Absurdities and Atrocities: How the Arms Races of Animals Can Illuminate the Bullshit of Humans

/3 Comments/in /by

A specter is haunting America — the specter of a vanished predator.[1] More precisely, it’s haunting the prairies west of the Mississippi, the home of a remarkable antelope called the pronghorn, Antilocapra americana. What’s remarkable about the pronghorn is that it runs far faster than it needs to. No living predator in America gets close to its top speed of 55 mph (88 kph), so some biologists have suggested that the pronghorn is, in effect, running from a dead predator, the long-extinct American cheetah, Miracinonyx spp.

Speeding from a specter: a pronghorn displays its remarkable speed (image from Wikipedia)

If those biologists are right, the pronghorn is the surviving half of an evolutionary arms-race, a competition between predator and prey in which each side had to respond when the other side evolved to be faster. A similar arms-race took place across the Atlantic between African antelopes and the African cheetah, which isn’t in fact closely related to its American namesake.[2] But both groups of cheetahs evolved ever-greater speed to catch ever-fleeter prey. By now, after millions of years of evolution, cheetahs and antelopes must be at the limits of biological possibility. They couldn’t get much faster. Nor could biology ever catch up with one of H.G. Wells’ most memorable short-stories. In “The New Accelerator” (1901), Wells describes the invention of a stimulant drug that makes the body work “several thousand times faster,” “heart, lungs, muscles, brain — everything.”

Power-hungry priests

When the narrator and the inventor take the stimulant and go for what seems to them a stroll, they find that the world of people, animals and objects has, from their point of view, almost frozen to immobility, because they’re moving and perceiving so fast. And when they run, air-friction almost sets their clothes on fire. It’s a highly inventive and entertaining story, but also physiologically absurd (as Wells must have been well aware). After the narrator takes the stimulant, he says: “My heart, for example, was beating a thousand times a second.” But in that case, his heart would have burst. And if his heart and blood-vessels hadn’t burst, his joints and muscles would have disintegrated when he began to move. And so on. Biology can’t be indefinitely accelerated. That’s why biological arms-races between predators and prey haven’t resulted in cheetahs and antelopes that break the sound-barrier.

But if biology can’t be indefinitely accelerated, theology can. Indeed, theology can be infinitely accelerated. I think the concept of an evolutionary arms-race can be applied to the human mind too. For example, some arms-races in theology have gone to infinity — and to absurdity. So have some arms-races in politics and culture.[3] What am I talking about? Well, in theology I’m talking about the concepts of Hell and infallibility. Both of these are big and so-far insurmountable barriers to my becoming a traditionalist Catholic, because I find them absurd and literally unbelievable. But I also find them fascinating as psychological phenomena. And I think I can explain them sociologically and epistemologically. More precisely, I think I can explain them memetically — as conceptual products of a cognitive arms-race, as memes in a Kulturkampf. The concept of Hell, of everlasting punishment in the afterlife, is the product of an arms-race between competing religions or between power-hungry priests and pleasure-hungry layfolk. The point of Hell is to frighten and manipulate. But any religion that used the threat of finite punishment in the afterlife, no matter how prolonged and agonizing, would be out-competed by a religion that used the threat of infinite punishment.

Obey the Church or be eternally tortured: Jan van Eyck’s 15th-century depiction of Hell (image from Wikipedia)

However, threatening infinitely intense pain would be no good, because we can’t imagine that. But we can imagine infinitely prolonged pain. That’s why even atheists and unbelievers can be disturbed by one section of James Joyce’s autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Joyce describes a preacher trying to frighten his audience with an utterly absurd but also deeply disturbing vision of Hell. And I think that vision represents the culmination of a conceptual arms-race between priests seeking to frighten and layfolk seeking to resist being frightened:

The preacher’s voice sank. He paused, joined his palms for an instant, parted them. Then he resumed:

—Now let us try for a moment to realise, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foulsmelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

—They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a neverending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?

—The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

—But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property that it preserves that which it burns and though it rages with incredible intensity it rages for ever. […] And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a redhot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls. […]

—O, my dear little brothers in Christ, may it never be our lot to [enter Hell]! May it never be our lot, I say! In the last day of terrible reckoning I pray fervently to God that not a single soul of those who are in this chapel today may be found among those miserable beings whom the Great Judge shall command to depart for ever from His sight, that not one of us may ever hear ringing in his ears the awful sentence of rejection: Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels! (James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, chapter III, 1916)

I’m an unbeliever, but I find that description of Hell disturbing. I also find it both absurd and atrocious.[4] How could any rational person believe in a perfect god and just God who inflicts such a punishment on weak and fallible humans for their finite sins?[5] Well, the simple answer is that Hell isn’t a matter of rationality but of cratology.[6] That’s a useful word meaning “study of power” or “system of power.” The preacher, as proxy for the Church, wants to exercise power over the minds of his audience. And he succeeds very well in one case. Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is badly frightened by the sermon and after it has a psychosomatic illusion that his “brain [is] simmering and bubbling within the cracking tenement of the skull.” That’s the point of Hell: to frighten. But anything short of an infinitely prolonged Hell isn’t frightening enough or can be out-competed by an infinite Hell. And so, for most of Christian history, the atrocity outweighed the absurdity and the threat of eternal punishment was a potent means of psychological manipulation by the priesthood.[7]

An arms-race with science

There’s no atrocity in another theological concept created by an ideological arms-race. But there is plenty of absurdity. It’s the concept of infallibility, that is, the claim that a religion can offer certain knowledge without any tincture of doubt or uncertainty. I’ve pointed out before that mathematics doesn’t claim infallibility because it doesn’t need to. Math is obviously as close to certain knowledge as fallible and intellectually limited humans can get. Theology, by contrast, is about as far as humans can get from certain knowledge. Our opinions about God and the supernatural are obviously both subjective and arbitrary, in that they’re highly dependant on the time, place and circumstances of our birth. And on our own, unchosen psychology (atheism goes with autism, for example). But one can hardly expect competing religions to admit their own contingency. Instead, competing religions — or ideologies — will enter an epistemological arms-race. The logical culmination of that arms-race is infallibility: the claim that a religion offers complete certainty about all-important matters.

