As I was leaving the University of the Communes in Tocuyito, after a joyful and uplifting visit, an earnest young Professor came up to me and pulled me aside. Very quietly, he asked me what was going to happen. A number of the students were terrified there would be regime change and they, picked as young socialist leaders in the commune movement, would be imprisoned, tortured and executed.

With students at an agricultural project of the Vittoria commune

It was a sharp reality check after a great day at this fledgling university. But it is very real. I had met sober and professional diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who knew exactly which part of the mountains they would flee to with assault rifles in the event of the right coming to power, and were resigned to a life of guerilla warfare, including partners and children. I have met nobody who doubts that a change of regime in Caracas would lead to immediate mass killings of leftists, and a lengthy civil war.

Almost everything you are told in the West about Venezuela is untrue, and the biggest lie is that Machado, Guaidó and the groupings around them are in any sense democrats or liberal. They are not, and have direct family and political links to the murderous CIA-sponsored regimes of the pre-Chávez years. They also have many scores to settle – Machado’s family, to give just one example, dominated the electricity supply before it was nationalised.

A very large number of the “political prisoners” the West is so concerned about, were involved in efforts at military coup or violent insurrection, of which Guaidó’s comic opera attempt in 2019 was only the most publicised. After the disputed 2024 elections many of those imprisoned were actually brandishing weapons – I met the families of three young men who told me their sons were misled into taking to the streets with guns, and hoped they would get out in the current amnesty.

Sanctions caused great economic hardship which affected government popularity. But it is a huge error to conflate discontent at the Maduro government with support for Machado – there is almost no evidence of the latter, no matter how hard you look. That Machado does not have the internal support to run the country is one of the few things Trump has stated truthfully. The alternative to the socialist government is chaos.

So Delcy Rodríguez has to maintain the Socialist Party in government, or see supporters butchered and the start of a civil war. At the same time she has to contend with the blatant colonialist assertion of control over Venezuela’s assets and finances by the USA, while placating the irascible and irrational Trump.

Let us get one thing straight. I have spoken personally to those closest to President Nicolás Maduro. I have spoken with Francisco Torrealba, who followed Maduro as President of the Transport Workers Union and also took over Maduro’s seat in the National Assembly. I have spoken to Maduro’s son, also Nicolás. None of these people believe for one second that Delcy Rodríguez was in any way implicated in the kidnap of Nicolás and Cilia Maduro.

Why does almost everybody in the West believe a narrative that nobody in Venezuela believes, and which I am quite certain is untrue?

That narrative has been force-fed to you. Trump undermined Delcy Rodríguez by open praise of her and assertion that she is his choice. The truth of course is different: as Maduro’s Vice-President, she naturally assumes the duties of President, as confirmed by the Venezuelan Supreme Court. A co-ordinated effort of briefings to journalists by the Trump administration, by the security services, and by Machado-aligned Venezuelans in Miami, gave to the media in a coordinated fashion a detailed story of negotiations between Delcy and her brother Jorge and the Americans, for a strategy of economic reform that included Maduro’s removal.

I have looked again through many articles that forward this narrative, and all of them very obviously come primarily from Washington sources, and it is a narrative that the United States has been very, very assiduous in feeding you.

It begs the question, if Delcy really is a Western puppet, why is the Western Establishment so keen to tell you that? In every other circumstance, like the Gulf monarchies or al-Jolani, they are always anxious to promote the myth that their puppets are not puppets.

My maxim, that if the government really wants you to know something, it probably means it isn’t true, holds in this case. Trump wants it known that Delcy Rodríguez is his puppet because it is part of his victory narrative, the fake story of Trump greatness. It is also intended to divide and weaken the socialist movement in Venezuela.

We have to look at the night of 3 January when Maduro was kidnapped. There is one key fact which again is simply not part of the Western narrative. It was Nicolás Maduro who instructed the military to stand down and not to fight, in the event of an attempt to take him. In fact he was aware that such an event was imminent, though he did not know the exact date.

Maduro’s primary concern was to avoid war between Venezuela and the United States, war which would devastate this peaceful country.

It is important to note that Maduro was consciously following the template of his mentor President Hugo Chávez in his kidnapping in a CIA-orchestrated coup in 2002. (That link is a wrenching reminder that there was once a Guardian and Observer not captured by the security services). Following armed opposition insurrection on 11 April 2002, in which 19 Chávez supporters were massacred and 150 injured, a military coup captured President Chávez and he was flown to the island of La Orchila in a CIA-chartered plane.

Opposition leader Pedro Carmona was sworn in as President by the military leaders and instantly recognised by the Bush regime in Washington. He announced the immediate repeal of all of Chávez’s reform measures. However the people and bulk of the armed forces rose against the plotters and after only 48 hours took back control. Chávez returned to power. This is the basis of the brilliant Irish documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (which, naturally, was never televised).

The key thing to understand is that – remarkably – Chávez did not execute any of the coup participants, not even those in the military. There were in fact few prosecutions, jail sentences were remarkably light and many – including “President” Carmona – were allowed to “escape” into exile. The longest jailings were for those who actually took part in the massacre of April 11. Chávez gave a December 2007 general amnesty.

The same astonishing tolerance was shown to Juan Guaidó, the Western puppet who attempted a farcical military coup on 30 April 2019. While his coup was a pathetic failure and his total number of military defectors was 50, he nevertheless caused the deaths of four people and wounding of 230.

Again the response of the socialist government was astonishingly lenient. Nobody was executed. Proper trials were held of those accused and jail sentences were remarkably light even for those convicted of treason. It is worth saying that the numbers tried and the sentences were notably lighter than those handed down for the Washington Capitol Hill “insurrection” of 2021.

A group of thirty who took refuge in Bolsonaro’s Brazilian Embassy were allowed peacefully to leave the country. Guaidó was never arrested and was tolerated to wander around the country for years claiming to be President, and travel freely in and out, until he was indicted by the Government of Colombia for entering that country illegally in 2023.

The socialists’ refusal to spill blood has never been mirrored on the right. The large majority of those “political prisoners” you constantly hear about were involved in these or a whole series of lesser-known armed attempts, or in the opposition’s very real links to narcotics trafficking and organised crime.

What is surprising to me is not the claimed authoritarianism of the socialist government but, on the contrary, its quite astonishing leniency with the opposition in the face of repeated CIA-sponsored, frequently armed attempts at overthrow.

