Connexion
La prestation de l’équipe ukrainienne aux Jeux olympiques d’hiver en Italie restera plutôt dans les mémoires non pour ses résultats
L’article En Italie, à l’Olympiade, l’Ukraine a remporté le championnat des provocations est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Verily, it is Victory or Martyrdom.
Venezuelans have a “true sense of belonging to a project worth saving.. This is a project of collective self-emancipation. .. Those who are committed to the Bolivarian revolution assume themselves as subjects of transformation, not as victims. And this is something to be reckoned with.”
Video Description:
“I’m joined by Cira Pasqual Marquina, author and educator at the Pluriversidad Patria Grande and co-host with Chris Gilbert of the Marxist education program and podcast Escuela de Cuadros.
I ask her:
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Cira Pascual Marquina interviews at Venezuelanalysis.
The Imperialist Offensive is Nothing New for the Bolivarian Revolution’: A Conversation with Ana Maldonado
A Chavista organizer examines the US militarization of the Caribbean and the Bolivarian Revolution’s enduring resistance to imperial aggression.
In recent months, Washington has stepped up its military presence in the Caribbean, sending warships, aircraft, and even a nuclear submarine to waters near Venezuela amid extrajudicial attacks on fishing vessels. For many, this new phase of aggression is all too familiar — part of a decades-long campaign of hybrid warfare designed to undermine Venezuela’s sovereignty.
In this context, Cira Pascual Marquina spoke with Ana Maldonado, a sociologist, international relations coordinator for the Francisco de Miranda Front—a national Chavista movement—and member of the Venezuelan chapter of ALBA Movements. In this interview, Maldonado offers her perspective on how Venezuelans are experiencing the latest imperialist escalation, reflects on the country’s long resistance to hybrid war, and situates the current threat within the broader struggle for sovereignty in Latin America and the Caribbean.
How are the Venezuelan people experiencing this new imperialist escalation?
President Nicolás Maduro has said that in this scenario of maximum pressure, our response must be maximum preparation. At the same time, he has called on us to combine vigilance with calm, to continue our daily lives, and to defend the peace with social justice that has cost us so much to build and preserve.
You can see this clearly in the fact that, even amid the current military escalation, the new school year began normally across the country. More than 20,000 educational institutions opened their doors without disruption, and over six million children and youth returned to class, as they do every year around this time.
While we are indeed facing a serious threat of war, people are also carrying on with their everyday lives and that, in itself, is a victory, since the enemy seeks precisely to disrupt our life.
People abroad are often surprised to learn that daily routines here continue undisturbed and that Venezuelans are not living in a state of panic. How do you explain this?
This is far from our first encounter with imperialist aggression. The tactics may shift, but the strategy remains unchanged: hybrid warfare. For years, US imperialism and its allies have waged a relentless campaign against Venezuela, beginning in earnest in April 2002 with the coup d’état and the people’s heroic counteroffensive that restored democracy. That was followed by the oil sabotage, mercenary incursions, and global media campaigns against our democracy.
After Comandante Chávez passed in 2013, a new and sustained period of aggression began. Initially, they bet that we would fail to hold peaceful elections or that President Maduro would never be elected. The dominant narrative was “Maduro is not Chávez.” With that simplistic argument, they sought to demoralize the Chavista social base, implying that the Bolivarian project would not withstand the loss of the Comandante. Yet we won the elections and, even as we mourned Chávez, the project continued.
But the US and their local agents were determined not to let us go on with our revolution. In 2014, the opposition launched a violent campaign called “La Salida” [The Exit], led by Voluntad Popular and María Corina Machado, the same factions now openly calling for foreign intervention. The following year, the United States took another war-like step: Obama’s 2015 executive order declaring Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat.”
That decree was followed by the 2016 economic strangulation, marked by deliberate shortages aimed at making everyday life unbearable. Ten years later, we remain under a blockade that has killed tens of thousands.
In 2017, the most extreme factions of the opposition returned to the streets with fascist violence, committing atrocities such as the burning alive of a young Black man, Orlando Figuera, targeted simply for looking like a Chavista. More than 100 people were killed during this period of intensified fascist terror.
President Maduro responded by calling for a National Constituent Assembly, once again raising the banner of peace and democracy in the face of fascist violence. People from all sectors, including residents of middle-class neighborhoods whose polling centers had been attacked, were able to vote in peace at the Poliedro de Caracas.