And it’s no coincidence, I’d suggest, that Papal infallibility was proclaimed as dogma in the century that saw the full rise of modern science. In the nineteenth century, Catholicism entered an arms-race with science, which had proved very successful in a physical sense but remained epistemologically modest. Mother Church could not compete materially with science but could compete metaphysically. And so Pius IX proclaimed the absurd concept of Papal infallibility.[8] Protestantism struck back with the even more absurd concept of Biblical inerrancy.[9] And these concepts then influenced secular politics: Leszek Kołokowski, the great Polish philosopher and intellectual historian, said this in his magisterial Main Currents of Marxism (1978): “When the party is identified with the state and the apparatus of power, and when it achieves perfect unity in the shape of a one-man tyranny, doctrine becomes a matter of state and the tyrant is proclaimed infallible. […] Lenin had always been right [and] the Bolshevik party was and had always been infallible.” (Op. cit., Vol 3, p 5) And Italian fascism, which was strongly influenced by Marxism, had the slogan Il Duce ha sempre ragione — “The Duce is always right.”

From pronghorns to perverts

The political concept of infallibility is again the product of an arms-race between competing ideologies. Part of the reason that communism won the arms-race in Russia and fascism won in Italy is that communists and fascists went to infinity. They believed that their leaders and their ideologies weren’t probably or overwhelmingly right, but infinitely right — infallibly right. I think such political and cultural arms-races have continued to this day. But they can be intra-ideological as well as inter-ideological. For example, I think the demand for open borders or defunding of the police is the culmination of an arms-race within the left, not just between the left and the right. Any leftists who support even minimal border-controls leave themselves vulnerable to charges of racism and xenophobia. And so, just as the theological arms-races resulted in the absurd but potent concepts of Hell and infallibility, the intra-leftist arms-race results in the absurd but potent concept of open borders. That is, it’s psychologically potent, because it maximally feeds leftist narcissism and self-regard.

A leftist absurdity: All races have the same brain and cognitive potential

So do two even more absurd leftist concepts: “Race does not exist” and “Transwomen Are Women.” There have been two more arms-races powered by the fact that accusations of racism or transphobia will shower down on any leftist who questions the Psychic Unity of Mankind or who doesn’t fully accept translunacy. And translunacy itself can be seen as the product of an arms-race between feminists and autogynephiles, that is, men who fetishize themselves as female. Translunacy can also be seen as the product of an arms-race inside the heads of those male fetishists. Before the 1960s and ’70s, men who derived sexual pleasure from dressing and play-acting as women could be dismissed by feminists as exactly what they were: perverted men with an absurd and embarrassing fetish. That’s why those men began to claim that they were real women, not perverted and play-acting men. They were seeking to defeat the feminist critique but also to heighten their own pleasure. An autogynephile who knows he’s play-acting as a woman gets less pleasure than one who manages to convince himself that he really is a woman.

Hacking the hierarchy

Like Hell or infallibility, transgenderism is an absurd concept whose absurdity hasn’t hindered its success. Again, it’s cratology that applies, not rationality. And translunatics have been very successful in pursuing power and winning their arms-race with feminists. Indeed, they’ve been astonishingly successful. As I pointed out in “Power to the Perverts,” some stale pale males in Britain have managed to hack the hierarchy and claim to be victims of hate-crime by a Black lesbian called Linda Bellos. How on Earth did they do that? Under normal circumstances, Bellos would be right at the top of the hierarchy of racial and sexual privilege in leftism. And stale pale males would be right at the bottom. But these stale pale males are “transwomen” and Bellos is a TERF, or Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Therefore the White men can claim that they are victims of “hate” by the Black lesbian. But since the besting of Bellos, translunacy has suffered setbacks, as I’ve described in “Trashing Traumatized Trannies” and “Moobs on the Move.” The British Supreme Court has ruled that women are defined by biology, not by bullshit.

The absurdity of autogynephilia: some bearded and balding male perverts invade female territory on a lesbian dating-site

But the translunatics haven’t gone away and haven’t dropped their absurd claim to be women. They never will drop it, because it’s the product of an arm-race inside their own heads: between sanity and sexual perversion. As you might expect, perversion has prevailed, because sanity and rationality aren’t essential elements of either psychology or cratology. Indeed, they often hinder the pursuit of power, which is why they’re often so conspicuously absent in human affairs. Concepts like Hell and transgenderism are absurd, but their absurdity has mattered much less than their potency. The seemingly disparate concepts of Hell and transgenderism are also united in the way they illustrate a famous principle: “Those who believe in absurdities will commit atrocities.” Those who believed in Hell used it to justify unlimited torture and tyranny. And those who believe in transgenderism have used to justify the mutilation and sterilization of children. As antelopes and cheetahs reveal, a biological arms-race often ends in celerity. As Hell and transgenderism reveal, a cultural arms-race often ends in atrocity.[10]

[1] This is a reference to Marx’s opening line in the Communist Manifesto (1848): “A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism.”

[2]American cheetahs seem to have been more closely related to pumas than to African cheetahs.

[3]  See also Nassim Taleb’s very interesting essay “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority.”

[4]  I also find Hell an immoral or extra-moral concept. If you refrain from bad behavior because you think bad behavior will send you to Hell, you’re not behaving morally. That is, you’re motivated not by abhorrence of sin but by fear of damnation. And if you cease to believe in Hell, you’ll presumably cease to refrain from bad behavior.

[5] I’ve seen the argument that infinite punishment is justified because sin is an offence against an infinite God. This seems to me like arguing that five-year-olds or animals should be punished as adults or humans if they commit an offence against an adult or a human. After all, children and animals can do real harm to their superiors. But how can a human harm God or, in any lasting sense, God’s creation?

[6] Traditional portrayals of Hell and the Crucifixion also owe something to sadism and sexual pathology. The S&M in traditional Catholicism is another thing that keeps me out of Mother Church. It might be easier if I were homosexual: Gerard Manley Hopkins “was horrified to find himself aroused by images of Christ on the cross, and he would scourge himself after erotic dreams.”

[7] Under secular criticism, Hell became embarrassing for the mainstream churches and was increasingly left to the vulgar fringe. You’ve seen above from Joyce how a devout Catholic described Hell at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, another devout Catholic says merely that unrepentant sinners will suffer “the isolation and emptiness of hell forever.” So it’s isolation, not incineration. And “hell” doesn’t even merit a capital letter. C.S. Lewis, the most popular Christian apologist of the twentieth century, presented a psychological Hell of self-willed egocentrism in The Great Divorce (1945). It’s an interesting book, but it owes much more to existentialism than to the unequivocal portrayal of Hell in the Gospels as a place of fiery torment.

[8] I’d also say that those traditionalists who claim in believe in Hell and infallibility don’t behave as though they do. If you possess passive infallibility (active infallibility is reserved to the Pope as God’s proxy), why do you not make your proof of infallibility central to your arguments in favor of your beliefs? Once infallibility is granted, all else follows, including the Virgin Birth, Resurrection and Hell. But traditionalist devote much more time and effort to arguing for those secondary concepts than they do to arguing for the primary concept of infallibility. And if they genuinely believe in Hell, why do they not talk about Hell much more?