One has only to envisage how a right-wing Latin American government would deal with repeated left-wing armed coup attempts, to appreciate just how extraordinary this restraint has been. Lack of violence or vengeance has always characterised the Bolivarian Revolution’s reaction to right-wing coup attempts. Though it is admirably principled, I am not even sure I think this extreme degree of tolerance is wise.

It is in the context of this longstanding socialist reluctance to use violence that you have to view Maduro’s decision to stand down the defence forces in the event of an American kidnap mission. This is a government which does not just use revolutionary slogans, it lives by them, and “peace” is a key one. Maduro almost certainly hoped that domestic solidarity would oblige his return quickly, as had happened with Chávez. It is unlikely it occurred to him that Trump would simply – and pointlessly – remove Maduro and leave his government in power.

Multiple sources have confirmed to me that the Venezuelan forces were ordered to stand down. I visited the hillside location at Fuerte Tiuna where young female Lieutenant Alejandra del Valle Oliveros Velásquez, age 23, refused the order to stand down and continued to stand guard with her gun at a vital hilltop communications facility. She died as it was struck by American missiles.

This is also a point missing from the Western narrative of military events. Venezuela’s defensive posture is hopelessly outdated in the age of precision missile warfare. Its radar installations and anti-aircraft batteries are highly visible on open hilltop locations, not in hardened bunkers. Its troops are in open barracks, like the unnecessarily murdered Cuban guards.

Outrage at the entirely unprovoked American assault has restored a much-needed sense of national unity to Venezuela. In the bitter aftermath of the disputed July 2024 presidential election, many government supporters, including some in office, concede that the wave of arrests went too far. That overreach damaged the government’s moral authority at home and handed valuable propaganda ammunition to its critics abroad.

There was not sufficient discrimination between armed and unarmed protestors, and while many would argue that emergency measures were essential to prevent immediate anarchic violence, it is generally admitted that many incarcerations have gone on far too long.

Acknowledging this does not mean accepting the inflated figures and politicised methodology pushed by Western-funded NGOs such as Foro Penal and their international partners. Those counts routinely lump together genuine dissidents with armed plotters, participants in violent insurrection attempts, and outright criminals — many of whom were brandishing weapons or linked to coup networks.

The NGOs’ inflated numbers are not neutral human rights monitoring; they are part of a longstanding information warfare operation, generously funded by the very governments and foundations that have spent years supporting regime change efforts in Venezuela. Their selective outrage and consistent inflation of “political prisoner” tallies serve a clear political purpose: to delegitimise the Bolivarian process and justify external interference.

Broader perspective is essential. The arrests did not emerge from a vacuum. They followed years of sanctions-induced economic pain, repeated opposition attempts to subvert constitutional order through street violence, election disruption both physical and electronic, and what were forged or selectively manipulated election returns from the opposition. The response was heavy-handed, but it occurred against a backdrop of genuine security threats.

The narrative that the opposition won 70% of the votes in the 2024 election is simply absurd to anyone who knows Venezuela. In their final election rallies, Maduro had 1 million people on the streets of Caracas and the opposition had 50,000. Many of the alleged voting machine printouts bandied about by the Biden regime were very evident forgeries – with the same handwriting in different locations, and multiple examples of returning officers or party officials signing with an X in a country with almost 100% literacy.

The Opposition refused to present these printouts to the Supreme Court for verification. The truth is that the electronic electoral process (I am not a fan) was badly affected by external hacking, almost certainly by the USA. There was indeed popular discontent with the effects of economic sanctions, and many seasoned observers think the elections were close. It will never be possible to discover the real result. But Western claims of 70% opposition support are absolute nonsense.

In fact, I do not believe that either the government or the Supreme Court really knew the true result. I certainly do not. But it was American-orchestrated disruption that made it impossible.

Venezuela is a substantively free country. People have criticised the government to me openly and without fear, including on camera. There was an opposition demonstration in Caracas a few weeks ago. It was very lightly policed. Speakers could say what they wished – support for Donald Trump was a key theme – and nobody has been subsequently questioned. About 500 people turned out. I have seen three or four opposition posters around town. Nobody takes them down.

I have been filming all around Venezuela in total for six weeks, and have never been asked who I am by officials or police, or required to produce identity papers. I received a permit from the Ministry of Communications but nobody has ever looked at it. Nobody has ever suggested what I should say, or instructed me not to film something.

I have been to many different areas and provinces. Everywhere the shops are fully stocked and the bars and restaurants fully operational. People look well fed. I have not seen one drug addict, beggar or homeless person. I have seen five police or military checkpoints in six weeks – three at the Presidential residence, Police HQ, and National Assembly; one checking car tyres and lights; and one at the exit to a national park doing wildlife conservation enforcement.

I have been rather obsessively keeping check because Western journalists always put in police and military checkpoints in their imaginary descriptions of Venezuela, penned from thousands of miles away. The Machado opposition have made it a meme, putting out advice saying you are not obliged to show identity documents at police checkpoints. It would be very hard to find a checkpoint to show your documents to.

This is not a repressive government. The atmosphere of repression is entirely absent and that is because the mechanisms of repression are entirely absent. There is no heavy police presence. People are not scared of informers. I have seen very few guns carried by police, and zero guns carried by anybody else.

The narrative now dominating Western media — that any economic liberalisation or pragmatic opening under Delcy Rodríguez is a sudden capitulation forced by Trump’s pressure — is simply false. Nicolás Maduro himself initiated processes of economic liberalisation years earlier, as a direct survival response to the crushing weight of sanctions. These are Maduro’s policies. The recent legislation liberalising the hydrocarbons sector was entirely developed under, and approved by, Nicolás Maduro.

Dollarisation spread from below as ordinary people sought stability; the government gradually relaxed price controls, permitted greater private-sector involvement in imports and distribution, and developed workarounds for oil sales. These were pragmatic adaptations forced on the revolution long before Trump returned to the White House.

As I told the students at the University of the Communes, if late-stage capitalism were (as it claims) the natural order of society, rather than a series of entirely artificial institutions and arrangements designed to produce an extreme concentration of resources in the hands of an elite, enforced ultimately through the violence of the state, then the capitalist states would not need to crush states practising other systems, through crippling sanctions and isolation from exchange of resources and capital, and ultimately through military force.

Its own founding ideology states that capitalism will naturally prevail eventually in any society through its greater beneficence and more efficient distribution of resources. Yet the rulers of the capitalist states constantly seek to crush any state practising any alternative system. They do this for fear that their own population will see the possibility of a better path than working as effective slaves while the value produced by their labour concentrates entirely into the hands of the Epstein class.

We will never know how the Bolivarian Revolution would have developed were it not for the financial and trade sanctions that crippled it.

