Does Noam Chomsky Need To Be Re-Assessed?

The usual circular firing-squad is forming on what passes for an American left, this time to decimate our all-too-limited ranks "re-assessing" Noam Chomsky as a "gatekeeper" for the U.S. empire he brilliantly critiqued for almost sixty years. That this fool's errand obviously benefits establishment elites desperately trying to shore-up their fading legitimacy by setting social justice groups at each other's throats appears to be escaping our attention.

Such a controversy speaks to the problem of our tendency to deify people we admire. Chomsky himself has always been critical of this propensity for hero-worship, because we can’t raise up heroes without diminishing ourselves in some important way. One suspects that a fair number of the unhinged accusations about Chomsky allegedly being a “sellout,” “fraud,” deceitful or gullible “gatekeeper” and the like, are not really assessments of Chomsky at all, but knee-jerk projections of him as (previously) a Saint and now a Devil. Clearly, Chomsky is neither, and what is called for is a rational assessment of his work, not a stimulus-response sequence of triggered reactions. Politics of the triggered by the triggered and for the triggered cannot possibly lead us to a better world.

There is also the problem of both his fans and his critics not really being very familiar with his work, which is no easy job, as he put out something on the order of 150 books. Anyone who has read and re-read a substantial portion of his political body of work (say half or more of it) should find it impossible to believe he is doing the establishment’s bidding. The establishment has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep Noam’s political ideas away from mass audiences. For years his political writings could most reliably be found in South End Press, a worker-owned and managed publishing house, and Inquiry magazine, a right-wing libertarian journal. Why did the establishment subject him to such a black-out if he was actually friendly to its agenda? It makes no sense.

Chomsky’s few appearances on U.S. corporate outlets were not characterized by him finding common ground with elite ideology. Quite the contrary. He offered his usual rational critique, but in doing so he may simply have convinced the corporate-captive audiences that he was a lunatic, since brief flashes of rationality amidst a flood of propaganda are unlikely to be perceived as such. As Chomsky himself said, “If they (elites) were BETTER propagandists they’d have me on more often.”

 

Useful follow-up to this commentary:

For un-triggered analysis of Chomsky, see "The Public Life of Noam Chomsky," Legalienate, November 28, 2024. 

For un-triggered analysis of the Epstein fiasco, see Michael Tracey, "The Idiocy of the Epstein Mythology," Legalienate, December 24, 2025

For critical, but not dismissive commentary about Chomsky, see "Debating Chomsky on Lesser Evilism, BLM, Stolen Elections, and Responsibility For WWII," Legalienate, December 26, 2020

Also, "The Lesser-Evil Syndrome: Noam Chomsky's Fall Into Self-Contradiction," Legalienate, April 12, 2020

Hero-Worship and Impunity: The Jerry Sandusky Case

Note: This story was originally published at Legalienate in 2012. See postcript below for an update calling the premise of Sandusky's guilt into serious question.

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Just in case you thought sodomized children might be the obvious victims in the Jerry Sandusky case, an editorial published today from the San Jose Mercury News tries to set you straight: The real tragedy of the case is that, by failing to strike the correct moral posture, Joe Paterno missed his chance to be a hero.

Here's how the editors arrive at this conclusion:

"Being told that Sandusky was seen abusing a boy in a shower, Paterno told a superior -- not the authorities as required by law -- what he had heard. . . . And went on as if it hadn't happened.

"When the revelations finally became public years later, Paterno, then 85 . . . had not the instinct to realize what he had done, to swiftly resign and apologize profusely to the victims and the families and everyone he had let down, and then fade into a chastened but still perhaps dignified retirement.

" . . . Paterno's fate is a tragedy. He probably should have retired long before the Sandusky case fell into his lap. He now passes to eternity less as a legendary coach than as that guy from Penn State who let a pedophile keep abusing kids.

"To those who knew and revered him, it will forever feel as though he was the victim. But he had the power to make it different. He could have done the right thing all those years ago and spared future victims. Or he could at least have faced up to what happened and become a champion for victims of abuse. He could have been the hero.

"That's the take away from all this, after Friday's verdicts. And the real tragedy."

In the first place, Sandusky was not seen merely "abusing" a boy in the shower; he was seen sodomizing him, which is several orders of magnitude beyond mere "abuse."

Secondly, Paterno sacrificed whatever claim he had on a "dignified retirement" the moment he knew what was going on and failed to go to the police. And this would not have been a "heroic" act, merely a necessary one. It is frankly outrageous to suggest that doing anything other than this would have been appropriate, much less heroic, especially years after being informed of the crimes.

"To those who knew and revered him [Paterno], it will forever feel as though he was the victim."

Here it's difficult to escape the conclusion that the Mercury News' editors are helping foster the very climate of hero worship that gives people like Sandusky their opportunity to victimize children in the first place. The victims were the children; Paterno doesn't count. But he made himself count in a negative way by his failure to act. This is no one's responsibility but his own.

Obviously, Sandusky should never have been allowed to be a coach, but neither should Paterno. Sandusky is a predator, Paterno a moral imbecile. Young athletes deserve better than either of these two.

Parents are now wondering, appropriately enough, how deep the moral rot runs in organized sport, and exactly what risks are entailed in letting their children participate. We should not surrender to hysteria on this count, but we should adopt a critical attitude towards the "winning forgives everything" attitude so dominant in the sports world today. Athletes and coaches are athletes and coaches, not Gods, and we should demand moral behavior of them just as we do everyone else.

The presumed impunity with which Sandusky acted arises from a culture of hero-worship in which the adored figure is presumed to be incapable of wrong. This presumption makes it easy for men like Sandusky to believe that wrong simply doesn't exist, which is undoubtedly how he continues to maintain his innocence, even as he concedes that he took showers with his victims and engaged in affectionate "horseplay," as though that would have been permissible.

