VENEZUELA AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WAR
How Conflict Functions as a Career Ladder, Not a Mistake
By Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. (Anthropology, UCLA)
With Contributing Author Janet Kira Lessin
War is rarely the result of collective delusion. Populations are not uniformly fooled, hypnotized, or naïve. They never have been. Vietnam did not persist because everyone believed the story, nor did Iraq, Afghanistan, or the long list of conflicts that followed. Wars persist because they work—not for the many, but for the few who reliably gain power from them.
The enduring mistake in mainstream war analysis is the focus on belief rather than incentive. Public opinion may be divided, skeptical, even resistant, yet conflict proceeds anyway. The machinery does not require consensus. It requires momentum, fragmentation, and enough coercive authority to override dissent. Within that structure, war functions as a political accelerator. It simplifies complexity, concentrates authority, suspends scrutiny, and elevates those willing to speak with certainty when uncertainty would otherwise prevail.
Venezuela now occupies this familiar position in the American political imagination, not because it presents a novel threat, but because it provides a usable one. Its internal contradictions, economic struggles, and political failures are real, but they are not the point. The point is utility. Venezuela serves as a canvas onto which domestic ambitions can be projected, a foreign stage upon which strength can be performed for audiences at home.
This is not about persuasion. It is about positioning.
The language surrounding Venezuela—especially in MAGA-aligned discourse—follows a rigid and recognizable structure. The country is reduced to a single moral identity. Its leadership is framed not merely as authoritarian or corrupt, but as existentially illegitimate. Sanctions are described as benevolent pressure. Escalation is framed as reluctant necessity. Any call for restraint is recast as weakness or complicity. This framing is not designed to convince skeptics. It is designed to reward those who adopt it.
Once the narrative is set, debate becomes performative. Evidence becomes secondary. What matters is alignment. Who is “strong.” Who is “soft.” Who belongs to the team. Who does not.
This is where war stops being a policy choice and becomes a sorting mechanism—not just abroad, but at home.
WARS CREATE LEADERS: WHO RISES WHEN OTHERS FALL
Every major war produces its political beneficiaries. Vietnam elevated figures who learned how to harness fear, patriotism, and moral absolutism while remaining insulated from the human costs of the conflict. Iraq and Afghanistan did the same. The pattern is consistent enough to be predictive.
War creates conditions under which leaders can bypass normal accountability. Emergency rhetoric justifies extraordinary power. Complex domestic failures—economic inequality, institutional decay, social fragmentation—are reframed as secondary concerns in the face of an external enemy. Political ambition finds cover in national urgency.
Those who rise in these moments do so not by solving problems, but by embodying certainty. They speak in absolutes. They simplify. They promise victory. They cast themselves as protectors of the in-group against a threatening out-group. Whether the threat is communism, terrorism, socialism, migrants, or “globalists” is largely interchangeable. What matters is that the threat is vivid enough to consolidate loyalty and silence hesitation.
The people who pay are never the people who rise.
Soldiers are sent into environments they do not control and do not fully understand. Civilians in targeted regions absorb the destabilizing effects of sanctions, covert operations, and violence that rarely make headlines once normalized. At home, dissenters are marginalized, surveilled, or dismissed as enemies within. The ladder ascends on the backs of those rendered invisible.
This is why wars are not corrected by hindsight alone. Calling Vietnam a “mistake” does nothing to dismantle the structure that rewarded those who escalated it. The same is true today. As long as war continues to function as a reliable path to power, it will be proposed again and again, regardless of public skepticism.
Venezuela’s role in this dynamic is not accidental. It provides a pretext for strength displays without the immediate costs of full-scale invasion. It allows for sanctions, posturing, proxy actions, and rhetorical escalation that signal dominance while deferring accountability. It keeps the machinery humming while careers are built, platforms expanded, and internal enemies identified.
This is where politics mutates into tribal warfare.
Modern political movements increasingly borrow their emotional logic from sports culture, because it is already familiar and deeply ingrained. Teams are chosen. Loyalty is demanded. Neutrality is treated as betrayal. Outsiders are not merely wrong; they are suspect. Once this framing takes hold, ethical considerations are subordinated to victory. Due process becomes negotiable. Evidence becomes optional. The only unforgivable act is refusing to pick a side.
In such a system, the enemy is not meant to lose temporarily. The enemy is meant to be removed.
