My personal take on Trump's invasion of Venezuela

Blazing Reader,

Here's my personal take on Trump's invasion of Venezuela (starting with the positive):

First, he gets points for pulling the operation off without starting a major war (that would have resulted in big profits for the military industrial complex and major casualties among civilians and soldiers). Instead, he used special ops to target the leader, remove him from power and put him on trial.

Secondly, as Stephen Subero expresses in his poetic plea: for Venezuelans like him, socialism is not a political theory; it is a traumatic reality. 

"People didn’t suddenly become poor because of 'capitalism' or 'the US' or whatever bullsh*t slogan people like to repeat online," writes Subero. "They became poor because socialism destroyed incentives, destroyed production, destroyed trust, and destroyed hope."

Life will probably be better under American capitalism (however watered down its free market might be). But Venezuela is in such a bad state that it would be hard to make things worse and still have something resembling a nation. 

Nonetheless, it could still get far worse, as Trump well knows.

Trump has referred to regime change as an "absolute proven failure" when campaigning for president, stating that, "We must abandon the failed policy of nation-building and regime change that Hilary Clinton pushed in Iraq, in Libya, in Egypt and in Syria."

Invading other countries wasn't what the "Make America Great Again" movement voted for. 

Venezuela had not attacked the United States.

There are other ways to protect the kids in your neighbourhood from drugs.

So what's really going on?

The obvious answer: Venezuela has oil. Trump even admits this motivation. 

Sadly, this looks like a "lite" version of what Bush and Obama did (sans the mass murder) with Iraq and Libya all over again.

—John C.A. Manley

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John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.