The Mercury News' editors engage in apologetics when they explain - as though it were relevant - that Paterno was of a generation that simply ignored sexual predation, hoping it would go away without the need for confrontation. To wit:

"In the olden days, reports of sexual abuse prompted many, whether priests or educators or even parents, to try to wish it away, hope they were wrong about what they thought they saw or heard or were told, and to grasp at the flimsiest of excuses to tell themselves they had done their part, done the best they could, fulfilled their responsibility. That is was not really that bad. That the kids would be fine.

"This was Paterno's downfall... When the revelations finally became public years later, Paterno, then 85, being of that earlier generation, had not the instinct to realize what he had done, to swiftly resign and apologize profusely to the victims and the families and everyone he had let down . . ."

As though letting a sexual predator run riot for years constituted a mere "let down" to the victims, one that could be swiftly erased with a perfectly useless apology.

The problem here is with the attitude of the Mercury News' editors. They still appear to believe that great coaches are Divine, and so they are prepared to downplay grotesque criminal behavior in the interest of continuing the delusion that success in sports is synonymous with Godlike perfection.

But it's not.

Source:

Bay Area News Group editorial: "The tragedy of Sandusky's case is that Joe Paterno could have been a hero," Marin Independent Journal, June 23, 2012

 

Postscript: The validity of the case against Sandusky has been seriously called into question on the grounds that it was part of a moral panic. See David Rosen's, "From Moral Outrage to Moral Panic: the Limits of Public Rage," Counterpunch, January 29, 2019, excerpted below:

"The trial, conviction and imprisonment of Jerry Sandusky is an illuminating example of how moral outrage can turn into a moral panic when a perfect target captures public attention.  He was a Penn State football coach who served for thirty years (1969-1999) as an assistant its legendary head-coach, Joe Paterno.  He also founded The Second Mile, a charity for at-risk youths.

"However, on November 4, 2011, a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report initially accusing him of sexually abusing eight young boys over a period of at least 15 years.  A month later, two additional boys came forward claiming they had been abused, raising the total of accusers to ten. He was charged with 48 counts of sexual abuse including “involuntary deviant sexual intercourse, indecent assault, unlawful contact with a minor, corruption of minors and endangering the welfare of children.”  But did he commit the acts he was convicted of perpetrating?

"Mark Pendergrast, a science writer and author of more than a dozen books, provides an invaluable case study into how questionable accusations and outrage could rapidly snowball into a moral panic.  In his recently-published book, The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment (Sunbury Press), he argues that Sandusky’s arrest, prosecution, trial and final imprisonment was a miscarriage of judgement and believes he should receive a new – and fair – trial.

"After careful coaching from aggressive law-enforcement officials, therapists discovered repressed memories and opportunistic civil-litigation attorneys, the alleged victims fundamentally changed their stories, their memories.  The author takes particular aim at those promoting recovered-memories theories, specifically many of the psycho-therapist who assisted the victims to recall long-suppressed memories of sexual abuse.  During the Sandusky scandal, this form of psychotherapy captured much media attention and became a short-lived self-help fad, with numerous scholarly/academic studies and popular books published about the topic.  Stories about recovered memories regularly appeared in the local media and spread to the New York Times and The Washington Post as well as CNN and NBC, ensuring that the Sandusky case became a national story."

The Idiocy of the Epstein Mythology

 

Michael Tracey

July 10, 2025

The Epstein mythology can be roughly defined as the popular belief, nearly ubiquitous on social media and adjacent outlets, that the deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein orchestrated a sprawling child sex-trafficking operation in which the powerful individuals across government, business, entertainment, and academia with whom Epstein consorted were systematically entrapped into compromising sexual encounters, surreptitiously filmed, and then blackmailed into silence or complicity—likely with the assistance of some unknown intelligence agencies (Mossad being a typical candidate). The true scale of this operation has been covered up, the mythology goes, because its exposure would unveil the evil at the very heart of global power structures. 

More recently, the mythology has taken on a startling new dimension. While the second Trump administration promised to vanquish the Deep State and to bring long overdue justice to child-predating wrongdoers, there appears to have been a slight snafu. Justice was apparently to be served by releasing what had colloquially become known as the “Epstein Files”—a compendium of damning documents understood to be sitting in a government repository somewhere, shielded from public disclosure by reprobates in the Biden Administration—and indeed the first Trump administration, which had also been obstructed by the insidious Deep State. But this time, Trump would install only the most loyal and tenacious warriors. Incorruptible heroes such as Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Pam Bondi would stop at nothing to reveal the truth, once and for all. And yet now, in a shocking twist, Trump and his subordinates have decided to join the coverup, and let the elite pedophiles continue enjoying their impunity. 

That’s a brief rundown of the current iteration of Epstein mythology. Of course, there are also non-mythological components to the Jeffrey Epstein saga. He really did procure teenage girls for his own perverse gratification. He really did hobnob with an astonishing array of well-connected and powerful individuals. He really did die under peculiar circumstances. It is easy to see why this story has morphed into an object of such sustained intrigue. But kernels of truth have long since given way to an ever-expanding mythology which cannot be falsified. No countervailing evidence could ever disabuse its most committed adherents of their essential belief: that organized sexual predation rings of the kind orchestrated by Epstein are pervasively real and play a decisive role in how power is distributed in society.

Belief in the ubiquity of elite pedophilia networks is a constant in the right-wing imagination, typically fused with turbulent variants of grassroots Christianity. In this way, Epstein mythology is a successor to the QAnon phenomenon from the first Trump administration, which was also believed to have sweeping explanatory power, though it lacked the more concrete factual predicate of Epstein mythology. While the right-wing version associates “sex trafficking” with demonology and sin, there’s a left-wing version as well. It is more secular, more concerned with notions of power imbalance and hierarchy, but nonetheless tends to converge on the same endpoint: that these wicked trafficking networks are anywhere and everywhere, and our failure to combat them is a profound indictment of our society.

