It’s an incontrovertible fact that the British colonizers built roads and railways in India, they established missionary schools, colleges and universities, they enforced the English common law, and the goal of exploiting the natural resources and four-hundred-million-strong Indian manpower, at the time of independence in 1947, and trading raw materials for pennies and exporting finished goods with huge profits to the Indian consumer market never crossed the “altruistic minds” of the British imperialists.
Puns aside, there is an essential precondition in the European Union’s charter of union, according to which the developing economies of Europe that joined the EU allowed free movement of goods (free trade) only on the reciprocal condition that the developed countries would allow the free movement of labor.
What’s obvious in this stipulation is the fact that the free movement of goods, services and capital only benefits the countries that have a strong manufacturing base, and the free movement of workers only favors the developing economies where labor is cheap.
Now, when international financial institutions, like the IMF and WTO, promote free trade by exhorting the developing countries all over the world to reduce tariffs and subsidies without the reciprocal free movement of labor, whose interests do such institutions try to protect? Obviously, they try to protect the interests of their largest donors by shares, the developed nations.
Some market fundamentalists, who irrationally believe in the laissez-faire capitalism, try to justify this unfair practice by positing Schumpeter’s theory of “Creative Destruction”: that the free trade between unequal trading partners leads to the destruction of host country’s existing economic order and a subsequent reconfiguration gives rise to a better economic order.
Whenever one comes up with gross absurdities of such proportions, they should always make it contingent on the principle of reciprocity: that if free trade is beneficial for the nascent industrial base of developing economies, then the free movement of labor is equally beneficial for the workforce of developed countries.
The policymakers of developing countries must not allow themselves to be hoodwinked by such deceptive arguments; instead, they should devise prudent national policies which suit the interests of their underprivileged masses. But the trouble is that the governments of the Third World countries are dependent on foreign investment, that’s why they cannot adopt independent economic and trade policies.
The so-called multinational corporations based in the Western financial districts make profits from the consumer markets all over the world and pay a share of those profits to their respective governments as bribes in the form of taxes.
A single, large multinational corporation based in the Wall Street and other financial districts of the Western world generates revenues to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, which is more than the total GDP of many developing economies. Examples of such behemoth business conglomerates include: Investment banks – JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, HSBC and BNP Paribas; Oil majors – Exxon Mobil, Chevron, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and Total; Manufacturers – Apple, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Pakistan’s total GDP is $300 billion and with a population of 210 million, its per capita income amounts to a paltry $1600; similarly, India’s per capita income is also only $2000. Whereas the GDP of the US is $20 trillion and per capita income is well in excess of $60,000. Likewise, the per capita incomes of most countries in the Western Europe are also around $40,000.
That’s a difference of more than twenty times between the incomes of the Third World countries and the beneficiaries of neocolonialism, North America and Western Europe. Only the defense budget of the Pentagon is $700 billion, which is more than twice the size of Pakistan’s total economy.
Every balance of trade deficit due to the lack of strong manufacturing base makes the developing nations poorer, and every balance of trade surplus further adds to the already immense fortune of the developed world.
Without this neocolonial system of exploitation, the whole edifice of supposedly “meritocratic” capitalism will fall flat on its face and the myth of individual incentive will get busted beyond repair, because it only means incentive for the pike and not for the minnows.
Regarding the contribution of British colonizers to India, the countries that don’t have a history of colonization, like China and Russia for instance, have better roads, railways and industries built by natives themselves than the ones that have been through centuries of foreign occupation and colonization, such as the subcontinent.
The worst thing the British colonizers did to the subcontinent was that they put in place an exploitative governance and administrative system that catered to the needs of the colonizers without being accountable to the colonized masses over whom it was imposed.
It’s regrettable that despite having the trappings of freedom and democracy, India and Pakistan are still continuing with the same exploitative, traditional power structure that was bequeathed to the subcontinent by the British colonizers. The society is stratified along the class lines, most of South Asia’s ruling elites still have the attitude of foreign colonizers and the top-down bureaucratic system, Afsar Shahi Nizam, is one of the most corrupt and inefficient in the world.
Regarding the technological progress, I do concede that the Western countries are too far ahead and even the Far Eastern nations, like Japan, South Korea and China, that attained their independence after India and Pakistan have become developed and prosperous nations, while South Asia has lagged behind. The way I see it, however, the failure of India and Pakistan in creating modern and egalitarian societies is primarily the failure of leadership.
It’s a fact that the European culture evolved in a bottom-up manner during the Renaissance period, especially after the invention of the Gutenberg’s printing press when books and newspapers became cheap and within the reach of common man, but when we look at the technological and economic development of nations in the 20th and 21st centuries, that happened mostly in a top-down manner, particularly in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and in China after the Maoist revolution in 1949.
Cultures take centuries to evolve and the basic driver is always the level of socioeconomic development of the masses, therefore the primary concern of the policymakers of the developing world should be to improve governance and invest in the infrastructure development and the technical education and vocational training of South Asia’s labor force. In the long run, technologically advanced and economically prosperous nations are more likely to bring about a cultural change, too.
The basic trouble with the 21st century social reformers is that they have given up all hope for bringing about economic reforms; nobody talks about the nationalization of the modes of production and labor reforms anymore. Laissez-faire capitalism and consequent social stratification is taken for granted; thus, if reforming the economic system is out of question, the next best thing for the chattering classes to espouse is cultural reforms. It’s worth noting, however, that reforming culture is many times more difficult than reforming political and economic systems, which the neoliberals have already given up on because it appeared daunting and impossible to achieve.
Truth be told, South Asia’s victim-blaming neoliberals lack any original insight into social and political phenomena, and they uncritically imitate the views of Orientalist academics. After the onset of the Industrial Revolution, when the Western societies were riddled with social disparity, the response of Western intellectuals was to come up with theories of economics, such as socialism, Fabianism and Marxism.
The naive South Asian intelligentsia, on the other hand, is fixated on bringing about cultural reforms without the essential prerequisites of technological progress, socioeconomic development and investment on technical education and vocational training of the workforce.
Finally, China is an interesting case study in regard to its history. Firstly, although it did fight a couple of Opium Wars with the British in the middle of the nineteenth century, the influence of Western imperialism generally remained confined to its coastal cities and it did not make inroads into inland areas.
Secondly, China is ethno-linguistically and culturally homogeneous: more than 90% Chinese belong to the Han ethnic group and they speak various dialects of Mandarin, thus reducing the likelihood of discord and dissension in the Chinese society.
And lastly, behind the “Iron Curtain” of international isolation beginning from the Maoist revolution in 1949 to China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, China successfully built its manufacturing base by imparting vocational and technical education to its disciplined workforce and by building industrial and transport infrastructure.
It didn’t allow any imports until 2001, but after joining the WTO, it opened up its import-export policy on a reciprocal basis; and since labor is much cheaper in China than in the Western countries, therefore it now has a comparative advantage over the Western capitalist bloc which China has exploited in its national interest. These three factors, along with the visionary leadership of Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai and China’s vanguard socialist party collectively, have placed China on the path to progress and prosperity in the twenty-first century.
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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The meetings in Beijing during January 30-31 between Washington, Russia, China, France and the UK apparently failed to preserve the commitment to prohibit intermediate range nuclear weapons. Washington stuck to its determination to withdraw from the historic agreement of Reagan and Gorbachev to destroy all land-based intermediate range nuclear missiles. This US withdrawal from a nuclear weapons reduction agreement follows the George W. Bush/Cheney regime’s withdrawal from the anti-ballistic missile treaty. Indeed, since the Clinton regime, every US president has produced worsening trust between the two major nuclear powers.
No good can come of this as Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said at the Beijing meeting.
The intermediate range nuclear missile treaty (INF) does not involve US security. It protects Europe from Russian missiles and Russia from US missiles stationed in Europe. Trump’s announcement that he is breaking free of the treaty tells the Russians that they are going to have missiles on their borders that allow them no response time. The Europeans are crazy to go along with this as they will be targeted by Russia in turn, but the Europeans are Washington’s vassals.
Ever since Clinton broke Washington’s promise not to move NATO eastward, Russia has known that Washington seeks military advantage over Russia. By leaving the ABM treaty, the George W. Bush regime told Russia that Washington intended to gain superiority by constructing an anti-ballistic missile shield that would negate Russia’s retaliatory capability, thus subjecting Russia to nuclear blackmail.
Russia responded with new hypersonic ICBMs that cannot be intercepted and now holds nuclear superiority over the US, but does not exploit it. The US response is to tear up the INF treaty and put its missiles back on Russia’s borders.
Another way to look at the INF treaty’s demise is that the Obama regime committed one trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money (in addition to the annual one trillion dollar budget of the military/security complex) to build more nuclear weapons, none of which are needed as the US alone has enough to blow up the world several times. Breaking the INF treaty is a sure-fire way to initiate a new arms race which would provide justification for the trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money that Washington is handing over to the military/security complex for more nuclear weapons.
Yet another way to look at the demise of the treaty is that Washington wants out of the treaty so that it can deploy intermediate range missiles against China. Washington has actually drawn up plans for war against Russia and China and has conducted simulations of what the outcome would be. America wins, of course.
The dangerous idea that a nuclear war can be won has been pushed for some years by the neoconservatives who are committed to US hegemony over the world. This idea definitely serves the material interest of the military/security complex and is very popular among the power brokers in Washington.
Washington’s excuse for breaking the INF treaty is that Russia is cheating and has violated the treaty. But Russia has no interest in violating a treaty that protects Russia. Russia’s intermediate range missiles cannot reach the US, and the only reason Russia would target Europe would be to retaliate for Europe hosting US missiles on Russia’s borders.
The beneficiaries of a renewed nuclear arms race are the stockholders of the military/security complex. Washington is feeding their profits by placing humanity at greater risk of nuclear Armageddon. Weapons are piling up, the use of which would destroy all life on the planet. This makes the weapons the very opposite of security. Trump whose goal was to normalize relations with Russia is now under the thumb of the military/security complex and has announced US intentions to withdraw from the last remaining arms control agreement—the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).
The situation is serious. Very little is reported in US media of the resurrection of the nuclear arms race, and what is reported is blamed on Russia and China. Americans hear that it is China, not the US, that is militarizing the South China Sea and Russia that intends to restore the Soviet empire and that these intentions are threats to American national security. The evidence consists of assertion. The Russians have offered proof that they have not violated the INF treaty, but Washington doesn’t care because Washington is not leaving the treaty because of Russian violations.
Washington is leaving the treaty because Washington wants military hegemony over Russia and China and a good excuse to hand over another trillion dollars to the military/security complex. In the end capitalism does more than exploit labor. It ends life on earth
Traditionally, an aggressor paves the way to war with constant propaganda against the country to be attacked. The propaganda creates public support and justifies the attack. The constant stream of provocative accusations out of Washington against Russia and China (and Iran) in order to justify treaty breaking and higher armaments spending sounds to Russia and China like they are being set up for attack. It is reckless and irresponsible to convince nuclear powers that they are going to be attacked. There is no more certain way of producing war. Russia and China are hearing what Saddam Hussein heard, what Gaddafi heard, what Assad heard, what Iran hears. Unlike these victims of Washington, Russia and China have substantial offensive capability. When a country is convinced it is targeted for attack, does the country just sit there and await the attack?
Washington might be setting up America for a first strike with the extraordinary stream of accusations and provocations issuing from people too stupid to be in possession of nuclear weapons. In the nuclear era, it is reckless for a government to replace diplomacy with threats and coercion. Washington’s recklessness is the most dangerous threat that the world faces.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102 Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling) PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
Yet again, the United States elite has decided to attempt to impose its will on the people of another nation, in this case, and not for the first time either, your country Venezuela.
Of course, this coup is perfectly consistent with US foreign policy for the past two centuries, the essential focus of which has been to secure control over key geostrategic areas of the world and to steal the resources of foreign nations. For a list of only the ‘most notable U.S. interventions’ in Central/South America over that period, see ‘Before Venezuela: The long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America’. But you can also read a more complete list of US interventions overseas (only since 1945) in William Blum’s ‘Overthrowing other people’s governments: The Master List’.
Unfortunately, international law (like domestic law) is simply used as another means to inflict violence on those outside the elite circle and, as casual observation of the record demonstrates, is routinely ignored by elites in the US and elsewhere when their geopolitical, economic and/or other interests ‘require’ it.
As usual, there is no remotely reasonable pretext for this coup, despite the usual alphabet of sycophantic US allies such as Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Israel…. – see, for example, ‘Australia recognises Juan Guaidó as Venezuela president’ and ‘Emmanuel Macron, Pedro Sanchez, Angela Merkel and Theresa May Have No Right to Issue an Ultimatum to Venezuela’– as well as the elite-controlled corporate media, lying that there is such pretext. Mind you, given the flagging domestic support for many of these political leaders in light of their obvious incompetence in dealing with issues of critical import to their own constituencies – is this where we mention words like ‘Brexit’ and ‘Yellow Vests’, for example? – it is little wonder that the distraction offered by events elsewhere is also used to provide some relief from the glare focused on their own ineptitude.
Of course, Luis Almagro, the submissive head of the Organization of American States (OAS), recognized Guaidó in violation of both the OAS Charter and a majority vote of that organization – see ‘Message of the OAS Secretary General on Venezuela’and ‘Caricom to Almagro: “You Don’t Speak For The Entire OAS”’– and the cowardly European Union (EU), also kneeling in the face of US pressure to ignore international law, simply add to the picture of a global system devoid of moral compass and the rule of law, let alone courage.
But lest some people think this US coup is only about resources, geopolitical control is also vital. As noted by Garikai Chengu:
‘America seeks control of Venezuela because it sits atop the strategic intersection of the Caribbean, South and Central American worlds. Control of the nation, has always been a remarkably effective way to project power into these three regions and beyond.’ See ‘Sanctions of Mass Destruction: America’s War on Venezuela’.
Of course, even though the outstanding problems in Venezuela have been primarily caused by the ongoing illegal US inteference, the eminently reasonable government of your country remains willing to engage in dialogue to resolve these problems. See, for example, ‘Venezuela leader Nicolas Maduro seeks talks with Obama’ and ‘Maduro Reaffirms Willingness For Dialogue’. However, this willingness for dialogue does not interest the US elite or its sycophantic western and local (both within Central/South America and within Venezuela) allies who, as noted above, are intent on usurping control from the people of Venezuela and stealing your resources.
Fortunately, of course, you have many solidarity allies including countries such as Russia, China, Cuba and Turkey who acknowledge your right to live with the government you elected and do not wish to steal your resources. Moreover, at an ‘emergency’ meeting of the UN Security Council on 26 January 2019, called by the United States to seek authorization for interference in Venezuela, the Council was divided as China, Equatorial Guinea, Russia and South Africa opposed the move, with Côte d’Ivoire and Indonesia abstaining. See ‘UN political chief calls for dialogue to ease tensions in Venezuela; Security Council divided over path to end crisis’.
Anyway, given your existing and ongoing resistance to the coup in defense of your elected government, I would like to offer another avenue of support for you to consider. My support, if you like, to plan and implement a comprehensive nonviolent strategy to defeat the coup.
However, I have also outlined the essential points of this strategy on the website Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy. The pages of this website provide clear guidance on how to easily plan and then implement the twelve components of this strategy.
If you like, you can see a diagrammatic representation of this strategy by looking at the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel.
And on the Strategic Aims page you can see the basic list of 23 strategic goals necessary to defeat a coup of the type you are resisting at the moment. These strategic goals can easily be adopted, modified and/or added to if necessary, in accordance with your precise circumstances as you decide.
If you want to read a straightforward account of how to plan and conduct a nonviolent tactic so that it has strategic impact, you can do so here: ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’.
And, to ensure that your courage is most powerfully utilized, you are welcome to consider the 20 points designed to ensure that you are ‘Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’ whenever you take nonviolent action where repression is a risk. The information is useful for both neutralizing violent provocateurs but also in the event that sections of the police or army defect to support the US puppet Guaidó in the days or weeks ahead, as often happens in contexts such as these.
In essence, your ongoing resistance to the coup is essential if you are to defeat the coupmakers and defend your elected government. But the chances of success are vastly enhanced if your struggle, and that of your solidarity allies around the world, is focused for maximum strategic impact and designed to spread the cost of doing so.
Remember, it is you who will decide the fate of Venezuela. Not the US elite and not even your President and government.
Of course, whether or not you decide to consider and/or adopt my proposed strategy, you have my solidarity.
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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
On the evening before National Security Advisor John Bolton reiterated that “all options [including, presumably, military intervention] are on the table” regarding the situation in Venezuela, Twitter announced that it had joined the US-backed coup by taking down 2,000 accounts that it said were engaged in a “state-backed influence campaign”, according to RT.
In a blog post,Twitter said it removed 1,196 accounts located in Venezuela which it deemed to “appear to be engaged in a state-backed influence campaign targeting domestic audiences.” The company also removed another 764 accounts, but said “we are unable to definitively tie the accounts located in Venezuela to information operations of a foreign government against another country.”
The purge was part of a crackdown on “foreign information operations”, which also serves as a resource for researchers hoping to investigate these operations. In the post, Twitter announced that it was adding five new sets of account sets to its archive of foreign influence campaigns.
Twitter has removed 764 accounts located in Venezuela. We are unable to definitively tie the accounts located in Venezuela to information operations of a foreign government against another country. However, these accounts are another example of a foreign campaign of spammy content focused on divisive political themes, and the behavior we uncovered is similar to that utilized by potential Russian IRA accounts. We are disclosing them out of an abundance of caution and welcome the feedback of researchers.
Additionally, we have removed 1,196 accounts located in Venezuela which appear to be engaged in a state-backed influence campaign targeting domestic audiences. We have shared information on these accounts with our industry peers, and continue to investigate malicious activity originating in Venezuela, both targeting audiences with in Venezuela and abroad.
Abby Martin, host of YouTube series Empire Files, lamented that amid Twitter censorship of pro-government supporters, “pro-coup Venezuelans and right-wing exiles dominate the media sphere.”
While pro-coup Venezuelans & right-wing exiles dominate the media sphere, tech companies are actively censoring pro-government accounts they say are working to "influence" people https://t.co/AEfKmHhl1w
And another journalist highlighted Twitter’s caveat that the company wasn’t able to “definitively tie” the accounts to the Maduro regime, meaning that some pro-Maduro Venezuelans with no ties to the government may have found their accounts eliminated.
Amazing how one dataset is Venezuela, just days after US set a coup into motion against its government. As usual, the caveat is buried: “We are unable to definitively tie the accounts located in Venezuela to information operations of a foreign government against another country.” https://t.co/8Krx9E1YDu
Of course, this isn’t the first time Twitter has cracked down on pro-government Twitter accounts. In September, Twitter suspended the official account of the Venezuelan government’s press team, reportedly without giving any explanation. In an interesting twist on a punitive technique often employed against conservatives, Twitter and several other US social media companies also removed the “verified” labels from accounts belonging to Maduro.
But of course anybody who questions Twitter’s commitment to open expression is a bigot – and probably a Nazi.
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For all its economic might, Germany’s main centrist parties are in crisis. If barely a decade ago the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD) conquered over three-quarters of the vote, in polling today they represent under half of the electorate. But as the main parties lose their hold over Germans, the Left does not seem well-placed to take advantage. The Die Linke party formed by postcommunists and a split from the SPD in 2007 has secured a respectable vote nationally and at the regional level, becoming the country’s fourth-largest political force, and yet has consistently failed to rise above 10 per cent of the vote. Indeed, the real upstarts in German politics today are the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, the first such party to reach parliament since 1952) and the liberal-ecologist Green Party.
Seeking to break out of this strategic impasse, some leading figures in Die Linke have created a new populist movement designed to reinsert the language of class and poverty into German politics and split the AfD’s own base. However, this remains controversial within Die Linke, with figures loyal to party co-chair Katja Kipping accusing Aufstehen’s frontwoman Sahra Wagenknecht of kowtowing to anti-immigration sentiment.
In this interview originally conducted for Novosti, Jerko Bakotin spoke with researcher Ingar Solty about the decline of social democracy, Die Linke’s strategic dilemma, and the possibility of building a counter-hegemonic force able to challenge for power.
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Jerko Bakotin (JB): The German Social Democrats (SPD) are at a historic low. The Greens are on the rise, but critics claim that this is now a solidly pro-business party. And to their left, Die Linke is unable to break into double digits in the polls. If there has often been talk of a future “red-red-green” government uniting all three parties, this is today arithmetically impossible. So how would you describe the Left’s perspectives today?
Ingar Solty (IS): Ever since the creation of Die Linke [in 2007, uniting the postcommunist Party of Democratic Socialism with a split from the SPD] the spoken or unspoken aim of the German left was to create an anti-neoliberal reform government together with the Greens and SPD. If for these other parties forming a government is itself the end goal, for Die Linke this would be what Rosa Luxemburgcalled a transitional goal of revolutionary realpolitik. That is, a move that improved conditions in the fight for a postcapitalist society. Such a coalition would of course require that the SPD broke with its Third Way, market-oriented neoliberal policies; the Greens, similarly, would have to turn away from market-based pseudo-“solutions” to the ecological crisis like carbon emission trading, and indeed their complete surrender to the car industry in the state of Baden-Württemberg, where they are the dominant political force.
Today “red-red-green” is impossible – for political reasons and, with the erosion of social democracy and the rise of the far right, even arithmetically. The SPD is incapable of renewing itself. Its leaders simply cannot turn around and say “Look, everything we ourselves did since at least 2002 was a total mistake and we will have to undo everything that we have done ever since.”
Yet while they cannot say this, doing so – and following up on it with concrete policies significantly improving workers’ lives – is a necessary step toward regaining some credibility.
JB: What chance is there for a radical shift within the SPD, like in the cases of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party or indeed Bernie Sanders’s 2016 primary campaign?
IS: There are no such leaders on the horizon – and there will not be a Sanders or Corbyn within the SPD. This first owes to Germany’s different political economy. In the U.S. and UK we see deindustrialization, the decline of labour unions, and tuition fees being offloaded onto workers, whereas Germany still does have a strong industrial base with relatively strong labour unions. Taken together with the existence of a vocational training system for manual labourers and the fact that higher education for intellectual workers is tuition-free, these factors still guarantee “middle class” status for a significant share of the professional working class. This major difference makes the U.S. and Great Britain politically more comparable to Spain, Italy, even Greece and Portugal, in the sense that while in all those countries, the erosion of the working “middle“ classes is already a fact; in Germany it is merely feared.
“Immiseration facilitates left-wing responses, whereas the fear of immiseration produces conditions for right-wing ones.”
It seems that real immiseration facilitates left-wing responses, whereas the fear of immiseration produces conditions for right-wing ones. And that’s why, so far, the richer, more industrialized northern European countries have seen the far right benefitting more from the global financial and eurozone crisis than the Left, while the opposite is true in the European Union’s (southern) periphery, in Britain and, at least potentially, in the U.S., where Sanders would probably have won against Trump, had it not been for the Democratic Party establishment’s machinations, and in Britain where we’re close to a Corbyn government. (Italy could be a counterargument to this thesis, but the Five Star Movement predominantly received its votes with left-wing demands and from former left-wing voters.)
The second reason why there is not going to be a Sanders or Corbyn type in the SPD is that it has been in government for sixteen of the last twenty years. Germany has proportional representation instead of a U.S.- or UK-style first-past-the-post electoral system, and this has allowed smaller, more consistently left-wing parties like Die Linke to establish themselves electorally. For sure, there are still some really well-meaning social-democratic leftists inside the union movement and even the SPD’s formally independent Friedrich Ebert Foundation and such like, but all the Corbyn and Sanders-types were already shed to Die Linke years ago.
There are no left-wing backbenchers in the SPD like Corbyn in Britain, who voted against pretty much everything New Labour did, in domestic as well as foreign policy. If some did remain, they left recently, like Marco Bülow, who described himself as completely isolated among SPD parliamentarians, or the young party intellectual Nils Heisterhagen who was ousted from his position after he had demanded a stronger class-based political orientation in his book The Liberal Illusion. And of course, what kind of sane anti-neoliberal and peace-oriented leftist would have joined or stuck with a hawkish neoliberal and imperialist SPD even over the last twenty years?
All the new cadres the SPD has attracted over that period have an utterly technocratic understanding of politics. While the ongoing class war from above demands massive social mobilizations from below, akin to the yellow vest protests in France or the kind of movements that Bernie Sanders is promoting, these SPD leaders do not know any form of politics other than working pragmatically within institutions that have long turned against the interests of their party’s former working-class base. They do not know how to do anything except governing under and with the powers-that-be. There is no reason to take cheer from this; the erosion of social democracy is a tragedy, because it is largely the far right and not the Left filling the vacuum.
JB: What about the rise of the Greens?
IS: They are almost homogeneously a liberal, upper-middle-class party. They have been a neoliberal force at least since the Agenda 2010 and Hartz labour reforms they implemented in government, and indeed on an imperial path since their active role in the 1999 war in Kosovo (Germany’s first military intervention abroad since World War II). The exodus of eco-socialists in the mid-1980s partly paved the way for this, but the party still had a notable left wing. However, this year, the Greens finally broke with their tradition of having one leader from the left wing, and one from the so-called realo, pragmatic wing. Now it is under the leadership of two young and charismatic right-wingers.
This has allowed the Greens fully to shift toward rallying a homogenously urban, cosmopolitan, i.e., pro-globalization and pro-EU electorate, made up of high earners or the young and “aspirant.” The Greens’ tremendous rise in the polls has to do with the fact that they are lucky to have this socially homogenous base. While the SPD and Die Linke have to find ways to win back working-class voters from the far right, the Greens can afford a liberal condescension toward rural and suburban far-right voters, calling them “racist,” “sexist,” “dumb hillbillies,” “deplorables“ etc. This even helps cohere the Greens’ base, because it thus appears the most consistently “antifascist” and humane force, even if its economic and education policy, the gentrification caused by its milieu, and such like, are kicking away the ladders for the “un-PC” working class toward whom they feel so superior. And in that respect, it is also no wonder that the Greens are today oriented toward a coalition with the CDU which Merkel, for opportunist reasons, modernized at least in terms of social policy (same-sex marriage) and ecological policy (a business-friendly exodus from nuclear energy).
JB: What alternative can Die Linke build, if these parties are both so thoroughly neoliberal?
IS: Die Linke remains in the ghetto of under 10 per cent in the polls. It cannot, however, and must not stay there. Neoliberalism’s destruction of society is accelerating and is nurturing the rise of the far right. Die Linke must, then, itself pose the question of power, must call for a “revolution for democracy and social justice,” as the co-chairs Bernd Riexinger and Katja Kipping called it last year. The Left must loudly voice its desire to rule in order to be able to credibly promise that voting for it and organizing in it is, more than just a symbolic protest, the path to actually changing the material living conditions for the working-class majority in Germany (male or female, German-born or migrant) and tackling the climate crisis through radical strategies including, as a minimum, a socially just industrial transition .
The question is how to effect change. In an interregnum like today’s, right-wing populists say: “The traditional establishment politicians are no longer credible, vote for us and everything will change” or, in a world of growing insecurities, “Everything can stay the same.” For its part, faced with the organized power of the capitalist class and its hegemony, the Left is aware that it has to build popular power and counter-hegemony from below in order to improve things or at least fend off the class struggle from above. Voting alone is not going to change things.
The strategy put forward by party co-chair Bernd Riexinger as well as party headquarters seeks transformative organizing as the key to building that kind of popular counterpower. Yet today the party’s class base is not industrial workers, but what Nicos Poulantzas called the new petty bourgeoisie – professionals, public sector, and white-collar workers. In other words, Die Linke’s members and activists have little to no organic connection to what Gramsci called “the productive bloc in society.” The Left therefore needs to start talking about how to create working-class cadres and party leaders from those sectors of the economy where surplus value is not only being redistributed and maintained, such as in healthcare, education etc., but also from those sectors where it is actually being extracted.
The lack of this has a significant impact on Die Linke’s strategy. The overrepresentation of academics leads to an approach that sees people purely on abstract ideological and moral grounds rather than in terms of their concrete socioeconomic interests. The idea is to rally as many people as possible for important causes like environmentalism, antifascism, or movements defending refugees. In other words, the goal is to mobilize people who are already politically aware and who can devote time to activism outside their workplaces and day-to-day interactions.
This can work extremely well, when, for instance, a quarter of a million people turn out to protest against TTIP and CETA, or the same amount of people turn out to the massive #unteilbar protest against the far right. However, these “new petty bourgeois” leftists, who arrived in the Left through intellectual and academic understanding – as I myself and so many of us did – often fail to not realize sufficiently is that it is much, much easier and less vanguardist to mobilize people based on their everyday material experiences and interests rather than political ideology and morality.
The dominant ideology of Die Linke’s activist base, many of whom are drawn to it as students in urban areas – and they are drawn to it increasingly out of an antifascist fear of Trump and the AfD – is a kind of movementism. Their diffuse notion of social change, which party co-chair Katja Kipping also more or less represents, holds that powerful street movements – like last year’s anti-G20 Summit protests, #unteilbar, the environmentalist “Ende Gelände” and Hambach Forest protests, the pro-refugee “Seebrücke” rallies, etc. – in combination with social media campaigns, like the anti-sexist #metoo, the anti-racist #metwo, and the anti-classist #unten will somehow magically lead to social-ecological transformation and democratic socialism.
All of these movements and campaigns are crucially important and absolutely key to constructing counterpower, but without strongholds in workplaces, the power of street protests will remain somewhat hollow, or at least less transformative as they could be if they were linked to class power directly emanating from the antagonism of labour and capital.
To take the example of our feminist struggles: If we seek more than just quotas on the number of women in boardrooms or more gender-sensitive language in public documents, if we want to impose on capital a complete socialization of reproductive work with free daycare, free elderly care etc., in a well-paid social-reproduction sector, we need to be able to attack capital where it hurts so that we can actually enforce such redistributive measures upon it. The same thing could be said about the huge gap between our eco-socialist, post-growth aspirations and the limited ecological advances we have made: this owes to the fact that the environmentalist movement began wielding political power in a situation where labour unions were in decline. In other words, because we lacked the class power which could have enforced a public Green New Deal against the interests of the capitalist class.
JB: What are Die Linke’s roots in workplace movements?
IS: The good thing is that Die Linke’s leadership increasingly understands that the Left needs to be present in class struggles and the union movement, which is the only thing that can even hypothetically allow for any fundamental anti-neoliberal shift. In the Institute for Critical Social Analysis we are calling for a “new,” ecological, anti-racist, and feminist class politics; Riexinger’s new book is also devoted to “new class politics.” However, in all honesty one must acknowledge that this strategy is going to take at least fifteen to twenty years. The party has been successful in becoming organically linked to the healthcare sector and the sphere of social reproduction, and the growing number of strikes and increasing industrial militancy there – from daycare to the hospitals like the Charité hospital in Berlin – are, without a doubt, an expression of Die Linke influence. The same is also true of the Ryanair strike.
But in the core industrial sector Die Linke is still very weak. It is not far-fetched to say the tiny German Communist Party (DKP) and the Maoist Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD), which are very sensitive to these issues, have more workplace presence than Die Linke, because Die Linke has none. Or rather, the party does not have its own workplace groups, only certain very active trade unionists who happen to be Die Linke members as well. Of course, the sphere of production is not the only essential battleground. In the sphere of distribution, absolutely key is the fight in the housing sector. Germany is a country of renters. Both unskilled and skilled, lower and “middle class” workers are heavily affected as global wealth and surplus capital shift into housing. In a society with strong centrifugal tendencies like Germany, the housing question could actually create a “coalition of the middle and bottom,” which is a precondition to challenging neoliberalism. Still, while the housing campaign, which Die Linke launched in 2018, is very important, it is only just getting going.
So, it may take fifteen or twenty years until Die Linke is actually what Mimmo Porcaro calls a “connective party” – one that wields real social (counter)power from within workplaces – and is the force behind a real challenge to the power of the German and global 0.1 per cent.
The million-dollar question is: do we actually have that much time? If social democracy continues to wither and the far right keeps rising, what backbone will remain for any kind of material progress, universal emancipation, and the fight against climate change? What will remain of the power the labour unions and a now-weakening collective bargaining system still have, by the time Die Linke is strong enough to offer real leadership? What will the far right do if the Left is not there to provide its own tangible alternatives to neoliberalism? We should remember Poulantzas’s warning: it is not the strength of the Left that strengthens the far right, but its weakness. Fascism historically took power when the situation for workers and the fears of social de-classing became so dire that the Left had to seize power and change society but was too weak to do so.
JB: Die Linke’s Sahra Wagenknecht and Oskar Lafontaine have launched the “Aufstehen” movement with the help of theater director Bernd Stegemann and others. One of Wagenknecht’s goals is to reach out to the people who voted for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). However, many accuse her of making too many concessions on the issue of immigration. Is this what explains her divisions with Die Linke co-chairs Kipping and Riexinger?
IS: I think the overall strategic dilemma – the question of power and how to gain it – is at the heart of the internal divisions. Yes, migration policy is something of a dividing line, and has also become one because of the vitriolic rhetoric that leftists on both sides have been hurling at each other, calling each other “neoliberals” (as some more unhinged Wagenknecht supporters sometimes call Kipping) or “AfD light” (as some of Wagenknecht’s more unhinged opponents sometimes call her). Yet, in my view, this dispute merely symptomizes differences in strategic approaches to power and the question of how to deal with working-class voters flocking to the far right. This ought to be debated openly, without self-righteousness, mutual suspicion, and destructive name-calling.
Wagenknecht is well-aware that there are voters with a coherent racist and misogynist mindset whom the Left will never reach, but also that many workers who voted for the AfD are not right-wingers but supported the party because of their insecurities and loss of status, subjective devaluations. She is, rightly, posing the question of how the Left can win them back by driving a wedge between the hard-right and, in many ways, neofascist AfD leadership and its loosely associated base. She wants to do this by showing workers that the AfD does not represent their economic interests, but those of capital, and especially domestically oriented small and medium-sized businesses which are the worst on labour rights.
As a prominent and highly popular media figure, Wagenknecht is also very sensitive to the new phenomenon of how what Klaus Dörre called “de-mobilized class societies,” i.e., societies in which workers experience class society’s impacts without being organized and recognizing themselves as a class, erode faith in parties and the political system and create a growing desire for charismatic leaders.
For instance, in the 2017 French elections the traditional big parties were effectively absent. Emmanuel Macron just created a movement for himself. Meanwhile in Austria, Sebastian Kurz turned the long-standing conservative party into his personal electoral machine. Similarly, Donald Trump governs through his 54 million Twitter followers, outside the Republican establishment. And in Germany, half of the voters for the liberal Free Democratic Party would not have voted for it, were it not for their popular leader Christian Lindner.
As the left has long known, these Caesarist desires are very dangerous. As the lyrics of the Internationale put it, “no savior from on high delivers, no faith have we in prince or peer”; rather, it must be “our own right hand” that makes “the chains of hatred, greed, and fear shiver.” So, this climate of Caesarism is dangerous, and also very real. In this new and volatile historic situation, we will be forced to experiment, and must be ready – as Bertolt Brecht once put it – “to prepare for our next mistake.” And this includes questioning the role that popular tribunes can play in left politics, perhaps helping and not hindering the popular mobilization from below. Without this, left populism will indeed end up in the top-down social-democratic statism embodied by Chantal Mouffe. However, in Germany’s “demobilized class-society,” Wagenknecht is, even if some in the party may regret this, for many this particular tribune, the only visible left and economically populist critic of the status quo.
However, being sensitive to the problem and posing correct questions does not mean that one is also giving the right answers. As I said, the difference between Aufstehen and Die Linke’s party leadership is also about migration, but it is, in essence, a strategic divide.
Wagenknecht’s theoretical orientation is, ultimately, a state-monopoly capitalism approach. She wants to create a big-tent political coalition, a united popular movement against the big banks, the big transnational corporations, and the big insurance companies. And Wagenknecht is extremely talented in not only stirring working-class hatred against class injustices, but actually convincing her meritocratic petty bourgeois audience – which pays to see her speak because they know her from the telly and are often in awe of her eloquent intelligence – that as hard-working doctors, lawyers, and professors, and so on they will still not ever join the top 1 per cent, let alone 0.1 per cent. She convincingly makes the case that it is not hard work, but inherited wealth invested as capital that makes people rich. Thus, she can convincingly lay out to these voters the need to confront the question of private property in the means of production and capitalist monopolies.
Still, in her last two books, Wagenknecht actually praises productive and innovative small-business capital and juxtaposes it to unproductive, innovation-blocking monopoly capital. This is to a certain degree borne of conviction, a belief in a left-wing kind of ordo-liberalism with strong regulation and various forms of socialization and common ownership. But is also tactical, seeking to create a wide coalition against monopoly capitalism. This is problematic because not only does she end up stabbing attempts to unionize super-exploitative small businesses in the back and creating illusions concerning capitalist markets and the origins of innovation – I wish she would read Robert Cox or Mariana Mazzucato on these issues – but also because she pits struggles against exploitation and struggles against oppression against one another.
Her big coalition strategy risks becoming a short-sighted tactic. Too often it leads to an impulse of staying silent on issues of racism, because addressing them might split the unity of the class. And thus, Wagenknecht’s valuable general emphasis on class struggle and economic populism drifts toward a reductionism unable to deal with less strictly economic issues.
Unfortunately, the more Wagenknecht is attacked by liberals and the outer shores of the Left – in an often self-righteously sectarian way – this appears to reinforce her and her followers’ gut feeling that left-wing emancipation struggles, (liberal) feminism, (liberal) anti-racism etc., are an opposing or even “neoliberal” agenda. And among her followers, one can now find the same kind of stubbornness and resentful self-righteousness. We can imagine a split in Die Linke would simply reinforce these kinds of stupidities on both extremes. It, therefore, must be prevented by any means necessary, especially with a more solidaristic dialogue among the Left, less self-righteousness, and more self-doubt.
JB: What actually is Aufstehen’s wider strategy?
IS: It wants to mobilize the Green Party and SPD bases against their own leaderships, to push those parties further to the left. This acknowledges two things: first, that the nation-state is strategically important, because it is where the working class has its strongest organizations and is best equipped to enforce change. And that there exist popular majorities for rebuilding the welfare state and a peaceful foreign policy. These majorities stem from the experience of the “moral economy” of 1970s welfare capitalism in the West as well as the tremendous economic securities and also feminist workplace emancipation provided by state socialism in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
Secondly, this approach recognizes that Die Linke has to break out of the sub-10 per cent ghetto but cannot do so by hoping for renewal in the SPD, a leftward shift in the Greens or backroom talks with these parties’ leaders. Nor can it rely on up-and-coming figures like SPD youth organization leader Kevin Kühnert, who ran the campaign against a new grand coalition with the CDU. Wagenknecht’s idea is: if movements and class struggles from below are too weak, as they currently are and look likely to remain in the short term, then Aufstehen’s approach has to be to help those struggles from below by mobilizing them from above, using her personal media popularity.
This is, of course, a very difficult and some might say impossible thing to do. If 140,000 people signed up to Aufstehen online with a click, they just as easily also un-sign. Some of Aufstehen’s events have not been very dynamic. And the fact that Wagenknecht and Stegemann often juxtapose class politics to so-called “identity” politics itself creates divisions rather than uniting the Left. And while we all want to replicate the drive of the Sanders movement, Momentum, or La France Insoumise, this tactical approach is also not comparable to what Sanders, Corbyn, or Melenchon are doing. They never pit class struggle and anti-racism against one another. Rather, they challenge racism whilst simultaneously creating universalist policies that, like the $15 minimum wage, help all workers at the same time as having a strongly anti-racist and feminist bent: that is, they most directly benefit African Americans, Latinos, and women who disproportionately belong to the low-wage sector of the working class.
In the end, the tactic of being silent about racism or denouncing “identity politics” is counterproductive, because it splits the Left while strengthening the AfD’s own culture-wars message and demonization of particularist gender-identity politics. AfD sympathizers will say: Wagenknecht’s rhetorical “realism” with regard to migration or her critique of identity politics are great, but she’s in the wrong party and in a minority there, while these kinds of convictions are dominant in the AfD. And finally, the verticalist way in which Wagenknecht launched Aufstehen from above, without consulting either the party leadership or the rank and file, was bound to create major – and justified – criticism of what many perceived as antidemocratic maneuverings. This has even led to attempts to unseat her as co-leader of Die Linke’s Bundestag faction.
So, for all of these reasons, I am skeptical that Aufstehen will succeed. But those on the Left who will it to fail seem unable to recognize that this weakens not just it but the Left in general. The biggest and strongest enemy is not inside Die Linke, and is not Wagenknecht, but the neoliberal, imperialist ruling class and the far right. On the continuum stretching from the maximalist position of “open borders,” (mentioned in passing in the party program), to Wagenknecht’s position of robust asylum rights and Kipping’s interest in a new immigration law, there is enough space for compromise as there is on any other issue.
In early December there was good news, in this sense: a special meeting of the party’s “Gang of Four,” namely Bundestag faction co-chairs Wagenknecht and Dietmar Bartsch plus party leaders Riexinger and Kipping, gave exactly that message of unity. There are differences on the issue of migration, for sure, but it is not like they cannot be overcome. The idea of a new political cleavage separating cosmopolitans from communitarians, as suggested by Aufstehen supporter and Frankfurt University political science professor Andreas Noelke, is illusory. If a split along those lines does happen nonetheless, it will be a self-inflicted wound.
Class politics and liberation struggles cannot be separated from one another: if you do that, you either receive class reductionism without emancipation or a “progressive neoliberalism” that only raises up some privileged individuals while creating new injustices along the way. Rather, liberation has to become real and material for everyone. To counterpose class politics and emancipation can only close us off in identitarian trenches, unable to speak to each other. That will destroy our capacity to unite masses of people behind a vision of taking and using power.
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Ingar Solty is Senior Research Fellow in Foreign, Peace and Security Policy at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Institute for Critical Social Analysis in Berlin. He is author of several books including Imperialismand the forthcoming What is to Be Done in Dark Times? Perspectives against Crisis Capitalism, the Rise of the Right, and Islamist Terrorism.
Jerko Bakotin is a freelance journalist and author, currently based in Zagreb, Croatia.
Amid international pressures, U.S. military aircraft have been spotted over Colombia, local media outlets report.
For the second time in two days, several U.S. military planes were seen soaring over Colombia. The most recent sighting, reported by Aircraft Spots, is a EO-5C N177RA PLOMO27 spy plane.
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US Army EO-5C N177RA PLOMO27 spy plane, heading east over Colombia. Quite rare! 🤔 pic.twitter.com/QZPZWSnYby
“Another intriguing U.S. military aircraft spotting over #Colombia now — a @USArmy EO-5C, likely being used for communications intercepts from #Venezuela.”
Several planes, including one C17A cargo plane Globemaster – used for military transport – and one Boeing 737, landed on the outskirts of Bogota at Air Command Military Transport (Catam) airport, a Colombian radio station, The FM, reported Wednesday.
The planes arrived at about 3:00 pm from the Dover air base in Delaware, one of the country’s busiest military bases, before leaving four hours later.
“A rare flight today of a @usairforce Globemaster (max payload: ~77,000 kg) from Dover AFB to #Colombia (and now heading back). It spent ~4 hours on the ground at Bogota,” Herman said.
On Monday, during a televised address, the words “5,000 soldiers in Colombia,” were seen scrawled across a notebook “carelessly” carried by U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton.
Herman told his followers,
“For those wondering- in view of the ‘5,000 troops to #Colombia’ notation on @AmbJohnBolton’s pad)- a C17 only can carry ~100 troops per flight.”
However, Colombia’s journalists at The FM responded,
“The C17 aircraft have capacity for 102 special assault forces or 134 soldiers in side chairs. Heavy cargo, military, an M1 Abrams tank, three Strykers or 6 M11 16. They can carry a total of 77 tons of cargo.”
The United States and its right-wing allies recognized opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido as Venezula’s “interim president” after he self-proclaimed himself such on Jan. 23, an illegal and unconstitutional move and a rejection of the second term of Nicolas Maduro, who won last year’s May elections.
Guaido, the United States and right-wing governments in the region have been calling on the Venezuelan military to oust Maduro. However, the country’s defense minister and top military brass have come out in support of Maduro and his government.
There have been whispers in Washington that the Donald Trump administration is “seriously considering” a military intervention in Venezuela if Maduro does not step down or be ousted internally.
Since the beginning of the recent political crisis, president Maduro has repeatedly said he was open to dialogue with the opposition and its leader Guiado in order to seek a peaceful resolution to the current situation.
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The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is force-feeding immigrants held in a detention center in Texas, using brutal torture against at least ten men engaged in a hunger strike against their prolonged confinement and mistreatment. The men, mainly Sikhs from the Punjab region of India, are being force-fed either through plastic nasal tubes or intravenous lines, inserted several times a day. At least 30 men are participating in the hunger strike, include some from Cuba as well as the majority from India.
Force-feeding through nasal tubes is a method of torture, used at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and other CIA-run secret prisons overseas, which has been condemned by international human rights groups. The American Medical Association bars its members from participating in such mistreatment. So long as the hunger striker is making a conscious and reasoned decision to refuse food, the AMA guidelines say, a medical doctor should respect their right to do so.
Democratic Party politicians who are making a show of opposition to Trump’s demands for a wall on the US-Mexico border have nothing to say about the brutal treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers in ICE detention centers that has provoked the hunger strikes and other protests. On the contrary: the legislation now being discussed in a House-Senate conference committee would provide billions more for ICE to expand the American gulag.
The detainees, held at the ICE El Paso Service Processing Center in the west Texas city, have asked immigration advocates visiting them in detention to make their struggle known to the public. The hunger strike was first reported Thursday morning by the Associated Press. A lawyer for one of the detainees and a volunteer immigration advocate both spoke to the World Socialist Web Site about the conditions the men face.
Ruby Kaur is a Michigan-based immigration attorney who speaks Punjabi, the first language of many of the prisoners, who are Sikhs from the north Indian state of Punjab. She represents one of the hunger strikers and said her client had been put on an IV and then force-fed after more than three weeks without eating or drinking water.
“They’ve been held for at least six months,” she said. “They are distinguishing them for treatment primarily on the basis of race.”
Kaur said that her client and the other strikers were protesting mistreatment and physical abuse in detention, and the response of ICE to the hunger strike was even greater mistreatment.
“Physical abuse to me is when they’re being force fed,” she said.
She said that the lawyers for the hunger strikers were still gathering information about the physical condition of their clients.