This is why reports of people being summarily killed, intercepted, or erased at borders—often justified with little proof and enormous certainty—should not be dismissed as isolated excesses. They are not aberrations. They are signals. They indicate how quickly team-based politics abandons law in favor of loyalty, and how readily violence becomes acceptable once the target has been designated “outside.”
This is not law enforcement. It is power enforcement.
Vietnam demonstrated that propaganda does not need to persuade everyone to succeed. It needs only to fracture resistance, exhaust critics, and reward those willing to advance the narrative. The same conditions are present now. The danger is not that people have forgotten Vietnam. The danger is that its lesson has been misdiagnosed.
The lesson was never that people were foolish.
The lesson was that war is profitable—politically, institutionally, and psychologically—for those positioned to exploit it.
Until that reality is confronted directly, new enemies will continue to be introduced, new crises rehearsed, and new leaders elevated on the promise of protection from dangers they themselves help construct.
Venezuela is not the cause of this moment. It is the instrument.
Refusing to participate in this machinery does not require believing that all actors are evil or all citizens are duped. It requires recognizing that when war reliably produces winners at the top, it will continue to be proposed—no matter how many times it fails everyone else.
That is not cynicism. It is structural realism.
And it is long past time to say it plainly.
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.
WHO BENEFITS WHEN THE SCRIPT IS ROLLED OUT
The idea that entire populations are simply duped into war is itself a convenient myth. Not everyone buys the propaganda. Not everyone ever has. During Vietnam, millions protested, resisted the draft, sheltered deserters, published underground newspapers, and refused the moral premises offered to them. The same pattern holds today. Skepticism toward intervention in Venezuela is widespread, informed not only by historical memory but by a growing recognition that the justifications offered rarely align with outcomes.
What sustains these conflicts is not universal belief, but selective advantage.
Wars do not require total consent; they require enough compliance to proceed and enough confusion to fracture opposition. Within that space, someone almost always rises. Political careers are made by projecting strength, clarity, and moral certainty in moments of manufactured crisis. Foreign threats simplify domestic complexity. They offer ready-made villains, rallying cries, and permission to sideline inconvenient questions about inequality, corruption, or failed policy at home.
Vietnam produced its winners, even as it devastated lives. So did Iraq. So did Afghanistan. Each conflict elevated figures who learned how to harness fear, patriotism, and grievance into political capital, while distancing themselves from the human costs once the spotlight moved on. The people who paid were rarely the people who gained.
Seen this way, war functions less as a tragic mistake than as a recurring political opportunity. It reshuffles power internally while presenting itself as external necessity. Those who question the premise are dismissed as naïve or unpatriotic, even when their objections are grounded in history rather than ideology.
This is why the language surrounding Venezuela matters. It is not simply about foreign policy; it is about domestic positioning. When political movements frame intervention as strength and restraint as weakness, they are not only arguing about another country. They are auditioning for authority at home.
The public, meanwhile, is cast in a familiar role: divided, pressured, and ultimately expected to absorb the consequences. Soldiers, migrants, sanctioned populations, and working families bear the costs, while the architects of escalation move on to the next cycle, the next election, the next platform.
The lesson Vietnam left behind was not that propaganda always succeeds, but that it succeeds enough. Enough to keep the machinery running. Enough to advance careers. Enough to ensure that when the war is later acknowledged as a failure, responsibility is diffuse and accountability elusive.
What is being tested now is whether that pattern still holds—or whether historical memory, hard-earned skepticism, and a refusal to play assigned roles can finally interrupt it.
WAR AS A TEAM SPORT: HOW TRIBAL GAMES TURN LETHAL
What is unfolding now is not simply propaganda, and it is not merely ideology. It is something older, more primal, and far more dangerous: the conversion of politics into a team sport where loyalty replaces ethics and victory replaces humanity.
Modern mass societies understand games. Football, basketball, soccer, hockey—each teaches the same lesson early and repeatedly. Teams are assigned. Colors are worn. Allegiance is demanded. Neutrality is treated with suspicion. If you do not pick a side, you are not seen as independent; you are seen as disloyal. The outsider is not simply wrong but untrustworthy. The enemy team must lose for your team to win.
This logic works because it is emotional, not rational. It bypasses evidence, complexity, and moral nuance. Once identity is fused to a team, facts become irrelevant. The only remaining question is who wins and who loses.
