‘Might Is Right’ Is Wrong
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WHAT SHOULD WE make of the latest headline grabbing adventure brought to us by the US military–industrial complex? Here, the events of 3rd January in Venezuela will probably soon feature in the Guinness Book of Records as the quickest regime change in history.
With President Nicolás Moros & his wife behind bars, Delcy Rodríguez is acting president. However, her hands are tied. She’ll have to do as she’s told by the US.
We’ve maintained for a long time that US President Trump is a National Capitalist & everything is about making money. Thus, his mentality leads him to believe that everyone and everything is seen as a ‘commodity’ to be bought and sold for a price.
Any form of capitalism requires three elements to function – cheap labour, an ever-expanding market & raw materials. By a sheer co-incidence, Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, the ninth-largest natural gas reserves, and vast untapped minerals including gold (1).
Trump has previously talked about taking the US down a non-interventionalist path. However, now he’s acting as a frontman for Washington-Wall Street internationalist interests. (Why the change in direction – is there some sort of powerplay going on behind the scenes?) For the moment, however, it seems that greed and the need to acquire yet more global power & wealth is winning.
To try and make more sense of what’s happening in Venezuela –we reproduce an article – the original of which can be found here https://www.paulembery.com/p/
Embery became a member of the Labour Party in the early 90s. He’s also a trade union activist (with the Fire Brigades Union – FBU). His views are probably best described as a form of patriotic & traditional working-class socialism. We’ve also reproduced his article as part of our ongoing strategy of promoting debate, particularly between those who hold alternative & non-conformist points of view.
It goes without saying that there are no links between Paul Embery, the Labour Party, the FBU & the National Liberal Party.
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‘Might Is Right’ Is Wrong
Civilisation itself rests on the principle that the strong must not be given licence to attack the weak
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Photo: Molly Riley, via Wikimedia Commons
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I NEVER cease to be amazed at how members of our political elite doggedly refuse to learn the lessons of history. Worse, some of them appear to have no knowledge of the past beyond the previous fortnight.
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How else might we explain the support shown by certain voices for the decision by President Trump to bomb Venezuela, seize its sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, and effectively turn the country into a US colony?
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Let me stress that, while I am on the left, I am not blind to the socialist Maduro’s misdeeds. There is strong evidence that he stole the 2024 presidential election, and that crime alone would be reason enough for Venezuelans to want rid of him.
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But who decreed that the White House should act as the planet’s law enforcement agency? What gives Trump the right to launch a military assault on another sovereign nation – one that posed no clear and present threat to the US – without consulting the United Nations, fellow world leaders or even his own Congress?
We’ve seen this movie many times. US-led interventions in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq became wars of attrition before ending up as military and political catastrophes. Similarly, the 2011 US-backed Libyan escapade – almost entirely ignored by the political and media classes these days – sparked a seismic migration crisis which plagued Europe for years thereafter.
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The pretext for such interventions is usually the liberation of an oppressed population and the promotion of democracy and human rights. The reality, however, is that the US has a grubby history of collaboration with despotic and corrupt regimes across the globe. It’s just that those regimes happen to serve its interests in a way that the Maduros of this world don’t. ‘Realpolitik’, they call it. Utter hypocrisy, I say.
We should, I suppose, at least commend Trump for not trying to fool us with guff about defending democracy and human rights in Venezuela. On the contrary, he was searingly honest in his admission that this intervention was all about oil and strategic advantage. He is plainly willing to use the mighty war machine at his disposal in the service of a new American imperialism, and he doesn’t care who knows it. Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO-member Denmark, is next on the hit list – and that’s when the balloon will really go up.
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Date: January 12, 2026
Categories: Articles