“We are not sure about that yet, because we are still in the process of meeting individuals,” she explained.
“I’m very passionate about immigrants’ rights,” Kaur said, adding that some of the hunger strikers had been placed in solitary confinement, which is also classified as a form of torture by international human rights groups.
She told the Associated Press,
“They go on hunger strike, and they are put into solitary confinement and then the ICE officers kind of psychologically torture them, telling the asylum seekers they will send them back to Punjab.”
Margaret Brown Vega from Advocate Visitors with Immigrants in Detention, an immigrant support group based in New Mexico, gave additional details about the conditions at the El Paso ICE facility. She is a volunteer for a group that organizes visits to people in detention, to try to minimize their isolation and despair.
“We became aware of the hunger strike,” she told the WSWS. “Three of us volunteers went and visited with four of the men to talk to them about their situation. El Paso Service Processing Center, the ICE facility, it’s a prison. If you look at the standards they operate under, and how they refer to the detainees, it is a prison. They are very much treated like prisoners.
“It’s very hard to get information about them. I spoke to one individual. Another volunteer spoke to two individuals. A third volunteer spoke to the fourth individual.
“Force-feeding is very troubling. They’re very weak. They walk very slowly, shuffling their feet. Their eyes are very tired looking. The man I saw showed me his arms. He’s been getting three or four IVs a day and he said he thought he would be put on a feeding tube through the side of the nose. I believe this is on an ICE protocol.”
The detainees are required to present themselves for their own torture, she explained:
“They’ve complained about having to walk to the medical area instead of being brought in a wheelchair.”
Vega added,
“What’s difficult for people to understand is that the conditions in immigration facilities are such they bring people to this point. It’s psychologically very challenging. Sometimes it’s physically challenging.
“I think people underestimate how bad it is to be held indefinitely in a place where you don’t get enough food, where you’re constantly berated, where people place obstacles in your way and play games with you. And the worst thing is never knowing when it’s going to end. It’s pretty bad, when it’s day in and day out.”
Vega said that there had not really been much of a change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration, in terms of conditions inside the detention facilities.
“I would say that many people feel this is not new,” she continued. “In these facilities, going back ten years, people have noticed these conditions. Even though there are supposedly standards that guide how these places are run.
“I have encountered people in detention who went to a port of entry and applied for asylum. I met one individual who was detained and never given parole. In the El Paso area we’re seeing 100 percent denial rates on parole. We encounter asylum seekers who are not a flight risk, who are not a threat to the community, but they’re not released.”
Both Ruby Kaur and Margaret Brown Vega made it clear that the prisoners had taken the initiative in seeking to have their hunger strike become public, known to a far wider audience than the ICE agents who run the El Paso center.
“Our first priority was to make this situation known,” Vega said. “It’s a matter of First Amendment rights. We feel like it’s our responsibility to help them amplify their voices. It’s very difficult to go even a couple of days without eating. They’re putting their bodies at risk.”
A federal judge has authorized the force-feeding, according to a spokeswoman for ICE, who did not address the charges of physical and psychological abuse by ICE agents. The El Paso facility is directly operated by ICE, not through a subcontractor as at many other detention centers.
When a hunger strike passes the one-month mark, as is the case with the immigrant detainees, there is mounting danger of irreversible physiological damage.
The Associated Press report quoted Amrit Singh, the uncle of two men participating in the hunger strike.
“They are not well. Their bodies are really weak, they can’t talk and they have been hospitalized, back and forth,” Singh told AP. “They want to know why they are still in the jail and want to get their rights and wake up the government immigration system.”
There have been repeated hunger strikes by immigration detainees over the last several years, but in most cases the strikers agreed to take food and water under threat of court-ordered force-feeding. It is the continued worsening of conditions, as well as the prospect of indefinite confinement, that has driven some prisoners to take this latest desperate step and defy the threat of torture.
The Freedom for Immigrants organization, the umbrella group to which AVID is affiliated, has documented nearly 1,400 people on hunger strike at 18 detention facilities since May 2015.
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A faux pas, especially when committed in the realm of international diplomacy and erroneously implying that a country’s new partner supports terrorism, usually has the effect of weakening bilateral relations between those two states, but a Russian official’s “slip of the tongue” paradoxically strengthened relations with Pakistan after Islamabad displayed political maturity by not overreacting and instead patiently waiting for an official clarification.
Something very confusing happened earlier this week when RIA Novosti reported (in the original Russian then republished in English by Sputnik) the words of Deputy Interior Minister Igor Zubov, who claimed that “Daesh fighters in massive quantities were transported from Pakistani territory to the border with Tajikistan”. This was such an unexpected statement because Russia and Pakistan have carried out joint anti-terrorist drills on one another’s territory and are closely cooperating in the context of the Moscow peace process for Afghanistan. Worse still, this claim was made on the same day that Russia’s Special Presidential Envoy for Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov arrived in Islamabad on an unannounced visit to discuss the latest events in the war-torn country in light of the news that the US might reach a deal with the Taliban to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2020.
Mr. Zubov’s words could have therefore ruined the occasion if an influential figure in Pakistan would have overreacted to them, but to the South Asian state’s supreme credit, its representatives displayed political maturity by patiently waiting for an official clarification from Russia before issuing a response. Had any other country implied that the Pakistani state supports Daesh – and worse still, in a possible operation to provoke a security crisis along the borders of Russia’s CSTO ally – there would have surely been an immediate response from the highest levels of the state, but the very fact that one wasn’t forthcoming in this instance speaks to the very deep trust that was recently developed between Islamabad and Moscow over the past few years which gave Pakistan’s representatives a reason to wait and officially find out what Mr. Zubov’s remark was really all about.
They didn’t have to wait long, however, since a journalist from RIA Novosti and another one from Pakistani media asked Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova to comment on Mr. Zubov’s report. What follows are brief excerpts of these journalists’ relevant interactions with the spokeswoman:
“RIA Novosti: Good afternoon, RIA Novosti, and the question is the following about the comment of Vice-Minister Zubov on the helicopters carrying ISIS combatants to the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
Mrs. Zakharova: We saw those statements, those quotes. I think they’re just a slip of the tongue because the ISIS combatants are being carried to the borderline between Afghanistan and Tajikistan from the Afghan territory, and we cooperate closely with Pakistan in fighting terrorism as well as on the Afghan agenda, and we share common concerns regarding ISIS gaining momentum on the territory there and the extent and full expansion of that terrorist group.”
Pak-Rus Media: The Pakistani media. I would like to specify a few points. During your briefings, you said that NATO is responsible for the airspace over Afghanistan. Are those helicopters indeed there, and who’s responsible for those helicopters, and who’s deployed in Afghanistan?
Mrs. Zakharova: Who for many years has been carrying out its military operation in accordance with the UN mandate and at the same time they do not report to the UN Security Council, those people are responsible. There are certain movements taking place and we’ve talked about them and we understand that there’s a link to militants and nobody is saying what this helicopter is for, why is it unmarked, this again is a fact, but this is not a question to pose to Russia.
It can be seen from the above that Mrs. Zakharova attributed Mr. Zubov’s remark about Pakistan to a “slip of the tongue” and emphasized that the unmarked helicopter originated on Afghan territory, which therefore makes it the full responsibility of the collection of countries that control Afghanistan’s airspace.
Not only did Pakistan have nothing to do with this terrorist operation, but she also proudly reaffirmed that “we cooperate closely with Pakistan in fighting terrorism as well as on the Afghan agenda, and we share common concerns regarding the ISIS gaining momentum on the territory there and the extent and full expansion of that terrorist group.” As such, instead of this faux pas worsening relations between these two new partners, it actually resulted in strengthening them after Pakistan’s political maturity impressed the Russians and proved each party’s deep trust in one another.
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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
A 30-year-old volunteer fireman who joined the Gilets Jaunes protests in Bordeaux, France on the 12th January 2019, is in a coma after being shot in the back of the head by an LBD or “flashball” bullet fired by French security forces who are brutally suppressing public demonstrations in most major French cities. Olivier Beziade is a father of three who now has a “very serious brain injury” and is in an induced coma. As violence radiates across France, western media locks down and fails to report comprehensively or fairly on Police infractions against protestors.
The following is the video of this event, during which one of the police officers appears to say “they (protestors) don’t know it’s us” and instructs his colleagues to “pick up the casings”, after Beziade had been gunned down and was lying face down on the street. WATCH:
The Gilets Jaunes or Yellow Vests
The Gilets Jaunes (GJs) or Yellow Vest movement began officially on the 17th November 2018 but according to some analysts this people’s initiative was being ignited long before and is a product of successive French government marginalisation of important sectors of the French population. Thomas Flichy de Neuville, academic and historian, wrote very recently about the socio-political alarm bells that preceded the Gilets Jaunes by at least five years.
In 2013, a deputy from the Pyrenées Atlantique department of France, Jean Lassalle, spent 8 months walking around France. He covered 5000 km on foot and spoke with the “forgotten” French people. Lassalle reported that the lasting impression from his experience was that most of those he encountered had a desire to “turn the tables, that they had had enough on many levels”.
Lassalle’s report was submitted to the presidents of the assemblées in April 2014. Lassalle warned that nine out of ten people in France were ready to “explode”, three out of ten were ready to mobilise if and when the “explosion” took place. Lassalle prophesied that “Les réseaux sociaux sont prêts à agir comme une arme formidable de mobilisation” “social media is ready to to act as a formidable weapon of mobilisation”.
According to Flichy, the one problem with Lassalle’s ground breaking report was that he predicted the imminent eruption of dissent “it is ten minutes before midnight”, Lassalle wrote. Nothing transpired as predicted in 2015 and the 196 page report was consigned to the archives, its prescient contents forgotten as France buried itself in a foreign intervention quagmire in Syria, Yemen and Mali and ignored the gathering storm at home.
GJ protestors being tear gassed in Bordeaux, January 12th 2019. (Photo: Nicolas Duffaure)
In 2014, Christophe Guilluy, a geographer, wrote a book entitled “La France Peripherique” which investigated the demographics of major French cities and highlighted the problems of wealthy, opulent city centers compared to the marginalised and poor suburbs where 60% of the “forgotten” population resided. Guilluy concluded that many of these communities would ultimately vote for more right wing or nationalist political parties in search of an antidote for their deteriorating living conditions.
Guilluy’s work is particularly relevant when we consider that the match to the touchpaper for the GJs was the hike in fuel prices by President Macron’s government. While this is not the sole reason for the unrest we see today, nationwide in France, it is an important factor for 60% of a population, many of whom subsist on the minimum wage (SMIC) – if those people travel 20km to work every day, they will spend 250 euros per month which is a quarter of the SMIC. It is easy to see why these people reacted so forcefully against a fuel tax that would impact them the most.
Why the Gilet Jaune ? Analyst and author, based in France, Diana Johnstone put it most succinctly in an article for Unz Review:
“Every automobile in France is supposed to be equipped with a yellow vest. This is so that in case of accident or breakdown on a highway, the driver can put it on to ensure visibility and avoid getting run over. [..] The costume was at hand and didn’t have to be provided by Soros for some more or less manufactured “color revolution”. The symbolism was fitting: in case of socio-economic emergency, show that you don’t want to be run over.”
The GJs have distanced themselves from politics and politicians to protect their grass-roots identity. The leadership structure is horizontal, no leaders or identity politics. The spokespeople are not practiced public speakers, they are people from every walk of life and they represent a wide spectrum of French society. The manifesto is varied depending upon regional collectives but most demands nationwide appear to be in synch with minor differences.
One such manifesto was published by a number of media outlets in December 2018 and it listed a number of demands for reform in the economic, political, health and social security and environmental sectors. This manifesto also addressed the issue of Macron’s neoliberal foreign policy and included a call to end “France’s participation in foreign wars of aggression and exit from NATO” and to “cease pillaging and interfering – politically and militarily – in Francafrique which keeps Africa poor. Immediately repatriate all French soldiers. Establish relations with African states on an equal peer-to-peer basis”
Forces of “law and order” on the streets of Bordeaux during Acte X of GJ protests, 12/1/2019. (Photo: Nicolas Duffaure)
The fundamental message of the GJs is that they simply can’t make ends meet. The cost of living keeps going up and salaries keep being squeezed. The Government needs to listen to its people and to change course. Most Europeans reading this will feel empathy with this expression of desperation. There has been a cover-up in France by the government and the media. These calls for help have been muted, filtered and ignored by the state-aligned media and government officials for some time now.
Macron’s government has used Climate Change and global warming as a damoclean sword brandished over the heads of the malcontent to distract them from their misery – suggesting the future of the planet outweighs the trivia of feeding your children or avoiding homelessness – the push back from the GJs was swift, while they may cherish their environment and are ecologically aware “they are more worried about the end of the month than the future of the world”
In some cases, early on in the protests, the GJs are being systematically dehumanized. Gerard Darminin, the budget minister, described the GJs as the “peste brune – the brown plague” meaning fascists. In the dozens of interviews I have listened to, not one GJ has expressed a sentiment that could even remotely be described as right wing or fascist. The GJs are an apolitical collective with a focus on socio-economic issues that directly affect their ability to survive in modern France which, in their view, is drifting dangerously away from the vision of a Republic that most of the demonstrators have grown up with.
Protestors in Bordeaux on 12th January 2019. The banner reads “Macron out, democracy is dead”. (Photo: Nicolas Duffaure)
The government response has been largely dismissive, repressive, condemnatory and increasingly inflammatory. Instead of “maintaining order” through genuine negotiation and reform, Macron appears to have unleashed an escalation of police violence against demonstrators which will provoke the GJs further, increasing dissent and the potential for counter-reactionary measures against the state.
Interior Ministry, State and Media Reaction to Gilets Jaunes
Image on the right: Christophe Castaner, Interior Minister. (Photo: Nicolas Messyasz)
Macron’s first choice Interior Minister was the socialist mayor of Lyons, Gerard Collomb who resigned his post in October 2018, despite Macron’s entreaties for him to stay, citing “immense difficulties” facing his successor. Collomb was replaced by Christophe Castaner as head of national police forces, among other responsibilities. Former socialist and with a degree in criminology, Castaner’s reputation is somewhat tarnished by his connections to a Marseilles mafioso, Christian Oraison, in the 1970s.
French Prime Minister, Edouard Phillippe introduced a new law to “better protect the right to demonstrate” in January 2019. Protestors who are labelled falsely as “agitators” “insurrectionists” or who demand that “President Macron resign” will effectively be collectively reprimanded by a law that introduces measures of heavy punishment of demonstration organisers whose time and place has not been given the official stamp of approval.
500 complaints against Castaner for restricing the right to protest were submitted to the Court of Cassation but were dismissed by Public Prosecutor, Francois Molins, who stated that he would not be prosecuting Castaner for his remarks that “participants in the GJ protests were complicit with those who had resorted to violence”.
Bordeaux police gather for GJ protests January 2019. (Photo: Nicolas Duffaure)
Castaner has consistently defended the police squads and their use of disproportionate force against unarmed demonstrators by claiming that the GJs are the ones to instigate violence, the police are acting in self-defense. The mounting number of cases of civilian mutilation and wounding by heavily armed police officers suggest that Castaner is distorting the truth.
Castaner’s only concession has been to equip the police forces with body cameras so they can record their own violations of the use of “proportionate force” in the maintenance of law and order. Doubts must be cast on the willingness of a police force already facing 100s if not thousands of claims against them, to provide the evidence that will further incriminate them. When Castaner was pressed to comment on the violence being meted out against civilians by the police, he responded:
I don’t know of one policeman or one gendarme who has attacked the Gilets Jaunes, on the other hand, I know many police or gendarmes who have taken defensive measures to defend the Republic, the order of the Republic – you know there is no “liberty” without public order [..] but naturally I have never seen a gendarme or a police officer attack a demonstrator or a journalist, on the contrary I have seen demonstrators systematically attack our security forces and journalists.
Police arrest a protestor. (Photo: Gilets Jaunes Facebook page)
Castaner is one of the chief promoters of the draconian and controversial “Loi Anti Casseurs – Anti-Breakers (looters) law”. Those who oppose adoption of the law have claimed it will further erode freedom of speech and liberty of expression in France. The law proposes security perimeters around protests, facial recognition, bag searches, body searches, 2-4 years in prison if found guilty of violence against the police and up to Euros 7,500 ($ 8580) fines for those who violate the law. It is worth noting that Castaner himself admits that the number of “casseurs” nationwide are negligible, numbering between “150 – 200/300 across all regions of France”.
The law states that protestors who hide their faces will be targeted – this measure is controversial as most protestors and journalists are forced to cover their heads and faces to protect themselves against tear gas and the risk of mutiliation by “flashball” rubber bullets or “grenades d’encerclement”” which contain 25g of TNT and can release hundreds of 10g rubber pellets at close range if used incorrectly, by the security forces. Macron’s government sees these measures as essential to crack down on violence against the state, the GJs will perceive it as a further instrument of oppression by the state against its own people. So far, 200 ammendments have been made to the law by those who are alarmed by the increased totalitarian measures being imposed upon France and its people by Macron’s ministers.
French state-aligned media and UK corporate media have followed Castaner’s narrative lead with little deviation, the following short clip from a report by France’s TF1 demonstrates the disinformation being presented about the GJs and the police violence. The TF1 presenter denies any police infractions and praises them for their “sang froid”, their composure:
Macron Response to Gilets Jaunes
After initially distancing himself from the protests, perhaps in the vain hope they would fizzle out, on the 10th December Macron finally appeared before his people on TV. During the broadcast an apparently chastened Macron agreed to delay the fuel tax hike, he offered an extra 100 Euros per month for minimum wage earners and tax cuts for pensioners among other measures. Even the Economist described Macron’s 10 billion-euro concession package as an attempt to buy off his critics. The broadcast was watched by a staggering 21m people. The reaction was mixed, perhaps 50% of the GJs and their supporters seeing it as an attempt to keep the people quiet rather than a genuine effort to change course and address the long-standing issues that had generated the protests in the first place.
Macron’s later New Year 2019 address to the nation which followed a terrifying increase in the violence seen on the streets of Paris and across France, was a much more aggressive affair. Having failed to appease the “crowds” with a few unconvincing political crumbs, Macron seemed to have decided to adopt the hardline approach. “These days I have seen unthinkable things and heard the unacceptable” Macron stated. Macron even took on the few opposition politicians who dared to empathise with the protestors. Macron berated those who pretend to “speak for the people”, calling them “spokespersons for hateful crowds” and denounced “those who have mingled with the Yellow Vest protesters to spread hate speech about “police forces, journalists, Jews, foreigners, homosexuals” as a “negation of France”. I am yet to find a recording of a GJ spreading hate speech about any of the factions mentioned by Macron.
Macron’s other concession was the so called “Grand Debate”, a series of town hall meetings where representatives of the communes and departments across France would meet to present grievances on behalf of their constituents and the GJs. In reality, anyone wearing a yellow vest in the vicinity of the meetings may be fined Euros 135 ( $ 154). At some meetings road blocks were erected some way from the meeting place and identity papers of drivers were photographed, anyone wearing a yellow vest was told to go back. So, from day one, the Grand Debate called to address the concerns raised by the GJs deemed the GJs as persona non grata.
On the 18th January 2019, a Grand Debate was held in Souillac, south-west France. One of the attending Mayors gave an interview to a local media outlet after the debate had finished. Rene Revol, Mayor of Grabels (Department 34) said the meeting was nothing more than a “masquerade”, a farce, an election campaign for Macron. Gilets Jaunes were forbidden and threatened with fines if they were caught in the vicinity wearing their vests. Road blocks were set up on all roads leading to the venue. Security forces surrounded Macron’s cavalcade. Mayors were able to speak only if chosen by government ministers or Prefets – effectively controlled discourse. The meeting was ostensibly called to address the issues of the people. Nothing was discussed and the “people” were banned.
State Sanctioned Violence and Repression
Record of some of the appalling injuries inflicted upon unarmed civilians by police forces across France. (Photo: Desarmons.net)
Since the 24th November 2018 the violence witnessed on the streets of cities across France has escalated dramatically. One French independent journalist, David Dufresnes, has been recording all infractions committed by police and security forces and tweeting them to the Interior Ministry while giving interviews to a huge number of French media channels to raise awareness of the police brutality during peaceful protests. In the tweet below, infraction number 362 dated 26/1/2019, an off duty soldier is reported to be hit in the head by a police LBD40 rubber bullet as he is leaving a restaurant in Montpelier on his way to the nightclub with two of his colleagues.
Dufresnes has recorded 157 injuries to the head including 18 who have lost an eye, fractures of the jaw and comas in the most severe cases. 11 hand injuries, in 4 cases resulting in the loss of a hand. 8 back injuries, 28 injuries to the upper body, 40 lower limb injuries, 3 injuries to the genital area, 48 unspecified injuries and 55 cases of intimidation, insults, repression of press freedom infractions. One eighty-year-old was murdered on the 1st December 2018 in Marseilles – Zineb Redouane was killed when a tear gas grenade was thrown in her face by the security forces. According to Dufresnes this is the list of the more serious injuries, an estimated 2000 – 3000 more GJs have been “lightly” injured during the protests since November 2018.
Chart produced by independent journalist, David Dufresnes and Mediapart showing injuries received by GJs and civilians from Police weapons and brutality during protests.
Dufresnes argues that the police have already lost control of the situation and can no longer be legitimately claiming to “maintain law and order”. In one interview Dufresnes points out that the use of 10,000 tear gas grenades on one day of protests points to a “panic” situation among the security forces. During “Acte XI” of the protests on the 26th January the elderly man, Eric, in the photo below was hit on the head by a police truncheon in Marseilles. He has three fractures and is forced to eat only liquid food from the left side of his mouth for three weeks, according to his brother.
Two students were recently inteviewed by independent French media channel, Mediapart. Antoine Boudinet lost his right hand when a GLIF4 grenade exploded close to him in Bordeaux, December 2018. Lola Villabriga was hit in the face by a LBD40 flashball bullet which triple-fractured her jaw in Biarritz, also December 2018.
Lola Villabriga, student, her jaw was fractured when she was hit in the face by a “flashball” bullet, December 2018 in Biarritz next to Antoine Boudient, student, who lost a hand during protests in Bordeaux December 2018. (Photo: Screenshot from Mediapart interview)
Boudinet was actually taking part in a “climate” march which joined with the GJ march at one point during the protests. Boudinet has submitted a claim against Christophe Castaner for the police use of the GLIF4 grenade which has disabled him for life. Boudinet clearly states that he holds Castaner and the Interior Ministry responsible for the arms used by the police – “when such arms are available, it is certain that at some moment something will happen and there will be an incident. Explosives should never be thrown at people”
Villabriga had been standing on a bench filming the protests when she was hit by the flashball bullet. She describes a protest that was 100% peaceful, “there was no chaos at all. The use of force was totally disproportionate”. Villabriga suffered a triple fracture of her jaw, she has undergone one operation and a second operation is foreseen in the future to remove the metal pins. Commenting on Castaner’s denial of police brutality, Villabriga told the presenter:
“This is absolute denial (from Castaner) which I find totally alarming to see that we are ignored while what happened to us is so terrible. Nobody has come to talk to us.”
Watching the interviews, including one with Dominique Rodtchenki Pontonnier, a mother whose two sons were terribly injured by a GLIF4 grenade, one son losing three fingers in the blast – I was struck by the trauma and shock on the faces of the guests. At one point we are shown the film of the moment Pontonnier’s son is hit and is screaming that he has lost his hand. Boudinet is visibly shaken by the video, he explains that it brings back the memories of the moment he realised that he had been mutilated by the GLIF4 grenade fired by police into unarmed crowds of people that included children and families.
There is utter disbelief during the interview that France has been so rapidly reduced to a violent police state and that the trust between state and people has been so profoundly damaged. Another guest, Anaelle, a volunteer medic, describes the “profound lack of respect and complete rupture of dialogue” between state and people. All guests are horrified at the weapons being deployed to maintain “law and order”.
Record of injuries from police use of disproportionate force against unarmed civilians during GJ protests. (Photo: Desarmons.net)
Meanwhile, Interior Minister, Castaner maintains that the use of the Flashball bullet is necessary because:
“..in the face of extreme violence we need the means to defend ourselves and the simple fact of having a uniform (presence) for a long time has prevented the violence because the people respect that. Now there are people who come to provoke, to attack and to aggress, even to kill. If we consider what happened on the Champs Elysee or at the Arc De Triomphe, according to statements I have studied, there is a desire to kill members of the security forces, therefore they need to be able to defend themselves”
The moment GJ spox, Jerome Rodrigues, is targeted first by a GLIF4 grenade before being hit in the eye by a LBD40 Flashball bullet. Acte XI, 26th January 2019. (Photo: Twitter)
Paris, 26th January 2019, the forces of “law and order” targeted one of the GJ’s most popular spokespeople, Jerome Rodrigues, while he was filming events during the GJ march. During Rodrigues’ live video we can hear him cautioning GJs to withdraw from the scene as elements of the Black Bloc have arrived. Rodrigues does not want the GJs to get caught up in the Black Bloc violence. As he continues filming we see the police forces advancing but not confronting the few members of the Black Bloc who are responsible for much of the looting and damage to shops and buildings during the weekly protests. Instead, the police appear to open fire on the retreating GJs including Rodrigues who is suddenly struck down.
The following video shows the moments after Rodrigues is targeted first by a GLIF4 grenade and then by a Flashball bullet to the eye (according to later testimony from Rodrigues from his hospital bed). WATCH:
Rodrigues is treated by the volunteer medics at the scene before being rushed to hospital. Two days after the incident, Rodrigues posted a live video to his Facebook page, from his hospital room. He calls for peace and calm, no knee-jerk reactions from the GJs and reinforces the message that a very small minority of Black Bloc or Casseurs are committing the random violent acts that are being weaponised by the state. He feels that he was deliberately targeted by the police and this had also been claimed by a number of eye witnesses to the attack. Rodrigues also reminds people that his mutilation is one of many and that he should not be singled out among the GJs who have suffered at the hands of the police. Rodrigues urges GJs back onto the streets for Acte XII, Saturday 2nd February. It remains to be seen where the escalation of violence will progress from here as popular support for the GJs grows across France.
Rodrigues’ poster for Acte XII reads “The powerful will stop dominating when the little people stop crawling”
Weapons used to “Maintain Law and Order”
Chart taken from the website of ACAT, an NGO arguing against increase in repressive laws in France, showing the weapons deployed by France during crowd control compared to other EU countries, November 2017.
The above chart shows the weapons used by French security forces against unruly crowds compared to those used by other EU police forces. There is a clear recommendation of steps and maintenance of proportionate force which is outlined in the national police instruction chart, below. Journalist, David Dufresnes, has clarified that the LBD40 Flashball rubber bullets and the GLIF4 grenade “d’encerclement” are not used anywhere else in Europe because of the risks to human life involved.
The National Police in France should be following the recommendations shown in the infograph above. Step one: demand for the crowd to disperse followed by two clear announcements of the intention to use “force”. First level of force: firearms are strictly prohibited at this stage. Truncheons, water canon and hand thrown tear gas grenades. Level two of force: GLIF4 grenades and grenade launchers. Level three of force: if the police are met with violence. LBD40 Flashball bullets, grenade launchers firing non-metal projectiles and flashball bullets.
What we are seeing, from the footage that is being released, is the police bypassing the recommended steps and progressing almost immediately to the use of disproportionate force and the apparent deliberate targeting of unarmed protestors among the GJs. This is panic crowd control with horrifying consequences. More than 80,000 police are deployed to maintain order during the nationwide GJ marches every weekend. A mix of the BAC (Brigade Anti Criminalite) and the CRS (general reserve of the French national police) are the most prevalent security forces who police the marches.
Many appear not to have been properly trained in the use of the weapons provided to them. The LBD40 Flashball bullet should never be fired at head height, for example, yet we consistently see police officers standing and firing from the shoulder into crowds of Gilets Jaunes. On the saturday that Rodrigues was targeted, I took screenshots from the Ruptly TV live video coverage of the Paris marches which clearly show one police officer pointing a target out to another officer who fires the weapon at head height ten seconds later. The velocity of the Flashball bullet is ten times that of a paintball, its capacity to mutilate at close quarters has been proven by the horrifying injuries circulating on social media.
A recent article in the media outlet, Liberation, has revealed that a police report highlighted the risks of using the GLIF4 grenade for crowd control but the grenade is still being used by police in France. The GLIF4 contains 25g of TNT explosive, emits 165 decibels upon explosion which has permanently deafened one protestor and has caused inner ear problems for others. The GLIF4can contain CS gas in powder form or 10g rubber pellets, lethal at close quarters with potential to tear into limbs and shred hands.
This report was picked up by journalist, David Dufresne, who highlighted the following paragraph:
Liberation had access to a Police scientific laboratory report carried out on this wound ( and submitted to the enquiry) before the Gilets Jaunes movement. The report concludes that the high risk of the (GLIF4) grenade has been underestimated by French authorities and the manufacturer. The Interior Minister (Christophe Castaner) still chose to use the grenades until “stocks were exhausted” without specifying the number of grenades remaining in stock.
The cavalier manner in which Castaner has put the lives of French civilians at risk must be considered reckless at best, criminally negligent at worst.
The following video is a compilation of just a few of the police infractions and violent responses to the GJ protests across France. WATCH:
Conclusion – Chaos Strategy Unleashed?
Alexandre Langlois, police violence and the Gilets Jaunes.
Alexandre Langlois, General Secretary of the Police Syndicate, VIGI, has accused Macron’s government of stoking confrontation and of favouring repression over dialogue. In a series of public interviews, Langlois blames the hierarchy within the Interior Ministry for the “manipulation” of the police forces already hugely under pressure and experiencing a climbing suicide rate since Macron’s rise to power in France. According to Langlois, the “hierarchy” direct the police working during the marches from remote control centers which disable the police’s ability to analyse events on the ground and avoid dangerous confrontation or provocation. Langlois demonstrates that this system has led to situations that have increased pressure on both the police and the GJs.
Langlois warns that Police are being forced to work blind. The state is pushing for confrontation and it is not avoiding repressive measures that will only increase the chances of violence not reduce them. Langlois laments the 75 suicides of police officers since Macron was elected, 17 since Castaner took over from Collomb who resigned after pressure from Langlois and his syndicate to address the issue of high suicide rates among the national police forces – “we called for the resignation of Collomb, now Castaner should go”.
The dismantlement of the “renseignments generaux” (RG – police intelligence branch) under Sarkozy in 2008 has contributed to the problems in 2019 according to Langlois. Langlois believes the RG would have developed relationships with GJ organisers and worked with them to ensure peaceful demonstrations. The police have been deliberately distanced from the people in order to enable the violence we are seeing since the 1st December 2018. Langlois stresses that many of the Police sympathise with the GJs but that the government is pushing the police to oppose the GJs which can only lead to catastophic consequences if allowed to continue.
Effectively the Gilets Jaunes have exposed Macron and his government for what it is. Macron is the President who was elected by the globalists, the capitalists and the ruling elite to protect their interests. A book recently published, authored by Francois-Xavier Bourmand, entitled “Emmanuel Macron the Banker who would be King” has investigated the corporatocracy who ensured Macron’s election win in order to expand their interests globally and to convert France from Republic into Plutocracy at the expense of the “dispensables”, the “little people”.
During one confrontation with a citizen at one of the Grand Debates, Macron is asked why he has failed to fulfill his pre-election promise of “no more SDF (homeless) on the streets of France – 580 SDF died on the streets of France in 2018. Rather than show compassion for the poverty-stricken and homeless, Macron defends his policies with accountant-speak, informing the audience that the elite must be protected in order to provide jobs for the “poor”.
If indeed Macron’s coterie in government are pushing for confrontation between the people and the security forces and introducing increasingly repressive measures to up the pressure on the protestors rather than trying to defuse matters, it is really ten minutes before midnight in France. The insanity of Macron supporting the “uprising” in Venezuela while sanctioning vicious reprisals against his own people at home is glaringly obvious to all but Macron and his backers. That is because Macron is doing his job and his job is to manufacture the conditions in which the privileged, wealthy ruling elite can thrive and further their globalist ambitions which includes military adventurism and resource theft from target nations that include Venezuela and Syria.
Violence will escalate in France because it is state-sanctioned. Unless the police wake up to their manipulation by the state and join forces with the GJs there is a risk of a serious confrontation in the very near future. However, as historian Diana Johstone has said: “for all the lamented decline in the school system, the French people today are as well-educated and reasonable as any population can be expected to be. If they are incapable of democracy, then democracy is impossible.”. There is still hope that the wave of discontent generated by the GJs may still bring down the globalist power structure and replace it with something more allied to the principles of the Republic of France.
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Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist, peace activist, photographer and associate editor at 21st Century Wire. Vanessa was a finalist for one of the most prestigious journalism awards – the 2017 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism – whose winners have included the likes of Robert Parry in 2017, Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Nick Davies and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism team. Please support her work at her Patreon account. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Volunteer fireman, Olivier Beziade, a father-of-three in his 30s, was shot in the back of the head in Bordeaux on Saturday 12th January 2019. (Photo: Stephanie Roy on Twitter)
Since 2015 Venezuela has endured gruesome economic hardships. Inflation rates have spiraled out of control, and the public is facing a recession that is tearing the country apart. Now, Venezuelans not only face economic turmoil, but also direct military aggression. A sane response of anyone who wishes to help Venezuelans through these troubles is to try to understand why this is happening.
Unfortunately, not all opinion pieces and news articles are honest in their approach. In fact, most media outlets seem to regurgitate the same poor and factually erroneous narratives, leaving the public ill-informed. It is necessary to address some common falsehoods that have been circulating concerning the economic situation in Venezuela and to highlight important facts that have largely been omitted from the common narrative.
Venezuela’s economic problems did not start with the Bolivarian revolution
One example of dishonest narratives in the pages of the Western media is that Venezuela’s economic problems are caused by the policies Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. These men are depicted as despots who have ruined a formerly healthy economy and as the culprits of Venezuela’s current crises. Latent in such narratives is the sometimes-unuttered, sometimes yelled, assumption that the Venezuelan economy was in good shape prior to the public election of Chavez in 1998. This is certainly not true.
Venezuela economic crisis started more than 35 years ago. From 1983 to 1998 real income fell by 14 percent, in a society that was already extremely corrupt and unequal (Corrales, 1999).According to data from the Inter-American Development Bank, 68 percent of Venezuelans lived below the poverty line in 1998. That same year the unemployment rate was 11.2 percent, and the inflation rate was 35.8 percent. This was a year before Chavez took office as president and before any economic sanctions and pressures from the West started.
After Chavez was elected president the economy strengthened considerably for three years, despite country being hit by massive flooding and landslides in December 1999. The inflation rate fell to 12.5% in 2001 and the poverty rate was successfully lowered to 39% (Weisbrot, 2008). The Bolivarian economic policies followed by the Chavez government were lifting Venezuelans out of poverty when Venezuela fortunately not being targeted for regime change.
What did cause the first downturn of Venezuela’s economy was not its progressive policies, nor Chavez’s alleged despotism, but a major attempt at a CIA assisted military coup d’état in 2002 and a subsequent violent shutdown of the country’s oil industry. That coup left the country in turmoil despite being unsuccessful.Prior to 2003, the government did not exert control over the oil industry. The oil industry shut-down in 2002-2003 was orchestrated by the “Coordina Democrática”, an umbrella group of political parties, business federations and right-wing unions that pursued to overthrow the government by non-electoral means.We shall examine that coup attempt in more detail later, but we must note that this overt policy of the Venezuelan right-wing and its supporters in the US was conducted in a climate of increasingly positive standards of living, especially for the poor.
Unfortunately, the failure of that coup attempt was not the end, but only the beginning of attempts to force Venezuela to steer from its policies. From that point to the present, Venezuela’s progressive policies were targeted by ever more sinister means and attempts at un-democratic takeover.
A recession followed the coup in 2002 that lasted for two years. But the country bounced back and in 2005, the Venezuelan economy grew by 9,4%, the highest in Latin America. Inflation rates lowered to 15.3% (Wilpert, 2005). In 2012, Venezuela was the most equal society in Latin America in terms of wealth distribution (BBC, 2012). According the CNN, “In 2011, the Gini coefficient — which measures income inequality –was .39, down from nearly .50 in 1998, according to the CIA Factbook. That is, equality in Venezuela was better than in the US and only behind Canada in the Western Hemisphere”. (Voigt, 2013). Thus, despite real and aggressive attempts at sabotage, the Chavéz government managed to put into place policies that aided the poor and, at the same time, strengthened the economy.
Simplistic explanations with glaring omissions
A common theme in current news stories regarding Venezuela’s crisis is that its cause can be found solely in the “economic mismanagement, corruption and political oppression” of Chavéz and Maduro (Laya, 2019). Such claims are supported with examples of the “Dutch syndrome”, where a country becomes to reliant on one commodity (Venezuela is very reliant on oil), on overspending on social programs, heavy lending and corruption. These claims might be open for reasonable debate if Venezuela had in any real sense been allowed to operate in peace. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Oil manipulation
A factor too seldom included in the common narrative on Venezuela’s economic crash is the apparently intentional meddling of oil prices by Saudi Arabia and its allies that apparently aimed at hurting Iran (Cooper, 2014) as well as other oil dependent countries such as Venezuela and Russia. Starting in 2014, Saudi Arabia started to flood the market with cheap oil. Despite this hurting even Saudi Arabia itself, this overproduction of oil had drastic effects. The price of oil went down from $110 per barrel to $28 in two years (Puko, 2016). This plummeting of oil prices had immediate negative effects on the Venezuelan state budget, as well as on other oil dependent countries, leaving Venezuela cash-starved. It is true that the country was indeed over dependent on one resource, and it has a serious corruption problem. But it is hard to see how the government of Venezuela could have managed to deal with such a huge blow to its economy amidst serious sanctions and economic sabotage that already plagued the country. A right-wing government would not have fared better in these circumstances. Instead of showing understanding to its problems, this crisis was used to denounce the Maduro government and to promote propaganda that increased the possibility of violent foreign and internal aggression.
The effects of economic sanctions
Economic sanctions directed by the most powerful military- and economic powers can cripple any economy. Even relatively mild sanctions can have serious consequences for the target economy. It has been found that the imposition of economic sanctions decreases the target state’s real per capita GDP growth rate by 25 to 30 percentage points on average with effects lasting for at least 10 years. More serious sanctions produce more serious effects (Neuenkirch, 2015).Furthermore, economic sanctions have been found to seriously worsen economic inequality and widen the poverty gap in target countries, in effect hitting the poorest people in the target countries hardest (Afersorgbor & Mahadevan, 2016; Mulder, 2018).
For example, in 1993, Serbia was singled out for economic sanctions that lasted until 2001. The sanctions had devastating effects on the public, making more than half the population of the country poor, unemployed, or displaced as refugees (Garfield, R. 2003). In Iraq, the economic sanctions imposed on the country in August 1990 and extended following the 1991 Persian Gulf War, lead to a decrease in GDP from $38 billion in 1989 to $10.8 billion in 1996. Per capita GDP declined over 75%, leading to devastating effects for the public. According to a report by Bossuyt (2000), the transportation, power and communication infrastructure were not rebuilt during the period, the industrial sector was in shambles, and agricultural production suffered greatly due to the sanctions. The “purchasing power of an Iraqi salary by the mid-1990s was about 5 per cent of its value prior to 1990 …” and, as the United Nations Development Program field office recognized, “the country has experienced a shift from relative affluence to massive poverty …The previous advances in education and literacy have been completely reversed over the past 10 years” (ibid).
As should be obvious, economic sanctions have horrible effects on the economy of the targeted nations and their inhabitants. How strange it is that opinion pieces, editorials and news segments tend to completely ignore that the overbearing barrage of economic sanctions directed against Venezuela might be a factor in the current crisis in its economy. Journalists that fail to address this cannot and should not be taken seriously.
The crash in Venezuela is directly linked to economic sanctions
In 2006, the first economic sanctions against Venezuela were put in place by Venezuela’s most important trading partner and,apparently, its worst enemy, the U.S. At first, these were directed against single individuals, but gradually these have evolved into hard and serious sanctions on all Venezuela.
The US House of Representatives passed the Venezuelan Human Rights and Democracy Protection Act (H.R. 4587; 113th Congress) on May 28, 2014. It applied economic sanctions against Venezuelan officials who were alleged to be involved in the mistreatment of protestors during the 2014 Venezuelan protests.
In December that year, the U.S. Congress passed S. 2142 (Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014). The bill directed the President to impose sanctions against “any person, including any current or former official for the government of Venezuela or person acting on behalf of that government” who the US Congress would deem as responsible for human rights abuses or “knowingly materially assisted, sponsored or provided significant financial, material or technological support for, or goods or services in support of, the commission of such acts” (Poling et al., 2014). When the US Congress passed the bill, U.S. businesses raised concerns that the legislation could provide an incremental step towards broader sanctions against the Venezuelan economy, including the country’s oil industry despite being introduced as targeting individuals (ibid).
On March 9, 2015, the Obama Administration signed and issued a Presidential order. In it, Venezuela was declared a threat to US national security and sanctions were ordered against Venezuelan officials. How Venezuela was a threat to the United States was not explained. The order was strongly denounced by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Sates for its “unilateral coercive measures against International Law” (Tejas, 2015). Ernesto Samper, the Secretary-General of the Union of South American Nations, deemed the order as an attempt to disrupt the democratic process in Venezuela.
The Trump Administration greatly escalated the economic pressures started by the Obama Administration. These included financial sanctions against the Venezuelan government and aggressive measures against the oil industry. The additional sanctions on Venezuela that were imposed with Executive Order 13808 on August 24, 2017 were nothing less than an act of aggression against the Venezuelan economy and its people. It specifically bars revenues from Venezuela’s state oil company to paid from the US, bars the Venezuelan government from selling bonds, and even bars the state from receiving loans. These sanctions were designed to prevent Venezuela’s own money from entering Venezuela.Note that all the Venezuelan governments’ outstanding foreign currency bonds are governed under New York State law,and one of Venezuela’s major government assets, the state oil company, is based in Texas. So barring all profit flow from that company is crippling for Venezuela (Ellner, 2019).
The US economic sanctions have indeed had devastating effects on the Venezuelan economy. Francisco Rodriguez, Venezuelan economist and a long-time critic of the Venezuelan government, presented clear evidence that since 2015, and especially after the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration in 2017, Venezuela’s oil production dropped much faster than had been predicted. According to Rodriguez, after the sanctions made it illegal for the Venezuelan government to obtain financing from the US, Venezuelan production fell by 37%, much more than the 6-13% decline that had been predicted. Rodriguez calculated that the difference in total revenue between the “sanctions” and “no sanctions” case over one year was about $6 billion. That sum is 133 times larger than what the UNHCR has appealed for in aid for Venezuelan migrants. Rodríguez summed up the main cause of Venezuela’s economic implosion as follows: “The fall in oil production began when oil prices plummeted in early 2016 but intensified when the industry lost access to credit markets in 2017” (Rodríguez, 2018).
As Rodriguez explained
“To understand the magnitude of this effect, consider how much Venezuela would be earning in oil export revenue today if production had not declined. Were the country selling as many barrels to the rest of the world today as in 2015, it would have exported $51bn in oil this year. By contrast, Venezuela will sell only $23bn of oil internationally in 2018. And, if the slide in production continues, only $16bn in 2019. We can safely say that if the country was receiving $28bn more in yearly export revenue than it does today, it would have experienced a much smaller decline in living standards than it saw.”
The US issued yet another economic sanction on Venezuela on January 28 this year. This time specifically focusing on “persons operating in Venezuela’s oil sector”, especially on Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). The press release announcing these new economic sanctions even specify that the US will “continue to take concrete and forceful actions against those who oppose the peaceful restoration of democracy in Venezuela” adding that the US “stands with interim President Juan Guaido”, an un-elected man (US dep. of State, 2019). This means that not only is the US arbitrarily sanctioning another country’s state assets and intentionally hurting its economy, it is directly involving itself in the internal affairs on another country, which is illegal under international law.
The severe attacks on Venezuela´s economy have been followed by US allies. Recently, the Bank of England refused to return $1.2 billion in gold reserves after lobbying from National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo (Laya, Bronner and Ross, 2019).
Indeed, these sanctions have been described “illegal and could amount to ‘crimes against humanity’ under international law” by Alfred de Zayas, former special rapporteur to the UN. According to de Zayas, the US is engaging in “economic warfare” against Venezuela that results in hurting the economy and killing Venezuelans (Selby-Green, 2019). As the sanctions seem to be means to starve the population of Venezuela and deliberately cripple the economy in order to achieve political aims, these acts can rightly be described as terrorism.
It is very doubtful that any economy would survive such violent sanctions. Unfortunately, the sanctions are only one part of the extensive sabotage that have been done towards the Venezuelan economy and society. An even bigger threat to Venezuela’s economy than US lead sanctions has been the conspicuous acts of the internal enemies of Venezuela’s government and its progressive Bolivarian policies.
Internal subversion
Ever since 1999, the Venezuelan government has been under constant attacks from the very rich and powerful elite of business oligarchs who hate Bolivarian politics with a passion. These oligarchs have been supported by the US, as well as far right groups in the hemisphere, not least in Colombia.
The first serious coup attempt took place in April 2002. It started with a general strike called by unions for the state oil company, PDVSA, which was followed by protest marches through Caracas. As protests neared the Miraflores palace, a massacre took place where 16 people were killed, 7 policemen and 9 civilians. Within hours, the military high command had arrested Chavéz and put in his place Pedro Carmona, the head of Venezuela’s largest business association. This presidency lasted 48 hours. In that short period Carmona, dissolved Congress and cancelled the newly approved constitution of Venezuela. Scores of people were imprisoned, and a military state was put in place. However, thousands of demonstrators and military personnel opposed to Carmona’s rule managed to reverse the coup. According to Bellos (2002),the Bush administration “was left with some eggs on its face. Unlike Latin American countries, which voiced concern that the coup had forsaken democratic principles, the US showed no remorse at Mr. Chavez’s removal”.
The narrative of exactly what happened is still very partisan, but the coup attempt had been organized for at least 9 months by a group of businessmen, military officers and various opposition figures in Venezuela. Keeping in mind how long this coup attempt was planned, it is hard to take seriously claims that the demonstrations and the massacre that occurred in the early hours of April 11, followed by the arrest of Chavez and other political figures by elements of the Venezuelan military were unrelated to these plans. Private media outlets reported with dishonesty about what happened that day (see Wilpert, G. 2009) and were therefore complicit in the coup attempt.
