Medicine DAO: Decentralized Like the Forest

Fabrizio Beverina 

How Tribal Memory, Sacred Healing, and Medicine DAOs Could Reweave What Civilization Forgot  

 

1. When Science Becomes Servitude 

I used to believe that working in a European research lab meant freedom, the freedom of science to explore, to innovate, to push the boundaries of human knowledge. But I quickly discovered that even curiosity must submit to funding priorities. Grants were often awarded not based on vision, but on alignment with the interests of major corporations, which controlled the funds of the European Community.

When I proposed a study to my boss on the effects of marijuana on brain–computer interfaces—at the frontier of neuroscience and altered states—the answer was polite, but clear: no funding available. Not because the science was weak, but because the topic fell outside the sphere of what mattered to the pharmaceutical industry, the hospital where I was working, and the Ministry of Health.

Even the academic world around me felt quietly transactional. Conference submissions required high fees. Publishing in respected journals often depended more on institutional affiliations than merit. There was brilliance, yes, sure, but there were also gatekeepers. And a growing sense that science, as I had imagined it when I was a child, was no longer a free field of exploration, but a system increasingly shaped by hierarchy and economics.

So I left.

I went to China, not to escape, but to breathe. What began as a sabbatical year slowly turned into something much longer. And there, in the mountains of Yunnan, something unexpected happened: spirituality entered my life. I found myself surrounded by a group of foreigners: artists, hackers, and meditators, each on their own journey.

Then something truly unforeseen emerged. In science, we call it an emergent property—when the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts, when the result is unpredictable, greater than the input. That’s how RiShi Labs was born—the Laboratory of the Eclipse: a self-organized, boundaryless creative commune.

We were inspired, not by books or theories, but by what we felt in the everyday rhythms of Chinese life. One concept stood out: guanxi—the subtle, living network of relationships that flows beneath society. And another phrase we heard often: “double happiness” (双喜): your happiness makes me happy, so joy is multiplied when shared.

This was the hidden virus of China, not control, but a kind of millenarian relational wisdom. We caught it. It changed us. We stopped organizing around individual goals and began living through shared ones. Art, music, healing, food, silence, celebration, it all flowed through relationship, not roles.

RiShi Labs was born of this contagion, not as a project, but as a pulse. No bosses. No plan. No product. Just a network of people infected by the quiet, ancient intelligence of a civilization that had survived collapse more than once, not by force, but by flexibility, harmony, and flow.

2. Tribes Were the First DAOs

At RiShi Labs, decisions were made by consensus. No one was above the group. Resources were shared. Healing happened in relationship. If someone was struggling, others stepped in, not out of obligation, but out of recognition: your well-being is part of mine.

It echoed what I would later experience among the Huni Kuin in Brazil and in the forests of Peru: an older form of intelligence, not based on dominance but on distributed presence. Elders offered guidance, not control. Ceremonies were collective, not transactional. There was no brand, no profit motive, only reciprocity, rhythm, and story.

In Civilized to Death, Christopher Ryan shows how our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in egalitarian, mutually sustaining bands for 95% of human history. These were not primitive societies, but actually they were highly functional, emotionally sane, relationally rich.

Daniel Pinchbeck, in How Soon Is Now, takes this further, arguing that our only path forward lies in remembering what we’ve buried: tribal coherence, ecological intimacy, sacred time. What we need is not reinvention. It is re-indigenization.

And strangely, the DAO—the Decentralized Autonomous Organization—might be one of the tools to help us get there.

3. Decentralized Since the Beginning: Tribal Roots of the DAO

Long before smart contracts and governance tokens, tribes practiced what we now call decentralization. Power was earned, not imposed. Value was shared, not hoarded. Identity was collective, not branded.

Among the Zapatista-inspired communities I visited in Chiapas, there was no money. No top-down rules. Decisions were made in horizontal assemblies. Labor was exchanged through trust. Food, care, stories, and healing circulated through mutual obligation, not profit.

DAOs today attempt to mirror these dynamics in code. They promise flat governance, token-based value distribution, and collective stewardship. But what we code now in blockchain, our ancestors already lived through ritual, myth, and land-based community.

To say DAOs are the future is misleading. They are, in their most sacred form, a return.

4. What Is a DAO? (And Why Should You Care?)

Before we go further, let’s pause.

DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Sounds futuristic, maybe even a little robotic. But the concept is ancient, older than banks, governments, or even alphabets.

A DAO is a system where rules are not enforced by bosses or buildings, but by code and community. Decisions are made collectively. Resources are managed transparently. Power is distributed, not concentrated.

Think of it like this:
If a traditional organization is a pyramid, with power at the top, a DAO is a circle, where every voice, every vote, matters.

In technical terms, a DAO is built using blockchain technology. This means the rules and financial flows are encoded in “smart contracts”: public, tamper-proof agreements that anyone can verify. No middlemen. No secret boardrooms. Just people, purpose, and protocol.

But here’s the important part:
A DAO is not just tech. It’s trust.
It only works if the people in it show up with integrity. The code provides structure, but the spirit has to come from us.

So when we talk about a Medicine DAO, we’re talking about a new way to hold sacred work. A way to organize healing not through hierarchy or branding—but through shared responsibility, collective vision, and accountability to the values we claim to serve.

Not a new religion. Not another guru cult. Just a circle.
Like the fire. Like the tribe. Like the forest.

5. The Medicine DAO: A Mycelial Network for the Sacred

Imagine a network of healing centers, not franchises, not brands, but living communities, each deeply rooted in the land they inhabit and the traditions they honor. One in the Amazon. One in the Andes. One in Mexico. One in Gabon. All different. All autonomous. Yet all connected.

Each center is guided by the ancestral medicines and cultural memory of its place: ayahuasca, iboga, huachuma, mushrooms, Chinese herbs, sweat lodges, songs. But not as frozen heritage. Rather, as living traditions, capable of evolving through respectful dialogue with modern knowledge: trauma therapy, breathwork, neuroscience, and qigong.

Not fusion. Not appropriation. Evolution. Like DNA recombining to face a changing world.

The DAO is the nervous system connecting these nodes. It allows centers to share resources, coordinate support, and remain accountable, not to donors, but to each other and to the sacred. It provides a non-corporate framework for value to move between centers, elders, and seekers. It is a container, not for scaling, but for spreading with integrity.

At Paojilhuasca, we’ve already walked this path: ceremonies rooted in the Amazonian tradition, integrated with bodywork, Chinese medicine, qigong, and deep, slow integration. We don’t mass-produce healing. We protect it. We make it relational again.