[9] Traditional Catholicism also claims that the Bible is inerrant, but layfolk cannot interpret its inerrancy for themselves. Fundamentalist Protestantism claims that layfolk do not need a church or Pope to be infallible on matters of faith, because they can be guided by an inerrant Bible.

[10] Or in tinnitus. Bands like Swans or Sunn O))) are the products of an arms-race in volume. Cultural arms-races can also end in unlistenability or incomprehensibility. Try listening to Schoenberg or reading Finnegans Wake.

A Dissident Perspective on Veterans Day: An Indictment of So-Called American Exceptionalism

/2 Comments/in /by

Most all Americans will be celebrating Veterans Day, the purpose of which is self-evident in its name. That purpose is to honor veterans who served in this nation’s military and who fought in the many wars this country has needlessly involved itself with. This is seemingly something quite noble. However, far too few are cognizant that the date was chosen to coincide with Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, which ended hostilities in the First World War. Nor are most aware that this country’s role in the Great War is hardly a cause of celebration or testament to “American exceptionalism,” but an utter indictment of this country, this government, and pretty much everything it stands for and has stood for over the past 125 years. The formal peace treaty, the Treaty of Versailles—better described as the Versailles Diktat—was not signed until seven months later on June 28, 1919: a moral outrage and a significant causal factor underlying The Second World War. As Darryl Cooper, aka Martyr Made, has noted, the blockade that was starving Germany was still in effect, with nearly a million German civilians perishing needlessly.

The United States had no legitimate reason to enter that war, just as it has had no legitimate reason for entering or instigating the number of conflicts it has been involved with, before or since. As most should already know, the purported casus belli, the sinking of the Lusitania, occurred after the German government implored neutral powers that areas of The Atlantic Ocean surrounding the British Isles was a war zone, and that while German submarines will make every reasonable effort not to sink neutral shipping, the ability to ascertain a ship’s nationality is most limited peering through a periscope. Most readers are doubtlessly well aware that forensics have proven the Lusitania was smuggling war contraband. This was in the broader context of arming Britain, supporting Britain, even though Germany never posed any threat to the United States or her interests. Woodrow Wilson’s this and that talk about “making the world safe for democracy” was an abject lie, although given the myriad evils inherent to democracy, one wonders if a threat to what may be the very death of Mother Europe would be a bad thing at all. Regardless, Germany neither had the intention nor the capacity to pose a threat beyond the Atlantic in either world war. 1

The moral outrage of the United States role in entering the Great War is further compounded by the Benjamin Freedman theory of the Balfour Declaration, which credibly posits that the British government enticed Jewish financial interests to nudge the United States into the war in exchange for granting land in Palestine to realize the Zionist dream of forming the Jewish state of Israel. Finally, those deluded by these lies of American exceptionalism should consider that Germany would likely have won The Great War but for American intervention, while further considering all the ramifications of this. The seemingly unending litany of existential threats facing the Occident would simply not exist had this not occurred.

In the aftermath of World War II, the Germans have adopted a war guilt complex into their very national character. One hopes this is temporary, but marinating in over 80 years of allied occupation and the post-war cultural milieu that occupation has infused into the German national consciousness does not instill a sense of optimism; this pathology is very likely to become a permanent, defining characteristic of the German national character. It is highly doubtful the German people will ever be able to throw off this national guilt complex, at least not until the nationale and völkische Abschaffung des deutches Volkes has been fully and utterly consummated in earnest. In particular relation to the absurd proposition that today is a day for honoring this country’s war mongering, the United States is responsible for this pathology first and foremost, as it is also responsible for the number of maladies that emanate from this complex, including the mad delusion of open borders and Angela Merkel letting in millions of racial imposters into sacred Germany and the European continent more broadly.

If one concedes that the Third Reich was the unmitigated, unequivocal evil in that conflict, a proposition that is dubious at best, consider further if any nation is to assume blame for the rise of Hitler, it should be first and foremost Great Britain as well as the United States. The Great Blockade, which claimed nearly a million Germans, has already been mentioned. The Treaty of Versailles assigned all liability of the Great War on Germany and Germany alone, despite the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia, and even France being far more bellicose in both actions and statements preceding the outbreak of war, catalyzing the sudden plunge into war across the continent. The German people suffered unspeakable hardships as a result, paying for a loaf of bread not with a wallet but a wheelbarrow. They were paying not just a million marks but a billion marks for a loaf of bread. One must also consider the legitimate territorial claims that further inform the rise of national socialism, from the demilitarization of the Rhineland to the German port city of Danzig. These and other grievances help explain, without the advantage of hindsight, why everyday Germans turned to the swastika. These considerations in turn reveal that the United States is not the force for good that American exceptionalism and high school civics class curricula insist. Great Britain and more particularly the United States are just as responsible for the rise of Hitler as any collective group (namely “The Germans”), if not more so. Remarkably, as Darryl Cooper points out in his podcast on American involvement in the Russian-Ukraine war, crimes and offenses against the German people by the American government are hardly unique. This government committed similar outrages against the Russian people, all for bringing the world a velvet revolution and a peaceful end to The Cold War, as American foreign policy has brought the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon through its intermeddling with Ukraine.

These and other reflections should not evoke a sense of patriotism, but national shame. Few will be so insightful. Most Americans, and particularly those opposed to the Democrat party, will be flying the American flag with unquestioning pride, and will be doing so with more purpose and vehemence than any other day except for perhaps July the Fourth. Many will have Lee Greenwood’s acoustic abomination “Proud to be an American” on particularly heavy rotation. Just as with any other day but even more so, today is not a day to be proud to be an American. Today, like each and every day, is a reason to be ashamed of this country, to be ashamed to call one’s self American. Ich bin nicht stolz darauf, Amerikaner zu sein. Ich schäme mich, Amerikaner zu sein.

Cernay German Military Cemetery, located South of the town on the Rue-d’Aspach. Here lie the remains of some 7,085 German soldiers from World War One and 1,479 soldiers from World War Two.

Other articles and essays by Richard Parker are available at his publication, The Raven’s Call: A Reactionary Perspective, found at theravenscall.substack.com. Please consider subscribing on a free or paid basis, and to like and share as warranted. Readers can also find him on twitter, under the handle @astheravencalls.

1

For starters, see Patrick Buachanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War generally. There are of course any number of sources confirming this.

When Black Power Turned Against Israel

/3 Comments/in /by
Few alliances in American history seemed more unshakable than that between Jews and Blacks during the civil rights era. Yet, by the late 1960s, the same moral conviction that had once united them began driving them apart.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli War awakened a deep sense of solidarity among Black Power activists in the United States, compelling many to align themselves with the Palestinian cause. Operating under the illusion that Black activism could be harnessed as a weapon against White gentile power, American Jewry soon discovered that the blade they had forged could just as easily turn in their direction.

