Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Venezuela. I think the most concise and yet complete and useful statement I can make about Venezuela is this:
Whatever the source,
if the information you get about Venezuela
does not mention US sanctions,
then immediately doubt all of their accusations
against Venezuela and its government.
US sanctions (“unilateral coercive measures” prohibited by the UN Charter) are now levied against roughly one third of the world’s population, mostly in the global south. Sanctions kill half a million people a year. Sanctions against Venezuela began in 2015 when Obama, ironically shortly after he softened US relations with Cuba, labeled Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” Unbelievable? See official archives.
Could you live on 10% of the money you lived on last year? Can a nation thrive on 10% of last year’s income? That’s what Venezuelans struggled with after being attacked by the economic weapon of sanctions.
A study published in 2025 in the British medical journal The Lancet Global Health finds that “unilateral economic sanctions lead to about 564,000 excess deaths around the world each year.” As coauthor Mark Weisbrot said, “Sanctions are widely misunderstood as being a less lethal, almost nonviolent, policy alternative to military force.”
The good news for Venezuelans is that it has been recovering. The bad news, you’ve already heard, is that the US is using its extraordinary military might — thanks to spending more on defense than the next nine countries combined — to invade Venezuela land and sea, and kidnap the president and his wife. The good news is that Venezuela’s constitution is being followed and the interim president is committed to the Bolivarian Revolution, a project of using the wealth from oil and other resources to widely benefit all Venezuelans, not just the rich Venezuelans and foreign corporations as in the past.
How to get labeled “dictator”
Resist US domination, meaning the domination of the — choose your preferred term — corporate and business interests, capitalist class, oligarchy, fascists, neoliberals, empire, military industrial complex.
It is wise — but not enough — that the majority agrees the US should not attack a sovereign nation with military weapons. And further to agree that it should not attack a sovereign nation with economic weapons like sanctions and blockades. However, we also need to not go along with “manufacturing consent” (as Noam Chomsky wrote in a book of that title), or with the “apparatus of persuasion” (as economist Thomas Piketty calls it). It’s important not to fall for the idea that, after all, the attacks are against a “bad guy.”
But “bad guy” is a little childish, and so the terms frequently used by media and hostile politicians are authoritarian, strong man, tyrant, and dictator.
For an earlier paragraph, I did an online search for a simple description of “what is the Bolivarian Revolution” and one of the “related questions” that popped up was this non-intelligent but bias-revealing question from AI:
Is Venezuela a dictatorship or dictatorship?
(Wow. This question is intelligent?)
AI Overview. Yes… (Wow again. What follows is AI giving us a list of terms that would seem, if you are a caring person, to justify “regime change.” Significantly, AI, like Trump, dropped the obviously false notion of drug trafficking. As we read the accusations, we need to immediately recognize the fact that, yes, Venezuela resists US domination, and that is why we encounter these attacks.)
AI continued. …Venezuela is widely considered a dictatorship or authoritarian regime, particularly under Nicolás Maduro, characterized by democratic backsliding, suppression of opposition, human rights abuses, economic collapse, and flawed elections, despite its official status as a republic. (End quote.)
So, again, how do you get labeled a “dictator”? Resist US domination.
I hope you can see that for whoever is suffering under violent and economic attacks in our own country and in Venezuela and dozens of other countries in the planet — and the planet itself — that we must in solidarity resist domination ourselves, for ourselves, and for all other beings.
Another world is always possible.