Venezuela in the mesh

Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1948 In the Mesh – a scenario for a film which was never produced as such – isn’t his best work. His emerging themes of political responsibility and the use of violence in liberation movements are largely sidelined in favor of a melodramatic portrayal of a love quadrangle (which itself is marred by sexism), the characters and their relationships are simplistically drawn, and many of the events are improbable.

But it’s of interest for two reasons. First, for its suggestions of experimental film techniques, marking a different artistic path for Sartre, who preferred “transparent” writing that didn’t draw attention to itself. Film, it seems, freed him to try new creative approaches. More important, for the premise of the film, even if it wasn’t realized as well as it could have been. It was prescient for 1948 and is of continuing relevance today.

The movie is set in a small, oil-rich country. It begins with a revolutionary storming of the presidential palace, and the action follows a hastily convened trial of the overthrown president for his seven years of repressive rule. We understand through trial testimony and flashbacks that he himself had been a revolutionary leader who rose to power in similar circumstances, and is seen to have betrayed the very movement he once led. While he came to power with a promise to nationalize the oil fields, he hasn’t done so. He’s restricted the press and refused to call free elections. He’s undertaken a mechanization of agriculture in the face of mass opposition from the country’s farmers and violently repressed their rebellion. The insurgents demand explanations.

We learn over time that he was operating under powerful constraints from the start. Moments after entering office, he was informed by the representatives of the government controlling oil concessions – presumably the US, but never named – that any nationalization would be regarded as an act of war and would result in an invasion and/or occupation. All of his actions, in his view, have responded to this dreadful possibility. He couldn’t nationalize, and democracy would have led immediately to legislative decisions to do just that. He was caught in the mesh. The only option he saw was to stall long enough for the superpower to become involved in a dispute with the other superpower and lose interest, which could take years but appeared to him the best of the very limited options.

Sartre set the film for some reason in Europe, but it would have more plausibly taken place in Iran or another less powerful nation of the global south. The constraints on movements and governments attempting to claim popular sovereignty, nationalize national resources, and institute social welfare policies in the face of US imperialism became all too clear in the years that followed. Outright invasion and occupation have been joined by covert actions: staged and assisted coups, the installation of puppet regimes, destabilization, underground support for the rightwing opposition, economic and resource warfare, financial warfare, diplomatic warfare, propaganda and (social) media warfare,…

Venezuela is facing these offensives, and has been since 1999 when it openly defied US dictates. Reading Sartre’s scenario, you wonder why the leader didn’t tell his comrades about the threat or include them in the decision, why he didn’t reach out to those in other countries in a similar situation. But that was to come in reality. In response to Venezuela’s defiance, as Sartre foresaw, the attacks never end, or even abate. A news search for the country reveals a constant barrage from the US government and its subservient media. Determined to have their way – or what they foolishly believe is their way - they won’t stop.

Whatever happens in today’s legislative – not presidential, as the English-language corporate media would have us believe – elections, the one certainty in the immediate future is that Venezuela will continue to be caught in, and its people to struggle against, the mesh.

Dear Rachel Maddow,

Hugo Chávez was not a dictator. He was a popular, democratically elected president of Venezuela. You imperil Venezuelan democracy and empower the Right in Venezuela and the US when you repeat such bogus characterizations. There are very real forces working diligently to overthrow South American democracies and to (re)establish US-dominated corporatocracies, real dictatorships, and your carelessness has helped their cause. Millions of lives are at stake. I hope you’ll be more responsible in the future, and correct this error from tonight’s broadcast.

Update: This goes for you, too, Bernie Sanders.

Quotes of the day

“If disorders flare up in Iran as a result of nationalization, the Russians may intervene, grab the oil, even unleash World War III. To call Mossadegh a fanatic may be correct, but it explains almost nothing. Mossadegh is a far more complex character than the most baffling men the West has yet had to deal with, including misty yogis like Nehru and notably unmisty commissars like Josef Stalin…. Mohammed Mossadegh, with his faints, his tears and wild-eyed dreams, is a whirling dervish with a college education and a first-rate mind.” - Life magazine, 1953, quoted in Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (2013)

“For a fleeting few years the South American nation of Venezuela and its histrionic late President Hugo Chavez made waves on the global stage. While he upended the country’s economy and exploited class conflict at home, he blamed the world's woes on the U.S., insulted the American president at the United Nations, and exhorted other leftists in the region to challenge the prevailing economic model and follow his path to ‘21st century socialism’.

Since Chavez died, the world mostly stopped paying attention. That, however, may soon change.

