniversary of diplomatic relations between Canada and Cuba – an uninterrupted milestone in our hemisphere, matched only by Mexico.

Paragraphs delivered in English:
On this occasion, allow me to highlight one central theme from my fourth book on Cuba and Latin America. This volume examines two prominent figures, Fidel Castro and Pierre Trudeau, and explores the dynamics of the Canada–Cuba–United States triangle from 1959 to 1976. It also outlines how both the conservative and the liberal parties, which have governed Canada since 1959, played key roles in shaping this unique relationship. Other political formations have also contributed – and continue to contribute – to this history, as I will address later.
Conservative Party leader and then-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, at the time of the January 1959 Cuban Revolution, defended the continuation of diplomatic relations between Canada and Cuba. He did so despite pressure from the United States under President John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy tried to force Diefenbaker to join the US-led effort to impose the anti-Cuba blockade and other coercive measures, Diefenbaker, the Prairie farmer, responded sharply to the wealthy urban intellectual from Massachusetts. He reminded Kennedy that “Canada is not a Boston in the state of Massachusetts.” This political tendency also plays a vital role in Canada–Cuba relations.

Paragraphs delivered in French:
Who invited Fidel Castro to Montreal only months after January 1959? To understand the complexity of the moment, one must remember that, although Fidel was widely admired internationally, a massive US-led media campaign was spreading disinformation – including in mainstream Canadian media. This campaign targeted the Revolution’s legal proceedings, including the trials and the executions of Batista’s known torturers and murderers – measures that had been demanded by the victims’ families. Yet the person who invited Fidel – and hosted him during his 24-hour visit to Montreal – was not a “leftist” or even a liberal. His name was Claude Dupras, a conservative at both the federal and municipal levels.

Why was he drawn to Fidel Castro? At the time of the Cuban Revolution in the late 1950s and 1959, Quebec was evolving in the budding atmosphere of its own multipartisan “Quiet Revolution,” which was initiated in 1960, challenging US-Anglo control over its vast electricity resources. Its goal was to become “maîtres chez nous” – masters of our own house. Dupras could relate to Fidel as a leader standing up to the United States on behalf of a small nation. It was therefore natural to invite him to Montreal. The spontaneous street scenes in April 1959, and the photos of TV interviews that I include in the book, show the broad support for Fidel in Quebec despite the disinformation campaign. People were clearly shrugging off the slanders.

At Fidel’s April 1959 press conference in Montreal, who do we see leaning in to interview him? None other than René Lévesque, the best-known journalist in Quebec at the time, an emerging sovereigntist, and a political precursor of today’s Bloc Québécois and MPs such as Gabriel Ste-Marie. The book shows that, in addition to conservatives and liberals, this political tendency also plays a vital role in Canada–Cuba relations.

Author

Arnold August is an award-winning journalist and author of three acclaimed books. His three books on Cuba-US-Latin America have been acclaimed by experts in the field. In 2013, he was awarded the Félix Elmuza Award by the Association of Cuban Journalists and contributes to outlets in English, Spanish and French in many parts of the world. He serves as a Contributing Editor for The Canada Files.

Slavoj Žižek is one of the most popular critics of political correctness (PC) from the ‘left.’ It is a topic he addresses in numerous books and popular articles. While the general spirit of critiquing PC culture or wokeism from the left is certainly one I am sympathetic to, he fundamentally misunderstands the level at which political correctness operates, placing it within an archaic sincerity paradigm, and not within its proper profilic context.
In Absolute Recoil, he writes that “under the discursive regime of political correctness, it is not enough to follow external rules of politeness, one is expected to be ‘sincerely’ respectful of others, and continually examined on the sincerity of one’s innermost convictions.”

This, frankly, completely misses the logic through which political correctness operates. The regime of PC culture (which is today almost wholly overcome) is intimately tied to profilicity. It does not concern itself with sincere role enactment — akin to how Lionel Trilling would describe the dominant identity technology in the pre-capitalist, pre-authenticity world. Neither is PC culture operative at the level of authenticity. Politically correct culture does not concern itself with whether one is dutifully enacting a role (sincerity), nor whether one is authentic about one’s pronouncements.

