alt Hacker NewsTrump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
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Why are comments allowed on these posts? What is the point? What is ever gained? Conservatives question and deny. Liberals point out the multiple laws broken. People from the rest of the world tell those of in the USA that we have our head up our ass.
How are any of us better for this? How is this better than Facebook's engagement-bait?
Peace. Out.
International law does not exist.
Regardless of how retarded maduro was, "i felt like it" should not be justifiable reason to kidnap a president of a different country on their own turf.
Maybe i felt better about that if trump wasnt in bed with another dictator.
1. It's distraction on a grand scale from the Epstein Event Horizon, also on a grand scale.
2. Trump: (2018) We don't want to be the policemen of the world BY BRETT SAMUELS - 04/30/18 [0]
> President Trump on Monday said the U.S. should no longer serve as the “policemen of the world.”
> “We more and more are not wanting to be the policemen of the world,” Trump said during a joint press conference with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari.
> “We’re spending tremendous amounts of money for decades policing the world, and that shouldn’t be the priority,” he said.
> Trump ran on the promise that he would extricate the U.S. from foreign wars.
[0] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/385521-trump-we-...
How on earth was this allowed?
Neither the republican nor democrat base wanted this. There wasn't even an attempt at justification, the drugs argument was a complete and utter joke. They could at least do a little false flag attack.
If voting does it solve it what does?
Trump will do anything for his oil friends.
Maduro was captured by Trump
Hernàndez was captured by Biden. Trump pardoned him because Biden bad.
This world is a shitshow. Honestly, I am GenX and always read of wars and tensions as historical artefacts (there were wars, but localized and far away from France).
Now I am seriously wondering if this is going to end well for us over here. I do not work that much about myself, I had an interesting life, but rather about my children whom I now start to regret. I did not expect to hand them a world like this one.
I know, global warming was there but I was 30 and was looking my close surroundings. My bad. This said, if I know what the world would be today I wrote reconsider having them.
If countries are able to just fly in and kidnap criminal presidents now will someone be coming for Trump? For the rape and various other crimes.
Trump ballon d'or 2026
"The oil must flow"
Imagine the terror felt by those in the capital as American warplanes flew overhead launching munitions.
Boy is trying to outdo both Regan and Dubya. He didn't even try to sell it to us like they did with Iraq.
Venezuelans, I'm sorry my shithole country is about to inflict a fascist puppet state on you. Nobody here gives enough of a shit despite all the chest-thumping and "MUH LIBERTY TREE". We'd rather have drum circles and ask for permission to dissent.
It's time for you Americans to wake up. You're supporting the wrong things!
National sovereignty is a fundamental principle of international law and cannot be selectively applied according to the interests of global powers. Donald Trump’s threats and aggressive rhetoric toward Venezuela undermine this principle by treating a nation’s self-determination as negotiable. Criticizing this stance does not mean endorsing the Venezuelan government, but acknowledging that sanctions, intimidation, and external pressure rarely affect political elites and instead harm ordinary people, deepening humanitarian crises.
Latin American history reveals a recurring pattern of foreign interference framed as the defense of democracy. From a moral standpoint, collective punishment and imposed solutions are indefensible. If such actions would be unacceptable when directed at the United States, they cannot be justified against Venezuela. A responsible international approach requires multilateral dialogue, international mediation, and genuine respect for the sovereignty of nations.
Project "don't talk about Epstein" is well under way.
So, uh, anyone seeing any educated guesses as to what we're bombing?
Next up: Greenland
The reaction on HN to what just happened in Venezuela is exhausting and revealing. People who have never lived under socialism, communism, dictatorship, or military rule speak with total confidence while dismissing those who have.
More than 8 million Venezuelans have fled their country, one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. They are celebrating. You are being critical. That alone should give pause.
Those condemning this action (and almost defending the oppressors) have never:
- Lived under a dictatorship where dissent leads to prison, torture, rape or disappearance
- Watched the military and police become criminal enterprises
- Seen private property and entire industries seized by the state, as happened under Chávez and Maduro
- Experienced the collapse that follows decades of corruption, repression, and ideological control
If you claim to care about migrants, human rights, or the oppressed, you cannot only care after people escape. You cannot oppose every serious attempt to end regimes that jail, torture, and kill their own citizens while calling yourself humanitarian. That is not morality, it’s distance.
Is oil involved? Of course. Venezuela’s oil industry, built with foreign investment, was expropriated, looted, and mismanaged into ruin. But this is also about state-backed criminal networks, narcotrafficking, and regional destabilization that have killed hundreds of thousands beyond Venezuela’s borders.
If you had lived under these conditions, if your family had been broken by fear, disappearance, or exile, you would not be citing abstract “international law” to defend your oppressors. You would be hoping, every night, that someone powerful enough would intervene.
What’s missing here isn’t compassion. It is context.
Before defending dictators from the safety of a functioning democracy, have the self-awareness to ask whether you understand the reality you’re judging. Otherwise what comes through isn’t moral clarity, it’s ignorance dressed up as virtue.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=venezuelan+cele...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=reacciones+de+v...
