Regime Change in Venezuela is the Marriage of Colonialism and Gangster Capitalism

I watched the coverage on CBS and NBC of the U.S. assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and what I witnessed was not journalism but the choreography of propaganda. CBS, in particular, offered thirty uninterrupted minutes of state-sanctioned fantasy, anchored by a fawning interview with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, a man implicated in the killing of more than one hundred people at sea, killed without evidence, accountability, or due process. Rather than interrogating power, the networks defaulted to spectacle.

At no point did either network raise the most basic questions of legality, sovereignty, or international law. Instead, both newscasts offered images of people dancing in the streets celebrating what amounts to a spectacularized violation of international and domestic law.  

There was no mention that the attack and abduction were condemned by the presidents of Mexico and Brazil, by international legal scholars, or by a widening circle of global leaders alarmed by the precedent being set. There was no scrutiny of the fabricated claims that Venezuela was plotting an invasion of the United States or serving as the epicenter of drug trafficking, assertions long discredited but endlessly recycled to justify imperial violence. 

Nor , crucially, was there any acknowledgment of Trump’s staggering hypocrisy: while declaring a war on drugs in the name of national security, he pardoned one of the most notorious narcotics traffickers ever prosecuted in the United States, Juan Orlando Hernández, described by prosecutors as a central figure in an eighteen-year operation that flooded the U.S. with more than 400 tons of cocaine.

Absent as well was any critical examination of Trump’s resurrection of the Monroe Doctrine, now stripped of even its earlier pretenses and refashioned as a doctrine of open coercion, colonial entitlement, and gangster capitalism. This silence was not incidental; it functioned to protect the ideological framework that renders imperial violence normal and profitable.

This imperial aggression mirrors the logic of Adolf Hitler’s doctrine of Lebensraum, a racist and expansionist ideology that justified conquest, terror, and annexation in the name of national destiny. History does not repeat itself mechanically, but it does return with new uniforms, new slogans, and the same deadly imperial ambitions.

The danger could not have been clearer when Marco Rubio publicly threatened the governments of Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and other nations in the region, warning that they would face retaliation if they failed to submit to the Trump administration’s demands. This was a declaration of imperial intent, a signal that the United States now claims the right to decide which governments may exist and which must be eliminated. 

Equally absent from the broadcast was any reckoning with the toxic reach of neoliberalism itself, despite the fact that Trump openly gloated publicly over Venezuela’s oil reserves and made the astonishing admission that he intended to hand control of those resources to the largest U.S. oil conglomerates. This declaration was an open admission of support for the fusion of state violence, corporate plunder, and imperial entitlement. 

In that moment, conquest was no longer disguised as security policy; it was announced as a business transaction. Such candor would have forced George Orwell and Aldous Huxley to append new chapters to their warnings about dictatorship, chapters in which authoritarian power no longer bothers to conceal its motives, and where the extraction of wealth replaces ideology as the naked logic of domination. 

What we are witnessing is fascism unbound, armed with military force and insulated by media silence. When mainstream media abandon their obligation to question power, to name crimes, and to defend democratic norms, they do more than misinform the public. They normalize lawlessness, launder violence, and prepare the population to accept the unthinkable as inevitable. This silence is not neutrality. It is complicity, and in an age of disappearing laws and vanishing lives, it is a complicity that history will recognize for what it is—an updated version of the worst horrors of the past.

-Henry Giroux