PC culture operates purely at the level of the surface — what matters is not what one actually believes (authenticity), nor the duties one fulfills (sincerity), but what one says (profilicity). Here the work of Hans Georg-Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio in You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity remains the best description of the shifts that have occurred at the basic levels of digital human sociality and identity construction.

Under the regime of PC, it is what appears on your profile which comes to matter most. One could actively fulfill one’s duty as an activist against racism, one can be authentically committed to fighting against racists, but neither your practices nor your subjective beliefs matter for PC culture — if you say a politically incorrect racial joke, or use a politically incorrect racial term (even in a non-racist or even anti-racist context) you will still be cancelled. It will leave (when PC was dominant) a seemingly eternal scarlet letter A on your profile.
Is the point, for instance, of all the DEI trainings universities have staff do really to inspire a certain set of practices or ideas on their staff? Or, is the role such trainings play in curating the profile of the institution as ‘woke’ and ‘progressive’ a greater motivating factor?

Is the point of the CIA ‘woke’ ad to inspire a sincere role enactment, or an authentic subjective belief about upholding disabled, trans, lesbian, Hispanic women? Or, is it about shaping the profile of how the institution is seen — or better yet, how it is seen as being seen, how it looks from the standpoint of second order observation?
Here is what Žižek gets most egregiously wrong about political correctness — what comes to matter most for it is the surface, not practice nor so-called subjective belief. In some ways, it operates at the level of form, in a manner reminiscent, but thoroughly distorted, of the way that Marxism and psychoanalysis treat form and content. If we recall, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek correctly identifies the ways in which both Marxism and Freud understand that the key operation is not piercing through the form to get at the content (traditional western philosophical cannon approach to ‘truth’), but understanding the secret of the form itself — why the ‘content’ needs to take on a distorted form. The distortion of form is not an external filter blurring a ‘truth’ which lies deeper in the content, it is a constitutive moment of the content itself, such that — as an apparent obstacle — removing it entails also the elimination of that which it is an obstacle for.

This dialectical treatment of form and content is not, of course, what we get with PC. However, it also isn’t the traditional paradigm of piercing through form to get at content, which is what is implied in Žižek’s treatment of it within the mode of sincerity. His treatment suggests that for PC there is a deeper belief (content) that must be sincere, that is, that must be consistent with the form. But this is not at all what PC culture was about — it was wholly concerned with the surface, with form. Not with the secret of the form itself (Marxism), but with the form as devoid of secrets, the form as a source of authority akin to the ‘content’ in the previous, traditional paradigm.

​As such, PC must be understood within the context of the emergence of profilicity and second order observation, a development arising out of the development of the productive forces that comes with the technological revolution.
For PC culture what always mattered was the words you said, not the context in which you said them, nor the spirit in which you did it. What mattered is the formal letter of the law, not its spirit. Therefore, Žižek’s understanding of it within the mode of sincerity is wholly inadequate. PC culture can be understood only within the logic of profilicity and second order observation.

Author 

Dr. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American Professor of Philosophy who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He serves as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Party and as a Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think-tank in the United States. Dr. Garrido has authored a few books, including Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), and the two forthcoming texts, Domenico Losurdo and the Marxist-Leninist Critique of Western Marxism (2026) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2026-7). Dr. Garrido has published over a dozen scholarly articles and over a hundred articles in popular settings across the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Iran, China, Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, Peru, Canada, etc. His writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He also writes short form articles for his Substack, @philosophyincrisis, and does regular YouTube programs for the Midwestern Marx Institute channel. He is on Instagram @carlos.l.garrido

The Wall Street Journal, founded in 1889, is the largest newspaper in the United States with respect to print circulation, and the second largest (after The New York Times) in digital circulation, with 4.15 million digital subscribers. It is considered a “newspaper of record,” defined in Wikipedia as “a major national newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative and independent.”

In “The High Stakes in Venezuela: Trump chose this showdown with Maduro, and only one will win,” published by The Editorial Board on December 1, 2025, the newspaper of record reveals a win-lose mentality in international relations which is out of sync with the demands of the current historic moment. It begins with the assertion, “President Trump is in a high-stakes showdown with Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. . .. One of the two presidents is going to lose, and it will be Mr. Trump if Mr. Maduro isn’t ousted one way or another.” Warming to the task at hand, the editorial further asserts, “If Mr. Trump withdraws his Caribbean flotilla with Mr. Maduro still in power, the Venezuelan strongman will have won. The world will see that he was able to stand up to American power in the Yankee’s backyard.”

