Richard Balzano

by Richard M. Balzano On January 3rd, “Operation Absolute Resolve” transformed years of coup attempts, subversion, and sanctions into outright abduction, as Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were kidnapped by U.S. forces and transported to New York. The White House framed Maduro as a narco-kingpin, head of the fictional “Cartel of the Suns,” dressing the regime-change operation in the language of law enforcement coated in uplifting rhetoric that oscillated between liberation-speak and outright resource imperialism. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, spent decades antagonizing Washington by committing the unforgivable crime of using Venezuela’s oil wealth to fund social programs instead of allowing multinational …

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by Richard M. Balzano What happens when a pariah state hosts a global spectacle? That question is more than academic as the United States hosts the FIFA World Cup while waging illegal interventions abroad and brown shirt dirty wars at home, complete with shady detainment facilities and on the cusp of Palantir-induced dystopia to boot. Governments have long understood the public-relations value of international sporting events, using them to project national greatness and rehabilitate tarnished reputations. Argentina’s military dictatorship hoped the 1978 World Cup would do exactly that. As Jorge Rafael Videla’s regime kidnapped, tortured, and murdered thousands of its own citizens in another Latin …

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by Richard M. Balzano This complicated nation celebrates its 250th birthday on July 4th. Despite, or perhaps because of, the tragic state of affairs at present, semiquincentennial celebrations will likely see a spike in a particular American brand—toxic nationalism cosplaying as patriotism, built on a profound and tactfully curated misunderstanding of both the present state of geopolitical affairs and historical events, in this case reducing the American Revolution to an anti-colonial common man’s war inspired by enlightened ideals. The American origin story, set in the context of the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution™, could use a touch of decolonization, because these revolutions were not …

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by Richard M. Balzano After another anniversary of the June 4th Tiananmen Square “massacre”—an event enshrined in the Western imagination as the defining symbol of Chinese authoritarianism—it is worth revisiting how the story was originally reported, amplified, mythologized, and then quietly redacted and corrected by many of the same Western journalists who helped turn it into political scripture. The Tiananmen story entered American political mythology in June 1989 as media coverage saturated audiences with claims that thousands of peaceful Chinese protesters had been massacred by tanks and machine-gun fire inside Tiananmen Square. Deathcounts snowballed from 2,600 to 8,000 and beyond, and NBC’s Tim Russert claimed …

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by Richard Balzano The United States kidnapped Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in January 2026* on now-crumbling allegations that he headed the fictional “Cartel of the Suns.” Washington framed Maduro as a narco-terrorist kingpin to justify what was effectively an act of war disguised as law enforcement, but prosecutors are now quietly backing away from the bolder claims used to rationalize his abduction. The irony, of course, is that the United States has spent decades enabling narcotrafficking in the name of democracy. For 40+ years Washington waged its unsuccessful War on Drugs alongside its oft-illegal Cold War pursuits. In the American hierarchy of foreign-policy values, anticommunism …

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