On January 8, 2009, we published in Página12 some brief reflections on a bombing that had massacred a hundred children. The final questions (which only repeated our perplexity about other massacres a couple of years earlier (Las palabras pueden, UNICEF, 2007):
«On what rights could such crimes be perpetuated? What God could justify so much pain and injustice? Because isn’t it an injustice for a hundred children to be crushed and torn apart by Freedom, Civilization, Law, Justice, and the best of Reasons? Under what noble arguments could such animal brutality be perpetrated to turn it into pure human brutality?»
In an informal conversation, in a tone of despair, I mentioned to Eduardo Galeano the great José Saramago’s statement about the futility of words, and Eduardo replied: “Even if words are worth so little, they are still worthwhile.”
Two decades later, I read in documents and memoirs of one of the most powerful CIA agents, Howard Hunt: “Our main weapon is words, not bullets.” Hunt, one of the masterminds behind the coup that destroyed democracy in Guatemala and triggered half a century of dictatorships and conflicts that left 200,000 dead, seemed to prove to me that words can be powerful to varying degrees. The most powerful words are those that derive from power, but those of us who do not have power must resort to the intellectual resources of conviction.
More recently, Gaza has shown that power, even power that is unchallenged due to its financial, technological, and military strength, has a special preference for weak victims, such as children and women. It is no coincidence that the ideology in vogue in the Northwest (the “dark Enlightenment”) never tires of demonizing women, dark-skinned immigrants, and children. In general, the poor.
Why? Because power is trembling. The same tremor of the abuser who has been elected president of a world power. The global and almost absolute power of the financial sects that continue to increase their wealth (in the United States, five white men have more money than half the country) and know that they are on the verge of collapse. The politics of chaos is a strategy to distract those at the bottom, but they must know that we are inexorably heading toward a breaking point, a general crisis that will knock them off their pedestals. They can build all the bunkers they want, but they will survive in their luxury tombs without their slaves.
As in the 19th century, white empires, after developing the comforting theory of racial superiority that justified imperial brutality, began to worry about “the great replacement of the Caucasian race.” The obligation to administer, repress, exploit, corrupt, and massacre the colonies had left them with a worrying fact: Black people outnumber us, and one day they will realize it.
When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election, he did not do so by proposing to abolish slavery—quite the contrary, because it was not in his interest. But the slave-owning Southern states realized that the fact that someone who did not sympathize with slavery had become president indicated that the slave trade was on a course of collapse. Before Lincoln said anything, the Southern states rose up in arms. Until then, they had been tolerant of abolitionists and respected their freedom of expression. Above all, because Black people could not read. All that sign of civilization and democracy turned into open censorship and brutal repression when the social narrative (now supported by a change in the forms of industrial production) changed sides.
This is exactly the moment we are living in now. Democracy and freedom of expression are luxuries of power, and power can no longer afford that luxury. When the genocide in Gaza began, students at US universities began protesting against the use of their debt money for war and against imperial brutality, as had happened against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and against South African apartheid in the 1980s.
By early 2024, most young people up to the age of 35 were expressing support for the Palestinian cause. By early 2026, for the first time in history, the majority of the US population supports Palestine more than Israel. This support has even crossed the ideological boundaries from the anti-imperialist left to the religious and conservative right.
On January 4, 2026, we observed (others were of the same opinion): «The goal, rather than buying oil from Maduro, is to secure his monopoly so that Iran can be attacked again. An oil crisis in the Strait of Hormuz and throughout the Middle East would leave the United States untouched, hit China hard, and give Israel a free pass to destroy the Iranian government (Israel’s only surviving obstacle) and continue its expansion.»
After the Israeli-US bombing of Iran, the Venezuelan government condemned these attacks at the same time as it condemned Tehran’s military response. This is significant and increases my doubts about the true position of Delcy Rodríguez’s government in this whole process.
Now that Iran has been bombed once again (in the name of world peace and stability), we can add that, for that hegemonic and hysterical power, in the short term there is no definitive objective but rather moving targets of the boundless madness of imperial domination. If there were a single human being living on Mars, it would be the frontier of that fever that needs to control everything and ensure that the rest of humanity is never unproductively happy and never lives in peace.
The reality, from Ukraine to Argentina, from Palestine to Minnesota, seems so perfectly coherent that it is impossible to think that it is all a matter of chaotic coincidences. Such consistency can only be the product of a centralized command, an elite, or a sect. Of course, if there is one thing superpowers know how to do very well, it is to miscalculate.
Now, if the Sect has ears, let it listen: beyond all the laws and property titles that their puppets in the colonies can pass, from the glaciers of Argentina to the oil in Venezuela, from the mines of Congo to Trump’s tariffs in Cucha Cucha, from Corina Machado to Reza Pahlavi, the powerful are not counting on the classic examples of history.
I mean, sooner or later the people (those majorities of nobodies, of women, of children, of the poor) will rebel and reset the entire social contract. When that moment comes, any million-dollar property contract will be worthless, and those at the top will have to run for their lives. The only problem is time. After all, slavery in chains lasted for four centuries.
In the recent arbitrary military aggression against Iran on February 28, 2026, the first victims were dozens of girls from a primary school in Minab, in the south of the country, 1,300 km from the capital. This historical brutality against poor children is consistent with the largest extortion network of the world’s powerful due to their penchant for pedomania. Because the rich and powerful come to power not by chance, but through a necessary psychopathy. Once in power, they are willing to kill and massacre to stay there.
Those below are too, though not out of ambition but out of self-defense.
Jorge Majfud, February 28, 2026.