Compare a right-leaning NGO focused on sex trafficking to a left-leaning NGO focused on the same subject. The Tim Tebow Foundation describes child sexual exploitation as a “horrific evil hidden in the darkness,” and presents itself as a rescue ministry, bringing “salvation” to “survivors” in the name of God. The Empowered Network aims to help these same “survivors” attain “economic freedom,” with an emphasis on “women of color” and “survivors from diverse backgrounds.” Instead of “horrific evil,” it speaks of “generational cycles of poverty and exploitation.” Evaluating the actual efficacy of these organizations is a daunting task, perhaps by design.

One person who eventually got in on the act was the late Virginia Giuffre, the most influential Epstein accuser, who reportedly secured a $2.7 million donation from the late Queen Elizabeth for her sex-trafficking awareness nonprofit, SOAR. The group appears to have done little to “raise awareness” beyond producing a barebones website to serve as a portal for Giuffre’s various media activities. “Giuffre is perhaps the most prominent survivor of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, but he was not her first abuser,” the website reads. “By the time she met Epstein, when she was 16, Giuffre had already been sexually trafficked by another man.” 

Perhaps the most glaring omission in the Epstein mythology is any acknowledgement that Giuffre was a serial fabricator. Her death earlier this year, at age 41, has been yet another boon to Epstein mythologists, as it would seem to vindicate in their minds that she needed to be “silenced,” even though no evidence has been presented for anything other than what’s already in the public record: that a deeply troubled woman in the throes of a worsening personal and familial crisis committed suicide. Giuffre’s estranged husband had recently been granted custody of their children, after claiming Giuffre had physically attacked him and was mentally unstable. Local authorities agreed. Giuffre was distraught, and posted online what could be construed as farewell messages to her children, whom she’d been legally barred from seeing. But regardless of the facts, mythologists will always assume Giuffre must have been “suicided” by unknown assailants, who for some reason neglected to prevent her from generating massive publicity with endless incendiary accusations over more than a decade, but decided in April 2025 that it was time for her to be killed.

Giuffre, as the highest-profile Epstein accuser, was absolutely integral to the creation of the mythology. It was she who made the most sensational claims of being sex-trafficked to prominent third-party individuals—including Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, and former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. For nearly a decade, Giuffre accused Dershowitz of committing depraved sex crimes, but by 2022, she was forced to admit in a civil settlement that her claims had been false. Strangely, this development failed to penetrate the mythology—perhaps because it demonstrated the serial fabulism of the accuser on whose claims the mythology was built.

 “Giuffre was a serial fabricator.”“Epstein hysteria, like other hysterias, has tended to erode civil liberties and injure due process.”

Major planks of Epstein mythology give way under the barest examination. Its adherents love to cluck that Alex Acosta, the former Trump labor secretary and federal prosecutor who was involved in arranging a 2008 plea deal for Epstein, said he was told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” and that Acosta should therefore “leave it alone.” This admittedly spicy claim derives from a single Daily Beast article from 2019, and has never been corroborated anywhere else, despite the avalanche of legal and journalistic resources dedicated to the Epstein saga. The quote is also plainly second- or-third-hand—hearsay, in other words—not a direct statement from Acosta, as it’s often portrayed. 

Is it implausible that Epstein, over his many years of strange international jet-setting, might have come in contact with certain intelligence agency assets, or even performed certain tasks at their behest? No. After all, this is a person who managed to insinuate himself into the company of everyone from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump. But the wild extrapolations that follow are the hallmark of a mythology lacking any epistemic guardrails. That Epstein plausibly could have come into contact with intelligence operatives is somehow taken to mean that it’s been dispositively established that he was coordinating a large-scale pedophilic sex-trafficking and blackmail operation, the full scope of which could finally be revealed if only the FBI would make good on its promise to release something called the “Epstein Files.”

Epstein mythologists also resist any recognition of the perverse incentives created by the Epstein saga turning into an enormous cash-cow. Giuffre received at least five Epstein-related settlements, including $10 million from Prince Andrew, unspecified “millions” from Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, $500,000 from Epstein’s own estate, and an unknown amount from JP Morgan, which agreed to a staggering $290 million settlement to resolve a class-action suit of Epstein accusers who charged the bank with malfeasance merely for at one point having Epstein as a client. Deutsche Bank likewise settled for $75 million on the same grounds. Given the radioactivity of anything that can be remotely associated with claims of child sex trafficking, the calculus behind the settlements is not hard to grasp. A similar logic likely applied with Prince Andrew, whose odd performance in an infamous 2019 BBC interview landed him and the British royal family in hot water. He subsequently opted to settle his lawsuit with Giuffre, presumably viewing this as preferable to standing trial in the United States amid a maelstrom of publicity. 

With this downpour of settlement funds, Giuffre purchased a six-bedroom oceanfront property in Perth, Australia, as well as a spacious nearby ranch estate. It might be uncouth to observe that Epstein accusers have made huge sums of money from their claims—but it’s also true. 

Despite her decade’s worth of sensational charges, Giuffre was not called as a witness by prosecutors in the 2021 trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. Not one of the four alleged victims to testify in that trial claimed they had ever been trafficked to any third-party individuals; indeed, the sex trafficking conspiracy for which Maxwell was ultimately convicted consisted of two persons: herself and Epstein. 

Thus, the only time that the heightened evidentiary standards and adversarial scrutiny of a criminal trial were brought to bear, no claims were even tested that could have substantiated the central premise of the popular mythology—namely, that Epstein ran an elaborate sex-trafficking operation to supply prominent men with minors, and then capture their illicit exploits on tape for the purposes of blackmail. (Blackmail to what end, exactly? Never clear.) 