Since then, we’ve lived through multiple phases of hybrid war: Juan Guaidó’s self-proclamation as “interim president” in 2019 and the “Battle of the Bridges,” when the opposition attempted to stage a false-flag operation on the Colombian border under the guise of a humanitarian aid effort. That was followed by massive blackouts that left the country in darkness for days and the 2020 Operation Gideon, recently further exposed in a Max Blumenthal interview with its US organizer, Jordan Goudreau, a former Green Beret.
None of these were isolated incidents: they are coordinated fronts in a sustained hybrid war combining political, psychological, economic, and military aggression.
Yet, in each of these moments, the government and the organized pueblo have responded effectively. During the 2019 electrical sabotage, for example, communities mobilized to ensure access to water and basic needs, while Operation Gideon was defeated by the same fisherfolk who are now being attacked in the Southern Caribbean.
So, to return to your original question: yes, people are alert because the threat is real, but we are also seasoned and organized. We know we are capable of defending the Revolution with unity and discipline. We are in a phase of maximum preparation, with millions voluntarily enrolling in the militia and preparing for the defense of the Patria [homeland].
Indeed, people are not only enlisting in the Bolivarian Militia but also preparing collectively. You’ve given us a historical account of the attacks faced by the Bolivarian Revolution over the past 25 years. But as we know, the current military buildup in the Caribbean is not only against Venezuela: it is an attack on the continent. How do you understand its broader implications?
The imperialist onslaught on the Caribbean is nothing new. Haiti, still punished today for its revolution more than two centuries ago, remains under siege. Now, armed gangs tied to the Dominican Republic are also involved. Puerto Rico continues to endure capitalist dispossession, with five million Puerto Ricans now living in the US while barely three million remain on the island. All the while, revolutionary Cuba has faced a brutal blockade for many decades.
However, the recent imperialist military buildup should deeply concern the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, since it signals a shift in Washington’s military policy. Around 10,000 US troops are currently stationed in the Caribbean, mainly in Puerto Rico, to say nothing of the destroyers, nuclear submarine, and air force deployments.
They are not there only to threaten Venezuela; this is the revival of the Monroe Doctrine. As Trump once said, “Why pay for Venezuelan oil, if we can just take it?” That’s how they think about the resources of the continent.
When it comes to Venezuela, beyond seizing our resources, the US also aims to strip away our sovereignty and destroy the example that we represent. If our project succeeds, it will inspire the entire continent. From Canada to Patagonia, people are struggling for liberation, and the Bolivarian Revolution represents a living example of how that can be done.
Attacking Venezuela serves two purposes: to loot our resources and to extinguish the example of participatory democracy. Since 2021, Venezuela has experienced renewed economic growth and the strengthening of its communes and popular power.
That is precisely what Washington wants to halt: they fear that the peoples of Latin America, and even within the United States, will draw inspiration from our experience.
Why the military escalation at this particular moment?
Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” is itself an admission of decline. The US is no longer what it once was, and its elites are desperate to recover lost ground. Yet even within those elites, fractures abound between the neoconservatives, the Zionist zealots, and the MAGA bloc. Their internal contradictions often produce erratic foreign policy decisions.
However, on one point they all agree: war is profitable. The military-industrial complex remains central to sustaining the US economy. So even amid domestic tensions, there is a bipartisan consensus around war as business.
Before the recent attacks on Venezuelan vessels, President Maduro warned that they might attempt to recreate a Gulf of Tonkin incident, because their hunger for war is insatiable. He was right: this aggression is ultimately driven by the economic imperative of feeding the war machine. In a post-Cold War world, it survives through perpetual “hot wars”—and what better front than Venezuela, which is rich in resources and defiant of imperial domination?
Let’s close with Chávez. He declared the Bolivarian Revolution anti-imperialist in 2004, but in truth, it always had a sovereign and anti-imperialist character. Could you reflect on Chávez’s anti-imperialism?
Indeed. The formal declaration came during a historic rally at the Botanical Garden in 2004, but the Revolution was Bolivarian from the start, and Bolívar himself was profoundly anti-imperialist. He warned that the United States seemed “destined by Providence to plague the Americas with misery in the name of liberty.” That same spirit lives in our revolution since day one.
Chávez revived Bolívar’s anti-imperialist legacy as early as 1977, when he created the People’s Army for the Liberation of Venezuela, whose founding document enshrined Bolivarianism and anti-imperialism as guiding principles. Later, in The Blue Book [1991], he outlined the vision of sovereignty and dignity that still guides us. President Maduro calls that text a “historical compass” pointing us steadfastly, no matter how much we have to maneuver, toward our strategic goal: the defense of sovereignty and the rejection of imperial domination.