Authoritarian movements understand this instinctively.
They do not need everyone to believe the narrative. They need people to pick a side. Once that happens, tribal loyalty does the rest of the work. The leader becomes the coach. The nation becomes the team. Opponents become enemies. Outsiders become threats.
At that point, politics ceases to be a contest of ideas and becomes a zero-sum game. Someone must be defeated for someone else to triumph. Compromise is weakness. Restraint is betrayal. And empathy—for those on the other side of the line—is treated as treason.
What makes the current moment especially dangerous is that the language of competition is no longer metaphorical. It is openly existential. MAGA rhetoric increasingly frames the conflict not as electoral or ideological, but as civilizational. The goal is not to win an argument, pass legislation, or even govern effectively. The goal is to win everything—and to remove opponents from the game entirely.
In that frame, the enemy does not merely lose. The enemy must disappear.
This is how games turn deadly.
Once people are reduced to “outsiders,” their rights become negotiable. Due process becomes optional. Proof becomes inconvenient. Violence becomes preemptive rather than reactive. The question shifts from what did they do to what team are they on.
We are already seeing the consequences. People on boats are being executed with little or no proof of guilt, justified by accusations that are vague, unverified, and politically convenient. The logic is familiar: they are smugglers, criminals, invaders, threats. Once labeled, they are no longer treated as human beings entitled to investigation or trial. They are treated as enemy players removed from the field.
This is not law enforcement. It is tribal enforcement.
History shows where this leads. When political identity becomes tribal identity, and tribal identity becomes moral identity, violence stops requiring justification. It becomes self-validating. Killing the “enemy” is no longer seen as a crime but as a duty. The crowd cheers not because justice was served, but because their team scored.
Vietnam followed this pattern. Iraq followed it. So did countless other conflicts dressed up as necessity or defense. Each time, the people were told they were protecting something—freedom, security, civilization itself. Each time, those who rose politically did so by amplifying fear, simplifying the story, and promising total victory. Each time, the costs were borne by people with no voice in the decision.
What makes the present moment especially alarming is how openly this logic is now expressed. The language is no longer cautious. The appetite for exclusion is no longer subtle. The willingness to see outsiders not merely defeated but dead is increasingly visible, increasingly normalized, and increasingly defended as realism.
This is not a game.
It is a rehearsal for a society in which belonging determines whether you live or die.
And the most dangerous part is not that everyone believes it. The most dangerous part is that enough people are willing to play along, while others are pressured into silence, exhaustion, or false neutrality.
The lesson history offers—again and again—is that once politics becomes tribal war, there is no natural stopping point. The circle of “us” keeps shrinking. Yesterday’s teammate becomes tomorrow’s suspect. The rules change mid-game. And by the time people realize the game was rigged, the field is already littered with bodies.
Refusing to play is not weakness. It is the last remaining form of sanity.
WHEN REPETITION BECOMES REALITY
Trump did not invent this strategy, but he perfected it for the age he inhabits. His power does not come from persuasion in the traditional sense, nor from coherence, accuracy, or consistency. It comes from repetition. From stating reality as he sees it—again and again, unchanged, uncorrected, unembarrassed—until sheer familiarity overwhelms resistance.
The mechanism is simple and brutally effective. A version of events is asserted. It is repeated verbatim. Contradiction is ignored. Evidence is dismissed as bias. The statement returns, unchanged, the next day, and the next, and the next. Over time, the repetition itself becomes the proof. What was once recognized as false becomes merely “one side.” What was once outrageous becomes normal. What was once unthinkable becomes discussable.
At a certain saturation point, the narrative no longer needs defending. It becomes the background. The operating system. The default framework through which new information is processed or rejected. This is not persuasion by argument; it is conditioning by exposure.
Trump understands something fundamental about mass psychology: people do not need to believe a claim for it to dominate their thinking. They only need to hear it often enough that it crowds out alternatives. Truth becomes exhausting. Fact-checking becomes pedantic. Disgust fades. What remains is alignment—team loyalty replacing ethical judgment.
This is how lies stop functioning as lies and begin functioning as infrastructure.
Once that threshold is crossed, the narrative becomes self-protecting. Those who reject it are framed not as correct, but as hostile. Not as factual, but as enemies. Reality itself is recast as partisan. From that point forward, power does not need to win debates; it only needs to maintain volume.