Even prior to 1967, the foundations of Black support for the Palestinian cause had been laid, most notably through Malcolm X’s early advocacy of Black-Palestinian solidarity. On September 5, 1964, he visited Gaza, touring the Khan Younis refugee camp and meeting Palestinian poet Harun Hashim Rashid.

His essay “Zionist Logic” pulled no punches: “The Israeli Zionists are convinced they have successfully camouflaged their new kind of colonialism. Their colonialism appears to be more ‘benevolent,’ more ‘philanthropic,’ a system with which they rule simply by getting their potential victims to accept their friendly offers of economic ‘aid,’ and other tempting gifts.” During a 1965 speech in Detroit, Malcolm X made his vision for Palestine clear: “We need a free Palestine… We don’t need a divided Palestine. We need a whole Palestine.”

The real earthquake came in June-July 1967 when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—a pillar of the civil rights movement—published “The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge” in its newsletter. The article accused Israel of being established “through terror, force, and massacres” and claimed “Zionist terror gangs… deliberately slaughtered and mutilated women, children and men.” It asserted: “ISRAEL WAS PLANTED AT THE CROSSROADS OF ASIA AND AFRICA WITHOUT THE FREE APPROVAL OF ANY MIDDLE-EASTERN, ASIAN OR AFRICAN COUNTRY!” Stokely Carmichael, the SNCC chairman from 1966-1967 who would later become a pan-African activist, promoted a “tricontinental” vision uniting peoples of color in the Global South against imperialism, and capitalism—with Palestinians playing a critical role in this revolutionary project.

Acclaimed writer James Baldwin, initially optimistic about Israel, shifted dramatically to the pro-Palestinian side of the aisle by the late 1960s. Palestinian scholar Nadia Alahmed noted that “once Baldwin changed his mind about Israel, he never stopped criticizing it. Baldwin was one of the very first prolific black American voices to recognize Israel for what it really is.” In a 1979 essay for The Nation, Baldwin wrote: “But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests… The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.” Baldwin’s change in opinion was particularly influenced by his conversations with Black Panther Party members Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, and Bobby Seale.

For many within the Black Power movement, Palestinians represented a kindred people resisting colonial domination. The United States’ close alignment with Israel merely confirmed this sense of shared struggle. By contrast, for Jewish liberals who had marched for civil rights, supported Black causes, and long identified with the progressive coalition, this shift came as a profound disappointment.
The once-vaunted Jewish-Black alliance, born in the crucible of America’s civil rights struggle, ultimately broke apart against the hard realities of global south nationalism and mounting anti-Zionist sentiment among certain sectors of the Black political community.

Such tensions would continue in ensuing decades. In August 1991, the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights—home to a large Caribbean-American population and the Lubavitch Hasidic Jewish community—erupted into three days of violent unrest after a Hasidic driver accidentally struck and killed a Black child. What began as a tragic traffic accident quickly spiraled into a wave of anti-Jewish rioting that left one man dead, hundreds injured, and continued Black-Jewish tensions.

The 1991 Crown Heights riots marked a decisive rupture in Black–Jewish relations. As historian Edward Shapiro bluntly put it, this was “the only riot in American history in which the violence was directed at Jews,” with mobs chanting “Kill the Jew.” The killing of Yankel Rosenbaum and the initial acquittal of his attacker produced “immediate and angered disbelief” in the Jewish community, according to a report by then-Director of Criminal Justice and Commissioner of the Division of Criminal Justice Services Richard H. Girgentini.

Leadership failures deepened the break. The state’s Girgenti Report called Crown Heights “the most extensive racial unrest in New York City in over 20 years.” and faulted City Hall for not acting “in a timely and decisive manner.”

Black Lives Matter’s 2020 revival re-opened deep fissures in the uneasy alliance between Blacks and Jews. Following the death of George Floyd, BLM declared solidarity with Palestinians and called for an end to “settler colonialism in all forms,” signaling a turn toward anti-Israel rhetoric that unnerved many Jewish groups who had once embraced the movement.

The rupture widened after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. BLM Chicago posted—and then deleted—an image of a paraglider carrying a Palestinian flag, widely interpreted as a show of support for Hamas. BLM Grassroots soon followed with a statement condemning Israel’s “apartheid system” and defending the Palestinians’ “right to resist.”

The reaction from organized Jewry was swift. The ADL publicly condemned BLM’s national chapters for spreading “sick, twisted, and dehumanizing” messages. CEO Jonathan Greenblatt warned that glorifying Hamas would not be tolerated—a message unmistakably aimed at reminding Black activists of their place in the anti-White totem pole.

Even prominent Jewish entertainers joined in. In a November 2023 interview on The Back Room with Andy Ostroy, actress Julianna Margulies, of Ashkenazi Jewish background and best known for her roles in The Good Wife and ER, alleged that Black Americans had been “brainwashed to hate Jews.”

For all the talk of “shared oppression,” history shows that moral alliances rarely survive political realities. From Malcolm X to Black Lives Matter, the story remains the same: every time the Palestinian cause rises to prominence, it reopens the rift between Black radicals and Jewish power brokers—reminding American Jewry that even the most reliable golems will eventually turn against their Hebraic masters.

Alan Dershowitz Wants to Use Tariffs to Teach Canada a Lesson

/3 Comments/in /by

Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz recently ignited a firestorm by declaring that “our enemy now is Canada” over Ottawa’s recognition of the State of Palestine and its pledge to enforce an International Criminal Court warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Speaking at the Rage Against Hate conference on Oct. 27, 2025, at Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, Dershowitz urged President Donald Trump to take punitive action—including tariffs and potential sanctions—against America’s northern neighbor.

The event, organized by the Shurat HaDin–Israel Law Center, featured high-profile figures such as former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, Australian broadcaster Erin Molan, Arab-Israeli influencer Yoseph Haddad, and Anne Bayefsky of Human Rights Voices. During his remarks, Dershowitz dismissed pro-Palestinian activism as “pro-hate” and claimed that “every element within the Palestinian movement has encouraged terrorism.”

“We have to understand who our enemies are,” Dershowitz told Canada’s National Post. “And our enemy now is Canada.” He added that he was “in favor of Trump putting tariffs on Canada for its statements regarding Israel and Netanyahu, and even sanctions perhaps.” 

Canada’s Recognition of Palestine

The remarks came in response to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decision to officially recognize the State of Palestine during the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 21, 2025—making Canada the first G7 country to do so. The move was coordinated with similar recognitions by the United Kingdom, Australia, Portugal, and several other European countries.

