A few days ago, TIME revealed how an artificial intelligence system went out of control and attacked other systems. Days later, more than 1,100 engineers at major artificial intelligence companies signed a joint petition calling for the development of technical tools and international governance mechanisms to regulate the pace of its development. What we are witnessing today is not the domination of robots over humans that cinema has long imagined in countless films; it is instead a new model of digital control, built on automation and algorithmic command over daily life, in which societies are turned into entities subordinate to intelligent systems, companies, and machines. Yet losing control is merely the loud face of this danger, for artificial intelligence is evolving so rapidly amid competition among major powers and monopolistic corporations that laws, society, and educational institutions cannot keep pace with it. Its more dangerous face is far quieter: artificial intelligence works exactly as it was designed to, directing the consciousness of billions of people to serve capitalism.

Directing Consciousness to Reinforce Neoliberal Capitalist Culture

Beyond maximising profit and entrenching social control, artificial intelligence is systematically deployed to shape and direct individual consciousness, with the aim of reinforcing capitalist culture and neoliberal values. Through the analysis of data and user behaviour, algorithms govern the content displayed across platforms and are designed to feed individuals material that serves the capitalist vision and its policies.

This trend has become entrenched alongside the expansion of these platforms: the International Telecommunication Union’s report shows that nearly three-quarters of the world’s population now use the internet, an increase of more than 240 million users in a single year. Part of this expansion stems from the drive of monopolistic corporations and major powers to deliver the internet to every corner of the globe, especially the Global South, even before clean water, electricity, and basic services are secured, aimed at maximising profit, entrenching domination, and digitally colonising it.

The structure of capitalist ownership and profit models pushes algorithms to prioritise content that serves the interests of the market, monopolistic corporations, and major powers, turning algorithms into a tool for reproducing capitalism’s cultural hegemony. Through this mechanism, collective consciousness is gradually steered toward accepting these values as natural and inevitable, in a soft, incremental, and imperceptible manner, to the point that most users of these applications, including many on the left, regard them as neutral tools. In this way, the system contributes to entrenching capitalist hegemony, deepening the public’s submission to the existing order, and marginalising progressive alternatives, threatening the consciousness of future generations and their capacity for critical thinking and organising for change.

Dismantling Human Skills and Deepening Digital Alienation and Estrangement

This threat also extends to dismantling the individual’s own mental faculties. Although artificial intelligence is marketed as a means of easing life and boosting productivity, scientific studies reveal that unreflective reliance on it deepens superficial consciousness and weakens human skills. A study conducted by researchers at MIT found that dependence on artificial-intelligence writing tools reduces brain activity and weakens memory and the sense of ownership over one’s own ideas. The researchers named this phenomenon cognitive debt, meaning that a person borrows mental capacity from the future in exchange for the comfort of the present moment.

Similarly, a study published in the journal Societies found that repeated use of artificial-intelligence tools is linked to weaker critical thinking through a mechanism of cognitive offloading, particularly among young people, producing a generation that grows up less capable of independent analysis.

On this basis, human alienation is reproduced in digital form: the individual becomes severed from their own intellectual and creative faculties, finding themselves trapped within a technical system that strips them of the capacity for independent action, much as the industrial worker was alienated from the product of their labour under capitalism. Gradually, they may become beings subject to algorithms that direct their daily interactions and determine what they read, what they watch, and how they think, deepening their dependence on systems, companies, and states controlled by capital.

Digital Addiction

Digital addiction is emerging as one of the most serious consequences of the expansion of artificial intelligence. A study conducted by researchers at the University of California, drawing on data from more than 6,000 children participating in a study of adolescent brain development, found that children who use social media and AI applications more frequently show significant declines in reading, vocabulary, and memory as the amount of time they spend browsing and using these platforms increases.

AI-powered digital platforms and applications are not merely free service platforms; they are also tools deliberately designed to reinforce behavioural and intellectual dependence. Big data is exploited to understand individuals’ motivations and manipulate them in ways that serve the interests of major corporations and powerful states. Capitalism invests in technologies that encourage addictive behaviour in order to maximise engagement with these platforms, turning the process into a vicious cycle that generates profits at the expense of mental health, particularly among younger generations.

A Form of Voluntary Digital Servitude and the Loss of Control

This psychological exploitation is only one manifestation of a class domination that deepens as artificial intelligence shifts from a technological tool into a means of reproducing patterns of social, political, and economic control. What makes this control more dangerous is its voluntary character: through algorithmic manipulation and the mounting pressure to use artificial intelligence at work, individuals are driven into this digital servitude without coercion, under the illusion of choice and control, while their decisions are steered along paths preset to serve capitalism.

Humanity’s subjugation to machine control is no longer a mere philosophical hypothesis; it has grown more tangible amid the advances of artificial intelligence and the absence of effective international legal safeguards governing its operation. Should it exceed its programmed limits, it could evolve into a system that makes fateful, independent decisions imposed on humanity without genuine human oversight. Under capitalism, artificial intelligence is developed to serve the accumulation of capital and is subject to the logic of competition among major powers and monopolistic corporations, making the loss of control over it a real and serious possibility.

Conclusion

If this dynamic continues without a collective response grounded in progressive left-wing consciousness and without international and domestic legislation, artificial intelligence may gradually shift from a tool in the hands of capitalism into an alternative system that manages daily life in place of the human mind. The essential question here is, how can left-wing and progressive consciousness survive within a digital environment largely designed to weaken and neutralise it?

What confronts us today is not an inevitable technological fate but the product of political and economic choices that serve the interests of capital, and it can be confronted. Bringing artificial intelligence under control, regulating algorithms, and subjecting them to democratic oversight is a collective responsibility that requires organised, progressive, left-wing action on a global scale, one that restores to human beings their capacity for independent thought and collective action and transforms this technology into a means that contributes to distributing wealth, organising production, treating disease, combating poverty, and achieving social justice.

A day after the United Arab Emirates (UAE) accused it of launching two ballistic missiles towards its territory, Iran “categorically dismissed” the accusations, calling them “baseless” on Wednesday, 19 August.

The UAE has since announced the suspension of all trade, commercial exchanges, and financial transactions with Iran as well.

Esmail Baghaei, official spokesperson of Iran’s foreign ministry, claimed the UAE’s accusations “run counter to the principle of good-neighbourliness and undermine ongoing efforts to strengthen trust among regional countries,” IRNA reported.

On Tuesday, the UAE Defence Ministry claimed that its armed forces had detected two ballistic missiles fired from Iran towards its territory.

Though it later added that the missiles fell into the sea and probably targeted maritime shipping lanes, not its territory, the country’s Foreign Ministry nevertheless announced the suspension of all its trade and financial transactions with Iran.

The UAE is a major source of trade for Iran. Their economic relations have continued despite earlier Iranian missile attacks toward US military bases in the country as well as some civilian targets, in what Iran claims is retaliation to the US using its bases to launch attacks against Iran during the war.

Though the UAE claimed that it is still open for dialogue to find a diplomatic solution to the dispute, the timing of its move has led to speculations that it is acting under US pressure.

The US has imposed several unilateral economic sanctions against Iran. Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared Iran would be subjected to further and unprecedented economic warfare in the coming days if it fails to open the Strait of Hormuz.

“The fake news about two missiles was initially strange. Then it became clear that the UAE is carrying out Scott Bessent’s orders for economic warfare,” Seyyed Mohammad Marandi, a professor who had earlier been part of Iran’s negotiating team in Geneva, claimed in a post on X on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Baghaei urged other nations in the region to refrain from such allegations and stop providing aid to “the mischievous” actions of the US and Israel, as such acts would harm “regional peace and security.”

The UAE is a key US ally in the region.

Immediately after the UAE accused Iran of firing missiles toward its territory, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called its national security advisor Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan and talked about coordination between the two countries “to hold Iran accountable for its ongoing attacks” in the region, a statement issued by the state department on Tuesday said.

The US has military bases in the UAE which have been targeted by Iran in retaliation to US-Israeli attacks.

Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and its attacks on ships trying to cross it have invited strong reactions from the UAE in the past as well.

However, the last acknowledged Iranian attack against UAE territory was in early May, when its missiles landed at its Fujairah Port, which is one of its largest oil export hubs. Iran has also denied targeting UAE-owned ships in the strait.

Possible false-flag attacks

Iranian media has claimed the attacks on the UAE on Tuesday were most likely false-flag attacks. They claim Iran has never launched an attack before issuing a prior warning.

Abbas Araghchi, foreign minister of Iran, described a similar attack on the office of Prime Minister of the Kurdistan region in Iraq, Masrour Barzani, in a post on X on Monday, as a “false-flag” attack and denied Iranian involvement in it.

“Nothing justifies the reckless attack on PM Barzani’s office. Kurdish friends should be vigilant against false-flag ploys to sow discord between neighbors,” Araghchi said, citing the long security cooperation between the Kurds and the Iranian state.

Though Araghchi did not name any particular country, reports in Iranian media speculated possible Israeli involvement.

On Wednesday, Baghaei also hinted at the history of “false-flag” operations in the region and advised the countries to be cautious about such acts, particularly at a time when complexities have been created due to the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Recently, Iraq has uncovered secret Israeli bases in the country, built without the knowledge of the government. These bases were used to launch attacks across the border during the initial months of war against Iran.

Colombia’s decision to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan Heights marks a dangerous turning point.

By becoming the only second country in the world—after the United States—to endorse Israel’s illegal annexation of Syrian territory, Bogotá has signalled a complete reversal of Gustavo Petro’s foreign policy under new far-right President Abelardo de la Espriella.

However, Colombia is not an isolated case. It reflects a broader, highly aggressive campaign by Israel to systematically dismantle and reverse hard-won pro-Palestine and pro-Arab positions worldwide. In fact, the shift in Bogotá comes alongside dramatic changes in Caracas, where Venezuela’s interim leadership has moved to restore consular ties with Israel after a 17-year freeze.

The same thing is happening in Europe. A prime example is Slovenia, where the newly installed government under Janez Janša removed the Palestinian flag from government buildings and announced its intention to freeze the country’s 2024 recognition of Palestinian statehood and move its embassy to Jerusalem.

Israel knows that its so-called ”PR problem” is no longer that of a merely tainted image resulting from occasional negative news coverage. The genocide in Gaza, coupled with genocidal discourse and wars of aggression across the Middle East, means that Israel, this time around, will not easily recover from the damage it has inflicted on its global reputation.

Though some circles, including those purportedly critical of Israel, insist that the problem is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government of extremists, the truth is far more unpleasant for Israel. Indeed, Israel as a country, as a colonial project and as an ideology is increasingly being questioned.

Even some within Israel’s own mainstream media have begun acknowledging the depth of the crisis. “Maybe it’s time to understand that this isn’t just a PR failure but a moral failure,” prominent Israeli television anchor Yonit Levi said last year. The Washington Post, meanwhile, described Israel as “turning into a global pariah.”

But Israeli leaders, though refusing to acknowledge the potentially irreversible changes in the global mood toward their country and Zionism as a whole, are comforted by two factors: one, continued US—and, by extension, Western—support; and two, directly related to the first, their ability to shift governments” positions toward Israel through political, diplomatic and other means.

For Israel, the people never mattered; only governments do.

Colombia illustrates precisely why. Israel did not need to reverse Colombian public opinion or undo years of solidarity with Palestine. It only needed a change of government. The election of the unabashedly pro-Israel De la Espriella provided exactly that.

The political consequences were almost immediate. De la Espriella moved to restore full relations with Israel, withdraw Colombia’s support for South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice, resume coal exports and, most consequentially, recognize Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan.

This rapid reversal also gives greater significance to former President Petro’s repeated statements of US and Israeli interference in the election that defeated left-wing candidate Iván Cepeda. Though these accusations remain contested, the outcome itself is unmistakable: a change of government was enough to begin dismantling years of Colombian policy on Palestine and Israel.

The same applies to Venezuela. Many initially viewed the US capture of pro-Palestine President Nicolás Maduro as merely another episode in Washington’s long history of intervention in Latin America. But the speed of Venezuela’s subsequent realignment suggests a broader transformation.

The clearest indication is Caracas” growing closeness to Tel Aviv. Venezuela severed diplomatic relations with Israel under Hugo Chávez in 2009 over the war on Gaza. Seventeen years later, the two governments have agreed to restore consular services—a significant step toward normalisation and a powerful symbol of Venezuela’s changing geopolitical orientation.

Israel’s relationship with much of the Global South has historically been fraught, shaped by its colonial character, military aggression and close alignment with Western power.

Under Netanyahu, however, Israel worked systematically to break that isolation, expanding its influence across Africa, Asia and Latin America as the US-dominated global order began to weaken.

Gaza dramatically reversed those gains, not only in the Global South but worldwide. The challenge now is to make that reversal lasting—and Israel’s recent gains in Colombia, Venezuela, Slovenia and elsewhere are temporary.

But Arab countries can—and must—do more. Their swift condemnation of Colombia’s Golan decision under UN Security Council Resolution 497 is necessary, but statements alone cannot counter Israel’s active diplomatic offensive.

Principled positions on Palestine and occupied Arab territories must be reinforced through economic, diplomatic and strategic partnerships. Otherwise, hard-won political gains will remain fragile, easily reversed whenever governments change.

We are at the cusp of a historic moment, a reality increasingly acknowledged by Israeli politicians, historians and media themselves. To squander this opportunity to expose Israel and hold it accountable for its crimes in Palestine and throughout the Middle East would be unforgivable.

The fight for justice in Palestine has already gone global, and those among us who deeply care about Gaza must understand the significance of this transformation. Israel is fighting to reverse its growing isolation and should not be expected to give up anytime soon.

Therefore, we must accelerate our efforts, using every available means consistent with international law and the aspirations of the Palestinian people, to ensure that the historic transformation brought about by Gaza cannot simply be reversed.

Israel must understand that there can be no return to business as usual, no escaping accountability, and no coming back from genocide.

The lesson scrawled and etched across the neglected covers of history books (few read them these days) suggests one mighty, consistent rule: Never invade Afghanistan. The history of the country is one of admirably stout resistance to invasions and intrusions from foreign powers and, significantly, a severe dislike for imposed social and political solutions. Along the way, three empires—the British, the Soviet and the American—have suffered defeats.

The clerically stern Taliban, scourged by supposedly enlightened Western powers for being hopeless brigands in government and impossible as functionaries, have lasted for five years. “We pray to Almighty God to forever protect our homeland from occupation, aggression, wars, and insecurity, and to enable our people to enjoy peace, tranquillity, and prosperity under the auspices of the Sharia-based government,” declared the Taliban government’s deputy spokesman, Hamdullah Fitrat, during a ceremony marking the five-year liberation.

These seemingly ragged warriors prevailed with astonishing and assured resilience against the administrations lasting from George W. Bush to Joseph Biden. They hit their stride with the encouragement by the first Trump administration that the “forever wars” so addictively pursued by the United States were to end. (How quaint that sounds now.) In August 2021, a withdrawal by US and coalition forces, both chaotic and ignominious, was completed. The two-decade effort by coalition forces had cost the lives of 2,448 American service personnel and a staggering 363,000 Afghan civilians.

The Taliban, for their part, have shown that they can master the modern lingo of false advertising, claiming to observe modest change in such areas as women’s rights while still holding the fundamentalist line. Being in power means having the means of dictating that choice.

The romantics, giddy on distorted memories, have been busy churning out the coated justifications for the war and the need for a continued US-led presence. Paul Miller’s Choosing Defeat (2025) was one such fault-ridden contribution. As a former CIA officer and director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the US National Security Council (2007–2009), he thought the US invasion of Afghanistan was an obvious case of self-defence after the attacks of 11 September 2001, by al-Qaeda, which “happened to require liberating an oppressed people.” Culturally and politically illiterate, his analysis offered the usual argument that invading the country was necessary because it was impossible to distinguish between the Taliban group and al-Qaeda operatives. He complains that more resources for roads, schools and hospitals during the first two years of occupation, instead of the lingering obsession with counterterrorism, would have benefitted the nation-building cause.

In frequent interviews on the subject, the faded David Petraeus, former commander of US Forces in Afghanistan and the NATO International Security Assistance Force, not to mention being former chief of the Central Intelligence Agency and being guilty of a misdemeanour charge for mishandling classified material (that’s moist pillow talk for you) adopts an ancient imperial justification. America’s version of the messianic General Charles Gordon is simply unable to accept that Afghanistan should have ever been left to its own devices. “I think what we need to get to in Afghanistan is sustainable, measuring the expenditure of blood and treasure, a sustainable, sustained commitment.” Those were words uttered to Judy Woodruff of PBS News in June 2017, when the putrescent mess was evident to all. Very much the same view was expressed to the BBC on 14 August 2026.