Although the extent to which institutions in the US were involved in the coup attempt, US officials knew it was going to take place. In 2004, declassified intelligence documents showed that the Central Intelligence Agency was aware that dissident military officers and opposition figures in Venezuela were planning a coup against President Hugo Chávez in 2002, well in advance. Parts of the document reads as followed: “disgruntled senior officers and a group of radical junior officers are stepping up efforts to organize a coup against President Chávez, possibly as early as this month…” It stated that Chávez and 10 senior officers were targeted for arrest and the plotters would try to “exploit unrest stemming from opposition demonstrations slated for later this month” (Forero, 2004).
In November 2013, a document titled “Plan Estratégico Venezolano” or “Stratetic Venezuelan Plan” that was written in June that same year, surfaced after suits from attorney Eva Golinger (2013). The document highlighted a plan by representatives of the United States, Colombia and the oligarchs in Venezuela to undermine the economy of Venezuela as part of removing Maduro. The document was prepared by the “Democratic Internationalism Foundations” which is headed by ex-Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, and also the “First Colombia Think Tank” and the US Consulting firm, FTI Consulting.
The document is a very sinister read. It outlines a strategic plan to destabilize Venezuela by various means. For example, it details a strategy to sabotage the electrical system in Venezuela, “maintain and increase the sabotages that affect public services” and “increase problems with supply of basic consumer products”. For propaganda, the authors propose “perfecting the confrontational discourse of [opposition candidate] Henrique Capriles” and generate “emotion with short messages that reach the largest quantity of people and emphasize social problems, provoking social discontent”. More seriously, the authors propose to create “situations of crisis in the streets that will facilitate US intervention, as well as NATO forces, with the help of the Colombian government” adding “whenever possible, the violence should result in deaths or injury”. The document recommends “a military insurrection” against Venezuela with “contacting active military groups and those in retirement to amplify the campaign to discredit the government inside the Armed forces… It’s vital to prepare military forces so that during a scenario of crisis and social conflict, they lead an insurrection against the government, or at least support a foreign intervention or civil uprising” (Golinger, 2013).
The plan was developed during a meeting between the three organizations as well as leaders of the Venezuelan opposition, including Maria Corina Machado, Julio Borges and Ramon Guillermo Avelado, expert in psychological operations J.J. Rendon and the Director of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for Latin America, Mark Feierstein.
One must ask, how many such plans have been put in place since, but not exposed? The actions and dialogue of these oligarch show just how low they are ready to sink in order to oust a democratically elected government.
The opposition in Venezuela has been very violent and showed complete disregard for democratic principles. For example, in 2014 Venezuela was hit by a big wave of demonstrations following the outcome of the 2013 presidential elections, where Nicolas Maduro won by a small margin, 50.6%. During this time of unrest opposition political figures such as Leopoldo Lopéz, who had also been involved in the 2002 coup attempt, and María Corina Machado, launched a campaign to remove Maduro from office. The plan was named “La Salida” (the exit) and had the intent of having Maduro resign through protests. Machado stated publicly that “we must create chaos in the streets” (Carasik, 2014). At least 36 people died in the unrest following this statement. The opposition predictably blamed the government for these deaths. But considering that the deaths included several security forces and pro-government civilians and others were apparently non-affiliated, that statement must be contested (see Hart, 2014).
Recently, an organization called “Democratic Unity Roundtable” seems to have been coordinating acts of violence against those who are identified as pro-Chavista (Joubert-Ceci, 2017).This group was formed in 2008 to unify opposition Chavéz and can be viewed as the successor of the CoordinadoraDemocrática. The violent protests centered around a call by Maduro to a vote on a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the constitution. Despite having called for the Assembly themselves, the opposition refused to enter dialogue, demanding the presence of the Vatican. But even Pope Francis announced that the dialogue had failed because the opposition would not participate (Nelson, 2017). Instead, the opposition rallied anti-Maduro demonstrators to start a spree of violence that left at least 100 dead (ibid). According to the Canadian Peace Congress of 2017, “if an attempt at internal counter-revolution fails, plans are being put in place for direct military intervention by the United States, possibly under the cover of the Organization of American States (OAS)” (ibid). It is at least clear that the opposition is thoroughly un-democratic in their planning’s and actions but are still supported by Western powers.
To report that the economy of Venezuela is in turmoil solely because of Maduros “socialistic” policies, while ignoring the very serious consequences of economic sanctions, oil price manipulations, and internal sabotage is deliberate denial of facts, is propagandistic journalism, is absurd. Informed discussions about the effects and costs of progressive social programsmay be interesting and useful theoretical exercises.But as distortions and denials of historic facts, emotional attacks on Venezuela’s government should be seen as the propaganda, designed to manipulate American, Canadian and European populations into supporting another violent regime change in another oil-producing nation.
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Jón Karl Stefánsson is an administrator for services directed to mentally disabled individuals from Reykjavík, Iceland. He studied computer science and psychology in the University of Iceland and received his MA in psychology in the University of Tromso, Norway with focus on biased language in news discourse. Since 2003 he has written several articles independently in mostly Icelandic newspapers and independent news outlets and has focused his writing on biased language, propaganda and its effects on society.
Sources
Afersorgbor, S. K. & Mahadevan, R. 2016. The impact of economic sanctions on income inequality of target states. World Development, 83, p. 1-11.
Bellos, A. (April 15., 2002). Chavez rises from very peculiar coup. The Guardian. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/15/venezuela.alexbellos
Poling, J. C., Segall, W. H., Davis, C. C. & Grant. A. H. (Dec. 18, 2014). Obama to sign Venezuela sanctions bill. Aking Gump, International Trade Alert.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro called on the people in the US to deter the Trump administration from putting boots on the ground in Venezuela, warning that any intervention would backfire leading to new Vietnam-like disaster.
In his first direct message to the American people, the Venezuelan leader urged them to stop the US government from entangling the nation in a pointless and inherently doomed military adventure.
“If the government of the United States intends to intervene us, they will have a much worse Vietnam than you could imagine.”
The 4-minute video, in Spanish with English subtitles, was posted on Maduro’s official Facebook page on Wednesday, shortly after he accused US President Donald Trump of ordering the Colombian government and mafia to assassinate him, and rejected a European ultimatum to call snap presidential elections within 8 days.
Maduro accused the US media of waging a “brutal campaign of false images” to support the Trump administration’s interference in Venezuela.
“This campaign has been prepared to justify a coup d’état in Venezuela that has been set, financed and actively supported by Donald Trump administration.”
Effectively sidestepping his US counterpart, Maduro urged Americans to second-guess the distorted narrative peddled by the mainstream media. The embattled Venezuelan leader stated that Washington cannot use the same pretext to invade Venezuela as it did to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, so it is spreading new falsehoods about his government in hopes that something will tip the balance.
“They cannot invent that Venezuela and Maduro have [weapons of mass destruction] so they could intervene, they now invent lies every day, false news to justify an aggression against our country.”
Maduro reiterated that US interests in Venezuela are limited exclusively to its vast natural riches. Venezuela boasts the world’s largest confirmed oil reserves and the fourth-largest reserves of natural gas. The president said that by fomenting unrest in Venezuela, the US elites want “to put their hands” on that national treasure “as they did in Iraq and Libya.”
“We are a country of great resources, both natural and energetic. That is the truth and this explains the constant attacks against Venezuela. That’s why I appeal to your conscience and solidarity.”
He admitted that Venezuela faces a plethora of problems, “as any other country” and said Venezuelans can “solve them by ourselves,” without any outside meddling.
Describing himself as an admirer of US history, Maduro said that he hopes that reasonable US citizens will prevail, adding that America “is a great country, and it is much more than Donald Trump.”
“The United States is a great country and it is much bigger than Donald Trump,” he said. “I only ask for respect for Venezuela and I need your support to avoid a war like Vietnam.”
More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed and some four million Vietnamese died in what is now the second longest war in American history after Afghanistan. The US sent first 3,500 combat troops to South Vietnam in March 1965, to fight against the communist government of North Vietnam that sought to unify the country under its terms. While the intervention was first met enthusiastically by the American public, the protracted nature of the conflict and US inability to turn the tide of the war led to a massive anti-war movement in the US. The last US troops withdrew in 1973 following the Paris Peace Accords. In 1975, troops from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam entered Saigon, the capital of US-backed South Vietnam, sealing the US military defeat.
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Lest anyone be tempted to believe that President Trump and other U.S. interventionists are intervening in Venezuela because of some purported concern for the Venezuelan people, let’s start examining just a few examples that will bring a dose of reality to the situation. This latest intervention is nothing more than another interventionist power play, one intended to replace one dictatorial regime with another.
Egypt comes to mind. It is ruled by one of the most brutal and tyrannical military dictatorships in the world. The U.S. government loves it, supports it, and partners with it. There is no concern for the Egyptian citizenry, who have to suffer under this brutal tyranny and oppression.
Saudi Arabia also comes to mind. It too is a brutal and tyrannical dictatorship, also a murderous one. The U.S. government loves it too, supports it, and partners with it. There is no concern for Saudi citizens who have to suffer under this brutal tyranny and oppression.
Historically, this has been the case as well. Some examples:
1. Iran under the Shah. In 1953, the U.S. national-security establishment destroyed Iran’s experiment with democracy by ousting the democratically elected prime minister, Mohamad Mossadegh, from power and installed in his stead the Shah of Iran, one of the world’s most brutal tyrants. Even worse, they helped train his national-security establishment in the arts of torture, tyranny, and oppression. There was no concern for the well-being or liberty of the Iranian people. Even today, the U.S. aim is to oust the current tyrannical regime and replace it with a pro-U.S. tyrannical regime.
2. Guatemala. In 1954, the U.S. national-security establishment ousted the democratically elected president from office and installed in his stead a succession of brutal military tyrants. The U.S.-engineered coup threw the country into a 3-decade long civil war, which killed more than a million people. U.S. officials couldn’t care less.
3. Cuba. In the 1950s, the U.S. national-security establishment supported and partnered with a brutal, corrupt dictator named Fulgencio Batista, who himself partnered with the Mafia, the premier criminal organization in the world. There was never any concern for the Cuban populace, including the young girls who Batista’s goons were kidnapping and bringing to the Mafia’s casinos to serve as sexual perqs for high rollers. Ever since the Cuban people ousted Batista from power through a violent revolution and replaced him with Fidel Castro, the U.S. national-security establishment has never ceased trying to get a subservient and compliant dictator back into power in Cuba.
4. Chile. In 1973, the U.S. national-security establishment engineered the violent ouster of the democratically elected president of the country, Salvador Allende, and his replacement by one of the most tyrannical and corrupt military dictators in the world, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet’s goons proceeded to round up, torture, rape, or murder tens of thousands of innocent people, including two Americans, with the full support of the U.S. national-security establishment. There was never any concern for any of the victims, including the two Americans (Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi), on the part of U.S. officials.
5. Iraq. In the 1980s, the U.S. national-security establishment supported and partnered with Saddam Hussein, one of the world’s most brutal dictators, one who some U.S. officials would refer to in the 1990s as a “new Adolf Hitler.” They were helping Saddam kill Iranians. Later, after U.S. officials turned on their partner Saddam in the 1990s, they targeted Iraqi citizens with death and suffering through one of the most brutal sanctions systems in history as a way of hopefully getting rid of Saddam and replacing him with another U.S. dictatorial partner. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright expressed the official mindset of U.S. officials toward the Iraqi people by declaring that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were “worth it.”
Make no mistake about it: the U.S. interventionist mindset today toward Venezuela is no different. That mindset is reflected by two things: one, the infliction of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela and, two, the official recognition of an alternative president, in the hope that these two actions will produce a violent revolution. The death toll from such a revolution, no matter how high, doesn’t matter to U.S. officials. After all, the people who will be dying will be Venezuelans. Like with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Chile, and so many others, the liberty and well-being of the citizenry is of no concern. All that matters is the ouster of an independent regime and its replacement with a new dictatorial regime that is eager and willing to be a partner and ally of the U.S. government.
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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics.
Featured image is from Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
For some months now, Venezuela’s socialist government has lurched through a series of escalating crises — hyperinflation, mass protests, political violence — while both the government and its opposition have flirted with authoritarianism.
It isn’t pretty — and to hear the right wing tell it, it’s the future the U.S. left wants for our own country. As if to prevent that, the Trump administration is now fomenting a coup in Venezuela.
They’ll tell you this about restoring “democracy” and “human rights” in the South American country. But one look at the administration officials driving the putsch perishes the thought.
Take Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who recently spoke at the United Nations calling on countries to stand “with the forces of freedom” against “the mayhem” of Venezuela’s government.
This fall, the same Pompeo shared a photo of himself beaming and shaking hands with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince — just as the prince’s order to kill and dismember a U.S. resident journalist was coming to light. The same prince is carrying on a U.S.-backed war in Yemen, where millions are starving.
Does this sound like a man who gives one fig for democracy, or against mayhem?
Or take Pompeo’s point man on Venezuela, the dreaded Elliott Abrams. Pompeo said Abrams was appointed for his “passion for the rights and liberties of all peoples.” More likely, it was Abrams’ history as Reagan’s “Secretary of Dirty Wars” (yes, that’s a real thing people called him).
A singularly villainous figure, Abrams vouched for U.S. backing of a genocidal Guatemalan regime and Salvadoran death squads in the 1980s. And when a UN report cataloged 22,000 atrocities in El Salvador, Abrams praised his administration’s “fabulous achievement” in the country.
Abrams was convicted of lying to Congress about U.S. support for Nicaragua’s brutal Contras, but that didn’t prevent him from serving in George W. Bush’s State Department — which backed not only the Iraq war but an earlier coup attempt in, you guessed it, Venezuela.
“It’s very nice to be back,” Abrams told reporters. I bet!
Finally there’s National Security Adviser John Bolton, who recently took a cute photo with the words “5,000 troops” written on a notepad. Bolton still thinks the Iraq war was a good idea, and he’d like one with Iran too. Do we think it’s bread and roses he wants for Venezuela?
For all its faults, Venezuela achieved tremendous things before the current crisis — including drastic reductions in poverty and improvements in living standards. Mismanagement and repression may have imperiled those gains, but that’s no justification at all for the U.S. getting involved. In fact, U.S. sanctions have worsened the economic crisis, and U.S. coordination with coup plotters has poisoned the country’s political environment even further.
The future of Venezuela’s revolution is for Venezuelans to decide, not us. All that can come of more intervention now is more crisis, and maybe even war.
Instead of regime change, the U.S. — and especially progressive politicians (looking at you, Nancy Pelosi) — should back regional dialogue and diplomacy. While Democratic Party leaders appear to back Trump, a few representatives — likeRo Khanna (D-CA) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) — are bravely backing a diplomatic course.
For all the right’s warnings that the left wants to “turn the U.S. into Venezuela,” we should pay careful attention to what the people who gave guns to death squads and destroyed the Middle East want to do with it. Because unlike the left, they’re already running our own country.
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Peter Certo worked as a researcher for Right Web, an Institute for Policy Studies project that studies neoconservative foreign policy figures. He edits OtherWords.org, which distributed this piece.
Featured image: Mike Pence (center), John Bolton (right of Pence), Nikki Haley, and Mike Pompeo (right). (Shutterstock)
Tomorrow, net neutrality will get it’s day in court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will hear oral arguments in the legal challenge to Ajit Pai’s reckless and resoundingly unpopular repeal of open Internet protections, brought by a coalition of startups, states, and public interest groups.
Digital rights group Fight for the Future, which has been behind the largest online protests in history and mobilized tens of millions of people to defend net neutrality, issued the following statement, which can be attributed to Deputy Director Evan Greer (pronouns: she/her):
“Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T are going to wish they never picked this fight with the Internet. More than a year after the repeal of net neutrality people are still outraged and paying close attention. Ajit Pai’s FCC blatantly ignored public opinion and acted with reckless disregard for the law in order to give a massive government handout to some of the most power-hungry corporations in the US.
Telecom lobbyists were hoping that we would have given up by now. They thought they could outspend and outlast us. They were wrong. Internet activists are continuing to fight in the courts, in Congress, and in the states. Net neutrality is coming back with a vengeance. It’s only a matter of time.”
Fight for the Future has been calling on Congress to conduct a thorough investigation of Ajit Pai’s corrupt actions at the FCC, and is pushing for lawmakers to act to restore net neutrality while opposing weak legislation pushed by telecom lobbyists that would undermine the open Internet while claiming to save it.
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Historically, from the massacres in Bangladesh in 1971 to the training and arming of Afghan jihadists during the Soviet-Afghan war throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, and then mounting ill-conceived military operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas under American pressure, leading to the displacement of millions of Pashtun tribesmen, the single biggest issue in Pakistan’s turbulent politics has been the interference of army in politics. Unless Pakistanis are able to establish civilian supremacy in Pakistan, it would become a rogue state which will pose a threat to regional peace and its own citizenry.
For the half of its seventy-year history, Pakistan was directly ruled by the army, and for the remaining half, the military establishment kept dictating Pakistan’s defense and security policy from behind the scenes. The outcome of Ayub Khan’s first decade-long martial law from 1958 to 1969 was that Bengalis were marginalized and alienated to an extent that it led to the separation of East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in 1971.
During General Zia’s second decade-long martial law from 1977 to 1988, Pakistan’s military trained and armed its own worst nemesis, the Afghan and Kashmiri jihadists. And during General Musharraf’s third martial law from 1999 to 2008, Pakistan’s security establishment made a volte-face under American pressure and declared a war against its erstwhile jihadist proxies that kindled the fire of insurgency in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
Although most political commentators in Pakistan nowadays hold an Islamist General Zia-ul-Haq (image on the right) responsible for the jihadist militancy in tribal areas, it would be erroneous to assume that nurturing militancy in Pakistan was the doing of an individual scapegoat named Zia. All the army chiefs after Zia’s assassination in 1988, including Generals Aslam Beg, Asif Nawaz, Waheed Kakar, Jahangir Karamat and right up to General Musharraf, upheld the same military doctrine of using jihadist proxies to destabilize the hostile neighboring countries, Afghanistan, India and Iran, throughout the 1980s and ‘90s.
A strategic rethink in the Pakistan Army’s top-brass took place only after the 9/11 terror attack, when Richard Armitage, the US Deputy Secretary of State during the Bush administration, threatened General Musharraf in so many words:
“We will send Pakistan back to the Stone Age unless you stop supporting the Taliban.”
Thus, deliberate promotion of Islamic radicalism and militancy in the region was not the doing of an individual general; rather, it was a well-thought-out military doctrine of a rogue institution.
The military mindset, training and institutional logic dictates a militarist and aggressive approach to foreign affairs and security-related matters. Therefore, as a matter of principle, military must be kept miles away from the top decision-making organs of the state.
Notwithstanding, is it not ironic that two very similar insurgencies have simultaneously been going on in Pakistan for the last several years: the Baloch insurgency in the Balochistan province and the insurgency of the Pashtun tribesmen in the tribal areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering the American-occupied Afghanistan.
While the Pakistani neoliberal elites fully sympathize with the oppressed Baloch nationalists, when it comes to the Pashtun tribesmen, they are willing to give Pakistan’s security agencies a license to kill, why? It’s simply because the tribal Pashtun insurgents use the veneer of religion to justify their tribal instinct of retribution.
The name Islam, however, is such an anathema to the core neoliberal sensibilities that the elites don’t even bother to delve deeper into the causes of insurgency and summarily decide that since the Pashtun tribesmen are using the odious label of the Taliban, therefore they are not worthy of their sympathies. And as a result, the security establishment gets a carte blanche to indiscriminately bomb the towns and villages of Pashtun tribesmen.
As well-informed readers must be aware that military operations have been going on in the tribal areas of Pakistan since 2009, but a military operation – unlike a law enforcement operation, as in the southern port city of Karachi – is a different kind of operation; it’s an all-out war.
The army surrounds the insurgency-wracked area from all sides and orders the villagers to vacate their homes. Then, the army calls in air force and heavy artillery to carpet bomb the whole area; after which ground troops move in to look for the dead and injured in the rubble of towns and villages.
Air force bombardment and heavy artillery shelling has been going on in the tribal areas of Pakistan for several years; Pashtun tribesmen have been taking fire; their homes, property and livelihoods have been destroyed; they have lost their families and children in this brutal war, which displaced millions of tribesmen who had to live for several years in the refugee camps in Peshawar, Mardan and Bannu districts after the Swat and South Waziristan military operations in 2009 and then the North Waziristan operation in 2014.
The Pashtuns are the most unfortunate nation on the planet nowadays, because nobody understands and represents them; not even their own leadership, whether religious or ethnic. In Afghanistan, the Pashtuns are represented by Washington’s stooges, like Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, and in Pakistan, the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party (ANP) loves to play the victim card and finds solace in learned helplessness.
In Pakistan, however, the Pashtuns are no longer represented by a single political entity, a fact which has become obvious after the last two parliamentary elections, in which the Pashtun nationalist ANP was wiped out of its former strongholds.
Now, there are at least three distinct categories of Pashtuns: firstly, the Pashtun nationalists who follow Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s legacy and have their strongholds in Charsadda and Mardan districts; secondly, the religiously inclined Islamist Pashtuns who vote for Islamist political parties, such as Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, in the southern districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province; and thirdly, the emerging new phenomena, the Pakistan nationalist Pashtuns, most of whom have joined Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in recent years, though some have also joined Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League.
It is worth noting here that the 2013 and 2018 general elections were contested on a single issue: Pakistan’s partnership in the American-led war on terror, which has displaced millions of Pashtun tribesmen. The Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party (ANP) was routed, because in keeping with its so-called “liberal interventionist” ideology, it stood for military operations against Islamist Pashtun militants in tribal areas.
And the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province gave a sweeping mandate to the newcomer in the Pakistani political landscape: Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), because the latter promised to deal with tribal militants through negotiations and political settlements.
Although both Imran Khan (image on the left) and Nawaz Sharif have failed to keep their election pledge of using peaceful means for dealing with the menace of religious extremism and militancy, the public sentiment has been firmly against military operations in tribal areas.
The last two parliamentary elections were, in a way, a referendum against Pakistan’s partnership in the American-led war on terror in the Af-Pak region, and the Pashtun electorate gave an overwhelming mandate to pro-peace political parties against the pro-war Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Awami National Party (ANP).
After the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party (ANP) was completely routed at the hands of Imran Khan’s PTI during the 2013 general elections, it came up with a new electoral gimmick in the form of Pashtun Tahafuz Movement – The Movement for Protection of Pashtun Rights – for the July 2018 parliamentary elections. Excluding Manzoor Pashteen and some of his close associates, the rest of Pashtun Protection Movement’s leadership is comprised of ANP’s political activists.
But is it not ironic that the very same political forces that cheerled military operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas, leading to the displacement of millions of Pashtun tribesmen, are now championing Pashtun rights? When Pakistan’s military was indiscriminately bombing the towns and villages of Pashtun tribesmen, Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Awami National Party (ANP) lent their unequivocal support to Pakistan’s so-called war on terror under American pressure, but now they are demanding that Pashtun tribesmen held by security agencies be released, the tribal areas be cleared of mines and security check posts be removed in order to placate Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province’s Pashtun majority electorate.
Finally, in Pakistan’s socio-political milieu, there are three important political forces: the dominant Islamic nationalists; the ethno-linguistic nationalists; and the neoliberal elites. The Islamic nationalists are culturally much closer to the traditional ethno-linguistic nationalists, but politically, due to frequent imposition of martial laws and military dictators’ suspicion toward the centrifugal ethno-linguistic nationalists, the latter were politically marginalized.
As we know that politics is mostly about forming alliances, therefore the shrewd neoliberal elites lured the leadership of gullible ethno-linguistic nationalists and struck a political alliance with them. But this alliance is only a marriage of convenience, because culturally, both these camps don’t have anything in common with each other. The Islamic nationalists and the ethno-linguistic nationalists belong to the same social stratum and go through thick and thin together; while the comprador bourgeois are beholden to foreign powers.
Leadership is a two-way street, a judicious leader is supposed to guide the masses, but at the same time, he is also supposed to represent the interests and aspirations of dispossessed masses. The detached and insular leadership that lives in a fantasy world of outlandish theories and fails to understand the mindsets and inclinations of the masses tends to lose its mass appeal sooner or later.
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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The announcement by President Trump, which recognises Juan Guaidó as the “legitimate President” of Venezuela, was prepared in an underground control room within the Congress and the White House.
This was described in detail by the New York Times. The principal operator, Republican Senator for Florida Marco Rubio, “virtual Secretary of State for Latin America, will lead and articulate the strategy of the Administration in the region”, in liaison with Vice-President Mike Pence and National Security Advisor John Bolton.
On 22 January, at the White House, the three men presented their plan to the President, who accepted it. Immediately afterwards – reports the New York Times –
“Mr. Pence called Mr. Guaidó and told him that the United States would back him up if he claimed the presidency”.
Vice-President Pence then broadcast a video message to Venezuela in which he called on the demonstrators to “let your voices be heard tomorrow” and assured “in the name of President Trump and the American People – estamos con ustedes (we are with you) as long as democracy has not been restored”, and defined Maduro as a “dictator who never won the presidency in free elections”.
The following day, Trump officially crowned Guaidó “President of Venezuela”, although he had not participated in the presidential elections of May 2018. The elections were boycotted by the opposition, which knew it would lose, and consequently handed the victory to Maduro under the surveillance of numerous international observers.
This back-stage gossip reveals that political decisions in the USA, before anything else, are taken by the “deep state”, the underground centre of real power, which is in the possession of the economic, financial and military oligarchies. These are the people who have decided to overthrow the Venezuelan state. Apart from its huge reserves of precious minerals, Venezuela owns the most expansive oil reserves in the world, estimated at more than 300 billion barrels, six times more than the United States.
In order to struggle free from the strait-jacket of sanctions, which go as far as preventing Venezuela from receiving the dollars they have earned by selling petrol to the USA, Caracas has decided to quote the sale price of petrol no longer in US dollars, but in Chinese yuans. This is a manœuvre which threatens the exorbitant power of the petrodollars, and it is for this reason that the US oligarchies have decided to speed up the overthrow of the Venezuelan state and get their hands on its oil wealth. They need it immediately, not as a source of energy for the USA, but as a strategic instrument for controlling the world energy market, mainly countering Russia and China.
To this effect, sanctions and sabotage have been used to artificially deteriorate the penury of basic necessities in Venezuela in order to stoke popular miscontent. Simultaneously, the penetration of US “non-governmental organisations” has been intensified – for example, in the space of one year, the National Endowment for Democracy has financed more than 40 projects in Venezuela on the “defence of Human Rights and Democracy”, each of them costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Since the government continues to enjoy the support of the majority, some large-scale provocation is almost certainly in preparation, aimed at triggering a civil war on the interior and opening the way for intervention from the exterior. With the complicity of the European Union, which, after having blocked Venezuelan public funds in Belgium – a value of 1.2 billion dollars – sent Caracas an ultimatum (with the agreement of the Italian government) to hold new elections. They would be under the control of Federica Mogherini, the same person who last year refused Maduro’s invitation to go to Venezuela and moniter the presidential elections.
Source: PandoraTV
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This article was originally published on Il Manifesto. Translated by Pete Kimberley.
Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
On January 26, Canadians learned the extent to which Canada’s “quiet diplomacy” had helped Venezuela’s Juan Guaido emerge to declare himself interim president on Jan. 23, in defiance of the elected president Nicolas Maduro. In a lengthy piece for The Canadian Press, reporter Mike Blanchfield noted that “emboldening Venezuela’s opposition has been a labour of months” for Canadian diplomats, given that the opposition parties had been in complete disarray. [1] But by January 9, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland was able to phone Guaido and “congratulate him … on uniting the opposition.” [2]
Freeland, working with the ad hoc Lima Group, had long been calling for unity among the Venezuelan opposition parties. After foreign affairs ministers from the Lima Group met in Toronto on October 26, 2017, Freeland appeared at a Munk School of Global Affairs panel and said the message of the Lima Group to the Venezuelan opposition is “Get your act together, guys!” [3]
Then came Maduro’s May 20, 2018 presidential victory, in which the Venezuelan people re-elected him despite months of suffering under U.S. economic warfare. [4] Blanchfield noted that the election results “galvanized” the Lima Group.
It took months to unify Venezuela’s opposition parties among themselves and also with the Lima Group, which Nino Pagliccia reminds us is “not an international organization. It’s just an ad hoc group of governments with no other purpose” than to promote “the overthrow of the legitimate Maduro government.” [5]
So getting foreign ministers to agree with Venezuelan opposition parties on a uniting figure and platform must have been difficult. The Lima Group members who eventually signed the declaration supporting Juan Guaido include Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay and Peru. Similarly challenging would be “building bridges with a fractured opposition that was as much at odds with itself as it was with Maduro.” [6]
And here’s where one sentence from Blanchfield’s article stands out, especially for alert Canadian readers. He noted:
“In a November [2018] report, the International Crisis Group documented the divisions and urged the groups to set aside their ‘personal and political rivalries’.” [7]
In Canada, we’ve read and heard that name quite a lot in the past few weeks. The International Crisis Group is the current employer of Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat and one of two Canadian men arrested in China in December in what appears to be retaliation for Canada’s arrest (at the request of the U.S.) on December 1, 2018 of Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, daughter of Huawei’s CEO and founder.
So the question arises: is there some connection between these two international political situations – Canada’s role in Venezuela and Canada’s role in the China embroglio? As it turns out, the answer is yes, and the International Crisis Group (ICG) is an important player in that connection.
What Is the ICG?
The Brussels-based International Crisis Group touts itself as a think tank and NGO dedicated to its slogan: “Preventing War, Shaping Peace.” Its analysts study political crises and make recommendations for so-called conflict-resolution through a series of reports, articles, seminars, and private meetings with its governmental, foundation, and corporate donors.
Given that ICG had advised on unifying Venezuelan opposition parties, I asked Raul Burbano, Program Director for the Canadian NGO Common Frontiers for comment. During the 2018 Venezuelan presidential election, members of the Common Frontiers delegations had observer status. With regard to the International Crisis Group, Burbano answered by email,
“They are a conservative right-wing think tank that masks itself as progressive. Any organization that proports to support peace and has Juan Manuel Santos as one of their trustees is out to lunch and can’t be trusted.”
Santos is the “former hawkish right president of Colombia,” Burbano explained.
Former Colombian President Santos is not the only controversial trustee of the International Crisis Group. The ICG website lists several other trustees, including Wesley Clark (former NATO Supreme Allied Commander); Lawrence H. Summers (former U.S. Secretary of Treasury); George Soros (founder of Open Societies Foundation); and Frank Giustra (President and CEO of Fiore Financial Corporation).
As F. William Engdahl recently wrote
“The International Crisis Group is an NGO with a knack for being involved in key conflict zones such as Myanmar. The magazine Third World Quarterly in a peer-reviewed article in 2014 accused the ICG of ‘manufacturing’ crises. It was founded by Trump nemesis and Hillary Clinton supporter, George Soros.” [8]
ICG says of its role:
“Crisis Group enjoys strong relationships with government and foundation donors, whose long-term funding is critical to our organisation’s effectiveness. For governments, Crisis Group fills a vital niche as diplomats’ access to key conflict actors is increasingly hindered by security concerns and political obstacles. Senior officials tell Crisis Group that our reports are indispensable, with a unique emphasis on the political foundations of international peace and security. We engage substantively with our institutional donors through private policy briefings, roundtables, and rapid response from field experts and senior staff. Crisis Group in turn benefits from this sustained engagement and knowledge sharing with its donors. Our partners have come to rely on our information and analysis on developing emergencies.” [9]
The ICG website lists as one of its 19 governmental donors “Canada (Global Affairs Canada),” currently headed by Chrystia Freeland.
Advancing Peace?
Just days after Engdahl’s article referring to the ICG appeared, Vancouver billionaire and ICG trustee Frank Giustra wrote an op-ed for The Globe & Mail in which named Michael Kovrig as ICG’s “senior advisor for North East Asia” and stated:
“Mr. Kovrig works for the International Crisis Group, a conflict-prevention organization that I have proudly supported for years. I am baffled by the allegations Chinese officials make against him – that he is somehow ‘endangering China’s national security’. Mr. Kovrig’s work – as anyone bothering to check it out would know – involves analysis of Chinese engagement with conflict-affected countries where Crisis Group advocates policies that advance peace, an approach congruent with China’s foreign policy. To conduct his research, he meets openly with China’s officials, analysts and academics to understand China’s perspectives on global affairs. His writings are published on Crisis Group’s website for all to see.” [10]
Interestingly, one of Mr. Kovrig’s recent analyses was entitled “Why China Should Help Solve Venezuela’s Deepening Crisis,” originally published as an op-ed in Asia Times (April 11, 2018). The piece, written with ICG colleague Phil Gunson, highlighted China’s political support for Venezuelan president Maduro and delineated China’s extensive financial investments in Venezuela, including $60 billion in loans, while noting China’s “overriding concern to ensure long-term access to Venezuelan oil and other raw materials.” [11]
The piece also stated that China’s support for Maduro is “increasingly at odds with another strategic priority for China: strengthening commercial ties with burgeoning economies elsewhere in Latin America. Beijing has stated its intention to pump $250 billion in direct investment into the region and ramp up trade to $500 billion in the coming years. … But China and these promising economic partners are on opposing sides of a divide over the political impasse in Venezuela.” [12]
So, in advance of the 2018 Venezuelan election, what was it that ICG’s Michael Kovrig and Phil Gunson thought China should do? “As one of the [Venezuelan] government’s few remaining supporters, Beijing can either prolong Venezuela’s plight or join the Lima Group in persuading Maduro to bargain with the opposition. …In the long term, the goodwill [towards China] that would be generated among Venezuela’s people and Lima Group members would far outweigh any short-term cost to relations with Maduro.” [13]
While the language seems mild, reasonable, and diplomatic, the message to China is more formidable: Dump your support of Maduro or risk losing those “promising economic partners” in the rest of the region.
The piece further noted: “The Lima Group is backed by a broad international consensus that includes the US and the European Union.” [14]
Kovrig and Gunson’s piece ended with this: “Beijing has signaled that it is unwilling to invest forever in Venezuela’s present dysfunction. The time is ripe for Lima Group states to engage with China to align objectives and policies as far as possible.” [15]
Engaging with China?
At this point, there is no way of knowing how the Lima Group member countries subsequently “engaged” with China throughout the remainder of 2018, but by late November the decision had been made to arrest Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou in transit at the Vancouver International Airport on December 1, while U.S. president Donald Trump discussed trade issues with China’s leadership.
The timing of the arrest was strange, given that the U.S. has for many years been concerned about Huawei and its rising technological supremacy, especially in the pending rollout of 5G. As Amy Karam, author of The China Factor, noted in a recent op-ed, “Having tracked the Huawei concern for 14 years, I wonder why the West is just now mobilizing on this? The Huawei challenge is not new.” [16]
Arguably, one explanation for the timing of the arrest has to do with 5G (fifth generation wireless technology) itself. Throughout 2018, there has been increasing criticism across North America and Europe of 5G’s potential to massively irradiate people and the planet. [17] The arrest of Huawei’s executive is an attempt to change the narrative from one of whether 5G should be allowed at all, to which companies should do the rollout.
But major moves like this arrest usually have several motivations behind their timing.
Of course, the Chinese were infuriated by Canada’s arrest of Meng Wanzhou, and days later detained ICG’s Michael Kovrig and Canadian businessman Michael Spavor. [18]
By late January, with Juan Guaido having declared himself interim president of Venezuela, and with ICG’s Michael Kovrig still in Chinese custody, International Crisis Group trustee George Soros used his annual dinner at the World Economic Forum in Davos to attack China as a cybersecurity threat and urged the U.S. and others to “crack down” on Huawei. [19]
A day later, Juan Guaido made “rapid moves to privatize Venezuela’s oil and open the door for multinational corporations.” [20] The Trump administration backed up those moves with new sanctions on the country’s oil giant PDVSA. National Security Advisor John Bolton said that $7 billion of PDVSA assets would be immediately blocked, while the company would also lose about $11 billion in export payments over the coming year. [21] That was the same press conference in which Bolton was seen carrying a notepad which read: “5,000 troops to Colombia.”
On January 31, Reuters reported that PetroChina Company “plans to drop Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) as a partner in a planned $10 billion oil refinery and petrochemical project in southern China,” and noted that under the revised plan, “the refinery will not be restricted to Venezuelan oil” but could process other heavy crude oil that could come from other countries. [22]
No doubt, the International Crisis Group’s Big Oil donors – Chevron, Shell, BP – are pleased with the way things are unfolding. Chevron and Shell are part of ICG’s International Advisory Council, whose members “play a key role in Crisis Group’s efforts to prevent deadly conflict.” [23] Meanwhile, the Lima Group will meet in Ottawa on Monday, February 4 “to see what can be done to ease the crisis in Venezuela.” [24]
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Joyce Nelson is the author of seven books, including Bypassing Dystopia: Hope-filled Challenges to Corporate Rule, published in 2018 by Watershed Sentinel Books.
Notes
[1] Mike Blanchard, The Canadian Press, “Quiet Canadian diplomacy helped Guaido’s anti-Madura movement in Venezuela,” National Post, January 26, 2019.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Joyce Nelson, “Canada vs. Venezuela: Have the Koch Brothers Captured Canada’s Left?” Counterpunch, February 16, 2018.
[4] Joyce Nelson, “Economic Warfare,” Watershed Sentinel, August 3, 2017; reprinted as “Venezuela: Target of Economic Warfare,” Counterpunch, August 11, 2017.
[5] Nino Pagliccia, “The ‘Lima Group’ Mandate to Trigger Regime Change in Venezuela,” Global Research, January 19, 2019.
[6] Blanchard, op cit.
[7] Ibid.
[8] F. William Engdahl, “Is Canada Huawei Arrest Attempt to Sabotage Trump XI Talks?” Global Research, December 19, 2019.
[10] Frank Giustra, “The Chinese government needs friends – people who are a lot like the Canadians it has detained,” The Globe and Mail, December 24, 2018.
[11] Michael Kovrig and Phil Gunson, “Why China Should Help Solve Venezuela’s Deepening Crisis,” Asia Times, April 11, 2018; re-posted on www.crisisgroup.org.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Amy Karam, “The West can learn from Huawei’s wins,” Toronto Star, January 30, 2019.
[17] Joyce Nelson, “5G Corporate Grail: Smart Cities/Dumb People?” Watershed Sentinel, November 5, 2018; reprinted as “5G Corporate Grail: Microwave Radiation,” Global Research, November 9, 2018.
[18] Ben Blanchard, John Ruwitch, “Detained Canadian in China being probed for harming state security,” Reuters, December 11, 2018.
[19] Larry Elliott, “George Soros: China is using tech advances to repress its people,” The Guardian, January 24, 2019.
[20] Ben Norton, “US Anointed ‘President’ Moves to Seize National Petroleum Company,” The Gray Zone, January 25, 2019.
[21] Tom Phillips, “Trump steps up Maduro pressure with sanctions against Venezuelan oil giant,” The Guardian, January 29, 2019.
[22] Chen Aizhu, “Exclusive: PetroChina to drop PDVSA as partner in refinery project – sources,” Reuters, January 31, 2019.
A group of 30 respected intellectuals, writers and historians has published a manifesto bewailing the imminent collapse of Europe and its supposed Enlightenment values of liberalism and rationalism. The idea of Europe, they warn, “is falling apart before our eyes”, as Britain prepares for Brexit and “populist and nationalist” parties look poised to make sweeping gains in elections across the continent.
The short manifesto has been published in the liberal elite’s European house journals, newspapers such as the Guardian.
“We must now fight for the idea of Europe or perish beneath the waves of populism,” their document reads.
Failure means “resentment, hatred and their cortege of sad passions will surround and submerge us.”
Unless the tide can be turned, elections across the European Union will be “the most calamitous that we have ever known: victory for the wreckers; disgrace for those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe, and Comenius; disdain for intelligence and culture; explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism; disaster”.
The manifesto was penned by Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher and devotee of Alexis de Tocqueville, a theorist of classical liberalism. Its signatories include novelists Ian McEwan, Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie, the historian Simon Shama, and Nobel prize laureates Svetlana Alexievitch, Herta Müller, Orhan Pamuk and Elfriede Jelinek.
Though unnamed, their European political heroes appear to be Emmanuel Macron of France, currently trying to crush the popular, anti-austerity protests of the Yellow Vests, and German chancellor Angela Merkel, manning the barricades for the liberal elite against a resurgence of the nationalist right in Germany.
Let us set aside, on this occasion, the strange irony that several of the manifesto’s signatories – not least Henri-Levy himself – have a well-known passion for Israel, a state that has always rejected the universal principles ostensibly embodied in liberal ideology and that instead openly espouses the kind of ethnic nationalism that nearly tore Europe apart in two world wars last century.
Instead let us focus on their claim that “populism and nationalism” are on the verge of slaying Europe’s liberal democratic tradition and the very values held dearest by this distinguished group. Their hope, presumably, is that their manifesto will serve as a wake-up call before things take an irreversible turn for the worse.
Liberalism’s collapse
In one sense, their diagnosis is correct: Europe and the liberal tradition are coming apart at the seams. But not because, as they strongly imply, European politicians are pandering to the basest instincts of a mindless rabble – the ordinary people they have so little faith in. Rather, it is because a long experiment in liberalism has finally run its course. Liberalism has patently failed – and failed catastrophically.
These intellectuals are standing, like the rest of us, on a precipice from which we are about to jump or topple. But the abyss has not opened up, as they suppose, because liberalism is being rejected. Rather, the abyss is the inevitable outcome of this shrinking elite’s continuing promotion – against all rational evidence – of liberalism as a solution to our current predicament. It is the continuing transformation of a deeply flawed ideology into a religion. It is idol worship of a value system hellbent on destroying us.
Liberalism, like most ideologies, has an upside. Its respect for the individual and his freedoms, its interest in nurturing human creativity, and its promotion of universal values and human rights over tribal attachment have had some positive consequences.
But liberal ideology has been very effective at hiding its dark side – or more accurately, at persuading us that this dark side is the consequence of liberalism’s abandonment rather than inherent to the liberal’s political project.
The loss of traditional social bonds – tribal, sectarian, geographic – has left people today more lonely, more isolated than was true of any previous human society. We may pay lip service to universal values, but in our atomised communities, we feel adrift, abandoned and angry.
Humanitarian resource grabs
The liberal’s professed concern for others’ welfare and their rights has, in reality, provided cynical cover for a series of ever-more transparent resource grabs. The parading of liberalism’s humanitarian credentials has entitled our elites to leave a trail of carnage and wreckage in their wake in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and soon, it seems, in Venezuela. We have killed with our kindness and then stolen our victims’ inheritance.
Unfettered individual creativity may have fostered some great – if fetishised – art, as well as rapid mechanical and technological developments. But it has also encouraged unbridled competition in every sphere of life, whether beneficial to humankind or not, and however wasteful of resources.
At its worst, it has unleashed quite literally an arms race, one that – because of a mix of our unconstrained creativity, our godlessness and the economic logic of the military-industrial complex – culminated in the development of nuclear weapons. We have now devised the most complete and horrific ways imaginable to kill each other. We can commit genocide on a global scale.
Meanwhile, the absolute prioritising of the individual has sanctioned a pathological self-absorption, a selfishness that has provided fertile ground not only for capitalism, materialism and consumerism but for the fusing of all of them into a turbo-charged neoliberalism. That has entitled a tiny elite to amass and squirrel away most of the planet’s wealth out of reach of the rest of humanity.
Worst of all, our rampant creativity, our self-regard and our competitiveness have blinded us to all things bigger and smaller than ourselves. We lack an emotional and spiritual connection to our planet, to other animals, to future generations, to the chaotic harmony of our universe. What we cannot understand or control, we ignore or mock.
And so the liberal impulse has driven us to the brink of extinguishing our species and possibly all life on our planet. Our drive to asset-strip, to hoard resources for personal gain, to plunder nature’s riches without respect to the consequences is so overwhelming, so compulsive that the planet will have to find a way to rebalance itself. And if we carry on, that new balance – what we limply term “climate change” – will necessitate that we are stripped from the planet.
Nadir of a dangerous arrogance
One can plausibly argue that humans have been on this suicidal path for some time. Competition, creativity, selfishness predate liberalism, after all. But liberalism removed the last restraints, it crushed any opposing sentiment as irrational, as uncivilised, as primitive.
Liberalism isn’t the cause of our predicament. It is the nadir of a dangerous arrogance we as a species have been indulging for too long, where the individual’s good trumps any collective good, defined in the widest possible sense.
The liberal reveres his small, partial field of knowledge and expertise, eclipsing ancient and future wisdoms, those rooted in natural cycles, the seasons and a wonder at the ineffable and unknowable. The liberal’s relentless and exclusive focus is on “progress”, growth, accumulation.
What is needed to save us is radical change. Not tinkering, not reform, but an entirely new vision that removes the individual and his personal gratification from the centre of our social organisation.
This is impossible to contemplate for the elites who think more liberalism, not less, is the solution. Anyone departing from their prescriptions, anyone who aspires to be more than a technocrat correcting minor defects in the status quo, is presented as a menace. Despite the modesty of their proposals, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US have been reviled by a media, political and intellectual elite heavily invested in blindly pursuing the path to self-destruction.
Status-quo cheerleaders
As a result, we now have three clear political trends.
The first is the status-quo cheerleaders like the European writers of liberalism’s latest – last? – manifesto. With every utterance they prove how irrelevant they have become, how incapable they are of supplying answers to the question of where we must head next. They adamantly refuse both to look inwards to see where liberalism went wrong and to look outwards to consider how we might extricate ourselves.
Irresponsibly, these guardians of the status quo lump together the second and third trends in the futile hope of preserving their grip on power. Both trends are derided indiscriminately as “populism”, as the politics of envy, the politics of the mob. These two fundamentally opposed, alternative trends are treated as indistinguishable.
This will not save liberalism, but it will assist in promoting the much worse of the two alternatives.
Those among the elites who understand that liberalism has had its day are exploiting the old ideology of grab-it-for-yourself capitalism while deflecting attention from their greed and the maintenance of their privilege by sowing discord and insinuating dark threats.
The criticisms of the liberal elite made by the ethnic nationalists sound persuasive because they are rooted in truths about liberalism’s failure. But as critics, they are disingenuous. They have no solutions apart from their own personal advancement in the existing, failed, self-sabotaging system.