But this is the key fact. Venezuela was targeted because of the extraordinary successes of Chavismo, not because it was a failed state. Poverty was more than halved. Literacy increased to better rates than the United States. Free education and healthcare were instituted. Pension recipients were tripled. Utilities were nationalised. Massive amounts of social housing were provided. These were the achievements that precipitated sanctions.

The economic collapse of 2017 was not caused by failures of a socialist system. The collapse – and the subsequent mass wave of emigration – was caused entirely by the sanctions regime, and particularly the blocking of all payment systems and financial transactions.

There is an obvious point seldom discussed: sanctions — particularly the financial sanctions that block normal international payment transactions and banking channels — do not merely cause hardship.

Sanctions actively breed corruption.

When a sovereign government is prevented from conducting legitimate trade and finance through standard global systems, it is driven into the arms of those who specialise in sanctions-busting, informal transfer networks, and money laundering. These forced partnerships with elements outside the formal economy then infect the state apparatus itself, creating new avenues for graft and abuse.

It is a vicious, predictable cycle engineered by Washington policy.

Sanctions force states for very survival to do things classified as illegal, and draw their operatives into the ambit of actual criminals. Some of the criticisms of the Maduro government should be viewed through this prism; and of course there is not, and has never been, any state entirely free of corruption.

Maduro’s rule is not the failure that is routinely portrayed in the West. The economy has rebounded remarkably. Under Maduro, the government scored measurable successes in public security. Murder rates have dropped by over two thirds and the narco gangs are almost entirely off the streets.

Large-scale operations significantly curtailed narcotics production and trafficking routes through Venezuelan territory. Venezuela reported record drug seizures to the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs — nearly 66 tonnes in 2025 alone, the highest level in two decades. UN data states that Venezuela plays only a very marginal role in global cocaine flows, and almost none in production. On fentanyl it doesn’t feature at all.

Maduro has succeeded to an extraordinary degree in suppressing drugs on the streets of Venezuela and in stopping trafficking. That he is now in a US jail charged with “narco-terrorism” is truly a sign of how depraved the United States has become.

At the same time, the overall crime rate fell sharply. Cities that once ranked among the most dangerous in the world became noticeably safer for ordinary citizens. Even Venezuelans critical of the government on other grounds acknowledge this improvement in daily life and personal safety. Just two nights ago I was talking to a Venezuelan visiting home from Germany, who told me she used to be terrified to walk the streets of Caracas at night, but now felt perfectly safe.

It is important to understand what kind of socialism Venezuela actually practised under Chávez and Maduro.

The Bolivarian project was never the full state ownership of the means of production and distribution envisaged in classical Marxist texts. Venezuela has always been a mixed economy. Its distinctive feature — and its greatest strength — was the heavy reliance of the state on ownership of the full range of oil sector activity, upstream and downstream, to channel large public revenues into socialist-oriented goals: universal free education from cradle to university, a national health service that brought clinics and hospitals into every barrio, expanded social security, housing programmes such as the Gran Misión Vivienda, and subsidies that kept basic foodstuffs affordable for the poor.

The nationalisation of utilities — electricity, telecommunications, water — followed the same logic. In many respects it resembled the Western social-democratic model of the 1970s, when European governments used progressive taxation to fund the welfare state while leaving large parts of the economy in private hands. The massive scale of affordable decent quality public housing in Venezuela is truly a marvel to behold for a developing economy.

What made Bolivarianism different, and ultimately more radical, was the commune movement. Its philosophy is genuinely grassroots. The communes did not spring from decrees in Miraflores Palace; they grew from below, from the communal councils that ordinary people in poor neighbourhoods formed to solve their own problems — fixing roads, organising rubbish collection, building clinics.

Chávez gave these organic commune structures constitutional recognition and legal power, but the energy came from the communities themselves.

Decision-making in the communes is direct democracy in action: assemblies debate and vote on how to spend the funds allocated to them. The people decide their own priorities. I have always been a sceptic of people’s assemblies and direct democracy. Visiting Venezuela’s communes has converted me. The key factor is the quite astonishing prevalence of political education and social awareness among the ordinary members of the Venezuelan working class.

For a long time the communes remained largely a mechanism for redistributing oil revenue in a more democratic and transparent way. But it was still, in essence, social democracy with revolutionary rhetoric — spending the rents from oil on social goods.

But the commune movement has not stood still. It has begun to push outward, asserting communal ownership over the means of production and distribution. Increasing numbers of communes now run their own small factories, agricultural cooperatives, bakeries, abattoirs, transport collectives and distribution networks. I have discussed with senior government figures how to use commune-owned enterprises as a spearhead in liberalised sectors of the economy, to socialise profit.

Communes are moving beyond simply receiving and spending state money and towards controlling the actual creation and allocation of wealth. This is the qualitative leap that marks Bolivarian socialism as something more than 1970s-style welfare statism.

Maduro instituted the University of the Communes in 2025. It is predicated on providing practical university-level teaching in the areas of particular value to the communes, ranging from public administration to electrical engineering and agriculture. Agricultural production is an area where many of Venezuela’s over 7,000 communes are engaged.

Agriculture collapsed in Venezuela long before Chávez. This is in common with many oil states.

My first overseas diplomatic post was an appointment to Nigeria in 1986, as Second Secretary (Agriculture and Water Resources), where my favourite statistic was that Nigeria went, in just 8 years, from being the world’s largest exporter of palm oil to being the world’s largest importer of palm oil. Oil-backed currencies frequently make agricultural exports uncompetitive and imported agricultural products cheaper than domestic.

This collapsed Venezuela’s cocoa, coffee, maize and other agricultural sectors decades before Chávez came to power.

The communes are reintroducing agricultural production from ground level up. I visited local commune Vittoria not far from the University. It has over 20 agricultural production units, and students were assisting in developing, for example, bamboo cattle pens to replace iron hurdles no longer imported due to Western sanctions.

At the other end of the production process I visited the Metro HQ in Caracas on the day when all the Metro workers and pensioners are given monthly packages including cooking oil, pasta, flour, eggs and tinned meat and fruit, all of it now produced in Venezuela, and almost all are new products since the 2018 crisis.

What strikes every visitor is the extraordinary level of public awareness of socialist philosophy. In the communes, in the Bolivarian universities, in political education circles, ordinary people discuss with real knowledge the difference between social democracy and socialism, the role of the commune as the “cellular tissue” of the new society, and the necessity of moving from distribution to production.

