Revista Revolução Cultural - What Is To Be Done?
In the early hours of this Saturday (the 3rd), the United States consummated a brutal and
savage aggression against Venezuela. U.S. commandos bombed military and civilian targets
both in the capital, Caracas, and in the states of Aragua, Miranda, and La Guaira, leaving
citizens dead and injured. Nicolás Maduro, the constitutional president of Venezuela, was
kidnapped together with his wife Cilia Flores and, according to war criminal and murderer
Donald Trump, is being taken to be presented before U.S. “justice,” where he will face a
sham trial for terrorism and drug trafficking.
In the first moments of the Yankee aggression, before his capture, Nicolás Maduro ordered
the total mobilization of the armed forces and the Venezuelan people. The Vice President,
Delcy Rodríguez, in the early hours of the day made a firm statement in which she classified
the Yankee aggression as a “brutal and savage” attack against the Venezuelan people. She
called for national resistance, not only to defend the country’s energy resources, but above
all in the name of its sacred right to independence. “We will never be slaves!” she concluded.
In the same tone spoke the Minister of Defense, Vladimir Padrino, and the United Socialist
Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Nothing up to this moment indicates the capitulation or fall
of the government, whose defense has become, since the open Yankee aggression
was unleashed in mid-last year and brutally intensified today, indistinguishable from
the very defense of the Venezuelan nation.
In one of the most infamous performances in modern history, Donald Trump declared to Fox
News that he followed Maduro’s kidnapping “live, as if it were on TV,” and that Venezuela
would pay for the oil “stolen” from the United States—oil that is located on sacred
Venezuelan territory. In a live statement, alongside the ringleader of the Latin American far
right, Marco Rubio, Trump reiterated his defense of the anachronistic Monroe Doctrine, said
that no one would dispute with the United States in “its” hemisphere, declared that the
United States itself would govern Venezuela, and that Yankee oil companies would exploit its
oil. It was a statement that explicitly affirmed colonial domination not only over Venezuela,
but over the oppressed peoples of the entire subcontinent.
At this moment, it is useless, impractical, and counterproductive to launch ourselves into
conjectures about the intricacies of the illegal and immoral operation perpetrated by the
contemporary followers of Hitler. Yes, followers of Hitler, because Trump seeks to subject
peoples to his dictates through the use of terror, lightning operations outside any legal
framework (even that of war, which presupposes a declaration of hostilities), and the
imposition of faits accomplis. The main future scenarios (which may be combined in many
variations without altering their essence) are as follows:
1. The Venezuelan government unites as one in the defense of the homeland and in
repelling the Yankee aggression. This would force the United States to carry out
aggression on a larger scale, plunging Venezuela into a powerful guerrilla war
against the invader and all of South America into a revolutionary situation.
2. The current government splits, with a part accepting a negotiated transition. In this
scenario, Venezuela would move toward a civil war, whose content and program,
however, would be that of a national liberation struggle.
3. Unconditional capitulation of the regime and demobilization of the popular militias,
with the rise of a puppet government or even an extreme-right military government.
This scenario, today the most unfavorable for the anti-imperialist struggle, seems
unlikely.
It is therefore necessary to reiterate that behind the appearance of strength of the United
States lies a lack of legitimacy and of any progressive historical meaning. While it is true that
imperialism has never ceased to commit atrocities and to subjugate the oppressed peoples
of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, there is an abyssal distance between committing such
acts and cynically verbalizing, in an unprecedented way, the intention to re-colonize
independent states by force. No one will accept living as a slave in the twenty-first century. In
truth, Donald Trump is the finished expression of the senility of Yankee imperialism. By
kidnapping and taking the president of a sovereign country to be tried on its own territory, he
violates the very idea of the nation-state contained in the Treaties of Westphalia of 1648. It
is, therefore, an attempt to push the international system four centuries backwards!