The new authoritarians are reverting to old, trusted models of xenophobic nationalism, scapegoating others to shore up their own power. They are ditching the ostentatious, conscience-salving sensitivities of the liberal so that they can continue plundering with heady abandon. If the ship is going down, then they will be gorging on the buffet till the waters reach the dining-hall ceiling.
Where hope can reside
The third trend is the only place where hope can reside. This trend – what I have previously ascribed to a group I call the “dissenters” – understands that radical new thinking is required. But given that this group is being actively crushed by the old liberal elite and the new authoritarians, it has little public and political space to explore its ideas, to experiment, to collaborate, as it urgently needs to.
Social media provides a potentially vital platform to begin critiquing the old, failed system, to raise awareness of what has gone wrong, to contemplate and share radical new ideas, and to mobilise. But the liberals and authoritarians understand this as a threat to their own privilege. Under a confected hysteria about “fake news”, they are rapidly working to snuff out even this small space.
We have so little time, but still the old guard wants to block any possible path to salvation – even as seas filled with plastic start to rise, as insect populations disappear across the globe, and as the planet prepares to cough us out like a lump of infected mucus.
We must not be hoodwinked by these posturing, manifesto-spouting liberals: the philosophers, historians and writers – the public relations wing – of our suicidal status quo. They did not warn us of the beast lying cradled in our midst. They failed to see the danger looming, and their narcissism blinds them still.
We should have no use for the guardians of the old, those who held our hands, who shone a light along a path that has led to the brink of our own extinction. We need to discard them, to close our ears to their siren song.
There are small voices struggling to be heard above the roar of the dying liberal elites and the trumpeting of the new authoritarians. They need to be listened to, to be helped to share and collaborate, to offer us their visions of a different world. One where the individual is no longer king. Where we learn some modesty and humility – and how to love in our infinitely small corner of the universe.
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Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Afghanistan has the unique opportunity to function as the irreplaceably vital component of the Golden Ring of Multipolar Great Powers after the US’ possible withdrawal by the end of 2020, but it can only achieve its geostrategic destiny if its many regional partners have a shared view of this future vision.
Failure After Failure After Failure
The very real possibility of an American withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of 2020 has the chance to completely change the regional geostrategic paradigm to multipolarity’s favor, thus representing a game-changer of unparalleled historic importance. The US’ War on Afghanistan was motivated by many factors, not least of which was pure geopolitics in seeking to establish a transregional base at the crossroads of Central, South, and West Asia from which America could then export its hard and soft influence through various means, be it Color Revolutions, terrorist-driven Unconventional Wars, or their combined application via HybridWars. The US failed each of the three times that it tried to do this in attempting to catalyze a “Central Asian Spring” in 2005 & 2010 and then trying to use Daesh against the neighboring countries from 2015 onwards.
America’s Retreat From The Taliban
Being unsuccessful at exploiting Afghanistan’s position as a springboard for spreading destabilization throughout this transregional space, the US’ only reasonable recourse is to try to clinch a pragmatic deal with the Taliban whereby its companies might still be allowed to extract natural resources from the country in exchange for a full-fledged withdrawal. As for the Taliban, their possible “compromise” might reportedly be that they agree to respect the writ of the Kabul authorities and renounce their previous wishes to establish a monopoly on power in the future. Provided that the US truly does withdraw from Afghanistan and the Taliban keeps its word to operate within existing state structures (which is still iffy because nothing’s been confirmed and anything can happen between now and the end of 2020), then the country would truly be opening a new page in its history.
The US will probably try to implement some “backup plan” or another such as replacing its troops with mercenaries, positioning “rapid response” special forces in a neighboring country such as increasingly American-friendlyUzbekistan, and/or retaining the right to launch cruise missile strikes against the suspected bases of international terrorist groups that the Taliban either doesn’t destroy (per its anti-terrorist responsibilities stipulated by a possible peace pact with the US) or is unable to. That said, America’s billionaire president seems to have realized that it’s about time to cut his country’s exorbitant costs from this conflict and pull out of this quagmire so that the government’s resources can be put to more effective use elsewhere, especially ahead of what’s bound to be a heated re-election campaign next year. Accordingly, the US might really be licking its wounds and be serious about withdrawing for good.
Ensuring Stability Through SCO Connectivity
Should that be the case and the Taliban also proves willing to pragmatically cooperate with Kabul, it would be incumbent on the SCO to swoop in and help stabilize Afghanistan with all of the socio-economic assistance that it so desperately needs during this sensitive transition. Out of the many countries that comprise this Eurasian organization, the three most directly influential ones in this context are Pakistan, Russia, and Iran, each of which has high-level national security interests related to Afghanistan’s stability. None of them want the country to turn into a terrorist hotbed like Iraq did shortly after the American withdrawal from that conflict theater, though they also don’t want to be caught up in “mission creep” by directly addressing these threats themselves. Therefore, they’ll probably try to “balance” between cooperating with the Taliban and Kabul to this end.
So long as Afghanistan doesn’t slide back into an intensified period of 1990s-like civil war, they won’t have to worry much about terrorist or other asymmetrical threats like “Weapons of Mass Migration” spreading across their borders. This could provide ample space for building the RuPak Railaway between Russia and Pakistan via Central Asia and Afghanistan, as well as extending Iran’s economic influence into the neighboring state through the Indian-built Chabahar Corridor that forms the eastern branch of the North-South Transport Corridor (NSTC). Speaking of Pakistan’s neighbor, India doesn’t have any legitimate interests in Afghanistan other than trying to strategically encircle its rival and counter China’s Silk Road influence there, but it’s theoretically possible that both Asian Great Powers’ interests could converge instead of compete with one another. That’s the ideal scenario, though it’s far from certain, but the point to focus on is the benefit of connectivity.
The Pakistani-Russian-Iranian Vanguard
Afghanistan’s location provides it with the unique opportunity to function as the irreplaceably vital component of the Golden Ring of Multipolar Great Powers because its continued stabilization guarantees the success of this ambitious integrational vision between Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and the Central Asian Republics (as well as India if it manages to make peaceful infrastructural inroads in this transregional space and doesn’t “fully defect” to the American camp). For that to happen, however, all of its people need to become stakeholders in this vision, which can only happen as result of political reforms (potentially even as radical as “decentralization”) and socio-economic progress, the latter of which can be achieved through the connectivity projects mentioned earlier (RuPak Railway, Chabahar Corridor, Silk Road). Preceding this, Afghanistan’s security must be ensured, and therein lays the leading role that Pakistan, Russia, and Iran must play.
As the vanguards of Afghanistan’s external security by virtue of their adjacent location to it (which is indirect in the case of Russia because of Tajikistan’s membership in the Moscow-led CSTO mutual defense alliance), each of these Eurasian Great Powers has the right to privileged partnerships with Kabul and the Taliban, as do Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to a lesser extent. China already works very closely with both de-facto governing parties but it’s traditionally shied away from any serious security cooperation with either of them given the risks of “mission creep” in this conflict-prone country. Therefore, it’s incumbent on the Russian-Pakistani Strategic Partnership to include Iran within its ranks as a comprehensive multilateral partner in Afghanistan, which can not only lead to these three implementing external security solutions for the country but also give Tehran a reason to “rebalance” its strategic focus eastward in the face of newfound challenges in the “Mashriq”.
Concluding Thoughts
The very realistic prospect of the US withdrawing from Afghanistan by the end of 2020 would be a paradigm-changing event if it ever occurs, opening up the opportunity to strengthen multipolarity in the geostrategic heartland of Eurasia, though only if peace and security in the war-torn country can be assured in the aftermath of America’s departure. For this to happen, Russia and Pakistan must first take the lead in externally securing Afghanistan’s northern and southern peripheries prior to incorporating Iran into a regional security matrix that could then be used as the basis upon which socio-economic development can be pursued. While China is Afghanistan’s natural economic partner, India isn’t, though it’ll ultimately be the sovereign choice of the country’s two de-facto governing factions whether to include it into this developing multipolar framework. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Russia and Pakistan will be the driving forces in post-US Afghanistan, and their RuPak Railway proposal represents its most promising post-war project.
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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Is it fair to call MAGA neocon lite, or possibly MAGAcons?
The fact so few of these establishment labeled “white nationalists” had nothing to say about Trump’s illegal bombing of Syria, or the death toll from his war against ISIS, leads me to believe they enthusiastically support intervention in foreign nations, most recently Venezuela. They are not opposed to these illegal actions, which leads one to believe they subscribe to the neoliberal religion, or at least are not opposed to it.
From the start, it was obvious Trump was not a noninterventionist. He sincerely believes in using state violence to realize his vision of making America great again, which is to say continuing neoliberal interventionist policies in violation of international law, policies designed and implemented by a global elite, the practitioners of the neoliberal creed of creative destruction that employs mass murder and societal destruction as regime change tools.
Trump has said he’s not interested in nation-building. On the other hand, he said he is in favor of making victims pay for the destruction of their nations and societies. Recall his promise to make Iraq pay for its destruction. Trump said he would do this by stealing Iraqi oil and also said “terrorists” (those resisting occupation) would be tortured in the presence of their families.
It is obvious Trump was playing to a specific audience, the neocons. He also appealed to the noninterventionists by declaring he would bring the troops home. Trump made this promise again in regard to Syria, but he was overruled by the real controllers of US foreign policy, the neocons. So powerful is their sway John Bolton managed to team up with his soulmate, the convicted Iran-Contra criminal Elliot Abrams. (image right)
The effort to further destabilize Venezuela has nothing to do with helping the people. Trump’s decision to declare Juan Guaidó supreme leader of Venezuela and eventually depose the elected president Nicolas Maduro is only the latest in a long series of efforts by the United States government to eradicate Bolivarianism. In the case of Venezuela, the plan is to undermine and destroy Chavism, the Venezuelan version of Bolivarianism.
Simón Bolívar’s Carta de Jamaica, written in 1815, called for the end of Spanish conquest, the establishment of new South American nations, and the formation of a union of those nations opposed to imperialism. In other words, allowing the people to decide their destiny, not bankers on Wall Street and corporations itching to exploit the continent’s bounty of natural resources.
For the neoliberals, fire alarms went off in 2008 when Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela formed Banco del Sur, or Bank of the South, in response to the World Bank and the IMF demanding sacrificial structural adjustment as a condition to receive emergency funding.
In the previous decade, Hugo Chávez was elected and this produced further consternation on Wall Street. It took the CIA and its clone NED three years to pull off a coup that ultimately failed. Following the two day imprisonment of Chávez and his release, the US-organized Venezuelan opposition organized a general strike that shut down the oil industry and economically crippled the country. GDP fell 27% during the first four months of 2003. It cost the oil industry $13.3 billion. This economic warfare resulted in Venezuela defaulting on its international petroleum supply contracts as it was unable to meet its commitments.
Trump, his neocon advisers (his latest addition, Elliot Abrams, is a senior CFR member), and the MAGA ranks insist Venezuela is in “our backyard,” which means it is entirely reasonable to sponsor the opposition, meddle in elections, foment coups, and if need be use the US military to force Maduro from office, never mind the people who will be killed in the process.
Even supposed “liberals” believe the US government has the right to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations within the US proclaimed “backyard,” a throwback to Manifest Destiny and Roosevelt’s Big Stick warship diplomacy.
Consider “comedian” Bill Mahr (image on the left). He recently declared on his television show the US has the right to overthrow the Maduro government. Bill and the neocons are on the same page. Venezuela is our backyard. We decide who will rule the country.
The MAGA faction—now apparently cleansed of noninterventionists—supports the foreign policy of the neocons. Read Breitbart and The Drudge Report. Nothing there about the neocon infestation at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or the illegality of subverting a foreign country which just so happens to be in possession of the world’s largest supply of petroleum.
MAGA is now throughly neocon-ized. Breitbart supports the policies of Israel, including those of the Likud Party and the New Right Party, the latter formed by settlers and ideological Zionists.
The Left hates Trump, reject his ideas about a border wall, and are steadfastly opposed to all of his proposals—with the exception of foreign policy.
Obama successfully neutered the antiwar and nonintervention movement in the United States. During the Bush wars, there were demonstrations and these were predominately organized by the Left. But after Obama entered office and the rhetoric changed, these illegal wars magically transformed into “humanitarian” interventions. Obama dramatically increased the drone war, organized the destruction of Libya with his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and set the stage for the slaughter of more than a half million Syrians.
Despite campaign trail ramblings about defunding NATO and bringing the troops home, Trump continued this dying empire legacy. He appointed generals to run his foreign policy and when this didn’t produce results, he fired the generals and brought the neocons in. Neocons get things done, as the corpses of more than a million Iraqis and tens of thousands of Afghans demonstrate. Trump is a textbook example of a malignant narcissist. His prime concern is his image and place in history.
The MAGA crowd will support anything and everything Trump does. Move the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. Check. Feed the military industrial complex and become its number one salesman. Check. Expand the warfare doctrine into space. Check. Build “usable” nukes. Check. Continue the inhumane treatment of illegal aliens and their children, same as Obama. Check. Appoint Goldman Sachs bankers and CFR operatives in key positions, including at the Treasury. Check. Forget that promise to audit the Federal Reserve. Check. I could go on, but what’s the point?
It’s working out nicely for the ruling elite—for the moment.
While the Left and Right fight it out over identity politics, the state continues and expands its agenda behind the scenes. Incessant propaganda and a shocking ambivalence by the people to inform themselves on geopolitical issues has produced a populace either largely ignorant or simply disinterested in what its government does in the Middle East, Africa, and South America. If they have an opinion, it is formed by establishment news and social media.
Thus The New York Times can safely publish an “op-ed” penned by Juan Guaidó, the future dictator of Venezuela, calling for an overthrow of the government. Few complain or point out the obvious—Mr. Guaidó is the main character in a stage production scripted in Washington DC and the backrooms of Wall Street and London.
The reality has yet to sink in and it is truly amazing—no matter the president or majority in Congress, the same neoliberal agenda creeps forward. It is often disguised in several ways, but is the same beast created during Bretton Woods following the Second World War.
If this simple fact is not understood and accepted, we can’t hope to stop what is now shaping up on the world stage as the neocons provoke and threaten every perceived and invented enemy, from Venezuela to North Korea, Iran, and Syria to—most ominously—Russia and China, the last two bristling with nukes.
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Money talks, and no one knows this better than the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s how the Trump Administration communicates with its enemies, as well as with its allies – through the application powerful long-range financial instruments. But Europe is moving in for another attempt at breaking Washington’s blockade of Iran.
After ripping up the JCPOA Iran Nuclear Deal in May 2018, the US began constructing a comprehensive global economic blockade designed to starve and break the Iranian economy. Of course, no one is happier about this than Israel (arguably, the architect of the JCPOA sabotage), along with regional rival Saudi Arabia. If Washington choking-off Iran wasn’t enough, it has also also vowed to sanction anyone who dared to trade with Iran. In the fall of 2018, Europe tried to bypass this by devising an alternative clearing mechanism for financial transactions for avoiding using the US dollar, called the “Special Purpose Vehicle” (SPV). When the US nixed it, it seemed any chance for an economic lifeline for Iran was off the table.
Still, Europe seems to be determined to try and bypass the ramparts of American economic statecraft. This week France, Germany and the UK have announced the creation of a new payment system is called INSTEX – short for ‘Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges’, to be based in Paris. This new improved version of the previous ‘SPV’ vehicle, now ready to facilitate “legitimate trade” with Iran by bypassing any US dollar transactions, and with an initial focus on crucial goods like food and medical supplies. Later on, organisers hope to expand its capabilities to cover all goods and services.
In their official joint statement, the working group have indicated that they will seek to expand the number of countries using this new channel.
Corporate Concerns, Fears
In light of this week’s INSTEX announcement, the question now remains whether of not Mnuchin’s sanctions armada will pursue European countries attempting to bust Washington’s unilateral measures. While the INSTEX may provide the framework for a viable work-around, it is still yet to be seen just how many companies will want to risk drawing the gaze of Washington’s financial eye of mordor. In other words, a company like Thyssenkrupp could deliver product to Iran via INSTEX, but by doing so they may risk losing their access to the lucrative US market – should Washington decide to punish the German corporation for its insubordination. No doubt firms will be deploying teams of lobbyists to Washington in search of exemption wavers. This same risk applies to small to medium size enterprises too, although smaller players cannot afford Washington’s pay-to-play lobby game.
Multipolar Weakness
Immediately after the initial Special Purpose Vehicle, or “SPV” idea was floated in Brussels this past fall, the US immediately began threatening to sanction anyone who defied its decree by continuing to trade with Iran. France, Germany and the EU itself, had vowed to bust Trump’s Iran sanctions through the SPV. This is an important concept, because it signals the first deliberate move by major state actors to move away from the US dollar as a world reserve currency. The reserve currency issue is paramount because it’s one of the fundamental prerequisites in transitioning from a unipolar world order with America in the cat bird seat, to establishing what many analysts and international relations scholars refer to as a ‘multipolar world order’ with power-sharing arrangements among ‘multiple equals.’ Naturally, the US was having none of it, and proceeded to threatened to sanction the international inter-bank financial messaging clearing system known as SWIFT, based in Belgium. Trump’s éminence grise and master of the coin, the US Treasury Secretary Dept’s resident Little Finger, Steve Mnuchin, then threw down the gauntlet to the Brussels rebellion saying, “We have advised SWIFT that it must disconnect any Iranian financial institutions that we designate as soon as technologically feasible to avoid sanctions exposure.” And that was that. No more SPV for the Europe’s multipolar crusaders.
Will INSTEX meet a similar fate? That depends on whether the European partners have the political will and determination to see this initiative through to the end.
Washington is certain to launch a counter move in order to try and intimidate western corporations from participating in trade with Iran, so onus is really on France, Germany and the UK to prove they have the stones to stand to Trump and be ready to elevate this issue to the UNSC level – and openly challenge the US on principle, and international law, something they have not yet been willing to do, and thus reducing any independent EU actions to remain merely symbolic and ‘good natured’, but never implemented to the point of being effective. They could start by asking Washington and Tel Aviv to present the evidence that they claim to have and which proves that Iran is in breach of the JCPOA by still pursuing a nuclear weapon. To date, no such evidence has been produced, other than a bizarre off-Broadway show and Powerpoint presentation delivered by Bibi Netanyahu. Team Europe has to be ready to tell Trump: put up, or shut up, and we’ll see you in court. If they aren’t, then their status as an offshore outpost of the US will persist.
Worse than that, the EU will continue to be a paper tiger in terms of its federalist foreign policy aspirations. If Brussels and its member states are unable to pursue a foreign policy independent of Washington’s, then it will be another nail in the coffin of the European Project.
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Author Patrick Henningsen is an American writer and global affairs analyst and founder of independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire, and is host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR). He has written for a number of international publications and has done extensive on-the-ground reporting in the Middle East including work in Syria and Iraq.
According to NOAA Arctic surface air temperatures continued to warm at twice the rate relative to the rest of the globe, leading to a loss of 95 percent of its oldest ice over the past three decades. Arctic air temperatures for the past five years (2014-18) have exceeded all previous records since 1900 and are driving broad changes in the environmental system both within the Arctic as well as through the weakening of the jet stream which separates the Arctic from warmer climate zones. The recent freezing storms in North America represent penetration of cold air masses through a weakening and increasingly undulating jet stream barrier (Figure 1). This weakening also allows warm air masses to move northward, further warming the Arctic and driving further ice melting.
The freezing storms in North America are cheering climate denialists (see this) who refuse to discriminate between the climate and the weather.
Figure 1– The weakened undulating Jet stream. Red represents the fastest air flow (see this)
The paleo-climate record indicates that over the last 800,000 years peak interglacial temperatures were consistently succeeded by temporary freeze events, attributed to the flow of cold ice melt water flow into the North Atlantic Ocean. As the Earth continues to heat and cold air masses move southward from the Arctic, temperature contrasts increase, leading to a rise in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events.
The paleoclimate evidence raises questions regarding the mostly linear to curved future climate trajectories proposed by the IPCC for the 21st century and beyond. Early stages of a temporary freeze event are already manifest by a decline in the north Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation and the build-up of a large pool of cold ice melt water south and east of Greenland and along the fringes of Western Antarctica (Figure 2).
Figure 2.[A] 2055-2100 surface-air temperature to +1.19oCelsius above 1880-1920 (AIB model modified forcing, ice melt to 1 meter) (Hansen et al. 2016); [B] Global surface-air temperature to the year 2300 in the North Atlantic and Southern Oceans, including freeze events resulting from the flow of cold water flowing from Greenland and Antarctic ice melt.
IPCC models of future climate change contain a number of departures from the paleoclimate evidence, including the role of feedbacks from land and water, estimates of future ice melt rates, of sea level rise rates, of methane release rates, of the role of fires in enhancing atmospheric CO2, and the already observed onset of temporary freeze events.
Ice mass loss would raise sea level by several meters in an exponential rather than linear response (Hansen et al. 2016) (see this). According to Rignot et al. (2011) in 2006 the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets experienced a combined mass loss of 475 ± 158 billion tons per year. The development of large cold water pools south and east of Greenland (Rahmstorf et al. 2015) and at the fringe of West Antarctica (Figures 1A),signify early stages in the development of a North Atlantic freeze, consistent with the decline in the Atlantic Meridional Ocean Circulation (AMOC).
As the Earth warms, the increase in temperature contrasts across the globe, and thereby an increase in storminess and extreme weather events, occurring at present, need to be taken into account when planning adaptation measures, including preparation of coastal defenses, construction of channel and pipelines from heavy precipitation zones to draught zones. In Australia this should include construction of water pipelines and channels from the flooded north to parched regions such as the Murray-Darling basin.
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Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and Paleo-climate science, Australia National University (ANU) School of Anthropology and Archaeology, ANU Planetary Science Institute, ANU Climate Change Institute, Honorary Associate Professor, Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, University of Queensland. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The latest bizarre episode in the Trump presidency is currently playing out in Venezuela. Just weeks after President Nicolás Maduro’s inauguration, Trump officially recognized Juan Guaidó, the 35-year-old head of the National Assembly—a man who has never even run for president—as the rightful head of state. A White House statement (1/29/19) announced, “President Trump stands with the people of Venezuela as they demand democracy, human rights and prosperity denied to them by Maduro,” noting that the “people” had “courageously spoken out,” and that the US would pursue increased sanctions on the country.
More alarmingly still, Trump has continually threatened a military intervention in Venezuela (New York Times, 8/12/17), and his National Security Advisor John Bolton allowed himself to be filmed with a notepad that read, “5,000 troops to Colombia” (CNN, 1/29/19).
Before any troops are sent anywhere, we should ask ourselves, who exactly does Trump mean by “the people of Venezuela”? A recent local poll shows that 86 percent of Venezuelans oppose military intervention, while 81 percent already disagree with the current US sanctions.
Nevertheless, it appears that the media have decided that “the people” want regime change, after all. PBS NewsHour (1/30/19) interviewed one Venezuelan resident of New York City who claimed he spoke for the entire population: “I—not only I—but 30 million people support the US circumstance,” meaning Washington’s attempt to replace the government. The New York Times (1/24/19) published a letter from someone in Boston using the phrase “the Venezuelan people” and “us” interchangeably, claiming Guaidó is “what we need” and that we are “feeling hopeful.”
On MSNBC (1/30/19), reporter Mariana Atencio declared matter-of-factly:
“This is a battle right now between legitimacy and power. Guaidó has the legitimacy, but Maduro has the guns, meaning the power.”
A Washington Post op-ed (1/29/19) declared that we should provide more support for “the Venezuelan people” who are demonstrating in the streets by working with the UN Human Rights Council to “tighten the sanctions” on Maduro, presenting a picture of the US leading a unified world against a dictatorship oppressing its people.
But in reality, the UN Human Rights Council has formally condemned the sanctions, noting they “disproportionately affect the poor and most vulnerable”; it called on all member states to break them, and even began discussing reparations the US should pay to Venezuela. A UN rapporteur who visited the country described Trump’s actions as possible “crimes against humanity” (London Independent, 1/27/19). This has not been reported by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN or any other US national media outlet.
Ignoring all this relevant information, the Post (1/29/19) noted that the emergence of Guaidó has brought hope to the “Venezuelan people” (or “long-suffering Venezuelans”) for the “restoration of their democracy.” This is despite the fact that more than 80 percent of Venezuelans have never heard of Guaidó, and that the body he leads, the National Assembly, has an over 70 percent disapproval rating (roughly the same as the disapproval rating for Maduro).
There has been a great deal of coverage (CNBC, 1/23/19; New York Times, 1/23/19; Fox News, 1/23/19) of the “Venezuelan people” protesting for Guaidó, but very little of the counter-protests in support of the government that complicate the picture. This continues a longstanding media policy of treating “the Venezuelan people” as a term that exclusively means “anyone who agrees with US policy.”
In a study of over 500 articles over a 16-year period published this week (Race & Class, 1/25/19), I found that terms like the “Venezuelan people” or “civil society” were used exclusively to refer to opposition groups in alignment with (and funded by) the US government. US intentions and actions in the country were consistently presented as democratic, regardless of their nature.
The US supported the opposition’s 2002 coup attempt to remove Maduro’s elected predecessor, President Hugo Chávez. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer framed the events as “the Venezuelan people rising up to defend democracy” (Washington Post, 4/13/02) and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated that “Chávez’s policies are not working for the Venezuelan people” (New York Times, 4/15/02). Media followed the government’s lead, with the London Times publishing an opinion piece (4/13/02) lauding “the people of Venezuela” for “mobilizing” against the government, while the Miami Herald (4/15/02) quoted an observer declaring that Chávez’s restoration meant that “the Venezuelan people have been betrayed.”
When acknowledged to exist at all, government supporters were consistently dehumanized as “thugs” (Washington Post, 3/29/14) or “gangs” (London Times, 4/12/14). The New York Timesreferred to the working-class counter-protesters that saved democracy in 2002 as “armed thugs” (4/15/02), “Dobermans” (4/12/02) or “furious mobs of Chávez supporters marching violently through the capital looting stores in poor areas” (4/16/02). (The latter article described the coup supporters as engaging in “a week of peaceful marches.”)
During a 2014 US-supported opposition attempt to violently overthrow the government, the Washington Post editorial board (3/29/14) implied the country was calling for foreign intervention:
Venezuelans despair at the lack of international interest in the political crisis that is rocking their country. Since anti-government protests began early last month, at least 34 people have been killed, most of them opposition supporters gunned down by security forces or government-backed gangs.
Referring to the same event, the Miami Herald (2/26/14) published an op-ed headlined “The Fight Is Between Nicolás Maduro and the Venezuelan People.”
President Maduro is unpopular, with approval ratings consistently below 30 per cent. Yet 31 per cent of the entire electorate voted for him in 2018, a higher percentage than Trump or Obama received in 2016 and 2012, respectively. (No one realistically maintains that Henri Falcón—the leading opposition candidate, who was hampered by widespread boycotting—actually got more votes in the election than Maduro.)
Venezuela certainly does need radical change, but erasing the voices and even existence of the people, as the media has done, will only hinder public understanding of the issue and hamper reconciliation.
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Alan MacLeod@AlanRMacLeod is a member of the Glasgow University Media Group. His latest book, Bad News From Venezuela: 20 Years of Fake News and Misreporting, was published by Routledge in April.
A blast of historic cold temperatures hit the US Midwest, with record lows for both daily high and low temperatures expected Wednesday and Thursday across the region. Wind-chills in parts of northern Minnesota and North Dakota reached negative 60 degrees Fahrenheit (negative 51 Celsius) and even lower. The US Postal Service suspended mail deliveries in ten states Wednesday and Thursday out of concern for the safety of mail delivery personnel.
Two-thirds of the population in the continental United States, 212 million people, are expected to experience freezing temperatures before the end of the week. Approximately 83 million people, one-quarter of the US population, will experience temperatures well below zero degrees Fahrenheit, as the weather pattern known as the polar vortex makes its way east.
The onset of extraordinarily frigid temperatures has once again exposed the criminal failure of American capitalism, which is unable to maintain the social infrastructure required to withstand extreme weather events and puts the most vulnerable populations, including the elderly and homeless, at increased risk of injury or death.
School was called off for millions of students and many businesses were closed, with heating systems struggling and in many cases failing to overcome the frigid temperatures. Thousands of flights have been cancelled or delayed and Amtrak stopped all train service to and from Chicago.
On Wednesday night, Consumers Energy, one of the main energy providers in Michigan, sent out an emergency appeal to customers throughout the state to reduce their heat as much as possible to avoid a critical gas shortage. A fire Wednesday morning disabled one of the utility’s facilities that accounts for 64 percent of its natural gas supply.
President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly denied the scientific reality of manmade climate change, used the onset of deadly cold weather as an opportunity to once again question the reality of global warming.
“What the hell is going on with Global Waming [sic]? Please come back fast, we need you!” Trump flippantly tweeted Monday.
The North Polar Vortex is an extremely cold counterclockwise spinning mass of air which usually sits over the Arctic Sea, but as global warming has melted Arctic Sea ice and warming air makes its way into the Earth’s northernmost regions, the vortex is disrupted, causing the cold air to split up and some of it to move further south. This process previously played out in 2014, when a mass of Arctic air drifted south, breaking temperature records across the US and causing the deaths of at least 21 people.
So far, at least six deaths have been attributed to this week’s cold temperatures. This figure will undoubtedly increase significantly once it becomes possible for emergency responders and social workers to make a more detailed accounting.
A 22-year-old man in Rochester, Minnesota died of frostbite and hypothermia after he was locked out of his home early Sunday morning. The temperature in the city had fallen to -10 Fahrenheit, nearly 20 degrees below average. The body of a 55-year-old man was found frozen in his garage Tuesday in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after he apparently collapsed while shoveling snow. Milwaukee’s daily high of 7 degrees was more than 35 degrees below average. A 70-year-old man was found Wednesday frozen to death outside a neighbor’s house in Detroit, where the high temperature barely reached -2 Fahrenheit.
In addition to increasing the risk of dying from exposure, the dramatic drop in temperatures has left those living in substandard and older houses at an increased risk of losing their homes or lives in a fire, as many rely on faulty space heaters and other cheap but dangerous forms of heating to keep warm. More than 2,000 people die every year across the US in residential fires, with faulty heaters a significant factor in these disasters.
A mother and her three children were killed Wednesday morning as a fire engulfed their home in Akron, Ohio. A 16-year-old and a 24-year-old man were killed in a house fire on Chicago’s southside after they were trapped in an attic by the blaze. A 12-year-old child died after a heat lamp likely sparked a fire in a Pulaski County, Kentucky home. And in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a family was displaced from their home when a fire was sparked after multiple space heaters overloaded the building’s electrical system.
Power and gas outages were reported from Minnesota to New Jersey, leaving thousands without heat in their homes for hours at time as utility workers worked to restore services in sub-zero temperatures, which officials warned could result in frostbite after even a few minutes of exposure. More than 5,000 people in the Twin Cities were without power Tuesday night, as the temperature fell to -25 degrees Fahrenheit.
Homeless shelters were filled to more than capacity in Omaha, Nebraska. At the Open Door Mission, which has 917 beds available for homeless men on any given night, dozens were forced to sleep on the floor after every bed was filled.
“We don’t turn people away,” CEO Candace Gregory told KETV News, “We just don’t want any deaths. Because this weather is life or death for those that we serve.”
In addition to providing meals for the homeless, Open Door reported that it served 100 hot lunches to children who were left without a meal after the city’s schools closed for the day.
Such conditions were repeated across the country as warming centers, homeless shelters and soup kitchens filled to over capacity from major urban centers like Chicago and Detroit to smaller cities like Reading, Pennsylvania and Lexington, Kentucky. Officials in Chicago struggled to provide shelter for the city’s homeless population, estimated at some 80,000 people, temporarily adding a mere 500 beds to the city’s shelter system this week. In Lexington 723 people sought shelter Tuesday night, including in freight trailers modified into sleeping quarters.
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The way personnel spin through Washington’s infamous revolving door between the Pentagon and the arms industry is nothing new. That door, however, is moving ever faster with the appointment of Patrick Shanahan, who spent 30 years at Boeing, the Pentagon’s second largest contractor, as the Trump administration’s acting secretary of defense.
Shanahan had previously been deputy secretary of defense, a typical position in recent years for someone with a significant arms industry background. William Lynn, President Obama’s first deputy secretary of defense, had been a Raytheon lobbyist. Ashton Carter, his successor, was a consultant for the same company. One of President George W. Bush’s deputies, Gordon England, had been president of the General Dynamics Fort Worth Aircraft Company (later sold to Lockheed Martin).
But Shanahan is unique. No secretary of defense in recent memory has had such a long career in the arms industry and so little experience in government or the military. For most of that career, in fact, his main focus was winning defense contracts for Boeing, not crafting effective defense policies. While the Pentagon should be focused on protecting the country, the arms industry operates in the pursuit of profit, even when that means selling weapons systems to countries working against American national security interests.
The closest analogues to Shanahan were Charlie Wilson, head of General Motors, whom President Dwight Eisenhower appointed to lead the Department of Defense (DoD) more than 60 years ago, and John F. Kennedy’s first defense secretary, Robert McNamara, who ran the Ford Motor Company before joining the administration. Eisenhower’s choice of Wilson, whose firm manufactured military vehicles, raised concerns at the time about conflicts of interest — but not in Wilson’s mind. He famously claimed that “for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”
Shanahan’s new role raises questions about whether what is in the best interest of Boeing — bigger defense budgets and giant contracts for unaffordable and ineffective weaponry or aircraft — is what’s in the best interest of the public.
Rampant Conflicts of Interest
Unlike Wilson, Shanahan has at least implicitly acknowledged the potential for conflicts of interest in his new role by agreeing to recuse himself from decisions involving his former employer. But were he truly to adhere to such a position, he would have to avoid many of the Pentagon’s most significant management and financial decisions. Last year, after all, Boeing received nearly $30 billion in DoD contracts for working on everything from combat, refueling, training, and radar planes to bombs, drones, missile-defense systems, ballistic missiles, and military satellites. If Shanahan were to step back from deliberations related to all of these, he would, at best, be a part-time steward of the Pentagon, unable even to oversee whether Boeing and related companies delivered what our military asked for.
There is already evidence, however, that he will do anything but refrain from overseeing, and so promoting, his old firm.
Take Boeing’s F-15X, for example. Against the wishes of the Air Force, the Pentagon decided to invest at least $1.2 billion in that fighter aircraft, an upgraded version of the Boeing F-15C/D, which had been supplanted by Lockheed Martin’s questionable new F-35. There have been reports that Shanahan has already trashed Lockheed, Boeing’s top competitor, in discussions inside the Pentagon. According to Bloomberg News, the decision to invest in the F-15X was due, in part at least, to “prodding” from him, when he was still deputy secretary of defense.
And that’s just one of a slew of major contracts scooped up by Boeing in the past year. Others include a $9.2 billion program for a new training aircraft for the Air Force, an $805 million contract for an aerial refueling drone for the Navy, two new presidential Air Force One planes at a price tag of at least $3.9 billion, and significant new funding for the KC-46 refueling tanker, a troubled plane the Air Force has cleared for full production despite major defects still to be addressed. While there is as yet no evidence that Shanahan himself sought to tip the scales in Boeing’s favor on any of these systems, it doesn’t look good. As defense secretary, he’s bound to be called on to referee major problems that will arise with one or more of these programs, at which point the question of bias towards Boeing will come directly into play.
Defenders of Shanahan’s appointment to run what is by far the largest department in the federal government suggest that key Boeing decisions won’t even reach his desk. That, however, is a deeply flawed argument for a number of reasons. To start, when making such decisions, lower-level managers will be aware of their boss’s lifetime connection to Boeing — especially since Shanahan has reportedly sung the praises of his former firm at the Pentagon. He has insisted, for example, that the massive F-35 program would have had none of the serious problems now plaguing it had it been run by Boeing.
In addition, Shanahan will be developing policies and programs sure to directly affect that company’s bottom line. Among them, he’ll be setting the DoD’s priorities when it comes to addressing perceived threats. His initial message on his first day as acting secretary, for instance, was summarized as “China, China, China.” Will he then prime the pump for expensive weapon systems like Boeing’s P-8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft, designed specifically to monitor Chinese military activities?
He has similarly been the Pentagon’s staunchest advocate when it comes to the development of a new Space Force, something that likely thrills President Trump. He’s advocated, for example, giving the Space Development Agency, the body that will be charged with developing military space assets, authority “on steroids” to shove ever more contracts out the door. As a producer of military satellites, Boeing is a major potential beneficiary of just such a development.
Then there’s missile defense, another new presidential favorite. Shanahan presided over Boeing’s missile defense division at a time when one of the systems being developed was the Airborne Laser, meant to zap launched nuclear missiles with lasers installed on Boeing 747 aircraft. The project, a dismal failure, was cancelled after more than $5 billion in taxpayer funds had been sunk into it. The Pentagon’s latest “Star Wars”-style anti-missile technology, whose development was just announced by President Trump, calls for a major investment in an equally impractical set of technologies at a price that Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund suggests could reach $1 trillion in the decades to come.
Among Boeing’s current missile-defense programs is the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System, an array of land-based interceptor missiles that has already failed the majority of its tests. It’s unlikely that it will ever function effectively in a situation in which incoming warheads would be accompanied by large numbers of decoys. The Congressional Budget Office has identified the cancellation of the program as one obvious decision that could save significant sums. But what chance is there that Shanahan would support such a decision, given all those years in which he advocated for that missile-defense system at Boeing?
Or take nuclear policy. His former company is one of two finalists to build a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Critics of such weapons systems like Clinton administration Secretary of Defense William Perry point out that ICBMs are the most dangerous and unnecessary leg of the U.S. nuclear triad, since in a potential war they might need to be launched on only minutes’ notice, lest they be lost to incoming enemy nukes. Even some of their supporters have questioned the need for a brand-new ICBM when older ones could be upgraded. Nuclear hawks might eventually be persuaded to adopt such a position, too, since the cost of the Pentagon’s across-the-board $1.5 trillion “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal (including the production of new nuclear bombers, missiles, and warheads) will otherwise begin to impinge on department priorities elsewhere. But how likely is Shanahan to seriously entertain even such modest critiques when they threaten to eliminate a huge potential payday for Boeing?
Finally, there is the issue of U.S. support for the brutal war launched by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in Yemen nearly four years ago. Boeing’s combat planes, bombs, and attack helicopters have played a central role in that conflict, which has killed tens of thousands of civilians, while a Saudi blockade of the country has put millions more at risk of famine. In addition, Boeing continues to benefit from a $480 million contract to service the F-15s it has supplied to the Royal Saudi Air Force.
Here, President Trump is firmly in that company’s corner.
“Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon… I don’t wanna hurt jobs,” he told60 Minutes. “I don’t wanna lose an order like that [from the Saudi government].”
Before his resignation, Secretary of Defense James Mattis was regularly called upon to comment on the Saudi war and help craft U.S. policy towards both that country and the UAE. Where will Shanahan stand on a war significantly fueled by the products of his former company?
There is, in fact, a grim precedent for Shanahan’s present situation. The Intercept and the Wall Street Journal have both reported that State Department Acting Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Charles Faulkner, a former lobbyist for Raytheon, advocated giving Saudi Arabia a clean bill of health on its efforts to avoid hitting civilians in its air strikes in Yemen, lest Raytheon lose a lucrative bomb deal. So much for draining the swamp.
The Revolving Door Spins Both Ways
Shanahan and Faulkner are far from the only former defense executives or lobbyists to populate the Trump administration. Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson is a former lobbyist for Lockheed Martin. Ellen Lord, who heads procurement at the Pentagon, worked at Textron, a producer of bombs and military helicopters. Secretary of the Army Mark Esper — rumored as a possible replacement for Shanahan as secretary of defense — was once a top lobbyist at Raytheon. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy John Rood was a senior vice president at Lockheed Martin. And the latest addition to the club is Charles Kupperman, who has been tapped as deputy national security advisor. His career includes stints at both Boeing and Lockheed Martin. (His claim to fame: asserting that the United States could win a nuclear war.)
All of the above, including Patrick Shanahan, spun through that famed revolving door into government posts, but so many former DoD officials and top-level military officers have long spun in the opposite direction. In 1969, for example, Wisconsin Democratic Senator William Proxmire, a legendary Pentagon watchdog, was already describing the problem this way:
“The easy movement of high-ranking military officers into jobs with major defense contractors and the reverse movement of top executives in major defense contractors into high Pentagon jobs is solid evidence of the military-industrial complex in operation. It is a real threat to the public interest because it increases the chances of abuse… How hard a bargain will officers involved in procurement planning or specifications drive when they are one or two years from retirement and have the example to look at of over 2,000 fellow officers doing well on the outside after retirement?”
Or, as a 1983 internal Air Force memo, put it,
“If a colonel or a general stands up and makes a fuss about high cost and poor quality, no nice man will come to see him when he retires.”
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump appeared to recognize the obvious problem of the revolving door and proposed a five-point ethics reform plan to slow it down, if not shut it down entirely. Unfortunately, the ethics executive order he put in place once in office fell wildly short of his campaign ambitions, leaving that revolving door spinning madly. A new report from the Project On Government Oversight has documented 645 cases in 2018 alone in which former government officials held jobs at the top 20 Pentagon contractors. The leader among them? You probably won’t be surprised to learn that it’s Boeing, with 84 such hires.
Retired Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieringa, who led the Pentagon’s arms sales office, is a case in point. In that role, he helped promote sales of U.S. weaponry globally. Perhaps as a result, he “earned” himself a position as president for global services and support at Boeing less than a year after he retired. He’s far from alone. Retired Rear Admiral Donald Gaddis, a program officer for Navy air systems, also joined the company, as did retired Air Force Major General Jack Catton, Jr., who served as the director of requirements for the Air Combat Command before moving to Boeing. Retired Vice Admiral Mark Harnitchek, the former head of the Defense Logistics Agency, charged with managing $35 billion in goods and services across the DoD annually, similarly became a vice president at Boeing.
Slowing the Revolving Door
Candidate Donald Trump saw the revolving door between government and industry as a problem.
“I think anybody that gives out these big contracts should never ever, during their lifetime, be allowed to work for a defense company, for a company that makes that product,” he said.
As the continuing flow of officials through it suggests, however, as president, he’s done anything but drain that swamp.
In order to do so, he would, as a start, have to focus his administration on closing the many loopholes in current federal ethics laws, which, however imperfectly, seek to limit conflicts of interest on the part of government officials who move to jobs in industry. Under current law, lobbying restrictions on such former officials can be circumvented if they label themselves “consultants” or “business development executives.” Similarly, former Pentagon officials can go to work for an arms maker they once awarded a contract to as long as they’re hired by a different division of that company. In addition, while Congress requires that the Pentagon track whoever’s moving through that revolving door, the database that does so is both incomplete and not available for public viewing.
Candidate Trump was onto something. However, rather than curbing the blatant conflicts inherent in the revolving door — the ultimate symbol of the military-industrial complex in action — President Trump is actually accelerating them. America is indeed great again, if you happen to be one of those lucky enough to be moving back and forth between plum jobs in the Pentagon and the weapons industry.
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In 2013, the Manmohan Singh’s government of India had certain objections to further opening up to the Western businesses. The Business Roundtable, which is an informal congregation of major US businesses and together holds a net wealth of $6 trillion, held a meeting with the representatives of the Indian government and literally coerced it into accepting unfair demands of the Western corporations.
On Friday, The New York Times continued its long, predictable tradition of backing U.S. coups in Latin America by publishing an editorial praising Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This will be the 10th such coup the paper has backed since the creation of the CIA over 70 years ago.
History is replete with instances where an “end” has been falsely predicted. Where do present climate science-based projections and the probabilities of nuclear war lie?
To clarify the importance of the January 23rd coup attempt in Venezuela we remember that ever since WWII the customary motivation for violations of the Convention on Genocide has been to gain a region’s natural resources.
A former United Nations rapporteur has criticised the US for engaging in “economic warfare” against Venezuela which he claimed was the real reason for the economic and humanitarian crisis facing the country.
Smashing the claims of “protecting democracy” in Venezuela, the United States National Security Advisor John Bolton said in an interview that they are backing the illegal coup in the South American country because of oil.
U.S. intelligence officials confirmed to the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Tuesday, that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons in violation of the 2015 nuclear agreement, and furthermore had no strategic plans to do so.
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An earler version of this text was published on October 6, 2017.
Text of Michel Chossudovsky’s presentation to the Regina Peace Council Anti-war Panel, Regina, Saskatchewan, June 8, 2018.
The Regina Peace Council panel will focus on the history of America’s wars of aggression, the role of Canada in supporting US led wars and the need to rebuild Canada’s anti-war movement.
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We are at the juncture of the most serious crisis in modern history.
An unfolding New World Order is destroying sovereign countries through acts of war and “regime change”. In turn, large sectors of the World population are impoverished through the concurrent imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms. This New World Order feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women.
In the wake of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, in the largest display of military might since the Second World War, the US has embarked upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity.
War is presented as a peace-making undertaking. The justification for these US-led wars is the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) with a view to instilling (Trump style) Western “democracy” Worldwide.
Global warfare sustains the neoliberal agenda. War and globalization are intricately related.
What we are dealing with is an imperial project broadly serving global economic and financial interests including Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, Big Oil, the Biotech conglomerates, Big Pharma, The Global Narcotics Economy, the Media Conglomerates and the Information and Communication Technology Giants.
Also, September 11, 2001 followed by the invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, also marks the official launch of the so-called “global war on terrorism” which has served as a justification for US-NATO led wars and interventions in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and South East Asia.
The Global War on Terrorism is Fake
Amply documented, Al Qaeda and its various affiliates including ISIS-Daesh are creations of US intelligence.
Pre-emptive Nuclear Doctrine
Meanwhile, a major shift in US nuclear doctrine has occurred with the adoption of the doctrine of preemptive warfare, namely war as an instrument of “self defense”. The ideology of preemptive warfare also applies to the use of nuclear weapons on a pre-emptive basis. In 2002, the US administration put forth the concept of preemptive nuclear war, namely the use of nuclear weapons against enemies of America as a means of self defense.
The Trump administration is openly threatening the World with nuclear war. How to confront the diabolical and absurd proposition put forth by the US administration that the use of nuclear weapons against Iran or North Korea will “make the World a safer place”?
Where is the Antiwar Movement?