Ideology is lived daily practice. I have heard teenagers and market sellers quote Chávez and Marx with ease, and with confidence their interlocutors will follow.

These are the fundamental elements of Bolivarian socialism that Delcy Rodríguez is now fighting to preserve and safeguard in the face of the Trump onslaught: the oil-funded social democratic state, the nationalised utilities, the direct-democracy structures of the communes, and the moves to spread the assertion of popular ownership over production.

Consider this: Venezuela has the most beautiful Caribbean beaches I have ever seen. They are as good as Mauritius or the Maldives. These are my own photos and the colours are not retouched.

What is remarkable about this is that all the people you see are ordinary Venezuelans. There is not a foreign tourist in sight: no beachside bar, restaurant or hotel chaining off stretches and covering them in sunbeds. Instead you have happy Venezuelan families with coolboxes enjoying the day for free. That is because, Isla Margarita aside, the Bolivarian Revolution protects Venezuela’s hundreds of miles of white sand beach by National Parks.

Where Chavismo sees a great amenity for the people and an astonishing habitat to be preserved, the Kushner and Machado worldview sees billions of dollars of prime beachside real estate, ripe for condominiums and huge hotels. Do not for one moment believe that they do not have their eye on it as part of the Imperialist grab. They do not want Venezuelans frolicking with their families on those beaches. They want them reserved to American and Israeli tourists, with the only Venezuelans in white shirt and bow tie carrying trays of drinks.

It may seem a small digression, but it is I believe a potent, and poignant, symbol of the clash of worldview that is at the heart of the struggle in Venezuela.

What the opposition wish to do is dismantle this entire architecture. Machado is pledged to abolish communes, to privatise utilities, to return Venezuela to the pre-Chávez model in which oil wealth flowed upward to a tiny elite and foreign corporations, while the majority existed only to serve. Delcy’s task is to hold the line so that the communes, and the consciousness they have created, can continue to develop while the universal education, healthcare and social provision are retained.

But this is the reality Delcy Rodríguez now confronts: Trump imposed a physical naval blockade on Venezuelan oil exports. Tankers carrying Venezuelan oil to buyers not approved by the US were physically seized by the US Navy. The US thus, by military force, imposed control over Venezuelan crude sales.

Revenues were initially routed to a US-controlled account in Qatar, later shifted to US Treasury accounts. Disbursements to the Rodríguez government are discretionary and ad hoc — for example, only $300 million of the first $500 million was released, with US approval required for its spending. The mechanism operates under executive emergency powers in the USA but under no Venezuelan authority. This is not with Delcy Rodríguez’s agreement.

It is totally illegal in every possible way. The naval blockade, the seizure of tankers, the stealing of oil revenue. All of this is absolutely against international law. Precisely what “Emergency” is justifying Trump’s powers, even in US domestic law, I have no idea.

The United States has no treaty agreement with Venezuela or international mandate permitting it to seize Venezuela’s oil and sell it. It is simple theft.

By controlling the tankers, Washington seized control of Venezuela’s only significant source of foreign revenue and crippled the government of Delcy Rodríguez. Oil accounts for over 70% of Venezuelan government revenue.

Oil cargoes approved by the United States are now sold on the international market, but the proceeds are not paid to Caracas. They are, incredibly, paid to the United States Treasury. The Trump regime dispenses ad hoc payments back to the Venezuelan government — whatever portion it chooses, whenever it chooses — to allow basic state functions to continue. It is a system entirely governed by the whims of Donald Trump, controlling another sovereign state.

This is less structured than the formal occupation authority the United States imposed on Iraq after 2003, but the principle is identical. Iraq’s oil revenues have been treated this way for 25 years. A great many people are unaware that all of Iraq’s oil revenue is stolen into United States Treasury accounts: the legacy media never tell you.

It is the classical colonial model. It is exactly how the British East India Company ran the princely states of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the local ruler was allowed to remain in nominal office, but the taxes were collected by the British and the local ruler given back whatever they chose. Senior East India Company officials in post were actually titled “Collector”.

Western coverage calls it “safeguarding,” “protection,” or “leverage”; the reality is pure, physical piracy.

Yet Delcy Rodríguez is stuck. She has no military force capable of countering it. The Venezuelan navy cannot challenge the US fleet, while the USA’s giant bombers can reach Caracas with 2,000lb bombs direct from US airbases in Florida. Any open attempt at defiance would spark the US military regime change which would lead to massacre.

Rodríguez is therefore reduced to negotiating with the occupiers over how much of Venezuela’s own money she is allowed to spend on her own people. She is obliged to host a series of sickening visits from smirking Trump henchmen, openly humiliating and raping Venezuela. The claims that Rodríguez wants this, still more that she engineered this, are nuts.

I have seen criticism from the political left in the West, that Venezuela should have fought, should still fight, should join the anti-Imperial resistance. I have seen Venezuelans criticised as “sell-outs”.

Rather few of those making these criticisms have personally taken to the mountains with an AK47 to fight a superpower which has openly abandoned all pretence to follow the laws of war on protection of civilian life and infrastructure. It is certainly an option; but the death toll would be appalling and Venezuela would be condemned to many years of civil war and US military occupation.

It is a suicidal option, as Maduro himself recognised.

Delcy Rodríguez is struggling under an almost unbearable burden. A lifelong socialist whose own father was tortured to death by a CIA-run Venezuelan security service, she now finds herself effectively a prisoner of the United States. Venezuela is not Iran. It does not possess the military capacity, the strategic depth or the alliances to fight the United States. If Trump wakes up one morning and decides on full regime change — and he could — the result would be an immediate bloodbath and the total erasure of all the social gains of twenty-five years of Chavismo.

To prevent that catastrophe Rodríguez must placate Trump. She must speak the language of economic liberalisation that Washington wants to hear, even though the actual policy shifts amount to only the smallest rightward adjustment in an economy that remains overwhelmingly mixed. The fundamental social-democratic achievements — the education, the health missions, the housing programmes, the pensions and welfare, the privatised utilities — are being preserved.

Rodríguez’s strategy is therefore one of grim endurance: hunker down, preserve what can be preserved, and wait for a change of political wind in Washington. Sources very close to her repeatedly mention the November midterms in the USA as the next possible turning point.

The tragedy is that this woman must endure the portrayal abroad, spread from Washington, as a traitor to her class and her country. She cannot publicly kick too hard against Trump without risking the provocation of the psychopath to the very violence she is trying to avert. A friend who has known her for decades told me: “She is doing what she can to keep the peace in this time of war.”