My AI summary of these 4k comments
Yes—there are very clear, recurring *themes*, and what’s striking is how consistently people keep circling the same fault lines from different angles. I’d group them like this:
---
## 1. *Legality vs. Morality*
*Core tension:*
> Is overthrowing a dictator morally right even if it violates international law?
* One side argues law exists precisely to restrain power, not to reward virtue. * The other argues moral urgency overrides abstract legalism when human suffering is extreme. * This becomes a meta-question: Who decides when morality trumps law?
This is the philosophical backbone of the entire thread.
---
## 2. *Precedent Anxiety*
*“Today Maduro, tomorrow anything.”*
* Fear that once unilateral regime change is normalized, the justification becomes infinitely elastic:
* “correcting elections”
* “restoring order”
* “protecting interests”This is less about Venezuela than about *future permission structures*.
---
## 3. *Outcomes Over Intentions*
*Ends don’t redeem means if outcomes are catastrophic.*
* Even commenters who despise Maduro emphasize:
* removing a dictator is easy
* building a functioning state is hardThis is pragmatic pessimism rather than ideological purity.
---
## 4. *American Power & Self-Deception*
*A recurring, uncomfortable self-indictment.*
* Several comments converge on the idea that:
* Americans benefit materially from interventionism
* but psychologically disavow responsibility for the costsThis becomes a debate about *collective guilt vs. structural impotence*.
---
## 5. *Realpolitik vs. Institutionalism*
*Power acting directly vs. power constrained by process.*
* Appeals to ICC, UN, asylum frameworks represent belief in institutions. * Skeptics argue those institutions are deliberately weakened by the same powers invoking morality. * Others argue asylum and invasion are orthogonal issues—and conflating them is rhetorical sleight-of-hand.
Underlying question: Is global governance real, or decorative?
---
## 6. *Lived Experience vs. Abstract Judgment*
*Who gets moral authority?*
* “Those who’ve never lived under dictatorship say this.” * Counter: “Those who never lived through US intervention say that.” * Venezuelans in-thread complicate narratives of total collapse or total liberation. * Firsthand testimony destabilizes neat moral binaries.
This creates epistemic friction: *whose suffering counts as evidence?*
---
## 7. *Cynicism About Motives*
*Oil never disappears from the conversation.*
* Even when people argue it’s not literally about barrels of crude, they frame it as:
* control
* leverage
* profit flows
* contractor ecosystemsSeveral commenters note the lack of even performative moral cover.
---
## 8. *Democratic Exhaustion*
*A sense that democracy is no longer the brake it claims to be.*
* Rapid escalation vs. slow electoral correction * Legislatures perceived as compliant or irrelevant * No clear mechanism for popular restraint short of catastrophe
This feeds resignation rather than outrage.
---
## 9. *Historical Echoes & Decline Narratives*
*“We’ve seen this movie.”*
* Arab Spring * Iraq * Libya * Panama (Noriega)
History is invoked less as analogy and more as *warning fatigue*—people feel trapped in a loop.
---
## 10. *A Deeper Subtext: Loss of Moral Coherence*
Perhaps the most important theme:
> The argument isn’t about whether Maduro is bad. > It’s about whether the system judging him is still capable of moral credibility.
That’s why the thread feels less like debate and more like *collective unease*.
---
### If you zoom out:
This isn’t really a Venezuela thread. It’s a conversation about *power without trust*, *law without enforcement*, and *morality without consensus*—and whether any of those concepts still function in the current world order.
If you wanted to fictionalize this, it wouldn’t be a war story. It would be a story about *people arguing at the edge of legitimacy*, trying to decide whether the rules still mean anything once the strong stop pretending they do.
So many people in the comments arguing as if the U.S. government made a rational decision based on specified goals and policies.
Trump is a pathological narcissist and sociopath. He admires dictators like Putin and wanted to emulate his invasion of Ukraine. Stephen Miller is pure evil, and Hegseth is a fool, so they came up with a pretext to attack Venezuela. All of this conveniently distracts from the Epstein files.
Nothing that's happened is justified, legal or rational. It's just the egos of idiots who should not be in power.
We need regime change in the U.S. immediately.
It's so hard to talk about this from the perspective of a venezuelan.
Venezuela is under a dictatorshipt that has violated human rights massively, in Caracas (the capital) there's a prison know as El Helicoide, that's the headquarterts of the SEBIN (Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia), they are the secret police and the have arrested opposition members, reporters, human rights activists, and even family members of any of the three. Their headquarters is El Helicoide, a prison that is the equivalent of Guantanamo, but in Venezuela; it is the largest torture center in Latin America.
On July 28, 2024, presidential elections were held, which were extremely difficult to reach. Negotiations with the government were necessary to allow the opposition to participate. The opposition held primary elections to determine its candidate, and María Corina Machado (MCM) (the previous year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate) won with approximately 90% of the vote. There was also a high voter turnout that the government had not anticipated, so they disqualified her, she then proposed another candidate, but this person was also disqualified, and ultimately, they had to put forward Edmundo González Urrutia (EGU), an stranger in Venezuelan politics, and had to convince him to participate in the elections.
