AND Editorial (Second Part) – There is Only One Path to Sovereignty for Venezuela and its People
We hereby share an unofficial translation of the second part of the editorial published by A Nova Democracia (AND) on the 1st of February.
You can find the first part on Venezuela here:
Yankee imperialism faces a pre-civil war situation, and this is now more evident than ever, in the context of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations and large protests, many of them armed, within the US. A nation founded on the enslavement of Africans and their descendants; on the complete and total extermination of indigenous peoples; the theft of entire territories from other nations; the complete denial of civil rights to Black people until 60 years ago; the super-exploitation—that is, exploitation higher than average—of immigrants, illegal or legal, who are in any case coerced by the risk of deportation; this nation, however much it boasts of being democratic, is nothing more than an insane dictatorship of a few financial capital oligarchs over the masses, in an accelerated process of ossification, of reactionarization of the State and all its institutions. As Lenin once said: imperialism turns the population into subjects of financial capital, and countries into prisons.
Trump’s persecution of immigrants has clearly defined objectives. First, to pit one section of the proletariat—the native-born—against another, the immigrants; chauvinism is a key resource for preventing class unity, winning over a backward section of the proletariat and the labor aristocracy, ruined by the parasitism of imperialism and the flight of industries to oppressed, hyper-populous countries, to the ideology of the extreme right, racist, and white supremacist Yankee. Of course, in general, it seeks to give vitality to the political regime, since such tactics only confirm that parliamentary stability and ordinary policies no longer appeal to the native proletariat, which is in the majority, because they are unable to reverse the general crisis.
Secondly, Trump is clearly betting on destabilizing the constitutional order, through which he intends to impose an unprecedented level of absolutist presidentialism, not only in relation to the “three powers,” but also in relation to federal units and electoral contenders. That is why States under the control of the Republican mafia, with a higher concentration of immigrants, do not face anti-immigrant police operations as States under the control of the Democratic mafia do. In this regard, Trump is not inventing any original goal: this is the reactionary task carried out by all Yankee governments in power; the originality lies in the chaotic method of blatant provocation.
Anyone who believes that the plan is to completely break the constitutional order is mistaken: Trump knows that this is a very difficult goal without the immediate danger of revolution, and that it is more feasible, at the moment, to destabilize the constitutional order in order to make it more flexible, until he succeeds in generalizing the use of exceptional and even openly fascist measures contained in the US legal system itself. It is part of the march towards fascism, ultimately.
The responses of the American masses, particularly community self-defense movements, immigrants, and black populations, calling for popular vigils against ICE and even the exercise of legitimate self-defense, are not common occurrences. The last time this happened on such a scale was in the 1960s, when civil rights were abolished for black people. The current popular reaction, which only has precedent in that extreme situation, says a lot about the current situation, which is also extreme, but not so much because of the lack of formal rights, but rather because of their practical revocation, which makes the scenario even more conflagrated, since, this time, the solution is not immediately found in the “most radical realization” of the old bourgeois democracy, which is beginning to reveal, in an immediate way to the average consciousness of the masses, its historical and political limits. The masses want another regime and are increasingly aware of this.
The great Enlightenment theorists paid close attention to the decline of empires. They all recognize internal polarization, economic stagnation, decline in foreign dominance, and civil war as common elements of periods in which great fortresses came crashing down in a matter of decades, even years. All of these elements are constitutive of the current situation in the US. The end of the empire is on the horizon, already visible to the naked eye.
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The mobilization of troops from NATO member countries that make up the European Union to Greenland, in the context of Trump’s threats to take that territory from Denmark, expresses the crisis of NATO, recognized even by military experts. This was not an isolated episode, the result of the thoughtless actions of a reckless individual. It is a historical phenomenon of an imperial nature, well supported by the fundamental contradictions of the present day: with Yankee imperialism already in decline as the sole hegemonic superpower, and with the intensification of disputes between powers and superpowers over the division of the world, NATO no longer has the importance it had when it emerged as an instrument of the imperialist doctrine of the “Cold War.” With its end in the 1990s, NATO became a pachyderm, whose creator, increasingly, with the crisis of the system, no longer needs it to the point of justifying the high costs of its maintenance, while its submissive partners, in the struggle for division, have no alternative, at least in the immediate future, amid the polarization between the US-Russia and US-China, other than to continue groveling before the emperor, as in the EU’s posturing on the Greenland issue.
However, the Yankees, as the sole but declining hegemonic superpower, are undoubtedly still interested, albeit not as much as before, in the existence of NATO in their strategy of world domination and guarantee of their full military superiority, especially in the so-called “interoperational” aspect, but now with the luxury of blackmailing their peers. Yankee blackmail to abandon or implode NATO, as a coalition in general, aims to force European member countries to spend more on the defense industry, which, in the case of NATO, comes from more than 60% of the Yankee military-industrial complex, which is still the largest war industry in the world, responsible for more than 40% of total exports of means of war. The Yankee economy is centered on the war industry—without war, and therefore without the costs of war, uncontrollable unemployment and recession are inevitable.
The Yankees also seek to put pressure on the European powers. On the one hand, mainly on the part of the Pentagon, they stir up the “Russian threat to regional security” and, on the other hand, they blackmail them by saying they will not defend Europe and will focus their attention on the struggle with China in the East to counter its expansion in the West, mainly in Latin America, as well as in Africa. In this way, the Yankees are forcing the European powers to submit to their sole hegemony, even if they question it, imposing restrictions or commercial, financial, and fiscal agreements on them in bilateral negotiations, weakening or keeping the European Union under tight control.
As such, the US interest in Greenland is to control strategic reserves of critical minerals and “rare earths,” key resources under Chinese control, which holds more than 60% of the world’s reserves and concentrates 90% of industrial processing capacity, and to prevent China from using the Arctic for strategic trade routes. No less important is its goal of securing a geostrategic position in the Arctic, which reduces the large ocean space between its territory and the European continent that lies under the feet of the atomic superpower Russia. All of this is true. But the Yankees have gone too far in their blackmail and threats to also impose new conditions in the dispute with the imperialist powers of Europe. Here, too, we see the beginning of the decline and the unveiling of the end of the Yankee empire.