…

The Venezuelan people have endured a catastrophic economic collapse that is sure to grow worse in the months ahead. If someone had set out to destroy the country they could hardly have done it more effectively than Chavez and his chosen heir, who has followed the same disastrous policies, driving the country into the abyss.

…

As his predecessor did, Maduro blames the shortages on the opposition, on his political enemies, and on the rich. But the real reason why the economy is simply not functioning is that the government has introduced wrong-headed policies that defy all logic.” - Frida Ghitis, CNN oped, days ago

Historical quote of the day

“Either we will have a coup, quick and dry, or another kind, or the proposal we’re making [for the Chávez government to step down]. There’s no other way to get past the deadlock being played out here in Venezuela.” – Venezuelan rightwing opposition leader Leopoldo López, April 11, 2002

This statement from an interview on a morning talk show is quoted in Roberto Lovato’s Foreign Policy article, “The Making of Leopoldo López.” Lovato was interviewed yesterday on Democracy Now!:



The full transcript is here, but the interview is a bit rushed and potentially confusing to anyone unfamiliar with the context. Better to read the FP article itself. (I do wish citations or video links had been provided for all of the quotations. That really should be standard practice.) A couple of thoughts:

The US rightwing propaganda and psyops experts, aided by the US media, have convinced our resident dupes that these people are progressive democratic activists and not far-Right, fat cat, violent coup-plotters. It’s the Cold War all over again.

And speaking of which, what is it with Kenyon College? The evidence presented in Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters was surprising given my previous image of the school. And now I learn that López and several rightwing figures in the US involved with the Venezuelan opposition are alumni…

Is Human Rights Watch ignoring calls for genocide in Syria?

Back in March, I posted about a demonstration at the New York headquarters of Human Rights Watch by people protesting the US government’s ongoing campaign to destabilize, undermine, and ultimately overthrow Venezuelan democracy. Two open letters to HRW offered evidence of the organization’s disturbing ties to the US government and its covert agencies. While the March protest focused on Venezuela, the letters cited tweets by HRW Executive Director Ken Roth actually demanding US military intervention in Syria. Quoting several such tweets, the second letter stated that

Such behavior is unbecoming for the head of a major human rights organization and runs counter to the spirit of HRW’s official neutrality toward the impending intervention in Syria. We encourage you to demonstrate greater tact and responsibility in light of the near-inevitability that U.S. missile strikes would have led to violations of international humanitarian law, including the killing, maiming, and displacement of many innocent civilians—as shown by the U.S. bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999, and of Iraq during the 2003 invasion and subsequent years of war.

In recent days I’ve posted about evidence of open calls in Arabic media for a genocidal campaign against the Alawites in Syria. As’ad AbuKhalil appears to be the only person trying to bring attention to this ominous development. As I previously quoted, he notes that he’s “yet to read one article about that in any Western publication” or “one statement about that by any Western human rights organization.”

While he’s been silent about the genocidal rumbling – even as it’s discussed openly on Al Jazeera – Roth continues to propagandize. This week, he posted an image he claimed to depict the aftermath of Syrian government barrel bombings in Aleppo

but which he was later forced to acknowledge actually showed destruction caused by Israeli bombing of Gaza.

Ten minutes later, he posted an image purported to be a genuine “example of Aleppo’s destruction after Assad’s barrel bombs.”

While this one is of Aleppo, the problem is that neither the story featuring the image nor the blurb connected to the image itself say that the devastation shown was caused by a barrel bomb or a Syrian government attack. They don’t say that it wasn’t, and it could have been, but the assertion required an illegitimate interpretive leap on Roth’s part. Furthermore, the Amnesty International report on which the story was based provides multiple photos of the destruction to civilians and civilian areas caused by attacks from various sources, including both regime barrel bombs and opposition “hell cannons.”

As AbuKhalil makes clear, none of this is “to argue against the fact that the Syrian regime and the armed Syrian rebels are both professional war criminals.” Nor is it to suggest that HRW is simply corrupt through and through, and can’t be trusted on any subject; nor that any documented human rights violations shouldn’t be condemned. But ignoring public calls for genocide while irresponsibly disseminating skewed information that can affect attitudes toward those being targeted for extermination is hardly what an independent human rights organization should be doing.

Data on women in parliaments worldwide

Reading this piece, “Latin America: From U.S. Corporate Hegemony to Regional Autonomy,”* by Preeti Kaur, I came across a useful link to the data on the percentage of parliamentary seats held by women in countries around the world.

