I woke up today, and as I opened my laptop and scrolled down my Facebook feed, a news channel was airing reports of US airstrikes in Venezuela. The probable invasion had recently been discussed on social media platforms by experts and social media users alike, but I did not see it coming this brazenly. The news felt like it was quietly tilting the furniture in the room. Explosions in Caracas, low-flying aircraft, and a president said to be seized and carried away by a foreign power. The morning was not furtive or coy. It read like a proclamation. The United States had announced that it had carried out strikes. After a few hours (two and a half), President Donald Trump tweeted that the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had been captured and flown out of the country.

There is a strange honesty to the brazenness, and that honesty is the problem. For decades, power relied on a grammar of absence. When a state wanted to remove a rival or to punish an enemy, it often preferred the language of shadows: plausible deniability, plausible silence, a story that left enough room for doubt. The architecture of ambiguity was not built on technicalities; it was institutional by design. It allowed violence to be dissociated from responsibility, and it let governments act while insisting they had not. Those levers have been broken or discarded. What used to be hidden is now announced, sometimes in blunt social media posts and sometimes in the quick flourish of a presidential statement.

Visibility can’t be confused or conflated with virtue; it is a tool. Seeing does not equal justice. Perceive it that way: the new openness can constrain lies. Satellite images, open-source investigators, and a thousand civilian cameras make cover stories harder to maintain. Yet this very relevance does a service to the bigger powers. It creates legitimacy in the eyes of viewers, or those who are........

© Paradigm Shift