This is why Trump can lose elections, face indictments, and suffer public disgrace while continuing to win the narrative war. His version does not retreat when challenged. It advances. It repeats. It waits. And eventually, enough people internalize it that it no longer needs him to speak it. They do it for him.
This is how a worldview becomes ambient.
And this is where something vital has been lost.
During Vietnam, disgust mattered. It was not abstract. It was visceral. A magazine like LIFE could publish an issue titled ONE WEEK’S DEAD, and the images inside could stop people in their tracks. The bodies were undeniable. The youth of the dead was undeniable. The scale was undeniable. The horror pierced the narrative. It broke through repetition. It created moral rupture.
That rupture no longer happens.
Not because violence has disappeared, but because it has been aesthetically and psychologically defanged. Death is now distant, filtered, algorithmically paced, stripped of cumulative weight. Images scroll past without settling. Numbers replace faces. Atrocities compete with entertainment. Shock is consumed and discarded before it can mature into conscience.
More importantly, disgust itself has been politically neutralized. It is now treated as weakness, manipulation, or sentimentality. To feel horror is to be accused of being naïve. To pause at suffering is to be told you are “playing into the enemy’s hands.” The very emotion that once halted wars has been reframed as a liability.
Trump’s genius—if it can be called that—lies in his recognition that repetition kills disgust. Say something often enough, and even revulsion loses its edge. The human nervous system adapts. What once triggered alarm becomes background noise. Eventually, nothing shocks—not because nothing is wrong, but because shock itself has been trained out of the population.
This is why the image you carry—ONE WEEK’S DEAD—cannot be recreated now. Not because the deaths are fewer, but because the conditions that allowed collective moral recognition have been dismantled. The witnesses are aging out. The media environment is fragmented. The narrative control is tighter. The repetition is relentless.
What remains is a society in which reality is no longer what is shown, but what is most consistently asserted.
This is not an accident. It is the refinement of a lesson learned in humiliation. Vietnam taught power that truth could be dangerous if left unmanaged. Trump represents the logical endpoint of that learning: a figure who does not retreat from contradiction, who does not correct himself, who does not concede reality, because concession is unnecessary once repetition has done its work.
He wins not because everyone believes him.
He wins because enough people stop caring whether something is true.
And when disgust no longer interrupts the narrative, anything becomes possible.
THE FIRST LEADER TO MERGE WITH THE MEDIUM
Orwell warned about the manipulation of language. Machiavelli warned about the instrumental use of truth. Both understood power as something imposed from above. What neither could have fully anticipated was a leader who would not merely use the machinery of narrative control, but become indistinguishable from it.
Trump did not invent lying in politics. He did not invent propaganda, repetition, or authoritarian myth-making. What he mastered—at a level not seen before, not even among contemporaries like Putin or Xi—was total media saturation without coherence, a strategy that functions precisely because it abandons consistency, accountability, and even plausibility.
Where traditional propagandists sought to persuade, Trump sought to overwrite.
His method was not to convince the public of a single, carefully constructed story, but to flood the environment with his reality until competing frameworks collapsed under the weight of exhaustion. He did not refine messages; he repeated them. He did not correct contradictions; he ignored them. He did not retreat from exposure; he escalated volume.
This was not recklessness. It was structural intuition.
Trump understood that in a fragmented, hyper-mediated environment, truth does not prevail by accuracy but by persistence. He grasped that repetition no longer requires discipline if the medium itself rewards attention over coherence. Where earlier authoritarian leaders relied on centralized control, Trump exploited decentralization. He allowed chaos to do the work.
Putin governs through managed narrative discipline. Xi governs through enforced narrative uniformity. Trump governed—and continues to operate—through narrative entropy, a constant churn that dissolves the very concept of shared reality. In this environment, lies do not need to be believed. They only need to be unavoidable.
At a certain point, the repeated assertion becomes ambient. It becomes the background against which all rebuttals must fight for oxygen. Fact-checking becomes reactive. Outrage becomes predictable. Disgust becomes fatigued. What remains is alignment—tribal loyalty substituting for epistemology.
This is why Trump survives contradiction in ways that would have destroyed other leaders. Scandal does not weaken him because scandal presumes a shared standard of truth. Exposure does not deter him because exposure assumes shame. He operates beyond both.