The Medicine DAO is a way to protect that spirit across geography and generations.

6. Shadow Warning: Don’t Code the Same Empire Twice

But let’s not be naïve. Power always finds its way into the system, especially when wrapped in good intentions. If DAOs forget their tribal roots, they risk repeating the same patterns they were meant to disrupt.

If we tokenize the sacred without embodying its values, if we reduce healing to content, to metrics, to branded “medicine experiences”, we haven’t built a new future. We’ve just given the empire a new mask.

The DAO must be more than a tool. It must be a ritual in itself. A structure that demands participation, presence, humility, and care.

Otherwise, we will simply rebuild the same hierarchies on chains—and the forest will look at us and sigh.

7. Conclusion: A Return, Not an Escape

I left the laboratory not because I hated science but because I loved it too much to watch it decay. I left the system that paid me because I could no longer afford the cost of my own silence. I went to the jungle thinking I was escaping. But what I found was a return.

A return to curiosity without permission. To community without hierarchy. To healing that lives in the body, not the brand.

Now I stand between worlds. I still believe in technology, but only when it remembers the soil. I still believe in progress, but only if it spirals. And I believe we can build systems that protect what is sacred, if we root them in what has always made us human: reciprocity, presence, and story.

The Medicine DAO is not the answer. But it may be a vessel, to carry the fire forward without extinguishing its soul.

 

Source: https://realitysandwich.com/medicine-dao-decentralized-like-the-forest/

How did Venezuela become a US protectorate? Interview with Malfred Gerig

Nuso.org | Monday, 23/02/2026 (leer en español)

The US military attack on Venezuela on January 3, along with the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, has sparked intense debate about how it could have happened, what the new government of Delcy Rodríguez represents, and what all this means for Venezuelan sovereignty.

In this interview, Malfred Gerig, a sociologist and graduate of the Central University of Venezuela, and author of the book *The Long Venezuelan Depression: Political Economy of the Rise and Fall of the Oil Century*, addresses the political, economic, moral, and military decline of the Maduro regime, which transformed Venezuela into such a weak link that Donald Trump's actions proved remarkably easy. He also reflects on the characteristics of the new protectorate and the possibilities of finding the energy to recover national autonomy and a democratic future. And, no less importantly, he critically examines the position of the international left regarding the Venezuelan crisis.

How do you interpret the US military actions that, after deploying warships in the Caribbean for several months, culminated in a military assault and the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Congresswoman Cilia Flores? Was the motivation simply to gain control of Venezuelan oil?

Obviously, the military intervention is related to oil, because everything concerning Venezuela is always related to oil. But it's a bit more complex, because two things came together here: the Venezuelan crisis and Trump's foreign policy. The long Venezuelan depression and the political crisis were compounded by the transfer of the conflict to the international arena. The weakening, over so many years, of the sources of national power—economic, political, institutional, military, and cultural—ultimately led to the most humiliating episode in Venezuela's republican history.

This national weakening made intervention in Venezuela appealing to Trump. First, because he was acting against a government without a social base and without rational-legal legitimacy. The United States knew that the Venezuelan people would not come out to defend Maduro, and this weighed heavily in the equation that led to the military action. They intervened against an unpopular head of state lacking democratic legitimacy. Second, because the country's political institutions were completely illegitimate and severely weakened in terms of their capacity for wielding real power—as seen in the (non)reaction to the military operation. And third, because the Maduro government, being a weak government that had undermined state capabilities for so many years in order to cling to power for its own sake, was an easy target for the United States to begin reshaping its entire foreign policy toward Latin America.

To this we can add that the Venezuelan political class doubled down on externalizing the conflict, believing that Trump would arbitrate in good faith in favor of one of the parties, without subsequently demanding anything in return. In the case of the opposition, this is very clear: they sought Trump's support to overthrow the regime and seize power. But the Maduro regime simultaneously sought an agreement with Trump that would legitimize electoral fraud and repression; a normalization that required Washington's blessing. I have called this, using Turkey as an example, Maduro's failed "Erdoganization," a failed transition to "competitive authoritarianism."

Here we see the moral, ethical, and above all, strategic character of the various factions within the Venezuelan political class. If responsibility for the catastrophic outcome of this systemic crisis must be assigned, it lies precisely with the political elites, both Maduro supporters and the opposition.

The country's weakening was exploited by the "foreign sentinel," who now seeks to reap economic and political gain. They will find a way to make Venezuela pay tribute—because the word that matters here is "pay tribute"—and pay dearly for the folly of its political class.

Oil is crucial to the United States' plans to profit from its intervention through the payment of an imperial tribute. The Venezuelan people, unfortunately, will pay dearly, given Trumpian territorialism and neo-mercantilism, for our inability to resolve the state's general crisis on our own. We will pay with oil, but also with dependence and the loss of national and popular sovereignty over our immediate future.

But Trump was negotiating with the Maduro government, as we saw with the visit of his special envoy Richard Grenell to Caracas. Why not simply accept Maduro's offer to hand over Venezuela's resources in exchange for remaining in power?

It's clear that there came a point when Trump changed his mind and Maduro ceased to be a credible negotiating partner. That moment was when Grenell was withdrawn from the negotiations. Trump realized that Maduro was untrustworthy. And by offering everything to the United States, Maduro also lost credibility with Russia and China. Secretary of State Marco Rubio even stated in an interview that Maduro "has violated every agreement he has signed."

When Trump withdrew Grenell, many of us believed that the United States was going to take military action in Venezuela. In military terms, it was very similar to what happened with Russia and Ukraine: this military buildup wasn't intended, as some analysts suggested, to force an internal collapse. It was clear that the United States was preparing for some kind of intervention. What was at stake was how he would act and what the aftermath would look like.

Simply put, Maduro lacked the national and international credibility to be the man of geopolitical realignment. Credibility is highly valued in international politics, and Maduro's, like his rational-legal legitimacy, was nonexistent.

You pointed out that Venezuela was seen as an easy target for the United States and its desire to reconfigure its policy toward Latin America. What role did Venezuela play in the foreign policy of Trump's second term?

The target ceased to be solely Venezuela. Irrational policies were implemented, for example, against a popular and legitimately elected president like Gustavo Petro in Colombia, by including him on the Clinton List [of individuals sanctioned for alleged involvement in drug trafficking and money laundering]. Constant threats of "ground" military interventions began in Mexico, along with open electoral interference in support of candidates aligned with what we might call the MAGA International, particularly in Honduras and Argentina. Petro's recent visit to the White House, celebrated by both leaders, which included the US president's statement that Petro is "terrific," demonstrates the inconsistencies in Trump's accusations. Furthermore, the Venezuelan issue has clearly become intertwined with the Cuban issue, creating a chain of weaknesses.

