US Imperialism in 2026 and Prayers of Resistance

Human Wrongs Watch By Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service*

“We always pray for peace.  But unfortunately, we have gotten into a rocky start for 2026,” Larry C. Johnson, former Central Intelligence Agency analyst told his Norwegian interviewer and International Relations Professor Glen Diesen in Oslo on 4 January.

Of course, Johnson was referring to Washington’s most recent brazen act of attacking Venezuela and kidnapping its sitting President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, former head of the National Assembly in the wee hours of January 3.

To belabour the obvious, US President Donald J. Trump is proving to be yet another aggressor in the White House despite the schizophrenic claims that he has ended eight wars, for which he practically demanded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.

For the coveted “peace” prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, however, opted for a more suitable candidate, whom the committee gift-wrapped as “a democrat”.  Her qualification?

At “America Business Forum” recently, the Venezuelan democrat announced, via a giant monitor, to the audience of greedy-eyed global businessmen and -women, that she will, in effect, pimp Venezuela, “upstream, downstream, midstream,” for the grand commercial opening.   

“Privatization”, and guaranteed “safety for foreign investment, ”in her words. All this, to the tune of $1 .7 trillion (i.e., $ 1,700 billion), presumably largely in the oil and gas sector.

To the interested corporate representatives while throwing in a huge bonus of “2,800 km of pristine Caribbean coastline” for hoteliers, developers, tourism industrialists and so on.

In the pundit-sphere, a lot of ink has been spilled and many an expertly words have been spoken, in the last 24 hours since the US Delta Force’s kidnapping of Venezuelan president and his wife. 

The operative word that keeps coming up is “imperialism” of the United States whose business has always been business, that is, accumulation of wealth – in land, resources, profits, cheap labour, consumer markets and banking.

Some analysts rightly connect the dots between Israel’s coming big war with Iran and Trump-Rubio-Hegseth’s crime of aggression–a charge senior Nazi officials faced at the Nuremberg in 1945-46–against Venezuela, with its world’s largest known, but untapped deposit of oil.    

[Hitler wanted land “in the East of Germany (Eastern Europe) for his chosen people of Aryan and Trump wanted oil in Washington’s “Latin backyard” for his chosen circle of US oligarchs.]

When – not if –in the coming weeks or months, Israel attacks Iran’s missile facilities and whatever else the genocidal Jewish supremacists in Tel Aviv feel like taking out in the coming months it is widely expected that Iran will shut down the Strait of Hormuz through which passes 20% of the global oil flow, as an act of retaliation, in addition to striking US bases across West Asia.

It appears that the US invasion of Venezuela for regime change for oil control in Caracas kills two birds with a single stone: as criminal as it is, the act enables Washington to pre-emptively acquire a massive mitigating alternative to the oil from the Middle East in the face of a likely economic fallout from the US-backed Israel’s war with Iran, while it is pregnant with massive oil bonanza for the Big Oil in USA, which had been shut out by the socialist-leaning policies that the late Hugo Chavez instituted.  

Chavez’s rationale was straightforward: Venezuela’s lucrative resources must be used for the welfare of the Venezuelan public the majority of whom were unemployed and poverty-stricken.

Obviously, the Big Oil drills on foreign soil not for the local people in any oil rich country, but for the shareholders at home in the USA – or for that matter, UK, Canada, France, Italy, etc. 

So, a foreign leader anchors his government on this oil-for-welfare, he or she is viewed unfavourably by the Free Marketeers of Global North (that is, formerly colonizing Europe and its settler colonial offshoots of which the United States is the most ruthless case of White Supremacist genocidal success).

As the cancerous mindset and politico-economic system aimed at sucking the planet and people dry by any means necessary, imperialism is antithesis of what is referred to as “humanity”.  

This is universally applicable to all strains of imperialism, dating back to the days of such darkly iconic fortune-diggers as Christopher Columbus and Hernan Cortes who led the plunder in the Caribbean, the New World.

Over the last 500 years, the list of lucrative resources which the White Men of “the Judeo-Christian Civilization” have sought after have changed. From spices, sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, tea, copper, silver and gold to the Black Gold of gas and oil and rare earth minerals.

The tribal backgrounds of largely white men leading the packs of Europe’s (and subsequently West’s) royally patronized and God-blessed plunderers and looters have changed from Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French, British, Italian or German to North Americans.

But the methodologies, the narratives and the vocabularies these Nuremberg-worthy “civilizational” criminals, and their “democratic” regimes, deploy remain more or less the same.

Enter “Propagation of the Gospel”, “bringing Light to the dark corners of Heathens, “Civilizing Mission”, “Progress and productive uses of the soil”, democracy, human rights, and freedom, “anti or counterterrorism”, women’s liberation and so on.

If one takes a close look what has been promoted as part of this Imperialist Design rooted in “Christian Europe” and, since the Palestinian revolt on 7 October 2023, “Judeo-Christian Civilization”, peace is never a value, a political vocabulary, a policy objective.

And yet peace is the essential pre-condition for life as we know it, for all humans, animals and their/our shared ecosystems.

For (Western) imperialism has aimed to conquer, control, dominate and decimate local populations for want of their land, labour and resources, above and underground, with some ruptures over the last five hundred years.

As such, it is the highest stage of organized tyranny marked by mass murder and loot. It has remained a quintessentially European/Western in form, essence and operation, aided by its technological superiority.  Its foundation is the absence of universal humanity.

Europe as we know it lacks any potential or prospect for self-enlightenment, despite its claim to the contrary.

As the latter-day conquistadores like Donald Trump and his European sycophants heading the old genocidal European states cannot be reasoned with or appealed to their humanity. For they have displayed none that qualifies as human decency, empathy or conscience.

These 21^st century conquistadors and their policies of plunder must be resisted worldwide.

No one knows this centuries-old White Supremacy Criminal Enterprise packaged as “Judeo-Christian Civilization” better than enslaved Africans.  

Over the last nearly four decades of my trans-national activism, I have always gone to the corpus of grounded wisdom that the freed men of African origin have gifted We the People, including Frantz Fanon and Frederick Douglas.

I will leave this editorial note with two short quotes by Frederick Douglas, a born slave on a plantation in Maryland, outside of American imperialists’ swamp known as Washington, DC. two hundred years ago.

Advocating for active resistance for one’s freedom, the self-freed man wrote:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

In the opening of this editorial, I quoted the former CIA agent Larry C. Johnson, now a vocal critic of his former employer, the United States, who talked of praying for peace. Douglass had a more practical piece of advice.

“I prayed for freedom for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

We must pray with our resistance.  For imperialists are not peaceable.

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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. 

Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei.

He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times.

Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims(Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.

*This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 5 Jan 2026. TMS: US Imperialism in 2026 and Prayers of Resistance. 2026 Human Wrongs Watch

Source: https://human-wrongs-watch.net/2026/01/06/us-imperialism-in-2026-and-prayers-of-resistance/