THIS coming September will mark 46 years since the US helped engineer a bloody coup against the Chilean government, a government seeking to break the chains of imperial dominance and capitalist enslavement.

Today the US government is at it again, engaging its enormous power to destroy a liberating project of the Venezuelan people. In the interim, US dirty hands have been present in thwarting the self-determination of peoples throughout the world, in some cases multiple times. Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, tiny Grenada, Panama – the list of the violated goes on and on – extending more recently to Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Honduras and, at the moment, Venezuela.

It doesn’t matter whether the US is ruled by Republicans or Democrats. When the first whiff of national independence is detected by the global watch dogs, the alarm sounds and the political “leaders” fall in line.

Surely only the wilfully blind fail to see a pattern. You don’t have to be a Marxist to grasp that the US is systematically and unilaterally reining in countries deemed by its corporate interests to be renegades. Nor do you have to study Lenin to see that this is the behaviour that history associates with empires. Thus, the word “imperialism” should come easily to even those who have little or no knowledge of the scientific precision of the term.