For us, being anti-imperialist means not only refusing to surrender our resources, but also defending our identity, our dignity, and our very being. The empire’s elites belong nowhere; they want the world to belong to them. We, by contrast, define ourselves by belonging to a land, to a pueblo, and to a history.
That is why even symbolic aggressions, such as the attempt to erase “Bolivarian” from the Republic’s name during the 2002 coup, or mocking us as “venecos” in an attempt to erase our identity, are part of the war.
Bolivarianism and anti-imperialism are also deeply rooted in your organization, the Frente Francisco de Miranda. Can you tell us about it?
Indeed. In 2003, Fidel and Chávez founded the Frente Francisco de Miranda as a movement of Bolivarian, anti-imperialist social workers. However, anti-imperialism isn’t limited to my organization; it’s in the bloodstream of millions of Venezuelans who have resisted International Monetary Fund impositions since 1989 and continue defending the Bolivarian project today.
To be Chavista is to be anti-imperialist. Chávez was the first Latin American president to recognize Palestine, to support the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, and to speak of our historical debt to Haiti. His backing of these and other liberation struggles was not just a matter of words but also about material support. He also linked the defense of Haiti to a history that, for him, didn’t begin with Pétion and Dessalines, but with Hatuey, the first known hero of an anti-colonial Caribbean rebellion.
That is our Chávez—the anti-imperialist Chávez—whose legacy continues to guide us!
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Cira Pascual Marquina is a Political Science professor at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela in Caracas. She is also co‐producer and co‐host (with Chris Gilbert) of the Marxist education program Escuela de Cuadros. She is actively engaged with grassroots organizations in Venezuela and abroad, and is dedicated, both as a militant and as an investigator, to communal initiatives.
“Most curious, though, are the 36% of Americans who still swallow Donald whole. The Donald sure knew what he was doing. His muscle memory was still fine.”
with gratitude to Linh Dinh at Postcards from the End.
Bubba Blow By Blow — Nov 16, 2025.
Before the Internet, you’d never hear from a guy like The Enemy from Within. He’s a trucker who has posted 368 videos on YouTube. Dude has done a fantastic job tracking America’s economic collapse. Due to Trump’s tariffs, much less stuff is being imported or moved about. Thanks to Trucker, let’s call him that, we know how bad it really is. Approaching this Christmas shopping season, Trucker sees dead truckstops everywhere, with one designed to hold around 300 trucks having, at most, 30 on a recent night.
I enjoy listening to Trucker because he sounds just like the Philly motherfuckers I used to drink with. It’s not just his language, but his candidness. He’s not some hit and run pussy who can only act tough while hiding behind some faggoty pseudonym. Now that Trump’s been outed as a cocksucking hypocrite, the internet has blown up. Most curious, though, are the 36% of Americans who still swallow Donald whole. Good Christians all, they must defend this child rapist held hostage by Jews. Red heifers are here.
Though Trump has dropped countless clues over decades, MAGA morons were steadfast. I had some among my readers, I’m embarrassed to say. Like others, I’ve had to conclude many enjoy Trump’s sexual exploits, if you want to call them that, vicariously. The most polite term for this is freudenfreude. These perverts just want to increase the world’s happiness.
“Dr. MDL” shared, “Note that grabbing pussies and banging miss universe types is [sic] not only fine but admirable.” How about banging helpless children and slurp slurping Bubba’s cock? I suppose that’s fine, too, for this doctor. How many clueless patients has he cared for? How many genitals has he grabbed?
During Biden’s era, I spoke out against the enforced trans fetish, but, again, I don’t care what anyone does with anyone else, if it’s consensual. I don’t think Arwin Weiwess should have been jailed for slowly killing Bernd Brandes, then eating him, chunk by chunk, over days. As performance art, it’s even more sublime than Mao Sugiyama serving pieces of his pecker at a banquet. Germans and Japanese are just different.
Trump, though, has never owned up to anything. He’s always pretended to be the exact opposite of what he is. A cowardly pervert business failure born into wealth who hates just about everybody, including his wives and “lovers,” Trump has tricked billions into wanting to be just like him, so copies of his How To Think Like A Billionaire are selling everywhere, including in Vũng Tàu, and this is technically a Communist country!
MAGA jerkoffs are fine with this Epstein statement, “Have them ask my houseman about donald almost walking through the door leaving his nose print on the glass as young women were swimming in the pool and he was so focused he walked straight into the door.”