Carney justified the recognition by stating that Israel’s government “has pursued an unrelenting policy of settlement expansion in the West Bank, which is illegal under international law,” and that “its sustained assault in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of civilians, displaced well over one million people, and caused a devastating and preventable famine.” He concluded that Canada recognized Palestine to preserve the two-state solution and to offer “our partnership in building the promise of a peaceful future.”

Dershowitz, however, dismissed the move as “recognition of a nonexistent entity.” He also condemned Canada’s pledge to enforce the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu, declaring, “I will come up to Canada. I will defend Netanyahu, and I will go after everybody who has tried to arrest him.”

Fallout Between Ottawa and Washington

Following Carney’s announcement, Israel’s embassy in Canada condemned the decision, claiming it “only rewards Hamas and its sympathizers.” The fallout also drew attention in Washington, where Trump quickly weaponized the issue.

In the early hours of July 31, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Wow! Canada has just announced that it is backing statehood for Palestine. That will make it very hard for us to make a Trade Deal with them. Oh’ Canada!!!”

At the time, U.S. and Canadian negotiators were racing to meet an August 1 deadline for a new trade agreement. Trump threatened to impose a 35 percent tariff on Canadian goods outside the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement if no deal was reached.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio joined the criticism, calling Western recognitions of Palestine “counterproductive.” “None of these countries have the ability to create a Palestinian state,” Rubio said. “There can be no Palestinian state unless Israel agrees to it.”

Dershowitz’s Pattern of Provocative Rhetoric

Dershowitz’s denunciation of Canada fits a long-established pattern of inflammatory defenses of Israel. A staunch Zionist and lifelong advocate for Jewish interests, he has repeatedly equated criticism of Israel with antisemitism and justified extreme military actions against Palestinians.

In May 2024, he compared anti-Israel college protesters to Hitler Youth, claiming that “Nazi students blocked Jews from entering universities” in a manner similar to campus activism in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 attacks. Earlier, he defended Israel’s 2002 Operation Defensive Shield by asserting there was “no evidence that Israeli soldiers deliberately killed even a single civilian,” despite Human Rights Watch findings documenting 22 civilian deaths, some of which constituted war crimes.

In May 2025, Dershowitz told an audience at Harvard’s Institute of Politics that “killing innocent civilians in Gaza might be necessary as part of a cost-benefit analysis.” He later wrote an essay titled “The ‘Better’ Civilians of Gaza” arguing that many Palestinians were “complicit” and thus “legitimate targets.”

His version of a two-state solution further underscores his worldview: “The only two-state solution that’s possible is to have a state without an army, without an air force and with security controlled by Israel for maybe 50 years, maybe 100 years.”

A Broader Trend Toward Annexation?

Dershowitz’s attacks on Ottawa echo a broader shift in U.S. political culture, where even allies face coercion when they deviate from Washington’s—and by extension, Israel’s—foreign policy priorities. The rhetoric mirrors Donald Trump’s veiled threats to make Canada “the 51st state,” as well as growing speculation about a revived North American Union under U.S. dominance.

In a land where Zionists are in control, all foreign policy decisions—no matter how trivial they seem—will be carried out with Zionist interests in mind. Any government that dares stray even slightly will be taught, in short order, the price of defying the pan-Judah imperium.

 

The Forgotten Jewish Origins of the Anti-Woke Crusade

/3 Comments/in , /by

Long before “wokeness” became a culture war buzzword, a cohort of Jewish thinkers who had come of age as socialists, Trotskyists, and New Deal liberals began warning about identity politics, racial grievance, and threats to Israel. As the radicalism of the 1960s engulfed American politics, these figures became what we might now call the original anti-woke activists.

Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995, embodied this transformation. Early on, he moved comfortably in liberal circles and even flirted with sympathy for the New Left. By the late 1960s, however, he underwent what he later described as a political “conversion experience,” emerging by 1970 as an unapologetic neoconservative. His critique of the radical Left was withering. He accused it of following “the route of personal grievance” instead of “the route of ideas” and of describing middle-class American values “in terms that are drenched in an arrogant contempt for the lives of millions and millions of people.”

Podhoretz’s shift was not purely ideological. It exposed deeper racial anxieties and a fraught relationship with America’s upheavals over race. Long before his full turn to neoconservatism, he wrote one of the most explosive essays of the decade, “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” which appeared in Commentary in 1963 and stunned readers with its brutal candor.

In that piece, Podhoretz admitted to “the hatred I still feel for Negroes,” yet proposed interracial marriage as the ultimate solution to racism. “I cannot see how [the dream of erasing color consciousness] will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear,” he wrote. “And that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.” He pushed further, insisting that “the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned,” and that only the physical erasure of racial difference through intermarriage could resolve the “Negro problem.”

This episode foreshadowed his later disillusionment with the Left. As the civil rights movement gave way to Black Power and campus radicals who were increasingly hostile to Israel, Podhoretz came to view the New Left not as an ally but as an existential rival. Reflecting on that era in the Claremont Review of Books, he observed that “the enemy of the New Left was not the Right. The Right didn’t exist for the New Left. It wasn’t on the radar. It was so self-evidently bad. They didn’t have to waste any energy on it. No, the enemy was the liberal community.”

If Podhoretz supplied the tone and the cultural venom, Irving Kristol supplied the architecture. Often described by the New York Times as the godfather of neoconservatism, Kristol began, as he later recalled in a PBS interview, as a Trotskyist at City College of New York in the late 1930s, part of a famous milieu bound together less by devotion to socialism than by hatred for Stalin and the Soviet betrayal of the socialist ideal.

After World War II, he evolved into a Cold War liberal, co-founding the London-based journal Encounter in 1953 to promote an Atlanticist, anti-Communist vision; its rise and later scandal have been chronicled in obituaries such as The Guardian’s appraisal. By the mid-1960s, Kristol remained a Democrat but was increasingly skeptical of the Great Society and the utopian social engineering it promised. With Daniel Bell, he launched The Public Interest in 1965 as a journal for reform-minded liberals wary of technocratic hubris and unintended consequences.

The New Left’s surge, with its anti-Americanism, moral relativism, and emerging hostility to Israel, pushed Kristol further right. He saw in the counterculture a sign of cultural and civilizational decay. By the 1972 McGovern campaign, he had concluded that, as one left-wing critic later put it in Jacobin, the Democratic Party had been captured by its radical fringe. Kristol openly aligned with the conservative movement, praising Nixon’s law-and-order pragmatism.

Kristol’s thinking was also shaped by the German-Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss, whose work on classical political philosophy and modern nihilism was popularized in venues like Cato’s overview of Straussian influence. For Kristol, politics became the art of the possible, grounded in moral tradition rather than abstract egalitarian ideals. His journey—from Trotskyist to liberal to conservative—came to be summed up in the famous line explored at VoegelinView: “a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.”