Venezuela has become the lever for a much more maximalist policy toward Latin America. This shift was reflected in the National Security Strategy and the reactivation of the Monroe Doctrine, with its "Trump corollary." Behind this lies an entire school of geostrategists, from Nicholas Spykman to Robert J. Art, who conceive of territorialism in Latin America as essential in a moment of global or hegemonic conflict. According to this view, North and South America possess the resources the United States needs to survive a major global confrontation, which would inevitably destabilize the world market. The "Trump corollary" represents precisely a return to territorialism, in which the United States, by controlling the western hemisphere, can afford a large-scale global conflict without becoming isolated or falling into a general depression due to the disruption of supply chains.

That is why we have gone from Barack Obama's "pivot to Asia" to Trump's "pivot to Latin America." Latin America will pay the price for the empire's decline and its withdrawal from Europe and, above all, from Asia. Venezuela offered the Trump administration a weakened opponent, with limited military capacity and international discrediting, upon which to reorganize its Latin American policy according to the MAGA vision; the possibility of a victory at very low cost.

Ideologically, this represents the defeat of socialism, even if the Maduro regime was socialist in name only. Militarily, it is a demonstration of firepower and persuasive power. Geopolitically, it represents a power shift at the table of the great powers, something Washington longed for. Economically, it promises a substantial oil windfall for the United States and the corporations that financed Trump's campaigns, although these corporations are somewhat skeptical given the massive investments needed to reactivate the industry in a still uncertain context.

There was much talk of “regime change,” but in the end, power remains in the hands of those who governed under Maduro. How can we understand this situation?

Regarding regime change, I recently wrote an article about it. Also, in *The Long Venezuelan Depression*, I argued that the sanctions implemented during Trump’s first term had failed to achieve regime change from above, but had been absolutely successful in achieving regime change from below; that is, they had achieved regime change in the country’s political economy, steering it toward what I called a “neoliberalism with patrimonial characteristics” and a very sui generis Venezuelan model of crony capitalism.

This regime change from below has now become linked to what we could categorize as regime change from the outside, or a geopolitical realignment. A prime example of this type of dynamic is Anwar Sadat’s Egypt. The United States achieved a complete realignment—against the Soviet Union—of Egypt after Nasser's death in 1970. That is what, with some differences, the United States is doing today in Venezuela.

But it was very difficult to achieve this with Maduro, since his ability to change the country's political climate was nonexistent. Maduro tried: we can see his last interview with journalist Ignacio Ramonet, on December 30th, where he clearly states everything he was willing to give up, namely, all the country's natural resources, which, as a true patrimonialist, he believed were his. That proposal failed initially, but it became a reality with Maduroism without Maduro. So the realignment, or regime change, continues externally, and we can see it happening every day.

Do you think he will succeed in this realignment?

A few days ago, when asked why he was doing things this way, Trump said, “If you ever remember a place called Iraq, they kicked everyone out—police, generals, everyone was removed—and they ended up joining ISIS.” Trump may be right about that. He’s trying a different approach to dealing with the day after regime change. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to succeed.

Venezuela is facing a kind of "Shimonoseki moment," alluding to the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. That war, and especially the tributes that followed the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki imposed by Japan, ushered in what is known as the "era of humiliation" for China. This was later replicated in the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I—and we know where that led. That is precisely what the United States is doing today: taking advantage of the collapse of the Venezuelan state, it seeks to impose a colonial policy in the form of a protectorate and make the oil-based colonial model irreversible in the medium term.

A model in which the United States—as requested by the CEOs of the major American oil companies—guarantees, for a considerable period (20 or 30 years), that things remain unchanged and that a constant tribute is paid. What the Trump administration is proposing is a counterrevolution against Venezuelan oil nationalism, which was the backbone of the Venezuelan state during the 20th century. And I go even further: to impose this protectorate, it has the acquiescence of the two major factions of the political class.

What was the condition that made all this possible? The extreme weakening of the foundations of the Venezuelan nation, to the point that Venezuelans preferred a military intervention to the impossibility of resolving things on their own. This national weakening was the responsibility not only of the opposition, but also of the regime that for so many years ignored the consequences of its strategies to maintain power and plunder public resources.

Now the Venezuelan political class has no substantive agency whatsoever, neither the opposition nor the ruling elite. The only thing it can do is obey Washington's dictates and compete to see who is the best janitor.

How does this leave the right-wing opposition, which remains out of power?

Regarding the opposition, there is much to say. First, it's important to highlight the idiosyncrasies, the worldview, of a sector of Venezuelan society that is ignorant of Venezuela and is utterly subservient. This led a large segment of the opposition to adopt a strategy of externalizing the conflict, putting all their eggs in the basket of the foreign watchdog. If we look at María Corina Machado's speeches, especially after the presidential elections of July 28, 2024, we realize that rather than speaking to Venezuelans in Venezuela, she focused on exploiting the emotions of the Venezuelan diaspora. This reflected a complete weakening of her internal political strength, an inability to manage and capitalize on the electoral fraud.

This weakening of the opposition's internal capacity for resistance was exploited by the United States. Machado's entire discourse—which even justified the deportation of Venezuelan immigrants from the United States—was utterly irresponsible and, I dare say, criminal. Machado and the opposition political elite provided Trump with ammunition to bolster his anti-Venezuelan policy, which considers Venezuelan immigrants practically hostis humani generis [enemies of humankind], to drive not only his foreign policy but also his domestic immigration policy based on the criminalization of an entire national group. This crime was completed when they called for military intervention and stained their hands with the blood of Venezuelans killed by a foreign military force on January 3rd.

What we have now is a very significant fraction of the political class vying to see who can best guarantee the new US protectorate in the country. That's the magnitude of our tragedy.

Were you at all surprised by how quickly relations between Delcy Rodríguez's new government and Trump's became so friendly, just hours after Maduro's kidnapping?

I wasn't surprised because it was widely known that the Maduro regime had been fostering a realignment, in which they were willing to concede everything in order to maintain their grip on "political power," as they like to call it. Nor was it surprising that the much-touted slogans about a "thousand-year war," a "second Vietnam," or "permanent resistance," repeated by the government in the face of the possibility of US military action, vanished, and that in just two hours the United States captured Maduro in an operation that was extremely humiliating for the Venezuelan Armed Forces. All of this was very consistent with Maduro's regime: absolute incompetence in military terms—as in the broader management of the state—with no one taking responsibility for the military debacle.