However, the trial did highlight the constitutionally questionable practice of allowing self-described “victims” to testify pseudonymously. Maxwell’s appellate brief, now pending before the US Supreme Court, convincingly argues that this “transformed the trial into a form of Kabuki theater designed to remind the jury at every turn that these adult women were being protected because their privacy interests, and not Maxwell’s constitutional right to a public trial, were paramount.” The brief continues: 

Immediately after Epstein’s death, complainants’ civil attorneys representing Epstein victims, including those who testified at trial, began to assist in the creation of the Epstein Victims Compensation Program (VCP), a non-adversarial and confidential claims resolution program set up to compensate self-identified victims of Epstein, even as they were actively involved in the Government’s investigation. On June 25, 2020, the Program began accepting claims. An attorney for one complainant encouraged her to cooperate with the Government in its case against Maxwell because it would improve her prospects for receiving a larger sum of money from the VCP. Tr. 2731-32. It did. “Jane” received $5,000,000. 

Excluded from the popular mythology is any cognizance that persistent Epstein hysteria, like other hysterias, has tended to erode civil liberties and injure due process. It authorizes the casual proliferation of abject lies—such as those made ceaselessly against Alan Dershowitz, whose eventual attainment of an admission from Giuffre that she had falsely accused him of depraved sexual acts for eight years straight is diligently ignored by the mythology’s adherents. It accepts as perfectly sensible that a “self-identified victim” can be enticed by attorneys to cooperate with federal prosecutors because this would improve her chances of obtaining a bigger payout from an adjudicative process that is both “non-adversarial” and “confidential,” meaning there is no downside risk to maximally dramatizing one’s purported victimhood—and the upside can be $5 million.

Epstein mythology has also thoroughly humiliated the Trump Administration. Figures like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino auditioned for their current top roles at the FBI by spending the prior several years on the GOP podcast circuit, and if anything plays to the id of right wing social media, it’s peddling speculation about the supposed concealment of child-sex trafficking rings. Once the righteous are restored to power, so the story goes, the perpetrators will finally get what’s coming to them.

When people wonder why Pam Bondi, as attorney general, teased imminent scandalous revelations from the “Epstein Files,” only to then disclaim the very existence of those files, they overlook the obvious answer: She and other administration officials have long sought to rouse their followers on social media by indicating keen interest in Epstein mythology. Simply name-dropping Epstein was a surefire winner in the less-than-scrupulous podcast environments where JD Vance was shrewdly electioneering last year. This made it possible for “anti-establishment” media consumers to believe that by voting Republican in 2024, they were voting to defeat the Deep State—and so to release the “Epstein Files.” Such logic may have been shallow and deluded, but its political employment has proved to be highly clever and effective.

Still, the dam was bound to break eventually. Epstein mythologists now denounce Trump & co. for concealing evidence of a far-reaching child-sex-trafficking ring and blackmail network that they are certain exists. But if anything needs to be denounced, it is the charlatanism of those who exploited the credulous and trafficked in nonsense to attain high office. Now that would be a “trafficking” conspiracy worth exploring in greater depth.

Trump Seizes Venezuelan Oil Tanker, Threatens Colombia "Could Be Next" Target For Regime Change

“It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”

-----Former U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton, Trish Regan Prime Time, Fox Business Report, January 28, 2019

   

President Donald Trump triumphantly announced on December 10 that the U.S. Coast Guard had seized a large oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, while failing to identify it by name or specify where it had been intercepted, typical omissions for the self-declared "very stable genius." This is but the latest news accompanying the massive U.S. military build-up in the Caribbean, which includes aircraft carriers, fighter jets, landing ships, and thousands of U.S. troops. At the same time, Trump threatened Colombian President Gustavo Petro that he "could be next" - presumably a threat of regime change - after Washington launches a military attack on the Venezuelan government, which Trump says is imminent.

The attack against Venezuela's principal revenue source has nothing to do with drug trafficking - military operations abroad are the least effective method of combating drugs - but rather, reflects an imperial desire acted on by the last five U.S. administrations to expel the Bolivarian Revolution from power and install a puppet regime in Caracas that will hand over the largest oil reserves on the planet to Western corporations.

This lust for hydrocarbons, which should have been subdued some time ago in order to deal with growing climate break-down, has gone full force with the second coming of Trump and his determination to extract and burn off as much oil as possible while eliminating even the most modest efforts to ameliorate the climate crisis. In July, for example, the Trump administration eliminated a regulation limiting toxic emissions from cars and power plants, and a week ago rolled back automobile fuel efficiency standards. This will aggravate the ecological crisis by increasing fuel consumption and carbon-dioxide production.

One can reasonably wonder whether the ongoing attacks on Bogota and Caracas are actually part of a Washington plan to take possession of existing cocaine-trafficking routes and open up new ones, for example, through "liberated" Venezuela.  After all, the White House and its intelligence agencies have a well-established record of working with governments that publicly take a hard rhetorical line against drug-trafficking in order to hide their own criminal involvement in it, as occurred with Felipe Calderon in Mexico and with the Colombian paramilitaries under Alvaro Uribe (when Colombia enjoyed lavish U.S. support). In the Calderon case, even the U.S. concedes that strongman Genaro Garcia Luna (secretary of public security under Calderon) was directing narco-trafficking while also heading the agencies tasked with combating it. 

As noted by Luis Hernandez Navarro in the Mexican daily La Jornada, the rising prospects of Uribe governing Colombia again through a figure-head following next year's elections give the Trump administration an incentive to close the noose around Venezuela, the last untoppled domino Washington needs to achieve complete control of the narcotics trade in Central and South America.

At the same time, Hernandez notes, the open contempt for Latin American and Caribbean sovereignty reflects Trumpian confidence in being able to perpetrate whatever atrocities Washington needs to with impunity, a self-assurance that appears to be grounded in reality given the lack of consequences to more than two years of wholesale slaughter in Palestine by Israel with full U.S. support.