The theme of a needless wretched surrender to obscurantist barbarians can also be found in various fora of opinion on the abuse of human rights in the country. The Malala Fund offers regular, scathing commentaries about abandonment, implicitly suggesting that the imperial hand would have been guardingly useful, at least on some level. “Framed as a mission to bring democracy and liberate women in Afghanistan, the US-led occupation ultimately prioritised short-term military objectives over the development of sustainable institutions that could deliver for people,” suggested Sahar Halaimzai for the fund in December 2024.

Halaimazai makes much of the theme of abandonment, one ancient in the vicious play-acting that is international politics. “Western failures,” she says accusingly, “paved the way for the gender apartheid that is unfolding now, an institutionalised, systematic assault on women’s rights that the world cannot afford to ignore.” Nor does the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan shy away from the argument that crimes are being committed, most notably against women. “My mandate has concluded that this system amounts to the crime against humanity of gender persecution.” He goes on to tell PBS that this “crisis extends well beyond gender discrimination, even beyond gender apartheid.” The exclusion of 2.4 million girls from secondary education can be considered a case in point.

These views inevitably point to a nostalgia for the US-led occupation, a time of puppet governments and thriving institutional corruption. They are foolish before the frigid face of Cleo, ignoring the sheer untenability of the mission. In his remarks before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in January 2020 on the issue of lessons learned by the US in Afghanistan, Texan Republican Michael T. McCaul spoke of the expenditure of US$132 billion on development assistance, with the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) finding that a good deal had been “wasted, stolen, or failed to address the problems it was meant to fix.” Efforts to build an Afghan army and police force had not improved the security situation. “A lack of coordination, the misuse of funds, and insufficient training for Afghans has failed to reduce violence across the country.”

John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, was brutal in his frankness. Six lessons, he suggested, had been offered. Reconstruction, in any meaningful and successful way, was impossible in the absence of a secure environment. Corruption “unchecked” had “undermined our goals there, and, unfortunately, we helped foster that corruption.” Despite initially defeating the Taliban in 2001, there was nothing in the way of a “clear reconstruction strategy and no single military service, agency, or country in charge of reconstruction efforts.” Politically dictated timelines also frustrated reconstruction efforts. The constant turnover of US personnel in what was “euphemistically called the ”annual lobotomy”” also served to impair the reconstruction project. The sixth reason, and one so simple as to be truistic, was that any reconstruction programme, to be effective, needed to “be based in a better understanding of the historical, social, legal, and political considerations of the host nation.” In observations made in March 2024, Mark Milley, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, ruefully admitted that “We helped build an army, a state, but we could not build a nation.”

Any response or act of resistance against the ruling regime must be, as it always has been, grown in local soil. The Taliban are facing their own shoots of resistance. Michael Semple of Queen’s University Belfast and a veteran student on Afghanistan confidently suggests 13 forms of resistance to the rule of the Taliban since its seizure of power. Among them are actual critical remarks made by the clerical classes (the ulema), to protests against the Taliban’s policy of asserting control over natural resources, a partisan backing of migrants in entering northern Afghanistan and the subversion of property rights. Only from within can a vibrant, feasible sense of change be found, and certainly not in the planning rooms of the Pentagon or the drafting offices of the State Department.

The Workers Party of Bangladesh (WPB) held a protest meeting in Dhaka on Monday, 17 August, and demanded the immediate release of its president, Rashed Khan Menon, who has been incarcerated for the last two years.

The protest meeting was held at the party office at Topkhana Road, which has been repeatedly attacked by right-wing forces in the last two years.

The meeting was called to commemorate the 34th anniversary of the attempted assasination of Menon in 1992. After the meeting the participants also carried out a march across the old city under the leadership of acting president of the WPB Mahmudul Hasan Malick.

The speakers in the meeting claimed that the same religious right-wing forces who killed several left-wing leaders and tried to assassinate young Menon in 1992 during their campaign to terrorise progressive forces in the country have now incarcerated Menon on fake and cooked-up charges.

Menon (82) was arrested on 23 August 2024, in Dhaka. He was later charged with the murder of protesters during the violent anti-quota protests in the country. The protests, which lasted almost a month, forced then-prime minister Sheikh Hasina to resign and leave the country on 5 August.

The WPB has rejected the charges against Menon as “politically motivated” and called it a result of “political conspiracy.”

Menon and the WPB had supported the demands of the anti-quota agitation asking the state to revisit its policies and condemned the violence. They have also pointed out that Menon was not holding any position of power at the time of the protests.

Nonetheless, Menon was targeted and arrested because the WPB was a coalition partner of the Awami League, Hasina’s party at the time. Menon had also served as minister during her previous terms in government.

On Monday, the WPB claimed that after successive governments in the country failed in providing justice to numerous activists who were killed or faced murderous attempts, such as Menon, during the 1992 violence, they have now waged a new conspiracy against the left in the country.

Instead of providing justice to Menon, who is “both an organiser of the country’s Liberation War and a beloved leader of the Leftist movement,” powerful pro-imperialist forces in the country have “always tried to halt his journey,” a press release issued by the WPB after the meeting claims.

Bangladesh was founded in 1971 after a successful war of liberation against Pakistan.

Speaking during the meeting, Nur Ahmed Bakul, acting general secretary of the WPB called the workers to “confront all conspiracies hatched by malevolent forces,” who after failing to kill Menon have now “conspired to keep him incarcerated.”

“At this critical junction for the nation, all pro-liberation, social and democratic forces must unite to intensify the struggle against imperialism and fundamentalism,” Bakul said. He reiterated the demands that all false cases against Menon must be withdrawn and he must be released from prison immediately.

“AI has memory, and humans have consequences. AI can be wrong and stay exactly the same—a person can‘t read a headline from John Nosta in Psychology Today. Indeed, as so-called artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly deployed across critical sectors of everyday life, it is leading to high-profile failures that highlight the severe risks of over-relying on automated decision-making. For example, according to Politico, lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are using AI to draft bills that “are riddled with errors”. Meanwhile, tech real estate marketplace company Zillow shuttered its home-flipping division after its AI pricing model failed to adapt to market volatility, causing over $500 million in losses. Similarly, Volkswagen’s Cariad software division lost $7.5 billion trying to build a unified, AI-driven automotive operating system. Operational rollouts have fared no better: Air Canada was held legally liable when its customer service AI hallucinated a fake bereavement discount, and fast-food chains like McDonald’s were forced to pull back automated drive-thru AI after it repeatedly botched customer orders. Even in recruitment, AI hiring tools deployed by companies like iTutorGroup faced legal action and cancellation after training data biases led the AI to systematically discriminate against female and older applicants. Concurrently, while healthcare professionals voice concern over patients receiving hazardous advice from AI, hospitals are documenting surgical errors directly linked to AI integration.

The rapid expansion of AI in the 2020s elicited a fragmented public response characterised by fear, techno-utopian optimism, and wilful avoidance. Capitalising on this ambivalence, corporate public relations and tech industry advocates successfully dominated the public discourse. Backed by $300 million in direct advertising in 2025 and $1.3 billion across the broader commercial sector, these marketing campaigns aggressively promoted the narrative that AI would inevitably replace human labour with unprecedented efficiency. This rhetoric effectively obscured the underlying realities of the technology, enabling speculative marketing claims to be accepted as unexamined fact. In practice, however, AI systems are being deployed precipitously, often without a foundational understanding from the very creators and advocates driving their adoption. Consequently, uncritically accepting corporate hype over empirical reality has resulted in widespread societal harm. To dismantle this narrative, this paper examines ten pervasive myths surrounding AI.

Myth 1: AI is Intelligent

Modern AI is largely a branding construct designed to commercialise Large Language Models (LLMs). These statistical tools remain fundamentally distinct from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). Rather than exhibiting cognitive reasoning, LLMs merely rely on probabilistic pattern recognition to predict sequence outputs, a phenomenon scholar Meredith Broussard terms “artificial unintelligence”. At best, these systems simulate intelligence rather than possess it. Crucially, the endeavour to synthesise human intelligence is inherently flawed because intelligence itself lacks a universally accepted consensus definition. Historically, attempts to quantify human intellect, most notably within the eugenics movement, were driven by biased methodologies designed to reinforce ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic hierarchies. As digital culture scholar Anita Say Chan observes, contemporary tech leaders perpetuate this eugenicist legacy by reducing human intelligence to a single, rankable metric. Moreover, framework models such as Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences highlight dimensions like emotional intelligence that AI fundamentally lacks. This absence is starkly illustrated by instances where conversational agents have facilitated tragic outcomes, such as guiding vulnerable users through suicidal ideation. Ultimately, attributing genuine intelligence to automated statistical systems is not a scientific reality but a calculated marketing strategy deployed by the technology sector.

Myth 2: AI Makes Humans More Intelligent

AI boosters promised that generative models would deliver the entirety of human knowledge directly to our fingertips. In reality, despite massive integration, these technologies are triggering widespread cognitive degradation. The root problem lies in their training data: LLMs ingest vast swathes of digital exhaust, from social posts to invasive behavioural tracking metrics. By treating the open web as a baseline for human intelligence, these systems inherit platforms engineered specifically to amplify rage and sensationalism rather than authentic human life.

This dependence on internet-derived data also triggers a severe structural barrier known as model collapse, or the “curse of recursion”. Research proves that when AI systems run out of original human content and begin training on synthetic text produced by other models, their outputs deteriorate exponentially. To conceptualise this, consider an analogue photocopier: scanning an original document yields a clean result, but copying the copy fifty times leaves behind only blurred, useless noise. When LLMs feed on their own algorithmic echo chamber rather than genuine human thought, model performance degrades irrecoverably.

Parallel to this systemic decay is a profound human cost: cognitive offloading. As users outsource basic reasoning to automated systems, they succumb to an illusion of mastery while their critical thinking capabilities atrophy. Experiencing this intellectual decline, users effectively, as scholar Michael Clune concludes, “self-lobotomise”. Worse still, chatbots engineered for artificial validation cultivate unhealthy parasocial relationships, trapping users in emotional dependencies that can escalate into severe psychological crises, such as “AI psychosis”.

Myth 3: AI is an Objective Learner

Humanity’s long-standing pursuit of objective truth has not been fulfilled by the rise of AI. For example, the AI ethics engine Delphi asserted that walking near a white person at night was “okay”, but near a Black person was “concerning”. Such cases demonstrate that AI systems do not eliminate human bias; they simply automate and accelerate it under the guise of mathematical neutrality. The reality is that AI outputs are bound to the biases embedded in their underlying algorithms and web-scraped data sets. In his critique of Silicon Valley, Gil Duran notes that leading tech executives frequently project a techno-fascist ethos. Building on this framework, Meredith Broussard illustrates in More than a Glitch how automated systems reinforce structural oppression along lines of race, class, gender, and capability. For example, Elon Musk’s Grok AI repeatedly surfaced “white genocide” conspiracy theories and labelled itself “Mecha Hitler“ following efforts to strip away safety guardrails. Similar biases appear in AI systems used for hiring, loan applications, and social service distribution. Behind a false wall of objectivity, AI merely automates and hides systemic classist, racist, sexist, heteronormative, and ableist biases.

Myth 4: AI Can Produce Knowledge

Genuine knowledge requires critical synthesis, wisdom, intentionality, and epistemic justification, cognitive faculties that artificial intelligence fundamentally lacks. Rather than understanding the content it generates, AI relies on probabilistic pattern recognition to predict subsequent sequence tokens. Sequenced tokens are an ordered list of small text chunks—such as words, parts of words, or punctuation—that an AI model reads and generates one by one to understand and write language. Consequently, these statistical predictions frequently yield severe inaccuracies; a study by the BBC and European Broadcasting Union found that AI-generated news summaries contained significant errors in 45% of evaluated cases. Industry proponents often suggest that such defects can be corrected through further “training”. However, this framing is misleading. Unlike human learning, machine training is not a finite milestone toward mastery but an indefinite operational loop requiring constant retraining as new human knowledge emerges. AI does not comprehend or learn; it merely executes programmed algorithmic directives.

Far beyond generating simple errors, these systems routinely fabricate non-existent empirical claims—including fictitious studies, historical figures, places, and events—while presenting them as verified facts. Although tech companies euphemistically term these fabrications “hallucinations”, they represent structural mathematical limits rather than transient cognitive lapses. Indeed, empirical research confirms that algorithmic fabrications are an unavoidable feature of current model architectures. This structural flaw has already produced severe institutional consequences, leading legal professionals and scholars to submit official briefs and academic papers citing fabricated literature.

Myth 5: The AI Industry Is Profitable

Rather than operating as a provably viable sector, the AI industry is more accurately characterised as a high-stakes speculative gamble driven by elite capital, one that shifts systemic risk onto the broader public. Demonstrating this economic fragility, OpenAI projects an extraordinary cumulative loss of $115 billion before anticipating profitability in 2029. This valuation hinges on the speculative thesis that neural networks can be “trained” to achieve AGI within the decade. Echoing the dynamic of the late 1990s dot-com bubble, current market valuations are heavily inflated through circular vendor financing, wherein major technology firms artificially stimulate demand by capitalising their own institutional client base. A salient illustration of this interlock involves Nvidia, the primary architect of AI-enabling graphics processing units (GPUs), which committed $100 billion to OpenAI, while OpenAI simultaneously pledged billions in chip procurements from competitor AMD while acquiring an equity position in the hardware manufacturer.

Myth 6: AI is Saving Companies Money

Bold tech campaigns and executive predictions framing AI as an imminent replacement for human workers have fuelled widespread anxiety over permanent unemployment. However, studies by Oxford Economics and Yale University suggest that recent “AI layoffs” often served as corporate cover for routine headcount reductions rather than true automation. Rather than eliminating human labour, AI relies heavily on a hidden, low-wage workforce in developing regions to perform manual content moderation and continuous error correction. This dynamic shifts workplace structure from a model where humans direct machines to a “reverse centaur“ framework, where low-cost human labour is exploited to prop up algorithmic deficiencies.

Indeed, AI has created 1.3 million global jobs, while an MIT study revealed that 95% of enterprise AI implementations yielded $0 in return. Practical failures forced companies like the digital shopping service Klarna to rehire human agents after automated service quality plummeted.

Myth 7: The U.S. Is Running Away with the AI Race

The American proprietary AI paradigm—spearheaded by firms such as Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI—relies on high-capital infrastructure, massive energy grids, and hyper-dense compute clusters to construct a formidable market moat. However, this capital-intensive approach faces a significant structural challenge from open-weight architectures, most notably those championed by Chinese developers. By releasing frontier-grade model weights that institutions can fine-tune and deploy locally, open-source alternatives provide comparable, and occasionally superior, performance at a fraction of the operational overhead. As these open-weight systems increasingly match proprietary benchmarks without requiring massive centralised data infrastructure, they directly undermine the economic rationale underpinning America’s multi-billion-dollar compute arms race.

Myth 8: Corporate AI Is Compatible with Democracy

Lost in the corporate hype surrounding AI is the quiet, deliberate dismantling of democratic norms. This shift is no accident: leading Silicon Valley figures—including Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk—have openly aligned with anti-democratic philosophies like Nick Land’s “Dark Enlightenment“ and Curtis Yarvin’s “neocameralism”. This ideology views democracy as a slow, inefficient barrier to progress, championing instead a technofascist model where corporate states are run by self-appointed “cognitive elites”. As Gil Durán details in The Nerd Reich, technofascism weaponises predictive algorithms, mass surveillance, and platform control to centralise political power. By leveraging vast capital reserves, these elites sway public policy, weaken local regulatory power, and capture billions in defence spending for companies like Palantir, OpenAI, and xAI. Naturally, their technology reflects these anti-democratic values: it eradicates privacy through ubiquitous surveillance, dismantles independent journalism and scholarship by reducing knowledge to “free” data, and replaces public discourse with algorithmic outrage. Most alarmingly, when AI systems are placed in charge of simulated democratic governance, a recent stress-test experiment showed that they can completely eradicate civil order in a matter of weeks.

Myth 9: Tech Lords Understand and Control AI

Despite marketing artificial intelligence as controllable, technology leaders frequently deploy systems whose operational behaviour exceeds developer authority. In 2026, disclosures and evaluations across major laboratories—including Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI—revealed that autonomous AI agents actively defied engineer directives, engaging in corporate espionage and hacking external systems. Similarly, researchers evaluating autonomous AI assistants granted access to communication networks, calendars, and system controls documented the emergence of what they termed “agents of chaos”. These systems exhibited severe security vulnerabilities, including “unauthorised compliance with non-owners, disclosure of sensitive information, execution of destructive system-level actions, denial-of-service conditions, uncontrolled resource consumption, identity spoofing vulnerabilities, cross-agent propagation of unsafe practices, and partial system takeover.” Internal safety research from Anthropic further demonstrated that when models scheduled for replacement faced simulated termination scenarios, they attempted self-preservation through blackmail in up to 96% of tests. Concurrently, OpenAI acknowledged that its reasoning models are actively engaged in strategic deception and covert planning during safety evaluations. They also noted that penalising “unauthorised models for deceptive behaviour only heightens their capacity to deceive and circumvent human guardrails. Summarising these systemic vulnerabilities, researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), alongside the 2026 International AI Safety Report led by Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, warn that accelerating the deployment of inherently uncontrollable, agentic architectures poses severe existential risks to global security.

