Venezuela: The "Final Humiliation"
At the risk of creeping a bit too close to the helplessly terminal state of Being a Concerned Liberal on the Internet, let's start this attempt to consider the state of contemporary American imperial politics by talking about Andor.
During the second season of Tony Gilroy's engrossing and powerful exploration of the messy, compromised realpolitik of the Star Wars universe (spoilers follow, be warned), there's an arc set on the wealthy but proud planet of Ghorman. Renowned for and enriched by its trade of fine fabrics and clothing made from the planet's unique native silk-spinning spiders, Ghorman (given a particular Gallic character through casting of French actors and a French-ish conlang, all in a clear homage to Jean-Pierre Melville's French Resistance film Army of Shadows) operates with a measure of autonomy from the authoritarian order of the Galactic Empire (you know, Darth Vader, the Emperor, and the Space Nazis). At least until the Empire discovers that deep beneath Ghorman's surface lies a particular mineral that they require for a certain hidden imperial weapons project, a mineral which cannot be effectively obtained without making the whole planet ultimately uninhabitable.
So, at a top secret Wannsee Conference-style meeting, an Imperial plan is hatched to presage this intended complete destruction of a planetary civilization for one of its resources by disseminating anti-Ghorman propaganda across the galaxy while fomenting an insurrectionist national movement that will ultimately be provoked into violence that would then provide the justification for the harsh Imperial crackdown that would lead to open conflict and then finally the planetary genocide which had been penciled in all along.
I was thinking of this arc of Andor and of the related exchange featured above from nearer the series' end when news broke this weekend of the Trump Administration's brazen and plainly illegal assault on Venezuela, which included a battery of bombings in the capital city of Caracas that killed 40 people alongside a lightning raid to abduct Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. Maduro was extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for (mostly) drug trafficking and weapons possession charges, presumably ending his nearly 13 years of rule over the troubled South American nation.
What happens next is anyone's guess, where "anyone" includes the entire American executive leadership up to President Trump himself. The operation was clearly driven by the Latin hemispheric neocon war hawk tendencies of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who seemed as miserable finally getting his way there as he does doing anything whatsoever amidst the soul-devouring pinnacle of MAGA Mountain. Perhaps resident Undead Affairs Advisor Stephen Miller figured a more open war with Venezuela would make migrants from the country within the U.S. more expeditious to deport as well, but who's to say?
The American government's own reasoning for the action is difficult to keep straight, as is the apparent next step and ongoing state of affairs of Venezuelan governance. Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ("NO, IT'S SECRETARY OF WAR!" he bellows, red-faced and slurring as he tears briefing binders in two with his teeth) insist it's a limited operation to arrest Maduro and with that mission accomplished, they're done. Meanwhile, President Grandpa's Bad Days Are All Days Now blurts out that the U.S. is occupying and running the country to take all of their oil (which American petro-capitalists likely don't even have a use for) and also Venezuela's remaining Vice President will do what they say but that's not what she says and the right-wing Venezuelan opposition is like "wtf, bro?" and Trump can't back their leader as an alternative because she won the Nobel Peace Prize that he's for some unfathomable reason convinced should have been his so whoops, war it is, I guess, maybe? Also they're at pains to make it clear that they'll do it to Cuba and Mexico and Greenland and maybe Canada while they're at it and why the heck not Belgium too, their chocolate is pretty nice.
Comparisons in the aftermath of this action have cited the Iraq War a good deal, an imperial war of choice sold to Americans and the globe on fraudulent premises, although as John Ganz and others have pointed out it more closely resembles the US invasion of Panama to forcibly capture its President, prolific drug trafficker and former CIA asset Manuel Noriega, in 1989-90. The premises of the Venezuelan attack are even more fraudulent and indeed barely present; no one is pulling out purported Venezuelan fentanyl during a prosecutorial statement in front of the UN (good luck finding any, as it doesn't come from there).
The Trumpists' no-sell job for any sort of military action targeting Venezuela (or any other imagined antagonist) resembles the briefer "final humiliation" quote from Andor than the elaborate, years-long op to create political instability in Ghorman. Trump always lies badly, but he and his cronies are barely even bothering to do that anymore. Part of this is a result of how completely "in the tubes" they are, as I decided today that I like to say about their excessively online-ness, their subsistence on their own echo-chamber misinformation puke funnel, their stubborn, addicted need to get and remain high on their own supply. The "situation room" thrown together at Mar-A-Lago for a tough war leaders photo op had a Twitter/X feed up on the big screen behind them, for pete's sake (the only previous "situation room" there involved Jeffrey Epstein and an underage staffer but let's not get into that right now).
They have sold their MAGA base on going after Venezuela by labelling it a corrupt crime-ridden socialist dictatorship, emphasizing the "socialist" part especially since the base and the bosses have no issues whatsoever with the other two adjectives nor with the noun (their Conservative Party of Canada asset Pierre Poilievre is gladly parroting that emphasis, obeying his American handlers' orders with a dutifulness that he feels persistently uncompelled to extend to his own country). And of course the perverse anti-immigrant sentiment that has driven and been further whipped up by ICE's reign of terror against Latinos in the U.S. has fed into anti-Latin-American sentiment that can be marshaled to justify such actions, at least among the MAGA rank and file who have needed firing up after nearly a year of grim economic news and persistent Epstein-related Pedo President info dumps.
But Mon Mothma's "final humiliation" from Andor is Trumpworld's starting blocks. An underrated element of Trump's grip on his loyal hordes relates to his discarding of the neoconservatives' dog-whistle Big Lies. What they're doing in Venezuela isn't about protecting Americans from a dangerous foreign military or from drug overdoses or about spreading democracy as prior Republican Presidents claimed their wars were about (but really weren't), it's just that they were very nasty people and leftist radicals and Very Rude to the President and we'd like to take their oil and we'll be looking very strongly at doing this in other places so they'd better watch out and do what we say. I hope we get lucky enough that speedrunning authoritarianism without laying the necessary framework to support it will not work out for the Trumpists, but there is great danger and much to be broken before it collapses, after all.