Since the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the antiwar movement is dead. Piece-meal activism often funded by Wall Street prevails, focussing narrowly on environmental concerns, climate change, racism, civil rights. Invariably war and the extensive war crimes committed by US-NATO as part of an alleged counterterrorism agenda are not the object of organized public dissent. The motto is a non sequitur: “we are against war, but we support the war on terrorism.”
War propaganda prevails, thereby providing a human face to US-NATO atrocities and human rights violations. In turn, the governments of the countries which are the object of US aggression, are casually accused of killing their own people.
Media disinformation turns realties upside down. North Korea is not a threat to global security. Belgium with 20 B61 tactical nukes deployed under national command has a larger arsenal than the DPRK (allegedly 4 nuclear bombs).
These B61 nuclear bombs in five undeclared European nuclear weapons states (Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey) are targeted at both Russia and the Middle East.
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The mainstream media has failed to warn public opinion that a US led nuclear attack against North Korea or Iran could evolve towards World War III, which in the words of Albert Einstein would be “terminal”, leading to the destruction of humanity.
“Today there is an imminent risk of war with the use of that kind of weapon and I don’t harbor the least doubt that an attack by the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran would inevitably evolve towards a global nuclear conflict.
In a nuclear war the “collateral damage” would be the life of all humanity. Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything that is used to make war, must disappear!” (Fidel Castro Ruz, Conversations with Michel Chossudovsky, October 12-15, 2010)
I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. (Albert Einstein)
The anti-war movement is dead, nuclear war is not front page news.
The justification of America’s long war is to “make the world safer”.
War is presented as a humanitarian endeavor. Global Security requires going after al Qaeda as part of an alleged counter-terrorism campaign.
The world is led to believe that the Islamic State and Al Qaeda are threatening the World. The truth is that Al Qaeda and its numerous affiliates as well as the Islamic State (ISIS-Daesh) are without exception creations of US intelligence. They are intelligence assets.
When a US sponsored nuclear war becomes an “instrument of peace”, condoned and accepted by the World’s institutions and the highest authority including the United Nations, there is no turning back: human society has indelibly been precipitated headlong onto the path of self-destruction.
From Colonialism to Post-Colonialism
Post-colonial history is a continuation of colonial history which established America’s contemporary imperial agenda, largely as a result of the displacement and defeat by the US of the former colonial powers (e.g. Spain, France, Japan, Netherlands). This US hegemonic project largely consists in transforming sovereign countries into open territories, controlled by dominant economic and financial interests. Military, intelligence as well economic instruments are used to carry out this hegemonic project.
Militarization marked by more than 700 US military bases and facilities worldwide under the unified combatant command structure indelibly supports a global economic agenda.
Moreover, this military deployment is supported by US macro-economic policy which imposes austerity on all categories of civil expenditure with a view to releasing the funds required to finance America’s military arsenal and war economy.
Military intervention and regime change initiatives including CIA sponsored military coups and “color revolutions” are broadly supportive of the neoliberal policy agenda which has been imposed on indebted developing countries Worldwide.
The Globalization of Poverty
The “globalization of poverty” in the post-colonial era is the direct result of the imposition of deadly macroeconomic reforms under IMF-World Bank jurisdiction. The Bretton Woods institutions are instruments of Wall Street and the corporate establishment.
The time path of these reforms –which has led to a process of global economic restructuring– is of crucial significance. The early 1980s marks the onslaught of the so-called structural adjustment program (SAP) under the helm of the IMF and the World Bank. “Policy conditionalities” largely directed against indebted Third World countries are used as a means of intervention, whereby the Washington based International Financial Institutions (IFI) impose a set menu of deadly economic policy reforms including austerity, privatization, the phasing out of social programs, trade reforms, compression of real wages, etc.
It is worth noting that a parallel process of neoliberal economic reform –which largely consisted in privatizing as well gradually dismantling the welfare state– was instigated in the 1980s in the US and Britain under what was described as the Reagan-Thatcher era.
Post-Cold War Era Reforms
A second phase of economic restructuring commences at the end of the Cold War with drastic economic reform packages imposed on Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, the Balkans as well as on the constituent republics of the former Soviet Union (e.g. Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan).
Concurrently in Western Europe the Maastricht Treaty –which came into force in 1993– was imposed on the member states of the European Union. What was referred to as the The Maastricht criteria (or convergence criteria) which eventually led to the formation of the eurozone largely consisted in imposed the neoliberal policy agenda on the EU member states. These Maastricht criteria also served to derogate the sovereignty of individual member states.
Maastricht is a structural adjustment program (SAP) in disguise. Essentially Maastricht and the subsequent instatement of the eurozone contributed to paralyzing national monetary policy, foreclosing the use of internal public debt operations as an instrument of national economic development. The requirements of budgetary austerity imposed under the “Maastricht criteria” limited EU member states ability to finance their social programs leading to the gradual demise of the post World War II welfare state. The public debt is taken over by the European Central Bank (ECB) as well as private creditors. The longer term impacts are mounting external debts as well as debt conditionalities and the repayment of debt from the proceeds of an extensive privatization program.
It should be mentioned that this phase of restructuring also coincides with the inauguration of the World Trade Organization (1995) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which has been conducive to a dramatic transformation of the North American economic landscape, leading to the demise of regional and local level economies throughout North America.
In turn, the 1990s coincides with an extension and expansion of NATO, including massive “defense” expenditures which are not the object of neoliberal austerity measures. In fact quite the opposite. Neoliberalism feeds the Military Industrial Complex.
What is at stake is the “Thirdworldization” of the so-called developed countries leading to mass unemployment in several EU countries including Spain, Portugal and Greece, whose economies are now subjected to same IMF style reforms as those applied in Third World countries. What this signifies is that the Globalization of Poverty has extended its grip, leading to the impoverishment not only of the former Soviet block countries and the Balkans but also of the so-called high income countries of Western Europe.
More generally, the 1990s coinciding with NATO’s “humanitarian” war against Yugoslavia is the launchpad of NATO’s military buildup as well as the globalization of NATO beyond it’s North Atlantic boundaries in the post Cold War era.
The Asian crisis of 1997-98 also marks an important threshold in the evolution of the neoliberal economic framework, pointing to the ability through speculative manipulations of foreign exchange and commodity market to literally destabilize the national economy of targeted countries. In this regard, institutional speculators have now the ability of artificially pushing up the price of food staples, or pushing up or down the price of crude oil.
The Global Cheap Labor Economy
The neoliberal agenda characterized by the imposition of strong “economic medicine” (austerity measures, freeze on wages, privatisation, repeal of social programs) has in the course of the last 30 years supported the extensive delocation of manufacturing to cheap labor (low wage) havens in developing countries. It has also served to impoverish both the developing and developed countries.
“Poverty is good for business.” It promotes the supply of cheap labor commodities worldwide in industry as well as in sections of the services economy.
This global process of economic restructuring (which has reached new heights) relies on compressing wages and the cost of labor worldwide while at the same time reducing the purchasing power of hundreds of millions of people. This compression of consumer demand ultimately triggers recession and rising unemployment.
The low wage economy is supported by exceedingly high levels of unemployment, which in developing countries are also the result of the destruction of the regional and local production not to mention the destabilization of the rural economy. This “reserve army on unemployed” (Marx) contributes to keeping wages down to their bare minimum.
China is the most important haven of cheap labor industrial assembly with 275 million migrant workers (according to official Chinese sources). Ironically, the West’s former colonies, as well as countries which are the victims of US military aggression and war crimes (e.g. Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia) have been transformed into cheap labor havens. The conditions prevailing in the aftermath of the Vietnam war were in large part instrumental in the imposition of the neoliberal agenda starting in the early 1990s.
Cheap labor is also exported from impoverished countries (India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Indonesia, etc) and used in the construction industry as well as in the services economy.
High levels of unemployment serve to maintain wages at an exceedingly low levels
Aggregate Demand
This global economic restructuring has been conducive to a dramatic increase in poverty and unemployment. While poverty is an input on the supply side favoring low levels of wages, the global cheap labor economy inevitably leads to a collapse in purchasing power, which in turn serves to increase the levels of unemployment.
Cheap labor and the compression of purchasing is the mainstay of neoliberalism. The transition from demand oriented Keynesian policies in the 1970s to the neoliberal macro-ecoomic agenda in the 1980s. The neoliberal economic policy agenda applied Worldwide sustains the global cheap labor economy. With the demise of demand oriented policies, neoliberalism emerges as the dominant economic paradigm.
Structural Adjustment in the Developed Economies
This generalized collapse in living standards which is the product of a macroeconomic agenda, is no longer limited to the so-called developing countries. Mass unemployment prevails in the United States, several EU countries including Spain, Portugal, Greece are experiencing exceedingly high levels of unemployment. Concurrently, the revenues of the middle class are being compressed, social programs are privatised, social safety nets including unemployment insurance benefits and social welfare programs are being curtailed.
Underconsumption
The generalized collapse of purchasing power is conducive to a recession in the consumer goods industry. Commodity production is not geared towards the basic necessities of life (food, housing, social services, etc) for the majority of the World’s population. There is a dichotomy between “those who work” in the cheap labor economy and “those who consume”.
The fundamental injustice of this global economic system is that “those who work” cannot afford to purchase what they produce. In other words, neoliberalism does not promote mass consumption. Quite the opposite: the development of extreme social inequalities both within and between countries ultimately leads to recession in the production of necessary goods and services (including food, social housing, public health, education).
The lack of purchasing power of “those who produce” (not to mention those who are unemployed) leads to a collapse in aggregate demand. In turn, there is surge in the demand for “high end luxury consumption” (broadly defined) by the upper income strata of society.
Weapons and Luxury Goods. The Two Dynamic Sectors of the Global Economy
Essentially, while global poverty contributes to underconsumption by the large majority of the World’s population, the driving force of economic growth are the upper income markets (deluxe brand names, travel and leisure, luxury cars, electronics, private schools and clinics, etc).
The global cheap labor economy triggers poverty and underconsumption of necessary goods and services.
The two dynamic sectors of the global economy are
1. Production for the upper income strata of society.
2. The production and consumption of weapons, namely the military industrial complex.
Neoliberal policy is conducive to the development of a global cheap labor economy which triggers decline in the production of necessary consumer goods (Marx’s Department IIa).
In turn, the lack of demand for necessary goods and services triggers a vacuum in the development of social infrastructure and investments (schools, hospitals, public transportation, public health, etc) in support of the standard of living of the large majority of world population.
The global cheap labor economy alongside the restructuring of the global financial apparatus creates an unprecedented concentration of income and wealth which is accompanied by the dynamic development of the luxury goods economy (broadly defined) (Marx’s Department IIb) .
Department III in the contemporary global economy is the production of weapons, which are sold Worldwide largely to governments. This sector of production in the US is dominated by a handful of large corporations including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, British Aerospace, Boeing, et al.
While neoliberal policies require the imposition of drastic austerity measures, the latter apply solely to the civilian sectors of government spending. State funding of advanced weapons systems is not the object of budgetary constraints.
In fact, the austerity measures imposed on health, education, public infrastructure, etc, are intended to facilitate the financing of the war economy, including the military industrial complex, the regional command structure consisting of 700 US military facilities Worldwide, the intelligence and security apparatus, not to mention the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons which is the object of a one trillion dollar allocation by the US Treasury to the US Defense Department. This money is ultimately trickles down to the so-called defense contractors, which constitute a powerful political lobby.
The reproduction of this global economic system is dependent upon the growth and development of two major sectors (departments): the Military Industrial Complex and the Production of High Income and Luxury Consumption.
High income luxury consumption for the upper social strata is combined with the dynamic development of the weapons industry and the war economy. This duality is what generates exclusion and despair.
It can only be broken and dispelled through the criminalization of war, the closure of the weapons industry and the repeal of the gamut of neoliberal policy instruments which generate poverty and social inequality.
How to Reverse The Tide of War and Globalization
The people’s movement had been hijacked. The antiwar movement is defunct. The civil society organisations which have all the appearances of being “progressive” are creatures of the system. Funded by corporate charities linked to Wall Street, they form part of a politically correct “Opposition” which acts as “a spokesperson for civil society”.
But who do they represent? Many of the “partner NGOs” and lobby groups which frequently mingle with bureaucrats and politicians, have few contacts with grass-roots social movements and people’s organisations. In the meantime, they serve to deflect the articulation of “real” social movements against the New World Order.” While the neoliberal paradigm is the focus of their attention, the broader issues of war and regime change are rarely addressed.
The programs of many NGOs and people’s movements rely heavily on funding from both public as well as private foundations including the Ford, Rockefeller, McCarthy foundations, among others.
The anti-globalization movement is opposed to Wall Street and the Texas oil giants controlled by Rockefeller, et al. Yet the foundations and charities of Rockefeller et al will generously fund progressive anti-capitalist networks as well as environmentalists (opposed to Big Oil) with a view to ultimately overseeing and shaping their various activities.
The mechanisms of “manufacturing dissent” require a manipulative environment, a process of arm-twisting and subtle cooptation of individuals within progressive organizations, including anti-war coalitions, environmentalists and the anti-globalization movement.
The objective of the corporate elites has been to fragment the people’s movement into a vast “do it yourself” mosaic. War and globalization are no longer in the forefront of civil society activism. Activism tends to be piecemeal. There is no integrated anti-globalization anti-war movement. The economic crisis is not seen as having a relationship to the US led war.
Dissent has been compartmentalized. Separate “issue oriented” protest movements (e.g. environment, anti-globalization, peace, women’s rights, climate change) are encouraged and generously funded as opposed to a cohesive mass movement. This mosaic was already prevalent in the counter G7 summits as well as the World Social Forum.
The Development of a Broad Grassroots Network
What is required is ultimately to break the “controlled opposition” through the development of a broad based grassroots network which seeks to disable patterns of authority and decision making pertaining both to war and the neoliberal policy agenda. It is understood that US military deployments (including nuclear weapons) are ultimately used in support of powerful economic interests.
This network would be established at all levels in society, towns and villages, work places, parishes both nationally and internationally Trade unions, farmers organizations, professional associations, business associations, student unions, veterans associations, church groups would be called upon to integrate the antiwar organizational structure. Of crucial importance, this movement should extend into the Armed Forces as a means to breaking the legitimacy of war among service men and women.
The first task would be to disable war propaganda through an effective campaign against media disinformation. The corporate media would be directly challenged, leading to boycotts of major news outlets, which are responsible for channelling disinformation into the news chain. This endeavor would require a parallel process at the grass roots level, of sensitizing and educating fellow citizens on the nature of the war and the global economic crisis, as well as effectively “spreading the word” through advanced networking, through alternative media outlets on the internet, etc.
The creation of such a movement, which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of the structures of political authority, is no easy task. It would require a degree of solidarity, unity and commitment unparalleled in World history. It would require breaking down political and ideological barriers within society and acting with a single voice. It would also require eventually unseating the war criminals, and indicting them for war crimes.
Text of Michel Chossudovsky’s address to the Regina Peace Council Panel, Regina, Saskatchewan, June 8, 2018.
In this new and expanded edition of Chossudovsky’s international best-seller, the author outlines the contours of a New World Order which feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women. The result as his detailed examples from all parts of the world show so convincingly, is a globalization of poverty.
This book is a skillful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving financially and economically.
In this new enlarged edition – which includes ten new chapters and a new introduction — the author reviews the causes and consequences of famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, the dramatic meltdown of financial markets, the demise of State social programs and the devastation resulting from corporate downsizing and trade liberalisation.
A CNN “exclusive” report from inside Venezuela aired multiple times on the network on January 28. It is a prime example of how influential media outlets in the U.S. effectively create propaganda for the opposition, which now is receiving funds from President Donald Trump’s administration.
For the four-minute report, CNN correspondent Nick Paton Walsh went “undercover” amidst what the network described as the “deepening crisis in Venezuela” in order “to capture the desperation gripping the nation.”
The segment highlighted hyperinflation at grocery chains, Venezuelans lined up in queues for fuel and food, particularly in Caracas, and opposition demonstrations on January 23, when opposition leader Juan Guaido declared himself president of the country.
“This was the day when change was meant to come,” Walsh stated.
It suggested President Nicolas Maduro’s government has given “handouts” to Venezuelans for years to buy their loyalty, but now “handouts” are no longer enough. Opponents like to equate social programs to “handouts” because corporate elites favor de-nationalization and privatization of services.
Walsh interviewed a rank-and-file officer in the Venezuela military and granted him anonymity. The officer stated,
“I would say 80 percent of soldiers are against the government. Some even go to demonstrations. But the big fishes, the senior officers, are the ones eating, getting rich while the bottom we have it hard.”
Video showed the opposition throwing stones at a military airfield in a standoff that apparently has lasted “for months.” One part of the barricade was on fire.
Sitting with his back against what appeared to be a concrete barricade, like he was part of the opposition hurling objects, Walsh declared,
“They may be throwing stones here, but what they really need is the army to switch sides.”
Walsh offered no comment on what it would mean for democracy in Venezuela if the military played an instrumental role in helping Guaido and a U.S.-led group of countries oust Maduro.
Another part of the report featured street children in Caracas. A 14 year-old boy recounted how his brother was killed in July by a member of a gang. He said he has to go through the garbage for food and beg so he does not go hungry.
Walsh did not show a cause-and-effect relationship, yet the boy’s poverty was wryly attributed to a “socialist utopia that now leaves nearly every stomach empty.”
On the surface, the report may have seemed balanced and neutral because CNN spoke to citizens caught in the middle of the political crisis. Yet, there was no clips of the tens of thousands of Maduro supporters who marched through Caracas the same day that Guaido claimed he was the country’s interim president.
CNN also omitted the role of U.S. sanctions and other measures in making Venezuela’s economic recovery nearly impossible.
According to Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), sanctions did not create hyperinflation in the country. However, they have made it incredibly difficult for the government to restructure their debt for a recovery.
In 2017, weeks before the Trump administration imposed new sanctions, a former top State Department official predicted they would cause the government to “default on their bonds and a collapse of internal investment and oil production.” They would spur “civil unrest, refugee flows across their borders, and a cutoff of Venezuelan financial support to Cuba and Haiti that could lead to migration flows to the United States.” (Note: It was estimated in June 2018 that about 35,000 refugees were crossing from Venezuela to Colombia each day.)
The same day that CNN aired their report the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the country’s state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PdVSA). The company is a “primary source of Venezuela’s income and foreign currency,” including U.S. dollars and Euros, according to the Department.
National security adviser John Bolton said the sanctions would block $7 billion in assets and result in the loss of $11 billion in proceeds from exports over the next year.
Even after the Trump administration announced oil sanctions, CNN still largely ignored the potential effect of sanctions when it aired this “undercover” report another time.
Oil sanctions are likely to intensify the suffering for Venezuelans, not make their lives better. In the 1990s, Iraq faced sanctions from the United Nations on their oil exports as well as restrictions on other foreign trade. To many, it was “one of the decade’s great crimes” because the sanctions contributed to the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.
In Iran, the poor bear the brunt of sanctions on oil that were re-imposed by the Trump administration. Financial Times reported in October on millions of Iranians, who were already stretched as “the value of the rial” had “plunged more than 70 per cent against the US dollar over the past year.”
“The sharp drop has pushed up import costs and stoked inflation, eroding purchasing power and leaving the most impoverished struggling to pay for basic goods such as meat, dairy products, and fruit,” FT noted.
As journalist Gregory Shupak previously highlighted for Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR),
“When Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in November 2017 proposed a meeting with creditors to discuss a restructuring of the country’s public debt, the Trump administration warned U.S. bondholders that attending this meeting could put them in violation of U.S. economic sanctions against Venezuela, which can be punished with 30 years in jail and as much as $10 million dollars in fines for businesses.”
“That same month, the U.S. government added further sanctions that prevent Venezuela from doing what governments routinely do with much of their debt, which is ‘roll it over’ by borrowing again when a bond matures. The sanctions also made it difficult if not impossible for Venezuela to undertake debt restructuring, a process wherein interest and principal payments are postponed and creditors receive new bonds, which the sanctions explicitly prohibit.”
Additionally, Francisco Rodrigueznoted for Foreign Policy in 2018,
“Ninety-five percent of Venezuela’s export revenue comes from oil sold by the state-owned oil company. Cutting off the government’s access to dollars will leave the economy without the hard currency needed to pay for imports of food and medicine. Starving the Venezuelan economy of its foreign currency earnings risks turning the country’s current humanitarian crisis into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe.”
This is not the first time that the opposition in Venezuela has destroyed the economy to help it win power. Back in 2002, the same year that President Hugo Chavez faced a coup backed by the U.S. government, his opponents “called for a massive strike in the country’s oil sector.”
“The strike brought oil production to a standstill and caused a double-digit recession in an attempt to get Chavez to resign,” Rodriguez recalled. “This event single-handedly convinced Venezuelans that they could not trust a political movement that was willing to destroy the economy in order to attain power. In a recall referendum held two years later, voters resoundingly backed Chavez.”
None of this history seems to matter to CNN anchors, who subscribe to the Washington bipartisan foreign policy consensus on Venezuela. Nor do they mention that it is not only Maduro’s security forces that commit violence. The opposition was involved in lynchings, burning people alive, and erecting barricades that cause deadly accidents in 2017. Some opposition leaders, including exiles like Lorent Saleh, have ties to neo-fascists.
When CNN anchor Jim Sciutto introduced the report, he mentioned Guaido had again urged the people of Venezuela to “hit the streets to demand new elections” in an effort to oust Maduro. It is easy to see how playing the report after this statement might help gin up sympathy for Guaido’s calls to action.
But apparently there is reason to believe the opposition may have the support of leaders from several Latin American and Western countries but still be struggling to win over the people.
Walsh noted the country is not seeing daily mass street protests. Guaido’s message may be resonating with some of the middle class, but it is not a message that inspires those in the slums, who have their own “poverty-based fight.”
In other words, it is likely that lower classes in Venezuela remain skeptical of the opposition because they fear it will mean inviting outside corporate interests to raid government assets and natural resources so they may enrich themselves. This would potentially lead to cuts or an end to social welfare programs that they utilize to help them survive.
This skepticism toward the opposition among Venezuelans is not something CNN wants to feature in its limited coverage of the attempted coup. But it should be viewed as a key reason to doubt the consensus around support for the opposition, which news networks are working to manufacture.
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While Guaido and his self-declared “government”(-in-waiting) are downplaying the prospects of a military invasion to topple Maduro, the reality is that such a scenario really isn’t all that far-fetched and could even succeed in the event that only a limited one was commenced in the ultra-strategic state of Zulia.
The Last Chance For Peace
Both supporters and detractors of the Venezuelan government seem to be of the mind that the country’s crisis is rapidly approaching a climax, with the specter of a military invasion looming large on the horizon. Each camp, and especially Guadio’s self-declared “government”(-in-waiting), has downplayed this possibility, but the reality is that such a scenario really isn’t all that far-fetched and could even succeed in the event that only a limited one was commenced in the ultra-strategic state of Zulia. This isn’t to say that an attack is imminent since there’s a chance that next week’s “Lima Group” meeting and the planned multilateral “mediation” summit in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo might yield some positive dividends, especially if Russia and China somehow get involved and turn the latter format into an Astana-like conference, but no one should discount the prospects of a military invasion being launched if neither of those functions results in Maduro quickly “compromising” on his principled position.
From Syria To Ukraine And Now Venezuela
The danger of something of the sort happening is real enough after US National Security Advisor John Bolton was caught on camera with a notepad where he scribbled “5,000 troops to Colombia” in what was probably a “self-leak” to telegraph the US’ intentions and put additional pressure on Venezuela. Furthermore, this coincided with Colombian-based military defectors begging the US to arm them so they can overthrow their government. From the looks of it, the same “Lead From Behind” HybridWar scenario as what happened earlier this decade in Syria and Ukraine appears to be on the brink of repeating itself in Venezuela whereby the US’ most trusted regional allies (Turkey, Poland, and Colombia) are charged with being the vanguard proxy force for assisting a regime change operation in the neighboring country whose government the US wants to overthrow.
Continuing with the comparisons, each of the targeted country’s adjacent regions to the US’ “Lead From Behind” proxy state share certain strategic similarities vis-à-vis facilitating the Hybrid War against it. Northern Syria contains the country’s largest city of Aleppo and is historically a hotbed of Muslim Brotherhood sentiment, Western Ukraine is popularly known as the country’s nationalist nest, and the economically significant state of Zulia has traditionally been an opposition stronghold. Seeing as how this analysis is first and foremost about the prospects of a military invasion of Venezuela, the relevance of the third-mentioned region deserves to be elaborated upon in order to better understand its importance in this context and how it compares to the two aforementioned regions in the other previously victimized states.
Zulia: Venezuela’s Achilles’ Heel
Reuters reported last summer that Zulia, Venezuela’s most populous state where nearly 1/5 of the population resides, accounts for approximately 35% of the country’s meat and dairy production as well as around 25% of its oil exports.
Being the Bolivarian Republic’s historic source of oil, some demagogic voices have previously called for autonomy in order to retain as much of their region’s energy revenue as possible, though this initiative has thus far been unsuccessful. Nevertheless, in times of serious economic and political uncertainty such as the present, it could become an attractive rallying cry of the opposition.
It’s with this strategic backdrop in mind why Zulia might be targeted by US-backed and Colombian-based Venezuelan military defectors if diplomatic means fail to get Maduro to “compromise”. Just like the “Free Syrian Army” did in Northern Syria with US & Turkish assistance and “EuroMaidan’s” supporters accomplished in Western Ukraine with US & Polish backing prior to the coup’s success, so too could anti-government fighters try to take control of Zulia with US & Colombian support in trying to carve that part of the country away from the central government’s authority. The possible success of this scenario could cripple the rest of Venezuela by immediately depriving it of hefty food, energy, and ultimately financial resources that could bring about the state’s rapid collapse soon thereafter.
Catalyzing The Final Collapse
This isn’t just “senseless fearmongering” either because the removal of 35% of Venezuela’s meat and dairy products from the rest of the country’s shelves and the loss of a further 25% of its oil-exporting-dependent state revenue (which would compound with the effects of the US’ recently imposed sanctions that cut the country off from its top oil consumer who previously purchased 41% of its exports) would be catastrophic and likely catalyze the large-scale exodus of pro-government internally displaced people eastwards towards Caracas where they’d inadvertently function as “Weapons of Mass Migration” in the capital. Faced with an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, the government would face the realistic prospect of either collapse or a military coup, the latter of which might be partially financed by some of the $7 billion of PDVSA assets that Guaido obtained access to earlier this week.
Considering that the US officially recognizes Guaido and his allies as representing the “legitimate” government of Venezuela, Washington might use the occupation of Zulia as the pretext to directly intervene and protect any energy assets that the Hybrid Warriors sign over to its control like Bolton hinted that he’d like to see happen if the rolling regime change operation succeeds. The US could then use Zulia (possibly described as “Free Venezuela” by that time by the Western Mainstream Media) as its base of operations for putting the finishing touches on its envisioned “government-in-waiting” for the country, recognizing that it would only be a “waiting game” after that point as it sees how long it’ll take for the rest of the country to either collapse or be taken over by a pro-US military coup as it descends further into dystopic chaos.
Concluding Thoughts
The US would ideally prefer for Maduro to peacefully step down as a result of a “compromise” political solution brought about by the forthcoming diplomatic initiatives set to be launched next week because that would be the easiest way for its companies to reap the most immediate and maximum profit from their country’s geopolitical “prize” if they simply assume ownership over its energy and mineral assets soon thereafter. Should that approach fail, however, then the back-up plan might be for the Bolivarian Republic’s “Achilles’ heel” of Zulia to be invaded by US-backed “moderate rebels” that would enter the state from Colombia following the “Lead From Behind” Hybrid War template trailblazed in Syria and Ukraine. The possible success of this “limited intervention” could serve as the pretext for a direct conventional one by the US itself, as well as catalyze the collapse of the rest of the country in bringing a quick end to this long-running regime change campaign.
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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Paul Kagame’s troops most likely shot down a plane carrying two African presidents, igniting genocides that killed millions — but the Rwandan President has never been charged.
“Former Rwandan General Nyamwasa said that Kagame most definitely ordered his troops to shoot down the plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents.”
Geopolitics trumped international justice again — just in time for Christmas. On December 21, a French court closed the long-running case against Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his inner circle for assassinating Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6, 1994, when a surface-to-air missile downed their plane over Rwanda’s capital Kigali.
Nearly twenty-five years later, there are still no convictions for the assassinations that turned first Rwanda, then the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), into a vast killing ground. Not in the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR), where two investigations of Kagame were shut down, and where a judge told defense attorney Tiphaine Dickson, “We don’t investigate plane crashes [or Tutsis, only Hutus].” And not in the French or Spanish courts, where French and Spanish citizens claimed jurisdiction because their relatives died in the plane shot down or in the ensuing massacres.
“The US and UK backed Kagame’s invading Tutsi army, which then invaded and occupied French-speaking Zaire.”
The subtext of the Rwandan War and the Congo Wars was competition between the US/UK and France. France, which was then the dominant power in the region, had been the patron of Habyarimana’s Hutu government; the US and UK backed Kagame’s invading Tutsi army, which emerged victorious in 1994, declared that English would from thereon be Rwanda’s international business language, then invaded and occupied French-speaking Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) two years later.
France and Rwanda have engaged in a bitter argument off and on for all these years about who was responsible for the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. Their embassies have often been closed in one another’s capitals, and France pulled out of the 20th anniversary commemoration in Kigali after President Kagame once again accused France of participating in the killing.
“Kagame’s troops followed the refugees into Zaire and massacred as many as 250,000.”
One of the recurring points of contention is Opération Turquoise, France’s emergency relief response, which began on June 23, 1994, several weeks before General Paul Kagame (now President Paul Kagame) seized power in Kigali. Some French officials who were in office at the time, most notably former French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, have maintained that Opération Turquoise created a humanitarian corridor for Rwandan Hutus fleeing into Zaire, for fear of being massacred by General Kagame’s advancing Tutsi army. Kagame’s government has claimed that France instead provided an escape route for Hutus guilty of genocide, although the vast majority flooding into Zaire were civilians, including women, children, and the elderly. According to the 2010 UN Mapping Report on Human Rights Abuse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993-2003, Kagame’s troops followed the refugees into Zaire and massacred as many as 250,000.
In “Dying to Live: A Rwandan Family’s Five-Year Flight Across the Congo,” Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga describes how he and his family and 300,000 more Rwandan Hutus fled Kagame’s advancing army all the way through the Congolese jungle, from east to west, as many more died of hardship or were massacred by Kagame’s troops along the way.
The authors of the UN Mapping Report said that the massacres in Congo would most likely be ruled a genocide if a case were brought to court, but none has been and none ever will be without a major geopolitical shift in power. In 2013, in one of his many cynical moments, Bill Clinton told BBC journalist Komla Dumor that he would not condemn his friend Paul Kagame for murdering the refugees because “it hasn’t been adjudicated.” (And because it happened on his watch, with his support, as did the 1998 Rwandan and Ugandan invasions of DRC, during which Kagame and Uganda’s Museveni became what another UN report called “the godfathers of the illegal exploitation of natural resources and the continuation of the conflict in the DRC.”)
“The UN Mapping Report said that the massacres in Congo would most likely be ruled a genocide if a case were brought to court.”
France of course wants its share, and French officials now in power have decided to close the case against Kagame in order to secure access to Congo’s riches, which he significantly controls. The court’s ruling came shortly after Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo became Secretary-General of La Francophonie, an international organization similar to the British Commonwealth, in what was widely perceived to be another concession to smooth French-Rwandan relations and ease France’s access to Congo’s riches.
Kayumba Nyamwasa, former Rwandan General, Chief of Army Staff, and Chief of Military Intelligence, was also named as a defendant in the French indictment. Speaking to Jane Corbin in the BBC video “Rwanda’s Untold Story,” he said that Kagame most definitely ordered his troops to shoot down the plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents:
Jane Corbin: Who do you believe was behind the shooting down of the plane?
Kayumba Nyamwasa: Paul Kagame, undoubtedly.
JC: Paul Kagame?
KN: Oh yes, oh yes.
JC: You know that?
KN: One hundred percent.
JC: Were you at meetings where it was discussed?
KN: Well, I know. I was in a position to know, and he knows I was in a position to know. And he knows that.
BBC interjection:General Nyamwasa has offered to cut a deal with the French judge totestify.
JC: If you discuss these matters with the judge and it implicates you yourself, are you willing to do that?
KN: Obviously. If it implicated me? Why not? Because I think that truth is what matters.
Closing the case is not acquitting
The French court said they were closing the case for lack of “credible” and “significant” evidence despite abundant such evidence. That does not mean, however, that they acquitted Kagame, Nyamwasa, or anyone else who was in Kagame’s inner circle at the time Habyarimana and Ntaryamira were assassinated. As Rwandan American legal scholar Charles Kambanda said, “This is a political decision which could well be superseded by another political decision to reopen the file when there is additional ‘credible’ and ‘significant’ evidence.” In other words, France has mollified Kagame for now, but it’s kept a knife behind its back.
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It’s an evident fact that neocolonial powers are ruled by behemoth corporations whose wealth is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, far more than the total GDP of many developing nations. The status of these multinational corporations as dominant players in international politics gets official imprimatur when the Western governments endorse the congressional lobbying practice of so-called “special interest” groups, which is a euphemism for corporate interests.
Since the Western governments are nothing but the mouthpiece of business interests on international political and economic forums, therefore any national or international entity which hinders or opposes the agenda of corporate interests is either coerced into accepting their demands or gets sidelined.
In 2013, the Manmohan Singh’s government of India had certain objections to further opening up to the Western businesses. The Business Roundtable, which is an informal congregation of major US businesses and together holds a net wealth of $6 trillion, held a meeting with the representatives of the Indian government and literally coerced it into accepting unfair demands of the Western corporations.
The developing economies, such as India and Pakistan, are always hungry for foreign direct investment (FDI) to sustain economic growth, and this investment mostly comes from the Western corporations. When the Business Roundtables or the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) form pressure groups and engage in “collective bargaining” activities, the nascent and fragile developing economies don’t have a choice but to toe their line.
State sovereignty, that sovereign nation states are at liberty to pursue independent policies, particularly economic and trade policies, is a myth. Just like the ruling elites of the developing countries which maintain a stranglehold and monopoly over domestic politics; similarly, the neocolonial powers and multinational corporations control international politics and the global economic order.
Any state in the international arena which dares to transgress the trade and economic policies laid down by neocolonial powers and multinational corporations becomes an international pariah like Castro’s Cuba, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe; or more recently, Maduro’s Venezuela.
Venezuela has one of the largest known oil reserves in the world. Even though the mainstream media’s pundits hold the socialist policies of President Nicolas Maduro responsible for economic mismanagement in Venezuela, fact of the matter is that hyperinflation in its economy is the effect of US sanctions against Venezuela which have been put in place since the time of late President Hugo Chavez.
Another case in point is Iran which was cut off from the global economic system from 2006 to 2015, and then again after May last year when President Donald Trump annulled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), because of Iran’s supposed nuclear ambitions. Good for Iran that it also has one of the largest oil and gas resources, otherwise it would have been insolvent by now.
Such is the power of Washington-led global financial system, especially the banking sector, and the significance of petro-dollar, because the global oil transactions are pegged in the US dollars all over the world, and all the major oil bourses are also located in the Western financial districts.
The crippling “third party” economic sanctions on Iran from 2006 to 2015 have brought to the fore the enormous power that the Western financial institutions and the petro-dollar as a global reserve currency wields over the global financial system.
It bears mentioning that the Iranian nuclear negotiations were as much about Iran’s nuclear program as they were about its ballistic missile program, which is an equally dangerous conventional threat to Israel and the Gulf’s petro-monarchies, just across the Persian Gulf.
Despite the sanctions being unfair, Iran felt the heat so much that it remained engaged in negotiations throughout the nearly decade-long period of sanctions, and such was the crippling effect of those “third party” sanctions on Iran’s economy that had it not been for its massive oil and gas reserves, and some Russian, Chinese and Turkish help in illicitly buying Iranian oil, it could have defaulted due to the sanctions.
Notwithstanding, after the brutal assassination of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, and the clear hand of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in the murder, certain naïve political commentators of the mainstream media came up with a ludicrous suggestion that Washington should impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia.
As in the case of aforementioned Iran sanctions, sanctioning Saudi Arabia also seems plausible; however, there is a caveat: Iran is only a single oil-rich state which has 160 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day (mbpd) of crude oil.
On the other hand, the Persian Gulf’s petro-monarchies are actually three oil-rich states. Saudi Arabia with its 266 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and 10 mbpd of daily crude oil production, and UAE and Kuwait with 100 billion barrels of proven reserves each and 3 mbpd of daily crude oil production each. Together, the share of the Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) amounts to 466 billion barrels, almost one-third of the world’s 1477 billion barrels of total proven oil reserves.
Therefore, although imposing economic sanctions on the Gulf states might sound like a good idea on paper, the relationship between the Gulf’s petro-monarchies and the industrialized world is that of a consumer-supplier relationship. The Gulf states are the suppliers of energy and the industrialized world is its consumer, hence the Western powers cannot sanction their energy suppliers and largest investors.
If anything, the Gulf’s petro-monarchies had “sanctioned” the Western powers in the past by imposing the oil embargo in 1973 after the Arab-Israel War. The 1973 Arab oil embargo against the West lasted only for a short span of six months during which the price of oil quadrupled, but Washington became so paranoid after the embargo that it put in place a ban on the export of crude oil outside the US borders, and began keeping sixty-day stock of reserve fuel for strategic and military needs.
Recently, some very upbeat rumors about the shale revolution have been circulating in the media. However, the shale revolution is primarily a natural gas revolution. It has increased the probable recoverable resources of natural gas by 30%. The shale oil, on the other hand, refers to two starkly different kinds of energy resources: firstly, the solid kerogen – though substantial resources of kerogen have been found in the US Green River formations, the cost of extracting liquid crude from solid kerogen is so high that it is economically unviable for at least a hundred years; secondly, the tight oil which is blocked by shale – it is a viable energy resource but the reserves are so limited, roughly 4 billion barrels in Texas and North Dakota, that it will run out in a few years.
More than the size of oil reserves, it is about per barrel extraction cost, which determines the profits for the multinational oil companies. And in this regard, the Persian Gulf’s crude oil is the most profitable. Further, regarding the supposed US energy independence after the purported shale revolution, the US produced 11 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil in the first quarter of 2014, which is more than the output of Saudi Arabia and Russia, each of which produces around 10 million bpd. But the US still imported 7.5 million bpd during the same period, which is more than the oil imports of France and Britain put together. More than the total volume of oil production, the volume which an oil-producing country exports determines its place in the hierarchy of petroleum and the Gulf’s petro-monarchies constitute the top tier of that pyramid.
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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
On Friday, The New York Times continued its long, predictable tradition of backing U.S. coups in Latin America by publishing an editorial praising Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This will be the 10th such coup the paper has backed since the creation of the CIA over 70 years ago.
A survey of The New York Times archives shows the Times editorial board has supported 10 out of 12 American-backed coups in Latin America, with two editorials—those involving the 1983 Grenada invasion and the 2009 Honduras coup—ranging from ambiguous to reluctant opposition. The survey can be viewed here.
Covert involvement of the United States, by the CIA or other intelligence services, isn’t mentioned in any of the Times’ editorials on any of the coups. Absent an open, undeniable U.S. military invasion (as in the Dominican Republic, Panama and Grenada), things seem to happen in Latin American countries entirely on their own, with outside forces rarely, if ever, mentioned in the Times. Obviously, there are limits to what is “provable” in the immediate aftermath of such events (covert intervention is, by definition, covert), but the idea that the U.S. or other imperial actors could have stirred the pot, funded a junta or run weapons in any of the conflicts under the table is never entertained.
More often than not, what one is left with, reading Times editorials on these coups, are racist, paternalistic “cycle of violence” cliches. Sigh, it’s just the way of things Over There. When reading these quotes, keep in mind the CIA supplied and funded the groups that ultimately killed these leaders:
Brazil 1964: “They have, throughout their history, suffered from a lack of first class rulers.”
Chile 1973: “No Chilean party or faction can escape some responsibility for the disaster, but a heavy share must be assigned to the unfortunate Dr. Allende himself.”
Argentina 1976: “It was typical of the cynicism with which many Argentines view their country’s politics that most people in Buenos Aires seemed more interested in a soccer telecast Tuesday night than in the ouster of President Isabel Martinez de Perlin by the armed forces. The script was familiar for this long‐anticipated coup.”
See, it didn’t matter! It’s worth pointing out the military junta put in power by the CIA-contrived coup killed 10,000 to 30,000 Argentines from 1976 to 1983.
There’s a familiar script: The CIA and its U.S. corporate partners come in, wage economic warfare, fund and arm the opposition, then the target of this operation is blamed. This, of course, isn’t to say there isn’t merit to some of the objections being raised by The New York Times—whether it be Chile in 1973 or Venezuela in 2019. But that’s not really the point. The reason the CIA and U.S. military and its corporate partisans historically target governments in Latin America is because those governments are hostile to U.S. capital and strategic interests, not because they are undemocratic. So while the points the Times makes about illiberalism may sometimes be true, they’re mostly a non sequitur when analyzing the reality of what’s unfolding.
Did Allende, as the Times alleged in 1973 when backing his violent overthrow, “persist in pushing a program of pervasive socialism” without a “popular mandate”? Did, as the Times alleged, Allende “pursue this goal by dubious means, including attempts to bypass both Congress and the courts”?
But Allende’s supposed authoritarianism isn’t why the CIA sought his ouster. It wasn’t his means of pursuing redistributive policies that offended the CIA and U.S. corporate partners; it was the redistributive policies themselves.
Hand-wringing over the anti-democratic nature of how Allende carried out his agenda without noting that it was the agenda itself—not the means by which it was carried out—that animated his opponents is butting into a conversation no one in power is really having. Why, historically, has The New York Times taken for granted the liberal pretexts for U.S. involvement, rather than analyzing whether there were possibly other, more cynical forces at work?
The answer is that rank ideology is baked into the premise. The idea that the U.S. is motivated by human rights and democracy is taken for granted by The New York Times editorial board and has been since its inception. This does all the heavy lifting without most people—even liberals vaguely skeptical of American motives in Latin America—noticing that a sleight of hand has taken place. “In recent decades,” a 2017 Times editorial scolding Russia asserted, “American presidents who took military action have been driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy, sometimes with extraordinary results.” Oh, well, good then.
What should be a conversation about American military and its covert apparatus unduly meddling in other countries quickly becomes a referendum on the moral properties of those countries. Theoretically a good conversation to have (and one certainly ongoing among people and institutions in these countries), but absent a discussion of the merits of the initial axiom—that U.S. talking heads and the Washington national security apparatus have a birthright to determine which regimes are good and bad—it serves little practical purpose stateside beyond posturing. And often, as a practical matter, it works to cement the broader narrative justifying the meddling itself.
Do the U.S. and its allies have a moral or ethical right to determine the political future of Venezuela? This question is breezed past, and we move on to the question of how this self-evident authority is best exercised. This is the scope of debate in The New York Times—and among virtually all U.S. media outlets. To ante up in the poker game of Serious People Discussing Foreign Policy Seriously, one is obligated to register an Official Condemnation of the Official Bad Regime. This is so everyone knows you accept the core premises of U.S. regime change but oppose it on pragmatic or legalistic grounds. It’s a tedious, extortive exercise designed to shift the conversation away from the United States’ history of arbitrary and violent overthrows and into an exchange about how best to oppose the Official Bad Regime in question. U.S. liberals are to keep a real-time report card on these Official Bad Regimes, and if these regimes—due to an ill-defined rubric of un-democraticness and human rights—fall below a score of say, “60,” they become illegitimate and unworthy of defense as such.
While obviously not in Latin America, it’s also worth noting that the Times cheerled the CIA-sponsored coup against Iran’s President, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953. Its editorial, written two days after his ouster, engaged in the Times’ patented combination of victim-blaming and “oh dear” bloviating:
“The now-deposed Premier Mossadegh was flirting with Russia. He had won his phony plebiscite to dissolve the Majlis, or lower House of Parliament, with the aid of the Tudeh Communists.”
“Mossadegh is out, a prisoner awaiting trial. It is a credit to the Shah, to whom he was so disloyal, and to Premier Zahedi, that this rabid, self-seeking nationalist would have been protected at a time when his life would not have been worth the wager of a plugged nickel.”
“The Shah … deserves praise in this crisis. … He was always true to the parliamentary institutions of his country, he was a moderating influence in the wild fanaticism exhibited by the nationalists under Mossadegh, and he was socially progressive.”
Again, no mention of CIA involvement (which the agency now openly acknowledges), which the Times wouldn’t necessarily have had any way of knowing at the time. (This is part of the point of covert operations.) Mossadegh is summarily demonized, and it’s not until decades later the public learns of the extent of U.S. involvement. The Times even gets in an orientalist description of Iranians, implying why a strong Shah is necessary:
[The average Iranian] has nothing to lose. He is a man of infinite patience, of great charm and gentleness, but he is also—as we have been seeing—a volatile character, highly emotional, and violent when sufficiently aroused.
Needless to say, there are major difference between these cases: Mossadegh, Allende, Chavez and Maduro all lived in radically different times and championed different policies, with varying degrees of liberalism and corruption. But the one thing they all had in common is that the U.S. government, and a compliant U.S. media, decided they “needed to go” and did everything to achieve this end. The fundamental arrogance of this assumption, one would think, is what ought to be discussed in the U.S. media—as typified by the Times’ editorial board—but time and again, this assumption is either taken for granted or hand-waved away, and we all move on to how and when we can best overthrow the Bad Regime.
For those earnestly concerned about Maduro’s efforts to undermine the democratic institutions of Venezuela (he’s been accused of jailing opponents, stacking the courts and holding Potemkin elections), it’s worth pointing out that even when the liberal democratic properties of Venezuela were at their height in 2002 (they were internationally sanctioned and overseen by the Carter Center for years, and no serious observer considers Hugo Chavez’s rule illegitimate), the CIA still greenlit a military coup against Chavez, and the New York Times still profusely praised the act. As it wrote at the time:
With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona.
Chavez would soon be restored to power after millions took to the streets to protest his removal from office, but the question remains: If The New York Times was willing to ignore the undisputed will of the Venezuelan people in 2002, what makes anyone think the newspaper is earnestly concerned about it in 2019? Again, the thing that’s being objected to by the White House, the State Department and their U.S. imperial apparatchiks is the redistributive policies and opposition to the United States’ will, not the means by which they do so. Perhaps the Times and other U.S. media—living in the heart of, and presumably having influence over, this empire—could try centering this reality rather than, for the millionth time, adjudicating the moral properties of the countries subject to its violent, illegitimate whims.
