Palestine and Venezuela Have Exposed the World |
“Palestine,” Yahya Sinwar said, “will expose the world.” It has done precisely that. Gaza has stripped the mask from the global order. Israeli-induced starvation, the systematic annihilation of hospitals, the levelling of an entire society, and the open genocide of Palestinians have not merely revealed the barbarism of settler-colonial violence; they have exposed the moral bankruptcy of the international system itself. The courage with which Palestinians face death-not as tragedy but as an expected guest-stands in grotesque contrast to the cowardice of those who claim to rule the world in the name of freedom, democracy, human rights, and even socialism “of their characteristics.”
The attempted kidnapping of President Maduro has shredded the already tattered veil of Western civilisation. The world has regressed to the colonial era, where countries’ sovereign wealth is seized at gunpoint without even disguising imperial designs. Imperialism no longer feels compelled to justify itself. The gangsterism normalised in Gaza has now encircled the entire Global South. Venezuela’s defiance sharpens this contradiction. While one besieged state dares to name imperialism openly, others with far greater economic and geopolitical capacity retreat into caution, diplomacy, and balance-at best condemnation, at worst silence. Europe, the eternal subordinate of hegemony, now watches nervously as its own interests come under threat. Greenland, openly eyed by Donald Trump, may yet remind Europeans that an empire eventually consumes even its most loyal servants.
The so-called liberal democracies of the West have revealed themselves as Orwellian regimes of managed outrage and selective humanity. International law exists only to discipline the weak; the strong violate it with impunity. The United States does not merely enable genocide-it organises, funds, and arms it. Europe follows obediently, issuing empty calls for restraint while ensuring the machinery of death never pauses. More damning still is the posture of those who present themselves as alternatives to Western imperialism. Russia mutters, hedges, and manoeuvres. China-a state governed by a Communist Party that teaches Capital while overseeing wage exploitation, class stratification, and the super-exploitation of labour-retreats behind the fiction of neutrality. It’s socialism, endlessly qualified and endlessly deferred, that evaporates the moment international solidarity demands material risk.
What Gaza and Venezuela have revealed is not merely U.S.-Israeli brutality. They have exposed the hollowness of Western democracy, the paralysis of international institutions, and the ideological exhaustion of states that once spoke the language of socialist revolution. The world system now stands naked: barbarism at the core, complicity at the periphery,........