There is very concrete evidence of Rodríguez’s loyalty to Maduro. Far from erasing Maduro or positioning herself as the new face of the revolution, Delcy Rodríguez has covered Venezuela in highly visible “Free Nicolás and Cilia” billboards and street art, while introducing no material that praises herself or attempts to construct her own cult of personality. This public symbolism is a powerful, real-life counter to narratives of disloyalty or betrayal.

One of my personal critiques of Chavismo is that it is too centred on cult of personality. It is a key fact that Rodríguez is doing the very opposite of trying to move that spotlight onto herself.

Most of Rodríguez’s critics, especially those in the Western media and commentariat, know almost nothing of Venezuela. Most of what the Western public think they know is the very opposite of the truth; the ability of Western media to maintain a false narrative is astonishingly evident on a visit here.

I have now spent a total of six weeks in the country over two trips, talking to students, diplomats, union leaders, commune activists and people inside the government – and a great many barmen. What I have seen and heard convinces me of one thing above all: Delcy Rodríguez is not a traitor. She is a socialist doing the only thing possible to her in this impossible situation — buying time for the Bolivarian Revolution to survive.

———————–

As I end my second Venezuelan visit, we have now spent substantially more on this than we raised and I am personally out of pocket. There is still quite a lot of video footage and the editing process is stalled for lack of funds. Please help if you are able – Our GoFundMe link for the Venezuelan operation is here:

This is the same crowdfunding account we used for Lebanon so discount the first £35,000 raised as it was spent in Lebanon.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse my work, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of subscription payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish, subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come to this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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Venezuela GoFundMe

The extreme nature of sanctions against Venezuela made it very challenging to keep economic activity going. One example is Caracas’s impressive five-line Metro system, where for almost twenty years they had to keep things running with no spares or maintenance support from the train manufacturers.

Yet resilience and ingenuity kicked in, and Venezuela actually reverse engineered and manufactured parts – the need to do this in the oil sector also created a burgeoning small foundry industry, for example. Eventually, sanctions will stimulate domestic production. I spent some time with the Metro looking at how this happens.

As ever we need to spread the load and please we are looking primarily to those who have never donated or contributed before. Our GoFundMe link for the Venezuelan operation is here:

This is the same crowdfunding account we used for Lebanon so discount the first £35,000 raised as it was spent in Lebanon.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of subscription payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

PayPal address for one-off donations: [email protected]

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address NatWest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

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What if Trump’s apparently chaotic thought processes and intuitive decision making are all a blind, a charade? What if we are really witnessing, in the Middle East and more widely, a carefully constructed plan with very definite objectives? Has Trump in fact “planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway”, while flinging the chaff of apparent chaos? I realise that this is not intuitive, but bear with me…

What kicked off my thinking was the revelation by Lockheed Martin that they had been instructed by Trump, months in advance of the attack on Iran, to massively increase production of interceptor missiles, with a short term goal of quadrupling capacity of THAAD. In January, before the start of the current conflict, Fox News was already reporting on various deals, including a trebling of PAC3 MSE interceptor deliveries, having been finalised between Lockheed and the Department of War.

While obviously there are supply chain and production line constraints on the ability to ramp up production within months, the urgency of this activity – almost entirely focused on interceptor missiles – that started in 2025 is in hindsight a clear indication that early war with Iran was expected. It is plain evidence of premeditation.

The second thing that triggered my thought that this is all carefully planned, is the nature of the breakdown of the nuclear deal talks. It appears there was a broad consensus that Iran offered concessions which made a deal very practical, in particular giving up its stocks of enriched uranium into trust (a proposal Iran had historically rejected when Putin offered to hold the material). Both the hosts, Oman and the British thought a deal was there.

The failure of the talks is being spun as due to the incompetence and lack of technical knowledge of Witkoff and Kushner. But I just don’t buy this. The sending of unqualified negotiators was part of a ploy to use the negotiations as cover for an attack – the second time in a year that the United States had pulled the same trick.

They didn’t need competent negotiators, because they had never intended a good faith negotiation.

The attack on Iran was always planned by Trump. He was not “bounced into it” by Israel. It had been in gestation for months. That fact had been held within a very tight circle to avoid both political opposition and institutional opposition from the US military and intelligence community.

January’s protests in Iran found ordinary people genuinely ready to protest, motivated by economic hardship caused by sanctions. But they were guided and abused by Mossad and CIA agents among the Iranian people, who committed and encouraged violence and initiated pro-Shah chanting.

There was never the slightest possibility the protests would bring regime change, but that was not the intention. The purpose was to incite an over-reaction by the Iranian government that could “justify” the planned attack on Iran. The dead protestors have been great martyrs for Trump’s – and Israel’s – wider cause.

The planting by Western state-sponsored individuals and organisations of ludicrous claims throughout Western state and corporate media of thirty to forty thousand killed, was a deliberate and considered plan to reduce domestic opposition in the West to the forthcoming war against Iran.

Now factor in another apparently random act by Trump – the astonishing kidnapping of President Maduro of Venezuela on 3 January, a month before the attack on Iran.

Trump’s naval blockade of Venezuela’s oil has secured a US monopoly of its sale and distribution. As with Iraq, only US-approved contractors can buy the oil and payments are made to a Trump-controlled account in Qatar, from which revenue is given to the Venezuelan government entirely at Trump’s discretion.

This audacious imperialist grab of the world’s largest oil reserve further insulated the USA against the effects of the forthcoming closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Again, the narrative is being spun that Trump did not foresee the closure of the Strait by Iran. That is plainly a nonsense – every commentary on a potential Iran war for half a century has focused on the Strait of Hormuz. The only possible explanation is that Trump does not mind the closure.

While, as Trump says, the United States does not need the oil that comes through the Strait, the apparent weakness in his case is that higher oil prices are universal and hit Trump’s support, particularly as Americans fill their gas tanks. But to concentrate on this is to make the fundamental error of imagining that Trump cares about what is good for the American people. He does not. He cares about what is good for Donald J. Trump and his immediate circle.

Here is the Chevron share price over the last month:

And here is Lockheed Martin. Note that the start of the 40% leap in share price coincides with those instructions last year on massively ramping up interceptor production.

Not to mention, of course, that the really big fortunes will have been made in oil and derivative commodity futures by those who knew this war was coming (acting through proxies).

The $200 billion Trump is requesting from Congress to continue the war is going to make an awful lot of well-connected people even richer.

So the plan is the making of fortunes, the strengthening of the military-industrial complex and the ratcheting up under cover of national cohesion in war of the authoritarianism that has reduced freedom of speech and outlawed dissent against Israel across the Western world.