During the campaign, the government placed every possible obstacle in their path to prevent them from campaigning, closing roads, arresting campaign workers, and issuing threats. On election day, there were several irregularities, and at midnight, the National Electoral Council (CNE) announced that Maduro had won. However, MCM claimed there had been fraud and, days later, presented evidence. She had conducted a large-scale operation to collect all the electoral records from every polling station in the country, managing to gather the vast majority, which showed that EGU had won with 67%. This sparked widespread protests and severe repression, including the arrest of many members of Vente Venezuela (MCM's party). She was forced into hiding, and EGU was forced to leave the country, but only after making a deal with the government while taking refuge in the Spanish embassy. His son-in-law was also arrested and remains missing to this day.
If you ask any Venezuelan, many agree with an US invasion. The vast majority are against the regime, just like me, although many aren't aware of how dangerous Trump is, or the things he's done in the US. To me, Trump isn't so different from Chávez: he insults those who disagree with him, he doesn't respect institutions, he installs his people in positions of power, and he only cares about loyalty. That's why I'm in a very complicated position, because on the one hand, I want this dictatorship to finally end; on the other hand, I don't like Trump. He's quite capable of trying to establish his own dictatorship in his country. He's not doing this just to liberate us; he's doing it because he has his own interests.
There are also many people who have spoken ill of MCM; many have said she didn't deserve the Nobel Prize and that she's just a puppet of Trump.
I couldn't disagree more with those statements.
I don't completely agree with her; I have a somewhat different ideology than hers, but even I can see how much effort she puts into everything she does. Here in Venezuela, she's greatly admired. I'm not one to admire people or have idols. I even criticize her a bit because she never makes it clear what the plan is for getting out of this situation and always says that freedom will come soon, something that gets very tiresome, but even so, I can understand her.
Being in her position is very difficult, due to the alliances the government has made. A large part of the left worldwide has sided with the dictatorship or doesn't denounce its atrocities, and because of that, she has no choice but to ally herself with right-wing people, including Trump. I don't think she agrees with everything he does, and she's even asked him to treat Venezuelans better, but she can't anger him either, because he's the only ally who can help her with this. That's why she told him he should have received the Nobel Prize, to avoid further anger and to try to appease him.
It's also important to mention something else: the Venezuelan government has used various operations to manipulate public opinion, both inside and outside Venezuela, trying to portray itself as a legitimate government and claiming that everything the U.S. does is for the sake of oil. While this is partly true, it also attempts to tarnish the reputation of MCM and the opposition. It's possible that here, on Twitter, Bluesky, or many other sites, there are fake accounts trying to promote this narrative, so be careful what you read, because this government has committed atrocities; don't forget that.
Talking about all this is very difficult, because on the one hand this is a dictatorship that we want to free ourselves from, but on the other hand Trump is one of the worst things that has happened to the world.
Excuse me if my text seems strange, I originally wrote it in Spanish and translated it in Google Translate, although I know English, it was easier for me to do it this way.
Orange man is, in fact, bad.
This takes the American Oligarchy to the next level. Trump is now enabling his billionaire friends plunder another country, no doubt Trump will get a cut of the profits.
Muhrica gonna muhrica. It's been like this since time immemorial, the "regime" changes but the modus operandi is the same. True for all other empires.
Prediction: this headline will be renamed "US invades Venezuela" very soon.
Did this thread get down-rated on HN due to too many comments? Please keep one main thread on this alive. Thanks.
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Hacker News?
As a European:
His voters thought Trump would be different, he would bring the troops home, put the homeland first, and that he would fight the Deep State.
In reality, he's building out Imperium Americanum, he is fighting wars without Congressional approval and proper casus bellis, he's not bringing the troops home and it is clear he represents the fucking Deep State even more than any of his predecessors since JFK. Shame on him for renaming the Kennedy Center the Trump-Kennedy Center. Which is absolutely disgusting given the reality of things!
Prime example: Invading Venezuela to steal their oil, just like his predecessors did with Syria (if you do not believe me, look where the US Army is located in Syria, and the prime locations of their oil fields).
Additionally: Trump's United States now has given Putin's Russia and Xi's China precedent to do whatever they fucking want to whoever or whatever. Because who fucking cares about international law if even the United States government, home of freedom and democracy and the rule of law, currently doesn't even give a fuck?
So now fucking what?
(And yes, as you might have noticed I AM FURIOUS AS HELL.)
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Is everyone sufficiently distracted yet?
Y'all never lived under a dictatorship, and it's felt.
"Fuck venezuelans, how can you capture a dictator, that violates a law no one gives a fuck about". You should be really happy how Trump treats putin, like a dear friend, not violating any law. I hope marines will raid kremlin next.
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What's the desired strategic outcome here - to remove the incumbent president and his political party from power and replace it with one more favorable to US oil interests? And to do that without putting ground troops in to some Latin American Vietnam? Good luck with that.