If Podhoretz and Kristol provided the intellectual spine, Sidney Hook represented the embattled academic conscience. Once a Marxist and Communist sympathizer in the 1930s, Hook became by the 1960s one of the New Left’s fiercest critics. As Jewish historian Edward Shapiro recalled in a piece for the National Association of Scholars, Hook was horrified when “groups of violent anti-Vietnam War radicals and racist demagogues, urged on by sympathetic faculty, occupied campus buildings, trashed faculty offices, and intimidated spineless administrators.” For anyone watching the campus pro-Palestine protests of 2023-2024, the echoes are unmistakable. The barricades, moral fervor, and denunciations echo the 1960s, when Jewish political actors first discovered how easily their own revolutions could turn against them.

Midge Decter, often described as the “godmother of neoconservatism,” followed a path akin to Podhoretz and Kristol. She began as a liberal Democrat deeply embedded in New York’s Jewish intellectual scene, but recoiled in the 1960s from what she later denounced, in a Jerusalem Post interview, as the Left’s “heedless and mindless politics and intellectual and artistic nihilism.”

The New Left’s radicalism, sexual liberation, and what she saw as a national “seizure of self-hatred” convinced her, as summarized in a National Humanities Medal citation, that America was spiraling into moral decay. By the 1970s she had become a leading critic of feminism, the counterculture, and gay liberation. In one widely cited formulation, reported in an Associated Press obituary, Decter argued that feminism aimed to keep adult women “as unformed, as able to act without genuine consequence, as the little girl she imagines she once was and longs to continue to be.”

Taken together, these figures were reacting to the same combustible mix: the rise of the New Left and Black Power, the spread of the counterculture, and the eventual fallout from the Arab-Israeli wars, which helped nudge segments of Black America toward sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Their response was to abandon the Left and remake American conservatism in their Judaic image.

The consequences of the Jewish neoconservative ideological conquest still shape American politics today. From it emerged an “invade the world, invite the world” order in which American power is spent advancing Jewish interests abroad while immigration policy at home enriches plutocrats and erodes the country’s European demographic core.

The Rise of the Extreme Female Brain: Making Sense of the Defenestration of Prince

/5 Comments/in /by

Research indicates that we can reasonably distinguish between the “Extreme Male Brain” and the “Extreme Female Brain.” The former is interested in logic and systematizing to the neglect of emotion and how people feel. The latter is focused on the emotions of others, on empathy, and on ensuring everyone is included but it is “system blind.” As women have become more influential in society, it seems fairly clear that we have moved from a focus on logic and consistency to an obsession with how others feel. This shift is epitomised in the treatment of Prince Andrew or, as we are suddenly supposed to call him, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

As I think I made clear in my review of the Prince Andrew biography Entitled, the younger brother of the King is, clearly, lacking in intelligence and is also an extremely unpleasant and Narcissistic individual. The word “entitled” perfectly encapsulates this thoroughly spoilt man who mistreats his staff, has tantrums when his full titles aren’t used and brazenly lies, particularly about the extent of his relationship with the late sex offender and tycoon Jeffrey Epstein. But, surely, even Prince Andrew deserves to be regarded as innocent until proven guilty, and this is not a right which the Royal Family have accorded him.

On 30th October, seemingly in response to the King being booed by members of the public and someone aggressively asking him how much he knew about his brother’s behaviour, Andrew was stripped of his titles of nobility, his knighthood, the prenominal “His Royal Highness” and even of the title “Prince,” humiliatingly reducing him to the status of a “commoner.” The press release directly stated that Andrew denied the allegations against him (of statutory rape of Virginia Roberts, by implication) and added, “Their majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.”

In other words, without quite directly saying so, the Palace stated it was defenestrating Andrew because (at least in part) of Virginia Roberts’ allegations, even though he denies the allegations and he has not been proven guilty of them. This is in spite of the fact that Virginia Roberts is a fantasist or, at the very least, is extremely unreliable woman. She claimed that Alan Dershowitz raped her as a minor multiple times and was forced to withdraw this and admit she’d made a mistake. She made accusations against a French public figure and was compelled to admit under oath that she made mistakes about the people who assaulted her. She originally claimed to have first had sex with Prince Andrew in New Mexico, something that flight logs proved simply never happened. In 2025, she stated on Instragram that she had four days to live, which was a complete lie. Prosecutors even dropped a rape case she brought because no jury would consider her credible. In her posthumously published memoir, Nobody’s Girl, she was raped by a “Prime Minister” in one edition but a mere “Minister” in another, presumably because she inflated the title.

If Nobody’s Girl, is to be believed then there is no bigger victim in the world than Virginia Roberts. From a relatively young age Virginia was sexually abused by her father and his friends, allegations the father denies. “He used his fingers at first. Then, days later, his mouth. He called my private parts my “tee-tee” and his penis his “pee-pee.” It wasn’t long before he asked if I wanted to touch his genitals. I didn’t want to, but he wanted me to. He was my father, so I did.”

Virginia’s mother used to beat her on the bare bottom with thorn-covered sticks as a punishment for wetting herself, presumably drawing blood with every stroke. Virginia’s mother would even do this in front of the neighbours: “When she was really angry, she’d send me out to the yard to cut a thorny branch from one of her prized rosebushes. “Pick a switch,” she’d say. Then, she’d make me pull down my pants, in front of the neighbors and anyone else who was around, so she could whip me with it.” The parents sent her to a kind of reform school called “Growing Together” where she was also supposedly abused: “Not for nothing would Growing Together eventually be dubbed “Suffering Together” in an exposé in New Times . . .”

Virginia’s behaviour patterns are consistent with having been abused in some way. Post-Traumatic Stress can lead to memory gaps which victims will fill in, extreme emotional dysregulation, warped perceptions, and Histrionic behaviour in order to feel better about yourself. This may result in their becoming addicted to attention, and sympathy, in such a way that confabulation is incentivised. Indeed, such women may become Vulnerable Narcissists, presenting themselves as the world’s biggest victim in order to get attention and turbo-charge bonding with people over whom they can then feel a sense of control. The unfortunate result is that even if Virginia was a victim of abuse it becomes difficult to believe anything she says.

This should extend to her allegations against Prince Andrew. Her brother “Sky Rocket” (that really is his name) asserted in an interview that this “ordinary American girl from an ordinary American family brought down a British Prince . . . ” But Virginia was not an “ordinary American girl.” She was probably an abuse victim and was certainly a fantasist. Appalling as Prince Andrew is, it, surely, unacceptable that he should be treated in this way due to allegations levelled by a woman whom no sensible person would regard as credible.