His greatest innovation was recognizing that reality itself could be treated as a branding exercise. Say it often enough, loudly enough, without retreat, and the statement does not need to win—it simply needs to persist until resistance fragments. At that point, the lie no longer functions as deception. It functions as infrastructure.
This is why his losses do not behave like losses. Elections, indictments, rebukes—all are absorbed into the narrative as further proof of persecution. The system itself becomes the enemy. Facts become partisan weapons. Disgust is reframed as hysteria. Moral revulsion is dismissed as weakness.
In this sense, Trump represents a new evolutionary phase of authoritarian power. Not a dictator in the classical sense, but a media organism—one that feeds on attention, thrives on conflict, and converts repetition into reality. He does not need to silence opposition; he simply drowns it.
And this is why the image you carry—ONE WEEK’S DEAD—cannot exist in the same way anymore. Not because the deaths are fewer, but because the conditions that allowed collective moral rupture have been dismantled. Shock no longer accumulates. Horror no longer interrupts. Repetition anesthetizes.
Trump did not create this environment. But he was the first to fully understand it, fully inhabit it, and fully exploit it without restraint.
That is what makes him next level.
Not smarter.
Not deeper.
But perfectly adapted to a system where truth loses to volume, and conscience loses to fatigue.
And once that threshold is crossed, history does not repeat itself.
It accelerates.
WHEN DISGUST NO LONGER STOPS WAR
The Broken-Record Effect and the Phase Change in Power
There was a time when disgust functioned as a brake. It was imperfect, uneven, and often delayed, but it existed. During Vietnam, images and numbers accumulated until they crossed a threshold of moral tolerance. Body counts on nightly news, draft lotteries broadcast live, and photo essays such as LIFE magazine’s ONE WEEK’S DEAD produced a collective rupture. The narrative did not merely falter; it collapsed. Public opinion shifted decisively, not because everyone agreed, but because enough people could no longer look away.
Power lost control of the story, and it was humiliated.
What followed was not repentance but adaptation. Institutions do not moralize; they learn. After Vietnam, a portion of the political and military establishment quietly internalized a different lesson: never again allow unfiltered reality to interrupt the narrative. Never again permit disgust to accumulate faster than explanation. Never again lose the ball.
That learning has been refined for more than six decades.
From a psychological standpoint, the core technique is well known. It is called the broken-record effect: the relentless repetition of a claim without engagement, variation, or concession until resistance weakens and the statement becomes familiar enough to feel plausible. Familiarity, not accuracy, does the work. The listener may object at first, then argue, then tire, and finally adapt. Repetition does not persuade by logic; it persuades by wearing down the nervous system.
With modern media, this technique scales.
Donald Trump did not invent the broken record. What he did—better than any contemporary figure, including Putin or Xi—was merge it with total media saturation. Where others rely on discipline, censorship, or centralized control, Trump relies on volume, repetition, and refusal to retreat. He states reality as he sees it, repeats it unchanged, ignores contradiction, and allows the media ecosystem itself to amplify the message through outrage, rebuttal, and constant replay.
The result is not belief in the traditional sense. It is something more durable: ambient reality.
At a certain saturation point, the repeated claim becomes the background against which all new information is judged. Fact-checking becomes reactive and exhausting. Moral outrage becomes predictable and dismissible. Disgust loses its edge. The lie no longer needs defending because it has become infrastructure—the operating system through which events are interpreted.
This is the phase change.
During Vietnam, disgust could still interrupt the system. It accumulated. It forced reckoning. It shattered the illusion that war could be managed without moral consequence. Today, disgust is anesthetized before it can mature. Images scroll past without settling. Numbers appear without faces. Violence is framed as enforcement, deterrence, or inevitability. The emotional response that once stopped wars is now treated as weakness, sentimentality, or manipulation.
The public has not become stupid. It has become conditioned.
Wars now persist not because everyone believes the story, but because repetition fragments opposition while creating political opportunity. War functions as a ladder. It simplifies domestic complexity, consolidates authority, and elevates those willing to speak with certainty when complexity would otherwise expose failure. Someone always rises. Soldiers, civilians, migrants, and sanctioned populations pay the cost. The beneficiaries move on.