What surprised me was that so many of the top countries – those with the highest proportion of women in parliament - were poor. It’s interesting to look beyond the regional breakdowns. In the top ten are Bolivia, Cuba, and Ecuador, and also Rwanda, Senegal, and South Africa. Regionally, the Nordic countries are an outlier at the top, but even with them included Europe still comes in below the Americas; with the Nordic countries excluded, Europe is pretty much on par with Sub-Saharan Africa (a difference of only one percentage point). And the percentages for the US and Canada are below the Americas average. In the full list, the US comes in at 72nd, below Pakistan and Bangladesh (Venezuela, home to teleSUR which published Kaur’s article, has nothing to be proud of here, falling even below the US at 82nd).

Overall, it’s fairly depressing, but there does seem to be real progress - which I can appreciate even as an anarchist - in many countries around the world.

* An important, and infuriating, part of the article described the speech by Ban Ki-moon at the Summit of the Americas this past weekend:

Rather bizarrely, the UN Secretary General then went on to spend a third of his intervention at the Summit of the Americas to discuss the importance of business involvement in the post 2015 development agenda, and in the agenda to address climate change. While the Secretary General recognised that the Americas have been at the vanguard of discussions on key issues regarding climate change, he also said that the ‘new global development agenda and the battle against climate change will need resources, technology and capacity’, and as such ‘private sources and partnerships’ would be crucial in the fight against climate change.

‘With business support for implementing the sustainable development goals, we can transform our world. Business is part of the solution to several major global challenges’, said the UN Secretary General. Such an analysis fails to articulate the ways in which businesses are obliged to pursue profit, even at the expense of harmful impacts to the environment, and people. There is an increasing recognition that capitalism has caused climate change, described incontrovertibly in Naomi Klein’s recent book ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate’.

The Secretary General’s intervention failed to explain how businesses might turn their minds to address the key issues of our day. Indeed, only three years previously, in Brazil at the Rio+20 sustainable development conference, Canada, and the U.S. united against reaffirming the responsibility of businesses to respect human rights, and protect our planet.

…Big business is the problem, not the solution. While technical innovation is necessary to combat climate change, much of this innovation is tailored to pursuing energy which increases profit opportunities for business, not which effectively reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

Continuing destabilization efforts in the long shadow of the coup

Venezuelanalysis has posted an interesting interview of two of their journalists – Z.C. Dutka and Rachael Boothroyd - by teleSUR. It focuses specifically on the meaning and legacy of the two-day coup in Venezuela in 2002. It’s all worth reading, but I’m going to quote from their answers related to the composition and tactics of the US-backed rightwing opposition:

“The 2002 coup was a sharp example of what most people already knew, that the Venezuelan opposition, with the support of the U.S. government, would stop at nothing to reroute Venezuelan politics back to neoliberalism. Since that attempt proved to be such a magnificent failure, they’ve focused their efforts on more subversive tactics associated with ‘color revolutions’; like corporate and social media campaigns, false NGOs, and economic sabotage. The idea is to create an environment of chaos while branding wealthy opposition leaders as ‘liberators’ and ‘human rights activists’.” (Dutka)

“Thirteen years later, and the impatience of the opposition and Washington hasn’t subsided, as you can imagine. Having lost virtually all democratic contests since 1998 (with the singular exception of its extremely narrow win in the Constitutional Referendum of 2007) and having falsely assumed that the revolution would fall following the death of Chavez in 2013, this desperation has now reached boiling point.” (Boothroyd)

“The other element which has also not altered since 2002 is the opposition’s obvious connections to the U.S. A factor which is a huge thorn in its side and which is preventing it from making sufficient political headway amongst the Venezuelan population.

At the time of the 2002 coup, the U.S. government admitted that it had financed and met with the coup leaders and organizations involved. This dynamic has continued since then, and in fact, funding to anti-government groups has increased under the Obama administration. This year, the NED (National Endowment for Democracy) and the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID) has an increased budget destined for Venezuelan opposition “youth” and “civil society” groups.

… This is of course part of the ongoing attempted coup against the Venezuelan government which began in 1999 and which has been advanced through all conceivable means - economic strangulation, street violence, military conspiracies - to name but a few. However, perhaps what best defined the 2002 coup, and what caused most impact throughout the world, was the role of the media in aiding and abetting it.

The media deliberately manipulated imagery or refused to broadcast the actual news. On the ground, hundreds of thousands of people had surrounded the presidential palace demanding Chavez’ return, but there were only cartoons being broadcast on the nation’s television screens. It was only through community media and on the ground communications that any real information managed to make its way to the general population.

Media tycoon and owner of Venevision, the biggest private television channel in Venezuela, Gustavo Cisneros, is reported to have met with coup makers both before and after the event. His channel played perhaps the most substantial role in manipulating the footage of Llaguna Bridge, which served as a pretext to delegitimise the democratic mandate of the Chavez government. Today, the media continues to be one of the most powerful tools that the opposition has available, despite the steady expansion of state and community media. Venevision is still in operation. In fact, just last month it was revealed that Cisneros had donated up to a million U.S. dollars to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State for the Obama administration.

