The (Over)Reach of Gangster Imperium, from Venezuela to Gaza

The Trump administration’s military aggression against the people of Venezuela proves the dictum: US/Western imperialism is gangsterism on an international level. The World has witnessed an attempted smash and grab/shakedown operation, and extortion racket perpetrated by a gangster state.

Of course, Trump is going to strut and preen and sputter braggadocio about his exercise in plundering Venezuela’s oil assets. Trump’s personality evinces the traits of a gangster given to ostentatious displays of his criminality, not the smart type who schemes from the shadows.

The history of the Mob proves the latter’s reign is given to greater longevity. After his moment of (fantasized) glory (early signs point to egomaniacal overreach) the tanking US economy and the shadow of Epstein will continue the (dismal and deranged) undoing of the Bitcon Don.

Trump’s increasing cusp-of-Alzheimer’s impulsiveness, his angry outbursts and non-sequitur-laced diatribes mirror Al Capone’s unseemly and pathetic end, undone, as syphilis ravaged the body and brain of the once king of the Chicago underworld.

Regarding Trump’s lies about Venezuela being a narco-state

The Hugo Chavez government halted CIA drug smuggling operations in the nation, decades back. Venezuela presents nada threat to the US on a military nor any other basis. And no, a contrived court case, sans a UN mandate and congressional resolution regarding war powers, does not constitute a legal justification for military action.

Trump is simply a congenital criminal, a sociopath born into a rigged system that protects the worst people US empire spawns within its swamp of mendacity. Of course, you recall said swamp…that Trump pledged to drain. Of course, you also remember he was “the peace candidate.”

Trump’s word is as real as the lie that is America. As real as the US is “a shining city on the hill.” The nation is a blood-sustained empire built on a mountain of corpses, from genocide-dispatched Indians, worked-to-their-grave African slaves, crushed beneath US empire Latin America and Caribbean peasants, and all the millions upon millions of victims of US Murder Inc. across the exploited globe. Once again, Trump tears down the facade and reveals the blood-drenched architecture of US empire.

Do you think when Trump’s rotting carcass shambles from the scene that Democrats will return US plundered oil loot to the Venezuelan people? The belief would display a mind-annihilating case of toxic innocence. Remember, Obama’s deployment of ISIS head-chopping jihadists to coup and kill Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi and smash and grab and abscond with the nation’s oil wealth and gold reserves — a war crime that rendered the once richest nation in Africa a failed state where slaves are sold on the open market.

This is the modus operandi of empire. Withal, believing voting can reform a military empire/economic imperium is like a squid applying for a job in a sushi restaurant “to change the system from within.”

In regard to the powerless of the earth e.g., me. My social media comment threads are infested by this sort of rage-frothing invective:

“Phil, you are a Kapo, a self-hating Jew, who enables Hamas terrorists.”

In response to the inanity, I posit, slaves who rose up against their masters (including, according to the mythos of the religion of my birth, Judaism — e.g., the followers of Moses who threw off their chains of bondage to Pharaoh, as well as the historical reality of the Jewish prisoners walled within the Warsaw Ghetto who fought to free themselves from Nazi imprisonment and the American slave (who insisted he was guided by God) Nat Turner and his rebellion against his Virginia plantation masters — all are regarded as heroes.

Yet Palestinians imprisoned within Gaza by their Zionist overlords — the majority of whom were born and have been confined within the massively militarily surrounded open air concentration camp — have never traveled outside of its precincts. Yet, according to Zionists and their apologists, their uprising was the action of depraved, blood-lusting terrorists.

Moreover, the citizenry of Gaza was under constant threat of attack from IDF marauders. Their military assaults on Gaza were termed by IDF raiding parties as “mowing the grass” i.e., acts of killing, terrorizing, and the taking of hostages (including children) back to Israeli torture prisons.