Furthermore, Hernandez goes on to point out, the presence of right-wing and extremely right-wing governments allied with Washington in Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Trinidad, and Tobago smooths the probable path to power of a Pinochet-aligned group in Chile, as well as the threat of resurgent Uribe-ism in Colombia, all of which emboldens Trump to indulge calculated imperial abuse of a divided region unable to overtly resist it, whether it takes the form of illegal sanctions, acts of piracy like the recent seizure of the oil tanker, or bombardments and massacres.

Such policies are hardly the recent invention of an aberrant Trump regime, but rather, trace back to the unsuccessful 2002 U.S.-sponsored coup d'etat against Hugo Chavez, an effort that was aborted (but never renounced) when masses of poor people (the Bolivarian base) surrounded the presidential palace and successfully demanded Chavez's release from captivity. Since then, and always in the name of freedom, democracy and human rights, the U.S. has unleashed sanctions, media slander campaigns, color revolutions, oil embargoes, assassination attempts (against president Maduro), robbery of currency reserves and infrastructure, threats of invasion, and attempted military coups against Bolivarian rule, including armed clashes between Colombian and Venezuelan forces, and once even recognizing a puppet government of its own choosing (Juan Guaido).

These actions have caused great damage to Venezuela and immense suffering to its people, taking the form of millions of dollars in lost oil income and the displacement of millions of Venezuelans, who have migrated to other countries in order to survive. Meanwhile, the oligarchs of old live the high life in great palaces in Miami and Madrid waiting for Washington to restore their lost privileges. 

They may have a long wait. All prior efforts to effect regime change in Caracas have run up against what appears to be an immovable object: the unity of the National Bolivarian Armed Forces, which has emerged from twenty-seven years of revolutionary effort designed to make Venezuelan sovereignty invulnerable to compromise, whether by manipulation or outright conquest. To date there isn't the slightest indication of an internal fissure anywhere in its considerable armor.

An important part of this unity has been the development of a new military doctrine known as Comprehensive National Defense, which confronts the U.S. military threat with three unyielding components: (1) strengthened military power; (2) deepened civilian-military union (people and army); and (3) increased popular participation in national defense tasks. 

The pre-revolutionary Venezuelan armed forces were fragmented in divisions and brigades. Hugo Chavez organized the country in regions, and insured that in each region there was a military structure with all the necessary components: Army, Navy, National Guard, popular militias, and the people. If one region comes under attack, it now has the capacity to defend itself alone. There is no need for Caracas to move in units from somewhere else.

In addition to this redundant self-sufficiency, Venezuela enjoys complete unity of purpose and frequent contact between the government and the troops. President Maduro visits all the barracks personally, showing up at dawn. He freely shares with the troops, runs with them, and does military exercises with them. Many militia members have been Chavistas since childhood, forming unbreakable bonds of loyalty to each other and the Bolivarian Revolution. They will not be easily dealt with. As Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello observes: "For the friends of Chavismo the popular militias are a diamond; for the enemies they're the worst possible news."

Foreign military intervention in Venezuela is enormously complicated, and not just because of civilian-military unity. Venezuela is a large country of nearly thirty million people. It has weapons, manpower, determination, and land capable of sustaining prolonged popular resistance. It has modernized its weaponry, buying from China, Russia, and Iran, while also forging an alliance with those countries. In addition, it is blessed with geographical diversity measuring almost a million square kilometers, including extensive mountain ranges, dense jungles, and the long Orinoco River basin. It has 4208 kilometers of coastline, a 2341 kilometer border with Colombia, and a 2199 kilometer border with Brazil. And the popular barrios of Caracas are rat-holes.

None of Venezuela's neighbors will lend themselves to being platforms for imperial war exploding in their midst. 

Obviously, U.S. firepower can inflict enormous damage, but power without legitimacy is just another name for impotence.

 

Sources:

Luis Hernandez Navarro, "Venezuela, the Day After," La Jornada (Spanish), December 9, 2025

Luis Hernandez Navarro, "Trump: the Context of the Aggressions," La Jornada (Spanish), December 11, 2025

 

 

 

 

Trinity and the Morals of Extermination

Perhaps never before in history had a group of scientists so fervently prayed. J. Robert Oppenheimer, slumping against a wooden post, told himself: "I must remain conscious!" Afraid it might electrocute him, the normally unflappable Sam Allison dropped the microphone at the last second of the countdown: "Five . . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . . . . . . . zero!"

After what seemed an interminable silence, a strange light never before seen in the world ignited the horizon and a reddish-orange fireball infinitely brighter and 10,000 times hotter than the sun rose majestically over the desert, turning darkness into light for a hundred miles around. On that day - the day of the Trinity blast - even a blind woman reported seeing the dawn.

A New York Times reporter was reminded of the Lord's command, "Let there be light!" Physicist Isidor Rabi feared the fire in the sky would burn forever. His colleague Dick Feynman, momentarily blinded, turned away in pain. Oppenheimer recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds!"

The boiling mushroom cloud swirled into the heavens, presaging catastrophe. Under a curtain of fallout, jubilant Manhattan Project scientists broke into a jig on the desert floor.

Thus did the nuclear genie escape the bottle in the desert of Alamagordo New Mexico eighty years ago. Of one thing there could be no doubt: Washington was issuing unconditional surrender to the morals of extermination. Even as the atomic bomb was nearing completion, the U.S. was razing whole cities to the ground with "conventional" bombs and burning hundreds of thousands of civilians alive with napalm sticks. In April 1945 one of FDR's advisers declared that he favored "the extermination of the Japanese in toto." It was not an isolated sentiment.