The editorial acknowledges that the Trump administration has maintained that its assembling of naval forces in the Caribbean has the purpose of fighting drug cartels, but the editorial considers this claim to be nothing more than “political cover.” It maintains that you do not need a large military mobilization “to blow up drug boats,” thus not anticipating the national security strategy released by the administration on December 3, which emphasized a reorientation of US national security policy toward the Western Hemisphere.

The editorial notes that if Maduro refuses to step down and find refuge in another country, “The President may have to take direct military action to oust the dictator” [sic]. It argues that, despite domestic political risks, “deposing Mr. Maduro is in the U.S. national interest given how he has spread refugees and mayhem in the region” [sic]. It maintains that deposing Maduro should not be considered an American coup, because “Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly to elect the opposition in the 2024 presidential race, but Mr. Maduro refused to cede power. Deposing him in favor of the elected president would restore democracy” [double sic].

For the esteemed members of The Editorial Board of the newspaper of record, the US government must not let Maduro win. “If Mr. Maduro refuses to leave, and Mr. Trump shrinks from acting to depose him, Mr. Trump and the credibility of the U.S. will be the losers. Mr. Trump chose this showdown, and it will cost America and the region dearly if Mr. Maduro emerges triumphant.”

§
Considerations on democracy in Venezuela
As the reader will discern, the premise of the WSJ Editorial is that Maduro is a dictator maintained in power through fraudulent means. Let us look at the facts.
​
Nicolás Maduro was re-elected President of Venezuela on July 28, 2024, receiving 51.2% of the vote, defeating the far-right candidate Edmundo González, who received 44.2%. Maduro was the candidate of a coalition of thirteen political organizations known as the Simón Bolívar Great Patriotic Pole as well as the leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. Eight other candidates—including candidates of the right, center-right, and center-left—received 4.6% of the votes cast. A total of 21,620,705 citizens voted—a voter participation rate of 59%—in more than fifteen thousand voting districts distributed throughout the country. In total, ten presidential candidates, thirty political parties, and 1300 international and national observers participated in the 2024 presidential elections, according to the president of the National Electoral Council.

Maduro was born on November 23, 1962, in Caracas, Venezuela, and he was politically active in the 1980s in the Socialist League. From 1991 to 1998, he worked as a bus driver, and he founded the Caracas Metro Union. During that period, he met and became a fervent supporter of Hugo Chávez, and he became active in the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement. He was among the new deputies elected in the electoral triumph of the Bolivarian Revolution in 1998. He held various positions in the National Assembly between 2000 and 2006. In 2006, he was named Minister of Foreign Affairs, and in that capacity, he became known in the international arena for his excellent discourses in defense of the Bolivarian Revolution. He was named Vice-President in 2012, and he was publicly named by Chávez to be his successor shortly prior to his death in 2013. Maduro subsequently won presidential elections in 2013, with 50.61% of the vote; and in 2018, with 78.84%.
Elections in Venezuela are managed by the National Electoral Council, an independent branch of government established by the Bolivarian Revolution. The electoral system is characterized by a high-level of citizen access to voting booths and clear identification of voters, in which voters cast both an electronic vote and a printed paper ballot, enabling cross-checking of the vote count. Verification of the electoral total is conducted automatically in 54% of the voting locations, which are chosen at random.

The latest of several US plans for the destabilization of the Venezuelan political system came to light two days before the 2024 elections, when suggestions were put forth of alleged fraud, preparing the terrain for the non-recognition of the results and for violence by fascist gangs, financed by Venezuelans from Miami and Spain, according to Granma journalist Francisco Arias Fernández. The plan included the non-recognition of the electoral results following the announcement of Maduro’s victory, with the complicity of the US-controlled Organization of American States and US allies in the region. The far-right leader, María Corina Machado, who benefits from foreign media coverage and foreign financial support, planned to relocate to Argentina, where she was to set up a command post as the coup d’état was unfolding, seeking political-diplomatic support with telephone calls to different countries. The plan anticipated the support of the major media, and Arias Fernández specifically mentions The New York Times, CNN, AP, Voice of America, Euronews, BBC, the German DW and the Spanish newspapers El País and El Mundo.