So don’t accuse me of being a supporter of terrorism. Israeli terror tactics were in constant play before the Oct. 7 uprising. In fact, they can be traced to the Nakba, then codified into Israeli state policy from 1948 to the present moment.

Thus sorry trolls, you cannot both-sides terrorism, in particular state-sanctioned terror that culminated in a genocide. The world has witnessed Israel’s perpetual war criminality; therefore, your compulsion to copy and paste hasbara lies (and spew ad hominem fallacy palaver) in my comment threads will not induce a global, collective outbreak of amnesia.

Further notes to Zionist apologists

It is not a good idea for Zionist true believers to equate, taking a stand against genocide as being antisemitic. We Jews are tiny in number; therefore, it is a far more propitious position to stand among the powerless and exploited of the Earth, and act as a vanguard of resistance against exploitative power, as opposed to acting as apologists for a brutal, highly militarized ethno-supremacist state, as well as Israel being deployed as a proxy force for Western imperialist agendas. (How is it possible, for a fleeting second, to believe that gentile western culture has developed a fondness for Jews?)

History relates, we Jews have all too often been prey. It is not a cogent notion to believe we will be welcome for long in the dominion of predators.

“The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens … for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus19:34).

IMO: In present day terms, the above passage of scripture, should be translated to, proffering a living amends to the Palestinian people, including a Right Of Return, and the bestowment of generous reparations for their decades of exile and suffering.

The damaged soul of Judaism can be restored by the dissolution of the Zionist state and the establishment of a true democracy on the stolen ground where it once stood. Otherwise, perpetually belligerent Israel will continue to be in asylum for the criminally insane disguised as a nation.

2025 played out as a global carnival of grim

The planet’s climate continued to rise to “are you fucking humans stupid beyond belief” levels, as the planet’s leadership class proved the declaration dead-on and deadly accurate.

Said gallery of grotesques either looked askance at genocide or enabled the abomination with stenographic fealty to Zionist hasbara or with proffered bottomless supplies of weaponry.

As noted above, at the advent of the new year, US Gangster Imperium (or what remains of it) has made a move to muscle in on Venezuela’s oil reserves. From all indications, Trump, intoxicated — to the point of grandiosity — from inflicting pain by his gambit to assert dominance on a smaller nation, is poised to double down on his bacchanal of aggression.

Malignant narcissist that he is, Trump derives a warped sense of pleasure from the fantasy he can hold a boot on the collective neck of the Venezuelan citizenry. Early indications from the ground in Venezuela, augur, its people are unwilling to take the position of supine submissive in accordance with Trump’s kink for dominance.

To wit, Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello:

Here, the unity of the revolutionary force is more than guaranteed, and here there is only one president, whose name is Nicolas Maduro Moros. Let no one fall for the enemy’s provocations. We are outraged because in the end everything was revealed — it was revealed that they only want our oil.

If an Iraq type debacle comes to pass, US economic conscripts, the power-devoid underclass of the empire, will lose their lives, will sustain lifelong injuries, and suffer from psychological afflictions due to their deployment as expendable tools of the Trump administration’s cosplay racketeering and extortion scheme.

Attack of conscience, never going to happen

As is the case with the powerless in Gaza, criminals (i.e., sociopaths in possession of official titles and the attendant freedom from consequences said titles afford) will attempt to justify the unjustifiable: the taking of human life in an attempt to assuage the appetite of the insatiable monster that rules their psyche.

Ours is a painful, anxious time for those of us powerless, little ants, who attempt, Atlas-like, to hold up the World. Ridiculous, right? Yet our status as ants imparts: we are many and they are few; together, we have a chance of enduring; but alone, devoured from within by alienation, we will perish.


Man Lying with Branch, Anselm Kiefer

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist, and essayist. His poems, short fiction, poetry and essays have been published in numerous print publications and anthologies; his political essays have been widely posted on the progressive/left side of the internet.  Read other articles by Phil, or visit Phil's website.