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Adam H. Johnson is a media analyst for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and is co-host of the Citations Needed podcast.
U.S. intelligence officials confirmed to the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Tuesday, that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons in violation of the 2015 nuclear agreement, and furthermore had no strategic plans to do so.
This report from the US intelligence community indicate that Israel’s Netanyahu and his American cohort, Donald Trump, have deliberately misinformed the world regarding Iranian nuclear capability. The state of Israel, which is estimated to have in excess of more than 400 undeclared nuclear warheads must be compared to Iran which is not a nuclear weapon state. Who, therefore, is the threat to world peace?
Under the influence of the Israeli Prime Minister and ignoring the emphatic advice from the UN Security Council and the European Union, US President Trump last year pulled out of an international nuclear deal with Iran, put in place under his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama. Trump then re-imposed sanctions on Tehran causing massive economic and political destabilisation throughout the Middle East in addition to dismay from the European and other signatories to the nuclear deal.
It is crystal clear where the truth lies, and it is certainly not in Tel Aviv nor in the Trump White House. Now is surely the time for Europe to strengthen cooperation with the geographically important state of Iran, both economically and politically, whilst cutting ties and trade with Israel. It is vital that the West recognises who are its future friends and strategic partners.
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Hans Stehling (pen name) is an analyst based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
A senior judge at the United Nations’ International Court in The Hague has resigned in protest of “shocking” interference from the Trump administration into a preliminary war-crimes investigation into U.S. troops.
The judge, Christoph Flügge, who hails from Germany, slammed National Security Advisor John Bolton over his response last year to a preliminary investigation into American soldiers accused of torturing people in Afghanistan. That investigation ultimately found “a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity” were committed by U.S. forces, MintPress News reported.
“The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court,” Bolton said in September.
He also called for sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC) and warned the body against pursuing any investigations into “Israel or other U.S. allies.”
Bolton even cited a Palestinian-led effort to bring Israel to the ICC over its human-rights abuses in Gaza and the West Bank as a reason for closing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington.
He went on to promise to ban ICC “judges and prosecutors from entering the United States,” adding:
We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. We will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us.”
“John Bolton, the national security adviser to the U.S. president, held a speech last September in which he wished death on the International Criminal Court,” Flügge said after leaving his post.
Flugge continued on Bolton’s declaration:
If these judges ever interfere in the domestic concerns of the U.S. or investigate an American citizen, [Bolton] said the American government would do all it could to ensure that these judges would no longer be allowed to travel to the United States – and that they would perhaps even be criminally prosecuted.”
The American security adviser held his speech at a time when The Hague was planning preliminary investigations into American soldiers who had been accused of torturing people in Afghanistan. The American threats against international judges clearly show the new political climate. It is shocking. I had never heard such a threat.
It is consistent with the new American line: ‘We are No 1 and we stand above the law.’”
A supine UN, a dreadful precedent
The attacks from the White House were one of two reasons for Flügge’s resignation, as the judge was left aghast by the UN’s deferential response to Turkey after Turkey arrested Aydın Sefa Akay, another UN judge, over alleged links to Fethullah Gülen, a cleric living in exile in the U.S. whom Turkish President Recep Erdoğan claims is the mastermind behind the 2016 failed coup attempt in Turkey.
Akay was at the end of his tenure when the charge was leveled by Turkey.
“We, the other judges, immediately protested. But his tenure was nevertheless not extended by the UN secretary general. And with that, he’s gone,” Flügge said.
The assaults by Turkey and the U.S. were both undertaken in the summertime. Afterwards, Flügge said he realized that the “diplomatic world” did not value the independent judiciary that was the ICC. The lack of a response by the UN to Turkey for its meddling in ICC matters set a dangerous precedent, according to the judge.
“Every incident in which judicial independence is breached is one too many,” Flügge said. “Now there is this case, and everyone can invoke it in the future. Everyone can say: ‘But you let Turkey get its way.’ This is an original sin. It can’t be fixed.”
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Alexander Rubinstein is a staff writer for MintPress News based in Washington, DC. He reports on police, prisons and protests in the United States and the United States’ policing of the world. He previously reported for RT and Sputnik News.
Featured image: International Criminal Court, The Hague | OSeveno
On January 24, 2019, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has stated:
“Humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats, either of which would be cause for extreme concern and immediate attention. These major threats—nuclear weapons and climate change—were exacerbated this past year (2018) by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these and other threats and putting the future of civilization in extraordinary danger.”
History is replete with instances where an “end” has been falsely predicted. Where do present climate science-based projections and the probabilities of nuclear war lie?
Clouded with a veneer of untruths propagated by mercenary pseudo-ideological forces, the brutal fact is that, to date, the emission of more than 600 billion tons of greenhouse gases, raising atmospheric CO2 concentration by more than 40 percent, has shifted the state of the terrestrial atmosphere to that of the Miocene 16 million years ago, at a rate faster than any recorded since 55 million years ago. Whereas species can adapt to gradual changes runaway global warming within less than a century is triggering a mass extinction. As stated by David Attenborough “The garden of Eden is no more” (See this).
Reinforcing the existential risk of climate disruption is the probability of a nuclear exchange, with a nuclear arsenal of 14,575 missiles and bombs (see this), with time the probability of a deliberate of accidental nuclear war becomes a probability and, with time, a certainty. Lateral and vertical nuclear proliferation is only growing. Sydney Drell, a physicist and nuclear weapons expert, commented on the proximity of a nuclear exchange in the following terms: “Given all the close calls and mistakes in the 71 years since then (Hiroshima), he considered it a miracle that no other cities have been destroyed by a nuclear weapon—“it is so far beyond my normal optimism” (See this)
What are the origins of the imminent demise of much of nature, likely including a large part of the human race? Where does responsibility lie? Is it the unrelenting conflict between life-giving and life-destroying forces in nature, the megalomaniac nature of leaders, infinite greed, messianic zeal, murderous atrocities of colosseum games, obscene film and TV shows that create model mirrors in the mind of growing generations?
At the roots of human pre-history are the tribe and the tribal leader, typically the stronger and brave hunger and warrior, capable of providing the tribe with food and protect it from enemies. The leader, however, may not be the wise and is prone to dragging the tribe to disaster, as have kings and emperors through the ages. Leaders, however, do not arise in a void but within circumstances which enhance their rise to power.
Translated to modern societies, it is often the more ruthless, canning and corrupt types who get to the top, but then, once the species has mastered the technologies of combustion, manipulation of the electromagnetic spectrum, splitting of the atom and production of a variety of poisons, the species needs to be absolutely wise and in control if it is to avoid self-destruction by its own inventions.
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Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and Paleo-climate science, Australia National University (ANU) School of Anthropology and Archaeology, ANU Planetary Science Institute, ANU Climate Change Institute, Honorary Associate Professor, Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, University of Queensland. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
To clarify the importance of the January 23rd coup attempt in Venezuela we remember that ever since WWII the customary motivation for violations of the Convention on Genocide has been to gain a region’s natural resources. For example Iraq, Libya, Syria, Haiti, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Guatemala, and others.
The people of resource-rich areas are forced into flight, exile, refuge elsewhere, or are attacked by disease, or starvation, or directly murdered by military programs, or divided internally into civil wars assuring the death of multitudes.
Damages are inter-generational with the effects of depleted uranium weaponry or mining waste; the survivors of one generation lose their children in the next. The effect of destroying a habitat is the destruction of a people with legal historical claim to the land and its natural resources.
If these people are eradicated, resource development proceeds without impediment or any benefit or payment to the rightful owners. Night’s Lantern places an implicit warning for peoples inhabiting or able to make legal claim to resource-rich territory. Venezuela possesses about a quarter of the earth’s oil resources. The corporate battle for profits is understood to be criminal. The U.S. has made a point of withdrawing from the International Criminal Court and attempting to destroy international law. Since there is strong evidence that Venezuela is threatened with a takeover by corporate interests, represented by U.S. policy, the people of Venezuela are now under a genocide warning.
A summary of the current coup attempt: on January 23rd, Juan Guaidó, leader of the right wing National Assembly declared himself the President of Venezuela. During the presidency of Hugo Chavez, and despite the failure of the first U.S. attempted coup against him, and then after the curious death of Chavez, and after the presidency was assumed by Chavez’s and the people’s chosen successor, Nicolás Maduro, the U.S. has continually and heavily funded the country’s political opposition. Guaidó’s counter-democratic declaration was endorsed immediately by Brazil, the U.S. and Canada in an attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government. Juan Guaidó’s platform if allowed to rule, would include returning nationalized companies to their previous owners.
The U.S. Vice president’s call-out to the Venezuelan people to rise up and embrace Guaidó as their President, failed. Of the Americas, governments installed by the U.S. have supported the U.S. position. Countries of the Americas controlled by right wing middle classes at the service of corporate policies and wealth, also support the U.S. position.
Western media explain ‘a need for change’ rising from the country’s ‘humanitarian crisis,’ which on examination is an economic crisis rising from very low prices of oil – and then the debilitating U.S.-initiated sanctions to sideline Venezuela’s attempts at economic recovery. As the largest holder of oil resources in the world Venezuela’s political and economic difficulties are consistently traced to foreign corporate interests.
The European Union has demanded new elections in an attempt to discredit President Maduro’s victory at the polls last May and his re-installation as President on January 10th. Cuba has shifted 2500 of its health providers from its mission to the poor in what has become fascist Brazil, to Venezuela. Venezuela’s alliances with Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, Mexico, among others, remain. Within Venezuela, the government and its supporters including all branches of the military have remained loyal to the country’s Constitution and Nicolás Maduro as the elected President. The U.S.-Brazil-Canada axis attempt to effect its choice of rulers for another country has risked tripping these as aggressors and Venezuela, into war. As noted at the mourning for Hugo Chavez whose illness many believe was the result of an assassination, “Chávez vive, la lucha sigue!”.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Night’s Lantern.
A former United Nations rapporteur has criticised the US for engaging in “economic warfare” against Venezuela which he claimed was the real reason for the economic and humanitarian crisis facing the country.
Alfred de Zayas, who last year became the first UN rapporteur to visit Venezuela for 21 years, also suggested in his recently published UN report, that US sanctions on the country are illegal and could amount to “crimes against humanity” under international law.
Mr De Zayas, an American lawyer, writer, historian and former secretary of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), presented his Venezuela report to the HRC in September.
In the report, which can be read in full here, Mr De Zayas recommended, among other actions, that the International Criminal Court investigate economic sanctions against Venezuela as possible crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute.
In the report conclusions Mr De Zayas, who is an expert in the fields of human rights and international law, went on to say the solution to the Venezuelan crisis lay “in good faith negotiations between the Government and the opposition, an end to the economic war, and the lifting of sanctions.”
The US imposed sanctions against Venezuela began in 2015 under President Barack Obama and have intensified under Donald Trump.
US sanctions against Venezuela prohibit dealing in currencies and stop US-based companies or people from buying and selling new debt issued by the state-run oil body, PDVSA or the government.
The US Department of State’s sanctions and justifications can be read here
In his report Mr De Zayas said modern-day economic sanctions and blockades are comparable with medieval sieges of towns.
“Twenty-first century sanctions attempt to bring not just a town, but sovereign countries to their knees.”
Since 2015 around 1.9m people have fled the country and inflation has reached 60,324%.
Speaking to The Independent yesterday Mr de Zayas also suggested his research into the causes of the country’s economic crisis has so far largely been ignored.
“When I come and I say the emigration is partly attributable to the economic war waged against Venezuela and is partly attributable to the sanctions, people don’t like to hear that. They just want the simple narrative that socialism failed and it failed the Venezuelan people,” Mr de Zayas told The Independent.
Mr de Zayas went on to suggest that sanctions are part of a US effort to overthrow the Venezuelan government and instal a friendlier regime.
“I’ve seen that happen in the Human Rights Council, how the United States twists arms and convinces countries to vote the way they want them to vote, or there will be economic consequences, and these things are not reflected in the press,” he told The Independent.
Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world and other abundant natural resources including gold, bauxite and coltan.
“If you crush this government and you bring in a neoliberal government that is going to privatise everything and is going to sell out, a lot of transitional corporations stand to gain enormous profits and the United States is driven by the transnational corporations,” the former UN special rapporteur told The Independent.
“The business of the United States is business. And that’s what the United States is interested in. And they can’t [currently] do business with Venezuela.”
In his report, Mr de Zayas expressed concern that those calling the situation a “humanitarian crisis” are being “weaponised” to discredit the government and make violent overthrow more “palatable”.
Amnesty, for example, have said the Maduro government is responsible for “the worst human rights crisis in the country’s history,”
“There is nothing more undemocratic than a coup d’état and nothing more corrosive to the rule of law and to international stability when foreign governments meddle in the internal affairs of other states,” he told The Independent.
“Only the Venezuelans have a right to decide, not the United States, not the United Kingdom … What is urgent is to help the Venezuelan people through international solidarity – genuine humanitarian aid and a lifting of the financial blockade so that Venezuela can buy and sell like any other country in the world – the problems can be solved with good faith and common sense.”
Mr De Zayas is one of 70 signatories of an open letter, along with with Noam Chomsky and over 70 other academics and experts, who have condemned what they described as a US-backed coup attempt against the Venezuelan government.
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Smashing the claims of “protecting democracy” in Venezuela, the United States National Security Advisor John Bolton said in an interview that they are backing the illegal coup in the South American country because of oil.
“It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela,” Bolton told Fox News in an interview this week.
Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jorge Arreaza wrote on Twitter,
“Confession … @ AmbJohnBolton confirms that the COUP is about OIL.”
Confesión de parte: @AmbJohnBolton confirma que el GOLPE es PETROLERO. Desde el segundo 48: "HARÁ UNA GRAN DIFERENCIA PARA LOS EEUU ECONÓMICAMENTE si podemos tener empresas petroleras estadounidenses invirtiendo de verdad y produciendo las capacidades petroleras en Venezuela" https://t.co/fXnLBT1PWL
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said in an interview Wednesday that the U.S. just wants to seize Venezuela’s oil and mineral resources and that is the reason behind backing the coup and intervention in the Latin American country.
“The reason is seizing the oil of Venezuela, because we have the largest oil reserves, we confirm that we have the largest reserves of gold in the world, we have the world’s fourth-largest gas (reserves), have large reserves of coltan, diamonds, aluminum, iron, we have drinking water reserves throughout the national territory, we have energy and natural resources,” said the Venezuelan president.
The U.S. has backed the coup by Juan Guaido, who on Jan. 23 illegally declared himself the “interim president” of Venezuela.
U.S. President Donald Trump recognized the self-proclaimed president. The same was done by the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, who has instigated attacks against Maduro and his government.
Maduro and the Venezuelan people are resisting this coup attempt by the interventionist North American country.
The new U.S. measures against Venezuela include the freezing of some US$7 billion in assets of the Venezuelan state oil company (PDVSA), in addition to an estimated loss of US$11 billion of exports over the next few years.
The sanctions are applied to the Venezuelan government; to any political organizations; state agencies, including the Bank of Venezuela and PDVSA; as well as to any person acting in the interest of the “government of Nicolas Maduro.”
Denouncing the U.S. interventionism, Maduro said that Venezuela is a sovereign country and not part of a U.S. backyard.
“They (the United States) consider us their backyard. And we say that we are not anyone’s backyard, we are an independent republic,” Maduro asserted.
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The situation in the Idlib de-escalation zone is slowly escalating with an increased number of artillery duels and clashes between pro-government fighters and militants taking place there on a daily basis.
On January 29, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) and Jaysh al-Izza reportedly attacked positions of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in the villages of Maan and Atshan in northern Hama. The SAA responded by shelling the areas of Tamanah, Tal Teri, Tal Suayk, Suayk, Morek and Tal Huwayr. Early on January 30, artillery strikes were also reported near the militant-held villages of al-Tah and al-Lataminah. Both sides are accused of using heavy artillery and grad rockets, openly showing that the de-militarization zone agreed by Turkey and Russia has not in fact been established in the area.
The situation is also tense in northern Lattakia and western Aleppo, but the daily intensity of strikes there is lower.
Recently, a new group of SAA troops arrived in the area of Abu al-Duhur Airport. According to the Russian military, on January 22, up to 200 Hayat Tahrir al-Sham members attacked SAA positions in the area, but this advance was repelled.
The political leadership of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and thus the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) continued their PR efforts to rescue themselves from the political and security dead end, in which they appeared to fiind themselves after the US announcement of troops withdrawal.
So far, YPG, SDF representatives have already claimed that:
They invite Damascus to their areas;
They do not invite Damascus to enter Manbij;
They are negotiating with Damascus;
They are not negotiating with Damascus;
They are ready to find “an understanding” with Turkey;
They’ve provided Russia and Damascus with a list of demands for negotiations;
On January 29, Ilham Ahmed, the co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council, a formal political body of the SDF, claimed that there are no signs of the US troops withdrawal from Syria saying that the situation is “just like before” Trump’s announcement.
On January 28, Syria and Iran signed 11 deals and memoranda of understanding covering fields including the economy, culture, education, infrastructure, investment and housing. They were signed during a visit to Damascus by Iran’s First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri. The gorwing Syrian-Iranian cooperation shows that the US-Israeli bloc key goal – to push Iran out of Syria – is something unlikely even theoretically.
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Russia just dropped a huge hint suggesting that it might be trying to assemble an Astana-like conference for resolving the Venezuelan Crisis in the same spirit as what it’s been trying to do with Syria over the past two years, which could present the most peaceful solution available even if this initiative ultimately results in “painful compromises” by the government if it succeeds.
Another Astana?
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov revealed earlier today that his country is in talks with other states and international organizations over the role that every concerned party could play in “mediating” the Venezuelan Crisis. He said that
“There is the EU’s initiative to set up a contact group. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has also put forward some initiatives, there is also some ideas that Uruguay and Mexico have come up with…We truly wish to help create conditions for dialogue between the government and the opposition. We are discussing it with our Venezuelan partners, China, Latin American and European countries. We are also ready to participate in international efforts on platforms that would be acceptable for the Venezuelan parties.”
Although it can’t be known for certain at this point, all indications suggest that Russia might be ready to “pull a Syria” by assembling an Astana-like conference for resolving the Venezuelan Crisis.
Follow The Money
Russia is a firm proponent of international law and adamantly opposed to the US’ regime change plots anywhere across the world, but it has more than just altruistic motives of principle for wanting to ensure that the Venezuelan Crisis is peacefully resolved as soon as possible. The country invested $11 billion in the Bolivarian Republic over the years through various loans and energy, mineral, military, and infrastructure deals and just recently agreed to commit another $6 billion in early December. The very real prospect of potentially losing some or all of these assets following the possible seizure of power by US-backed Color Revolution forces in Venezuela terrifies Russia because it would result in a hefty financial hit its interests, though China would be even more adversely affected because of the whopping $50 billion that it loaned Caracas up until this point. Accordingly, it makes sense for both Eurasian Great Powers to pool their resources in trying to de-escalate this crisis as soon as possible.
Self-declared wannabe “president” Juan Guaido understands the impressive leverage that his US-backed Color Revolution forces have over those two countries after hinting that Maduro isn’t “protecting their investments” from what can only be interpreted as the veiled threat that this Hybrid Warriors pose to their physical assets. Catching the drift, Russia and China might be compelled to “convince” Maduro to “compromise” with the “opposition” out of fear that their investments might be targeted by Guaido’s supporters during any forthcoming escalation of unrest in the country, with the Western Mainstream Media gleefully waiting to “report” that “the people are also rebelling against the regime’s backers” as they blow up pipelines, demolish mines, and attack the other property of those countries’ companies. Under this very realistic scenario, Russia and China would be powerless to protect their assets, and their on-the-ground partners in the Venezuelan Armed Forces charged with ensuring their security might have their hands full responding to more pressing regime change threats.
On The Road To “Compromises”
Faced with the horrifying prospect of losing so many billions of dollars, Russia and China are incentivized to help Maduro and Guaido reach a “compromise solution” to the crisis, something that Moscow implied is its intention after Lavrov said after his above-cited comments in the same statement that “We are confident that creating conditions for the Venezuelan parties to make an agreement is the only possible goal.” This powerfully lends a degree of “legitimacy” to Guaido by implicitly recognizing the need for him and the authorities (“the Venezuelan parties”) to “make an agreement”, the outcome of which shouldn’t be “predetermined” in advance according to Lavrov in a subsequent remark but which could be predicted by context to refer to either a power-sharing arrangement or early elections despite Maduro ruling out the latter. Either way, it looks like the only option for Russia and China to avoid any harm to their assets in Venezuela is to get Maduro to “compromise” in one way or another and as soon as possible.
Arguments For And Against America’s Support For Another Astana
This urgent motivation is probably what’s behind Russia’s efforts to streamline an Astana-like conference on Venezuela, though this peacemaking initiative could fall flat if neither the “opposition” nor its foreign backers agree to it. The US controls the so-called “Lima Group” and is ultimately the final decision maker on whether Russia’s effort will have a chance at succeeding or not. On the one hand, it might remain opposed to this because it either intends to throw Venezuela into civil war and/or wants to seize its rivals’ assets once its proxies come to power or have them destroy Russian and Chinese properly during the chaos. On the other hand, however, the US might be willing to “give peace a chance” if it thinks that it can use the “goodwill” that it might engender from both of its Eurasian Great Power rivals to get them to geopolitically and/or economically “compromise” on something else, as well as if it fears that oil prices might surge for a while to Moscow’s benefit.
At the end of the day, it’s “more convenient” for the US’ proxies to “legitimately” take power in a “peaceful” way (even if it takes time through a Russian-brokered “phased leadership transition”) than in a controversial one such as a coup or after a prolonged civil war because it’ll allow American companies to most immediately profit from their government’s foreign policy “success” in its “backyard”. If Venezuela becomes the “next Syria”, it’ll take a lot of time and investment before the US “reaps the rewards”, which is why it might be willing to “allow” Russia and China to save some (but likely not all) of their investments on the condition that they “convince” Maduro to begin the process of transferring power to Guaido under whatever pretext they can come up with so that “everyone looks like they won” (ex: “this was the only way to keep the peace and prevent another Syrian scenario”).
“Sell-Out” Or Strategic?
While some might frame the possibly forthcoming move to organize an Astana-like conference on Venezuela as a “sell-out”, it’s actually the only realistic and pragmatic option available to Russia under these very difficult circumstances. Moscow can’t stage a Syrian-like military intervention to support Caracas like it did Damascus 3,5 years ago even though it could commence a “humanitarian intervention” by dispatching food and other much-needed supplies to the country out of “Christian solidarity” (which might win it some points with regional right-wing forces). Just like Russia realized that the “success” of “Israel’s” “Yinon Plan” in Syria is “inevitable” to a certain degree and is therefore trying to “responsibly guide” this process as much as possible in the direction of its national interests, so too is it contemplating doing the same in the Balkans as well, so applying this approach to Venezuela would actually be following its latest trend instead of bucking it.
It should always be remembered that Russia has no ideological solidarity with Venezuela’s socialist experiment like the USSR might have had if it still existed but is partnered with the South American state out of purely pragmatic reasons having to do with helping the Bolivarian Republic diversify its erstwhile strategic dependence on the US per former President Chavez’s multipolar vision.
No one should be under any illusions of imagining that this is being done pro bono like the USSR would have done, since all of Russia’s investments (and especially loans) in the country are firstly made with financial motives in mind and only afterwards take on possible geostrategic dimensions. The same logic holds for China as well, which isn’t a criticism of either but just a reflection of objective fact. Therefore, both Eurasian Great Powers have more than enough reasons to do whatever needs to diplomatically be done to safeguard their tens of billions of dollars’ worth of investments.
Concluding Thoughts
Russia’s 21st-century grand strategic vision of becoming the supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia can realistically be replicated in Latin America if it succeeds in bringing together a diverse set of countries to facilitate a “political solution” to the Venezuelan Crisis, one which would secure (at least some of) it and its Chinese partner’s enormous investments in the Bolivarian Republic while simultaneously raising its regional prestige. Such an Astana-like conference could symbolically be held in the Bolivian capital of La Paz (which means “the peace”) or in one of the small Caribbean island nations allied with Caracas through its Petrocaribe oil subsidization program, and could be complemented by a Russian-led “humanitarian intervention” that delivers much-needed food and supplies to Venezuela’s destitute population. If another Astana does indeed take place and results in Maduro “compromising”, then it wouldn’t be a “sell-out” but a strategic defense of Russian state interests that made the best out of a bad situation and prevented the Syrian scenario from repeating itself in South America.
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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Robert Newman gets to grips with the wars and politics of the last hundred years – but rather than adhering to the history we were fed at school, he places oil centre stage as the cause of all the commotion.
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The emerging narrative that Russia is planning to “annex” Belarus is nothing more than an external infowar attack on their recently troubled partnership that seeks to accelerate the pace of Minsk’s pro-Western pivot by falsely fearmongering about Moscow’s geopolitical intentions.
Applebaum Rings The “Annexation” Alarm
Even the most casual “Russia watcher” has probably come across the narrative over the past few months that Russia is planning to “annex” Belarus under the aegis of the 1999 Union State agreement between both neighboring countries, with this speculative theory being pushed most prominently by Anne Applebaum, a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member and the neoconservative wife of former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski. For as much as many in the West might want to believe that President Putin is secretly plotting to exploit the integrational progress that was made in recent months between his country and Belarus in order to “cling to power” after the end of his fourth term in 2024, the reality is that such a scenario is extremely far-fetched, not least because of Belarus’ unwillingness to go along with it to that extent. Truth be told, state-to-state relations between these two fraternal countries are tenser than they’ve ever been before in spite of both sides’ official reassurances to the contrary.
Westward Ho!
The author has been following this trend for some time and most recently published a piece on it back in November about how “Belarus Just Threw Russia Under The Bus”, which was accompanied by a Facebook thread documenting the relevant developments that have occurred in their relationship since then. To concisely summarize, Belarus is basically blackmailing Russia for billions of dollars’ worth of energy and other subsidies otherwise it’ll accelerate its pro-Western pivot. Skeptics commonly remark that these two states often quarrel with one another over this issue, but this time their dispute is qualitatively different after Minsk hosted experts from the neoconservative Jamestown Foundation last November that also included former Commander of the US Army in EuropeBen Hodges. In addition, President Lukashenko has since talked extensively about how much he wants to preserve his country’s “sovereignty” and “genuine independence” in what was obviously a riposte to the rumors that the Union State might lead to Belarus’ actual Crimean-like incorporation into Russia.
Not only that, but Lukashenko actually directly confronted such a scenario head-on by denying that anything of that nature was on the agenda of his country’s bilateral relations with Russia, curiously quipping that “If there is no equitable basis, then there is no union” in what can be interpreted as a jab against what he’s framing as his partner’s alleged desire to ‘dominate’ its much smaller neighbor. In other words, while Belarus’ merger with Russia is off the table no matter what Western neoconservatives and some overly-zealous Russian-friendly media commentators might say for their own reasons, that doesn’t mean that Minsk is ruling out further integration with Moscow on other levels. To the contrary, Belarus is eager to continue along the Union State trajectory, though only if relations between the two can be “rebalanced” on a more “equal” basis. Put another way, Lukashenko won’t “betray” Putin if the latter “compromises” on certain financial, economic, and other issues, though it’s not assured that the Russian leader will do so.
“Balancing” Or “Blackmailing”?
Being a comparatively small country in an ultra-geostrategic position, Belarus is well aware of its importance to both Russia and the West, and it now seems willing to instrumentalize that in pursuit of what it believes to be its best interests. Its leadership has signaled that its “balancing act” will now become more robust as it actively seeks to court its Western neighbors and their American patron, thereby putting pressure on Russia to act fast or “lose out”. Russia recognizes the game that’s being played but is reluctant continuing caving into Belarus’ demands, worrying that it’ll embolden its “partner” even more and will indefinitely perpetuate its ever-increasingly high-stakes “blackmail”. At the same time, however, the argument can be made that Belarus’ geopolitical “loyalty” (however unreliable it may be nowadays) is “priceless” and that Moscow must do whatever it can to prevent Minsk from moving westward in a manner that could one day endanger the Eurasian Great Power’s security.
After having explained these geostrategic sensitivities, it’s now easier to understand how the Western Mainstream Media’s fake news fearmongering about Russia’s alleged intentions to “annex” Belarus through the Union State structure figure into the larger paradigm. Although Russian-Belarusian relations are undergoing unprecedented strain at the moment, these two countries are still closely connected to one another through various systems of complex interdependency (economic, family, religious, historic, military, etc.) that make it all but impossible for Belarus to pull off a “clean pivot” if it’s leadership ever decided to do that. It’s true that Belarus is gradually moving westward under the pretext of “diversifying” ties with the EU and its American patron, but the progressive pace has yet to destabilize Russia’s interests and is still technically “manageable”, especially if Moscow cuts a deal with Minsk.
Infowar Intentions
That said, the introduction of the devious infowar narrative about a possibly impending Russian “annexation” of Belarus is designed to sow the seeds of distrust between these two partners by playing to demagogic fantasies on each side, both of hardcore Russian “nationalists” who would actually want to see this scenario implemented into practice and their Belarusian counterparts who will do anything within their power to prevent it from happening. The external generation of this highly emotive scenario is intended to “naturally” provoke very heated (and as the West hopes, public) discussion about this, thereby facilitating this storyline’s “organic growth” from the “grassroots” all the way up to the parliamentary and even head of state level, the latter of which was recently breached by the Belarusian leader after he felt compelled to openly deny that any such plan was in the cards.
The ideal scenario for the West is that a prominent social figure, politician, or head of state says something very provocative about the infowar narrative (such as preemptively condemning the other side in very strong language) so as to trigger a self-sustaining cycle of further distrust between Belarus and Russia that could be exploited to accelerate the former’s westward pivot at the latter’s expense. This cunning plan could actually work because it takes advantage of their unprecedented preexisting disagreements with one another, having been prepared far in advance after infowar experts predicted that another round of “blackmail” was due around this time of the year. That explains why this weaponized narrative was unleashed at exactly this time and in as coordinated and “sophisticated” of a fashion because it’s meant to be a crucial component of the West’s non-kinetic Hybrid War against Russia.
Concluding Thoughts
There’s no credible truth to the reports that Russia is getting ready to “annex” Belarus – whether peacefully through the Union State or forcefully via an invasion – but this narrative is alluring to some forces in each of those two countries and the West, albeit for completely different reasons. Some Russian ultra-nationalists dream of “restoring the Soviet Union” through such a scheme, while their Belarusian counterparts fret this ever happening. Suffice to say, the West would prefer to stand on the sidelines and watch both sides bicker over this non-existent plot that it strategically introduced into their relations for devious reasons. The whole point in hyping up this speculative scenario is to further aggravate the already unprecedentedly tense ties between both countries, though it seems for now at least (key qualifier) that cooler heads are prevailing on both sides and that neither the Russians nor the Belarusians will bite such obvious infowar bait.
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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
I remember when a suspect was regarded as innocent until proven guilty in a fair trial. Today prosecutors convict their victims in the media in order to make an unbiased jury impossible and thereby coerce a plea bargain that saves the prosecutor from having to prove his case. In the United States law is no longer a shield of the people. Law is a weapon in the hands of prosecutors. (See Roberts & Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions.)
Formerly, if a prosecutor staged an arrest for publicity purposes, as Mueller did by placing a CNN presstitute on the scene and sending a couple of dozen heavily armed men in a pre-dawn raid to arrest a well known political consultant for allegedly “lying to Congress” when the appropriate procedure is for Mueller to inform Stone’s lawyer to present his client for indictment, the judge would throw out the case on the grounds that the prosecutor’s unethical action had biased the juror pool and made a fair trial impossible. The judge might also have thrown out the case on the grounds of selective prosecution. James Clapper while serving as Director of National Intelligence lied to Congress under oath and suffered no consequences, and Hillary Clinton has clearly broken the law and lied about it.
Today judges permit unethical behavior by prosecutors that deprives defendants of a fair trial, because judges don’t want the bother of trials any more than prosecutors do. Consequently, according to official statistics 97% of federal criminal cases are settled by a defendent pleaing guilty to a charge negotiated by his attorney and a prosecutor. As the charge is a negotiated or made-up one, most people in prison are there for confessing to crimes that never occurred.
Prosecutors, now that they are no longer bound by constraints of legal integrity, often fabricate a case against a person in order to force the person to give false testimony against the prosecutor’s real target. This is what Mueller’s cases against Cohen, Manafort, and Roger Stone are. Trump is the target, not Cohen, Manafort, and Stone. In addition, prosecutors string out the investigation so long that they force the target to use up his net worth fighting off an indictment. Then when the indictment arrives, there is no money left for lawyers, which adds to the pressure to “cooperate.” If Trump were a fighting man, he would pardon Cohen, Manafort, and Stone, reimburse them out of the Justice (sic) Department’s budget for their legal expenses, and have Mueller arrested for sedition and plotting to overthrow the duly elected President of the United States. This would be hypocritical as Trump himself is plotting to overthrow the duly elected president of Venezuela.
Mueller is not an agent of law. He is the agent of the military/security complex (and factions within Democratic Party) who intend to do away with Trump, because Trump positioned himself between them and their agendas.
The preposterous charge against Trump is that he, in league with Russian President Vladimir Putin somehow through computer hacking and backdoor deals stole the presidential election from Hillary Clinton. This is the fabrication known as “Russiagate.” The creation of this fabrication involves far more crimes than those of which Trump, Cohen, Manafort, and Stone are accused. “Russiagate” rests on a fake “dossier” paid for by the Democrats and perhaps the FBI that was used to mislead the FISA court in order to obtain permission to spy on the Trump team. This is a felony for which the officials responsible are not being charged. The spying failed to turn up any real evidence, and neither has Muller’s “investigation.” The charges against Cohen, Manafort, and Stone are unrelated to the election and are likely false and used as threats for the purpose of eliciting false testimony against Trump in exchange for dropping the charges.
Mueller’s tactics in his effort to frame the President of the United States are more despicable than the tactics to which the Gestapo stooped. Even worse, they are the tactics commonly in use today by US attorneys, and this evil has spread into state and local prosecutions. That prosecutors routinely behave in a way that once would have caused them to be dismissed from office shows the collapse of law and prosecutorial integrity in the United States.
The American and British media are as accommodating in the frameups as the German media was with the Nazi government. The Guardian, once an honest voice for the British working class, is now a propaganda sheet for British intelligence just as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR are for the CIA and FBI. The US media has never been very good, but until the Clinton regime during which 90 percent of the media was concentrated in six corporate hands, there was more than one explanation.
Since Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, the media has been allied with the military/security complex and the Democratic Party in an effort to deep-six Trump. As I expected would be the case, Trump had no idea how to staff a government that would have supported him against the Establishment. He has been blocked on every front from normalizing relations with Russia to establishing control over US borders to withdrawal from Syria. The latest line from the military/security complex and the presstitutes is that the US cannot withdraw its troops illegally occupying a rump section of Syria, because ISIS is resurgent in Syria and Iraq and will renew the war if US troops are withdrawn.
This is nonsense. As General Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said on television, it was a willful decision of the Obama regime to send ISIS to overthrow Assad once Russia and the UK Parliament blocked a US invasion. It is Russia and Syria who fought and defeated Washington’s proxy army known as ISIS. Washington is blocking Trump’s order to withdraw US troops, because Israel wants the US to renew the attack on Syria and to carry it into Iran. Israel and its American vassals must think that Russia is going to stand down and permit the destabilization of the Islamic world to proceed into the Russian Federation.
Once upon a time the media and the foreign policy community would have publicly examined these issues. Now the media reads out the script handed to them.
As for Roger Stone, the media’s instructions are to convict Stone in the public’s mind as a facilitator of the Trump/Putin theft of the US presidential election. The actual facts do not matter, and the facts will never emerge from the media or from Mueller’s “investigation.”
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Die Ankündigung von Präsident Trump, in der er Juan Guaidó als „legitimen Präsidenten“ Venezuelas anerkennt, wurde in einem unterirdischen Kontrollraum innerhalb des Kongresses und des Weißen Hauses vorbereitet.
Dies wurde von der New York Times[1] ausführlich beschrieben. Der Hauptakteur, der republikanische Senator für Florida Marco Rubio,“gewissermaßen Außenminister für Lateinamerika, wird die Strategie der Regierung in der Region leiten und artikulieren“, in Verbindung mit Vizepräsident Mike Pence und National Security Advisor John Bolton.
Am 22. Januar präsentierten die drei Männer im Weißen Haus ihren Plan dem Präsidenten, der ihn billigte. Unmittelbar danach – so berichtet die New York Times – „rief Herr Pence Herrn Guaidó an und sagte ihm, dass die Vereinigten Staaten ihn unterstützen würden, wenn er die Präsidentschaft übernehmen würde „.
Vizepräsident Pence übertrug dann eine Videobotschaft nach Venezuela, in der er die Demonstranten aufforderte, „Ihre Stimmen morgen hören zu lassen“ und zu versicherte „ im Namen von Präsident Trump und dem amerikanischen Volk – estamos con ustedes (wir sind bei euch), solange die Demokratie nicht wiederhergestellt ist“, und Maduro als „Diktator, der die Präsidentschaft bei freien Wahlen nie gewonnen hat“ bezeichnete.
Am nächsten Tag krönte Trump Guaidó offiziell zum „Präsidenten Venezuelas“, obwohl er nicht an den Präsidentschaftswahlen im Mai 2018 teilgenommen hatte. Die Wahlen wurden von der Opposition boykottiert, die wusste, dass sie verlieren würde, und überreichte Maduro den Sieg unter der Aufsicht zahlreicher internationaler Beobachter.
Dieses hintergründige Gemunkel zeigt, dass politische Entscheidungen in den USA vor allem vom “Tiefen Staat” getroffen werden, dem unterirdischen Zentrum der realen Macht, das im Besitz der Wirtschafts-, Finanz- und Militäroligarchen ist. Das sind die Menschen, die beschlossen haben, den venezolanischen Staat zu stürzen. Abgesehen von seinen riesigen Vorräten an wertvollen Mineralien besitzt Venezuela die größten Ölreserven der Welt, die auf mehr als 300 Milliarden Barrel geschätzt werden, sechsmal mehr als die Vereinigten Staaten.
Um sich von der Zwangsjacke der Sanktionen zu befreien, die Venezuela daran hindern, die Dollars zu erhalten, die sie durch den Verkauf von Benzin an die USA verdient haben, hat Caracas beschlossen, den Verkaufspreis von Benzin nicht mehr in US-Dollar, sondern in chinesischen Yuan anzugeben. Dies ist ein Manöver, das die exorbitante Macht der Petrodollars bedroht, und aus diesem Grund haben die US-Oligarchien beschlossen, den Sturz des venezolanischen Staates zu beschleunigen und seinen Ölreichtum in die Hände zu bekommen. Sie brauchen diesen sofort, nicht als Energiequelle für die USA, sondern als strategisches Instrument zur Kontrolle des Weltenergiemarktes, vor allem gegen Russland und China.
Zu diesem Zweck wurden Sanktionen und Sabotage eingesetzt, um die Knappheit an Gütern des täglichen Bedarfs in Venezuela künstlich zu verschlimmern und damit die Unzufriedenheit der Bevölkerung zu schüren. Gleichzeitig wurde die Durchdringung von US-amerikanischen „Nichtregierungsorganisationen“ intensiviert – so hat beispielsweise die National Endowment for Democracy innerhalb eines Jahres mehr als 40 Projekte in Venezuela zur „Verteidigung der Menschenrechte und der Demokratie“ finanziert, die jeweils zehn- oder hunderttausende von Dollar kosteten.
Da die Regierung weiterhin die Unterstützung der Mehrheit genießt, ist mit ziemlicher Sicherheit eine groß angelegte Provokation in Vorbereitung, die einen Bürgerkrieg im Inneren auslösen und den Weg für Interventionen von außen ebnen soll. Unter der Mittäterschaft der Europäischen Union, die Caracas nach der Blockade venezolanischer öffentlicher Gelder in Belgien – ein Wert von 1,2 Milliarden Dollar – ein Ultimatum (mit Zustimmung der italienischen Regierung) für Neuwahlen stellte. Sie würden unter der Kontrolle von Federica Mogherini stehen, der gleichen Person, die Maduros Einladung, nach Venezuela zu gehen und die Präsidentschaftswahlen zu überwachen, im vergangenen Jahr abgelehnt hat.
Why is Canada violating the UN Charter and leading the way for regime change in Venezuela? Paul Jay and Yves Engler join Sharmini Peries.
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SHARMINI PERIES:It’s The Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore.
The Lima group will meet in Canada on February 4 to address the Venezuela crisis. For those of you who doesn’t even know who the Lima Group is, don’t worry; neither did we, many of us who are in the business of following this stuff. It is a multilateral body formed by Canada of Latin American countries that includes Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Guyana, and St. Lucia. The last two countries just joined.
The group was established in August of 2017 as an opposition to the OAS because they couldn’t get the decisions that they wanted to get out of the Organization of American States. So they formed a organization to address the Venezuela crisis. And in its mandate it states that it is established to bring about a peaceful resolution to the Venezuela crisis.
Joining me now to discuss Canada’s role in the Venezuela crisis today is Yves Engler and Paul Jay. Yves is a Canadian commentator and author of several books, and the most recent one is Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada. And Paul Jay is the Senior Editor-In-Chief here at The Real News Network. And he was also the former executive producer of Counterspin, a current affairs debate show that took place in Canada on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for nearly ten years. Thanks for joining us, Paul.
PAUL JAY:Thank you.
SHARMINI PERIES:So, Yves, let me go to you first. First of all, tell us about who or what this Lima Group is, why it was formed. And then, of course, why is Canada leading the charge here, along with the United States, in the Venezuela crisis?
YVES ENGLER:Yes. The Lima Group was formed because the governments that were critical of the Maduro government in Venezuela, because they couldn’t get resolutions through the Organization of American States. They didn’t have the majority of votes to pass resolutions at the OAS. So they basically set up another forum to bring together governments, mostly right-wing governments, in Latin America that were critical of the Maduro government. And Canada has played–was right there at the founding. Canada hosted the third meeting of the Lima Group, and now is hosting a second meeting; I think the first country to host two different meetings of the Lima Group. And this is just part, one part, of a multifaceted Canadian campaign to undermine the Maduro government in Venezuela.
That campaign includes all kinds of critical comments against the Venezuelan government; includes back in September bringing the Venezuelan government–first time ever that a member state has brought another member state to the International Criminal Court. Canada and a couple of other governments brought Venezuela to the International Criminal Court. Canada has brought in three rounds of sanctions against Venezuela. Canada has been funding opposition groups in Venezuela. Canada has been pressuring Caribbean countries to join the Lima Group, to join the critical statements of the Maduro government. And so–and then in recent–last few weeks, last couple of months, Canada has been right at the forefront in this campaign to recognize the head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaido, as the interim president, as the president of Venezuela, and completely reject the legitimacy of the Maduro government.
So the Liberal government in Canada is viewed by many as a sort of a progressive government. But the Trudeau government in Canada has been right at the forefront of this campaign to try to undermine the Maduro government. And you know, this is certainly what they’re looking for. My estimation is their preference would be a military coup. But there is some indication that Canada even would be fine with a foreign invasion. In fact, when the head of the Organization of American States a few months ago sort of mused about a possible foreign invasion, the Lima Group, or 11 of the 14 members of the Lima group, criticized the head of the Organization of American States for talking about a foreign invasion. Canada, Colombia, and Guyana were the three countries that refused to to condemn any talk of a foreign invasion. So possibly even Canada is prepared to accept some form of military type intervention as part of this effort to get rid of the Maduro government.
SHARMINI PERIES:All right. Paul, for many of us who feel warm and cozy about Canada being a peace loving nation that goes around the world with peacekeeping forces and not military forces–of course, that is a mythology. Give us a sense of the history of Canada’s role in these kinds of situations.
PAUL JAY:Well, let me talk specifically about Venezuela. Just a little note, first of all. Mexico was part of the Lima Group, but now with the new leadership, with AMLO now taking office in Mexico, Mexico is not going along with this plan to recognize Juan Guaido. Guaido or Guido? I keep mixing it up.
SHARMINI PERIES:Guaido.
PAUL JAY:Guaido. Thank you. Is not going along with this, and has called for–that it is a domestic affair, and that there should be negotiations. And Mexico is not the only country of the region. Many, many countries of CARICOM have come forward and have said they do not support this plan. So the corporate media is trying to make this sound like the whole region’s on board with this scheme.
Canada’s argument here, and it came out in the Canadian press recently, that the formation of the Lima group in 2017–and for months Canada has been playing a leading role in preparing for, according to the Canadian newspapers, for exactly what happened, the recognition of Juan Guaido. I keep screwing up his name, I’m sorry. Guaido? Am I saying it right? Juan Guaido. And that this has been a scheme for months. And Canada has been into this scheme for months. And the rationale is supposedly that the election of 2017 was not a legitimate election because there was the, people were supposedly kept out. The press is not telling people that there was a big boycott from the opposition that didn’t want to run. But because of–there are supposed to have been various infractions in the 2017 elections that reelected Maduro. This is the rationale for why Canada gets so involved.
Well, it’s a total crock. And the reason it’s a crock is I know from personal experience that Canada has been trying to destabilize and nurture and promote the opposition in Venezuela at least from 2004. When Chavez was still in power, Chavez had been elected over and over again with internationally observed elections. Everyone said the elections were clean during the Chavez period. Many people that tried to throw the elections into disrepute were invalidated. The Carter Center legitimatized them. I actually personally was on an election observer mission to go to polling stations in 2004, 2005, one of the elections leading up to the referendum on Chavez’s presidency. And I went to 40 polling stations, and I interviewed opposition people in all 40 polling stations in Caracas. And I asked, have you seen any infractions? And if there were any infractions were they dealt with properly. And I took video, and I recorded it all, and there wasn’t a single complaint from an opposition observer that there had been anything done incorrectly with those elections. And in fact, this vote was called the report. So it’s a complicated thing, but it led to a referendum on Chavez’s presidency. And in fact, the opposition won that vote.