True to the plan, the opposition claimed electoral fraud on July 29. Marina Corina Machado announced that she had in her possession electoral records that showed that González had received 70% of the vote, but she did not release the information she claimed to have. In this unsubstantiated claim of electoral fraud, the opposition in Venezuela had the backing of the Western media, as the plan anticipated. The Washington Post, for example, published on July 30 a one-sided article giving credence to the opposition claims of fraud, citing protestors on the streets on July 29. It made no mention of the reports of international observers. Similarly, an article in The New York Times, “Venezuela’s Election Was Deeply Flawed,” was written with the prevailing Western ethnocentric narrative which assumes that nations seeking independence from US direction are authoritarian, ignoring the historical struggles of said nations against US imperialism and US control of the natural resources and the economies of their countries.

On Monday, July 29, protests expressing dissatisfaction with the results were held. The opposition claimed that they were spontaneous demonstrations by the people in protest of supposed electoral fraud. However, the Venezuelan news outlet Telesur reported that some demonstrators, many with criminal antecedents, had been paid $150. There were reports of violence, including setting fire to hospitals, pharmacies and radio stations, blocking roads, and derailing buses carrying international election observers.

Telesur reported, with videos provided by on-the-scene reporters, that the streets where the demonstrations had been held were calm and normal by midnight. Beginning on Tuesday, July 30, crowds began to appear in support of Maduro and the electoral process.

Venezuelan analyst Luigino Bracci explained that elections in Venezuela are automated. When a citizen casts a vote in a voting machine, the machine prints a receipt, which the voter places in a box. Thus, there is a double system of counting, in which the machine keeps track of each vote and prints a tally of the votes, and at the same time, polling station members and political party observers verify that the machine report of the vote tally is consistent with the tally of the printed receipts. The machine reports the results to one of two tallying centers of the National Electoral Council (CNE for its initials in Spanish).

Bracci noted that for the last twenty years, CNE has been publishing the results of each polling station on its website, making the votes transparent, and enabling observers representing the political parties to verify the results with their polling station observations. This publication of results usually occurs a few hours after the first electoral bulletin is released. However, the results could not be verified in this way with respect to the July 28 presidential elections, because there had been a cyberattack against the data transmission system of CNE, a fact that was announced by the president of CNE, Elvis Amoroso, when he announced the election results at 12:13 a.m. on July 29. He noted that the cyberattack was slowing down the transfer of information to the tallying centers.

After the CNE announcement, President Maduro went to the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice to request an investigation and to request that all candidates and the National Electoral Council be summoned and be requested to submit all necessary records and documents. Maduro also promised that the tally sheets of his party’s witnesses would be presented. Maduro declared that he was seeking the protection of the Supreme Court from false accusations of electoral fraud by the extreme Right opposition, which had contracted fascist and criminal gangs to engage in violent actions in a destabilization strategy supported by the US government.
In accordance with the request of the President, the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court, authorized by the Constitution to rule on such questions, summoned the ten candidates to appear, and nine of them did so on August 2. Edmundo González, on whose behalf accusations of fraud had been made beginning on July 29, was the only one of the ten candidates who did not appear before the Court.

The opposition claim of fraud raised the possibility of someone secretly manipulating the machines to reprint tally sheets with numbers favorable to the government. Víctor Theoktisto, a computer science professor at Simón Bolívar University who had served as an advisor in the development of the nation’s automated electoral system, noted that the automated electoral system is designed with numerous security checks, such that any manipulated or modified tally sheet would have a QR code or “hash” different from the unique code of the original, which could be discerned through investigation. For this reason, the question of fraud ought to be resolved through the Supreme Court, with all parties presenting what they have, as the CNE was doing in accordance with Maduro’s request. The opposition ought to present their evidence and their case to the Court, Theoktisto asserted. “The fact that González did not appear before the Electoral Chamber last Friday raises many questions. If they have the evidence, why not challenge the elections before the appropriate body? Are they willing to have their election evidence verified? . . . The opposition must challenge the results before the [Supreme Court], not in public opinion or international media.”