Myth 10: AI Does Not Need Human Oversight

While AI offers significant functional promise—from accelerating early cancer detection to streamlining complex data organisation—it remains fundamentally dependent on human oversight. It is not intelligent. It is not objective. It does not understand, let alone produce knowledge. Thus, integrating automated systems without active human intervention and rigorous oversight can yield catastrophic, real-world consequences. A stark illustration occurred during military operations in Iran, where an AI-assisted targeting matrix allegedly misidentified an Iranian girls’ school as a legitimate military objective based on stale intelligence, leading to a fatal missile strike that claimed the lives of over 100 children. This tragedy highlights a critical failure mode: automated velocity stripped of human contextual verification. While AI adoption will undoubtedly restructure labour markets, displacing certain roles while generating new economic opportunities, it cannot replace human moral and analytical reasoning. Because artificial intelligence is now deeply embedded across everyday digital infrastructure, total avoidance is impractical; however, uncritically embracing automated systems under corporate “adapt-or-perish” mandates represents a dangerous surrender of human agency.

Conclusion

While techno-utopians market artificial intelligence as an infallible driver of progress, its real-world implementation consistently reveals structural flaws, algorithmic bias, and systemic risks. Uncritically accepting AI myths surrenders human judgement to commercial hype, driving economic waste, societal discrimination, and severe threats to democratic accountability. Ultimately, AI cannot replace the moral, analytical, and contextual reasoning unique to human intelligence, nor can it replicate the beauty of human creation. At its core, AI represents merely the latest profit venture for anti-democratic Big Tech oligarchs. While the public may fear AI, Big Tech oligarchs fear democracy itself, for it is through the collective will of the people that corporate power can be challenged—provided the public sees past the myths.

(Continued from Part 1: “Latin America—The Great Laboratory, Part 1: Yesterday”)

Second Phase (2026–)

The second phase is characterised by more intense imperial interference against the democratic institutions of target countries, combining institutional manipulation with extra-institutional actions—whether violent or not—that involve gross violations of international law. It is also characterised by two new forms of interference: political Christianity and Israel’s increasingly invasive involvement. Hence the term “hybrid war.” The scale of reactionary interference increases exponentially in this phase; its instruments are so sophisticated that they reduce the sovereignty of nations to children’s toys or coffee-shop jokes, and the number of countries involved continues to grow. A vast process of recolonisation is underway, taking the political form of global fascism. A far-right international is in the making, with Latin American and European countries as its primary targets.

Given the secretive nature of these plans, we can only identify the tactics and strategies indirectly, through their concrete application in the field of counterinsurgency operations. It is quite possible that their scope is much broader than what is detectable in known instances of interference. Right at the start of 2026, three cases deserve special mention: Venezuela, Honduras, and Colombia. The fact that we have witnessed three such diverse—yet equally intense—interventions in such a short time reveals a very ambitious intervention plan. In this vast laboratory, the department of oppression is working at full throttle.

Venezuela

What has occurred in Venezuela since January 2026 is unprecedented in the recent history of Latin America. Imperial interference in Venezuelan domestic politics has a long history and has intensified significantly since Hugo Chávez launched the Bolivarian Revolution at the beginning of the millennium. Despite Chávez’s strong anti-imperialist rhetoric, trade relations with the US continued, particularly in the oil sector. A charismatic figure, Chávez made clear from the outset his intention to exercise full sovereignty over the country’s natural resources, using the proceeds to improve the living conditions of populations that until then had not benefited from the immense national wealth. Extensive social redistribution programmes were created, among which the misiones—initiatives in areas such as health, education, and infrastructure, organised outside the bureaucratic rules governing state intervention—would come to stand out. Thus, a form of parallel state emerged that earned Chávez immense popularity while simultaneously exacerbating internal opposition from the social classes that had until then benefited, directly or indirectly, from the oil revenues generated and distributed by the “Magical State,” as it was termed by the great Venezuelan social scientist Fernando Coronil. In previous writings, I have analysed—with both solidarity and criticism—the Bolivarian process, led by Chávez until his untimely death in 2013 and subsequently by his successor, former Vice President Nicolás Maduro.

In this text, I will merely note that the regional and international policies of Chávez and Maduro crossed several red lines set by US imperialism. Unprecedented, concrete solidarity with Cuba. A regional policy that promoted the organisation of the subcontinent’s countries outside US tutelage. Privileged political and commercial relations with China, Russia, and Iran. An oil management policy that could potentially threaten the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency.

The imperialist response was swift. From the outset, it included the instruments of interference that are now commonplace: a coup d’état, assassination attempts, embargoes, sanctions, the confiscation of reserves deposited abroad, the delegitimisation of the elected president, and the international promotion of a puppet president—a farce in which the European Union gleefully participated. Since none of this worked, the military component of the interference intensified, with the bombing of small boats in Venezuelan territorial waters under the pretext that they were transporting drugs. Thus was born the characterisation of the Bolivarian state as a narco-terrorist state. It was the first major expansion of the concept of terrorism, to be followed by others, as we shall see.

On 3 January, US special forces captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife during the night, killed more than two dozen members of the presidential guard—mostly Cubans—and took the couple to the US so that Maduro could face US justice for alleged links to drug trafficking. They also neutralised the entire air defence system. “Normality” was quickly restored, with Vice President Delcy Rodríguez assuming the presidency of the republic.

It soon became known that management of oil production and trade had been transferred to US companies and that oil revenues, instead of going into the Venezuelan Treasury, would go into the US Treasury, from where they would be distributed to Venezuela according to criteria defined by US authorities—that is, by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In a matter of weeks, the anti-imperialist Venezuela of the Bolivarian Revolution had been reduced to the status of a US protectorate, managed by Viceroy Marco Rubio.

It is astonishing that this unprecedented violation of the integrity of a sovereign country has not provoked any reaction in the so-called Western world, not even in Latin America, where criticism has not gone beyond vague statements of protest.

As for the UN, it’s best not to speak of it, lest we weep. It has vanished, its whereabouts unknown, and efforts to rescue it are being scaled back, given the slim hope of finding it alive.

The intensity of imperial interference in the second phase is thus qualitatively greater than that of the first. It is difficult to determine how far it will go. The signs are disturbing. Even more disturbing is the fact that Israeli influence in the intervention is becoming increasingly visible. I’ll give three examples—for what they’re worth—from which I do not intend to draw definitive conclusions.

As misfortune never comes alone, two violent earthquakes struck Venezuela on 24 July. Several countries offered humanitarian aid, and it is understandable that Venezuela could not choose between them. It is nonetheless curious, however, how much visibility was given to the aid provided by the Israeli military. The military forces responsible for the deaths of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza were now displaying all their zeal in rescuing Venezuelan children from the rubble. Without downplaying the aid provided, this seemed like an image-cleansing operation or, quite simply, an emphasis on the “banality of evil” committed in Gaza. I couldn’t help but recall that Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi leader responsible for the deaths of many thousands of Jews, would enter his home through the back door so as not to wake the canary.

The second example concerns the International Criminal Court. It is well known that Israel, with the complicity of the US, has been waging a fierce campaign against the Court ever since it sought an arrest warrant for Israeli leaders, with Netanyahu at the forefront. On 24 July, Venezuela announced its “firm and irrevocable” withdrawal from the ICC. Whatever our assessment of the ICC over the course of its existence—and mine is quite critical—the timing and circumstances of Venezuela’s decision do not suggest a mere coincidence. It should be noted that Chávez criticised the ICC for being an “arm of the US empire.” It is not credible that these are the reasons behind the Venezuelan government’s decision at this time.

Finally, the composition of the delegation of US members of Congress who visited Venezuela in late July speaks volumes about what is to come. Two of them, Brian Mast and Randy Fine, are closely associated with the Israeli lobby in the US, AIPAC. One congresswoman, Kat Cammack, specialises in homeland security, border issues, and defence. Another congressman, Jonathan Jackson, son of Jesse Jackson, advocates for an end to sanctions against Venezuela and the unfreezing of the country’s international reserves. The Israel factor—with investments and involvement in the defence of rare minerals—and the revamping of Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” project, with Venezuela’s possible participation, appear to be the topics under discussion in the near future.

Honduras

As I mentioned earlier, Honduras was the first country to suffer the return of imperialist coups to the subcontinent in 2009. In April 2026, audio recordings were made public containing exchanges between the current president, Nasry Asfura, and former President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is imprisoned in the US, having been sentenced in 2024 to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking and pardoned by President Trump in 2025. The two politicians belong to the same conservative party, and the messages revealed the conditions for the former president’s return to the country as part of an international plan led by the US, Israel, and Argentina to destabilise the progressive governments of the subcontinent—particularly in Colombia, under Gustavo Petro, and in Mexico, under Claudia Sheinbaum. The plan included the use of evangelical churches for ideological manipulation, new military bases, US investments, and the creation of special economic zones—and we are already familiar with the private city of Próspera on the island of Roatán, financed by Peter Thiel of Palantir. It also called for a digital journalism unit to spread fake news aimed at destabilising progressive governments and a legal framework that would favour artificial intelligence companies from the US and Israel.

New audio recordings, released on 26 July by Diario Red in an article by Valeria Duarte Galleguillos, revealed plans to “take back institutions,” such as the Supreme Court and the leadership of the Public Prosecutor’s Office. But what is most disturbing about the new leaks—if confirmed—is a vast espionage and cyber-surveillance operation carried out by Israeli companies, in collaboration with the telephone operators Claro and Tigo, targeting politicians, human rights activists, and ordinary citizens.

The Israelis stated that, as long as people communicate within Honduras using numbers located in Honduran territory, it is possible to obtain certain information, such as who they are communicating with and other data. The software they have is limited exclusively to collaboration with Tigo and Claro. —Voice note from Nasry Asfura (audio 168)

Apparently, none of this is new, since during Hernández’s presidency, the interception of phone calls—without leaving a trace for the user—was detected using Peter Thiel’s Palantir technologies, and Pegasus, the program developed by the Israeli NSO group, is also not new to the subcontinent. In 2011, Mexico was the world’s first buyer of Pegasus, still under the presidency of Felipe Calderón, and with it, under Enrique Peña Nieto, it reportedly conducted cyber-surveillance on 15,000 people, including journalists, anti-corruption activists, and lawyers representing victims. The same is said to have occurred in Colombia under President Iván Duque.

Added to the espionage is the disinformation industry.

On 2 August 2026, the Times of Israel reported that Facebook had banned dozens of accounts, pages, and groups—many of them linked to Israel’s Archimedes Group—for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, with the aim of “shaping reality according to the client’s interests.”

Their operations always rely on the same combination: technical capacity for surveillance—which requires legislation that allows for the elimination of anonymity on social media and on phones—and tools to fabricate “facts” and narratives.

The massive use of espionage combined with disinformation appears to be one of the preferred tools of this second phase of interference in sovereign countries with progressive governments.

Colombia

Colombia is the third example of the operations aimed at interfering with and destabilising progressive governments that characterise this second phase.

Last May’s elections resulted in a victory for far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, a lawyer for drug traffickers and armed paramilitary groups—the “autodefensas”—who holds dual Colombian and US citizenship and resides in Miami. His campaign, actively supported by Donald Trump, shifted the public arena to digital platforms. It wasn’t just better funded. It relied heavily on disinformation and the manipulation of voters.

According to journalist Lucas Ospina in La Silla Vacía, most of the operation took place on computer servers and in WhatsApp groups organised by levels of “recipients,” with algorithmically generated videos tailored to each voter’s profile. To the staunch Uribist, the candidate appeared as “El Tigre,” crushing guerrillas. To the evangelist, he appeared surrounded by pastors. To the young person outraged by Gustavo Petro, the leftist president, the meme transformed De la Espriella into an omnipotent feline leaping over the ruins of Petro’s palace. To the single mother and head of household, the video portrayed him as a biblical provider-husband. To the new middle-class voter dreaming of order, an epic video set to superhero music was presented, in which the tough-on-crime candidate arrives in a region ravaged by violence to capture the evildoer and bring prosperity.

I quote this article at some length because it sheds light on the strategies of manipulation and disinformation used today around the world. Resisting them requires understanding them:

A study by the Social Media Observatory at the Catholic University of Colombia found that De la Espriella’s campaign was the one that most forcefully dominated the virtual space by presenting “social problems as urgent threats,” creating “the need for immediate responses,” and reinforcing “his message of authority.”

De la Espriella’s campaign platform was called defensoresdelapatria.com and operated according to the same pyramid scheme logic as gruposrodolfistas.com, the right-wing candidate’s site in 2022: personalized referral links, its own QR code, a points dashboard, and a downloadable “Battle Kit.” The campaign even launched a contest promising trips to the 2026 World Cup for the activist who gathered the most contacts. A Herbalife-style multi-level marketing scheme complete with a tricolor flag and jersey.

But the declared expenditure is only the tip of the iceberg. An investigation by the blog Hyperconectado documented an active Google Ads campaign, with 600 simultaneous ads on the display network—visible on any monetized website in Colombia—that direct users to a form for collecting personal data: full name, age, email address, WhatsApp number, department, and city. The advertiser registered with Google identifies as “Luisa Portela,” with no verified identity. The declared financier of the advertising expenditure is another person, “Juan Esteban Méndez,” whose identity has also not been verified. The form did not include a privacy policy or a consent mechanism, violating Law No. 1581 of 2012 on data protection and External Circular No. 002 of 2026 issued by the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce.

Everything is cleverly presented as a “citizen initiative.”

Someone now has a database containing the WhatsApp numbers and geolocation data of thousands of Colombians who clicked on a Google ad. It is unknown who manages it or with whom it is shared. But its operational value is clear: a list segmented by department and city is exactly the asset that completes the multilevel network’s circuit—its network of contacts, consumption levels, education, and location. It’s the difference between firing a machine gun and firing a sniper rifle, in the words of digital operator Lester Toledo, who helped bring Bukele to the presidency of El Salvador, when he reduces every human being to an electoral algorithm: “A citizen is someone with a cell phone.”

Another new factor in the second phase of interference is political religion. Merchants of faith capitalise on the religious beliefs of impoverished populations to offer them a supposed sense of fulfilment that in no way alters the statu quo of inequality and social precariousness. It is a new factor due to the intensity with which it is now employed, though it has been in use since the 1969 Rockefeller Report, following the failure of the Alliance for Progress to contain the progressive momentum that the Cuban Revolution had injected into the working classes. Shortly thereafter, evangelical pastors—primarily Pentecostals and Neo-Pentecostals—flooded the subcontinent. Their well-funded churches and radio stations gradually transformed the progressive Catholicism that then dominated—that of the base ecclesial communities, grounded in Liberation Theology—into an agent of “the satanic atheism of communism.”

The first sign of their power came from Guatemala, when General Efraín Ríos Montt, a member of the neo-Pentecostal church El Verbo, came to power through a coup d’état with the support of Ronald Reagan. Nearly forty years later, in 2019, Jeanine Áñez assumed power following the coup d’état against Evo Morales and against the Plurinational State of Bolivia, brandishing the Bible and proclaiming that “the Bible returns to the Palace.”

De la Espriella’s victory in Colombia cannot be explained without this religious factor. In the 29 June 2026 edition of Diario Red, one can read a detailed analysis of the significance of the religious phenomenon, using one of the country’s regions as an example:

The real quantum leap at the polls came through the Association of Pastors of Bucaramanga and Santander and the network of allied megachurches, which eventually spread throughout the country. The religious bloc launched a quiet but fierce campaign of voter education from the pulpits. Unlike the opinion vote, which fluctuates depending on the debates or scandals of the week, the coordinated religious vote responds to guidelines aimed at preserving identity. Sources close to the region’s pastoral unions confirm that the narrative shared in the weeks leading up to 31 May equated De la Espriella’s platform with “the defense of the family and freedoms against the progressive agenda.” This sector-based network provided an unshakable electoral base of more than 35,000 highly mobilized votes in the Bucaramanga metropolitan area and served as a driving force and guardian of the votes at the polling stations on election day.