So as you can see, these anti-government elements are historically linked and continue to be so, from George Bush, through to Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, to Gustavo Cisneros and Venezuela’s old political elite, to which even the opposition’s newest faces belong. From Maria Corina Machado, to Henrique Capriles Radonski and Leopoldo Lopez, who all come from families belonging to Venezuela’s business elite.” (Boothroyd)

“[M]uch of the opposition's political discourse and action is actually designed for consumption abroad, in the U.S. and Europe, rather than in Venezuela. I say consumption because these figures are, in essence, paid to voice these opinions, which are basically performances designed with the gaze of the international media in mind, and which employ the aesthetic, linguistic and “moral” codes established by liberal capitalist political norms and “human rights” organizations.” (Boothroyd) [links added]

The isolation of the US

I remember years ago (probably in the 1990s) seeing a newspaper photo of a meeting of the leaders of the Americas. The Cuban representative stood out like a sore thumb, the lone figure dressed in a military uniform while all of the others wore business suits. The implication couldn’t have been more clear: the Americas at the end of history were the land of the Washington Consensus, and the Cuban government was pitifully out of touch.

Things have changed. Democracy Now! is covering the Summit of the Americas in Panama and features an interview today with Miguel Tinker Salas and Mark Weisbrot.



I recommend watching the whole thing, especially since – if Rachel Maddow’s sycophantic report last night is any indication* – you’re not going to see any serious analysis anywhere in the US corporate media.

The central theme articulated by both Tinker Salas and Weisbrot is that the US government is so driven by internal forces and so incredibly out of touch with the reality of Latin America and the Caribbean that they continue to speak and act as though the region can be treated as their “backyard,” leading to increasing isolation. They can’t accept a hemisphere in which relations are based on mutual respect, in which people in countries other than the US can elect their own governments and choose their own policies, and in which other governments won’t reflexively accede to the US government’s arrogant attempts to punish leaders who refuse to abide by its wishes. Just listen to Roberta Jacobson! UNASUR and CELAC had to be established precisely because the US and Canada relentlessly seek to dominate any regional organization that includes them. And it appears that the chance of Hillary Clinton taking a different course as president is essentially zero, while any Republican would undoubtedly be worse.

(A note on a topic discussed in the interview: They talk about Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, who was just deported from the US to El Salvador to face justice for human rights crimes during the country’s civil war; and how the US might also deport (to Spain) Inocente Orlando Montano, another former Salvadoran general, for human rights crimes. These include the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter. Among the priests was Ignacio Martín-Baró, the great political-humanist-liberation psychologist.)

* My jaw dropped when Andrea Mitchell actually brought up Venezuela, and then returned to place when that discussion went nowhere.

Breaking News: Venezuela not actually a threat to US national security

Just ahead of the Summit of the Americas, the Obama administration has acknowledged what everyone knew to be true all along: that it lied when it declared Venezuela a threat to US national security. “The United States does not believe that Venezuela poses some threat to our national security,” announced Benjamin J. Rhodes yesterday.

They've only done this, of course, because the backlash was swift and strong and came from virtually the whole of the region (even some in the Venezuelan Right objected to the characterization) and beyond.

The excuse being peddled is that the threat-language was “completely pro forma,” which mischaracterizes the meaning of “pro forma” in a manner most harmful to legality and democracy. What they did was intentionally lie in order to take measures that wouldn't be allowed in the absence of the lie, and they did so with the support of the US corporate media, who are all too happy to play along with government lies. And even now that they've publicly admitted the claim that was the basis for the sanctions decree was false, the decree hasn't been rescinded. Because that's how they roll. Who's the threat, again?

History has shown us again and again

Two more analyses of the US government’s longstanding policy of antidemocratic interference in Venezuela:

James Petras’ “US and Venezuela: Decades of Defeats and Destabilization” (I don’t agree with everything in the article) discusses what a coup in Venezuela would mean for the country and the region:

What the US has in mind is not merely a ‘palace coup’ in which the democratic incumbents are ousted and replaced by US clients. Washington wants to go far beyond a change in personnel, beyond a friendly regime amenable to providing unconditional backing to the US foreign policy agenda…

A coup and post-coup regime is only the first step toward a systematic and comprehensive reversal of the socio-economic and political transformations of the past 16 years!

Heading the list will be the crushing of the mass popular community organizations which will oppose the coup. This will be accompanied by a mass purge, of all representative institutions, the constitutionalist armed forces, police and nationalist officials in charge of the oil industry and other public enterprises.