Maduro's regime abandoned its programmatic, ideological, and ethical principles long ago. What is surprising is that Delcy Rodríguez appeared in the National Assembly to refer to the funds that the Trump administration will manage as "sovereign funds" "intended to guarantee the social protection of the Venezuelan people and to promote the country's economic and social development." This is yet another episode in the absolute distortion of language and reality to which we have become accustomed in Venezuela: the reign of Newspeak.

The situation now is as pathetic as it is worrying. Trump is issuing orders that will include absolute control over the marketing of Venezuelan oil and the completely discretionary management of the revenue from those transactions, transferring to the Venezuelan government whatever he deems appropriate, in addition to deciding what Venezuela can and cannot import and from where. Trump dictates, and they obey. “Sovereign is he who decides,” wrote Carl Schmitt, and those who are deciding in Venezuela right now are in Washington, not in Caracas.

In this neocolonial context, it will be up to the Venezuelan people, the Venezuelan nation, the remaining moral, ethical, and dignified reserves in the country, to decide how long this situation will continue. The answer will not come from either the Maduro regime or the opposition. If anyone can become an agent against all this national humiliation, it is precisely the Venezuelan people, not those responsible for this situation.

The government of Delcy Rodríguez is taking steps to amend Chávez's hydrocarbons law. What is happening in terms of state sovereignty over oil?

What is being done is to dismantle—to the delight of many in the country who have always wanted this—the foundations of Venezuelan oil nationalism, which is far from being the sole property of Chavismo. This was one of the great pillars of the construction of the Venezuelan state and nation throughout the 20th century. The Bolivarian Revolution, which had as one of its pillars precisely the vindication of oil sovereignty, is becoming the most anti-national episode in our oil history. Even worse than the Gómez regime, with its oil concessions that enriched the power elite. Today, what we have is a "lease agreement" imposed by force, in the sense that oil production is being granted to private US companies.

This reform of the Hydrocarbons Law is Venezuela's surrender as an oil-producing country and a step backward to the first half of the 20th century as a country that owned the resource. Specifically, it is a radicalization of what was already happening, a formalization of it. The precedent was the Anti-Blockade Law and the so-called "Chevron model," so celebrated by Maduro, with its production participation contracts (CPPs), through which PDVSA's [the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela] partners manage everything within the framework of absolute operational delegation. The Chevron model will now be intensified: we will see it on steroids, as it adds the monopoly of US private companies over marketing, discretionary management of revenues, and a monopoly over imports.

Some argue: "But they pay taxes, they pay royalties." Even that isn't clear; how it works is completely opaque. The extent of the embezzlement of the nation's assets is still unclear.

Obviously, all of this goes against what is enshrined in the Constitution and the current Hydrocarbons Law. That is why it is necessary to adapt the regulations in accordance with the new reality, something that some oil companies were requesting in their meeting with Trump. This will allow oil companies with far greater expertise and capacity to enter the market, while all those shady, unknown, and dubious shell companies, like the one backed by Trump's friend Harry Sargeant, will be forced out. These companies will now have to compete with the megacorporations of Big Oil. These companies had entered the oil business without any oversight or transparency, in a completely opaque manner, under the Maduro government. The CPP (Committees for Productive Development) were the prerequisite for the arrival of crony capitalism in the oil business, through these phantom oil companies that served the interests of the political clique and were created precisely to plunder Venezuelan oil.

Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, a Venezuelan lawyer and former Minister of Mines and Hydrocarbons between 1959 and 1963, understood very well that the logical consequence of the state owning oil was the state producing oil, since being a producer was the only way to maximize revenue. A state that doesn't produce oil has no way to claim revenue from its property. In other words, ownership of oil is meaningless if you can't extract the resource.

Furthermore, the model being implemented envisions an oil-producing country dependent on importing light crude and diluents to be able to market its heavy crude. Revenue is likely to plummet, even if production increases—currently at historic lows. All of this is a consequence of having undermined PDVSA's capacity for vertical integration for 60 years.

Do you see any possibility of resistance against Trump's recolonization plans?

The future, even in the short term, is very difficult to predict because all these agreements are highly unstable. It's true that the Maduro political class is the least resistant—so to speak—to implementing Trump's foreign policy in Venezuela. It's no coincidence that the CIA reports on which Trump based his policies chose the Maduro regime to lead the transition to a protectorate. And as we can see, for the moment, it's succeeding without major problems.

But there are also some potential lines of resistance: for example, internal conflicts within the Maduro regime could cause this new normal to be disrupted at some point. Not due to issues of dignity, ethics, or policy, but rather due to power struggles within each faction, as well as attempts to make rivals pay the price. It doesn't seem that the social base of the Maduro regime—what remains of it—is going to accuse the Maduro regime without Maduro of betraying the legacy of Hugo Chávez or the Bolivarian Revolution. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge in a very long time. Maduro's regime is an utterly devoid of ideology, advocating only for the economic survival of its cronies. Its only homeland is power, its privileges tied to the control of the state.

But I do believe—and that's why I mentioned the Shimonoseki moment—that nations possess moral and ethical reserves that allow them to persevere in their very being, the conatus of the homeland. What came after the Shimonoseki moment in China? The Boxer Rebellion. The Venezuelan nation, in some way, will have to demonstrate a reservoir of dignity to reclaim our right to self-governance.

We are perhaps entering the most important crossroads in our republican history, a crossroads in which we will see how the nation rebuilds itself and begins to demand its rights, primarily its right to decide its own destiny. There will be no shortage of reactionaries who advocate for Venezuela to lose its sovereignty as penance for the catastrophic outcome of the political conflict, but there will also be no shortage of republicans and Bolivarian supporters who will advocate for freedom, sovereignty, equality, virtue, and the general and national-popular interest as a supreme value that we can give ourselves and deserve.

Do you believe a return to democratic governance is possible in the short or medium term?

The transition to democracy—including free elections—is not foreseen in the short term by the United States. Why? Because Trump makes sound decisions, in terms of his own interests, when he realizes that Maduroism without Maduro could guarantee much greater governability than a government led by María Corina Machado or Edmundo González [opposition candidate in 2024], which would have to confront democratic, economic, and popular demands that Maduroism is currently suppressing. I think we must pay close attention to this, to see what happens in the future. For Trump—and Marco Rubio—tribute comes first; democracy can wait.

I don't see, in the short or medium term, that a transition to democracy is the most important thing for the United States. The main thing is to make the protectorate irreversible or "make a lot of money," in Trump's own words. He seems to agree with the government on this, which believes that the Venezuelan people must be kept politically captive so they don't vote for the extreme right. I think other international actors—not the United States—will begin to pressure for a government with genuine electoral legitimacy as the months go by, and I think this will be no small matter.