With Hitler dead, Germany defeated, and Japan in ruins, the U.S. Target Committee met to select a Japanese city for atomic doom. Seeking to heighten the international impact of the bombing, General Leslie Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project, favored Kyoto, on the grounds that the inhabitants of an intellectual center would be "more apt to appreciate the significance of such a weapon." Secretary of State Henry Stimson, having visited Kyoto and grown fond of it, vetoed Groves's preference. The committee ultimately opted for Hiroshima, amidst a lament that its mountains weren't close enough to the city to maximize the bomb's effects.

Everyone involved in the operation was well aware of the historic nature of the occasion, and strove to act appropriately with an eye toward posterity. Moments before the Enola Gay obliterated Hiroshima, Colonel Paul Tibbets told his crew, "watch your language." Since the bombing was being recorded, he didn't want a slip of the tongue to reflect badly on his crew. Profanity, not extermination, was the feared sin.

At 8:09 a.m. Hiroshima broke into the Enola Gay's view. Four minutes later, the bombardier took control of the plane, lined up the "T" of the Aioi Bridge in the cross hairs of his bombsight and announced, "I've got it."

At 8:15 a.m. the bomb-bay doors swung open, lightening the plane's load by five tons. The plane lurched skywards. Tibbets pulled on his goggles.

Nothing happened.

With the crew suspecting a dud, the cockpit was suddenly flooded with bright light, which was followed by two strong shock waves that jolted the plane upward. Sergeant George Caron dictated into his tape recorder: "A column of smoke is rising fast. It has a fiery red core . . . . Fires are springing up everywhere . . . there are too many to count . . . " In the copilot's seat Robert Lewis scribbled a more emotional reaction: "My God, what have we done?"

On the ground thousands of feet below him came the answer. Eyes turned skyward liquified in the blinding flash, streaming down upturned faces. Bodies turned to charcoal. Infrared rays melted skin like wax.

Windows exploded, buildings crumpled, people hurtled through the air like missiles, limbless and headless bodies piled up like logs and lay under piles of fallen debris. After the ear-shattering roar, an immense column of dirt blotted out the sun. At 8:16 a.m. Hiroshima suddenly turned as still and black as night.

On the Aioi Bridge eerie silhouettes of the vaporized were permanently burned into the concrete. Along the streets, blackened and bleeding survivors swarmed towards water, hands and arms aloft, patches of roasted skin flapping in the wind. Stunned, terrified, in agony, they moved - herdlike - toward estuaries of the Ota River, which quickly filled with bloated corpses. Helpless voices cried out for water, for their mothers, for the relief of death.

The few functioning medical facilities were overwhelmed as ten thousand wounded jammed the Red Cross Hospital contending for four hundred beds and a handful of dazed doctors. Burned beyond recognition, patients hoping to be reunited with their families finger-painted their names in blood on the lobby walls.

Back in Los Alamos Hiroshima represented sweet triumph. Robert Oppenheimer received word by phone from General Groves, who confirmed that the bomb had exploded "with a very big bang indeed." Relieved and proud, Oppenheimer had an announcement issued over the public address system that a "successful combat drop" of one of Los Alamos's "units" had taken place, and called a meeting in the theater to celebrate with his ecstatic fellow scientists.

It was a showman's dream moment, and Oppenheimer didn't let it go to waste. Arriving to the meeting late, he strode up the aisle amidst the bedlam of clapping, foot-stomping, and shouting coming from his fellow experts in emotional discipline. For once the scientists were irrepressible and the celebratory din did not subside until long after Oppenheimer clasped his hands over his head in the ritual victory stance and mounted the podium to speak.

In the evening a party was held in the men's dormitory. Off in a corner Oppenheimer showed a colleague a telex of the Hiroshima damage reports. The colleague shook his head. Oppenheimer, depressed, left the party early and spotted a scientist vomiting in the bushes outside. Meanwhile, back in Washington President Truman was apparently enjoying great peace of mind, calling the atomic bombing "the greatest thing in history."

Three days later a piercing flash accompanied by a thunderous blast announced the world's first plutonium bomb in the skies over Nagasaki (Hiroshima had been a uranium bomb). At ground zero, there were no screams or moans: within a radius of 1000 yards the unsheltered perished before they could react.

The swath of destruction roared through northern Nagasaki at 9000 miles an hour, making it rain debris. Houses and buildings were smashed, crushed, and burned. Stone was pulverized and tiles shot through the air like bullets. The sturdy beams of the Mitsubishi Steelworks twisted and turned like silly putty while the roofs of reinforced concrete buildings crumpled and collapsed. Trees were ripped from the ground, utility poles snapped like matchsticks, and a hurricane of shattered glass embedded countless shards in human flesh.

Yellow smoke hung over the carbonized remains of the city. Near the epicenter fires raged out of control. Stunned survivors cupped detached eyeballs back inside their skulls.

Six days later the Japanese signed the surrender. Shortly after that the U.S. War Department announced that the atomic bombings had not been militarily necessary:

"Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts . . . it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

Cultural historian Lewis Mumford recapped fission's ugly debut by accusing the U.S. government of having reverted to Bronze Age barbarism and "reversed the whole course of human history." At Hiroshima and Nagasaki the U.S. had lifted the curtain on the atomic age with the annihilation of an estimated 200,000 non-combatants, "virgin" targets deliberately selected to isolate and measure the atomic bomb's unique effects. So ended what historians have taken to calling the "good war."

That Japan was already putting out peace feelers through its emissary in Moscow did not stay the hand of the nuclear executioners, nor did the cosmic destruction deter General "Hap" Arnold from staging the war's grand finale five days after Nagasaki - a 1000-plane raid that bombarded what remained of Japanese cities, killing thousands as leaflets fluttered to the ground announcing the Japanese government's surrender. Some, however, were still not satisfied. General Carl Spaatz wanted to use a third atomic bomb on Tokyo, but decided that bouncing rubble around the demolished capital might fail to make a discernible point.