The King’s actions reflect a kind of hysteria. This hysteria is ultimately underpinned by the long-term shift from being system-focused to being system-blind and centred, to far too great a degree, on empathy and emotion.

Why Invading Venezuela Won’t Be a Walk in the Park

/8 Comments/in /by

Why Invading Venezuela Won’t Be a Walk in the Park

Neoconservative strategists aren’t talking about the day after…

As American warships patrol Caribbean waters and F-35 fighters prowl Venezuelan airspace, hawkish voices in Washington paint an enticing picture: A swift military operation to topple Nicolás Maduro, similar to the easy interventions in Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989). It’s a dangerous fantasy that ignores three decades of failed Venezuelan policy and fundamentally misunderstands the catastrophic difference between those brief police actions and what a Venezuela invasion would entail.

The comparison is essentially that of a neighborhood skirmish to a regional war. Venezuela is roughly 2,650 times larger than Grenada and 12 times larger than Panama, with 243 times more people than Grenada and 12 times more than Panama. The appropriate historical parallels aren’t Grenada or Panama—they’re Iraq and Afghanistan, multi-trillion-dollar quagmires that killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of civilians while advancing no genuine U.S. interests.

What regime change boosters consistently ignore is what happens the day after Maduro falls. They focus obsessively on knocking out Venezuela’s conventional military—no walk in the park, but an attainable feat—while studiously avoiding the nightmare that follows: A multi-factional civil war among heavily armed irregular forces, refugee flows dwarfing the current crisis, and a protracted insurgency that could justify further U.S. intervention and spiral into a broader conflict that could attract irregular leftist forces from the region.

As far as historical analogues are concerned, Grenada was a tiny 344-square-kilometer volcanic island—smaller than many American cities. Despite hilly terrain, the entire country could be secured quickly because of its minuscule size. Panama at 75,420 square kilometers was larger but still a narrow isthmus focused around the Canal Zone, where U.S. forces already had extensive military presence and insider knowledge based on decades of American influence in Panama.

Venezuela covers 912,050 square kilometers—featuring the Andes mountains in the west, vast central plains (llanos), dense Amazon jungle in the south, and 2,800 kilometers of Caribbean coastline. This geographic complexity creates countless opportunities for asymmetric warfare, with mountainous terrain favoring defensive operations, urban centers ideal for guerrilla resistance, and jungle regions providing sanctuary for irregular forces.

Unlike Panama where U.S. forces had extensive familiarity from decades of base presence, or Grenada, where the entire operational theater was one small island, Venezuela’s diverse terrain would require controlling vast territories to prevent insurgent sanctuaries. U.S. military planners have no established presence, no intimate geographic knowledge, and would face the same challenges that gave American forces fits in Afghanistan’s mountains, Iraq’s urban centers, and Vietnam’s jungles.

Venezuela hosts one of the most complex networks of armed non-state actors in the Western Hemisphere. Start with the colectivos—far-left paramilitary groups numbering 8,000 individuals operating in 16 states and controlling approximately 10 percent of Venezuelan cities. These aren’t poorly armed street gangs; they possess AK-47s, submachine guns, fragmentation grenades, and tear gas—much of it supplied directly by the Venezuelan government.

Colombian guerrilla organizations have also established a significant presence on Venezuelan territory. The National Liberation Army (ELN) maintains operations in 13 Venezuelan states. According to a report by Colombian media outlet Connectas, the ELN has armed cells in roughly 10 percent of Venezuela’s more than 300 municipalities. The group controls territory in the Venezuelan states of Zulia, Táchira, Apure, and Amazonas—the four states bordering Colombia—and also operates in Barinas, Bolívar, and Delta Amacuro, with a presence of roughly 1,000 fighters in Venezuela and 6,000 members in total.

Segunda Marquetalia, dissidents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) who rejected Colombia’s peace accords, operates with an estimated 1,000 members. Other FARC dissident factions add approximately 2,000 more fighters. These groups maintain Marxist-Leninist, anti-imperialist ideologies and view the United States as the primary threat to revolutionary movements. Combined, these irregular forces are in the tens of thousands with substantial weapons, territorial control, and operational experience.

It should be stressed that Venezuela’s official military doctrine has been explicitly designed around asymmetric warfare against a hypothetical U.S. invasion since the Chávez era. The strategy assumes initial conventional defeat followed by sustained guerrilla resistance—making occupation costly and politically unsustainable.

Nevertheless, Venezuela won’t just roll over without a conventional fight. Venezuela is the number one purchaser of Russian weaponry in Latin America. It boasts mobile Russian S-300VM and Buk-M2E air defense systems (described as “by far the most formidable in Latin America” by Military Watch Magazine) and KH-31 anti-ship missiles. Additionally, Venezuela boasts 24 Su-30MK2V Flanker fighters (approximately 21 operational) capable of carrying anti-ship missiles and critically, components of Russia’s C4ISR system—integrated digital warfare networks previously shared only with Belarus.

Most significantly, Russia signed a comprehensive 10-year strategic partnership with Venezuela in May 2025, ratified in October 2025, covering more than 350 bilateral agreements on security, defense, and technology. Russian cargo aircraft have recently been landing in Caracas with additional military supplies. In October 2025, Maduro requested Russian assistance enhancing air defenses, restoring Su-30 aircraft, and acquiring missiles. The Iranians have also cooperated with Venezuela on the development of drone technology and sanctions evasion assistance.

This great power backing has no parallel in Grenada (where Soviet/Cuban support was minimal during the invasion) or Panama (where Manuel Noriega’s late attempts to seek Cuban/Nicaraguan support proved futile against American forces.

The ultimate challenge for the United States comes the day after when Venezuelan forces, colectivos, militias, and allied guerrilla groups retreat to mountainous regions, jungles, and southern plains. From there, armed groups would be able to conduct asymmetric attacks on U.S. forces and any post-Maduro government, creating multiple overlapping resistance movements.

A 2019 U.S. Army analysis concluded Venezuela presents a “Black Swan” hot spot significantly more complex than the 1989 Panama operation, noting Venezuela has “115,000 troops, in addition to tanks and fighter jets” and “thirty million people, about 20 percent of whom still support the Maduro government,” with leaders having “been preparing for asymmetrical warfare for more than a decade.” In contrast, the study noted that “[Manuel] Noriega’s Panama had only fifteen thousand troops—of which, only 3,500 were soldiers.” The study highlighted that “there is no chance that countries in the region would participate in an effort to topple Maduro.”

