Soft Power Tools of Empire

This week, we return with another installment of “Fourth Reich Geopolitik,” our ongoing survey of the modern geopolitical landscape. In this one we unpack the United States’ recent military aggression against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.  As of this writing, the U.S. War Machine has killed no less than 76 people on the high seas off the coast of Venezuela and it has unilaterally–and with no apparent proof–designated these victims as “narco-terrorists.”  The stated goal of this military operation is to stop drug traffickers.  The actual goals appear to be regime change, sending messages to various audiences both foreign and domestic, and flouting the law as only the King of Crime knows how.

To be honest, we did not want to do a Venezuela episode at risk of stating the obvious (i.e., that the powers that be are yet again up to their same bag of dirty tricks to personally profit from unspeakable violence around the world). But then we spent some time digesting the mainstream media and academic analysis about the situation, heard some of the most outrageous propaganda imaginable, and realized, yet again, that perhaps it is important for us to discuss this stuff even if it seems obvious. 

In this episode, we first turn back the clock and lay a little historical foundation of the Monroe Doctrine, President James Monroe’s 19th Century declaration to the empires of Europe that the western hemisphere was off limits–to them, at least.  We thought we’d start off with a short primer on the Monroe Doctrine because it seems like anyone talking about Venezuela is invoking it, and it seems to us that most don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.  Next, we speed-run the history of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, and the long and storied U.S. tradition of destabilizing economies, overthrowing democratically elected leaders, and exploiting the land and its people to enrich the capitalist ruling class. We then focus specifically on the Spanish-American War at the turn of the 20th century, which really locked in the U.S. as the new kid on the block for the imperial powers, and use that as our jump off point to the modern day to talk about American Imperialism today.  

And this latest phase of American imperialism is goofy as hell.  In the age of purportedly “ending the forever wars” and putting “America first,” the Trump administration is going full on Leeroy Jenkins into Venezuela.  Nevermind that the stated purpose of combating drug traffickers is BS, the fact that the Trump administration is deploying the full force of the U.S. Navy to do so shows that the United States has no qualms about going head first into another military quagmire as though the only lesson from the Iraq War was “we can get away with this and nobody will stop us.” (Shoutout to the USS Gerald R. Ford.) 

As we said in our first episode, and as we’ve been saying it regularly ever since, it is as if we are all suffering from some collective, mass psychosis.  Those in charge say one thing, but do another.  But you know things are getting schizophrenic as hell when with each day that passes, Amerikkka’s fringe reactionary kooks—the likes of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens—are the only ones in the media that dare to call this out.  We are not here to praise these kooks for calling out the U.S. war machine for its hypocrisy. To the contrary, we fully reject their kind.  But that they have identified the problem while, say, the New York Times merely parrots the official narrative, tells you everything you need to know about the sad state of affairs today.