Nicolás Maduro two days ago in DEA released footage
How can a man as savvy as Richard Murphy is on economics be so clueless on geopolitics? I’ve been asking myself that for four years while watching the man intone the view, as superficially plausible as that the sun orbits a flat earth – and no less wrong – that time began for Ukraine in February 2022 with a land grab by Evil Putin.
The answer, I’m sure, lies in the professor’s blindness to empire: the same blindness that leads liberals and even large swathes of the avowedly Marxist Left to view each fresh manifestation of imperial criminality in isolation – to see the dirty war on Ba’athist Syria as though Iraq and Libya had not happened, Taiwan or Xinjiang as though the US were not seeking to contain its biggest economic rival and using every propaganda trick in the book to that end, and events on Russia’s borderlands as though NATO had not spent two decades advancing recklessly east …
Two days ago, apropos the criminal abduction of Venezeula’s president, Professor Murphy was compounding that ignorance of empire with the delusion, widely shared it must be said, that the elected president of the United States actually calls the shots on such matters. You’d be forgiven for thinking, from his simplistic assessment …
… we need to look at just two reasons for what is happening. The first is oil. The second is to provide a distraction from the Epstein files. There is nothing more to this than that –Tax Research LLP, January 3: Venezuela, War and Trump
… that any POTUS – be he Trump, Biden or Obama – could get within sniffing distance of the Oval Office without the backing of the billionaire interests which actually rule the US Empire.
If on the other hand you deem the professor an ingenue with an inflated sense of his political savvy – if, moreover, you actually troubled to consult a little Latin American history and on that basis view Maduro’s abduction as merely the latest in twenty-six years of lethal sanction, coup attempt, lies, blackmail, theft and colonial menace – well, you’ve come to the right place.
Over to Brian Berletic at The New Atlas for a grown-up understanding … 1
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Ignorance of geo-politics is bad enough. However, ignorance of the consequential impact on the rule of law at every level takes ignorance to zen levels.
Cue Raphael Machado over at the Strategic Culture Foundation:
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2026/01/04/usa-seizes-maduro-but-nothing-is-guaranteed-regarding-venezuelas-future/
“The mutual recognition between countries as sovereign states and, therefore, legitimate belligerents in case of conflict, implying obedience to certain rules of engagement, constitutes a significant achievement of civilizations. The criminalization of foreign sovereigns opens the door to savagery and to unlimited conflicts devoid of rules of civility.
But beyond this dimension of a return to the same mentality of the piracy era, it becomes quite clear that appeals to International Law and the UN are, today, of little effectiveness.
The world is being redrawn into spheres of influence, and only military might and the willingness to use it seem to be effective barriers against foreign interventions.”
Without common laws, rules and standards at every level, civilisation itself cannot function and everything falls apart. The choice is therefore straightforward. Either the majority across the planet bite the bullet and enforce those standards against the minority operating to the law of the jungle, or they, along with civilisation, are next to go under.