All the major public welfare programs in education, health, housing and low cost retail food outlets, will be dismantled or suffer major budget cuts.

The oil industry and dozens of other publicly owned enterprises and banks will be privatized and denationalized. US MNC will be the main beneficiaries. The agrarian land reform will be reversed: recipients will be evicted and the land returned to the landed oligarchs.

Given how many of the Venezuelan working class and rural poor will be adversely affected and given the combative spirit which permeates popular culture, the implementation of the US backed neo-liberal agenda will require prolonged, large-scale repression. This means, tens of thousands of killings, arrests and incarceration.

The US coup- masters and their Venezuelan proxies will unleash all their pent-up hostility against what they will deem the blood purge necessary to punish, in Henry Kissinger’s infamous phrase, “an irresponsible people” who dared to affirm their dignity and independence.

The US backing of violence in the run-up to the February 2015 coup will be escalated in the run-up to the inevitable next coup.

Contemporary US imperial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya and past US backed bloody military coups installing neo-liberal regimes in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay a few decades past, demonstrate that Washington places no limits on how many tens of thousands of lives are destroyed, how many millions are uprooted, if it is ‘necessary’ to secure imperial dominance.

Independent regional alliances would be threatened:

According to Washington’s domino theory, Cuba will be more susceptible to pressure if it is cut-off from Venezuela’s subsidized oil-for-medical services agreement. Ecuador and Bolivia will be vulnerable. Regional integration will be diluted or replaced by US directed trade agreements. Argentina’s drift to the right will be accelerated. The US military presence will be enlarged beyond Colombia, Peru, Paraguay and Central America. Radical anti-imperialist ideology will be replaced by a revised form of “pan-Americanism”, a euphemism for imperial primacy.

Dave Lindorff’s “Venezuela, the Latest ‘National Security Threat’” emphasizes that “anti-democratic tactics used abroad inevitably find their way home”:

The real threat to national security in Venezuela and around the world today is the government in Washington. And the US is not just a threat to the security of the peoples of the world, whether in third-world nations, in Russia and China, or in the ostensible allied nations of Europe. It is a threat to the national security of the people of the United States too.

History has shown us again and again that repressive and anti-democratic tactics used abroad inevitably find their way home, where they are then turned against the people of the home country. We’ve seen this happening with the militarization of US police, who now operate in most US communities as if they were occupying troops in a foreign country, carrying military weapons, shooting to kill, breaking into homes in night raids and using brutal force to make the most minor of arrests, treating ordinary citizens as criminals who have no right to speak or to challenge how they or a family member or friend are being treated. We’ve seen it in the massive expansion of domestic spying, and we’ve seen it in the corruption of the courts, where judges in national security trials now deny defendants even the right to present a real defense to a jury, and where higher courts give the government permission to violate almost every Constitutionally guaranteed right in the name of “combatting terrorism” or defending “national security” interests.

“How long-standing is that?”

I hadn’t linked to yesterday’s interview with Miguel Tinker Salas on Democracy Now! because I preferred the Real News interview for reasons I explained here. But Glenn Greenwald mentioned one segment in his latest article on the subject and it reminded me that I had wanted at least to provide the transcript of this one exchange. The contrast between the behavior here of AP reporter Matt Lee and the habitual deference and credulity of the US media is striking:

AMY GOODMAN: And I want to play for you a recent exchange between State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki and Matt Lee, a reporter with the Associated Press.

REPORTER: President Maduro last night went on the air and said that they had arrested multiple people who were allegedly behind a coup that was backed by the United States. What is your response?

JEN PSAKI: These latest accusations, like all previous such accusations, are ludicrous. As a matter of long-standing policy, the United States does not support political transitions by nonconstitutional means. Political transitions must be democratic, constitutional, peaceful and legal. We’ve seen many times that the Venezuelan government tries to distract from its own actions by blaming the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela. These efforts reflect a lack of seriousness on the part of the Venezuelan government to deal with the grave situation it faces.

MATT LEE: Sorry. The U.S. has—whoa, whoa, whoa—the U.S. has a long-standing practice of not promoting—what did you say? How long-standing is that? I would—in particular in South and Latin America, that is not a long-standing practice.

JEN PSAKI: Well, my point here, Matt, without getting into history—

MATT LEE: Not in this case.

JEN PSAKI: —is that we do not support, we have no involvement with, and these are ludicrous accusations.

MATT LEE: In this specific case.

JEN PSAKI: Correct.

MATT LEE: But if you go back not that long ago, during your lifetime even—

JEN PSAKI: The last 21 years?