In view of the foregoing it is safe to paraphrase Mark Twain and say that reports of Hitler's defeat in WWII are greatly exaggerated. Germany was defeated, but the loathesome tenet that wholesale slaughter is praiseworthy if it brings victory was perpetuated. At Nuremberg and Tokyo the victors framed their war crime indictments to exclude Allied atrocities, deliberately pardoning U.S. officials for the atomic bombings, though Justice Radhabinod Pal of India did manage to declare in his dissent that "the decision to use the atom bomb is the only near approach to the directives . . . of the Nazi leaders . . . "Secretary of War Henry Stimson justified atomic incineration on the basis that it saved lives - by obviating an American invasion of Japan. Within a generation the same "humanitarian" logic was at work in Vietnam as the CIA employed systematic torture to deter a guerrilla movement and blackmail its supporters into capitulating to U.S. demands.

Accompanying the morals of extermination was a shadowy nuclear priesthood stockpiling the bombs of cosmic violence and advancing the fascist religion of permanent war to justify them. Fine-tuning deranged technological fantasies in totalitarian enclaves of total secrecy, the Atomic Apostles operated completely outside the process of democratic government, poisoning earth and sky with radioactivity, upsetting a delicate ecological balance, and contaminating the genetic heritage of life itself. A critical focus of their work was the institutionalization of atomic testing, which showered fallout on hundreds of thousands of American G.I.'s at test ranges in Nevada and Utah while the U.S. government downplayed the radioactive dangers, assuring its conscripted guinea pigs that all would be well if they just placed complete faith in the Pentagon. At the same time in the South Pacific, Marshallese Islanders sickened by atomic tests were removed from their radiated islands to face years of bitter exile, only to return home and be evacuated anew after it was discovered that the area was still radioactive. When thousands of soldiers and islanders found themselves dying of cancer, Washington disclaimed all responsibility for their plight.

Eight decades later the heirs to these atomic crimes bombed Iran to prevent any possibility of its developing an atomic bomb. Iranian theocrats, the reasoning goes, are strangers to rationality and therefore cannot be trusted to use nuclear technology responsibly like the civilized master race in Washington has done for so long.

That the perversely comic premise of good U.S. nukes vs. evil Islamic nukes will not ever be debunked in front of mass U.S. audiences illustrates how far the United States is from anything remotely resembling democratic debate. In spite of the the fact that the constituency that desires that it not be annihilated by nuclear bombs or subjected to slow death by radiation poisoning includes everyone, no "focus group" is ever asked its reaction to the morals of extermination heralded by its leaders as merely gutsy realism in a "dangerous world."

No doubt the world is a dangerous place. But the point is that it is made a suicidal place by the lunatic policies of "rational" nuclear war upheld by the United States government. That the world has survived this nuclear recklessness for eight decades is nothing more than blind luck, and as is well known, luck inevitably runs out.

Sources:

Lewis Mumford, "The Conduct of Life," (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1951)

Lewis Mumford, "My Works and Days," (Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1979)

Howard Zinn, "Postwar America: 1945-1971," (Bobbs-Merrill, 1973)

Noam Chomsky, "Year 501- The Conquest Continues," (South End, 1993)

Peter Wyden, "Day One," (Simon and Schuster, 1984)

Stephen Hilgartner, "Nukespeak: Nuclear Language, Visions, and Mindset," (Sierra Club, 1982)

John Hersey, "Hiroshima," The New Yorker, August 31, 1946

Frank Chinook, "Nagasaki: The Forgotten Bomb," (World Publishing, 1969)

Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present," (Harper, 1995)

Walter LaFeber, "The American Age - United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750," (W. W. Norton, 1989)

Democratic Notes On Anti Democratic Social Reality

 By Frank Scott

 

Many of us are so mentally abused by the lies of ruling power that we believe only the most far fetched tales of plots seemingly conducted by forces of evil invisible to all but the anointed who can spot false flags a mile away but are blind to political economics staring them in the face.

 

Reduced to an endless mob of consumers buying bullets, cosmetics, pizza, fashion, beer or pet food, and a parade of proles carrying plastic bags filled with merchandise, garbage or dog shit, most of us are innocently swept up in whatever trend of the moment comes via our networks of believability. And all those networks are directly or indirectly owned by the same financial powers which have nothing to do with fantastic schemes or the illuminati but everything to do with what is quite visible, material and threatens the world we all live in whether compelled to wave fabric painted red white and blue or coerced to carry mentally false banners denoting a sub-human status forced upon us as alleged minorities.

 

We are legitimately upset about the dangerous decline in relations among Americans, not least over the police controversies but we need to remember the police are not vigilantes who appoint themselves to uphold law. They are state workers who have nothing to do with creating low income communities of higher crime than affluent communities - at least on the streets where people suffer drive by shootings and more while the affluent don’t even have streets - but police are sent to regulate reality when social breakdowns occur. If we don't un-create low incomes, poverty, and all the other injustices which help create if not necessitate street crime, and the larger crimes of the people in the suites who rule and run society, things will get much worse. Defund the police? We need to defund the Pentagon, get the hell out of the rest of the world unless invited by the people to visit in friendship, and stop swallowing mythology about how everyone is evil and plotting to destroy America when most of the evil and plotting originates right here.   Among the more destructive aspects of the private profit market religion of capitalism that keeps us at each others throats rather than acting as a democratic majority and transforming our political economy into something that serves all of us rather than only some at the expense of others is the information and thought control that teaches us nonsense about the world and murderous lies about our relations to foreigners and one another. Thus we are reduced to alleged minorities- identity groups - while being subjected to mind menacing horror that describes war as some sort of natural way of living. Ruling power minorities reign supreme by keeping people divided, as in the cases of human beings suffering the outrageous realities that deny comfortable survival for all by creating luxury for only some while the majority are forced into competition and resentment for one another instead of joining forces and taking on ruling minorities before they destroy all of us.   These two areas, the division of humans into allegedly different races when there is only one human race, and rationalizing mass murder as some natural act of life because some identity group or other is an enemy of some other identity group though the only identity group that should concern us is the small minority that owns and controls material reality while we are used to seeking a better life for disabled polish American gay Jews of color while not noticing the enormous numbers of people without food clothing or shelter who represent the identity group all of us belong to: the human race.