Venezuela illustrates this perfectly. It is not being framed as a nation with specific historical and economic circumstances, but as a symbolic enemy—useful, reusable, and rhetorically interchangeable. The same narrative architecture deployed in Vietnam, refined through Iraq and Afghanistan, and perfected in Trump’s media environment is now rehearsed again. The goal is not persuasion. It is dominance of the narrative field.
Once politics is converted into a team sport, the broken-record effect supplies the chant. Loyalty replaces ethics. Outsiders become enemies. Due process becomes negotiable. Proof becomes optional. The decisive question is no longer what happened, but which side you are on. In such a system, the enemy is not meant to lose temporarily. The enemy is meant to be removed.
This is why images like ONE WEEK’S DEAD cannot function today as they once did. Not because the deaths are fewer, but because the conditions that allowed collective moral rupture have been dismantled. The witnesses are aging out. The media environment is saturated. The repetition never stops. Disgust no longer accumulates; it dissipates.
Trump’s mastery lies here. He does not correct. He does not concede. He does not refine. He repeats. And repetition, in a system optimized for attention rather than truth, outlasts opposition. He wins not because everyone believes him, but because enough people stop caring whether something is true. When that happens, reality becomes negotiable, and war becomes administratively easy.
This is not Orwell’s world of enforced silence, nor Machiavelli’s world of strategic deception. It is something newer and more corrosive: a world in which truth loses to volume, and conscience loses to fatigue.
The phase change is this: when disgust no longer stops war, nothing internal does.
What remains is memory—and memory is being waited out.
‘Look At These Beautiful Boys’: In 1969, Life Magazine Published The Faces Of Americans Killed In Vietnam
- Alex Ashlock – June 27, 2019
That is why naming the mechanism matters. Not to shock, not to posture, but to restore a capacity that once existed: the ability to recognize when repetition is being used to replace reality, and when war is being proposed not as tragedy, but as opportunity.
Disgust was never the enemy.
Its disappearance is.
CODA: WHEN THE GUARDIANS ARE GONE
The war babies and the Baby Boomers did not emerge in a vacuum. We were imprinted by proximity to catastrophe. Our parents and grandparents—the so-called Greatest Generation—carried the lived memory of two world wars, a devastating global plague, and the largest economic collapse the modern world has ever known. They survived trenches, camps, rationing, hunger, mass death, and moral rupture. And they did not simply tell us about it. They transmitted it.
They transmitted it through silence and stories, through vigilance and anxiety, through the way the nervous system never fully stood down. Long before trauma had a clinical name, it had a biological signature. It altered stress responses. It sharpened threat detection. It taught entire families to watch the horizon.
We absorbed that inheritance.
The war babies and Boomers became the carriers of historical memory not because we chose the role, but because it was embedded—encoded in DNA, etched into the nervous system, printed on the psyche. Our brains learned to scan for danger early. Our bodies learned that peace was provisional. We grew up with sirens, drills, body counts, and mushroom clouds in the cultural background. We learned, instinctively, that collapse was possible and denial was lethal.
So we became the guards.
We were the ones who flinched when rhetoric turned absolutist. The ones who recognized the smell of scapegoating before others noticed it. The ones who heard echoes when leaders promised purity, strength, or final solutions. We were the Cassandras, often dismissed, often mocked, often told we were exaggerating—until history proved otherwise.
That vigilance came at a cost.
Some of us burned out. Some lost our footing. Some lost our minds. Some lost our lives. Hypervigilance is not a sustainable state. Carrying ancestral trauma while trying to prevent its recurrence exacts a toll. The Guard has been aging, thinning, and quietly dying for years now.
And that raises a question that cannot be deferred much longer.
What happens to this planet—this fragile, astonishing world—when the witnesses are gone?
What happens when the last living nervous systems that remember unfiltered war, unmediated horror, and collective moral rupture finally fall silent? When memory becomes archival rather than embodied? When disgust has no elders to teach it how to speak?
And if reincarnation is real—if consciousness cycles back into form—what kind of world will we be born into then?
A world where repetition has replaced reality.
A world where war is sanitized, managed, and endlessly rehearsed.
A world where disgust no longer interrupts power.
The question is no longer abstract. It is generational. It is biological. It is civilizational.
The Guard is dying.
What remains to be seen is whether memory itself will survive us—or whether humanity will have to relearn, once again, what it means to be shocked by its own reflection.