MATT LEE: Well done. Touché. But, I mean, look, does “long-standing” mean 10 years in this case? I mean, what is—

JEN PSAKI: Matt, my intention was to speak to the specific reports.

MATT LEE: I understand, but you said it’s a long-standing U.S. practice, and I’m not so sure how—depends on what your definition of “long-standing” is.

JEN PSAKI: We will—OK.

REPORTER: Recently in Kiev, whatever we say about Ukraine, whatever, the change of government in the beginning of last year was unconstitutional, and yet you supported it. The Constitution was not—

JEN PSAKI: That is also ludicrous.

AMY GOODMAN: That was State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki being questioned by reporters. Professor Miguel Tinker Salas, if you could respond to both that exchange and also Josh Earnest, White House spokesperson?

MIGUEL TINKER SALAS: I would have loved if that kind of exchange would have got broader diffusion in the U.S. press, but the fact is that it hasn’t. And we continue to have the belief that the U.S. does not—is not involved in unconstitutional change in Latin America. And as a historian, the record speaks just the opposite, from ’53 in Guatemala to the Dominican Republic, to Chile in ’73, and through the support of the Argentine military dictatorships and Brazil, and, if we want to go even closer, to 2002 in Venezuela, when the U.S. actually did support a coup against the democratically elected Hugo Chávez, the shortest coup in the world, and the coup that brought Chávez back to power, and then again in Honduras in 2009, and, not shortly thereafter, in Paraguay with Lugo, where they said it was a democratic transition, when in fact it was an unconstitutional shift in power. So, again, the notion that the U.S. has not supported both military coups directly or through what they call soft power is really ludicrous.

And, in fact, we should turn the question around. If they want to support democracy, I think the best thing the U.S. can do in the case of Venezuela and other countries is to pull back and let things develop on their own….

Playing along

The Bush administration wanted to invade and occupy Iraq, so they lied. The Obama administration wanted to move aggressively against the democratically elected government of Venezuela, so they made the outlandish claim of a national emergency due to the “unusual and extraordinary” threat posed by Venezuela to US national security.

As this latest episode shows, they no longer even think they have to pretend to be telling the truth – the actual language of the laws is a meaningless formality. Can’t take certain measures against another government unless they’re a real threat? No problem. Just declare them a threat, reality and honesty be damned. “We wanted to do something that’s only permitted under certain conditions, so we lied about the existence of those conditions” is now put forward as a legitimate justification. And the US media and public should be ready to play along. I mean, acquiescing to the flagrant subversion of laws meant to check government power and prevent its abuse couldn’t possibly have negative consequences for people in the US.

UPDATED TO ADD: Jim Naureckas at FAIR just posted about the embarrassing WaPo article I linked to above, reading it in light of the paper’s own government links: “WaPo, Owned by CIA’s Webmaster, Blasts Venezuela’s ‘State-Financed’ News.” The most relevant bit:

Ah–the administration is just pretending there’s an “unusual and extraordinary threat” because it wants to invoke powers that it’s only legally allowed to use in an actual emergency. No biggie. Thanks for clearing that up, Washington Post!

Apropos of nothing, here’s an interview Chris Hayes did with former CIA official John Kiriakou a few weeks ago, in which Kiriakou describes how the CIA grooms presidents.



Democratic presidents entering office are perceived as hostile or ambivalent, so

The CIA as an organization, as a culture, has sought to bring those presidents into the fold. And we saw it with Bill Clinton, when I was there, and we saw it in spades with Barack Obama. Obama was seen as a potential enemy, and virtually as soon as he took the oath of office, the agency brought him in, taught him the secrets, showed them what they could do. And he became their biggest cheerleader.

Hayes remarks that it sounds similar to how spies are recruited, and Kiriakou responds that the basic techniques are indeed the same:

What you do with a president is you convince the president that not only are you his best friend in government, but you’re going to help make his presidency and make his legacy. And it’s going to benefit him to have a close relationship with the CIA. Starting with his morning intelligence briefing, and going all the way through whatever covert programs happen to pop up….

Hayes notes, “I mean it’s…talk about an advantage over everyone else in government. You get the president every morning.” “Every single morning,” Kiriakou answers, “you have a private meeting with the president. Most members of the cabinet can’t say that.”

TRNN interviews Miguel Tinker Salas on US government’s actions toward Venezuela

Here’s an interview on the Real News Network with Venezuela scholar Miguel Tinker Salas. (You can watch it there or read the transcript, or watch it on YouTube here. Embedding isn’t allowed, which is annoying.)