It’s also worth noting that Cuba has deep penetration of Venezuela’s security apparatus through secret agreements signed in May 2008 that “gave Cuba vast access to the Venezuelan military and wide freedom to spy on and reform it,” according to the Havana Times. Approximately 5,600 Cuban personnel work in Venezuelan security sectors, including 500 active Cuban military advisors. Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN) has been described as “almost a branch of the G2—the Cuban secret service—in Venezuela.”

This integration helps explain Venezuelan military loyalty despite economic collapse and has proved key in protecting the South American nation from U.S. covert operations. The Cuban intelligence network provides early warning of dissent and mechanisms for neutralizing opposition forces and other fifth columnists. For U.S. planners, any intervention would effectively fight not just Venezuela’s military but Cuba’s sophisticated intelligence apparatus with decades of experience countering U.S. operations.

Before contemplating another Latin American adventure, Washington should review its track record. Historian John H. Coatsworth documented that from 1898-1994, the United States intervened to change Latin American governments at least 41 times across 100 years, averaging once every 28 months.

The results? The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion failed catastrophically, strengthening Fidel Castro. The 1980s Contra War in Nicaragua killed approximately 30,000 Nicaraguans, yet Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, who lost the presidency in 1990, eventually returned to power in 2007. Ortega has currently ruled as an authoritarian president, exactly what the United States tried to prevent through the proxy war it facilitated during the Reagan era.

Beyond Latin America, the United States’ second invasion of Iraq cost over $2 trillion and killed 4,500 U.S. troops while creating conditions for the rise of ISIS and rival Shiite militias across the nation. The United States’ nation-building experiment in Afghanistan cost $2.3 trillion and killed 2,461 U.S. troops, only to see the Taliban return to power after 20 years.

Perhaps most striking is how overwhelmingly Venezuelans themselves reject foreign military intervention. September 2025 polling found 93 percent of Venezuelans oppose foreign military intervention, with only 5 percent supporting it. October 2025 polling showed this increased to 94 percent opposition.

This creates a paradox: Polling demonstrates 64 percent to 90 percent of Venezuelans wanting some form of democratic transition yet 93 percent to 94 percent reject foreign military intervention. When presented with peaceful alternatives, 63 percent have supported a negotiated settlement to remove Maduro, making negotiation by far the most popular option.

The Venezuelan opposition itself is deeply divided, with prominent figures like two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles—who remains in Venezuela—explicitly rejecting intervention. “Most people who want a military solution and a US invasion do not live in Venezuela. They don’t even understand the consequences of it,” Capriles said in an interview with the BBC. In an interview with The New York Times, he posed a pointed question: “Name one successful case in the last few years of a successful U.S. military intervention.”

As far as stateside is concerned, 62 percent of Americans also oppose invading Venezuela, with only 16 percent supporting such action, per YouGov polling.

Here’s what neoconservatives don’t discuss: Knocking out Venezuela’s conventional military is attainable. U.S. technological superiority would likely produce a relatively swift conventional victory. But then what?

A decapitation strike removing Maduro wouldn’t stabilize Venezuela—it would detonate it. Consider the armed actors positioned to fill the vacuum such as the colectivos with heavy weapons controlling urban neighborhoods; ELN fighters with decades of guerrilla experience; Segunda Marquetalia combatants; thousands of other FARC dissidents; and remnants of defeated military units retreating to mountains and jungles.

The result will likely be a multi-factional civil war. Various armed groups would compete over oil, gold, and minerals. Colectivos would defend urban territory. ELN and FARC dissidents would establish rural sanctuaries. Criminal organizations would exploit the ensuing chaos. The 20 percent of Venezuelans supporting Maduro ideologically would provide a substantial resistance base.

Such a conflict would trigger a massive refugee crisis. Venezuela has already had nearly 8 million people flee since 2015. Military intervention triggering civil war could produce millions more refugees, destabilizing Colombia, Brazil, Trinidad, Guyana, and the entire Caribbean basin. Moreover, many of these refugees would wash up on American shores—a prospect Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his cheap labor-addicted Republican cohorts in Florida would embrace with open arms.

Any U.S.-backed government would face prolonged insurgency, requiring sustained American military occupation, not the swift operation regime change boosters promise, but years or decades of counterinsurgency. Ironically, this could be dangerous even for María Corina Machado or whatever U.S. puppet is installed, as pro-regime forces remain heavily armed and motivated, while countless other militants will start carving out their own statelets nationwide. Not exactly an ideal climate for a prospective U.S. client regime to operate in.

Perhaps most underestimated would be backlash among Latin America’s radical Left. Since the end of the Cold War, leftist movements have been relatively pacified because the United States hasn’t taken direct, kinetic action in the regime. But when Marines enter the mix, this will galvanize nationalist sentiment throughout the region.

The ELN maintains strong ideological affinity with Venezuela’s state ideology of Chavismo and sees itself leading the struggle against American imperialism. Colombian guerrillas already recruit Venezuelans. U.S. intervention would dramatically accelerate recruitment. One could see foreign fighters form international brigades to fight American forces and the puppet government they try to prop up.

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro already condemned U.S. strikes as “acts of tyranny.” Full-scale invasion would trigger denunciations across the region, breathe new life into dormant anti-American movements, and create a generation of Latin American leftists radicalized by direct confrontation with U.S. military power. External actors like Iran, Russia, and China—who all have their own set of grievances with the United States—would pounce on this chaotic environment to further inflame tensions and poke Uncle Sam in the eye.

Comparing Venezuela to Grenada or Panama is fundamentally misleading propaganda. Those were brief police actions against micro-states in political chaos with minimal armed opposition, limited territory, no great power backing, and some regional support.

After 30 years of escalating intervention—coups, sanctions, economic warfare—Maduro remains in power while Venezuela has deepened ties with Russia, China, and Iran. The humanitarian crisis has worsened. Multiple coup attempts strengthened authoritarian control.

The historical record is unambiguous: U.S. military interventions consistently fail to achieve stated objectives. Initial conventional victories give way to protracted insurgencies, state collapse, refugee crises, and strategic disasters costing trillions. Venezuela would be worse because of its size, geography, complex array of armed actors, ideological polarization, and strategic importance to U.S. adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran, who are all itching to get back at the United States.

Neoconservative strategists are engaging in dangerous wishful thinking. They promise swift operation followed by grateful Venezuelans welcoming democracy. Reality would be years of counterinsurgency, multi-factional civil war, massive refugee flows, regional destabilization, and a strategic quagmire.

Invading Venezuela won’t be a walk in the park. It would be a quagmire defining American foreign policy for a generation. After 30 years of failure, perhaps it’s time to try something radically different: Diplomacy, engagement, and respect for sovereignty. The alternative is catastrophe, something Donald Trump’s “America First” movement never voted for.