But it's important to think about how to rebuild the state. A nation that collapses militarily, as Venezuela did on January 3rd, is not viable. But neither is a country with its healthcare system destroyed, its education system in ruins, and its political institutions lacking any legitimacy. For Trump, Venezuelans will only be able to vote when they are capable of not voting against the interests of the United States. That is, when the protectorate is irreversible. But for the Venezuelan people, political participation and electoral expression in accordance with their interests should be a vital demand.

What could the international left do to support the Venezuelan people in this critical moment?

The first thing the left should understand is that its solidarity must be with the people of Venezuela, not with the Maduro government, as has been the case. What we in Venezuela are asking for is a political ethic that stands with those who have truly endured this crisis and will continue to endure it for a long time.

This regime ceased representing the deepest and most fundamental interests of the Venezuelan people long ago—and now it no longer represents the nation's basic interests either. Nicolás Maduro's son, "Nicolasito," had no qualms about saying that Venezuela should establish relations with Israel, while what Maduro did with the global left is very similar to what Machado did with the Venezuelan diaspora: sentimental exploitation and nothing more.

The Maduro government represented a moral and strategic debacle for the left, not only in Latin America, but throughout the world. When I say strategic, I mean that Maduro orchestrated defeats that weakened the nation, but he also annihilated the ethical and political strength of the movement he inherited. He reduced it to rubble. And when he had to plunge that movement into an irreversible crisis to defend his own power, he didn't hesitate.

This attack by U.S. imperialism doesn't prove that Maduro was right. Rather, it proves that Maduro was utterly incompetent to defend the Venezuelan nation against that same imperialism. What he did was precisely to aid what the United States wanted to do to Venezuela: weaken it militarily, economically, and culturally—areas where the possibilities for social transformation lay. What we must ask ourselves is: why did an attack like this, against international law, generate hope in the majority of the Venezuelan people, both inside and outside the country?

For much of the left, Venezuelans are incapable of even sustaining a "domestic tyranny," to use an expression of Bolívar. This left denies the Maduro government any agency, even the agency to implement a despotic regime; thus, the only subject in this whole story is imperialism. The problem with much of the global left is that they don't consider Venezuelans, neither the elite nor the people, as subjects in this story, their own story. Because for them, we are merely objects of a history determined by imperialism. Imperialism's actions against Venezuela are very useful for fueling the "anti-imperialist" discourse in their respective countries. The complexities of reality matter little to them.

However, when it seems we lack the capacity to decide our own destiny, I am certain that the Venezuelan nation will be reborn in some way, sooner rather than later, and we will take the reins of our future and our destiny.

Note: This interview was also published in English in Links. International Journal of Socialist Renewal and is available here.

1. Juan Vicente Gómez established a dictatorship that lasted from 1908 to 1935, a period known as the Gomecismo [Editor's note]. 

 

Source: https://www.aporrea.org/tiburon/n415874.html

The Caliphate Incubator

 

How the CIA, MI6 and Mossad turned jihadism into an instrument of state.

 

Marcos Paulo Candeloro

May 06, 2026 (Leer en castellano) 

The Islamic State entered the Western imagination as a demonic apparition: beards, black flags, execution videos, desert pickup trucks, beheadings broadcast in high definition, enslaved women, captured cities, smuggled oil and a theater of horror served in real time to a civilization already incapable of distinguishing news from propaganda from a medium-grade psychological operation. The official version demanded simplicity, and simplicity was supplied with customary generosity: religious fanatics emerged from nowhere, went collectively mad, defied the free world and were then combated by the same powers that, moved to tears by the barbarity, resumed their favorite role as firefighters of the blaze that always starts near their own matches.

Reality tends to be less cinematic and considerably more indecent.

The first document that tears the fantasy apart is not a basement pamphlet or a fever dream from the fringes of the internet. It is a RAND Corporation report produced in 2008 for the United States Army under the title Unfolding the Future of the Long War. The strategy appears there with the coldness native to imperial laboratories: divide and rule, exploit fractures between Salafi-jihadist groups, deploy covert action, information operations, unconventional warfare and local forces, mobilize nationalist jihadists against transnational ones, and capitalize on the Sunni-Shia war by taking the side of conservative Sunni regimes against Iranian-aligned Shia movements. It is all there. Not as conspiracy, but as strategic recommendation from an institution funded by the American security state itself. The think tank did not dream it. It invoiced it.

The doctrine was elegantly simple: when the primary enemy is the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis, any force capable of bleeding it becomes an asset. The jihadist ceases to be an absolute threat and becomes a tactical resource. The fanatic becomes ammunition. The militia becomes a proxy. The border becomes a corridor. The civil war becomes a laboratory. The civilian death toll becomes collateral damage manageable by press conference.

Then came Syria.

Washington presented the war against Assad as moral drama, democracy against dictatorship, people against tyrant, spring against winter. Meanwhile, backstage, the grammar was different: regime change, Iranian isolation, Russian containment, Levantine fragmentation, energy corridor redesign and the calculated exploitation of confessional divisions. WikiLeaks diplomatic cables had already revealed an American obsession with exploiting the internal vulnerabilities of the Syrian government, including Sunni fears of Iranian influence, as a destabilization instrument. In 2012, a Defense Intelligence Agency report noted that radical Salafist groups were central forces of the Syrian insurgency, that Al-Qaeda in Iraq was among the relevant actors, and that there existed a possibility of a Salafist principality emerging in eastern Syria. The report also noted that this corresponded to the interests of the powers supporting the opposition, as it would isolate the Syrian regime. In less bureaucratic language, the monster was anticipated before it received a name, a flag and an improvised capital. The paperwork preceded the atrocity.

Then came the fiction of the moderate rebels.

For years the Western press repeated this phrase with the liturgical submission of those receiving catechism from an agency. The moderates were the armed groups receiving weapons, training, money, diplomatic cover and semantic shielding. The moderates were the fighters who, in the field, frequently battled alongside jihadist factions, lost arsenals to them, sold equipment to them, changed flags according to the flow of financing and treated the border between civil opposition and Islamist militia as an abstraction maintained for the consumption of CNN readers. The CIA program known as Timber Sycamore formalized this machinery. American journalism itself eventually acknowledged the existence of the secret program to arm and train anti-Assad rebels, initiated under Obama and terminated by Trump in 2017. Al Jazeera and the New York Times reported that weapons sent by the CIA and Saudi Arabia to Jordan for Syrian rebels were stolen by Jordanian intelligence officers and sold on the black market, flooding the region with rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.