Now, right around that time, when they were clean elections, and Chavez was getting elected over and over again, my first trip to Venezuela in 2004, I was producing the big debate show on Canadian TV called Counterspin on CBC Newsworld. I was a well-known documentary filmmaker. I had founded the Big Hot Docs! Documentary Film Festival. So I was a known quantity in Canada. And so when I was in Venezuela I said for the heck of it I’ll go say hello to the Canadian Embassy, and take their temperature. And you know, I was trying to figure out what was going on in Venezuela. And so I went, I went to the embassy. I made an appointment and I went to go see–I figured I’d see some counselor of some kind who would, you know, pat me on the head and say welcome to Venezuela. No, I get, like, the number two charge d’affaires greets me and brings me into a meeting room with seven members of the opposition who then for–it must have been two hours–beat me over the head with how corrupt the regime was, how awful it was, and so on.
I’m not going to comment on what was right or wrong with what the opposition people said. I have perhaps that sort of experience. I don’t know. What I do know is what business does the Canadian Embassy have bring in a Canadian journalist into a room with opposition people, doing–essentially trying to involve me in a conspiracy against the Venezuelan government.
So this Canadian role in Venezuela, it’s been going on for a long time, and been very, very active in trying to destabilize the situation, promote and nurture the opposition. And clearly for two reasons. Number one, Canada is one of the biggest mining nations in the world, and Venezuela has tremendous untapped natural resources, particularly gold. And Canada has a very strong gold mining sector. And the gold was not–Canada wasn’t, Canadian companies weren’t easily getting at that gold. There was one company called Crystallex that actually had a concession and then lost it. So the ability to nurture an opposition and get an in with an opposition that might come to power, and then favour Canadian mining companies, I think that’s one motivation.
And another motivation, I think, has to do with Canada’s role historically; how it plays with the United States and helps the U.S. and its foreign policy. And I once interviewed a Canadian general in 2004, Lewis MacKenzie. And I asked him, why is Canada so into this Afghan war? You know, this Afghan, post-9/11. It could have been dealt with as a police-type operation, in terms of going after al Qaeda. But a full-fledged invasion, full-fledged regime change. Why is Canada in this, and in it for the long haul? Because it’s 2004, after the invasion of Iraq. And his answer was, I think, very instructive. He said, well, we didn’t go to Iraq. So to keep our ability to selling goods into the United States, we needed to pay with some blood. We needed to send troops to Afghanistan and have some Canadian soldiers killed to show we’re willing to share the burden. He didn’t use the word empire, but that’s essentially what he was saying.
So the role of Canada assisting in very nefarious American policy, and giving it this Canadian, oh, we’re for the UN, we’re humanitarians, giving it that veneer, it’s an important role that Canada plays. But it’s, I think, now the recognition of Guaido so exposes Canada because it’s such a clear violation of the UN Charter of non-interference in internal affairs.
SHARMINI PERIES:All right. Now, the Canadian media wasn’t really covering this issue very much till recently. And I saw Thomas Walkom in the Toronto Star do a very good article that reinforces what Paul just said about Canada’s role, and the interest of trade, and of course the interests of Canadian corporations getting played out through its foreign policy. And then there was a blast of news in the Globe and Mail today about the Lima Group, and so forth. Tell us how the Canadian media is covering this issue, and are they seeing through the farce here about keeping peace in Venezuela?
YVES ENGLER:No. I mean, the Canadian media is sort of on two hands. On one hand they are just following the sort of Washington-Ottawa propaganda about how, you know, Maduro’s a total dictator that needs to be overthrown. On one hand they’re doing that, and that’s the sort of bulk of the discussion. But simultaneously they have, as Paul pointed out, the Globe and Mail and the Canadian press both run incredibly–what should be viewed as incredibly damning stories about Canada’s role in building opposition support for Guaido. They talk about how Canada’s facilitating meetings within Venezuela, facilitating meetings internationally to try to solidify support for this recognition of the head of the National Assembly.
But the thrust of the stories are that, you know, to just present this as a positive affair that Canada is pursuing, to the point where a few of the NDP, the social democratic party, MPs, or people in that party, a couple of them have expressed criticism of Canada’s policy on Twitter, and the media has sort of pushed back against the NDP’s, in my opinion, quite mild criticism of Canadian policy.
But I do want to echo, for sure, what Paul is saying. There’s a quote in terms of Canada’s role historically in terms of serving empire, and the fact that sometimes it’s better to have a sort of Canadian face on an intervention than a more sort of, more easily demonized U.S. face. In his biography, Jacques Chretien, a former prime minister, says quite explicitly that he told Bill Clinton that if we just go along with you in everything, we’re just going to be perceived as a 51st state. But if we, if it looks like we have a little bit of independence, we can do more for you than the CIA can do. And it was almost like–that’s a paraphrase, almost word for word. So there’s just this historic kind of putting a bit of a Canada, a positive Canada cover on policies that the U.S. is pursuing around the world.
And there’s a long history of that in the hemisphere beyond the example that Paul gave with regards to Afghanistan. In Haiti in 2004 Canada played a very important role in the overthrow of the elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide. And again, there was Bill Graham, the former defense minister, said in a book about about the war in Afghanistan, he said that because Canada officially joined the coalition of the willing that invaded Iraq in 2003, they felt like they needed to not only go heavily into Afghanistan, but also participate significantly in the coup in Haiti.
So part of this Canadian policy in Venezuela today is about Canada’s close ties to the U.S. empire. And Canada, in my opinion, has been quite a beneficiary. The Canadian corporate class have been very much beneficiaries of U.S. empire for half a century. And the mining sector in Latin America is a big force, banking sector is a big force that partly explains Canadian policy there today.
SHARMINI PERIES:All right. Paul, do you have anything more to add before we sign off here?
PAUL JAY:Well, just a, just a quick note that Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, it was his father that played exactly this role in Vietnam. There was something called the International Control Commission, the ICC, that was, I believe, under the auspices of the UN, supposed to monitor treaties and such and during the Vietnam War. And they would go to Hanoi and interview people in the North, and they would observe, and then they would come back. And it turned out that the Canadian delegation, completely contrary to international law and the norms of such a commission, was going back and reporting to the CIA on what was going on in North Vietnam, and straightforwardly spying. So it seems to be a family business in the Trudeau family to play this kind of a role.
SHARMINI PERIES:And yet at the same time Pierre Trudeau established a different kind of approach when there was sanctions and the blockade against Cuba, where it was beneficial for Canada to have direct relations different from that of the U.S. in Cuba, where the Canadian companies actually benefited from that, as well.
PAUL JAY:Well, it’s true. But let’s add to that it was Diefenbaker, the conservative, that established that policy, and refused to join the embargo and sanctions that the Americans tried to get Diefenbaker to impose on Cuba. So while it’s true Pierre Trudeau did that, he was carrying on the policy of Diefenbaker.
SHARMINI PERIES:And then subsequent governments actually upheld those, you know, open trade relations and bypassed American blockades against Cuba. So there is precedent set that Canada could follow.
So, stay tuned. These conversations will continue here The Real News Network. Thanks for joining us, Yves Engler, in Toronto, yes?
YVES ENGLER:Montreal.
SHARMINI PERIES:In Montreal. Yves Engler in Montreal, and Paul Jay right here at The Real News Studio. Thanks for joining us.
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More than eight out of ten Venezuelans oppose international intervention, both military and non-military, in their country, as well as the crippling sanctions imposed by the United States to force leftist President Nicolás Maduro out of power.
The news of drawdown of American forces is expected after the next round of peace talks is held in late February in the capital of Qatar, Doha, in which Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a close aide to the Taliban’s deceased leader Mullah Omar, will lead the Taliban delegation.
Riotous protesters briefly stormed the Cameroonian Embassies in Paris and Berlin over the weekend in an attempt to raise global awareness about the rolling regime change campaign back in their homeland following the reelection of President Biya to his seventh consecutive term in office late last year, possibly forcing France to choose sides in decisively throwing its weight behind either its decades-long proxy or his anti-government opponents.
The British political establishment is experiencing an unprecedented crisis over the issue of exiting the European Union. The Conservative government staggers from crisis to crisis over its Brexit deal while politicians off all colours bicker and argue as the UK lurches towards a potentially devastating No Deal scenario.
A large number of prisoners, all of them senior members of Daesh (also ISIS or ISIL) terrorist group, broke out of a Taliban prison in northwest Afghanistan after US troops helped them escape through a covert operation.
The United States and its allies have done both extensively – from exploiting the flow of refugees fleeing US-led wars in Libya and Syria – to the cynical exploitation of high-profile cases like Rahaf al-Qunun of Saudi Arabia and Hakeem al-Araibi of Bahrain – both of whom are fleeing autocratic regimes armed and propped up exclusively by the West.
Socialism isn’t the problem. The problem in Venezuela is the cancer of Western-supported deep state agencies that are subverting its political economy for the perceived benefit of a tiny transnational oligarch class.
Prominent billionaire George Soros has launched an attack on China’s President Xi Jinping in his annual speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He warned that artificial intelligence and machine learning presented ‘unprecedented danger’ and ‘a mortal threat to open societies’ if used by authoritarian regimes.
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The Trump administration has imposed sanctions on Venezuela’s state-run oil company and moved to block any U.S. revenues from going to Venezuela’s government. Like the administration’s Iran sanctions, this will do immediate and significant harm to the civilian population:
Such a blow to the government’s revenue stream could deteriorate an already dramatic scarcity of food and medicines. Crippling hyperinflation has broken the socialist nation, fueling widespread hunger, spreading disease and prompting a historic wave of Venezuelan migrants. In Venezuela, the government is responsible for a large portion of imports, meaning shortages of food and medicine could deepen as the government loses access to cash from oil sales to the United States [bold mine-DL].
“There’s no way the population won’t be affected in the short term,” said Luis Vicente Leon, head of Datanalisis, a Caracas-based polling and political analysis firm. “If this strategy isn’t successful quickly, the effect on the people will be devastating. “ [bold mine-DL]
Most of the hardship that Venezuelans have endured for the past several years has been caused by the failures and mismanagement of their own government, but this move by the U.S. to strangle the Venezuelan government and the economy will inflict punishment on the entire population and exacerbate the already severe humanitarian crisis in the country. If Maduro has brought the people of Venezuela to the edge of a precipice, the Trump administration’s sanctions will push them over the edge. There is no justification for punishing the civilian population for the wrongdoing of their leaders, especially when the administration’s official line is that they are supposedly trying to help the people. Much like the administration’s empty rhetoric of support for the Iranian people, their professions of concern for the people of Venezuela appear to be similarly vacuous.
Sanctions are a blunt and frequently indiscriminate weapon that the U.S. uses with little thought for the effect that they have on the people in the targeted country. Until now, the administration had refrained from imposing sweeping sanctions on Venezuela that would repeat their mistake in Iran, but their eagerness to force regime change has led them to resort to the same cruel collective punishment. The administration wants to starve Maduro of revenue, but as a result of that they are going to be starving innocent Venezuelan civilians of basic necessities. U.S. policy towards Venezuela amounts to unwarranted, destructive economic warfare against the entire country in a bid to topple the current leadership. This policy is every bit as indefensible as the economic war that the Saudi coalition is still waging against Yemen, and Americans need to stand up and reject a policy that will lead to loss of life from preventable causes. Instead of helping the people cope with the terrible humanitarian conditions, our government is stepping on their heads as they drown.
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Featured image is from Reynaldo Riobueno/Shutterstock
In a victory for advocates of precaution, an Italian court has ordered the government to launch a campaign to advise the public of the health risks from mobile and cordless phones.
The information campaign must begin by July 16.
The court in Rome reached its decision last November, but the announcement was only made yesterday. The decision is here.
Today, the government announced that it would not appeal the ruling, Stefano Bertone told Microwave News. Bertone is with the law firm of Ambrosio and Commodo in Turin, and is helping represent a citizens group called APPLE, which sued to force the government to act. APPLE is an acronym for the Association for the Prevention of and Fight Against Electrosmog.
In a joint press release, three different ministries —of Health, of Environment and of Education and Research— acknowledge that there is a need to raise public awareness on how to use mobile phones safely.
“This case has important implications not only in Italy, but worldwide,” Bertone said. “At the moment, health and safety information is contained —or, I should say, buried— in cell phone manuals. This is not good enough. If it was, the court would have agreed with the government that sufficient information is already available.”
In October 2012, the Italian Supreme Court affirmed a ruling granting a claim for workers compensation filed by a businessman who claimed that his use of a cell phone for 12 years had caused a tumor to develop on one of his cranial nerves (the trigeminal nerve). Gino Angelo Levis, a founder of APPLE, was an expert witness for the plaintiff.
Today’s local coverage from La Repubblica is here, and from Corriere della Serahere.
A fake-news story about large-scale clashes between pro-Russian and pro-Iranian factions in Syria is making jitters in English- and Russian-language mainstream media outlets. According to these reports citing anonymous sources and each other, “the pro-Russian Tiger Forces and 5th Assault Corps” clashed with “the pro-Iranian 4th Division” near the villages of “Shahta, Bredidg, Innab and Haydariye” in northern Hama.
Most of the reports claimed that there were casualties among the sides providing “precise” numbers varying from a dozen to 200 fighters from the both sides. No source was able to provide details into how clashes had started but the versions are varying from “some differences” to “a campaign to limit Iranian influence”.
Most of the media outlets presented these reports as some kind of breaking news. However, in fact, this is a week-old story. First such reports appeared in several pro-militant social media accounts and a local media outlet, al Modon Online. Later this rumor was reposted by anti-Assad, anti-Iranian and anti-Russian bloggers also citing anonymous sources to show the story look more reliable. By January 29, this rumor has reached large mainstream media outlets, but no evidence has appeared to confirm this kind of developments. However, the lack of factual data was ignored because this story is contributing to the US-Israeli-backed media efforts designed to undermine cooperation between Iran and Russia or at least to show that there are significant tensions between the sides.
The similar situation was observed in 2018 when various mainstream media outlets and even top US leadership like President Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo were claiming that “hundreds” of “Russian fighters” were killed by the US-led coalition in the province of Deir Ezzor. Both of these stories demonstrate how media forgery could reach the wide international audience and start being repeated as facts despite zero evidence supporting them.
On January 27, Russian forces launched at least three surface-to-air missiles at unidentified aerial objects near the Hmeimim airbase. According to local sources, at least 3 UAVs apparently launched from the Idlib de-escalation zone were intercepted.
The Syrian Arab Army deployed reinforcements at frontlines near the Idlib de-escalation zone and carried out a series of artillery strikes on militant positions in northwestern Hama and southern Idlib on January 28 and 29.
The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces continue to claim dozens of casualties among ISIS members in the Euphrates Valley. However, a few remaining ISIS positions remaining there are still not captured.
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When Trump announced his support for the unfolding coup in Venezuela, Bernie Sanders remained silent for 24 hours. This matters because coups are made or broken in the first moments or hours; a day during a coup can feel like a month or more.
With each hour Bernie’s silence roared louder. So much was hanging in the balance with Trump at home and abroad, to the point where a finger could tip the scales— yet Bernie refused to lift his.
Among the many Democratic Party candidates running for President, only Tulsi Gabbard (image on the right) made an unequivocal statement condemning the coup, while leftist darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez limited her criticism to a retweet.
While U.S. politics grappled furiously over the government shutdown, Trump’s coup gifted the Democrats a dagger and an exposed flank, yet they refused to strike, returning the weapon so that it could be used against the democratically-elected government of Venezuela.
Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats went further and cheerleaded their Commander and Chief by using their platform to attack President Maduro. Trump’s position was consequently strengthened. Instead of being condemned for breaking international law he was made to look like a responsible statesman, leading a “coalition” of countries facing off against an ‘authoritarian dictator’. The virulently anti-Trump section of the U.S. media closed ranks in his favor— since it was difficult to find a dissenting opinion.
In this context Trump was put into an excellent position to win the war over the government shutdown, that is until the bold actions of airport workers swiftly ended the drama. But Trump certainly learned a valuable lesson: the Democratic Party “resistance” crumbles in critical moments when a foreign conflict erupts, which helps promote more such moments in the future.
Bernie Finally Tweets!
After an excruciating day of silence Bernie finally found his voice— by sending three tweets. But the content was revealing, reinforcing the weakness that kept him silent during the first critical day.
Tweet #1 was essentially a point-by-point plagiarism of Trump’s lies used to justify the coup. Bernie Tweeted:
“The Maduro government has waged a violent crackdown on Venezuelan civil society, violated the constitution by dissolving the National Assembly and was re-elected last year in an election many observers said was fraudulent. The economy is a disaster and millions are migrating.”
Instead of targeting Trump’s coup actions Bernie targets the victim. Bernie’s allegation of a fraudulent election is simply slander, since Venezuela’s elections are widely regarded as among the best in the world.
Every time the opposition in Venezuela believes they’ll lose an election they “boycott” it, though the opposition was fractured during the last election, to the point where some boycotted while others supported two separate anti-Maduro candidates. Thus, every semi-objective observer knew Maduro would easily and fairly cruise to victory. For Bernie to give Trump this ammo— the key rationale being used to justify the coup— simply makes the Senator an accomplice in a crime.
Furthermore, Bernie claiming that Maduro “dissolved the National Assembly” is also untrue. Although what happened is complicated, the Venezuelan Supreme Court (not Maduro) dissolved the National Assembly in 2017, in reaction to flagrant violations of law that made the pro-opposition Assembly a non-functioning institution that only passed laws which unconstitutionally attacked Maduro’s government.
Venezuela has been functioning in a state of dual power since 2017, when a unitary government was torn into two by the pressures of the class struggle and the non-stop shenanigans of a U.S. supported opposition hellbent on overthrowing the government.
Regarding Bernie’s mention of the economy being “a disaster”, he surely knows that U.S. economic sanctions, pro-opposition immigration policies and political threats have much to do with the situation, choosing to ignore these critical factors because doing so bolsters anti-Maduro sentiment.
Bernie’s 2nd Tweet was a reinforcement of the first, further buttressing Trump’s actions:
“The United States should support the rule of law, fair elections and self-determination for the Venezuelan people. We must condemn the use of violence against unarmed protesters and the suppression of dissent.”
The “unarmed protestors” that Bernie is referring to here are the shock troops of the wealthy opposition trying to overthrow the government, who in 2017 lead deadly, violent protests that resulted in over a 100 dead, which included the opposition burning alive at least four pro-Maduro supporters. Bernie certainly knows that the opposition in Venezuela is neither peaceful nor democratic.
The 3rd and final tweet is where Bernie finally expresses his half-hearted “opposition” to Trump’s coup:
“But we must learn the lessons of the past and not be in the business of regime change or supporting coups—as we have in Chile, Guatemala, Brazil & the DR. The US has a long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American nations; we must not go down that road again.”
Bernie says “we must not go down that road again”, while failing to condemn the fact that Trump is a 1,000 miles down the coup road already. Much planning and organization has gone into the coup, to the point where every pro-U.S. country in South America and key European allies have agreed to recognize a new President, Juan Guaido, who has zero actual legitimacy.
Also, critically, in his Tweets Bernie puts no demands on Trump, offering no solutions to the mushrooming crisis— he doesn’t insist that Trump withdraw his recognition of the coup leader as President, nor does he suggest any specific actions that would act to reverse the current course, allowing it to continue unbothered.
Such a passive position— that buttresses many of the key lies that Trump used to make his case— amounts to, at best, a neutral position, and as Desmond Tutu said “neutrality aids the oppressor”. In reality Bernie’s position is a signal to Trump that no organized opposition to the coup will occur, while Democrats will limit their reaction to the ensuing bloodshed by criticizing Maduro.
Why Imperialism Matters
The question of imperialism isn’t abstract, affecting only people in under-developed, ‘exotic’ countries like Venezuela. In reality U.S. foreign intervention government directly impacts U.S. residents every day, ruining their living standards while ensuring that their children have an even less opportune future.
Money spent abroad— and the politics it creates— always affects what’s possible domestically, since tax dollars that go to destroy other governments cannot be used for the kind of proposals that Bernie makes, such as Medicare For All, free college education, a Green New Deal, etc. A key reason that Western European countries have amazing social programs is the small size of their armies.
War spending acts as an endless, guaranteed veto to social programs that people in the U.S. desperately want but are always denied— a true example of how oppression abroad limits your freedoms at home.
“Imperialism is a bogeyman that haunts social progress, re-appearing in countless forms to keep resources flowing endlessly into wars abroad that stunt domestic spending and distract from working class demands. A new military “crisis” will always strive to take priority over domestic considerations.”
Will the Coup Fail?
Some analysts have already dismissed Trump’s coup as a failure, since the Venezuelan military appears unified in their support for Maduro. But the coup machinery is marching forward. U.S. allies in Europe (France, Germany, and Spain) have given Maduro 8 days to hold new elections, or they will recognize Juan Guaido as President. Of course elections cannot be held in 8 days in any country; the demand simply acts as a pretense to give the coup momentum.
For European powers to follow Trump into the abyss over Venezuela means that Trump has spent much political capital cajoling them into action. This coup is a serious investment that will demand returns. The nations following Trump don’t typically break with international norms so spectacularly, since doing so is risky; thus the Europeans must be convinced that the U.S. will actually complete the coup, ensuring that Maduro falls, otherwise Germany will be recognizing as President a man ingloriously hiding underground to avoid arrest like a common criminal.
If Trump fails to complete the coup the U.S. loses vital credibility, and next time finding allies on such adventures will be harder. If the U.S. recognizes a President that never becomes President there are political-economic consequences. For example the U.S. cannot afford to look weak internationally while it’s actively threatening China and Russia and still involved in the multi-nation Syrian War. The major powers are furiously competing for allies and a failed coup makes one less competitive.
A country that uses its military as its main political lever cannot afford a sickly image, which is a key reason why so many establishment figures were furious at Trump for not “finishing the job” in Syria, leaving Assad in power (Trump has since hesitated on his decision).
Trump is thus committed to this new undertaking, which will deepen in the coming days and weeks. Many are expecting that Trump will use the ‘Syrian option’ — formerly referred to as the ‘Salvador option’ — which begins with the arming and training of anti-Maduro militias, and ends with attacks on the government and/or pro-Maduro forces that create the “need” for U.S. intervention to impose “law and order”. The rehearsal for this strategy already occured in 2017, when the above-mentioned violent protests occurred but didn’t quite provoke a large enough crisis to justify U.S. military intervention.
Such conspiracy theories were immediately given credence when Trump announced, mid-coup, that he had a new ‘Special Envoy’ to Venezuela, thenotorious Elliot Abrams, made famous for his role in the Iran-Contra affair, where he was in the inner circle breaking laws while publicly advocating for the death squads (or “Contras”) that terrorized Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, which is where the term “Salvador Option” was birthed. Abrams was convicted for his role in Iran-Contra but predictably pardoned by George H.W. Bush (who used his office as VP to Reagan to promote Iran-Contra).
In his new position Abrams will focus on accelerating and finalizing the coup by holding talks with Venezuelan military and opposition figures, cobbling together groups willing to take the coup to the next level, and no doubt conspiring with hostile neighbors Columbia and Brazil, who can easily be lured in to the conflict with the smallest of concessions (Columbia has been involved for a number of years). Promises will be made to Venezuelan military figures who, after defecting, will have their profiles raised as the new leaders of the newly-created Venezuelan military.
If Maduro Falls
Abrams approach will quickly lead Venezuela into an especially bloody civil war, since much of the military came into maturity under Chavez, the majority of which still retain a strong devotion to the revolution and its principles.
Chavismo is further buttressed by the still-expanding National Bolivian Militia, where hundreds of thousands of working-class people received military training that focused, in part, to prepare the country for exactly the kind of coup being unleashed today. The Venezuelan working class will not quietly accept a right-wing dictatorship, and they have the means and organization to resist and win.
But if Maduro’s government falls the far-right opposition will seek to bulldoze the progress made under the Chavez-Maduro governments: a mass privatization frenzy will ensue while the currency crisis will be resolved over the backs of the working class.
The size of the political and economic “correction” will require enormous amounts of blood be spilled, as the organizations of the working class resist the attacks on their living standards, democracy, and dignity. The would-be President Juan Guaido has already discussed plans to ramp up the privatization of Venezuela’s oil, as well as going to the austiery-hungry IMF, who will demand nothing less than their typical “restructuring” economic packages that target the social programs created by Chavez-Maduro. Ironically, it was IMF austerity that sparked the Venezuelan revolution nearly 30 years ago with the Caracazo Uprising.
When democracy is easily trashed abroad it empowers anti-democratic forces at home. As the U.S. military-industrial complex is emboldened, so too are the far-right political actors in the U.S. that are the most hardened supporters of militarism and ‘Trumpism’. As coups give birth to fascist-minded governments abroad, new allies for Trumpism are created from what could have been allies for the left. These are the hidden yet real consequences of Bernie’s inaction, which serves to minimize the importance of imperialism at a historic moment for the western hemisphere.
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Venezuela has the dubious fortune of being located on the continent of South America, which the United States has treated under the so-called “Monroe Doctrine” as its exclusive zone of political, economic, and military influence. In practical terms it meant that whenever a Latin American government pursued a policy at odds with Washington’s preferences, it would be subjected to measures ranging from economic sanctions to outright military invasion.
Latin America became one of the many battlefields of the Cold War when several countries sought to leave the US shadow and align themselves with USSR. The US retaliation was harsh, and included the support for the brutal military coup in Chile, training of “death squads” in Honduras and El Salvador, support for the so-called Contras in Nicaragua, not to mention the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Once the Cold War was over, however, a relative peace settled over the region, with Cuba remaining the only hold-out against US power. Even the coming to power of soft Marxist “pink wave” governments in Venezuela and Bolivia did not seem to overly ruffle Washington’s feathers. But the current escalation of the US campaign against Venezuela suggests a revival of US activism in the region.
“Energy Dominance”
One might as well cut to the chase and state the obvious: Venezuela is not only a member of OPEC, it is also a country with the world’s largest known oil reserves dwarfing those even of Saudi Arabia. It is no coincidence that pretty much every country that has been on the US “hit list” in the last decade or so—Libya, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela—is a major producer of hydrocarbons. Given that the global economy is utterly dependent on steady provision of hydrocarbons, US political control over these countries means a stranglehold over major industrial competitors to the United States, namely the EU and China. It also creates US jobs, once US oil companies establish control over the country’s oil fields. At the very least, should the effort to place the country under indirect US control fail, plunging it into chaos removes a competitor to struggling domestic US oil producers.
Monroe Doctrine Returns
The timing of the US escalation closely follows the visit by Russian Tu-160 strategic bombers to Venezuela during which the possibility of creating a Russian military base in the country was discussed by some media outlets. Given that Russia has by now established through the Syrian example that once Russian troops arrive in a country they are unlikely to leave no matter how great the US pressure, Washington may have decided to step up the pressure in the hopes of not only Russia but it’s other major competitor, China, from establishing themselves more firmly in the country. Russia’s Rosneft already has considerable presence in the Venezuela, assisting it with the development of its oil potential, and China has also made a number of investments in the country, though its economic footprint remains modest. Moreover, the US aggression against Venezuela sends a signal to the nearby Nicaragua, also a country facing increasing US political pressure, against pursuing a project of building a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with China’s support.
Thus far US actions consisted of economic sanctions and apparent coordination of coup attempts to be carried out by elements within Venezuela’s military and security forces. It is still difficult to make out what the Trump Administration’s recognition of Juan Guaido, the President of the National Assembly of Venezuela, as the country’s “interim president” was supposed to represent. Even by the standards of Trump’s current foreign policy team of Pompeo and Bolton, “recognition” of a claimant to supreme executive office who does not actually occupy said office is unprecedented. Not even in the case of Syria, where the US has been far more directly involved in attempting to overthrown its legitimate government, was any opposition leader “recognized” as the official representative of the country itself. Therefore one may conclude Guaido’s “recognition” was supposed to follow the military coup which Guaido probably promised and Washington clearly expected. It is also difficult to say whether Guaido overestimated the degree of his support within the military or outright lied to his American sponsors. Either way, the US intelligence community has once again failed at providing an accurate assessment of the situation within a country, as Venezuela’s military rallied around President Maduro.
Bay of Pigs 2
United States has thus painted itself into a corner. Guaido’s recognition, which was moreover coordinated with the bulk of Latin America’s countries and with the European Union (which likewise points to a wider though failed conspiracy to overthrow Venezuela’s government) cannot very well be walked back. Maduro’s continued presidency has now become a challenge to US power at least as great as Assad’s. One can therefore expect stepped up US efforts to overthrow Venezuela’s government, though it remains to be seen how far the US is willing to go. An outright US military invasion appears unlikely at the moment. The most recent such effort has been in Panama during the George H.W. Bush administration, a far smaller and easier to control country. There is no evidence of US intelligence services training Venezuelan expats in the manner of the “Bay of Pigs” invasion force or the Nicaraguan contras. However, Venezuela is bordered by two countries ruled by far-right politicians closely allied to the United States, Brazil and Colombia. In the wake of the failed US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and with the US military retooling itself for great power confrontations, the US modus operandi in the past several years has been to use proxy armies. These may take the form of non-state actors funded and armed by US intelligence agencies or of friendly states, as in the case of Saudi Arabia’s invasion of Yemen. One could readily imagine the Yemen model used against Venezuela, but this time with a “Brazil-led” coalition doing Washington’s dirty work.
Bargaining Chip?
Last but not least, one must consider the possibility of Venezuela being treated as a bargaining chip in some sort of negotiation with Russia and/or China in the delineation of the great powers’ spheres of influence. This would mark a de-facto return to the policy of compensations wherein the balance of power is preserved by major powers ceding parts of their empires to others in exchange for gains elsewhere. Thus, for example, Washington could approach Moscow and offer a “Venezuela for Syria” or even “Venezuela for Ukraine” bargain. While not out of the realm of possibility, it remains a difficult course of action to imagine for two reasons. The first is that there is little awareness of the limits of US power in Washington itself. The expectation is still of powering through any opposition. The second is that even if the offer were made, it would probably not be accepted in Moscow. Apart from the cost to Russia’s international image, the US at this point has very low credibility and trustworthiness.
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It is all a rather sorry tale. Molly Russell, another teenager gorged on social media content, sharing and darkly revelling, took her own life in 2017 supposedly after viewing what the BBC described as “disturbing content about suicide on social media.” Causation is presumed, and the platform hosting the content is saddled with blame.
Molly’s father was not so much seeking answers as attributing culpability. Instagram, claimed Ian Russell, “helped kill my daughter”. He was also spoiling to challenge other platforms: “Pinterest has a huge amount to answer for.” These platforms do, but not in quite the same way suggested by the aggrieved father.
The political classes were also quick to jump the gun. Here was a chance to score a few moral points as a distraction from the messiness of Brexit negotiations. UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock was in combative mood on the Andrew Marr show: “If we think they need to do things they are refusing to do, then we can and we must legislate.” Material dealing with self-harm and suicide would have to be purged. As has become popular in this instance, the purging element would have to come from technology platforms themselves, helped along by the kindly legislators.
Any time the censor steps in as defender of morality, safety and whatever tawdry assertions of social control, citizens should be alarmed. Such attitudes are precisely the sorts of things that empty libraries and lead to the burning of books, even if they host the nasty and the unfortunate. Content deemed undesirable must be removed; offensive content must be expunged to make us safe. The alarming thing there here is that compelling the tech behemoths to undertake such a task has the effect of granting them even more powers of social control than before. Don’t they exert enough control as it is?
While social media giants can be accused, on a certain level, of faux humanitarianism and their own variant of sublimated sociopathic control (surveillance capitalism is alive and well), they are merely being hectored for the logical consequence of sharing information and content. This is set to become more concentrated, with Facebook, as Zak Doffmanwrites, planning to integrate Instagram and WhatsApp further to enable users “across all three platforms to share messages and information more easily”. Given Facebook’s insatiable quest for advertising revenue, Instagram is being tasked with being the dominant force behind it.
The onus on production and exchange is on customers: the customers supply the material, and spectacle. They are the users and the exploited. This, in turn, enables the social media tech groups to monetise data, trading it, exploiting it and tanking privacy measures in the process. The social media junkie is a modern, unreflective drone.
In doing so, an illusion of independent thinking is created, where debates can supposedly be had, and ideas formed. The grand peripatetic walk can be pursued. Often, the opposite takes place: groups assemble along lines of similar thought; material of like vein is bounced around under the impression it advances discussion when it merely provides filling for a cork-lined room or chamber of near-identical thinking. All of this is assisted by the algorithmic functions performed by the social media entities, all in the name of making the “experience” you have a richer one. Far be it in their interest to make sure you juggle two contradictory ideas at the same time.
Instagram’s own “Community Guidelines” have the aim of fostering and protecting “this amazing community” of users. It suggests that photos and videos that are shared should only be done by those with a right to. Featured photos and videos should be directed towards “a diverse audience”. A reminder that the tech giant is already keen on promoting a degree of control is evident in restrictions on nudity – a point that landed the platform in some hot water last year. “This includes photos, videos, and some digitally-created content that show sexual intercourse, genitals, and close-ups of fully-nude buttocks.” That’s many an art period banished from viewing and discussion.
The suicide fraternity is evidently wide enough to garner interest, even if the cult of self-harm takes much ethical punishment from the safety lobby. Material is still shared. Self-harm advisories are distributed through the appropriate channels.
Instagram’s response to this is to try to nudge such individuals towards content and groups that might just as equally sport reassuring materials to discourage suicide and self-harm. Facebook, through its recently appointed Vice-President of Global Affairs, Sir Nick Clegg, was even happy to point out that the company had prevented suicides:
“Over the last year, 3,500 people who were displaying behaviour liable to lead to the taking of their own lives on Facebook were saved by early responders being pointed to those and people and intervening at the right time.”
This is all to the good, but such views fail in not understanding that social media is not used or engaged in to change ideas so much as create communities who only worship a select few. The tyranny of the algorithm is a hard one to dislodge.
In engaging such content, we are dealing with narcotised dragoons of users, the unquestioning creating content for the unchallenged. That might prove to be the greatest social crime of all, the paradox of nipping curiosity rather than nurturing it, but instead of dealing with the complexities of information from this perspective, governments are going to make technology companies the chief censors. It might well be argued that enough of that is already taking place as it is, this being the age of deplatforming. Whether it be a government or a social media giant, the same shoddy principle is the same: others know better than you do, and you should be protected from yourself.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
Featured image is from Russell family/Leigh Day Law vis FarmWeek
Understanding imperialism as a general phenomenon loses sight of its modus operandi in any specific and meaningful context. While the exercise of imperialist power is a common strategy, its motives, instruments, objectives and engagement vary, depending on the nature of the imperial ruler and targeted country.
Venezuela, the current target of US, President Donald Trump, is a case illustrating the ‘peculiarities’ of imperialist politics. We will proceed to outline the background, techniques and impact of the imperial power grab.
Historical Background
The US has a long history of intervention in Venezuela primarily to gain control of its oil wealth. During the 1950’s Washington backed a military dictatorship –led by Perez Jimenez— until it was overthrown by mass alliance of revolutionary socialist, nationalist and Social Democratic parties. Washington could not and did not intervene; instead it sided with the center-left Democratic Action (AD) and center-right COPEI parties which proceeded to declare war against the radical left. Over time US regained hegemony until the economy went into crises in the 1990’s leading to popular uprisings and state massacres.
The US did not intervene initially as it felt that it could co-opt Hugo Chavez because he was unaffiliated with the left. Moreover, the US was militarily committed to the Balkans (Yugoslavia) and the Middle East and preparing for wars against Iraq and other nationalist countries which opposed Israel and supported Palestine.
Using the pretext of a global terrorist threat Washington demanded subordination to its declaration of a world-wide ‘war against terrorism’.
President Chavez did not submit. He declared that ‘you do not fight terrorism with terrorism”. The US decided that Chavez’s declaration of independence was a threatto US hegemony in Latin America and beyond. Washington decided to overthrow elected President Chavez, even before he nationalized the US owned petroleum industry.
In April 2002, the US organized a military-business coup, which was defeated within forty-eight hours by a popular uprising backed by sectors of the military. A second attempt to overthrow President Chavez was set in motion by oil executives via a petroleum lock-out. It was defeated by oil workers and overseas petrol exporters. Chavez national-populist revolution proceeded to nationalize oil corporations who supported the ‘lock-out’.
The failed coups led Washington to temporarily adopt an electoral strategy heavily financed via Washington controlled foundations and NGO. Repeated electoral defeats led Washington to shift to electoral boycotts and propaganda campaigns designed to illegitimatize the electoral success of President Chavez.
Washington’s failed efforts to restore imperialist power, boomeranged. Chavez increased his electoral support, expanded state control over oil and other resources and radicalized his popular base. Moreover, Chavez increasingly secured backing for his anti-imperialist policies among government and movements throughout Latin America and increased his influence and ties throughout the Caribbean by providing subsidized oil.
While commentators attributed President Chavez mass support and influence to his charisma, objective circumstances peculiar to Latin America were decisive. President Chavez’s defeat of imperialist intervention can be attributed to five objectives and conditions.
The deep involvement of the US in multiple prolonged wars at the same time – including in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa distracted Washington. Moreover, US military commitments to Israel undermined US efforts to refocus on Venezuela.
US sanctions policy took place during the commodity boom between 2003 – 2011 – which provided Venezuela with the economic resources to finance domestic social programs and neutralize local boycotts by elite allies of the US.
Venezuela benefited by the neo-liberal crises of the 1990’s-2001 which led to the rise of center-left national popular governments throughout the region. This was especially the case for Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Honduras. Moreover, ‘centrist’ regimes in Peru and Chile remained neutral. Furthermore Venezuela and its allies ensured that the US did not control regional organization.
President Chavez as a former military officer secured the loyalty of the military, undercutting US plots to organize coups.
The world financial crises of 2008-2009 forced the US to spend several trillion dollars in bailing out the banks. The economic crises and partial recovery strengthened the hand of Treasury and weakened the relative influence of the Pentagon.
In other words, while imperial policies and strategic goals remained, the capacityof the US to pursue conquests was limited by objective conditions.
Circumstances Favoring Imperial Interventions
The reverse circumstances favoring imperialism can be seen in more recent times. These include four conditions:
The end of the commodity boom weakened the economies of Venezuela’s center-left allies and led to the rise of far-right US directed client regimes as well as heightening the coup activities of US backed opponents of newly elected President Maduro.
The failure to diversify exports, markets, financial and distributive systems during the expansive period led to a decline in consumption and production and allowed imperialism to attract voters, especially from middle and lower- middle class consumers, employees, shop keepers, professionals and business people.
The Pentagon transferred its military focus from the Middle East to Latin America, identifying military and political clients among key regimes – namely Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and Chile.
Washington’s political intervention in Latin American electoral processes opened the door to economic exploitation of resources and the recruitment of military allies to isolate and encircle nationalist, populist Venezuela.
Objective external conditions favored Washington’s imperial quest for domination. Domestic oligarchic power configurations reinforced the dynamic for imperial intervention, political domination and control over the oil industry.
Venezuela’s decline of oil revenue, the elite mobilization of its electoral base and its systematic sabotage of production and distribution had a multiplier effect. The mass media and the self-proclaimed electoral-right embraced the US led far-right coup which manipulated democratic and humanitarian rhetoric.
Washington heightened economic sanctions to starve the low income Chavista supporters, and mobilized its European and Latin American clients to demand Venezuela’s surrender while planning a bloody military coup.
The final stage of the US-planned-and-organized military coup required three conditions:
A division in the military to provides the Pentagon and coup planners a ‘beachhead’ and a pretext for a US ‘humanitarian ‘invasion
A ‘compromising’ political leadership which pursues political dialogues with adversaries preparing for war.
The freezing of all overseas accounts and closing of all loans and markets which Venezuela continues to depend upon.
Conclusion
Imperialism is a central aspect of US global capitalism. But it cannot accomplish its goals and means whenever and how it wishes. Global and regime shifts in the correlation of forces can thwart and delay imperial success.
Coups can be defeated and converted into radical reforms. Imperialist ambitions can be countered by successful economic policies and strategic alliance.
Latin America has been prone to imperial coups and military interventions. But it is also capable of building regional, class and international alliances.
Unlike other regions and imperial targets, Latin America is terrain for class and anti-imperialist struggles. Economic cycles accompany the rise and fall of classes and as a consequence imperial power advances and retreats.
The US intervention in Venezuela is the longest war of our century– (eighteen years) – exceeding the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The conflict also illustrates how the US relies on regional clients and overseas allies to provide cover for imperial power grabs.
While coups are frequent, their consequences are unstable – clients are weak and the regimes are subject to popular uprising.
US coups against popular regimes lead to bloody massacres which fail to secure long-term large-scale consolidation.
These are the ‘peculiarities’ of Latin America coups.
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Award winning author Prof. James Petras is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
American economic sanctions have been the worst crime against humanity since World War Two. America’s economic sanctions have killed more innocent people than all of the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons ever used in the history of mankind.
The fact that for America the issue in Venezuela is oil, not democracy, will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore history. Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves on the planet.
America seeks control of Venezuela because it sits atop the strategic intersection of the Caribbean, South and Central American worlds. Control of the nation, has always been a remarkably effective way to project power into these three regions and beyond.
From the first moment Hugo Chavez took office, the United States has been trying to overthrow Venezuela’s socialist movement by using sanctions, coup attempts, and funding the opposition parties. After all, there is nothing more undemocratic than a coup d’état.
United Nations Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur, Alfred de Zayas, recommended, just a few days ago, that the International Criminal Court investigate economic sanctions against Venezuela as a possible crime against humanity perpetrated by America.
Over the past five years, American sanctions have cut Venezuela off from most financial markets, which have caused local oil production to plummet. Consequently, Venezuela has experienced the largest decline in living standards of any country in recorded Latin American history.
Prior to American sanctions, socialism in Venezuela had reduced inequality and poverty whilst pensions expanded. During the same time period in America, it has been the absolute reverse. President Chavez funnelled Venezuela’s oil revenues into social spending such as free+6 healthcare, education, subsidized food networks, and housing construction.
In order to fully understand why America is waging economic war on the people of Venezuela one must analyse the historical relationship between the petrodollar system and Sanctions of Mass Destruction: Prior to the 20th century, the value of money was tied to gold. When banks lent money they were constrained by the size of their gold reserves. But in 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon took the country off the gold standard. Nixon and Saudi Arabia came to an Oil For Dollars agreement that would change the course of history and become the root cause of countless wars for oil. Under this petrodollar agreement the only currency that Saudi Arabia could sell its oil in was the US dollar. The Saudi Kingdom would in turn ensure that its oil profits flow back into U.S. government treasuries and American banks.
In exchange, America pledged to provide the Saudi Royal family’s regime with military protection and military hardware.
It was the start of something truly great for America. Access to oil defined 20th-century empires and the petrodollar agreement was the key to the ascendancy of the United States as the world’s sole superpower. America’s war machine runs on, is funded by, and exists in protection of oil.
Threats by any nation to undermine the petrodollar system are viewed by Washington as tantamount to a declaration of war against the United States of America.
Within the last two decades Iraq, Iran, Libya and Venezuela have all threatened to sell their oil in other currencies. Consequently, they have all been subject to crippling U.S. sanctions.
Over time the petrodollar system spread beyond oil and the U.S. dollar slowly but surely became the reserve currency for global trades in most commodities and goods. This system allows America to maintain its position of dominance as the world’s only superpower, despite being a staggering $23 trillion in debt.
With billions of dollars worth of minerals in the ground and with the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela should not only be wealthy, but her people the envy of the developing world. But the nation is essentially broke because American sanctions have cut them off from the international financial system and cost the economy $6 billion over the last five years. Without sanctions, Venezuela could recover easily by collateralizing some of its abundant resources or its $8 billion of gold reserves, in order to get the loans necessary to kick-start their economy.
In order to fully understand the insidious nature of the Venezuelan crisis, it is necessary to understand the genesis of economic sanctions. At the height of World War Two, President Truman issued an order for American bombers to drop “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 140,000 people instantly. The gruesome images that emerged from the rubble were broadcast through television sets across the world and caused unprecedented outrage. The political backlash forced U.S. policy makers to devise a more subtle weapon of mass destruction: economic sanctions.
The term “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) was first defined by the United Nations in 1948 as
“atomic explosive weapons, radioactive material weapons, lethal chemical and biological weapons, and any weapons developed in the future which have characteristics comparable in destructive effect to those of the atomic bomb or other weapons mentioned above”.
Sanctions are clearly the 21st century’s deadliest weapon of mass destruction.
In 2001, the U.S. administration told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; Iraq was a terrorist state; Iraq was tied to Al Qaeda. It all amounted to nothing. In fact, America already knew that the only weapons of mass destruction that Saddam had were not nuclear in nature, but rather chemical and biological. The only reason they knew this in advance was because America sold the weapons to Saddam to use on Iran in 1991.
What the U.S. administration did not tell us was that Saddam Hussein used to be a strong ally of the United States. The main reason for toppling Saddam and putting sanctions on the people of Iraq was the fact that Iraq had ditched the Dollar-for-Oil sales.
The United Nations estimates that 1.7 million Iraqis died due to Bill Clinton’s sanctions; 500,000 of whom were children. In 1996, a journalist asked former U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, about these UN reports, specifically about the children. America’s top foreign policy official, Albright, replied:
“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”
Clearly, U.S. sanctions policies are nothing short of state-sanctioned genocide.
Over the last five years, sanctions have caused Venezuelan per capita incomes to drop by 40 percent, which is a decline similar to that of war torn Iraq and Syria at the height of their armed conflicts. Millions of Venezuelans have had to flee the country. If America is so concerned about refugees, Trump should stop furthering disastrous foreign policies that actually create them. Under Chavez, Venezuela had a policy of welcoming refugees. President Chavez turned Venezuela into the wealthiest society in Latin America with the best income equality.
Another much vilified leader who used oil wealth to enrich his people, only to be put under severe sanctions, is Muammar Gaddafi. In 1967 Colonel Gaddafi inherited one of the poorest nations in Africa; however, by the time he was assassinated, Gaddafi had turned Libya into Africa’s wealthiest nation. Perhaps, Gaddafi’s greatest crime, in the eyes of NATO, was his quest to quit selling Libyan oil in U.S. Dollars and denominate crude sales in a new gold backed common African currency. In fact, in August 2011, President Obama confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold-backed Dinar currency.
Africa has the fastest growing oil industry in the world and oil sales in a common African currency would have been especially devastating for the American dollar, the U.S. economy, and particularly the elite in charge of the petrodollar system.
It is for this reason that President Clinton signed the now infamous Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, which the United Nations Children’s Fund said caused widespread suffering among civilians by “severely limiting supplies of fuel, access to cash, and the means of replenishing stocks of food and essential medications.” Clearly, U.S. sanctions are weapons of mass destruction.