A PASSING OF THE TORCH
Every generation inherits a world shaped by decisions it did not make. What distinguishes generations is not whether they bear responsibility, but whether they recognize it in time.
The war babies and Baby Boomers were shaped by proximity to catastrophe. We carried the afterburn of two world wars, a devastating plague, and an economic collapse so severe it rewired how entire societies understood security, scarcity, and trust. That inheritance did not arrive as ideology. It arrived as vigilance. It arrived in the nervous system. It arrived as a refusal—sometimes conscious, sometimes instinctive—to accept comforting lies when history had already shown where they lead.
We did not always succeed. We failed often. But we remembered.
Now the burden of memory is shifting.
The generations coming of age today did not grow up with body counts on the evening news or draft lotteries on live television. They did not watch friends disappear into war as a rite of passage. They live instead inside an environment of constant information, endless crisis, and narrative saturation so dense that shock rarely has time to become meaning. The danger they face is not ignorance, but overexposure without coherence.
The torch we pass is not certainty. It is not ideology. It is not a script.
It is a warning.
War does not announce itself honestly. It arrives wrapped in language that feels familiar, necessary, and righteous. It promises protection while demanding obedience. It offers belonging while narrowing the definition of who counts. It always claims there is no alternative, and it always punishes those who ask for time to think.
When repetition replaces evidence, slow down.
When loyalty replaces ethics, step back.
When disgust is mocked as weakness, pay attention.
These are not political preferences. They are early warning signals.
The task ahead is not to mimic the Guard, nor to inherit our trauma wholesale. Hypervigilance is not a virtue when untempered by rest, care, and clarity. The task is to build new forms of collective memory that do not depend on aging witnesses to remain alive.
Memory must become structural rather than personal.
Ethics must become systemic rather than emotional.
Resistance must become disciplined rather than reactive.
This means refusing the conversion of politics into a team sport. It means rejecting the idea that enemies must be erased rather than opposed. It means insisting on due process, evidence, and restraint even when fear demands speed. It means understanding that power always benefits from haste, and humanity almost never does.
If reincarnation is real—if consciousness returns—then the world you help shape now may be the one you wake up into later. That is not mysticism. It is continuity. It is consequence.
The Guard is not asking to be remembered as heroes. We are asking not to be replaced by silence.
The torch we pass is simple and heavy at the same time:
Do not let repetition replace reality.
Do not let exhaustion replace conscience.
Do not let war become normal again.
History does not need perfect people to survive. It needs awake ones.
The rest is up to you.
VENEZUELA AND THE RETURN OF THE SCRIPT
How Endless War Narratives Turn Politics into a Deadly Team Sport
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 waited, recalibrated, and learned. Today, Venezuela occupies the role once filled by Southeast Asia, Iraq, and Afghanistan—not because its circumstances are identical, but because the story being told about it follows a familiar design.
The language surrounding Venezuela, particularly in MAGA-aligned political discourse, follows a well-worn trajectory. A complex nation is reduced to a caricature. Internal political struggles, economic sanctions, historical pressures, and global market forces are collapsed into a single accusation. Leadership is framed not merely as flawed or authoritarian, but as an existential threat whose very existence demands action. Economic coercion is described 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 narrative does not require universal belief to function. It never has. During Vietnam, millions resisted the war, protested in the streets, sheltered draft resisters, published underground newspapers, and refused the moral premises being offered to them. Skepticism today toward intervention in Venezuela is likewise widespread and informed by historical memory. Wars persist not because everyone believes the story, but because enough people are pressured into compliance, confusion, or exhaustion while others find opportunity in the chaos.
Someone always rises politically from these moments.
Foreign threats simplify domestic complexity. They redirect anger away from inequality, corruption, and failed policy at home and toward an external enemy that can be named, blamed, and punished. Political careers are built on the projection of strength during manufactured crises. Moral certainty becomes a substitute for evidence. Those who question the framing are dismissed not as cautious or informed, but as disloyal.
Seen this way, war functions less as tragic miscalculation than as recurring political opportunity. It reshuffles power internally while presenting itself as external necessity. Those who benefit rarely bear the human costs, which are absorbed instead by soldiers, civilians, migrants, and families whose lives are destabilized long after attention has moved elsewhere.