Theoktisto further noted that hacking technologies exist that could slow down the CNE process by disrupting connections, although they could not change the actual tallies. He further observed that the attacks on the CNE Website were so numerous that they likely involved hacking sources outside the country, with some level of support from local actors. He noted that “a governmental actor is indispensable” for an attack of this scale, and he believed that a hostile government was involved. But all such questions need to be investigated, he stressed.
After July 30, the Western media withdrew from the terrain, posting few articles after that date. And the Biden administration began making contradictory statements, retreating from recognition of the opposition candidate as the winner of the elections and as the true head of state in Venezuela. Meanwhile, the Maduro government was in full control in Venezuela, with the National Electoral Commission proceeding with a full review of the ballots, in accordance with the Venezuelan constitution and the request of the Maduro government; with successful and peaceful public events in support of the government; and with the attorney general’s office proceeding with legal action against those who violated laws in seeking to promote destabilization, some of whom are in hiding.

On August 22, 2024, the Electoral Chamber of the Venezuelan Supreme Tribunal of Justice, designed by the Constitution to adjudicate electoral questions, ratified Nicolas Maduro as the winner of the July 28 presidential elections. In a press conference attended by government officials, diplomatic representatives, and members of the press, Supreme Court magistrate Caryslia Rodríguez began by reaffirming the jurisdiction of the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court on the question, noting that recent electoral processes in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States were ultimately settled by judicial rulings. Rodríguez proceeded at the press conference to read the verdict of the Court. It stated that a team of national and international experts had conducted a review, with the highest technical standards, of the voting records that had been submitted by the electoral parties and candidates.

​The verdict asserted that the investigation found that the voting records fully coincided with the data of the tallying centers of the National Electoral Council, which had declared Maduro the winner with fifty-two percent of the vote, as against forty-three percent for Edmundo González. The verdict further mandated the National Electoral Council to publish the final results in the National Gazette before the August 28 deadline established by Venezuelan electoral procedures. Magistrate Rodríguez also asserted that opposition candidate Edmundo González was in contempt of court for not appearing in response to the Court’s summons and for not submitting requested evidence. She also called upon Attorney General Tarek William Saab to launch investigations for possible criminal conduct, including the usurpation of state functions, forging documents, and instigating violence.

The Bolivarian Revolution was convoked by Hugo Chávez on February 4, 1992, when he led approximately 100 military officers in an attempted coup d´état, with the intention of overthrowing the government and convening a constituent assembly. The coup failed, and he was imprisoned. Upon his release in 1994, he resigned from the military and formed the Bolivarian Fifth Republic Movement, again with the intention of convening a constitutional assembly, but now seeking to attain power through the electoral process. Traveling throughout the country and meeting with the people during the presidential electoral campaign, he was elected President of Venezuela in 1998, and he assumed the presidency on February 2, 1999. He immediately issued a decree convoking a Constitutional Assembly. Elections for a new constitution were held, and a new Constitution was approved, establishing the Fifth Republic. Chávez was elected to two six-year terms as president under the new Constitution. He died of cancer in 2013, before completing his second term.

Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was born in Sabaneta, a rural village of Venezuela, on July 28, 1954. His father was a schoolteacher who earned his teaching diploma by studying part-time. Although his mother and father lived nearby, he was principally reared by his grandmother, a peasant woman who was half indigenous. In 1971, at the age of 17, Chávez entered the Military Academy of Venezuela, and he earned a commission as a Second Lieutenant in 1975. His study during his years in the military academy established the foundation for his revolutionary formation. He read the writings of Simón Bolívar, Mao Zedong, and Che Guevara, and he developed a perspective that he described as a synthesis of Bolivarianism and Maoism. He investigated these themes further in a master´s program in political science at Simón Bolívar University. He continuously read books of historical, political, social, and literary significance during his military and political careers.

Central to Chávez’s political rise was his call for effective state control of the state-owned petroleum company (Petróleos de Venezuela, Sociedad Anónima, or PDVSA). The company had been nationalized in 1976 during the era of “petroleum nationalism” in Venezuela, but the nationalization did not have the results that its advocates had hoped. Prior to the nationalization, foreign companies had appointed Venezuelans as managers, seeking to ensure political stability. Since the Venezuelan managers previously had been socialized into the norms and values of the international petroleum companies, the transition to Venezuelan state ownership had little effect on the dynamics of the nation’s petroleum industry. PDVSA adapted to the neocolonial world-system, exploiting petroleum in accordance with the norms and interests of the international petroleum industry. Like the foreign-owned oil companies in other neocolonized countries, PDVSA sought to reduce payments to the Venezuelan state. Accordingly, PDVSA adopted a strategy of channeling surpluses to investments in production and sales, including the purchase of refineries and distributorships in other countries. By transferring surpluses out of the country, the PDVSA evaded payments to the Venezuelan state.