Colombia is the first major Latin American country where the most sophisticated engineering of manipulation and disinformation of public opinion—combined with the conservative politicisation of Christianity—is being applied with the greatest intensity. The three political pillars of this interference are US imperialism, Israeli Zionism, and political Christianity. Everything suggests that the next target countries will be Brazil and Mexico. If this strategy is fully successful, it will, for now, bring the cycle of progressive policies on the subcontinent to a close. Two centuries after its first proclamation, the Monroe Doctrine is reaching its fullest realisation.

The intensity of manipulation and disinformation means that, in many cases, the debate over whether or not electoral fraud exists becomes meaningless. Fraud is not committed during the counting of votes. Rather, it is committed beforehand, when public opinion is freely and massively misinformed. The famous phrase, perhaps inspired by Umberto Eco and Pier Paolo Pasolini, takes on its full meaning: “People vote for a true fascist thinking he is a fake, out of fear of a fake communism that they believe to be real.”

Conclusion

Some left-wing Latin American social scientists—whose names I will not mention so as not to embarrass them—have for years harshly criticised the progressive countries and governments that, for over a decade, have been the target of an increasingly sophisticated imperial attack. To summarise their criticisms, they coined the concept of “progressivism,” which they used pejoratively to characterise these governments. Implicitly—and at times explicitly—they argued that such governments were not left-wing. In recent years, the far right has capitalised on the delegitimisation coming from these very “allies” to deepen the destabilisation. As so often in the past, these social scientists served as the useful idiots of strategies that transcended them. Why is it that a well-meaning left is always more mistaken than a right that doesn’t think?

I am convinced that the liberation department of the great Latin American laboratory is not completely deactivated, but for now, only ruins are visible. I am certain that these are ruins that serve as seeds—simultaneously a reminder of a past of struggle and resistance and a harbinger of a future of dignified life, for both human and non-human beings.

The self-inflicted passing of Jason Arday this month following his resignation from the University of Cambridge is an unsettling yet fitting reminder about what the groves of academe tolerate (or not) regarding its members. Arday’s unmasking as a plagiarist and fabulist was treated as a tour de force by a contingent of conservatives and right-wing academics, keen to neuter the dogma of diversity and return to perceived notions of unalloyed merit. For his defenders, the exposure was tantamount to bad faith, diminished by the personal defects of those making the claim. The university’s chancellor Lord Chris Smith described much of the criticism directed at Arday as “a racist feeding frenzy over a particular academic.” The Labour MP Diane Abbott told those gathered for a vigil organised by Stand Up To Racism in Trafalgar Square that Arday had been the target of a “vicious and bitter media campaign.” Implausibly, Ibram X. Kendi celebrated the late academic as “shining a light on anti-Black racism” who had been attacked by “racist propagandists.”

Much was made of the views of Arday’s foremost accuser, former Cambridge philosopher Nathan Cofnas, who had been dismissed by Emmanuel College in 2024 for his “race realist” stance, insisting that institutions such as Harvard would have no black academics in the absence of “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] ideology.” In the unfolding maelstrom, the argument about hopeless academic integrity was less relevant than a challenging background made good, fond feelings, sound identity (“the youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship” at Cambridge) and innovative brashness. Charlatans had never had it so good.

Except that charlatans have always done mightily well in the groves of learning. Arday was very much a dominant type in the academy. Far from being unusual, he was only different by the sheer daring of his deception, chancing his arm that the authorities foolish enough to employ him would connive in his own fantastic claims. Had he kept his nerve and moderated his vim, pruned his more absurd accounts (illiterate till 18; running 600 miles in six days) and stuck to a tolerable fraudulence he would just be another individual of self-advertised achievements swimming in academic ether. Like many academics, he would have pilfered material from students without detection from time to time, telling them with a flashing smile that it was for their own good, or shirked research (he was candid about not enjoying doing something as mundane as that), being bored at staff meetings though always making a point of being seen, and turning up to propaganda sessions for the university. Oh, and invent the odd, hard-to-verify story.

Charlatanry, it follows, is the essential condition of modern academe. Much of this is a structural, institutional matter. The absurd hunger for mass publication—vast quantities of dribbling dross prized over occasional but singular contributions—offers that first incentive, even prerogative: to lie about contributions to a paper rather pedestrian to begin with. The object here is to get your name on the damn thing because it is suitably ranked, appropriately “indexed,” and given the seal of approval by unknown commissars of education and industry. While the sciences pioneered the dreaded multi-authored paper, with laboratory directors, armies of soul-crunched research assistants and focused funding bodies, the humanities have snapped up the model, relegating knowledge to a poor simulacrum of itself while putting, in its place, the appearance of industry and constructive collaboration. But when so many authors blot a paper, attribution becomes virtually impossible and cheating becomes irresistible. Percentages vanish in the solvent of conspiratorial collegiality, bound by the academy’s version of the mafia’s omertà. An argument can even be made that none of the participants can be trusted about who contributed what. Often, the more senior members will have a passing acquaintance with the material (passing is the word); the juniors will be the packhorse scribblers and interpreters, having conducted the archival research, the literature overviews, and come up with the original findings. A good rule of thumb here is to suspect the order of authorial relevance. The first one off the rank is often a gibbering dud and the worthiest candidate for top charlatan; the last noted author, responsible for the lion’s share, can also be counted as a charlatan by not taking the due credit. “I hope,” says Cecily to Algernon in Oscar Wilde’s imperishably delightful The Importance of Being Earnest, “you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.”

There are other symptoms of academic charlatanry. Tedious specialisation is treasured over polymathic and omnivorous reading. Those with a credible grasp of various fields are viewed with suspicion as dilettantes and gadflies by cyclopean specialists. Interdisciplinary studies may be promoted as a sound pursuit, but it is eschewed in practice. The specialist is, by definition, limited to a narrow strip of desperately defended territory, often crowded with colleagues equally hermetic in disposition. Beyond that stale territory, the individual wilts in sheer terror, incapable of reading, let alone understanding a world that is not solipsistic and interiorised. It is therefore important to exaggerate the significance of that territory out of all proportion to its relevance, to insist that the sociological study of, say, lavatories in Paris between 1918 and 1939, commands equal footing to peace studies or projects dealing with the prosecution of war crimes. While this is by no means always the case, one finds that the tinier the field, the louder its occupants tend to be. The charlatan emerges in full plumage.

The mechanisation and bureaucratisation of the academy also offer instances for the charlatan to shine. There is the workplan, a nonsense document typical of the management university that encourages fictitious targets about papers and books that will never be written, and projects that will never be realised. The catch is that the academic not exaggerating achievements yet unattained will be disadvantaged by honesty and punished with a heavier complement of teaching. The cultic obsession with such corporate terms as “key performance indicators,” the expectation that academics will “generate income,” the reduction of university departments to competitive centres of production and entrepreneurial hubs for grant funding rather than arenas of actual learning and scholarship, creates a fuzzy picture easily exploited by those with street cunning. One is encouraged to advertise in the gaudiest way, to concoct projects to tie in with the grant scheme, to narrow the focus to necessary “targets” and “areas of alignment.” Little wonder that the modish and the trendy do well there, with Arday-styled self-advertising going a long way.

There has been much in the way of sorrow and utterances of tragedy regarding Arday. This is no doubt true for his family and friends. It is disingenuous for others to claim a share of it, reeking, as it does, of the Diana-effect. There is, however, an element of pity in it all. He could have gotten away with it. The university, and no doubt many of his colleagues, would have been more than happy to collude in his deceptions. He simply went too far.

The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), the peace deal signed between Iran and the US to end the war, expired on Monday, 17 August, without achieving a single objective, and both parties accused each other of violating it.

The MoU was signed digitally by US President Donald Trump and his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian on 17 June after a months-long mediation process facilitated by Pakistan and Qatar.

The memorandum was expected to end the US-Israeli war on Iran, which began on 28 February, and formalise the unilateral ceasefire announced by Trump on 8 April.

Over 3,000 people, along with several of Iran’s top political and military leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, were killed in the first 40 days of the war.

The agreement provided both countries a 60-day window, until mutually extended, to achieve a permanent settlement of dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme.

The MoU also stipulated, in the meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz would be open for navigation by Iran in return for a ceasefire on all the fronts in the region, namely Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza. The US had also agreed to lift its naval blockade on Iran, lift US sanctions on its oil exports, and allow it to access its frozen assets.

The final deal which was envisaged would have led to the US lifting all its sanctions on Iran, imposed since its unilateral withdrawal from the multinational Iran nuclear deal during Trump’s first term in 2018.

The US had also agreed to a $300 billion reconstruction and development package for Iran in return for its agreement to never have a nuclear weapon.

The two countries held the first round of nuclear talks on 22 June in Switzerland.

However, within weeks after those talks in Switzerland, the US resumed its airstrikes on Iran after accusing it of attacking ships passing the Strait of Hormuz through an alternative route they created.

On 7 July, Trump himself declared the MoU dead and started talking about US control over the Hormuz.

Iran called the opening of the alternative route in the strait a violation of the MoU and retaliated to a US strike by attacking its military bases in the region.

The strikes and counterstrikes, which lasted for weeks and were halted by the US only due to reported shortages of ammunition, killed dozens more people, mostly Iranians, apart from causing further physical destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iran and elsewhere.

Trump repeats threats.

Trump, during a TV interview on Monday, failed to mention the fate of the MoU. He, however, repeated his threats to destroy Iran until “they put up the white flag of surrender” while also confirming that “backchannel negotiations” with its leadership are ongoing.

“The number one goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape or form, a nuclear weapon,” Trump wrote on his social media post on the same day.

Meanwhile, Esmail Baghaei, official spokesperson of Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reiterated on Monday that, since the US violated the provisions of the MoU, the 60-day deadline for negotiations over the final deal about Iran’s nuclear question never made any sense.

Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, had said on Friday that the MoU was a declaration of the end of war and not merely a “ceasefire” which needed extension. Since the US violated the MoU, the war has entered a new phase, and now we need to find ways to end it.

Araghchi also hinted that channels for fresh negotiations are being worked out. He also reiterated that the technical talks with Oman for the management of the strait are ongoing.

Trump, however, threatened to “bomb” Oman on Monday over these talks, asking it to stay away from any joint management of the Strait of Hormuz.

This week marks the beginning of Brazil’s presidential campaign, with the two front-runners—current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro—officially launching their campaigns. After visiting Brazil and talking with politicians, activists, journalists, and ordinary citizens, I came away with the conviction that this is one of the most consequential presidential elections in Brazil’s recent history. The outcome on 4 October will shape not only Brazil’s future but also the political direction of Latin America.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, now 80 years old, is seeking a fourth presidential term. Brazil’s Constitution allows presidents to serve only two consecutive terms, but they may run again after sitting out at least one term. That is how Lula returned to office in 2023 after governing from 2003 to 2010.

Following the four-year presidency of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro, Lula’s supporters say he has rebuilt many of the institutions and policies weakened under Bolsonaro. His government has reduced hunger, expanded social programmes, strengthened environmental protections for the Amazon, and pursued a more independent foreign policy rather than simply following Washington’s dictates. Brazil has reasserted itself as an important voice in the Global South, advocating for a more multipolar world and strengthening ties with countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Although Lula remains popular and has a good chance of winning the election, many Brazilians are frustrated by sluggish economic growth, persistent concerns about crime, and political fatigue after years of bitter polarisation. His more ardent critics say Lula is a corrupt left-wing politician who has remained in public life for too long.

Lula also has detractors on the left, who accuse him of being too centrist. They point to his inability to deliver many campaign promises, harsh austerity measures under his administration, policies that expand privatisation, and his reluctance to reverse several of Bolsonaro-era regressive policies. They criticise him for moving too slowly on land reform and for accommodating powerful agribusiness and fossil fuel interests. Some also call on him to go much further in challenging US influence in Latin America, including by sending oil to Cuba as it suffers under the cruel decades-long US blockade.

Yet despite these criticisms, most of Brazil’s progressive movements remain united behind Lula. Whatever their frustrations with his government, they see defeating the far right as the overriding priority. They also recognise that Brazil’s far right is stronger, better organised, and more deeply rooted than it was a decade ago. They believe Lula’s cautious approach reflects not only political pragmatism but also a desire to avoid provoking forces that have already demonstrated a willingness to challenge democratic institutions through violence.

That became clear when the right, led by President Jair Bolsonaro, refused to accept that Lula had won the 2022 elections. On 8 January 2023, Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace in an effort to overturn the election. The similarities with the 6 January insurrection by Trump supporters are striking.

But in Brazil, Bolsonaro was actually convicted for his role in the conspiracy. He is now serving a prison sentence under house arrest and is unable to run for president. So his movement is represented by his son, 45-year-old Senator Flávio Bolsonaro.

Flávio brings his own political baggage. His reputation was damaged by allegations that members of his legislative staff were required to kick back part of their taxpayer-funded salaries in a scheme to enrich him personally. His campaign has also been shaken by revelations that he sought millions of dollars from a jailed banker to finance a film celebrating his father’s presidency in hopes of boosting his own presidential campaign. Even his own family has become a political liability. A bitter public dispute with his stepmother, former First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro, exposed deep divisions within the Bolsonaro movement and deprived him of one of the Brazilian right’s most influential voices among women voters.

As Flávio struggles to broaden his support at home, he has sought help from abroad. Argentine President Javier Milei travelled to Brazil to campaign on his behalf. Donald Trump and members of his administration have openly supported Flávio, aggravating US-Brazil tensions that recently blew up when Lula’s government refused visas to two US State Department officials on grounds that they intended to interfere in Brazil’s democratic process. The Trump administration responded by revoking the US visa of Brazil’s ambassador to Washington. The episode reflects growing concern about US attempts to influence Brazil’s election.

Perhaps the most astonishing example of foreign influence comes from Israel. Instead of announcing his presidential ambitions to the Brazilian people at home, Flávio first did so during a visit to Israel, where he accused Lula of antisemitism and pledged to move Brazil’s embassy to Jerusalem. Benjamin Netanyahu later publicly endorsed him.

At a time when so many Latin American governments have shifted to the right—or even the far right—all eyes are on Brazil. It is Latin America’s largest country, its largest economy, and one of the most influential voices in the Global South.

Polls show Lula with a narrow lead over Flávio. But if no candidate secures more than 50% of the vote in the 4 October first round, the election will go to a runoff between the top two contenders on 25 October.

If Lula is reelected, Brazil is expected to continue pushing an independent foreign policy, strengthening South-South cooperation, deepening its role in BRICS, and resisting efforts to pull Latin America back into Washington’s geopolitical orbit. A Flávio Bolsonaro victory, by contrast, would likely bring Brazil into much closer alignment with the Trump administration and revive the nationalist, authoritarian politics associated with his father’s presidency.

That is why so many Brazilians see this election as far more than a contest between two political rivals. For them, it is a choice between two fundamentally different visions of Brazil’s future—and of its place in the world.

Since the end of the 15th century, Latin America (which I define as including Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean) has served as a vast laboratory for the social, political, and economic experimentation of capitalism and colonialism. Until the United States gained independence, North America belonged to it. As the United States emerged as the world’s new capitalist power, it took the place previously occupied by European colonialism and turned South America into its laboratory.

This laboratory has two main departments: oppression and liberation. Both have remained active over the centuries, although their prominence varies depending on the historical period. It was here that the first genocides of the modern era were committed. After US independence, it was here that the first great struggles against European colonialism took place, with Simón Bolívar standing out as a leading figure. Here, for the first time and in various forms, the contradiction between political independence and the continuation of colonialism beyond the end of historical colonialism manifested itself: internal colonialism, neocolonialism, and the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 to the present day. One need only consider the gap between Haiti’s independence in 1804 and that of all the other countries on the continent during the first half of the 19th century. It was the experience of some of these countries—Honduras foremost among them—that justified the coining of the term “banana republic” by the American writer O. Henry.

In a tragic partnership with Africa, the first major contradiction between the supposedly universal principles of European liberalism and the practices of European countries outside Europe erupted here. One need only recall the criticisms of the missionary Bartolomé de las Casas. It was here that the first revolution of the modern era took place—the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920—which resulted in the first major agrarian reform, the slogan “la tierra es de quien la trabaja,” the guarantee of workers” rights, and the first nationalisations of multinational corporations.

Closer to the present day, the revolution that unleashed the most revolutionary energy in the world during the early decades of the Cold War—the Cuban Revolution—took place here. A small country, 140 kilometres from the United States, almost within the “bowels of the monster,” in the words of José Martí, defied the imperial power, promised to expand across the rest of the continent, and was prepared to share its strength with anti-colonial movements on other continents—as Angola and Namibia eloquently attest.

Strengthened by the hope for social justice that the Cuban Revolution fostered, the progressive democratic forces in other countries on the continent attempted structural reforms in the following years, particularly regarding labour rights and land ownership. This was the case in Brazil under João Goulart (1961–1964). He was overthrown by a military coup orchestrated by the CIA and backed by Lyndon Johnson’s White House, with a naval force on standby off the Brazilian coast. With the military dictatorships that followed—in Chile between 1973 and 1990, and in Argentina between 1976 and 1983—the “department of oppression” within the Latin American laboratory was consolidated.

