“The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism.”

— Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:3

Case in point: Venezuela.

In 2017, when the U.S. imposed crippling economic sanctions on Venezuela, Marco Rubio applauded them. He said cold-bloodedly that “Venezuela is going to enter a period of suffering no nation in our hemisphere has confronted in modern history.” Back then, Rubio was a powerful Republican senator; today he is a major player in the fascist Trump administration as Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor, as well as two other positions.

How bad was the suffering that Rubio forecast? The Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) estimated that 40,000 people died in 2017-18 alone due to reduced access to food, medicine, and disrupted healthcare. This is heartless collective punishment. Venezuela was already in economic difficulty but these measures—which included blocking financial markets, seizing assets, and crippling water and electricity—indeed led to the severe suffering that Rubio so openly anticipated and helped to bring about. By 2020, estimates of total excess deaths ran as high as 100,000 human beings. 

Elsewhere in this issue we talk about the suffering imposed on El Salvador throughout the last 100 years, and we include testimony from immigrants now living here as to what it was like. You can go here, here and here to see what “your country” has done to Guatemala, to Chile, or to Haiti. Gaze upon the horrors that “your government” perpetrated on these peoples. 

When an institution does the same horrific thing over and over and over again, at what point do you confront the fact that there is something systemic—that is, built into the very way that it has to function—that accounts for its behavior? And what is driving this behavior is the system of capitalism-imperialism. While we unite together to demand that this stop, go deeper into why this system operates this way, and the fundamental revolutionary solution to bring a radically different and far better world into being.

Now it is eight years since Rubio’s statement. Contemplate the fact that we are being ruled by a straight-up fascist regime that has put tightening its grip on the hemisphere as its immediate strategic goal. The murders that this regime has already carried out off the coast of Venezuela and the murders they are moving to carry out form just one blood-soaked step in a whole larger agenda. 

To do nothing is to accommodate oneself to living with fascism. If you are telling yourself stories about the MAGA regime melting down and the coming midterms, this point from Bob Avakian is relevant, and what we’ll end on:

No more waiting for elections that will happen way too late—if they happen at all! No more talk of “three and half more years” of this fascist regime! Talk like that amounts to accommodation with this fascism... accommodation means collaboration with its monstrous and mounting tyranny and ongoing atrocities. (From Bob Avakian's social media messages, REVOLUTION #124: "Donald Trump’s whole fascist regime is caught in a contradiction of its own making: his continual Big Lies.")