The government of Hugo Chávez sought to reduce the autonomy of PDVSA and to incorporate its resources into a project of national development. The Chávez government appointed new directors of PDVSA, replacing the directors appointed by previous governments, provoking a great conflict with the established order.

But the conflict had favorable results for Venezuela. With the new leadership of PDVSA, the state income from petroleum increased significantly, and the new funds were directed toward various social projects in education, health, and housing as well as to wage increases, financial assistance to those in need, and the elimination of foreign debt.

The governments of Chávez and Maduro have conducted more than thirty national elections, either nationwide referendums, presidential elections, or elections to the national legislature, and the Chavistas have won all but two of them. This impressive process prompted former President Jimmy Carter to declare that Venezuela has one of the best elections in the world.

However, the numerous elections have been conducted in accordance with the rules and procedures of representative democracy, in which success depends on the mobilization of resources, especially financial resources. Therefore, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela has sought to supplement elections developed according to the norms of representative democracy with the creation of Communal Councils throughout the country. Communal Councils are formed by the people through open assemblies, encompassing approximately 100 families in urban areas and thirty families in rural areas. The communal councils seek to identify and implement local priorities and projects with respect to housing, health, water, or electricity, with the full and equal participation of all citizens over the age of fifteen, and with the support of a financial unit and an oversight unit. The long-term goal is the integration of the Communal Councils with the structures of representative democracy, thus establishing “true participatory democracy” based on the concept of people’s power from the grassroots.
§
Further considerations on The Wall Street Journal
As is evident, the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal accepts as Truth what is merely one side of a political conflict in Venezuela. If that side had any validity, we would have seen beginning in August the taking of the streets by the people in opposition to the Maduro government, providing internal support to the aggressive actions of the USA toward the government of Venezuela. But exactly the opposite has occurred. The government of Maduro since August has been able to mobilize the people in a great national exercise of self-defense, preparing the nation and the people for what is perceived as a pending military invasion.
The Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal appears to know little of political processes in Venezuela. If it does know, it chooses not to report. So, the esteemed members of the Editorial Board are guilty of either ethnocentrism or corruption.
In addition, in taking as given a paradigm of win-lose competition in international affairs, the members of the Editorial Board either do not know of, or decide not to report on, the alternative paradigm of win-win cooperation, which has emerged from the Global South during the first quarter of the twenty-first century, and which points to a possible resolution of the structural contradictions of the world-system. This constitutes a profound failure in moral duty, unworthy of the high office which they hold and the sacred duty to the people which it implies.

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Further considerations on Venezuela and Cuba
Venezuela and Cuba have both committed the crime of breaking with the structures of the neocolonial world order, Cuba with its agrarian reform of 1959 and nationalizations of 1960, and Venezuela with its effective control under Chávez of the state-owned petroleum company. As punishment, Cuba and Venezuela are accused of being authoritarian, when in fact they have developed structures of people’s democracy that are more advanced than the structures of representative democracy.

Neither Cuba nor Venezuela should be sanctioned for seeking transformations of the national manifestations of the structures of the neocolonial world-system, because it is their right as sovereign nations to choose their own road to economic development.

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No to regime-change war in Venezuela

It can be argued that the United Sates of America, as the regional power of the Western Hemisphere, has the right to control the seas of the region, in order to fight back against criminal cartels invading its national territory; and it has the right to impose tariffs or refuse trade with any nations in the region that align with a non-Hemispheric power, enabling its control of strategic assets that are vital to US national security, such as key sea lanes. But the United States does not have the right to decide who the leaders of Venezuela will be. Only the people of Venezuela have that right.

This principle of the sovereignty of the people was proclaimed by the American Declaration of Independence. And the people of the United Sates, through an anti-establishment people’s movement called into being by Donald Trump in 2016, has risen—in response to the betrayal of the nation by the elite and the political establishment and the post-modern confusion of the professional class—to reaffirm the principles of the American Republic and to declare the rejection by the people of regime-change wars.