This is, naturally, something impracticable, which will only increase North American isolation
and the hatred of the peoples of the world against it. These peoples will rise up, part by part
and increasingly, as President Mao rightly said at the time of the Yankee aggression against
Panama in January 1964:
“By acting despotically everywhere, U.S. imperialism has placed itself in a position of hostility
toward the peoples of the whole world and has become increasingly isolated. Those who
refuse to be slaves will never be intimidated by the atomic and hydrogen bombs possessed
by U.S. imperialists. The tide of anger of the peoples of the whole world against the U.S.
aggressors is irresistible. Their struggle against U.S. imperialism and its lackeys will surely
win greater victories.”
(Mao Tse-tung, Statement in support of the just patriotic struggle of the Panamanian people
against U.S. imperialism, January 1964).
These are prophetic words that have already begun to be fulfilled, from Iran, through Yemen
and Somalia, to Venezuela and all of Latin America. The Yankees and their army of drug
addicts and degenerates will be humiliated on our sacred lands as they were in Korea,
Cuba, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and wherever they dared to set foot with their filthy boots.
In the specific case of our subcontinent, its countries, although they have degenerated into a
semi-colonial situation, enjoy two hundred years of political independence, independence
that was conquered in bloody struggles against European colonialists, circumstances from
which powerful national cultures were born. If, in the first round, the wars of independence
confronted and defeated colonialism, in this second round the new wars of independence
will confront and defeat imperialism, with a crucial distinction: in doing so, they can only
move toward socialism—that is, a regime in which formal independence is combined with
true national and social emancipation.
Crush fascism, crush imperialism: inseparable tasks
President Lula’s statement on the gravest attack on the sovereignty of a South American
country since the wars of independence is a shameful chapter in national history. Although
he condemns the Yankee aggression as an action that “recalls the worst moments of
interference in the politics of Latin America and the Caribbean and threatens the
preservation of the region as a zone of peace,” Lula does not classify it as a crime nor does
he name its author: Donald Trump and Yankee imperialism. This was the same government
that vetoed Venezuela’s entry into the BRICS and did not recognize Maduro’s election in the
last Venezuelan poll. Indeed, Trump’s tactic of negotiating with Lula while strangling
Venezuelan sovereignty is the classic case of divide and rule. Once the “Venezuelan
question” is “pacified,” in the Roman sense, does anyone doubt that the next target of
Yankee aggression will be Brazil?
Therefore, believing in the possibility of a long-term policy of appeasement would be a
strategic error, insofar as it would disarm the popular masses both ideologically and
materially to defend national sovereignty. In fact, this policy of appeasement attempted by
Lula toward Trump merges with his policy of appeasement toward the Brazilian far right,
which is directed directly, without any disguise, from Washington. All the chips of coup
containment have fallen on the Supreme Federal Court (STF). Although some military heads
have been tried, the structure of the armed forces and their obtuse anti-communist doctrine
remain untouched. The Brazilian armed forces, in reality, act as pro-North American
occupation forces, a privileged caste incapable of any independent national project and
hostile to the Brazilian people themselves. In Congress, traitors to the homeland abound.
Therefore, there is no way to separate unilaterally the national question from the internal
democratic and social question: without the masses mobilizing independently, there can be
no future for our nation; without crushing the fascist far-right, the fifth column of imperialism,
and those who conciliate with it, there can be no true sovereignty.
There is no middle ground: either a true national independence, which implies the
defeat of the internal lackeys of imperialism; or permanent exposure to military coups
and aggressions. This is the immediate future of Latin America. Not even the
democratic façade serves the designs of Yankee imperialism anymore.
The point is that, as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have shown, the unbridled
aggression of imperialism and its wars of plunder can accelerate the conditions for all these
contradictions—national and social—to converge toward a single breaking point. At that
moment, the teachings of President Mao and of the Chinese revolution—which not only do
not coincide with, but are the direct antipodes of the contemporary Chinese revisionism of Xi
Jinping—that U.S. imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers, of the necessity of
constituting a powerful revolutionary united front against the aggressor, and that people’s
war is invincible, are the touchstone for the future of all working humanity.
To defend Venezuela is to defend Latin America!
Let us prepare for a second war of independence!
Death to Yankee imperialism!
Punishment for Donald Trump, bandit and enemy of humanity!
Imperialism is a paper tiger!
Homeland or Death!
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