To benefit Israel is the other predominant motive.

Trump’s thrashing about to articulate objectives for the war in Iran is performative, a blind to cover his true and steadfast objective – simply the annihilation of Iran as a functioning state, the infliction of the maximum amount of death and infrastructural damage, the reduction of Iran to the condition of Libya.

It goes without saying that the seizure of control of Iran’s hydrocarbons by the US is the ultimate endgame of this destruction, exactly as in Libya and in Iraq. But a linked and crucial objective is the elimination of the source of the only physical resistance to the expansion of Israel. Iran and its allies in Yemen and Lebanon have been the sole support of the Palestinians for years.

The colonial settler state of Israel is central to the projection of imperialist power in the Middle East. Its expansion is an essential part of the plan.

Destruction of Iran on the scale envisaged will take years of hard pounding. Again, it is planned – you don’t ask Congress for an instalment of $200 billion for a war you plan to wrap up in a month. Again, Trump’s taunts about having already won, objectives being achieved and about possibly finishing soon, are all just smoke and mirrors. The scale and horror of what is planned for Iran has to be obfuscated to limit a public revulsion that would be echoed in parts of the state apparatus.

Netanyahu yesterday revealed an interesting part of the endgame – construction of an oil pipeline that brings Iran’s oil out to be shipped from a Mediterranean terminal in Israel. That is a breathtakingly audacious plan, but absolutely aligns with Netanyahu’s and Trump’s actions.

Which brings us to the Greater Israel side of the project. Israel is not going to put any of its ships or soldiers in harm’s way in Iran – that is the American contribution. But while the world is primarily watching Iran, Israel is starting a large-scale invasion of Lebanon with the aim of annexing all of Southern Lebanon permanently, even beyond the Litani River and including the cities of Tyre and Nabatieh, both currently under Israeli evacuation orders.

This land of course adjoins the annexed Golan Heights and the much larger area of Southern Syria that Israel has annexed in the past year with the acquiescence of Zionist puppet “President” al-Jolani.

It is essential not to lose sight of the bipartisan nature of the United States’ long term plan. In a very real sense Trump is continuing – if greatly accelerating – the policy under Biden, who protected and enabled the Genocide in Gaza. The success of this US policy is phenomenal. Just consider that only 18 months ago the Zionist “Presidents” al-Jolani of Syria and Aoun of Lebanon were not in power. Both were brought to power as a result of US-aligned military action, by Israel against Hezbollah and by the CIA- and MI6-sponsored HTS forces. Put in place by Biden, they are now central to Trump’s strategy.

Aoun and al-Jolani are now united in threatening Hezbollah in the rear as it fights a desperate action against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Meanwhile Israel officially occupies over 60% of the Gaza Strip – under cover of Trump’s “Board of Peace”, and continues to murder, blockade and starve the inhabitants of the remnant, while the de facto expansion of Israel into the West Bank and the levels of settler violence are escalating to levels of the utmost barbarity.

Iranian resistance is noble and Iran’s resilience has surprised many. It will be able to make any ground invasion, or even limited incursion, extremely costly for the United States. But as in Gaza or Lebanon, if the US and Israel are content simply to pound from the air for years with devastating force, and with no concern whatsoever for civilian casualties, ultimately all Iran can do is hang on and try to survive.

Given another year of destruction at the current levels of intensity, I do not believe that Iran would effectively be sending many missiles and drones back in self-defence. In a week or two we will hit the period of maximum Iranian effectiveness, where depletion of US-supplied interceptor missiles coincides with Iran retaining significant strike power. Israel’s fragile civilian morale will then be tested severely for a few weeks.

Iran’s capacity to defend against massive, years-sustained aerial bombardment is limited. We should not blind ourselves to that fact out of current joy at the Americans and Israelis getting a bloody nose.

It is comforting to see Trump as a buffoon, to accept the facade he presents of a blustering and ill-educated ignoramus, who swings wildly between policy options, and who does not understand the world of geopolitics.

But that is nonsense.

I have no hesitation in characterising Trump’s genius as evil, focused on personal gain and willing to inflict any amount of death, maiming and deprivation on innocent civilians to attain his goals. But he is indeed attaining his goals on the world stage.

Trump has forced the Security Council to underwrite his Board of Peace. This was a quite astonishing diplomatic triumph over a helpless Russia and China, both of which decided that other negotiations with Trump were more important. Trump has presided over Israel expanding on the ground by the day. Trump has taken Venezuela’s oil, the largest reserves in the world. Trump is currently killing the people of Iran and destroying their infrastructure, while feigning indecision.

You should hate Trump: but he is no clown.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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There is no place like home, and a few hours after arriving back in Scotland I was in Glasgow giving a talk to Pensioners for Independence. I still covered quite a wide sweep, but my focus came back to what I care about more than anything – the freedom, prosperity and just position in the world of my own nation of Scotland.

With thanks to Scottish Independence Podcasts, IndyPod Special, and of course to Glasgow Pensioners for Independence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBCwV6HUE4c

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My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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I today met our legal team and instructed them to submit an application for interim relief in the Scottish judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action. If successful this will immediately lift the proscription in Scotland, pending the review.

Scores of people in Scotland face imminent conviction for terrorist offences simply for exercising free speech and expressing their opposition to the proscription. Most of these are summary cases with no jury, but up to six months imprisonment. Others face up to 14 years in jail for speeches supporting Palestine Action.

A terrorism conviction is life-changing even without a prison sentence. It routinely leads to loss of employment and inability to get another job, to debanking, and to severe international travel restrictions.

Most of those facing these massively disproportionate effects are entirely respectable citizens who merely wish to oppose the facilitation of genocide.

My calculation is that submitting the application for interim relief is likely in itself to lead the Crown to drop the prosecutions for speeches, placards and T shirts. The UK government is desperate to avoid the situation of Palestine Action being legal in Scotland and not in England, with all the constitutional questions that arise.

Dropping the prosecutions would remove our main argument for interim relief (and probably make that avenue impractical for us). But this would be a huge win, removing the threat of a terrorism conviction from large numbers of peaceful campaigners in Scotland.

If the Crown does not drop the prosecutions, I am very confident our interim relief application in Scotland will succeed. In England, the High Court refused interim relief and then refused to lift the proscription pending appeal, even after it had ruled the proscription unlawful.

This nonsensical position is explained by the fact that in the English case, Judge Chamberlain was replaced at the last moment by three hand-picked very right-wing judges with a long history of finding for the government in “security”-related cases. In Scotland we are not on that kind of rigged pitch.