What gives the current moment its particular edge is the way politics has been openly converted into a team sport, borrowing its emotional logic from games people already understand. Football, basketball, soccer, hockey—each trains the same instinct. Teams are assigned. Colors are worn. Loyalty is demanded. Neutrality is treated with suspicion. If you refuse to pick a side, you are not seen as independent but as untrustworthy. The outsider becomes the enemy, and the enemy must lose for your team to win.
Authoritarian movements understand this dynamic intuitively. They do not need universal agreement; they need allegiance. Once identity is fused to a team, facts become secondary. Leaders become coaches. The nation becomes the team. Political opponents become enemies. Outsiders become threats. At that point, politics ceases to be a contest of ideas and becomes a zero-sum struggle in which compromise is betrayal and restraint is weakness.
In this frame, MAGA rhetoric increasingly treats conflict not as electoral or ideological, but as existential. The objective is no longer to govern, persuade, or even coexist, but to win everything. The enemy is not meant to lose and regroup; the enemy is meant to be removed from the game altogether.
This is where the metaphor turns lethal.
When people are reduced to “outsiders,” their rights become conditional. Due process becomes inconvenient. Proof becomes optional. Violence shifts from being reactive to preemptive, justified not by evidence but by affiliation. The decisive question is no longer what did they do, but which team are they on.
Reports and images circulating of people on boats being summarily killed or violently intercepted—often framed with minimal verification and maximal certainty—signal how quickly this logic can migrate from rhetoric to action. Once individuals are labeled as invaders, criminals, or existential threats, investigation gives way to assumption, and punishment precedes proof. Whether every account is accurate is almost beside the point. The cultural readiness to accept such outcomes without demanding evidence is itself the warning sign.
This is not law enforcement. It is tribal enforcement.
Vietnam followed this trajectory. Iraq followed it. Afghanistan followed it. Each conflict was introduced as necessary, framed as defensive, and justified through moral urgency. Each elevated leaders who learned how to harness fear and grievance into political capital. Each left behind trauma, disillusionment, and a belated acknowledgment that what had been presented as unavoidable was, in fact, a choice.
The deeper lesson Vietnam offers is not that propaganda always succeeds, but that it succeeds enough. Enough to keep the machinery running. Enough to advance careers. Enough to ensure that when the war is later recognized as a failure, responsibility is diffuse and accountability elusive.
What Venezuela now tests is whether historical memory can interrupt this cycle. Whether enough people, recalling how these stories end, will refuse to accept simplified villains, manufactured urgency, and team-based morality as substitutes for ethical clarity.
The danger is not only that another war might occur. The danger is that a society trained to think in teams may accept the disappearance of the “other” as victory rather than catastrophe.
Refusing the script is not passivity. It is the most active form of responsibility left.
ILLUSTRATIONS (FOR OPTIONAL INSERTION AT SECTION BREAKS)
THE ENEMY IS INTRODUCED
Description:
A contemporary media montage showing bold headlines about Venezuela layered over cable-news graphics, political rallies, and militarized imagery, creating a sense of urgency and threat.
Prompt:
Realistic, cinematic illustration, modern news media montage, headlines about Venezuela, cable news graphics, political rhetoric imagery, manufactured urgency, muted but tense color palette, documentary realism, landscape orientation.
WAR AS A TEAM SPORT
Description:
A symbolic scene blending a packed sports stadium with political imagery—crowds wearing team colors morphing into partisan symbols, cheering as opposing figures are erased from the field.
Prompt:
Conceptual realistic illustration, sports stadium transforming into political rally, crowds in team colors becoming partisan symbols, zero-sum competition imagery, emotional intensity, subdued tones, landscape orientation.
THE SCRIPT REPEATS
Description:
Split-era composition juxtaposing Vietnam-era television news with modern Venezuela coverage, showing identical framing techniques across decades.
Prompt:
Conceptual realistic illustration, split-screen composition, Vietnam War TV news on one side, modern Venezuela news coverage on the other, visual parallels, historical continuity, muted tones, landscape orientation.
🚧 Work in Progress
This article is part of an ongoing series examining how domination consciousness, war narratives, and tribal politics shape history—and how they might be interrupted.
📬 Subscribe
👤 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 focused on historical memory, partnership consciousness, and ethical witnessing.
https://www.dragonattheendoftime.com
https://substack.com/@janetalexlessinphd
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.
📬 Subscribe
👤 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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