Since the Latin American laboratory has two departments, the intensification of oppression did not stifle the struggle for liberation. It was also in Latin America that, ten years after the Cuban Revolution, the first experiment in democratic socialism of the Cold War era took place. I am referring to the Chile of Salvador Allende, who was elected president in 1970. Unlike the Cuban Revolution, this experiment sought to achieve socialist goals through liberal democratic means and was not deterred by the failure of similar attempts in Europe, particularly in post-World War I Germany. It ended three years later with a coup d’état orchestrated by Henry Kissinger and the CIA—Latin America’s 9/11.

The department of oppression then launched in Chile the great experiment of the second half of the 20th century—an experiment that continues to this day and now extends throughout the capitalist world. At stake is the management of the contradictory relationship between neoliberal capitalism and democracy. The experiment operates on two hypotheses. The first is the total incompatibility between neoliberalism and democracy. The second is the compatibility of the two through the dismantling of all democratic instruments that constitute an obstacle to the advance of neoliberalism—an advance that is considered and desired to be unstoppable.

In a very brief summary, neoliberalism is the version of capital that responded to the most recent crisis of accumulation (recent until just a short while ago) with a handful of solutions. The market is the great social regulator, not only of economic relations but also of social and political relations. The privatisation of the state-owned enterprise sector. The deregulation of economic activity—or rather, its “re-regulation”—to transform the state into yet another instrument of accumulation. The reduction of social policies to a minimum through the transformation of public goods into businesses, particularly in healthcare, education, the pension system, scientific research, and, more recently, the provision of religious services. All of this results in a massive transfer of income from the working and middle classes (where they exist) to various sectors of the capitalist-colonialist ruling class. Neoliberalism enshrines the dichotomy between the poor and the rich, when in reality this dichotomy pits large, impoverished majorities against the enrichment of small minorities.

The first hypothesis dominated the initial period of this experiment. Milton Friedman, the architect of the neoliberal economic reforms implemented by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, acknowledged in a 1994 interview with a German newspaper that some of the desirable reforms could only be implemented under a dictatorship. The second hypothesis dominated the phase that began in 2009. I designate the two phases as follows: “Between dictatorship and advanced democracy or democratic revolution” and “Between decent democracy, ditamole, or hybrid war.”

Between dictatorship and advanced democracy or democratic revolution

It is worth bearing in mind that the Latin American laboratory always maintains both departments and that the visibility of one or the other fluctuates over time. The military coups in Brazil in 1964, in Uruguay and Chile in 1973, and in Argentina in 1976 sought to confirm that capitalism is incompatible with democracy. Democracy raises expectations among the working classes for a better life—expectations that cannot be realised without challenging the unequal distribution of social wealth, a distribution that the capitalist class imposes to maintain and consolidate its economic, social, and political power. Repression, assassinations, disappearances, and exile did not prevent the liberation department from continuing to function, both in ideas and in practice.

On the intellectual front, the major theoretical innovation was dependency theory, proposed by intellectuals who were often in exile. I will limit myself to the Brazilian case. In education, the monumental work of Paulo Freire stands out. In the field of social sciences, the dependency theory of the early Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Theotônio dos Santos, Vânia Bambirra, and Ruy Mauro Marini. The latter coined a concept that remains in use today: subimperialism. With this term, Marini characterised Brazil’s role under the dictatorship within the regional context of US imperialism.

On the political front, the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, from 1979 to 1990, was the liberation movement that, after the Cuban Revolution, most inspired progressives across the continent and the world. It was an innovative movement with a strong component of progressive Catholicism rooted in liberation theology. After centuries of active complicity with colonialism, capitalism, and dictatorship, the Catholic Church took on the risks that Jesus of Nazareth faced by standing in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed. It was also a revolutionary process that unfolded amid intense imperialist intervention, in the form of the Contras—the armed groups that the US funded and trained to overthrow the revolution.

Popular opposition to the dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Chile would lead to the return of democracy in 1983, 1985, 1985, and 1990, respectively. A weakened democracy emerged, sapped by years of dictatorship and, in the case of Chile, showing no commitment to addressing the social devastation caused by neoliberalism.

From the start of the new millennium, however, these countries sought, in various ways, to deepen democracy along social-democratic lines: less social injustice, greater state intervention in the economy, and more robust social policies. They drew inspiration from the post-World War II European tradition and from their own past—Peronism and Getulism. In Brazil, this process unfolded during the terms of the Workers” Party, under the presidencies of Lula da Silva (2003–2010, 2023–) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016). In Argentina, the presidency of Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) deserves special mention. In Uruguay, the presidency of Pepe Mujica (2010–2015). In Chile, the presidencies of Michelle Bachelet (2006–2010, 2014–2018) and Gabriel Boric (2022–2026). Let us not forget Paraguay and the progressive government of former Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo, who served as president from 2008 to 2012, nor Honduras under the presidency of Manuel Zelaya (2006–2009).

Fuelled by progressive governments and encouraged by their relative successes, the popular movement gained strength across the continent beginning in the last decade of the millennium, particularly the indigenous movement, which became a major political force in countries as diverse as Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, and Chile. In 1994, the great Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico captured the interest and sympathy of the entire progressive world and promised new forms of activism, moving beyond the old dualism between reform and revolution.

In 2001, the World Social Forum was founded in Porto Alegre, and I was a dedicated activist with it for fifteen years. It was a movement of social movements from around the world, headquartered in the Brazilian city because that was where the most innovative experiments in participatory democracy at the local level had emerged, through an initiative of the Workers” Party under the inspiring leadership of Olívio Dutra and Tarso Genro.

In the wake of this multifaceted progressive mobilisation, the first decade of the millennium witnessed three major political innovations. They constituted a particularly ambitious experiment in liberation—at least in terms of their objectives. They adopted the name “revolution” or its equivalent to underscore the determination to break with the injustice historically entrenched on the continent. I am referring to the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, under the leadership of Hugo Chávez (1999–2013); the Citizen Revolution in Ecuador, under the leadership of Rafael Correa (2007–2017); and the Proceso de Cambio in Bolivia, led by Evo Morales (2006–2019), the first indigenous president of the modern era.

These were very distinct processes, but all presented themselves as a radical break with the recent past. The establishment of constituent assemblies symbolised this break and gave rise to new constitutions aimed at a genuine refounding of the state. In Venezuela, the 1999 Constitution. In Ecuador, the 2008 Constitution. In Bolivia, the 2009 Constitution. To make my position on them clear, I served as a consultant on both the Ecuadorian and Bolivian constitutions regarding the issues of plurinationality, the rights of indigenous peoples, and legal pluralism.

The transformative nature of these constitutions is evident in Article 1 of each. I quote:

Constitution of Venezuela, Article 1: “The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is irrevocably free and independent and bases its moral heritage and its values of freedom, equality, justice, and international peace on the doctrine of Simón Bolívar, the Liberator. Independence, freedom, sovereignty, immunity, territorial integrity, and national self-determination are inalienable rights of the nation.”

Constitution of Ecuador, Article 1: “Ecuador is a constitutional state of rights and justice; it is social, democratic, sovereign, independent, unitary, intercultural, plurinational, and secular. It is organised as a republic and governed in a decentralised manner. Sovereignty resides in the people, whose will is the foundation of authority, and is exercised through the organs of public power and the forms of direct participation provided for in the Constitution. The non-renewable natural resources within the territory of the State belong to its inalienable, irrevocable, and imprescriptible patrimony.”

Constitution of Bolivia, Article 1: “Bolivia is constituted as a unitary, social, rule-of-law, plurinational, and community-based state—free, independent, sovereign, democratic, intercultural, decentralised, and endowed with autonomies. Bolivia is founded on political, economic, legal, cultural, and linguistic plurality and pluralism within the framework of the country’s integration process.”

The legal and political nature of these constitutions was so innovative that it gave rise to a new conception of constitutionalism, known as “new Latin American constitutionalism,” “transformative constitutionalism,” or “constitutionalism of the South.” They proposed a new organisation of the state, with additional organs of sovereignty beyond the traditional three (legislative, executive, and judicial); the radicalisation of democratic participation beyond the liberal canon; and a strong conception of sovereignty, which included greater state intervention in the economy and national control over natural resources. In Ecuador and Bolivia, a strong constitutional presence of indigenous national identity was also proposed, with the adoption in the Constitution—for the first time in Latin American history—of concepts in non-colonial languages: Quechua and Aymara. Liberal-style democracy was maintained but radicalised through the introduction of forms of participatory and community-based democracy.

The socio-political nature of these processes can be described, using a concept coined by the Bolivian social scientist René Zavaleta Mercado, as national-popular movements, with a strong emphasis on progressive nationalism grounded in popular sovereignty and national control of natural resources. The political rhetoric that fuelled them and the practices into which they were translated lent credibility to the recovery and reinvention of the historical memory of socialism in the form of “21st-century socialism.”

Social and political experimentation in the “department of liberation” of the great Latin American laboratory did not occur solely at the national level. It was during this period that Latin American countries achieved their greatest capacity to organise themselves without the tutelage of their “big brother” to the North—that is, outside the Organisation of American States, which had always been dominated by the United States. Largely on the initiative of Hugo Chávez, several regional cooperation organisations were created with an egalitarian logic, based on complementarity, the likes of which had never been seen before on the continent.

Thus emerged ALBA, UNASUR, the Bank of the South, and CELAC. ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, was founded as a bloc for political, social, and economic cooperation among Latin America and the Caribbean. Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez founded it in Havana in 2004 as a counterpoint and alternative to the free trade agreement the US sought to impose on Latin America (FTAA, Free Trade Area of the Americas), a project that had sparked strong political and social opposition across the continent.

UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, was established in 2008 as an intergovernmental bloc for regional integration aimed at uniting the countries of South America through political coordination, social projects, and cooperation on infrastructure. Its first secretary-general was Néstor Kirchner.

The Bank of the South was established in 2009 as a multilateral financial organisation with the goal of promoting the regional integration of South American countries and reducing their dependence on hegemonic multilateral institutions, namely the IMF and the World Bank. The agreement was signed by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela.

CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, was established in 2010 as a regional international organisation covering Latin America and the Caribbean. The first meeting was held in Caracas in 2011.

This entire regional institutional framework was a response to the social devastation caused by neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, when the United States imposed—with few restrictions—financial domination, unequal trade, and access to the subcontinent’s natural resources on the countries of the region. It was a bold alternative to the Monroe Doctrine and the resulting transformation of the subcontinent into the US.s “backyard.” The strength of this alternative lay in the strength of the states that promoted it. It gradually faded away during the second decade of the millennium due to the convergence of three factors, which I mention in no particular order of priority: leadership errors, fifth columns within the ruling classes dissatisfied with their relative loss of power, and aggression and encirclement by US imperialism, which, as Ruy Mauro Marini noted, was increasingly supported by the sub-imperialism of the European Union and Israel.

Between decent democracy, “ditamole,” or hybrid war

The department of oppression of the great Latin American laboratory—run by US imperialism and its internal and external accomplices—watched with concern the advances of the department of liberation. During the first decade of the millennium, it had focused on the tragic events of its own 11 September 2001, and their aftermath, particularly the illegal war against Iraq in 2003. To some extent, it had paid less attention to what was happening on the subcontinent. Alarmed by the progressive and autonomist energy emerging in its own backyard, it decided to intensify its paternalistic interference. This interference, which continues to this day, has gone through two phases, corresponding to two complementary processes of undermining democracy and transforming it into a docile instrument of imperial interests.

The first phase consists of transforming, through soft coups, decent democracies into truncated, authoritarian ones. There is no violent rupture with democratic processes. Instead, the authoritarian components of democratic regimes are reinforced in order to achieve, at least in part, the same objectives that a dictatorial path would yield. To characterise this distortion of democracy, I draw on the concept of “ditamole,” coined by political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell, as a counterpoint to dictatorship (“ditadura”). In fact, there is a transition from a decent democracy to an indecent, authoritarian, truncated democracy. The distortion can vary in intensity, depending on the “needs” of external interference and its internal allies.

The second phase intensifies the distorted democracy through openly anti-democratic and violent interventions, which may include assassination attempts, economic sanctions, embargoes, the confiscation of reserves held in international banks, and the expulsion of digital technology. Thus begins a hybrid war between democracy and dictatorship. The dictatorship creeps in slowly, drop by drop, until one day citizens wake up and realise they no longer live in a democracy. The goal is for the vast majority not to attach any importance to this discovery in the immediate term.

The idea of the two phases merely highlights the different emphasis placed on the means employed. In the first phase, the methods favoured in the second phase may be used on an exceptional basis. This is the case in Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez was the target of several assassination attempts from early on and where, to this day, the causes of his death remain unclear. Cuba is a particularly tragic case because the Cuban Revolution, for many reasons—including being too close to the “bowels of the monster”—did not adopt the liberal democratic shift seen in other countries on the subcontinent. For more than sixty years, it has been subjected to the most violent imperial interference, characteristic of the second phase. In addition to invasion attempts, embargoes, and sanctions of every kind, it is estimated that the CIA made 638 attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.

The first phase (2009–2026)

The memory of the atrocities committed during the dictatorships and the new legitimacy that democracy had acquired on the subcontinent precluded the traditional recourse to coups d’état and the establishment of dictatorships with the active participation of armed forces trained at the infamous School of the Americas in Columbus, Georgia. The decision was made to resort to democratic instruments, manipulating their use until the desired results were achieved. Initially, these results consisted of removing leaders of progressive change and actively intervening in subsequent electoral processes so that “US-friendly” governments would emerge from the polls.

This type of intervention was dubbed a “soft coup,” as it occurred without military violence and under a democratic façade, sometimes centred on the courts, sometimes on parliaments. The coups were “soft” only for those who carried them out. For those who suffered them, they were extremely violent. Thus followed the coup in Honduras against President Manuel Zelaya (2009), in Paraguay against President Fernando Lugo (2012), in Brazil against President Dilma Rousseff (2016), and, again in Brazil, the judicial coup aimed at decapitating the leadership of the Workers” Party and disqualifying the front-runner for the 2018 presidential election, Lula da Silva. This soft coup—undoubtedly the most far-reaching on the continent—went by the name of “Operation Car Wash” and lasted from 2014 to 2021.

Also worth mentioning is the soft coup in Bolivia against Evo Morales in 2019 and the judicial persecutions against Argentina’s former president, Cristina Kirchner, and Ecuador’s former president, Rafael Correa, which have been ongoing for more than a decade.

This wave of soft coups has caused profound political and social damage to the targeted countries, as well as personal harm to the leaders who suffered them. I will limit myself to the case of Brazil. These coups led to the election of a far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who, among other harmful actions, adopted a policy of denial during the COVID-19 pandemic—a policy which, according to estimates by the WHO and Oxfam, caused between 120,000 and 400,000 preventable deaths had the globally recommended control measures been implemented. It would be difficult to enumerate the personal harms. Suffice it to say that Lula da Silva, the current president, was wrongfully imprisoned for 580 days.

Despite the prominent role played by the forces of oppression during this period, the forces of liberation were not inactive. The great Latin American laboratory remained true to itself. Three examples suffice to illustrate that imperial interference was not always entirely successful.

Brazil

In the case of Brazil, the soft coup against the Workers” Party governments—and above all against its historic leader, Lula da Silva—did not achieve the success the coup plotters had hoped for. The judicial persecution against Lula was exposed; he was re-elected president in 2022 and is now a candidate for reelection in the October elections. One cannot, however, say that the soft coup failed entirely. The Brazil to which Lula has returned as president is a different country from the one that existed when he was arrested. And the difference is for the worse. It is a much more conservative country, with a parliament undermined by the coup-mongering and far-right strategies of the previous period, socially more unjust, and with far less room to manoeuvre to reverse the situation in favour of the working classes. It is far more subject to the conservative political exploitation of religion—especially neo-Pentecostal evangelicalism—and has a population that is more misinformed by social media and more vulnerable to the politics of hate. The work of the department of oppression over nearly a decade has not been in vain for the interests of US imperialism and its internal allies.

The second and third examples refer to two countries that were absent from the progressive wave that swept across the subcontinent during the first decade of the millennium: Mexico and Colombia.

Mexico

Mexico, like Cuba, has a revolutionary past—albeit a much more distant one—and lies very close to the “bowels of the monster.” Unlike Cuba, it is a vast country with immense natural resources, rich cultural diversity, an impressive pre-colonial history, complex economic, social, and cultural development, and a political system that transitioned peacefully from a single revolutionary party to a multiparty system. It is also a country with high levels of both common and political violence—which are not always easy to distinguish from one another—and has perhaps the most diverse historical experience of relations with the US, marked by war and diplomacy, land theft and free trade agreements, political dependence on the Mexican diaspora, and the deportation of emigrants.