On the original timetable the judicial review was due to start this coming Monday. It has however been postponed at least until June because the UK government is introducing “secret” evidence from intelligence that we will never be allowed to see or reply to. The veneer of democracy and human rights in the UK has worn extremely thin.

The extent of Zionist domination of the UK government was shown in the astonishing decision to ban the annual al-Quds march for Palestine, which has been taking place for 47 years without incident.

The Minister of State at the Department of Justice, Sarah Sackman, called for the demonstration to be banned.

The Israeli and USA attack on Iran is, beyond argument, illegal in international law. Iran is not a proscribed organisation. It is not illegal to express support for Iran. Whether it is “anti-British” is a matter of opinion, not of law. Personally I think supporting the genocidal apartheid state of Israel is “anti-British”. But expressing an opinion is a specific legal right.

Sackman worked as a clerk in the Supreme Court of Israel. She is a fanatical Zionist with a long-term financing record from the Zionist lobby. As “Courts minister” she has been the leading advocate for the government’s proposed abolition of many jury trials. She is behind the plans for five-at-a-time, two-and-a-half-hour trials in England for 2,700 Palestine Action activists.

The positioning and empowerment of this Zionist monstrosity is yet more evidence of how deep Israel’s tentacles run in the UK Establishment, and in Starmer’s Labour Party in particular.

Interviewed on Sky News yesterday, Sackman condemned “Iranian attacks on civilians” but refused to condemn the US bombing of the girls’ school in Minab, describing this as “the realities of war”.

We are fighting against a deeply entrenched evil. The legal campaign against the proscription of Palestine Action is a small corner of this fight, but it is essential as an assertion of our freedom to carry the fight at all.

I am afraid the full Scottish judicial review is going to be very expensive. The latest estimate we have from the legal team is a final cost of £263,000 – without going to the Supreme Court. Of the £263,000 we have to date through all donation avenues raised a total of £189,000. We are therefore currently an estimated £74,000 short.

We need everyone who can contribute to contribute, even if it is only a pound, dollar or euro. And we need everyone who already contributed to think of another person who they can ask to contribute. All of us have to look towards people we know of good heart with means.

If we succeed, we will save many scores of people from the life-changing consequences of a terrorism sentence and from possible jail. But PLEASE do not contribute if you really cannot afford it – we are trying to make people’s lives better, not worse.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/scottish-challenge-to-proscription/

I know these are the most difficult of times. But that is why we have to keep fighting. The sums needed to mount a successful legal challenge to the power of the state can be eye-watering. But we are the many. Every penny helps, but please do not cause yourself hardship. You can contribute via the crowdfunder above or via these methods:

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of subscription payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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The United States and Israel are both revelling in inflicting the maximum possible death and suffering on Iran. After the genocide in Gaza, on a far larger field in Iran, those in power in Israel and the USA have a lust to kill and they revel in impunity.

The Epstein files reveal the same dynamic. We live in a society where those who obtain power wish to exercise it in the cruellest possible ways against the most defenceless. It appears to be a feature of late Western capitalist society, where sociopathic tendencies are essential to obtaining power, in a society which rejects altruism and cooperation as concepts and promotes competition, self-love and ruthlessness.

Iran is showing commendable fighting spirit, but as my last article stated, American military power should not be underestimated. They have the ability to destroy Iran from the air, to obliterate the institutions of the state and all of the key civilian infrastructure. Electricity, water, healthcare, education, administration, policing all can be knocked out just as they were systematically in Gaza and – on a scale insufficiently recalled – in Iraq.

Trump is already asking Congress for $50 billion to fund the operation and replenish stocks. The scale of destruction Netanyahu envisages will cost at least half a trillion dollars from the US Treasury. But there is nothing that can stop them.

I witnessed close up over five months the 80 to 100,000 homes destroyed in Lebanon by Israel in the last three years. We have all seen what they did to Gaza. The notion they cannot do this to Iran is simply wrong. It requires a colossal effort of will, a mania for killing, a vast amount of money and the depletion of the US arsenal. But they can do it.

Only political action by the peoples of the West against their leaders can stop it.

Iran and its allies have been the only physical opposition to the creation of Greater Israel. If the physical destruction of Iran is achieved, Greater Israel will be established at pace. One of the world’s greatest civilisations will lie in ashes, covering millions of corpses, but none of that will prevent the extraction of oil.

Pete Hegseth, American Secretary for War, simply comes over as a Nazi thug. He plainly is enjoying this as much as Netanyahu, Ben Gvir or Smotrich. He has gloatingly promised “Death and destruction from the sky, all day long”. He repeatedly signals ever-escalating bombing.

The Iranian Red Crescent has listed the bombing destruction so far. It includes:

• 5,535 civilian residential units
• 1,041 commercial units
• 65 schools
• 14 hospitals and medical centres
• 13 Red Crescent Society bases

By contrast, there has been no credible claim that Iran has inflicted widespread civilian damage. It has very tightly targeted specific facilities – collateral damage seems almost entirely confined to debris from intercepted drones and missiles.

But we know the US/Israel axis targets hospitals and medical facilities. It is proven beyond doubt in Gaza, and I witnessed it in Beirut.

In gloating about US military superiority, Trump advised Iranian civilians:

“Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere.”

Yet they are deliberately bombing residential buildings, exactly as in both Lebanon and Gaza. Trump is attempting to terrorise Iran into “unconditional surrender”.

At the Battle of Waterloo – an epic, large-scale and unmissable event – approximately 15,000 people died on the field of battle (more died later of wounds in an age before antibiotics). You are supposed to believe that the Iranian government in January killed twice as many demonstrators as died at Waterloo. This using only small arms and despite the complete lack of visual evidence of killing on anything like that scale.

At the same time you are supposed to believe that tens of thousands of tonnes of the highest explosives have been dropped into the centre of cities all across Iran but that these are “precision attacks” killing very few civilians.

It is obvious nonsense.

AI targeting only adds a new layer of dystopia to an entirely vicious and unnecessary war. The indifference of the Western media to the slaughter of 160 Iranian schoolgirls leads to really difficult questions about the type of society the West has become. Racism is just the beginning of the problems.

The effort to coerce the Kurds into yet again fighting for the USA, only to be abandoned when no longer deemed helpful, is reckless in the extreme. It is bound to lead to further war and fragmentation in Iraq. The repercussions in Turkey are potentially extreme – and possibly may jolt Erdoğan from his complacent furthering of the US/Israeli agenda.