This is the moral miracle of empire: it arms the chaos, loses control of the weapons, blames the armed chaos and requests additional budget to combat it.

The MI6 appears in the plot as it always appears, elegant, indirect, wrapped in institutional fog, the old imperial hand trained in outsourcing the dirty work to a comfortable distance. London learned before Washington that the most efficient way to manage colonial fires is to choose which tribes receive the kerosene.

And Israel?

Dear reader, here resides a portion of the history that tends to be handled with gloves thicker than the evidence warrants. The Israeli security apparatus operated in Syria from its own strategic objectives: pushing Iranian forces away from the border, containing Hezbollah, controlling the Golan zone and ensuring that Syrian collapse favored Tel Aviv's strategic geometry. Foreign Policy reported that Israel armed and financed at least twelve rebel groups in southern Syria, with transfers including weapons, cash, vehicles and monthly payments to combatants. The Times of Israel noted that the then-IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot acknowledged that Israel provided light weapons to Syrian rebel groups in the Golan. Call it IDF, Mossad, border security, military intelligence or the Israeli external operations ecosystem. The administrative name matters less than the strategic function: using Syrian decomposition to prevent the consolidation of Israeli enemies near the frontier. Jihadism, when pointed at Damascus, Tehran or Hezbollah, ceased to be merely a threat and became an operational variable.

This is how hell acquired a supply chain.

The Islamic State did not need to be founded in a room with minutes, a rubber stamp, cold coffee and a director's signature. Intelligent states rarely create monsters that way. They create environments. They remove barriers. They move money. They open corridors. They arm intermediaries. They ignore reports. They rebrand extremists. They transform fanatics into opposition. They transform opposition into proxies. They transform proxies into territorial entities. When the creature escapes the leash, they inaugurate phase two: the war on terror, the humanitarian bombardment, the emergency budget, the domestic surveillance expansion, the new bases, the new contracts, the new justifications.

Empire calls this a mistake.

Mistake is the word used when the truth would produce tribunals.

What Syria revealed was the moral anatomy of Western foreign policy: the defense of democracy as packaging, sectarianism as method, terrorism as intermittent instrument, the regional ally as operational laundry, the think tank as doctrine laboratory and the press as the public relations department of the disaster. The Syrian carnage also exposed the cynical convergence among Washington, London, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, Doha, Ankara and Amman. Each entered with its own agenda. The Americans wanted to redesign the regional balance. The British wanted to preserve imperial relevance. The Israelis wanted to push back Iran and Hezbollah. The Gulf monarchies wanted to amputate Shia influence. Turkey wanted to expand its strategic depth and crush the Kurds when convenient. The result was a conveyor belt of corpses, refugees, ground cities, sold girls, massacred minorities, expelled Christians, enslaved Yazidis and an entire generation buried under the rubble of a game presented to the public as a democratic crusade.

The Islamic State was the finished portrait of that engineering: a rented caliphate, fed by its enemies' contradictions and by its indirect patrons' hypocrisy. The flag was black. The fuel was geopolitical.

The greatest obscenity of the twenty-first century may reside precisely there. The same governments that taught the world to fear terror learned to administer it as an asset. When it serves, it receives weapons through intermediaries. When it becomes inconvenient, it receives drones. When it dies, it becomes proof of success. When it resurfaces, it becomes the argument to begin everything again.

The Western establishment will never admit full culpability, because full culpability would require dismantling the entire altar: CIA, MI6, Mossad, Pentagon, Foreign Office, think tanks, Gulf funds, Atlantic press, diplomats, showcase NGOs, reconstruction contractors and the priests of the rules-based international order.

That order generated the caliphate and then posed for photographs above its ruins.

Broadly speaking, the name for that is not accident.

It is method. 

Source: https://candeloro.substack.com/p/the-caliphate-incubator

Blessings from Heaven

Israel Shamir
April 30, 2026 

I have two news items for you today, a good one and a bad one. Should we begin with a good one? OK, so we shall.

The Good News  

In the parched lands of the Middle East, the rains are few and far between. My readers who live in lands of temperate climate, in the US or England or Germany, probably think a break from the rain would be a nice change. That’s because they enjoy rivers and lakes, and lots of them. In our arid lands, water has become a synonym for compassion, and we are perilously short of both. The wells are dry, and the springs in the mountains have all but perished. History tells us that without the rain of water, a rain of lead – molten or cast – will take its place.

All of us expected some horrible consequences from the US-Israel attack on Iran, but – totally unexpectedly- things have turned out for the better. Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian and Turkish news outlets are reporting that their countries are experiencing heavy rainfall, temperatures have dropped sharply, and in some places, it has even snowed (yes, right now, at the end of April)!

The results are astonishing: the Tigris and Euphrates are filling with water (residents of Mosul are particularly shocked), deserts bloom, and water and life are returning to dried-up lakes, such as Iran’s Lake Urmia. Some dams (including Darbandikhan, Iraq’s largest dam) have opened their floodgates due to being 100 per cent full — a state not seen for many years. Iran has been suffering for years under one of the worst droughts in recent history. Rivers ran dry, dams hit critically low levels, and officials were even whispering about relocating the capital due to water shortages. Then, suddenly, the skies opened. Heavy rains returned to Iran and neighbouring Iraq.

Such a dramatic change in the weather in such a short period of time is inexplicable outside the context of war and weather control. Historically speaking, a region-wide drought cannot resolve itself so quickly, and so decisively. Naturally, people seek an explanation for phenomena that remain officially unexplained. And they have come up with a good one!

These unprecedented weather changes are being attributed to the fact that Iran bombed all the US radars throughout the Gulf states. The exact number is unknown, but the result is undeniable, and known to every man, woman and child in the Middle East.

The story is that these overpowered NEXRAD-style stations were ‘stealing clouds’ (i.e. they were spraying chemicals as well as preventing cloud formation using HAARP waves or microwaves, altering wind directions to draw moisture towards the Persian Gulf, etc.). The science is maturing and secretive, so don’t judge us on our in-depth understanding of weather control, but no one can deny it exists. We might quibble over how effective it is, but of course governments try to control the weather. We would expect them to; in fact, we might well demand it.

Using weather control as a weapon would be no doubt one of the first applications, perhaps even before being used domestically. You know, to work the bugs out. Employing weather control over a large US city would invite thousands of lawsuits, so there it must strictly remain deniable. But overseas, especially on an officially-despised ‘rogue state’ like Iran… well, it’s just a natural testing ground.