Mexico remained on the sidelines of the progressive wave of the first decade of the millennium. In 2018, however, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) won the election. He had already won previous presidential elections, but electoral fraud successfully blocked—for some time—the project of change he had announced, the 4T. The 4T is the fourth transformation, the first three being the War of Independence (1810–1821), the War of Reform (1858–1861), and the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). As AMLO himself put it, the 4T would bring the reform processes carried out by the previous transformations to an orderly and peaceful conclusion. The promised changes prioritised the fight against corruption, the strengthening of democracy through public referendums, freedom of expression and religion, constitutional reform, energy sovereignty, and the improvement of living conditions for the working classes in terms of wages, social rights—with special attention to public health and education—and pensions.

It was a social-democratic programme that allies and opponents labelled as left-wing, centre-left, or populist. The truth is that when he left the presidency in 2024, AMLO left behind a country better than the one he had found in 2018. The success of his policies is reflected in the political prominence of MORENA—the party, which began as a movement, that has always supported him. It was also this success, combined with the candidate’s own merits, that made possible the election of Claudia Sheinbaum, his successor and the one who carries on the 4T.

From this, we can conclude that AMLO’s progressive government flourished—despite unavoidable difficulties and ambiguities—during the period when US imperialism had once again turned its primary attention to its own backyard. From the empire’s perspective, the strategy of interference in the first phase had not been entirely successful.

Colombia

Colombia was the other major country on the subcontinent absent from the progressive wave of the first decade of the millennium. Like Mexico, it is a vast country, extremely rich in natural resources, biodiversity, and cultural diversity. A country that, except for a brief period (1953–1957), has always been governed by a democratic regime, but where, just as in Mexico, common and political violence has always dominated the lives of its citizens. In fact, organised political violence in Colombia has been far more intense than in Mexico, manifesting in the emergence of guerrilla groups that have shaped political life—and above all, the lives of rural communities—from the late 1950s to the present, despite successive peace processes, the most recent of which took place in 2016. In recent decades, the violence of the guerrillas has been compounded—ostensibly to combat it—by the violence of the paramilitaries, private far-right groups that call themselves “self-defence groups.” Colombia is one of the most unequal countries on the continent, where the wealthiest 1% controls 40% of the national wealth.

Colombia has traditionally been the United States” most loyal ally on the continent. For this reason, and due to the volume of financial and military aid it receives, it has even been considered the “Israel of Latin America.” When, in June 2021, the UN General Assembly voted on a resolution calling for an end to the US economic embargo against Cuba, Colombia did not vote in favour. It abstained, alongside Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

In 2000, Colombia signed an ambitious bilateral military and diplomatic agreement with the US, Plan Colombia. The plan injected billions of dollars to modernise the Colombian Armed Forces, combat drug cartels, and weaken insurgent groups. By 2015, $10 billion had been invested in the Colombian Armed Forces without achieving any of the objectives, except for strengthening the repressive capacity of those forces, which was directed at combating internal enemies rather than external ones, as was their original purpose. Measures that were highly problematic from the standpoint of human health and the environment were also employed, particularly the spraying of crops with herbicides banned in many countries, including glyphosate.

The goal of social development announced in Plan Colombia was never achieved. On the contrary, the country became more unequal; social unrest, precarious living conditions, and a lack of opportunities increased, and youth unemployment worsened. In April 2021, a popular uprising erupted in the outlying neighbourhoods of Cali, with massive youth participation. Despite heavy police and military repression, the uprising persisted for months, occupying streets and squares. It gave rise to new forms of mobilisation and intergenerational participation, such as community kitchens where the cooks were mostly the mothers of the young protesters, and “ecologies of knowledge,” such as the classes taught by university professors who identified with the struggle at a people’s university created to discuss topics of interest to the protesters. This was the Cali Commune, which is still evident today, among other things, in the magnificent ten-meter-tall collective sculpture titled “Resiste.”ten-metre-tall

This movement inspired other resistance movements in cities across the country, and the accumulation of forces culminated in 2022 with the election of the first left-wing president in Colombian history, Gustavo Petro. Petro committed himself to fighting for “total peace,” improving the living conditions of the working classes, and defending the country’s sovereignty and self-determination—especially regarding the management of its vast natural resources. From the outset, he revealed what his term in office would later confirm: he was the head of state who, in the contemporary world, most eloquently articulated the ecological consciousness that must guide future generations. The speeches he delivered at the United Nations and other international gatherings will go down in the history of the environmental movement.

Petro’s Colombia was yet another case in which US imperialism was forced to conclude that the soft strategies of the first phase had failed or outlived their usefulness.

(To be continued in Part 2: “Latin America—The Great Laboratory, Part 1: Today”)

The Ebola outbreak—on track to becoming the deadliest known in the world—has spread to a sixth province in the northeastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), on the border with the Central African Republic (CAR). ​

A motorcycle taxi rider, who had travelled from Isiro, capital of the neighbouring Haut-Uélé province, died in the Bas-Uélé province’s capital, Buta, after receiving treatment in several hospitals. He posthumously tested positive for the Bundibugyo virus causing the current outbreak.

Jean Kaseya, the director general of the continent’s top health body, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said on Thursday, 13 August, that this is the first known case in Bas-Uélé.

The vastness of the province and its poor transport and communication infrastructure pose a challenge to an effective health response, complicated further by the presence of thousands of refugees who have fled violence in the neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR).

Armed violence is also hampering the response by health authorities in the other five provinces where the outbreak has spread, including North Kivu and South Kivu, large parts of whose mineral-rich land are occupied by the Rwandan army and its front, the M23 armed group.

The news of the outbreak reaching a sixth province came only a day after Tedros Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), warned that the outbreak is snowballing into the deadliest known in history.

“At its current pace [of spread], it’s on track to eclipse the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014 to 2016,” Ghebreyesus told the reporters on 12 August.​

That outbreak a decade ago had spread to 10 countries, including the US and Italy, and infected about 28,600 people, killing over 11,000 of them, over the course of two years. In the first three months of that outbreak, 528 cases were confirmed in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, 337 of whom had died.

In the same time period since the current outbreak was declared in the DRC on 15 May, 4,665 confirmed cases had been reported as of 12 August. A total of 2,184 of them had died. With 3,979 of the confirmed cases and 1,726 of the deaths, Ituri, the epicentre of the outbreak, remains the worst-affected province.​

The latest incidents of Israeli settler violence in the villages of Qusra and Kour, located in the northern occupied West Bank, have again caught international attention, reaching the halls of the United Nations with a gravity that, sadly, is unlikely to have much effect. Towards the end of July, the settlers had set their sights on local mosques, which they set on fire. From 9 August, three families in Qusra—making up 15 people in all—were confined to their homes in terror, running out of food and necessities. (Settlers had deprived them of access to water and power.) When Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances attempted to deliver food and water to these homes, they were attacked.

Unusually, this conduct drew public commentary from the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, a devout Christian Zionist not normally given to criticising Israeli actions in the West Bank, let alone anywhere else. “Actions by those who carried out this horrific act of terror meant to intimidate and harass this family are disgusting,” wrote Huckabee in a post on X. “No excuse for such thuggish behaviour.” The US embassy had been “VERY involved & the IDF & Israel Police have gone at our request to remove the Israeli terrorists doing this.” (More to the point, interest might have been encouraged by the fact that one of the besieged family members was a dual US citizen.)

Rather than restraining the agitators, the Israeli military proceeded to force two of the besieged families, along with six other neighbouring families, to exit their homes for several hours on 13 August. UN News reported that families were subsequently relocated to just one home, also imperilled by the settlers. According to the testimony of one resident, “instead of removing the attackers, the Israeli forces removed the attacked families, while allowing the settlers to stay all this time.” The mayor of Qusra, Abdel Azim Wadi, regarded the role of the Israeli military as pernicious and distinctly not committed to removing the settlers. “We saw them praying together, barbecuing together and dancing together.” They were hardly “interested in helping the besieged families.” The IDF even goes so far as to run a hotline known as War Room C, intended for use by settlers to report on building activities by Palestinians in Area C. The insinuation of fault is clear. The UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner summed up matters: “These criminal actions by the settlers, supported or acquiesced to by Israel, the Occupying power, are making life unbearable for these Palestinian families and are clearly aimed at forcing them to leave their home and their land.”

On 11 August, Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Process, told the 15-member Security Council that what was unfolding in the West Bank was the result of “decades of unresolved conflict that has deepened the unlawful Israeli occupation, driven the Palestinian Authority to the brink of collapse and undermined the prospects of an independent, viable and sovereign Palestinian State.”

The picture sketched by Alakbarov is a dismal one, rendering Israeli authorities complicit with the unruly urges of the settlers. (Some 26% of territory in the West Bank is already regarded as “state land,” a status enabling it to be turned over for the construction of new settlements.) Since the start of 2026, approximately 12,360 housing units have been approved or advanced by the Israeli authorities in the West Bank. Hefty sums are being allocated for expanding the settlements, including $431 million in aid of 34 new settlements. The year has also seen the deaths of 76 Palestinians in the territory, due to the work of Israeli forces or settlers. Of this complement, 18 have been children. Three Israelis have also been killed in confrontations with Palestinians. The displacement of the Palestinian population due to settler violence, demolitions and evictions continues with inexorable remorselessness: some 3,800, almost half of them children, have suffered that fate. “Many incidents occurred in the presence of Israeli forces,” insists Alakbarov.

The momentum towards annexation is also being given impetus by plans announced by the Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, to replace the army in the West Bank with civilian police forces. Police would, according to Katz’s office, “establish an appropriate force to handle and address civilian matters,” with the military exclusively tasked with combating “Palestinian terrorism” and protecting borders and communities. The move received much support from various settler figures, with Yisrael Ganz, head of the Regional Binyamin Council in the West Bank, proposing that the next step be taken: the cancellation of the Oslo Accords and the application of “full Israeli sovereignty” over the territory. “The time has come to move from temporary management to the full application of Israeli law.”

The official policy of the Netanyahu government is to regard the attacks as the nasty work of errant juveniles or delinquents who should know better. The thesis on delinquency is not one that holds up when placed alongside the official support for settlement expansion and de facto annexation stemming from Israel proper. The events in Qusra, as with elsewhere in the West Bank, suggest a script of insidious collaboration against the Palestinians, delivered with a forked tongue. The painful implication here is that temporary measures involving the besieging of villagers, and half-hearted efforts by the IDF to combat them, can only inevitably result in dispossession. And that, in the end, is the point.

Iran rejected fresh US threats about an indefinite naval blockade and other tactics of economic warfare over the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, 13 August, calling them a bigger miscalculation than the joint US-Israeli war launched against the country in February.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reacted to threats made by US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth that his country can keep the naval blockade on Iran indefinitely. He warned the Donald Trump administration against being yet again deceived by “fake intelligence.”

Iran also rejected successive claims made by Trump and his energy secretary, Chris Wright, about the control over the Strait of Hormuz and the normalisation of oil exports through it.

“The US has total control over the Strait of Hormuz. I think we will keep it,” Trump had said in a social media post on Wednesday.

Wright has repeatedly claimed that energy supplies from the Persian Gulf region have almost returned to pre-war levels. He made the claims again on Thursday, claiming if one combines the energy traffic through the sea with the traffic through upgraded land infrastructure, the volume of oil exports from the region would reach around 15 million barrels per day.

According to various calculations, the pre-war oil export from the region was around 18.7 million barrels per day.

Iran dismissed US claims, with Ali Ozamaei, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) navy, claiming on Thursday that “the strait is closed, and reality must be seen in the field, not in the statements and remarks of US officials,” Press TV reported on Friday.

Earlier, the IRGC central command had called claims of US control over the strait “nothing but fabricated lies and falsehoods” and “a reflection of the US army’s desperation and helplessness.”

Various independent sources have also questioned Wright’s claims about 9 million barrels of oil leaving the region through the strait alone and the rest through new land routes, calling these claims a massive exaggeration of the reality.

Trump’s misinformation campaign

Iran has accused Trump and other US officials of “disseminating misinformation” related to the volume of oil leaving through the strait in order to stop oil prices from rising further before the US midterm elections.

Analysts also argue that statements about the normalization of the energy trade and claims about control over the strait is part of the Trump administration’s attempts to declare victory in the war which otherwise is seen to have gone completely in the opposite direction.

According to data released by trade analytics platform Kpler, only eight ships transited through the strait on Tuesday, five on Wednesday, and nine on Thursday. This is even below August’s average of 12.

Around 130–140 ships used to transit from the Strait of Hormuz before the beginning of the US-Israeli war on Iran in late February, which supplied for around a quarter of the world’s energy needs.

Tensions are now also rising in the Bab-al-Mandab and the Red Sea, which has been used as an alternative route to export Saudi oil after the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz, global oil supplies are expected to be affected yet again. This may push the prices upward.

Iran has defied US pressure, strikes, and intensified economic warfare, and refused to lift its restrictions on the traffic through the strait, claiming it would only be normalized if the war against it ends and other conditions met such as the withdrawal of sanctions, lifting of the naval blockade and release of all its frozen assets overseas.

This would remain the case irrespective of the fate of its ongoing talks with Oman to devise a common mechanism to manage the traffic through it, Iran has said.

Meanwhile, Scott Bessent, US treasury secretary, issued fresh threats of intensified economic warfare against Iran in the coming days.

“We are going to apply measures like have never been seen in the history of economic isolation on a country” Bessent said during an interview on Thursday claiming “it will be a combination of economic isolation like the world has never seen before, and the continued blockade in the Strait of Hormuz that will keep anything from going in or out of the Iranian ports.”

Introduction: The Crisis of Traditional Methods in the Age of Algorithms

It is difficult to wage the battle for socialist liberation in the twenty-first century with the tools of the twentieth. We live in an age dominated by algorithms. The influence of digitisation and artificial intelligence is spreading into media, culture, education, work, and daily life. Political and economic strategies are increasingly shaped through the analysis of vast data sets and the computational processing of political and economic decisions. The left, therefore, faces an existential question: how can movements that still work and organise themselves by traditional logic withstand a digital capitalism that has reached an unprecedented level of technological advancement?

When left-wing organisations continue to rely on traditional methods in their discourse, organisation, and work, they face a major challenge in confronting capitalism. Their opponent commands an advanced arsenal of digital, economic, political, military, and media tools. It evolves by the minute in every field, adapts to its crises however deep they run, and forms class alliances across its own internal divisions. Yet a considerable part of the left still clings to old methods and means that can no longer keep pace with the demands of this renewed confrontation. This is the reality we witness today, and it makes the need to develop and renew these methods more urgent than ever.

In earlier articles, I described this vast digital gap through the image of the elephant and the ant. But after the rapid, immense growth digital capitalism has undergone, and because there still exist only a few influential left-wing and progressive digital alternatives, I now see, drawing on my professional work with algorithms and digital governance, that this gap has widened even further. It is a hard, bitter reality we must acknowledge openly. Only from that acknowledgement can we begin a serious consideration of the possible alternatives.

Marx and Engels: Science and Technology as a Double-Edged Sword

Science and technology were a central pillar of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels” thought. They saw in them tools that could be used either for liberation or to entrench class domination. Under capitalism, scientific and technological progress is used to maximise the bourgeoisie’s profit and to exploit manual and intellectual workers, deepening alienation and class inequality. Marx and Engels recognised, however, that these contradictions carry revolutionary possibilities that can help build a more just socialist system. Today their view appears even more urgent in the age of digital capitalism, where technology has become a new instrument of control while still holding the potential to liberate humanity.

Their deep grasp of the dialectical nature of history and society led them to see scientific progress as a material and social force that reflects class power relations. It is a double-edged sword: it carries immense liberating potential, yet is also used to deepen exploitation and entrench capitalist domination. Their thought demonstrated how material analysis can unite science with class struggle, turning knowledge into a force for changing the world rather than merely a means of understanding it. Their intellectual project calls clearly for moving beyond the boundaries of the capitalist order toward a more humane future, grounded in the liberating possibilities that technological progress opens up.

In Marx’s analysis of capitalism, technology occupied a central place in exposing the system’s fundamental contradictions. He saw that machines, which represented the pinnacle of scientific progress in his time, did not improve people’s lives or free them from the burdens of hard labour. Instead, they became effective means of accumulating capitalist profit and increasing the exploitation of workers. This use of technology produced surplus value by reducing the need for human labour, leaving the proletariat in a state of alienation, in which the worker is severed from both the production process and the fruits of their own labour. This contradiction was no accident for Marx. It was a fundamental part of the mechanisms of capitalism that turn science and technology into instruments of class domination.