Civil war is close in Lebanon. The traitorous Zionist regime of General Aoun has no forces capable of taking on Hezbollah; but the other Zionist puppet al-Jolani has concentrated forces on the border with the Bekaa Valley ready to attack Hezbollah from the East while they fight Israeli invading forces in the South. Macron has indicated he may send troops and armour to assist Aoun.

This entire conflict sounds like a dreadful regional disaster in which millions could die – and it is. But to the US and Israeli Zionists, the prospect of a devastated region is precisely what they wish to achieve to facilitate Israeli expansion and American seizure of resources.

There is an urgent need for regime change – in the West. The only way for this carnage to stop is for the people of the West to remove their Zionist-controlled ruling classes.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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There has scarcely been an attempt to pretend any justification in international law for the attack on Iran and murder of its leader. The response of the UK government, focusing almost entirely on condemning Iran for exercising its legitimate right of self-defence, takes the Starmer dishonesty meter further off the scale.

The RAF has been actively involved in genocide in Gaza for two years with its surveillance and logistic support for the IDF. It is now fighting for Israel again; intercepting Iranian missiles is not defensive; it is joining in the attack on an already vastly overmatched opponent.

I am afraid that the truth is the Iranian attempt to defend itself militarily will be less impactful than many anti-imperialists hope. The astonishing amounts of money spent by the US government on military and surveillance technology simply do have real-world effect.

Here in Venezuela, having seen the major sites struck by the US on 3 January, I have concluded that no act of betrayal was needed. Just overwhelming force and precision technology applied against a technologically unequal opponent whose key capabilities were all on open hilltops or in unhardened barracks.

Iran is much more militarily sophisticated, but facing exponentially more force. Khamenei was killed in his own home, not hiding away. He is going to prove a lot more powerful as a martyr than as a ruler with his internal critics.

We are facing not only a period of unapologetic imperialism to which virtually all Western countries are prepared to defer, but a return of medievalism, both in the sheer barbarity and scale of physical abuse, as witnessed in Gaza and in general Israeli brutality, and in use of kidnap and murder as methods of high policy. Legitimising the killing and kidnap of leaders of opposing states is of course a double-edged sword.

Having sanctioned genocide, mass killings and deliberate destruction of medical facilities and staff, the mass murder of children, as well as the kidnapping and murder of Heads of State, it is hard now to imagine almost any atrocity which the Western powers are in any moral position to condemn.

While Iran’s military ability to strike back is limited, the ramifications of this attack will not be. The rulers of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have reverted to the norm of being not only reliable US and Israeli satraps, but promoters of atavistic hatred of Shia Muslims.

The West is deliberately exploiting the Shia/Sunni divide, as it has for centuries; but this will now destabilise the region for decades. Iraq in particular is going to be convulsed, and so will Pakistan. In Bahrain, the Shia population has been held in check by its Sunni rulers using systematic Western-sponsored murder and torture. Using it as a base to murder the Ayatollah is going to blow back.

It would appear that we are going to witness an aerial campaign to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, as in Iraq where 65% of clean drinking water, 50% of hospitals and clinics and 80% of electrical generation was destroyed by “liberation” by the NATO powers. The object is the destruction of Iran as a viable state.

It is worth recalling that Iran used to be a Western-style state with a reasonable democracy. It was the election of the Socialist Mosaddegh in 1951, and his nationalisation of British Petroleum, which was met by the MI6- and CIA- sponsored coup of 1953. The vicious and vainglorious rule of their puppet Shah was the cause of the theocratic revolution.

Escalating Western sanctions were imposed by the US or EU on Iran in 1979, 1984, 1995, 1996, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2019 and 2025. There were UN-approved sanctions imposed from 2006 to 2010. These very substantially hampered Iran’s economic development.

The curious thing is that the founding myth of the Western powers is that economic development leads to an expanding, educated middle class which promotes both economic and social liberalism and produces the conditions for democracy. By this reading, if you wished to cement in power an authoritarian government, then limiting economic development is the way to do it. There is something in this reading; I do not doubt that the West’s relentless efforts to strangle Iran – which have had some real success – have hampered its political development.

That is not to accept all the Western myths about Iran. Female education is very strong, and there is extensive female participation throughout economic and governmental institutions. Iran has an extremely good record of tolerating and even supporting minority religious communities, including the Jewish community. There are plenty of women in Tehran without head coverings – Iran is far more tolerant in this regard than Saudi Arabia. While it retains a retrograde intolerance of gay people, it acknowledges gender dysphoria and assists trans people.

I am not prepared to give a moment of countenance to arguments that bombing Iran back to the nineteenth century is going in any way to improve the lives of its people. It did not do so in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya. It was a disaster which unleashed waves of refugees upon Europe, leading directly to the rise of the far right.

I think it is unlikely to change the form of government in Iran in any significant way. Regime change by bombing is a highly problematic concept.

What it has done is to remove Ayatollah Khamenei, whose fatwa on the creation of a nuclear weapon was the only reason Iran does not have one. It is delusional to believe that Iran, with its excellent scientific base, could not have developed nuclear bombs in secret away from those monitored enrichment programmes, had it chosen to do so. What is likely to result in the medium term from this conflict, if it long continues, is a more primitive, more atavistic and nuclear-armed Iran.

The Iran nuclear deal torpedoed by Trump in 2018 had provided a rare moment of hope. With sanctions easing, there were chances of both smoother economic development and reform in Iran. That is why Israel wanted the agreement scuppered.

The attempted obliteration of Iran is part of a systematic attempt to eliminate by physical force all pockets of resistance to American hegemony. We have seen Rubio’s astonishing assertion of Imperialism as a positive force. Matthew Lynn in the Washington Post exemplified the new Western doctrine. He mocked China for its pacific policy. He argued that for China to build infrastructure for the Global South was futile because the United States might simply seize, blockade or destroy any infrastructure by military force. This he viewed as not shameful, but a great triumph.

What long-term lessons China, Russia and the Global South are learning from the abandonment by the entire West of the principles of international law, we shall see in the decades to come. None of this is going to be good for anyone. It is not just a Trump phenomenon. Biden fully supported the Gaza genocide. Almost all major political parties throughout the West are under firm Zionist control, as is all of the significant major media and the ownership of every significant alternative media platform.

Iran has provided, directly and through proxies, the only military opposition to the creation of Greater Israel. This war is for Greater Israel. But it is also a wider effort to re-establish the failing economic dominance of the United States by military control of key resources. There is no part of the world which will be safe from the fallout.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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