Who can resist juicy chicks bobbing in a pool? Even Trump having some hooker piss on him sounds like a blast. The only problem with this is blackmailing. Trucker:
My understanding of that was that Donald Trump was in a hotel room with a Russian hooker that peed on him. And they had a tape recording of it. And they were holding that over Donald Trump’s head as leverage. And I don’t know why you would even try to cover that up. I’m going to level with you, my friends. And you’re going to find out just how much of a degenerate I can be sometimes. If I had a weekend where I got drunk off my ass and ended up in a hotel room with a hooker that pissed all over me, you wouldn’t be able to shut me up about that tape. I’d be telling all you guys about it. You’d see me get on a video, hair all messed up, looking tired, like I had one hell of a weekend going. Guys, you would not believe the weekend that I had. And I wouldn’t be able to post that video here on YouTube because it would get me kicked off of YouTube really quick. But I would be finding ways to make sure all of you guys got to see the video of the weekend I had. You would not be able to blackmail me with a video of a hooker peeing on me. That would be my crowning life achievement right there. On my deathbed, that would be the last thing that I thought about. It wouldn’t be blackmail around here, baby. Not at all. That’s what I call a good fucking weekend, all right? Truckers, man. We’re degenerates. We do shit.
I wonder what my Scranton buddy, Chuck Orloski, is thinking about his superhuman savior? How much are you paying for eggs and ground beef, Chuck? How many bags of groceries are you getting per week from your soup kitchen? How many new jobs have appeared in Deer Hunter country? You must be so rich, Chuck, you don’t know what to do. The next time I see you, you better buy me rounds of Yuenglings!
As a Philly housepainter, I used to hit the titty bar with the rest of the crew right after work. We had to unwind, man. Sitting in the Office, I watched some old fart lick a stripper’s high heel. Standing on the bar, she had come round to collect tips. After grandpa was done, I asked, “Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know. It’s something new.”
Since it was his first time, gramp was terrible.
When Trump gave that microphone a simulated blowjob in front of thousands, he acted like a seasoned pro. The Donald sure knew what he was doing. His muscle memory was still fine. Now, he can’t locate his mouth or asshole to wipe it.
I don’t know any straight guy who would even attempt that. Shit, man, even queers would have had stage fright.
Dr. MDL, “Flipping shit and trolling people is [sic] funny as hell. You must know that from hanging in Philly.” No, doctor, Philadelphians may talk much shit, but most of us have class. We have boundaries and respect. Like Trucker, we laugh best at ourselves.
On 8/26/15, Trump tweeted, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” At Friendly Lounge, Dom, Felix, Johnny AC, Johnny the Hat, Chinese George, Marty the Mortician or Vern the Vietnam vet would never think of saying that, much less broadcast it to billions for posterity. They’re not retarded teenagers.
Only Donald can satisfy Bubba. At 79, his teeth are supernaturally white, and that tongue is flickering as well as ever. Geriatric slobbering is a natural, God-given lubrication. Holding down that bobbing red hat, Bubba sighs rhythmically until they both scream. Is there a better example of Republicans and Democrats working together to benefit Joe and Jane Sixpacks? It’s your turn, Bubba. Fair is fair. America has never been greater.
About Linh Dinh (@linhdinh):
‘Before being canceled, I was an anthologized poet and fairly prolific author, with my last book Postcards from the End of America. Now, I write about our increasingly sick world for a tiny audience on SubStack. Drifting overly much, I’m in Cambodia.
Born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963, I lived mostly in the US from 1975 until 2018, but have returned to Vietnam. I’ve also lived in Italy, England and Germany. I’m the author of a non-fiction book, Postcards from the End of America (2017), a novel, Love Like Hate (2010), two books of stories, Fake House (2000) and Blood and Soap (2004), and six collections of poems, with a Collected Poems cancelled by Chax Press from external pressure. I’ve been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, 2004, 2007, Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology (vol. 2) and Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories From Around the World, etc. I’m also editor of Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (1996) and The Deluge: New Vietnamese Poetry (2013). My writing has been translated into Japanese, Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Korean, Arabic, Icelandic, Serbian and Finnish, and I’ve been invited to read in Tokyo, London, Cambridge, Brighton, Paris, Berlin, Leipzig, Halle, Reykjavik, Toronto, Singapore and all over the US. I’ve also published widely in Vietnamese.’
AHH: Please support this wonderful writer on his Substack! Thanks
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