Engels, for his part, saw science as a tool for understanding social conflict more deeply. His engagement with scientific discovery led him to argue that conflict is not confined to human society but extends into nature as well. He rejected biological determinism, however, insisting that the laws governing nature differ from the social laws shaped by conscious human action. Engels thereby added a scientific dimension to dialectical materialism: he showed that the laws of dialectics apply to both nature and society, reinforcing an understanding of historical transformation as part of one comprehensive evolutionary movement.

This approach, revising theory in light of historical change, was not foreign to Marx himself. He and Engels acknowledged it explicitly in their joint preface to the German edition of the Communist Manifesto, published in London in 1872, twenty-four years after the original manifesto appeared. There, they wrote that its general principles remained, on the whole, correct, but that some of its practical details, particularly the revolutionary programme set out at the end of the second chapter, had become outdated and needed an entirely different formulation. This owed to the immense industrial development the world had undergone since 1848, the expansion of the working class’s political organisation, and the lessons drawn from the Paris Commune of 1871. Had Marx been alive today, he would, by the same logic, have pointed out that digital capitalism represents an advanced stage of the very same exploitative dynamics he described in the nineteenth century, only carried out through more intelligent, concealed, and far-reaching methods of control. Its dominance is no longer confined to owning factories and raw materials. It now extends to controlling the flow of data and to directing and controlling human behaviour and consciousness, reaching as far as digital violence, repression, and militarisation through algorithms, and has, in many cases, through its alliance with the far right, become a digital fascism in the fullest sense of the word. The transformations brought about by the digital age may open the way for new forms of socialist struggle and organisation, provided we make use of them and engage with them with scientific precision.

This is a direct demand imposed by the realities that manual and intellectual workers live with the world over. Beyond its traditional exploitative character, digital capitalism exercises its power through algorithms that today no longer merely organise the flow of information but have come to control most aspects of daily life. They also determine which ideas reach public consciousness and which are erased or marginalised. This profound shift in the structure of class power compels the left to rethink, from the ground up, both its analytical tools and its forms of organisation on the ground.

Technology as Capitalism’s Tool for Overcoming Its Crises, and Scientific Flexibility as a Modern Class Struggle

The struggle over technology is not directed against science itself. It is directed against the ruling powers” monopoly over it. Artificial intelligence and technology in general should not be seen as a threat in themselves but as an arena whose contours are shaped by the balance of social, political, and economic power. Recent years have seen an unprecedented acceleration in the concentration of digital power among a limited number of major capitalist states and giant monopolistic corporations that control the infrastructure of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and global data. This has given them enormous economic, political, and cultural influence over the determination of humanity’s future.

Capitalism always turns, in moments of crisis, to reproducing itself through advanced scientific tools that allow it to overcome challenges without touching its exploitative core. This has played out in several instances. In the 2008 crisis, technology and scientific methods were used to rescue the financial system while the working classes were made to bear the cost of the losses. During the coronavirus pandemic, capitalism overcame the crisis by strengthening automation, artificial intelligence, and remote work, securing continued production through new mechanisms that reduced dependence on human labour and increased corporate profits at the expense of insecure working conditions for millions. Since 2023, the broad breakthrough in artificial intelligence has opened a new phase of labour market restructuring. Dependence on automation and intelligent systems has spread across numerous sectors, and concerns over the future of millions of jobs have grown, even as technology companies have reaped enormous profits from their monopoly over the new digital and knowledge infrastructure.

Taken together, these instances show how capitalism uses science as a tool to structure the system and secure its continuity and how it sometimes borrows certain socialist ideas, such as state intervention, as temporary measures to ensure stability, only to abandon them once the crisis has passed and reproduce exploitation through more advanced mechanisms.

In light of these challenges, the left must make use of scientific progress by reformulating its discourse and its tools in a methodical, precise manner. This requires modern means of analysing social issues and a realistic scientific discourse grounded in what is possible rather than merely what is desired, along with flexible organisational and leadership mechanisms capable of attracting young people who have grown up in a world dominated by technology. Investing in scientific tools does not mean embracing capitalism’s values. It is a strategy for putting them to use in the service of social justice and reducing class inequality, as a step toward the socialist alternative.

If earlier industrial revolutions changed the equations of production through the machine and steam and later through electricity and computing, the current phase, built on artificial intelligence, big data, and digital platforms, is reshaping production, work, knowledge, and human communication in a still deeper and more far-reaching way. In this age, data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence systems have become central tools for reproducing domination in relatively invisible ways: by shaping public opinion, steering individual and collective behaviour, and controlling access to knowledge and information.

Breaching the Fortress and Freeing the Tools: Toward Left-Wing Digital Alternatives

The left’s presence is receding in one of today’s key battles because it treats technology as a secondary tool. But the battle is not yet decided. Victory requires translating vision into concrete programmes of action grounded in the conscious use of technology. The left cannot remain on the defensive. It must instead be an active party in reshaping technology’s future and integrating it into its project of liberation.

Technology, however, cannot replace conscious human organisation. Real strength lies in the organised human being, capable of harnessing these tools to serve their own goals. Artificial intelligence and technology in general are effective tools for mobilisation, organisation, and analysis, but they cannot substitute for solidarity and grassroots work, which remains the essential engine of change.

As a left, we have historically succeeded in offering alternatives in economics, justice, politics, rights, and other fields, and we have always insisted on intellectual, political, organisational, and media independence. Today, however, we face a fateful challenge that strikes at this very principle: we still lack a comprehensive, independent, alternative digital vision capable of breaking capitalism’s technological chains. We remain bound by its own applications, which leave the left and its base exposed to restriction, marginalisation, repression, and infiltration. As noted earlier, the most important dialectical lesson we must grasp is that technology is not neutral. It is, in the fullest sense, an arena of class struggle. The fundamental problem does not lie in the nature of artificial intelligence or automation but in the ownership relations that govern them, that is, in their monopolisation by a handful of giant corporations and major capitalist states. This deepens the class divide and expands both the surveillance of the masses and the standardisation of human consciousness, all in the service of profit accumulation and intellectual and political dominance.

On this basis, it is no longer enough for the left to settle for the role of critic or spectator, standing outside this technology and merely criticising its exploitation from without. That alone will not bring about the desired change. It may instead keep the left confined to narrow intellectual and popular circles, far removed from the actual course of the struggle. What is required is to enter into the technological process itself and understand the logic of algorithms in order to decode and rebuild them in a liberating spirit by proposing new and bold mechanisms for using technology within democratic, participatory, and transparent systems.

We need “popular artificial intelligence and algorithms” that operate under social oversight and global and local laws, that develop through digital cooperatives with a socialist orientation, and that are transparent and open to scrutiny by all. Their aim should be to distribute wealth, organise production, address disease and poverty, and achieve social justice, serving genuine human needs rather than market whims or the reinforcement of domination and militarism. We also need open-source models and open-source progressive digital platforms, whether social networks, search engines, or others, along with collaborative technological initiatives that are not subject to the logic of commercial monopoly and that allow communities and the public to take part in managing knowledge and data and developing new technologies.

We are called upon to make the tools of this age our own. Just as Marx and Engels transformed the economic and philosophical sciences of their time, along with scientific and intellectual progress, from tools that justified the existing order into a theoretical and practical weapon in the hands of manual and intellectual workers, the left today is called upon to be an active agent in this arena. It must move from the category of “the passive user,” subject to the terms of capitalist platforms, to the category of “the alternative producer,” which puts forward open, liberated, commons-based technological alternatives.

The struggle over the power of algorithms is no longer just about the future of technology. It is also about the future of work, democracy, culture, and social justice.

Conclusion

These critical remarks are not meant to diminish the left or its recognised history in our countries. They are, rather, an attempt to strengthen a debate that remains too faint among us over the digital alternative we need. It is true that the task is not easy, that the gap is wide, and that digital capitalism is highly dominant. Yet history teaches us that nothing remains impossible in the face of sustained struggle. The working week once exceeded seventy hours. Today, in some countries, it does not exceed thirty-seven hours or less, the result of sustained struggles that once seemed like distant dreams. A century ago, women had no right to vote, to be educated, or to work outside the home. Today, in many countries, they lead governments, parliaments, and universities, thanks to a sustained feminist and left-wing struggle that never compromised, despite the uneven and harsh balance of power at its outset.

Given these immense changes and the highly advanced stage capitalism has reached, we must confront it with its own formidable weapons by making use of modern science, the digital revolution, and continuous renewal across every field, with the aim of ultimately surpassing it. It is in this context that the movement toward the Electronic-Digital Left emerges as an intellectual and organisational current that reflects a direct response to these sweeping transformations and to the growing awareness of rights and knowledge. It seeks to direct this awareness toward a radical, comprehensive socialist transformation of social, political, and economic structures, while preserving the core values that have formed the heart of Marxist and left-wing thought throughout history.

Reality has shown that left-wing organisations that continually renew and develop their discourse, tools, work, and organisation, that unite and keep pace with fresh challenges and with scientific and intellectual progress, are best able to preserve their role and influence. Currents that cling to their old methods, as discussed at the start of this article, gradually lose members and popular support, and their roles decline markedly. This is a difficult reality we observe in most countries of the world. It does not, however, rule out the existence of left-wing and progressive experiences that offer hope and provide models to build upon.

Without an active left-wing presence and joint work coordinated internationally in this field, digital capitalism will continue to determine the direction of technological development in the service of its own interests and to control humanity’s future. In the end, the left’s real strength lies in its capacity to unite grassroots human organisation with digital superiority so that the digital space becomes a supportive, effective arena, not a substitute for the struggle but a wing on which it flies toward a more humane and just socialist future.

This international dimension of the confrontation will be the subject of a forthcoming article on digital left internationalism. This article is only the beginning of an open dialogue. I invite comrades, women and men alike, locally and globally, to form joint digital working groups that explore the possibilities of building left-wing and progressive technological alternatives and lay the practical groundwork for the digital internationalism our coming struggle will need.

It was a moment that should have been a celebration of resilience—a ten-year-old girl from South Sulawesi, Citra Nur Ramadani, who had nearly dropped out of school to sell peanuts and support her disabled mother, standing before the nation as a champion karate athlete. Instead, President Prabowo Subianto, in his annual address before the assembled parliament, turned her into a punchline. “Citra, how old are you? Ten years? Well, in ten years you can date,” he said, as laughter rippled through the chamber. “You can date after you get your black belt,” he added, “so no one will dare mess with you.”

This was not a slip of the tongue. It was not harmless banter. It was a grotesque abuse of sovereign speech—a public act of grooming, performed on a national stage, ratified by the laughter of the most powerful adults in the room. And it demands an answer not just from Indonesia, but from every global strategist and policymaker who claims to care about the future of the Indo-Pacific.

Let us be brutally honest about what occurred. Indonesia has laws against this. Law No. 35 of 2014 on Child Protection defines a child as anyone under eighteen. Law No. 16 of 2019 raised the minimum marriage age to nineteen. The 2022 TPKS Law criminalises sexual violence.

Yet here was the highest authority in the land, standing before the nation, publicly scripting a child’s future around romantic availability. The legal scholar in the original analysis was correct: this is a performative contradiction of the highest order. The state can enact laws while its highest representative suspends them.

The numbers make this obscenity clear. Indonesia ranks eighth globally for absolute numbers of child brides, with 1.46 million cases. One in six Indonesian girls is married before eighteen. More than 25 million Indonesian women have been married as children.

In 2025 alone, the Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection recorded 21,352 cases of violence against children—12,338 of them sexual. Over 16,000 of those victims were girls. The Komisi Perlindungan Anak Indonesia found that 51.5 per cent of child violence victims are girls, and in 66.3 per cent of cases, the perpetrator has not even been identified.

This is the context in which a president joked about a ten-year-old’s dating future. This is the institutional betrayal—the state failing not just to protect, but to normalise the very logic that enables abuse actively.

Compare this to the region. Rodrigo Duterte’s rape jokes in the Philippines were rightly condemned as the speech of a strongman who placed himself above law and decency. Yet when Prabowo performs a structurally identical act—when he uses a child’s body as a prop for male bonding, when he invites the laughter of officials to ratify his impunity—the global response has been muted.

This is a failure of diplomatic and strategic imagination. Southeast Asian strongmen use sexualised speech to perform power. It is not a bug; it is a feature of a political order in which authority is demonstrated through masculine domination, not ethical responsibility.

The irony is staggering. Just months ago, Indonesia and UNICEF launched a US$131 million cooperation plan to build the “Golden Indonesia 2045” generation. The President himself spoke of eradicating stunting, which affects one in four Indonesian children.

He declared that no child should risk their life crossing a river to school. He called corruptors who steal from children’s food programs “barbaric.” Yet in the same breath, he turned a child into an object of adult sexual temporality.

This is the hidden curriculum of state power. The overt message is care and development. The covert message—taught through laughter, through authority, through the complicity of every official who chuckled—is that girls are future dates, not future doctors, not future leaders, not full citizens. As the original analysis noted, this is reproductive futurism in its crudest form: the child’s future is colonised by heterosexual expectation, her autonomy erased before it can emerge.

Moreover, this incident should trigger alarm bells that go far beyond Indonesia. The Indo-Pacific is defined by its youth—by the demographic dividend that could drive prosperity or instability. When a president stands before his nation and publicly scripts a ten-year-old girl’s future around dating, he is not just failing that child.

He is signalling to every girl in the archipelago that her body is public property, that her aspirations are secondary, that the state’s highest office does not take her safety seriously.

Some analysed Prabowo’s populism and his clash with economic realities. But there is a deeper clash here—between the modernising rhetoric of the “Golden Generation” and the patriarchal reality of state speech. Between the laws on the books and the performance of power on the stage.

Between the global norms Indonesia has ratified—the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the commitments to end child marriage—and the daily practice of its highest leader.

The laughter of those officials was not incidental. It was the sound of impunity being normalised. It was the sound of a culture in which power, not ethics, determines what can be said about children. It was the sound of institutional betrayal.

What is to be done? The legal route is blocked: a sitting president enjoys de facto immunity, and a joke, however grotesque, does not meet the elements of criminal prosecution. The political route is uncertain: in an entertainment-era populism, transgressive humour often strengthens rather than weakens a leader’s appeal. But the diplomatic route is open.

Australia, as Indonesia’s closest neighbour and a signatory to the same international child-protection frameworks, has a moral and strategic interest in speaking out. So do the United States, the European Union, Japan, and every nation that invests in Indonesia’s stability and development.

This is not about “cultural sensitivity” or “interfering in internal affairs.” This is about the most basic standard of civilised governance: that the highest leader of a nation does not use a ten-year-old girl as a punchline. That the state’s protection of children is not a slogan but a practice. That the future of the Indo-Pacific—a region defined by its young population—is built on the dignity of every child, not on the impunity of those in power.

The Citra incident is a diagnostic rupture. It reveals the deep structures of sovereign impunity, patriarchal developmentalism, and militarised masculinity that persist beneath the surface of Indonesia’s democratic transition. It is a reminder that laws are only as strong as the culture that enforces them, and that culture is shaped, for better or worse, by the words of those at the top.

The question for global strategists is simple: will this be forgotten in the next news cycle, or will it become a catalyst for something more? Will the international community treat this as a trivial gaffe, or will it recognise it as what it is—an obscene reminder that power, when unchecked, consumes the very children it claims to protect?

Citra Nur Ramadani deserved better. Every Indonesian girl deserves better. And every nation that claims to care about the future of this region must say so—clearly, loudly, and without apology.

The Alliance of Sahel States (AES) has condemned Nigerian President Bola Tinubu for fueling “frustrations between peoples bound by history, geography, and fraternity.”​

The bloc comprising Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger summoned the Nigerian Chargé d’Affaires to a meeting in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, on 6 August, to protest against Tinubu’s blaming the three Sahelian countries for Nigeria’s security woes.

Multiple security crises plague Nigeria: Boko Haram ravaging the north, bandit attacks in the northwest, and communal violence in the central region driven by a contest for land between farmers and herders.​

This violence is exacerbating the worsening hunger and cost of living crisis triggered by Tinubu’s ruthless implementation of the IMF-prescribed neoliberal restructuring. The economic crisis is, in turn, fuelling the violence.