What I like about this interview in particular is that it focuses on the US government’s actions and relations with Latin America. Too many interviews, and I think it’s out of fear of appearing uncritical, devote too much time to discussing Venezuela’s domestic economic problems and the internal difficulties of the Maduro government. I have a problem with this tendency for several reasons. First, it can contribute to the arrogant, imperialistic sense that we have in the US (and the global North generally) that it’s our right and responsibility to provide criticism and recommendations to other countries, with the expectation that they’ll listen.

Second, emphasizing these problems in the context of opposition coup-plotting can implicitly normalize the idea that the illegal removal of a democratically elected government, the destruction of democracy, and the sweeping aside of the popular will is potentially justifiable. If things are really that bad or protesters that angry, people could easily start to think, maybe something drastic like regime change might be necessary. This is an idea that would never be accepted by the vast majority of people in North America or Europe with regard to their own or other Northern countries’ governments, but we often have a tendency to see poor countries’ democratic institutions as less sacrosanct and to be less absolute in their defense.

Third, the focus on Venezuela’s current woes removes them from any historical, comparative, or global context, which tends at once to magnify them and to make them appear more potentially tractable for the Venezuelan government. The economic, political, and social problems Venezuela is facing are shared by many other countries, including in the same region, often in far more extreme forms. Further, to dwell on current corruption and shortages and so forth distracts attention from the terrible situation before Chávez was elected, which would certainly recur were Maduro to be criminally ousted. This narrow focus also leads away from an analysis that recognizes both the general difficulties involved with building strong welfare programs and policies of local political involvement in a global capitalist order and the specific effects of the covert campaign of destabilization and economic warfare continuously waged by the rightwing opposition in league with the US. (And it should go without saying that economic improvement wouldn’t deter the Venezuelan Right or the US government in their destabilization efforts at all - these have been a constant since 1999.)

Finally, it distracts from what should be our primary focus, which is to challenge media misrepresentations in our own countries and stop our own governments from persisting in antidemocratic and imperialistic intervention. We should be focused on joining with the people of the region to demand that the US government especially respect the democratic process in Latin American and Caribbean nations and engage with their elected governments in good faith. They aren’t going to do it without sustained pressure from within as well as without.

A bit of background on the Palmerola civilian international airport / US military base

As Nikolas Kozloff described in the wake of the 2009 coup:

Prior to the recent military coup d’etat President Manuel Zelaya declared that he would turn the base into a civilian airport, a move opposed by the former U.S. ambassador. What’s more Zelaya intended to carry out his project with Venezuelan financing.

…A couple weeks after Zelaya announced that the armed forces would proceed with construction at Palmerola the military rebelled. Led by Romeo Vásquez, the army overthrew Zelaya and deported him out of the country.

So now the coup-legacy government is going to proceed with the construction with funding from the rightwing Spanish government and continuing US military control. This (Soto Cano) is the same base, you might recall, that was used to fly the democratically elected Honduran president out of the country after he was kidnapped from his residence in his pajamas.

Venezuela and the US: context and perspective

Two recent articles:

• Joe Emersberger, “Breaking the Silence about Colombia and Ourselves”

• Greg Grandin, “What Is Happening in Venezuela?”

“Today Washington made real life imitate Venezuela’s art of story telling.”

I continue to be struck by the similarities between the preposterous claims made by the US Right and its media lackeys about the Obama administration and the preposterous claims made by the Obama administration and its media lackeys about Venezuela and other thorns in the side of US imperialism.

I’m also amazed at the corporate media’s willingness to act as mouthpiece for the assertions of the State Department and the CIA, no matter how harmful, dumb, or seemingly embarrassing and shameful. Venezuela, and not the US, is increasingly isolated in Latin America. Washington “gets tired of Venezuela’s love affair with conspiracy,” and in its exasperation decides to oblige with…a more open conspiracy:

Washington has finally had enough of Venezuela’s obsession with U.S. conspiracy theories. On Monday, the White House gave Venezuela a realistic dose of the bad romance it has consistently written about its relationship with the U.S.

…So today Washington made real life imitate Venezuela’s art of story telling. The White House press office made President Obama’s note to the speakers of the House and Senate public, calling Venezuela’s foreign policy [?] an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” [emphasis added]

And of course the invasion of Iraq was about bringing democracy to the Middle East.

#ObamaYankeeGoHome

...has been trending on Twitter.

Securing empire through propaganda

I’m writing a critical review of Mark Neocleous’ 2008 Critique of Security, in which he argues (among other things) that “security” in the modern world has meant the securing of the capitalist political order through the institutionalization of a permanent state of so-called exception.