Individuals are racists, brutes, sadists, killers, rather than social policies and social influences and cultural training, as in grunts raping and killing, cops killing unarmed people etc. …Never the result of social always the result of individual evil, whether at the bottom, middle or top…the leader is a demon-monster-killer, the cop is a demon monster killer, the soldier is a demon monster killer. At worst, they commit “war” crimes, which like hate crimes that mean there must be a love crime, insure that there must be a legal war and by George we have it. Angelic folks in business suits, with law and other degrees, figure out how to commit mass murder the politically correct way.

 

Of course, grunts and other monsters carry it out under the command of a demon, for the losing side, while heroic figures operating under the sway of an angelic leader are the winners.

 

And big Pharma operates to help regulate all those working to maintain the system. If you have a problem with survival it must/can/should be solved by you as an individual. You have A.D.D., depression, HDBA, neurosis, psychosomatic disorder your own personal problem .but just because millions like you have the same problem, means it is exclusively individual, demanding a personal solution meaning a drug administered to thousands, millions, whatever number makes the biggest profits. If you can afford it and/or have coverage you can go to a shrink – legal- and get your prescription for the drug that will ease your social dilemma and buy it – legally- from a legal dope peddler – HMO, Walgreens, RiteAid, Blue Cross, Red Cross etc. If you can’t afford it and/or you have no coverage, you can go to an illegal drug dealer – or undocumented pharmacist – and get the stuff you need to ease your social dilemma. Mental bliss awaits if you can afford the drug-therapy-treatment Both sides of the legal coin deal with individual problems having nothing to do with society, but they are dealt with differently based on economic power, but all of that, too, is individual and has nothing to do with any social arrangements, especially class membership and economic status.

 

When we cannot pay for the car, the house, whatever, what do the private insurance companies, banks, financial institutions do? They “repo”, as in repossess. Who insures the banks? What is FDIC? The taxpayers insure the banks? We insure one another, as well as most especially them? When the banks under private control cannot pay, the people should, need to, must, “repo” the banks!

 

Gated communities at one end with split-levels, moats, sun decks and armed guards & gated communities at the other end with bars, cell blocks, isolation holes and armed guards. The America we are taught to call “our” democracy is believable under heavy mind managing and drug sedation.

 

 

An environmental, political, economic and growing mental breakdown is being attributed to every conceivable outside force or source but its core which threatens ultimate destruction of humanity itself. Capitalism didn’t just bring us a pandemic that killed millions but has long sustained vicious poverty and warfare which have killed millions more in pursuit of lucrative market profits that benefit fewer each day and threaten more each stormy overheated undernourished experience being suffered by the poorest among us first, as always, but all of us, eventually.

 

Is there a solution to the wretched state of reality as experienced by growing majorities? A truly Democratic state, when the state becomes an “us”, not an “it”. We need to become aware and act on social reality and end belief in individual fiction.

 

 

email: fpscott@gmail.com Frank Scott writes political commentary and satire which appears online at the blog Legalienate http://legalienate.blogspot.com)  

Solidarity With Palestine Means De-Nazifying Israel

The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People recently passed on November 29, amidst a shameful silence about Israel's ongoing extermination campaign in the West Bank and Gaza. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres marked the dismal occasion pointing out that hunger, disease, and trauma are still the order of the day in Palestine, with schools, homes, and hospitals bombed into ruins and murderous injustice also prevailing on the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, where Israeli military operations, settler violence, settlement expansion, evictions, home demolitions, and threats of annexation continue unabated.

Israel's ongoing massacres make it abundantly clear that norms of international law that have existed for generations are not even window dressing in the face of the Jewish state's barbaric transgressions. As it always has, but now on a larger scale than ever before, Tel Aviv presumes a unique right to slaughter civilians, annul the sovereignty of any nation it perceives as an enemy, maintain a secret nuclear arsenal, use famine as a weapon of war, organize selective assassinations and state terrorist operations on a vast scale, and all this not only without being punished, but while maintaining its membership in international cultural, educational, and sports organizations as though a Jewish supremacist settler state were the most stellar example imaginable of a law-abiding nation.

Alas, that is anything but the truth. Two years into Benjamin Netanyahu's acceleration of the ethnic cleansing that began in 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli occupation forces, armed by the U.S. and Europe, with the survivors forced to live outdoors amidst 61 million tons of rubble. Since October 10 when a fake cease fire went into effect, IDF troops and Zionist settler fanatics have killed another 500 Palestinians, blocked the entrance of more than three quarters of humanitarian aid sent to Palestine, maintained thousands of abducted Palestinians in conditions of permanent torture (conditions conceded to be inhumane even by the Israelis themselves), and proceeded with systematically destroying the West Bank and Gaza. To date the "cease fire" has revealed itself to be nothing more than a cynical propaganda exercise orchestrated by Washington and its allies in order to help Israel continue with its extermination project without the annoyance of the faint media and political pressure against the effort that existed previously in response to Israel's unrestrained barbarity. 

To speak of solidarity under these conditions, with the Palestinian people languishing under the boot of vicious colonialism, forever at the mercy of an apartheid state that openly calls for and celebrates its campaign to annihilate them, would be a sick joke. 

For those who have been paying attention it has been clear for years now that the only way to have international law worthy of the name, and a just outcome for Palestine, is to disarm and de-Nazify the Jewish state, on the way to establishing for the first time ever a genuine peace process in Palestine.

 

Source: 

"Urgent Solidarity With Palestine," La Jornada (Spanish), November 30, 2025