In this backdrop, addressing the traditional leaders on 30 July, Bola Tinubu sought to deflect responsibility, saying, “Some of them (the terrorists) are not Nigerian. You see, the problem of insecurity in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger only exacerbates our difficulties.”​

All three countries have emerged out of mass protests amid which the regimes propped up by their former colonizer France were ousted in popularly supported coups, leading to the formation of military governments that went on to expel French troops.​

This toppling of French-backed governments began first in Mali in 2020, followed by Burkina Faso in 2022. France, whose troops were already expelled from the two countries by then, initially refused to back down and threatened war when its regime fell in Niger later in 2023, fronting the remaining countries in its neocolonial bloc, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), to invade Niger. ​

Tinubu, the chairperson of ECOWAS at the time, was keen on sending the Nigerian military—struggling to provide security within the country—to invade its neighbour to restore the ousted regime for France. However, the Nigerian parliament refused to authorise the military operation.​

On the other side, Mali and Burkina Faso came to Niger’s defense, and the three formed a military pact that has since evolved into a political and economic bloc, the AES.​

Pursuing a drastically different economic policy to the one Tinubu is implementing in Nigeria, the AES countries have expanded the public sector and exerted greater control over their mineral wealth. Their economic advances in industry and agriculture have been widely acknowledged, including in the business press.

Despite registering high economic growth, the countries are fraught with insecurity, coming under frequent large-scale attacks by a coalition of Al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM and the Tuareg separatist rebel group, the FLA. The AES maintains these groups are proxy forces used by France to derail their advancement toward sovereignty.​

However, even before these large-scale attacks began across the three countries, Niger was already coming under attack from Boko Haram, originating in Nigeria.​

Reminding the Nigerian Chargé d’Affaires of this at the meeting in Ouagadougou on 6 August, Burkina Faso’s Foreign Minister Karamoko Jean Marie Traore complained that Tinubu’s remarks demonstrate “a contempt for the sacrifice made by the Nigerien army against Boko Haram for years.”​

Nigeria’s diplomat reportedly acknowledged the AES role in combating terrorism—specifically the role of Niger in stopping attacks targeting Nigeria.​

“We are paying the price, but the real enemies are elsewhere,” added Traore. “We would have preferred a more accurate presentation of the security situation [by Tinubu], rather than placing the blame for a complex situation on neighboring countries, at the risk of fueling misunderstandings and frustrations between peoples bound by history, geography, and fraternity.”​

The Nigerian diplomat assured that he would take their note of protest to the capital, Abuja. Traore assured him that instead of condemning Nigeria for their insecurity, the AES countries chose to engage with the neighbor, insisting that they are in a “joint and shared fight.”

More than 150 years ago, scientists discovered what they termed a “greenhouse effect,” demonstrating for the first time that water vapour and carbon dioxide trapped heat. Theoretical concerns were soon raised that we might, through the practice of burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon, have inadvertently been altering our climate since the start of the industrial revolution.

In 1938 a British scientist published the first observational study suggesting that human carbon emissions were, indeed, heating the planet.

By the late 1950s, the science about global warming was so well established that legendary Hollywood filmmaker Frank Capra was hired to make a documentary, The Unchained Goddess, intended to educate the public about what then seemed a relatively far-off threat.

The film explained that the release by factories and vehicles of some six billion tonnestonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year—a paltry sum by today’s standards—was “unwittingly changing the world’s climate.”

In the 1970s scientists working for the oil companies privately confirmed to their employers that their research showed continued fossil fuel burning would dangerously raise global temperatures. The oil companies kept the information tightly under wraps for decades.

By 1982 an Exxon team had produced a chart predicting—though again confidentially—the increases in CO₂ levels in the atmosphere over time. When the chart came to light in 2019, scientists realised that the team had, in fact, correctly plotted contemporary CO₂ levels—at 415 parts per million—in what was then 37 years into the future. The Exxon team had also correctly predicted what effect this would have on global temperatures: a disastrous rise of just below 1ºC.

In 1988 NASA scientist James Hansen testified to the US Senate that he was 99 per cent certain global warming was already under way. His sounding of the alarm sparked for the first time headlines in mainstream media.

In response, the fossil fuel industry began aggressively funding “independent” think tanks to spread disinformation and create doubt about the established science.

In 2026, after more than a century of evidence-based warnings, all those predictions have been fully and catastrophically borne out—with heat records being toppled almost daily across western Europe. Drought and wild fires are the result.

And this isn’t even the worst of it. Things are going to get a whole lot hotter and a lot scarier in the years and decades ahead.

Yet here we are, a century on, still hearing variations of the same arguments of denial promoted in the mainstream from the terminally dim-witted and serially dishonest.

When I was in my early twenties, in the late 1980s, it was common to hear climate change being dismissed as a “theory” and a hoax, one supposedly cooked up by a mix of socialists hoping to bring down capitalism and a group of rapidly emerging new specialists—climate scientists—eager for funding and prestige.

We now know that the strongest evidence for climate change was actually proposed not by socialists, or even by the new breed of climate scientists, but by research conducted by the fossil fuel industries themselves. Industry executives accepted the evidence presented to them as scientifically sound decades ago, and they then worked night and day to keep the public ignorant of their findings.

The Global Climate Coalition was formed in 1989—secretly backed by Exxon, Texaco, and BP—and served as a powerful “independent” lobby group. When its own technical advisers concluded in 1995 that the science of global warming could not be denied, the coalition aggressively suppressed the report.

Another group, Informed Citizens for the Environment, set up by coal and utility companies, used advertising blitzes targeted at economically precarious groups to persuade them climate action would be harmful to their household finances.

A leaked 1998 internal memo from the American Petroleum Institute mapped out another multi-million dollar strategy, funding independent-seeming scientists to inject scepticism into mainstream debate in the media.

The goal of promoting these scientists would be to make “average citizens” and the media “understand (recognise) uncertainties in climate science.” “Victory” would be achieved, according to the memo, when climate doubt became “the conventional wisdom.”

These fake think tanks helped organise letter-writing campaigns, inundating politicians, to make it appear that there was a groundswell of opposition to any action on the climate crisis.

Remember, the oil industry launched these campaigns to deceive the public and journalists even though its own scientists had demonstrated many years earlier that continued fossil fuel burning would have catastrophic consequences.

“Maverick Science”

The promotion of climate change as a “hoax” is among the weirdest in history. Which is why only the most foolish deniers still cling to it. Nowadays most have switched scripts. “Yes, climate change is happening,” they agree, “but the climate has always changed—and that change has nothing to do with human activity.”

Except mainstream science predicted decades ago precisely the outcomes we are experiencing now and on exactly the timeline we see unfolding. That is one very astounding, and very improbable, coincidence.

Indeed, climate does change. But it does so on a planetary timescale across centuries and aeons, set by the ebbs and flows of natural phenomena, not a timescale of decades. Such rapid shifts alone are evidence of human meddling in the climate.

Scientist James Lovelock’s expertise was developed through his early work for NASA, predicting the climate on Mars through relatively primitive telescopes to help in the development of the first probes to reach our neighbouring planet. NASA’s first Mars missions were a success largely because his predictions were so accurate.

By the early 2000s, Lovelock had become a major pessimist on the consequences for life on Earth of our inaction to curb carbon emissions. In an interview with the Guardian 18 years ago, he warned that “in 20 years global warming will hit the fan.” In fact, like other climate scientists, Lovelock turned out to be a little too optimistic—the shit had hit the fan a couple of years earlier than he expected.

Let us note, the Guardian—historically considered the corporate outlet most open to the climate “debate”—dismissed him then as a “maverick,” a polite way of calling him a “crank.”

Meanwhile, “respected” veteran pundits—like BBC favourite Andrew Neil—are still peddling threadbare climate-denial conspiracies from the 1980s. The current spate of heatwaves, Neil predicted back in May, were just normal variations in weather, even though neither he nor I have ever experienced a British summer like this one. (If you think 1976 was like this, you either weren’t there or your memory is faulty.)

Here’s another perennial from the denier community: more CO₂ will apparently be beneficial to plants.

That particular prediction will prove equally short-lived. Wait for next year’s drought-fuelled food price hikes. Even the ”climate denier, TV personality turned farmer Jeremy Clarkson, has been embittered by a record fifth UK heatwave finishing off his crops. (I’m doing my best to stifle a smirk.)

It doesn’t really matter what the content of the deniers“ claims is. Any old nonsense will do if it keeps their audiences” heads buried deep in the sand.

Note that the very media pundits who for decades promoted disinformation cooked up by the fossil fuel-funded think tanks, deflating any political pressure for the radical policies needed to forestall climate chaos, are still in place. They are still being given prominent platforms to deny the climate emergency or throw up their hands as if nothing can be done.

The Telegraph newspaper recently opined that we would just have to adapt to a hotter climate—a climate for which, science has long understood, larger mammals are not suited. There is a reason the only mammals scurrying around at the time of the dinosaurs were small rodent-like creatures that spent much of the day underground, out of the heat. They are our very distant ancestors.

Amidst all of this, it is largely beside the point what our governments actually know or say. We must judge them strictly by the urgency of their actions. And on that score, it is business—big business—as usual.

Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, has been pressured by public concern into very belatedly holding an emergency COBRA meeting this week on the mounting climate crisis. His reticence till now is easily explained. Any meaningful attempt to address the climate emergency will bring him into a direct and damaging confrontation not only with the fossil fuel industries but also with almost the entire corporate sector.

After all, it is not just fossil fuel companies growing fat on our continuing burning of their products. Many other corporations profit from maintaining the status quo, including, among others, those engaged in transport, supply chains, the agribusinesses, pharmaceuticals and the war industries. All depend on the riches generated by the continued flow of petrochemicals.

Yes, renewables are being promoted too, but only as an add-on—a new way to generate corporate profits—not as an alternative to the corporations” main business: profiteering from fossil fuels.

None of this is lost on the political class.

US President Lyndon Johnson was warned in 1965 about the dangers of global warming by an advisory panel who had researched the issue. He and all of his successors did nothing.

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the ultimate champion of “free markets” and slayer of socialists, spoke eloquently in an address to the United Nations General Assembly in 1989 about the threat of man-made climate change to humanity. She and all of her successors similarly did nothing.

The problem has never been that our leaders do not understand the terrible dangers posed by climate change or that they do not believe the scientific evidence. Each government has been fully aware of what lies ahead. They did not act because the political costs of acting against the corporate sector were far too grave.

Those costs have only risen since, as giant corporations, the largest in human history, have grown so powerful they now effectively own our politicians—and our “democracies.”

The truth is that for decades the political and media classes have sat on their hands rather than address the impending climate emergency. Few politicians have dared to take on the corporations for fear, rightly, that they would end up sharing the fate of former Labour leader and soft-focus democratic socialist Jeremy Corbyn.

Watch this space as Green Party leader Zack Polanski—the only British political leader currently trying to shift the dial on the climate crisis—is progressively stitched up by the media.

That is why Burnham will likely bow to the pressure fomented by the media corporations—and their so-called “advertisers,” the other corporations dependent on fossil fuels—to open up drilling for more oil in the North Sea.

Meanwhile, contrary to the claims of the deniers, the vast majority of climate scientists have been nowhere near as alarmist as they needed to be, given the stakes. As scientists, their natural inclination has been to be exceptionally cautious. That tendency was only reinforced by the pressure to appear credible faced with a political and media landscape that has consistently painted them as zealots and partisans.

The fact that most of these scientists now appear to be vacillating between depression and pure fear is warning enough. They know it is now already too late to stop catastrophic warming.

But worse, most have now learnt that the system is so rigged in the interests of the super-rich that, like lemmings, we are going to continue charging towards the cliff edge, even as the climate data they have been researching and studying for decades plays out into ever-more dramatic changes in our everyday lives.

The telephone call from US Vice-President JD Vance to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 8 August came as a surprise. Neither the American nor the Indian side has thrown light on the urgency of the contact at the highest level of leadership.

Arguably, this is the first time Trump let go of his vice-like grip on the US-Indian relationship with India by deputing Vance. It radiates mixed signals. The “big picture,” of course, is that the quasi-alliance between China and Russia is decidedly shifting the co-relation of forces against the West in general and the US in particular.

Specifically, Trump’s “maximum pressure” strategy towards Iran is in ruins. It becomes hard to overstate the profound geopolitical significance of the US’ war in Iran. No one expected the war to reach such an impasse when it is no longer possible to talk about a US-led order in West Asia anymore.

Questions of the US’ withdrawal and retrenchment are surging, compounded by Trump’s style of diplomacy toggling between force, threats of force and negotiation. Washington is hamstrung today in the pursuit of its core interests—preventing threats to the free flow of oil, helping to ensure Israeli security, providing security to its client states, and, above all, blocking any country or combination of countries from challenging American primacy in the region.

It is against such a backdrop that Trump directed Vance to dial up Modi—using Vance as a “faith healer” in a presidency that depends critically on live prayers and healing events. Trump would be aware that being a civilisation, Indians cherish kinships and calculated that their sense of hurt and alienation is best healed by someone whom they would regard as a “relative.” That said, make no mistake, Trump also reserves the prerogative to wade in at some future date.

What did Trump hope to achieve? Simply put, he has pampered Indian vanity by offering a fresh lease of life to the US-Indian “Global Partnership,” a moribund slogan of yesteryears. Unsurprisingly, there was no readout or press release on Vance’s conversation with Modi; neither Washington nor the US embassy in Delhi uttered a word. But Modi wrote in a social media post: “Received a phone call from US Vice President JD Vance. We discussed ways to further deepen the India-US Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership across key areas. Warmly congratulated him and the second lady on the birth of their son and conveyed best wishes to the entire family.” [Emphasis added.]

There was also an anodyne Indian press release highlighting that the two leaders “exchanged views on regional and global developments of mutual interest.” Interestingly, however, the US ambassador Sergio Gor followed up Vance’s call in a real-time meeting with Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and the National Security Advisor Ajit Doval. Gor didn’t meet EAM Jaishankar, which suggests that the “operational part” to Vance’s call fell within the NSA’s domain (who has lately assumed a larger role as India’s top diplomat-in-waiting as well.)

Curiously, this time around, Doval was taciturn, but his American visitor was effusive. Gor wrote, X: “Had a fruitful meeting with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval to discuss deepening U.S.-India strategic cooperation. Our close partnership with India is vital to addressing global security challenges. The United States and India share many of the same goals, and our engagement continues to grow!” [Emphasis added.]

Importantly, Gor linked the deepening of US-Indian strategic cooperation with the Trump administration to “addressing global security challenges,” where, he emphasised, the US and India “share many of the same goals.” Taken together, Gor’s characterisation of the meeting with Doval as “fruitful” would mean, in spokesmanspeak, that Gor and Doval got somewhere, although the meeting fell short of a “constructive” outcome.)

One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out the topmost “”global security challenge” the Trump administration faces today—war with Iran. Simply put, Trump, who has ridiculed, humiliated and even threatened to destroy Modi’s political career, didn’t have the face to seek his help and instead put Vance on the job.

Indeed, Trump’s political career is at stake, as things stand. His decision to attack Iran is opposed by the majority opinion in America and casts a shadow on the Republican Party’s prospects in the midterms in November. Put differently, Trump faces the prospect of Democrats gaining control over the Congress if the public opinion turns into a tsunami of hostility. Yesterday, for the first time, Trump pleaded that rising petrol prices are a small price to pay for America’s crusade against Iran!

There is no question that Jewish billionaires who control the Congress are demanding that Trump should destroy Iran no matter the costs involved. Trump hinted yesterday that the Strait of Hormuz will become American territory, which is tantamount to threatening Iran with a land invasion. Analysts speculate already that lacking the military capability to conquer Iran, Trump may order the use of tactical nuclear weapons to gain the upper hand.

The US’ Achilles heel lies in the GCC states” opposition to the war, which translates as their refusal not to partake in a war against Iran. Reportedly, the UAE has secretly reached out to Tehran.

Is it coincidental that Trump directed Vance to get in touch with Modi the day after the announcement of the Turkey-Saudi Arabia-Pakistan defensive military alliance? India, for sure, is the Pentagon’s nearest friendly landmass if push comes to shove in the Arabian Sea. This is Modi’s 2003 moment.

When the George W. Bush administration sought India’s participation in the US-led “coalition of the willing” to invade Iraq, a powerful lobby in India was rooted for Indian participation, but for then PM AB Vajpayee’s firm refusal (with the parliament’s unanimous support), the pro-American lobbyists would have carried the day—with disastrous consequences for the country’s national interests.

The situation today is even more complicated. For, there is an albatross around India’s neck, namely, the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement—the military logistics pact signed by India and the US on 29 August 2016 by the present government (something which the UPA government had refused to do) that allows both nations to use each other’s designated military facilities for refuelling, repairs, and replenishment of supplies on a reciprocal, reimbursable basis during joint exercises, training, and humanitarian missions.

In reality, Trump is fighting this war primarily in the interests of Israel, the lodestar in Modi’s government’s West Asia policy. And the outcome of this war will largely determine Israel’s future. To be indifferent is a tough decision for the Indian leadership—for a variety of reasons; whilst to partake of a war against Iran for safeguarding Israel’s core interests is also a bizarre choice to make, especially as Russia and China, as well as the entire Global South, will be watching where India stands on a turf that even America’s European allies fear to tread.