This understanding makes sense of the longstanding pattern of ignoring or minimizing genuine military and terroristic threats while deeming people, movements, and governments that pose no such danger threats to national security. Only in these terms can we understand today’s absurd and despicable announcement by the Obama administration that Venezuela – whose democratically elected governments the US state has illegally sought for years to overthrow, in plain violation of that country’s popular sovereignty – is now classified as a national security threat. To the US. Irony Watch, indeed.

I’m beginning to wonder if there exists any claim about Latin America* so cynical and implausible that the US government, corporate media, or public would balk at it. Worryingly, there doesn’t appear to be.

* (or, alternatively, about allies like Saudi Arabia)

March on Human Rights Watch in New York City on Thursday, part of day of action in solidarity with Venezuela

This Thursday, March 5, will be a national day of action in the US in solidarity with Venezuela, with events to be held in cities across the country. I won’t be able to attend any of the scheduled events, which is regrettable (well, for some – those focused on “remembering Hugo Chávez” don’t interest me especially). But one in particular caught my eye:

New York City, NY
Thursday, March 5
5th Avenue between 33rd and 34th Street
4:00 p.m.
March: “Human Rights Watch, Weapon of the U.S. State Department”

A rally in support of human rights protesting a major human rights organization might initially seem bizarre. But HRW has been somewhat suspect when it comes to humanitarian imperialism for some time. The information documented in this letter from last July leaves little doubt as to the organization’s ties to the Obama administration and US intelligence agencies. These ties substantially compromise HRW’s mission and undermine its credibility.

Venezuela: “Will they forget that they ever refused to lend a hand?”

Michael Albert has a new piece, “Whispering Venezuela?”, which tries to engage some sectors of the Left in an examination of the causes of their relative silence surrounding the ongoing efforts by the US government, in league with the Venezuelan Right, to destabilize and foment a coup against the country’s democratically elected government. Albert wonders about the reasons for this inaction in the face of a serious threat:

Neighborhoods organized, albeit with great difficulty, into councils, and councils into larger communes. Isn't this what an anti authoritarian, non violent, participation-advocating left wants?

Grass roots missions to solve social problems? Expanded education and health care? Democracy defended and plebiscites repeatedly taken and enacted? Do these and many other positive trends mean the Bolivarian project is flawless? Of course not. Do they mean that concern and criticism are unwarranted? Of course not. Do they mean the Bolivarian effort will succeed without doubt? Of course not. But the alternative to being a mindless sycophantic booster need not and should not be being silent or derogatory.

And in any case, why should Venezuela's project being less than perfect deter people from feeling outrage at the right wing and corporate opposition in Venezuela and at U.S. machinations seeking Venezuela's collapse? Why should the Venezuelan project being less than perfect prevent support for the best of Venezuela's efforts as well as constructive criticism of whatever one finds wanting?*

I think no serious progressive person would say the Venezuelan project being less perfect than some abstract textbook conception ought to terminate our support for it. Ought to silence our voices for it. Yet Venezuela being less than abstractly perfect often has had just that effect. Or so it seems to me. [emphasis added]

The article concludes sadly:

It is not the place of revolutionaries to watch world historic endeavors from the sidelines, either castigating aggressively or whispering unobtrusively due to thinking those endeavors aren't perfect, include errors, don't yet evidence complete and absolute freedom. Yes, someone looking on from the side, that way may, when the dust clears, in the socially worst case, be able to intone over the grave of the effort they rejected, ‘see, I told you so…I got it right. They failed’. What a sad kind of self affirmation that would be. And I have to wonder, in a vastly more preferable scenario wherein the rejected project persists and proceeds, will those same critics say, down the road, ‘I was horribly wrong’, or will they forget that they ever refused to lend a hand?

It’s quite perplexing to me that so many seem not to realize that in remaining silent on the matter they’re not only taking an extreme position on the Venezuelan government but in effect allying themselves with the US government and corporations and their view that they have the right to intervene in the democratic processes of Latin American countries. They’re in effect denying these countries’ claims to collective self-governance. They’re in effect choosing the alternative: a vicious neoliberal regime serving US-corporate interests. I can’t imagine that’s what anyone on the Left consciously wants, but it’s the scenario that history has well shown is made more likely by a policy of tacit abandonment.

A coup in Venezuela would have catastrophic consequences for democracy, for equality, for social justice and liberation (including secular) movements, for health, education, and other human rights, not just in Venezuela but throughout the region. People would die. They would be violently oppressed. Their life-chances would be sharply circumscribed. The power of Northern governments and corporations would be vastly increased, and their covert agencies more confident than ever in their ability to override democracy. If you make this more likely through your silence or inaction, you have no right to speak critically about Iran in 1953 or Chile in 1973.

* Here’s a somewhat more critical piece on the government’s policies. And here’s a more general post by me about leftwing movements and governments in Latin America.