It is claimed that climate engineering was launched in the 1990’s through a cooperative project between the UAE and Israel (why am I not surprised?). The current water problems in the region generally began around 10–15 years ago — that is, roughly when the sheikhs, again according to rumours, decided to equip their oases with cloud farms. I like that – blame the sheikhs. In 2011, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said: “They are stealing our rain.”

Of course, no one believed Ahmadinejad. Nevertheless, time passed, and climate change became evident in various countries and regions — reduced or absent precipitation (particularly snow), abnormally high summer temperatures, and so on. Into this desperate situation stumbled the Purim War Against Iran.

Iran destroy American radars in the region,Increased rainfall Dams are overflowing after 7 years.

Tucker Carlson Exposed American Weather Engineering in Iran.

Follow Us for updates. pic.twitter.com/wbEX0ld5EJ

— Iran Press ☫ (@IR_Press) April 22, 2026

As soon as Iran launched strikes on various targets in the Persian Gulf region, the climate changed, and decades of drought ended in literally the span of a week. In short, the current, unusually cold spring can be explained precisely (and only) by this. If this is the case, then we urgently need some new conspiracy theories!

I asked a renowned physicist, prof RZ, who kindly agreed to share with us his take:

In other words, the question is whether radars are linked to the weather. I’m no meteorologist, but I think – yes, perhaps. The process of cloud formation is actually poorly understood. When moisture condenses from the gaseous phase into cloud microdroplets, nucleation occurs right at the start – that is, the initiation of this process. Radar energy may destroy the tiny nucleation nuclei right at the start of the process, and as a result, either no cloud forms, or it turns out diffuse, and no rain falls from it. The moisture-saturated air is carried by the wind to another location, where a rain cloud then forms. However, proving a causal link will not be straightforward; it requires many years of observation.

So, barring some whistle-blower disclosure, we can’t know for certain whether the drought was being caused by an American/Israeli radar that was destroyed by Iranian missiles, or perhaps it was some other mysterious HAARP system that was wrecked, but the result is wonderful. A ten-year long drought ended, and the rains have returned. Such are the strange blessings of war that the righteous may receive. You say, correlation exists, causality is not established. Yes, but in the middle of an unjust war, is not healthy suspicion warranted?

Dr Fatima Saad Al-Hassani, a researcher at the University of Oregon, said:

When Iran attacked a secret cloud-seeding and weather control centre in the UAE, it targeted not just a “base”, but the “heart” of the climate control system, which intentionally caused drought in Iraq and eastern Iran.

This “secret centre” in the UAE, according to Al-Hassani, was part of a global climate management network.

It is possible that so-called global warming phenomena has been deliberately engineered by Bill Gates and his company. Maybe America should keep closer tabs on its billionaires, so they can’t intentionally or unintentionally make the planet Earth uninhabitable. Such globe spanning power in the hands of a few men is a recipe for disaster. Each billionaire can wield too much wealth, too much power, and aim it at any point in the world. It’s undemocratic. It’s a return to the power of kings. No one wants to live in fear of such cosmopolitans.

But why would they do it, you’ll ask? Well, if there is a drought, they might sell us bottled water. If there is no clean air, they can sell us bottled air. Or perhaps not to sell, because domination beats greed anytime. As it happens, the US is the only place where such powerful creatures exist. It depends on you, the Americans, to control them. If you don’t, then it will eventually be done by Chinese and Russian soldiers, and all mankind will suffer for it.

GK Chesterton judged: The striking and even startling peculiarity of the present, of the time in which we now live, is the fact that the rich wield a quite new and abnormal power that was never known in the world before. I should say that no rich man in the past ever had anything like the power over humanity possessed by a millionaire or financier today.

Well, that was the good news. Let’s contrast it with the following:

The Bad News

The visiting King Charles III in his speech to Congress repeated his call for maintaining the British-American “unyielding resolve” in order to defend the Ukraine. “Today, Mr Speaker, that same unyielding resolve is needed for the defence of Ukraine and her most courageous people,” said the King. In other words, the King called on what remains of the Anglo-American Empire to go to war against Russia, and that is really bad news, for it is a suicide for mankind.

In addition, we have a bizarre reading by a lip-reader of the conversation between president Trump and the King. Reportedly, Trump said that he spoke with President Putin, who is ready to destroy the UK and Western Europe if pushed. Apparently, Trump tried to dissuade the King from pursuing the war with Russia over Ukraine.

It makes sense that the UK would want the US military to pull its chestnuts out of the fire, just like they did in WWI and WWII. Trump is stuck in his war with Iran, and even the Orange Man is not mad enough to overextend his country in two major wars at once. It seems that Trump hopes to pacify Putin by accepting his reasonable demands. But the King, representing Western Europe and the UK, doesn’t want peace to happen.

Putin, peace-loving man though he is, will never agree to the humiliating conditions demanded by the King. Thus, once again we stand on the threshold of the nuclear Armageddon.

As Unz readers were presented with a UFO theorist quite recently, they may know there is a theory that the absence of real space travellers on Earth is due to the fact that every civilisation that was on the threshold of breaking into space instead destroyed itself. It seems that now we are very close to self-destruction, whether by death-seeking Jews pushing for Armageddon, or by death-seeking Brits competing to be first. The chances are not too good that our own particular civilisation will escape the personal ambitions of our own billionaires and warmongers.

So, what will it be raining down upon us? Will it be blessings from Heaven, in the form of soft rains, green fields and abundant harvests? A billionaire might worry that the abundant harvests might devalue his investments in grain futures. A warmonger will certainly worry that an outbreak of peace may hurt his popularity and reduce the impact of his favourite weapon systems. These men might do anything, anything at all to achieve better quarterly dividends, and no one can stop them. The mere whim of a billionaire might cause something far more substantial and destructive than blessed rain to be falling down upon our own heads someday. It’s time to rein them in, perhaps with a wealth tax.

Edited by Paul Bennett of Minnesota. 

Rains returned to Iran after destruction of UAE's secret weather modification centers:  

Source: https://www.unz.com/ishamir/blessings-from-heaven/

Christians and Hezbollah unite against 'Epstein empire'

Paul Nuki, Simon Townsley

March 23, 2026 (Lire en francais) 

A shrine to Saint Rafqa in the Christian village of Ras Baalbek, Lebanon - Simon Townsley

The complexity of Lebanon is apparent in few places more than Ras Baalbek, a Catholic Christian town in Lebanon’s northern Bekaa Valley close to the borders with Syria.

The town, which boasts two Byzantine churches, has teamed up with Hezbollah in a bid to preserve its heritage and protect its 6,000 devout Catholic residents.

So close are the two communities that the Iranian-backed militant group buys a Christmas tree each year for the village.

