How the Same War Narrative Is Being Rehearsed Again
VENEZUELA AND THE RETURN OF THE SCRIPT
How the Same War Narrative Is Being Rehearsed Again
By Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. (Anthropology, UCLA)
With Contributing Author Janet Kira Lessin
History does not usually repeat itself in identical form. What it repeats are patterns: rhetorical structures, emotional triggers, and narrative shortcuts that make violence appear necessary before it ever becomes inevitable. The Vietnam War taught this lesson at enormous cost, yet the machinery that produced it was never dismantled. It merely waited for a new stage, a new villain, and a new generation insufficiently acquainted with how these stories end.
Today, Venezuela occupies that stage.
The language surrounding Venezuela—particularly in MAGA-aligned political discourse—follows a familiar trajectory. A foreign nation is reduced to a caricature. Its internal complexities are flattened into a single moral accusation. Its leadership is framed not merely as flawed or authoritarian, but as an existential threat whose existence demands action. Economic pressure is presented as humanitarian concern. Regime change is discussed as rescue. Military force, though often left unsaid at first, hovers just beyond the frame as the “inevitable” solution should all else fail.
This is not new. It is the same narrative architecture that underwrote Vietnam, later Iraq, and numerous interventions in between. What changes are the names, the accents, and the slogans. What remains constant is the psychological preparation of the public.
In Vietnam, the threat was Communism. In the post–Cold War world, it became terrorism. Today, it is “socialism,” a term used with deliberate vagueness, stripped of historical specificity and inflated into a catch-all menace. As with earlier iterations, the word functions less as description than as emotional trigger. It signals danger without requiring analysis. It invites fear while discouraging context.
Media plays a central role in this rehearsal. Complex economic realities—such as sanctions, global oil markets, and decades of external pressure—are rarely foregrounded. Instead, images of scarcity and dysfunction are presented as proof of ideological failure, while the conditions that contributed to those outcomes are treated as irrelevant or invisible. The result is a moral story with a single conclusion already implied: intervention is justified because inaction would be immoral.
This is the same moral inversion that operated during Vietnam. Then, as now, escalation was framed as reluctant necessity rather than strategic choice. Doubt was characterized as weakness. Opposition was equated with disloyalty. Those who questioned the narrative were accused not merely of being wrong, but of siding with the enemy.
What makes this pattern especially dangerous is that it thrives on selective memory. Vietnam is acknowledged as a “mistake,” but rarely examined as a system. The Gulf of Tonkin is cited as a cautionary tale, yet its underlying lesson—that governments will manufacture incidents to justify predetermined goals—is treated as an anomaly rather than a structural feature of power. The public is encouraged to remember the war’s tragedy while forgetting how easily the tragedy was sold.
From an anthropological perspective, this repetition is not accidental. Domination systems require periodic external threats to consolidate internal control. Foreign enemies justify surveillance, militarization, and the suppression of dissent at home. They also redirect public frustration away from domestic inequality and toward an external target. War, or the promise of war, becomes a stabilizing mechanism for unstable hierarchies.
In Enlil–Marduk terms, this is the logic of command and obedience: authority asserts itself through fear, while sacrifice is reframed as virtue. Partnership consciousness, by contrast, asks different questions. Who benefits from this framing? Who bears the cost? What alternatives are being excluded before the conversation has even begun?
The tragedy is that the human consequences of these narratives are rarely borne by those who promote them. Just as in Vietnam, it will not be politicians, pundits, or generals who pay the price of escalation. It will be ordinary people—soldiers sent into environments they do not understand, civilians whose lives are destabilized by sanctions and conflict, families who will absorb loss long after attention has moved elsewhere.
For those of us shaped by Vietnam, this recognition carries a particular weight. We have seen this story before. We know how it begins: with confident assertions, moral certainty, and promises of quick resolution. We also know how it ends: with trauma, disillusionment, and the quiet realization that what was presented as unavoidable was, in fact, a choice.
The question Venezuela poses is not whether its government is perfect or its society without fault. No nation meets that standard, including our own. The question is whether we are once again being prepared—emotionally, rhetorically, and psychologically—to accept violence as the default solution to complexity.
If Vietnam taught anything, it is that refusing the script matters. Not loudly, not performatively, but persistently. It means resisting the pressure to simplify, to demonize, and to forget. It means recognizing that manufactured urgency is often the enemy of ethical clarity.
The danger is not only that another war might occur. The deeper danger is that we might accept it as familiar.
ILLUSTRATIONS (FOR OPTIONAL INSERTION)
THE ENEMY IS INTRODUCED
Description:
A contemporary news montage showing bold headlines about Venezuela layered over images of political rallies, military hardware, and scrolling cable-news graphics, creating a sense of manufactured urgency.
Prompt:
Realistic, cinematic illustration, modern news media montage, headlines about Venezuela, cable news graphics, political rhetoric imagery, sense of urgency and fear construction, muted but tense color palette, documentary realism, landscape orientation.
THE SCRIPT REPEATS
Description:
Split-era composition showing Vietnam-era news footage on one side and modern Venezuela coverage on the other, visually echoing the same framing techniques across decades.
Prompt:
Conceptual realistic illustration, split screen composition, Vietnam War television news on one side, modern Venezuela news coverage on the other, visual parallels, historical continuity, subdued tones, landscape orientation.
🚧 Work in Progress
This article is part of an ongoing series examining how war narratives are constructed, repeated, and normalized across generations.
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👤 Author
Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D.
Anthropologist (UCLA), researcher, and author examining power systems, mythmaking, and domination narratives.
https://www.enkispeaks.com
👤 Contributing Author
Janet Kira Lessin
Writer, editor, researcher, and publisher focusing on historical memory, partnership consciousness, and ethical witnessing.
https://www.dragonattheendoftime.com
https://substack.com/@janetalexlessinphd
🏷️ Tags
Venezuela, Regime Change, Manufactured Consent, War Narratives, Media Propaganda, MAGA, Cold War Rhetoric, Vietnam War Lessons, Dominance Consciousness, Partnership Consciousness, U.S. Foreign Policy, Sanctions, Imperial History
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