“The relationship between the village and Hezbollah is stronger than with the Pope,” Rifiat Nasrallah, 60, a quarryman and village leader whose marble sarcophagi line the village cemetery, told The Telegraph during a visit in the midst of war.

“The Vatican did nothing for us but Hezbollah spilt their blood to protect us. The Pope only has prayers.”

Two soldiers from the Lebanese army, whose political leaders have vowed to disarm Hezbollah, sit in Mr Nasrallah’s home as he explains the local politics. A crucifix hangs next to a portrait of Hassan Nasrallah (no relation), Hezbollah’s former secretary general, on one of the room’s walls.

 

 

Shia refugees play with a toy gun in the village of Ras Baalbek - Simon Townsley

 

The Bekaa Valley is beautiful, dangerous and cosmopolitan in equal measures. Christian, Sunni and Shia Muslim villages sit cheek by jowl.

As The Telegraph drives there, Israeli jets and drones are hunting Hezbollah positions in the hills to the west after the militants let rip one of their long-range ground-to-ground missiles towards “the entity” the previous night.

These missiles are large and said to be launched from adapted shipping containers carried by articulated trucks, which makes the drive there hazardous.

But the threat that brought the Christians of Ras Baalbek and Hezbollah close came from the east. The village sits at the foothills of the arid Qalamoun mountains, over which you can trek just a few kilometres into Syria.

It was from there, between 2013 and 2017 during the height of the Syrian civil war, that Islamic State (IS) fighters launched several assaults on the village, threatening to wipe it from the map and behead its Catholic residents.

 

 

 The village sits at the foothills of the arid Qalamoun mountains, over which you can trek just a few kilometres into Syria - Simon Townsley

 

“The first attack came from a village called Qasr, just seven kilometres from here in Syria. IS came over the hills and reached the edge of the village and kidnapped some of my workers and tortured them,” he said.

“At first, it was only Hezbollah and the villagers who fought back against the Salafists. We fought together with missiles and rockets. Many were wounded and some died. I was almost killed with shrapnel in my back from a mortar.”

Mr Nasrallah did not say so, but the bond between the villagers and Hezbollah, is a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” – or that’s how it started.

During the Syrian civil war, Hezbollah sent thousands of fighters in support of the Iranian-backed Assad regime. Their adversaries included jihadist organisations such as Isis and the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra.

When IS first struck on Lebanese soil in 2013, the group was quick to the defence of the villagers, unlike the Lebanese army, which only became involved later.

“The army was weak. The leader of the army at the time was not strong. He did not have the political support for the fight. Only later in 2015 and 2017 did they help,” said Mr Nasrallah.

 

 

A cross stands above the Christian village of Ras Baalbek - Simon Townsley

One of the two Lebanese soldiers said: “I lost five friends. One Humvee we were following was blown up by a mine. Three colleagues died in that. We had good-quality soldiers but, at first, we lacked logistics and equipment.”

In 2017, the Lebanese army did see IS off, and is credited for doing so in much of Lebanon. The Dawn of the Jurds (hills) anti-terror operation was documented in official dispatches at the time.

“The army liberated today around 30 square kilometres, making the total liberated space since the beginning… now around 80 square kilometres out of 120 square kilometres,” said an official army memo dated Aug 20 2017.

It added: “During the military operations, three soldiers fell and a fourth was severely injured as a result of the explosion of a landmine that hit a military vehicle. Moreover, two other soldiers were slightly injured during the clashes while the operations resulted in the death of 15 terrorists and the destruction of 12 posts containing caves, tunnels, communication paths, fortifications and different weapons.”

Today in Lebanon there are again widespread fears, so far unsubstantiated, that Syria will become involved in the war. Hezbollah suspects that the Israelis are making use of Syrian airspace to launch commando attacks on places like Nabi Sheet, which was attacked two weeks ago. And the Christians of Ras Baalbek are worried about renewed attacks from Syrian Salafist groups like IS.

“His history speaks for itself”, said Mr Nasrallah of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, the new Syrian president, who once led the al-Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda affiliate that fought against Hezbollah in Syria. “We have a saying, ‘You cannot change a wild animal. He is what he is’. And he is at our border.”

 

 

Rifiat Nasrallah: ‘The Vatican did nothing for us but Hezbollah spilt their blood to protect us. The Pope only has prayers’ - Simon Townsley

There is no evidence that al-Sharaa has any plans to attack Lebanon, let alone Christian villages. Most analysts say he has enough on his plate stabilising Syria, and on Friday the IDF announced it was again bombing areas in the As-Suwayda area of Syria’s south in defence of Druze communities there.

Nevertheless, fears persist, binding the Christians of Ras Baalbek and Hezbollah ever closer together. So much so that Mr Nasrallah said that “Israel is our first enemy... Hezbollah is our friend”.

He and a Shia refugee from a Hezbollah village further down the valley recounted the many thousands of Israeli air strikes that occurred during the 13 months of the last ceasefire, which ended when the Iran war started.

The period, said the refugee, Ahmad, 30, was the “cruellest” part of the war. “There were violations every day. Bombs in the front of our houses. Drones always overhead. There were mothers that saw their children killed in front of them and children who saw their parents killed.

“There were cases where the Israelis would call and say, ‘do you want to die with your family or die alone?’. They would then walk out and be killed in front of their children. How much courage does that take? And how much cruelty?”

 

 

A statue of the Holy Mary stands on a house in Ras Baalbek - Simon Townsley

Israel said all its air strikes during the ceasefire were in response to Hezbollah violations.

But the toll was significant. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon recorded more than 10,000 ceasefire violations over the period, including air and ground incursions. The Lebanese authorities reported 331 deaths and 945 injuries in the first 12 months alone.

This has left many, like Ahmad, traumatised. And like Mr Nasrallah, they are reaching for conspiracy theories to explain things –some ancient, some much more modern.

“We are at war with the Epstein people. The people eating, frying and raping kids. They are monsters, beasts. They are not humans. But the worst part is they are the ones that rule the world,” said Ahmad.

Does Mr Nasrallah worry that Christian Ras Baalbek’s relationship with Hezbollah may now place the village in peril as Israel and the Lebanese army seek to disarm the militant group? His answer was an emphatic “no”.

“How can we as Christians in this area not be with Hezbollah?,” he said. “They protect our churches. They helped us fight Isis. During Covid they gave us free care in their hospitals. When there was no electricity they gave us generators. They even put up a Christmas tree at Christmas. How can we not be with them now?”

Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/christians-and-hezbollah-unite-against-epstein-empire/ar-AA1ZcAt2