Not so long ago, Iraq and Libya were the two most modern and secular states in the Middle East and North Africa, with the highest regional standards of living. Nowadays, U.S. Military intervention and economic sanctions have turned Libya and Iraq into two of the world’s most failed nations.
“They want to seize Libya’s oil and they care nothing about the lives of the Libyan people,” remarked Chavez during the Western intervention in Libya in 2011.
In September 2017, President Maduro made good on Chavez’s promise to list oil sales in Yuan rather than the US dollar. Weeks later Trump signed a round of crippling sanctions on the people of Venezuela.
On Monday, U.S. National Security adviser John Bolton announced new sanctions that essentially steal $7 billion from Venezuela’s state owned oil company. At that press conference Bolton brazenly flashed a note pad that ominously said “5,000 troops to Colombia”. When confronted about it by the media, Bolton simply said,
“President Trump stated that all options are on the table”.
America’s media is unquestionably the most corrupt institution in America. The nation’s media may quibble about Trump’s domestic policies but when it comes to starting wars for oil abroad they sing in remarkable unison. Fox News, CNN and the New York Times all cheered the nation into war in Iraq over fictitious weapons of mass destruction, whilst America was actually using sanctions of mass destruction on the Iraqi people. They did it in Libya and now they are doing it again in Venezuela. Democracy and freedom have always been the smoke screen in front of capitalist expansion for oil, and the Western Media owns the smoke machine. Economic warfare has long since been under way against Venezuela but military warfare is now imminent.
Trump just hired Elliot Abrams as U.S. Special Envoy for Venezuela, who has a long and torrid history in Latin America. Abrams pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the Iran Contra affair, which involved America funding deadly communist rebels, and was the worst scandal in the Reagan Era. Abrams was later pardoned by George Bush Senior. America’s new point man on Venezuela also lied about the largest mass killing in recent Latin American history by U.S. trained forces in El Salvador.
There is nothing more undemocratic than a coup d’état. A UN Human Rights Council Rapporteur, Alfred de Zayas, pointed out that America’s aim in Venezuela is to “crush this government and bring in a neoliberal government that is going to privatise everything and is going to sell out, a lot of transitional corporations stand to gain enormous profits and the United States is driven by the transnational corporations.”
Ever since 1980, the United States has steadily devolved from the status of the world’s top creditor country to the world’s most indebted country. But thanks to the petrodollar system’s huge global artificial demand for U.S. dollars, America can continue exponential military expansion, record breaking deficits and unrestrained spending.
America’s largest export used to be manufactured goods made proudly in America. Today, America’s largest export is the U.S. dollar. Any nation like Venezuela that threatens that export is met with America’s second largest export: weapons, chief amongst which are sanctions of mass destruction.
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Garikai Chengu is an Ancient African historian. He has been a scholar at Harvard, Stanford and Columbia University. Contact him on [email protected]
Juan Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington’s elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, he has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization.
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Before the fateful day of January 22, fewer than one in five Venezuelans had heard of Juan Guaidó. Only a few months ago, the 35-year-old was an obscure character in a politically marginal far-right group closely associated with gruesome acts of street violence. Even in his own party, Guaidó had been a mid-level figure in the opposition-dominated National Assembly, which is now held under contempt according to Venezuela’s constitution.
But after a single phone call from from US Vice President Mike Pence, Guaidó proclaimed himself president of Venezuela. Anointed as the leader of his country by Washington, a previously unknown political bottom-dweller was vaulted onto the international stage as the US-selected leader of the nation with the world’s largest oil reserves.
Echoing the Washington consensus, the New York Times editorial board hailed Guaidó as a “credible rival” to Maduro with a “refreshing style and vision of taking the country forward.” The Bloomberg News editorial board applauded him for seeking “restoration of democracy” and the Wall Street Journal declared him “a new democratic leader.” Meanwhile, Canada, numerous European nations, Israel, and the bloc of right-wing Latin American governments known as the Lima Group recognized Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela.
While Guaidó seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, he was, in fact, the product of more than a decade of assiduous grooming by the US government’s elite regime change factories. Alongside a cadre of right-wing student activists, Guaidó was cultivated to undermine Venezuela’s socialist-oriented government, destabilize the country, and one day seize power. Though he has been a minor figure in Venezuelan politics, he had spent years quietly demonstrated his worthiness in Washington’s halls of power.
“Juan Guaidó is a character that has been created for this circumstance,” Marco Teruggi, an Argentinian sociologist and leading chronicler of Venezuelan politics, told The Grayzone. “It’s the logic of a laboratory – Guaidó is like a mixture of several elements that create a character who, in all honesty, oscillates between laughable and worrying.”
Diego Sequera, a Venezuelan journalist and writer for the investigative outlet Misión Verdad, agreed:
“Guaidó is more popular outside Venezuela than inside, especially in the elite Ivy League and Washington circles,” Sequera remarked to The Grayzone, “He’s a known character there, is predictably right-wing, and is considered loyal to the program.”
While Guaidó is today sold as the face of democratic restoration, he spent his career in the most violent faction of Venezuela’s most radical opposition party, positioning himself at the forefront of one destabilization campaign after another. His party has been widely discredited inside Venezuela, and is held partly responsible for fragmenting a badly weakened opposition.
“‘These radical leaders have no more than 20 percent in opinion polls,” wroteLuis Vicente León, Venezuela’s leading pollster. According to León, Guaidó’s party remains isolated because the majority of the population “does not want war. ‘What they want is a solution.’”
But this is precisely why he Guaidó was selected by Washington: He is not expected to lead Venezuela toward democracy, but to collapse a country that for the past two decades has been a bulwark of resistance to US hegemony. His unlikely rise signals the culmination of a two decades-long project to destroy a robust socialist experiment.
Targeting the “troika of tyranny”
Since the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez, the United States has fought to restore control over Venezuela and is vast oil reserves. Chávez’s socialist programs may have redistributed the country’s wealth and helped lift millions out of poverty, but they also earned him a target on his back.
In 2002, Venezuela’s right-wing opposition briefly ousted Chávez with US support and recognition, before the military restored his presidency following a mass popular mobilization. Throughout the administrations of US Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Chávez survived numerous assassination plots, before succumbing to cancer in 2013. His successor, Nicolas Maduro, has survivedthree attempts on his life.
The Trump administration immediately elevated Venezuela to the top of Washington’s regime change target list, branding it the leader of a “troika of tyranny.” Last year, Trump’s national security team attempted to recruit members of the military brass to mount a military junta, but that effort failed.
According to the Venezuelan government, the US was also involved in a plot, codenamed Operation Constitution, to capture Maduro at the Miraflores presidential palace; and another, called Operation Armageddon, to assassinate him at a military parade in July 2017. Just over a year later, exiled opposition leaders tried and failed to kill Maduro with drone bombs during a military parade in Caracas.
More than a decade before these intrigues, a group of right-wing opposition students were hand-selected and groomed by an elite US-funded regime change training academy to topple Venezuela’s government and restore the neoliberal order.
Training from the “‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions”
On October 5, 2005, with Chávez’s popularity at its peak and his government planning sweeping socialist programs, five Venezuelan “student leaders” arrived in Belgrade, Serbia to begin training for an insurrection.
The students had arrived from Venezuela courtesy of the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS. This group is funded largely through the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cut-out that functions as the US government’s main arm of promoting regime change; and offshoots like the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. According to leaked internal emails from Stratfor, an intelligence firm known as the “shadow CIA,” CANVAS “may have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle.”
CANVAS is a spinoff of Otpor, a Serbian protest group founded by Srdja Popovic in 1998 at the University of Belgrade. Otpor, which means “resistance” in Serbian, was the student group that gained international fame — and Hollywood-level promotion — by mobilizing the protests that eventually toppled Slobodan Milosevic.
This small cell of regime change specialists was operating according to the theories of the late Gene Sharp, the so-called “Clausewitz of non-violent struggle.” Sharp had worked with a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, Col. Robert Helvey, to conceive a strategic blueprint that weaponized protest as a form of hybrid warfare, aiming it at states that resisted Washington’s unipolar domination.
Otpor at the 1998 MTV Europe Music Awards
Otpor was supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute. Sinisa Sikman, one of Otpor’s main trainers, once said the group even received direct CIA funding.
According to a leaked email from a Stratfor staffer, after running Milosevic out of power,
“the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS… or in other words a ‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions. They are still hooked into U.S. funding and basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic governments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).”
Stratfor revealed that CANVAS “turned its attention to Venezuela” in 2005, after training opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime change operations across Eastern Europe.
While monitoring the CANVAS training program, Stratfor outlined its insurrectionist agenda in strikingly blunt language:
“Success is by no means guaranteed, and student movements are only at the beginning of what could be a years-long effort to trigger a revolution in Venezuela, but the trainers themselves are the people who cut their teeth on the ‘Butcher of the Balkans.’ They’ve got mad skills. When you see students at five Venezuelan universities hold simultaneous demonstrations, you will know that the training is over and the real work has begun.”
Birthing the “Generation 2007” regime change cadre
The “real work” began two years later, in 2007, when Guaidó graduated from Andrés Bello Catholic University of Caracas. He moved to Washington, DC to enroll in the Governance and Political Management Program at George Washington University, under the tutelage of Venezuelan economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top Latin American neoliberal economists. Berrizbeitia is a former executive director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) who spent more than a decade working in the Venezuelan energy sector, under the old oligarchic regime that was ousted by Chávez.
That year, Guaidó helped lead anti-government rallies after the Venezuelan government declined to to renew the license of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV). This privately owned station played a leading role in the 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez. RCTV helped mobilize anti-government demonstrators, falsified information blaming government supporters for acts of violence carried out by opposition members, and banned pro-government reporting amid the coup. The role of RCTV and other oligarch-owned stations in driving the failed coup attempt was chronicled in the acclaimed documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
That same year, the students claimed credit for stymying Chavez’s constitutional referendum for a “21st century socialism” that promised “to set the legal framework for the political and social reorganization of the country, giving direct power to organized communities as a prerequisite for the development of a new economic system.”
From the protests around RCTV and the referendum, a specialized cadre of US-backed class of regime change activists was born. They called themselves “Generation 2007.”
The Stratfor and CANVAS trainers of this cell identified Guaidó’s ally – a street organizer named Yon Goicoechea – as a “key factor” in defeating the constitutional referendum. The following year, Goicochea was rewarded for his efforts with the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, along with a $500,000 prize, which he promptly invested into building his own Liberty First (Primero Justicia) political network.
Friedman, of course, was the godfather of the notorious neoliberal Chicago Boys who were imported into Chile by dictatorial junta leader Augusto Pinochet to implement policies of radical “shock doctrine”-style fiscal austerity. And the Cato Institute is the libertarian Washington DC-based think tank founded by the Koch Brothers, two top Republican Party donors who have become aggressive supporters of the right-wing across Latin America.
Wikileaks published a 2007 email from American ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield sent to the State Department, National Security Council and Department of Defense Southern Command praising “Generation of ’07” for having “forced the Venezuelan president, accustomed to setting the political agenda, to (over)react.” Among the “emerging leaders” Brownfield identified were Freddy Guevara and Yon Goicoechea. He applauded the latter figure as “one of the students’ most articulate defenders of civil liberties.”
Flush with cash from libertarian oligarchs and US government soft power outfits, the radical Venezuelan cadre took their Otpor tactics to the streets, along with a version of the group’s logo, as seen below:
“Galvanizing public unrest…to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez”
In 2009, the Generation 2007 youth activists staged their most provocative demonstration yet, dropping their pants on public roads and aping the outrageous guerrilla theater tactics outlined by Gene Sharp in his regime change manuals. The protesters had mobilized against the arrest of an ally from another newfangled youth group called JAVU. This far-right group “gathered funds from a variety of US government sources, which allowed it to gain notoriety quickly as the hardline wing of opposition street movements,” according to academic George Ciccariello-Maher’s book, “Building the Commune.”
While video of the protest is not available, many Venezuelans have identified Guaidó as one of its key participants. While the allegation is unconfirmed, it is certainly plausible; the bare-buttocks protesters were members of the Generation 2007 inner core that Guaidó belonged to, and were clad in their trademark Resistencia! Venezuela t-shirts, as seen below:
Is this the ass that Trump wants to install in Venezuela’s seat of power?
That year, Guaidó exposed himself to the public in another way, founding a political party to capture the anti-Chavez energy his Generation 2007 had cultivated. Called Popular Will, it was led by Leopoldo López, a Princeton-educated right-wing firebrand heavily involved in National Endowment for Democracy programs and elected as the mayor of a district in Caracas that was one of the wealthiest in the country. Lopez was a portrait of Venezuelan aristocracy, directly descended from his country’s first president. He was also the first cousin of Thor Halvorssen, founder of the US-based Human Rights Foundation that functions as a de facto publicity shop for US-backed anti-government activists in countries targeted by Washington for regime change.
Though Lopez’s interests aligned neatly with Washington’s, US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks highlighted the fanatical tendencies that would ultimately lead to Popular Will’s marginalization. One cable identified Lopez as “a divisive figure within the opposition… often described as arrogant, vindictive, and power-hungry.” Others highlighted his obsession with street confrontations and his “uncompromising approach” as a source of tension with other opposition leaders who prioritized unity and participation in the country’s democratic institutions.
Popular Will founder Leopoldo Lopez cruising with his wife, Lilian Tintori
By 2010, Popular Will and its foreign backers moved to exploit the worst drought to hit Venezuela in decades. Massive electricity shortages had struck the country due the dearth of water, which was needed to power hydroelectric plants. A global economic recession and declining oil prices compounded the crisis, driving public discontentment.
Stratfor and CANVAS – key advisors of Guaidó and his anti-government cadre – devised a shockingly cynical plan to drive a dagger through the heart of the Bolivarian revolution. The scheme hinged on a 70% collapse of the country’s electrical system by as early as April 2010.
“This could be the watershed event, as there is little that Chavez can do to protect the poor from the failure of that system,” the Stratfor internal memo declared. “This would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate. At that point in time, an opposition group would be best served to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez and towards their needs.”
By this point, the Venezuelan opposition was receiving a staggering $40-50 million a year from US government organizations like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, according to a report by the Spanish think tank, the FRIDE Institute. It also had massive wealth to draw on from its own accounts, which were mostly outside the country.
While the scenario envisioned by Statfor did not come to fruition, the Popular Will party activists and their allies cast aside any pretense of non-violence and joined a radical plan to destabilize the country.
Towards violent destabilization
In November, 2010, according to emails obtained by Venezuelan security services and presented by former Justice Minister Miguel Rodríguez Torres, Guaidó, Goicoechea, and several other student activists attended a secret five-day training at the Fiesta Mexicana hotel in Mexico City. The sessions were run by Otpor, the Belgrade-based regime change trainers backed by the US government. The meeting had reportedly received the blessing of Otto Reich, a fanatically anti-Castro Cuban exile working in George W. Bush’s Department of State, and the right-wing former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.
At the Fiesta Mexicana hotel, the emails stated, Guaidó and his fellow activists hatched a plan to overthrow President Hugo Chavez by generating chaos through protracted spasms of street violence.
Three petroleum industry figureheads – Gustavo Torrar, Eligio Cedeño and Pedro Burelli – allegedly covered the $52,000 tab to hold the meeting. Torrar is a self-described “human rights activist” and “intellectual” whose younger brother Reynaldo Tovar Arroyo is the representative in Venezuela of the private Mexican oil and gas company Petroquimica del Golfo, which holds a contract with the Venezuelan state.
Cedeño, for his part, is a fugitive Venezuelan businessman who claimed asylum in the United States, and Pedro Burelli a former JP Morgan executive and the former director of Venezuela’s national oil company, Petroleum of Venezuela (PDVSA). He left PDVSA in 1998 as Hugo Chavez took power and is on the advisory committee of Georgetown University’s Latin America Leadership Program.
Burelli insisted that the emails detailing his participation had been fabricated and even hired a private investigator to prove it. The investigator declared that Google’s records showed the emails alleged to be his were never transmitted.
Yet today Burelli makes no secret of his desire to see Venezuela’s current president, Nicolás Maduro, deposed – and even dragged through the streets and sodomized with a bayonet, as Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi was by NATO-backed militiamen.
.@NicolasMaduro, jamas me has hecho caso. Me has fustigado/perseguido como @chavezcandanga jamás osó. Óyeme, tienes sólo dos opciones en las próximas 24 horas:
1. Como Noriega: pagar pena por narcotráfico y luego a @IntlCrimCourt La Haya por DDHH.
The alleged Fiesta Mexicana plot flowed into another destabilization plan revealed in a series of documents produced by the Venezuelan government. In May 2014, Caracas released documents detailing an assassination plot against President Nicolás Maduro. The leaks identified the Miami-based Maria Corina Machado as a leader of the scheme. A hardliner with a penchant for extreme rhetoric, Machado has functioned as an international liaison for the opposition, visiting President George W. Bush in 2005.
Machado and George W. Bush, 2005
“I think it is time to gather efforts; make the necessary calls, and obtain financing to annihilate Maduro and the rest will fall apart,” Machado wrote in an email to former Venezuelan diplomat Diego Arria in 2014.
In another email, Machado claimed that the violent plot had the blessing of US Ambassador to Colombia, Kevin Whitaker. “I have already made up my mind and this fight will continue until this regime is overthrown and we deliver to our friends in the world. If I went to San Cristobal and exposed myself before the OAS, I fear nothing. Kevin Whitaker has already reconfirmed his support and he pointed out the new steps. We have a checkbook stronger than the regime’s to break the international security ring.”
Guaidó heads to the barricades
That February, student demonstrators acting as shock troops for the exiled oligarchy erected violent barricades across the country, turning opposition-controlled quarters into violent fortresses known as guarimbas. While international media portrayed the upheaval as a spontaneous protest against Maduro’s iron-fisted rule, there was ample evidence that Popular Will was orchestrating the show.
“None of the protesters at the universities wore their university t-shirts, they all wore Popular Will or Justice First t-shirts,” a guarimba participant said at the time. “They might have been student groups, but the student councils are affiliated to the political opposition parties and they are accountable to them.”
Asked who the ringleaders were, the guarimba participant said, “Well if I am totally honest, those guys are legislators now.”
Around 43 were killed during the 2014 guarimbas. Three years later, they erupted again, causing mass destruction of public infrastructure, the murder of government supporters, and the deaths of 126 people, many of whom were Chavistas. In several cases, supporters of the government were burned alive by armed gangs.
Guaidó was directly involved in the 2014 guarimbas. In fact, he tweeted video showing himself clad in a helmet and gas mask, surrounded by masked and armed elements that had shut down a highway that were engaging in a violent clash with the police. Alluding to his participation in Generation 2007, he proclaimed, “I remember in 2007, we proclaimed, ‘Students!’ Now, we shout, ‘Resistance! Resistance!’”
Guaidó has deleted the tweet, demonstrating apparent concern for his image as a champion of democracy.
On February 12, 2014, during the height of that year’s guarimbas, Guaidó joined Lopez on stage at a rally of Popular Will and Justice First. During a lengthy diatribe against the government, Lopez urged the crowd to march to the office of Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz. Soon after, Diaz’s office came under attack by armed gangs who attempted to burn it to the ground. She denounced what she called “planned and premeditated violence.”
Guaido alongside Lopez at the fateful February 12, 2014 rally
In an televised appearance in 2016, Guaidó dismissed deaths resulting from guayas – a guarimba tactic involving stretching steel wire across a roadway in order to injure or kill motorcyclists – as a “myth.” His comments whitewashed a deadly tactic that had killed unarmed civilians like Santiago Pedroza and decapitated a man named Elvis Durán, among many others.
This callous disregard for human life would define his Popular Will party in the eyes of much of the public, including many opponents of Maduro.
Cracking down on Popular Will
As violence and political polarization escalated across the country, the government began to act against the Popular Will leaders who helped stoke it.
Freddy Guevara, the National Assembly Vice-President and second in command of Popular Will, was a principal leader in the 2017 street riots. Facing a trial for his role in the violence, Guevara took shelter in the Chilean embassy, where he remains.
Lester Toledo, a Popular Will legislator from the state of Zulia, was wanted by Venezuelan government in September 2016 on charges of financing terrorism and plotting assassinations. The plans were said to be made with former Colombian President Álavaro Uribe. Toledo escaped Venezuela and went on several speaking tours with Human Rights Watch, the US government-backed Freedom House, the Spanish Congress and European Parliament.
Carlos Graffe, another Otpor-trained Generation 2007 member who led Popular Will, was arrested in July 2017. According to police, he was in possession of a bag filled with nails, C4 explosives and a detonator. He was released on December 27, 2017.
Leopoldo Lopez, the longtime Popular Will leader, is today under house arrest, accused of a key role in deaths of 13 people during the guarimbas in 2014. Amnesty International lauded Lopez as a “prisoner of conscience” and slammed his transfer from prison to house as “not good enough.” Meanwhile, family members of guarimba victims introduced a petition for more charges against Lopez.
Yon Goicoechea, the Koch Brothers posterboy and US-backed founder of Justice First, was arrested in 2016 by security forces who claimed they found a kilo of explosives in his vehicle. In a New York Times op-ed, Goicoechea protested the charges as “trumped-up” and claimed he had been imprisoned simply for his “dream of a democratic society, free of Communism.” He was freed in November 2017.
Hoy, en Caricuao. Llevo 15 años trabajando con @jguaido. Confío en él. Conozco la constancia y la inteligencia con la que se ha construido a sí mismo. Está haciendo las cosas con bondad, pero sin ingenuidad. Hay una posibilidad abierta hacia la libertad. pic.twitter.com/Lidm8y5RTX
David Smolansky, also a member of the original Otpor-trained Generation 2007, became Venezuela’s youngest-ever mayor when he was elected in 2013 in the affluent suburb of El Hatillo. But he was stripped of his position and sentenced to 15 months in prison by the Supreme Court after it found him culpable of stirring the violent guarimbas.
Facing arrest, Smolansky shaved his beard, donned sunglasses and slipped into Brazil disguised as a priest with a bible in hand and rosary around his neck. He now lives in Washington, DC, where he was hand picked by Secretary of the Organization of American States Luis Almagro to lead the working group on the Venezuelan migrant and refugee crisis.
This July 26, Smolansky held what he called a “cordial reunion” with Elliot Abrams, the convicted Iran-Contra felon installed by Trump as special US envoy to Venezuela. Abrams is notorious for overseeing the US covert policy of arming right-wing death squads during the 1980’s in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. His lead role in the Venezuelan coup has stoked fears that another blood-drenched proxy war might be on the way.
Cordial reunión en la ONU con Elliott Abrams, enviado especial del gobierno de EEUU para Venezuela. Reiteramos que la prioridad para el gobierno interino que preside @jguaido es la asistencia humanitaria para millones de venezolanos que sufren de la falta de comida y medicinas. pic.twitter.com/vHfktVKgV4
Four days earlier, Machado rumbled another violent threat against Maduro, declaring that if he “wants to save his life, he should understand that his time is up.”
A pawn in their game
The collapse of Popular Will under the weight of the violent campaign of destabilization it ran alienated large sectors of the public and wound much of its leadership up in exile or in custody. Guaidó had remained a relatively minor figure, having spent most of his nine-year career in the National Assembly as an alternate deputy. Hailing from one of Venezuela’s least populous states, Guaidó came in second place during the 2015 parliamentary elections, winning just 26% of votes cast in order to secure his place in the National Assembly. Indeed, his bottom may have been better known than his face.
Guaidó is known as the president of the opposition-dominated National Assembly, but he was never elected to the position. The four opposition parties that comprised the Assembly’s Democratic Unity Table had decided to establish a rotating presidency. Popular Will’s turn was on the way, but its founder, Lopez, was under house arrest. Meanwhile, his second-in-charge, Guevara, had taken refuge in the Chilean embassy. A figure named Juan Andrés Mejía would have been next in line but reasons that are only now clear, Juan Guaido was selected.
“There is a class reasoning that explains Guaidó’s rise,” Sequera, the Venezuelan analyst, observed.
“Mejía is high class, studied at one of the most expensive private universities in Venezuela, and could not be easily marketed to the public the way Guaidó could. For one, Guaidó has common mestizo features like most Venezuelans do, and seems like more like a man of the people. Also, he had not been overexposed in the media, so he could be built up into pretty much anything.”
In December 2018, Guaidó sneaked across the border and junketed to Washington, Colombia and Brazil to coordinate the plan to hold mass demonstrations during the inauguration of President Maduro. The night before Maduro’s swearing-in ceremony, both Vice President Mike Pence and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland called Guaidó to affirm their support.
A week later, Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart – all lawmakers from the Florida base of the right-wing Cuban exile lobby – joined President Trump and Vice President Pence at the White House. At their request, Trump agreed that if Guaidó declared himself president, he would back him.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met personally with Guaidó on January 10, according to the Wall Street Journal. However, Pompeo could not pronounce Guaidó’s name when he mentioned him in a press briefing on January 25, referring to him as “Juan Guido.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just called the figure Washington is attempting to install as Venezuelan President "Juan *Guido*" – as in the racist term for Italians. America's top diplomat didn't even bother to learn how to pronounce his puppet's name. pic.twitter.com/HsanZXuSPR
By January 11, Guaidó’s Wikipedia page had been edited 37 times, highlighting the struggle to shape the image of a previously anonymous figure who was now a tableau for Washington’s regime change ambitions. In the end, editorial oversight of his page was handed over to Wikipedia’s elite council of “librarians,” who pronounced him the “contested” president of Venezuela.
Guaidó might have been an obscure figure, but his combination of radicalism and opportunism satisfied Washington’s needs. “That internal piece was missing,” a Trump administration said of Guaidó. “He was the piece we needed for our strategy to be coherent and complete.”
“For the first time,” Brownfield, the former American ambassador to Venezuela, gushed to the New York Times, “you have an opposition leader who is clearly signaling to the armed forces and to law enforcement that he wants to keep them on the side of the angels and with the good guys.”
But Guaidó’s Popular Will party formed the shock troops of the guarimbas that caused the deaths of police officers and common citizens alike. He had even boasted of his own participation in street riots. And now, to win the hearts and minds of the military and police, Guaido had to erase this blood-soaked history.
On January 21, a day before the coup began in earnest, Guaidó’s wife delivered a video address calling on the military to rise up against Maduro. Her performance was wooden and uninspiring, underscoring the her husband’s limited political prospects.
At a press conference before supporters four days later, Guaidó announced his solution to the crisis: “Authorize a humanitarian intervention!”
While he waits on direct assistance, Guaidó remains what he has always been – a pet project of cynical outside forces. “It doesn’t matter if he crashes and burns after all these misadventures,” Sequera said of the coup figurehead. “To the Americans, he is expendable.”
*
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Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
Dan Cohen is a journalist and filmmaker. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. Dan is a correspondent at RT America and tweets at @DanCohen3000.
All images in this article are from Grayzone Project unless otherwise stated
Would anybody reading this article want to appoint him/herself as prime minister of Canada in front of a friendly crowd? All you need to say is that you don’t recognize the elected prime minister as legitimate.
I asked that question to a crowd at a rally organized to affirm the sovereignty of Venezuela a few days ago in Vancouver. No one came forward. Instead, people laughed, and for a good reason. The notion of such an occurrence is ridiculous. But think again. It just happened in Caracas, Venezuela last January 23 with the assent of the government of Canada.
An unknown Juan Guaidó of the Venezuelan opposition party Voluntad Popular appointed himself interim president of Venezuela in front of a multitude without fulfilling a single requirement of the democratic process. Process that may involve registered political parties and a political campaign; and it should definitely have a free and secret ballot with all constitutional guarantees approved by a duly established national electoral institution, leading to an election and the public inauguration of the winning candidate.
“The position of speaker of the National Assembly held by Juan Guaidó (from a constitutional standpoint) is in some regards comparable to that of the Speaker of the US House of Representatives and the leader of the majority party which is currently held by Democrat Nancy Pelosi.
Nancy Pelosi is second in line to the US presidential line of succession, after Vice President Mike Pence. (25th Amendment of Constitution and 3 USC 19, a section of the U.S. Code, established as part of the Presidential Succession Act of 1947).”
Then Chossudovsky concludes,
“Trump’s endorsement of Venezuela’s speaker of the National Assembly Juan Guaidó is tantamount to stating that Nancy Pelosi could legitimately from one day to the next replace Trump as interim president of the US. A pretty grim prospect for the Donald.”
Even Canadian MPs couldn’t avoid making a reference to the absurdity of the Venezuelan situation. Erin Weir, Independent MP, addressed Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland – a staunch supporter of Juan Guaidó – by facetiously saying,
“I am going to resist the temptation to declare myself Prime Minister of Canada.”
But what happened in Venezuela on January 23 is very serious and we must recognize two things that would convince us to end all interference in the affairs of Venezuela.
First, appointing oneself president or prime minister of a country is unconstitutional. Juan Guaidó has broken the foundation of a constitutional democracy: to be voted by the majority of the population in democratic elections.
In his pretense of following the Venezuelan Constitution of 1999, Guaidó called on Article 233 to appoint himself. That article determines the circumstances that would allow the appointment of a president when the elected one cannot be present for the inauguration.
None of the assumptions to establish the absolute absence of the president has been met: neither death, nor resignation, nor dismissal by the Supreme Court, nor physical or mental incapacity, nor abandonment of office nor recall by the people.
Nicolas Maduro is alive, in power and is the legitimate democratically elected president of Venezuela according to the Venezuelan constitution. He does not need the acclamation of foreign governments.
Speaking of foreign governments, the second thing we must recognize that happened on January 23 in Venezuela is that this was done with the full and overt interference from foreign countries. And this breaks all sorts of international laws. Principally, it goes against the UN Charter and the OAS 1948 Charter. However, foreign intervention in Venezuela is nothing new. The US has tried to destroy the Bolivarian Revolution since the failed attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002.
Fast-forward to 2014 and to this day; Venezuela is confronting severe sanctions from the US, Canada, EU and some Latin American countries. Sanctions are crippling the Venezuelan economy and affecting the population. The new US sanctions of this week further prevent the repatriation of revenues for Venezuelan oil exports to the US.
We must emphasize that sanctions can only be enforced by resolution of the UN Security Council. Any other sanction unilaterally imposed is illegal in the eyes of the community of nations according to the UN Charter. Incidentally, the UNSC has not resolved to recognize the self-proclaimed president.
In the same way that Guaidó appoints himself as the illegal president in Venezuela, the likes of Trump and Trudeau in our continent appoint themselves as judges in the internal affairs of Venezuela that only pertain to the people of Venezuela.
This is reckless.
This tragic farce has been staged under the pretext that the elections of May 20, 2018 won by Nicolas Maduro are not recognized by the US and Canada.
Facts:
Sixteen political parties participated in the elections last year. Three parties decided not to participate (under US pressure), but that does not make the electoral process illegitimate.
Maduro won with a wide margin, obtained 6,248,864 votes, 67.84%; Henri Falcón followed with 1.927.958, 20.93%; Javier Bertucci with 1,015,895, 10.82% and Reinaldo Quijada who obtained 36,246 votes, 0.39% of the total. The difference between Maduro and the second contender was 46.91%.
Close to 200 international observers were present during the elections. The UN refused to send an observer.
But there is also a personal angle to this story.
I was forbidden by the Canadian government to vote at the Venezuelan consulate together with all Venezuelans across Canada. That was my right as a Venezuelan, and it was taken away. The Canadian government deemed the elections “fraudulent” even before they took place!
And here is where the US and Canadian governments fall into ridicule in this whole tragedy: Of the 25 elections at different levels that have taken place in Venezuela over the last 20 years, the only one that they would recognize as legitimate is the election of the National Assembly of 2015 where the opposition won a majority that was immediately recognized by the Venezuelan electoral authorities. All 25 elections were held with exactly the same electoral standard.
However, three candidates committed fraud and another election in the respective districts had to be called again. The National Assembly refused and persisted in swearing in the three members. Consequently, the Supreme Court declared it in contempt in 2016 and remains so to this date.
Interestingly, the National Assembly’s only declared item on their agenda was to topple Nicolas Maduro “within 6 months”. No relevant legislation was ever proposed and discussed. The aim was an all familiar “parliamentary coup” as others occurred in other Latin American countries.
Let me emphasize what I consider the most blatant example of intervention.
Article 19, Chapter IV of the Charter states:
“No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, and for whatever reason, in the internal or external affairs of any other. The previous principle excludes not only armed force, but also any other form of interference or tendency to threaten the personality of the State, the political, economic and cultural elements that constitute it. “
Canada is a member of the OAS and as such it is called to abide by the OAS Charter of 1948. But, does it? Not in the least.
Repeatedly, the OAS, with arm-twisting by Luis Almagro, the Secretary General, has tried to condemn Venezuela last year but it never reached the sufficient number of votes. And by the way, this week the OAS failed to recognize Guaidó as proposed by Argentina and endorsed by the US.
So while the majority of OAS member countries abide by the Charter, Chrystia Freeland breaks off creating a fictitious splinter group, the “Lima Group”, with no international authority except to force regime change in Venezuela. She has just called for a meeting of the group in Ottawa on February 4th. Agenda topic: Venezuela.
The only conclusion we can draw from this scenario is that the Canadian government is complicit in a US sponsored coup attempt in Venezuela.
It’s committing a reckless action and is not speaking for all Canadians. Many Canadians and organizations have endorsed the legitimacy of the Maduro presidency, and have protested in rallies across the country speaking up against the Canadian government’s dangerous, illegal, interventionist, colonial and imperial attack on Venezuela.
The future of a Latin America country – that attempts to break away from foreign domination following the example of Cuba 60 years ago – is uncertain under real threats of a military invasion. Venezuelans have hard choices to make and they should be left alone to make them as a sovereign nation. As many all over the world are repeating to their governments: Hands off Venezuela!
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Nino Pagliccia is an activist and freelance writer based in Vancouver. He is a retired researcher from the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a Venezuelan-Canadian who follows and writes about international relations with a focus on the Americas. He is the editor of the book “Cuba Solidarity in Canada – Five Decades of People-to-People Foreign Relations” (2014). He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The vast majority of Venezuelans oppose military intervention and US sanctions to try to remove President Nicolás Maduro from power, according to polling by the local firm Hinterlaces.
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More than eight out of ten Venezuelans oppose international intervention, both military and non-military, in their country, as well as the crippling sanctions imposed by the United States to force leftist President Nicolás Maduro out of power.
According to a study conducted in early January 2019 by the local polling firm Hinterlaces, 86 percent of Venezuelans would disagree with international military intervention. And 81 percent oppose the US sanctions that have gravely hurt the South American nation’s economy.
This poll was conducted before the Donald Trump administration launched a political coup in Venezuela on January 23, attempting to replace its government with a right-wing opposition that has made it clear that it seeks to impose neoliberal capitalist economic policies.
Hinterlaces is led by the independent pollster Oscar Schemel, who has experience studying numerous elections in Venezuela and has a pro-business perspective. Most polling firms in the country, such as the competitor Datanálisis, tend to be pro-opposition. Hinterlaces is more neutral, and often leans toward the government, although Schemel has criticized some of Maduro’s economic policies.
English-language media outlets frequently ignore local polls done inside Venezuela, and if they do report on them, they tend to publish the results of polling firms run by pro-opposition figures.
The Grayzone has translated the findings of a Hinterlaces study conducted between January 7 and 20. The following data is based on direct interviews with 1,580 Venezuelans from all across the country, and was reported on the program José Vicente HOY on January 27.
Do you agree or disagree with the US economic and financial sanctions that are currently applied against Venezuela to remove President Maduro from power?
81% disagree
17% agree
2% not sure
Would you agree or disagree if there were international intervention in Venezuela to remove President Maduro from power?
78% disagree
20% agree
2% not sure
Would you agree or disagree if there were international military intervention in Venezuela to remove President Maduro from power?
86% disagree
12% agree
2% not sure
In general do you agree or disagree with a dialogue being held between the national government and the opposition to resolve the current economic problems in the country?
84% agree
15% disagree
1% not sure
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Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
On Saturday, January 26, Reuters reported [1] that Taliban officials said the US negotiators agreed on a draft peace pact setting out the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan within 18 months, potentially ending the United States longest war.
Confirming the news, New York Times reported [2] on Monday, January 28, that the US chief negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad stated the American and Taliban officials had agreed in principle to the framework of a peace deal in which the insurgents guaranteed to prevent Afghan territory from being used by terrorists, and that could lead to a full pullout of American troops in return for a ceasefire and Taliban talks with the Afghan government.
Moreover, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted on Saturday:
“The US is serious about pursuing peace, preventing Afghanistan from continuing to be a space for international terrorism and bringing forces home,” though he declined to provide a timeframe for the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.
The news of drawdown of American forces is expected after the next round of peace talks is held in late February in the capital of Qatar, Doha, in which Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a close aide to the Taliban’s deceased leader Mullah Omar, will lead the Taliban delegation.
Baradar was released from captivity [3] in October by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and was allowed to join his family in Afghanistan. He was captured in a joint US-Pakistan intelligence operation in the southern port city of Karachi in 2010. His release was a longstanding demand of the Afghan government because he is regarded as a comparatively moderate Taliban leader who could play a positive role in the peace process between the Afghan government and the Taliban.
Alongside the issues of Taliban providing guarantees it would not allow Afghan soil to be used by transnational terrorists, al-Qaeda and Islamic State Khorasan, the Taliban holding direct negotiations with the US-backed Afghan government – which the Taliban regards as an American stooge and hence refuse to recognize – a permanent ceasefire and the formation of a mutually acceptable interim government, a few other minor issues, such as the exchange and release of prisoners, removing travel restrictions on the Taliban leadership and unfreezing its bank accounts are also on the agenda of the peace talks.
Although both Reuters and New York Times reports hailed the news of the pullout of American forces from Afghanistan a diplomatic victory for Washington since the Taliban had agreed to a ceasefire and holding talks with the US-backed government of Afghanistan, in fact the withdrawal of foreign troops from the Afghan soil would be a stellar victory for the Taliban and one of the most humiliating defeats for Washington since the Fall of Saigon in 1975, because besides destroying a country of thirty-million people, Washington has failed to achieve any of its objective, including the much-touted imperialist project of “nation-building,” during its seventeen years of occupation of Afghanistan.
Regarding the presence of transnational terrorist networks on the Afghan soil, the al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden has already been killed [allegedly] in a May 2011 raid of the US Navy Seals in the Abbottabad compound in Pakistan and its second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri is on the run. Besides, the number of al-Qaeda’s Arab militants in the Af-Pak region does not exceed more than a few hundred and are hence inconsequential.
As far as Islamic State Khorasan is concerned, a number of Islamic State affiliates have recently sprung up all over the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia regions that have no organizational and operational association, whatsoever, with the Islamic State proper in Syria and Iraq, such as the Islamic State-affiliates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and even Boko Haram in Nigeria now falls under the rubric of the Islamic State.
It is understandable for laymen to conflate such local militant outfits for the Islamic State proper in Iraq and Syria, but how come the policy analysts of think tanks and the corporate media’s terrorism experts, who are fully aware of this not-so-subtle distinction, have fallen for such a ruse?
Can we classify any ragtag militant outfit as the Islamic State merely on the basis of ideological affinity and “a letter of accreditation” from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi without the Islamic State’s Baathist command structure and superior weaponry that has been bankrolled by the Gulf’s petro-dollars?
The Western political establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, deliberately and knowingly fall for such stratagems because it serves the scaremongering agenda of vested interests. Before acknowledging the Islamic State’s affiliates in the region, the Western mainstream media also similarly and “naively” acknowledged al-Qaeda’s affiliates in the region, too, merely on the basis of ideological affinity without any organizational and operational association with al-Qaeda Central, such as al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula, al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb.
Regarding the creation and composition of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, apart from training and arms which were provided to Syrian militants in the training camps located in the Turkish and Jordanian border regions adjacent to Syria by the CIA in collaboration with Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies, another factor that contributed to the stellar success of the Islamic State in early 2014 when it overran Raqqa in Syria and Mosul and Anbar in Iraq was that its top cadres were comprised of former Baathist military and intelligence officers from the Saddam era.
Reportedly, hundreds of ex-Baathists constituted the top and mid-tier command structure of the Islamic State who planned all the operations and directed its military strategy. The only feature that differentiated the Islamic State from all other insurgent groups was its command structure which was comprised of professional ex-Baathists and its state-of-the-art weaponry that was provided to all militant outfits fighting in Syria by the intelligence agencies of the Western powers, Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf states.
Recently, the Islamic State’s purported “terror franchises” in Afghanistan and Pakistan have claimed a spate of bombings against the Shi’a and Barelvi Muslims who are regarded as heretics by Takfiris. But to contend that the Islamic State is responsible for suicide blasts in Pakistan and Afghanistan is to declare that the Taliban are responsible for the sectarian war in Syria and Iraq.
Both are localized militant outfits and the Islamic State without its Baathist command structure and superior weaponry is just another ragtag, regional militant outfit. The distinction between the Taliban and the Islamic State lies in the fact that the Taliban follow Deobandi sect of Sunni Islam which is a sect native to South Asia and the jihadists of the Islamic State mostly belong to Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi denomination.
Secondly, and more importantly, the insurgency in Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan is a Pashtun uprising which is an ethnic group native to Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, while the bulk of the Islamic State’s jihadists is comprised of Arab militants of Syria and Iraq.
The so-called “Khorasan Province” of the Islamic State in the Af-Pak region is nothing more than a coalition of several breakaway factions of the Taliban and a few other inconsequential local militant outfits that have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State’s chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in order to enhance their prestige and draw funds and followers, but which don’t have any organizational and operational association, whatsoever, with the Islamic State proper in Syria and Iraq.
Conflating the Islamic State either with al-Qaeda, the Taliban or with myriads of ragtag, local militant groups is a deliberate deception intended to mislead public opinion in order to exaggerate the threat posed by the Islamic State which serves the scaremongering agenda of Western and regional security establishments.
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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes
[1] Foreign troops to quit Afghanistan in 18 months:
Riotous protesters briefly stormed the Cameroonian Embassies in Paris and Berlin over the weekend in an attempt to raise global awareness about the rolling regime change campaign back in their homeland following the reelection of President Biya to his seventh consecutive term in office late last year, possibly forcing France to choose sides in decisively throwing its weight behind either its decades-long proxy or his anti-government opponents.
The “Perfect Storm”
Most of the global media didn’t pay much attention to it but anti-government protesters briefly stormed the Cameroonian Embassies in Paris and Berlin over the weekend in an attempt to raise awareness about the rolling regime change campaign against their country’s long-serving president, who was just re-elected to his seventh consecutive term in office late last year. The West-Central African country is currently experiencing a pronounced bout of Hybrid War unrest whereby it’s suffering asymmetrical onslaughts from Anglophone separatists and Boko Haram Islamists while simultaneously having to fend off a simmering Color Revolution movement. The so-called “perfect storm” is brewing, but it hasn’t yet attracted the serious focus of any Great Power mostly because President Biya remains immensely loyal to his French patrons in spite of his Silk Road partnership with China, though the latest attention-grabbing tactic is trying to change all of that.
Hybrid War Origins
While the case can be made that the Hybrid War on Cameroon is designed to achieve the dual objectives of disrupting China’s future transcontinental Silk Road in the region (Sudan-Chad-Cameroon) and creating the conditions where the rising African Great Power of neighboring Nigeria can be more easily controlled, no Great Power has yet to throw its full weight (even just diplomatically) behind this destabilization campaign. This suggests that it might either be a “work in progress”, a “probe” intended to gauge the resiliency of regional security structures, or a short-term pressure tactic that aims to coerce certain political concessions out of Yaoundé. There’s also the chance that a large degree of these Hybrid War processes are “naturally occurring” outcomes of the ultra-diverse country’s identity fault lines finally colliding with one another. Whatever the case may be, some members of the diaspora are clearly eager to shape the situation to their favor.
Double Standards
The coordinated storming of two of a nation’s embassies over the weekend would ordinarily be a global media event but wasn’t in the case of Cameroon because the country is a medium-sized African state whose diplomats aren’t afforded much respect in the West. Had this happened to a Great Power such as France, however, the reaction would be altogether different, though the “silver lining” in this instance is that this attention-grabbing provocation has yet to get any of the Great Powers to publicly throw their weight behind the rolling regime change operation that the protesters are in support of. That might soon change, however, if the ongoing destabilization of the nation’s largest port of Douala interferes with Chad and the Central African Republic’s imports from there, possibly impeding them and therefore raising the cost everything else in those countries as a precursor to a socio-economic crisis in each landlocked state.
Rival Rumblings In Central Africa
The Central African Republic (CAR) has recently come under heavy Russian influence after Moscow received UNSC approval in late-2017 to dispatch “mercenaries” there as part of a train-and-assist program for buffeting the anti-militant capabilities of the country’s fledgling military as the central state seeks to restore its sovereignty over the rest of its mineral-rich territory. As for Chad, it periodically slips into civil war and sometimes has to fend off foreign-based militants from Sudan and Libya, but it’s nevertheless still a regional military power with impressive reach that extends as far westward as Mali. Of interest, N’Djamena recently restored relations with Tel Aviv following Netanyahu’s visit there last week, which contributed to the interesting state of regional affairs where one Central African state (Chad) is under “Israeli” influence, another (CAR) recently came under Russian influence, and the third (Cameroon) is under Chinese influence despite all three informally being part of Paris’ neocolonial Françafrique.
Time To Choose
Although France still controls each of their currencies and almost a dozen other African countries’ through the CFA franc, it’s slowly but surely losing geopolitical influence in its former colonial domain. Fretful that it won’t be able to regain its formerly strategic position in the CAR after Russia moved in there to help stabilize the situation, and possibly even Gabon as well following the US’ dispatch of troops there earlier this month before the country’s failed coup attempt, France might feel compelled for now to cling to its partner in Cameroon despite the growing “grassroots” pressure for it to betray him. That said, if the situation appears to be moving in the direction where a regime change seems “inevitable”, then Paris could be expected to turn on its proxy in a last-ditch attempt to save its influence there instead of having the country fall under American or British influence if France hasn’t prepared a replacement for him.
Is It Now Or Never For Françafrique?
Just like the Ottoman Empire was regarded as the “sick man of Europe” for some time prior to its collapse, so too might France come to be seen as the “sick man of Africa” if its Françafrique holdings continue to fall under the sway of other powers. The CFA franc might not go anywhere soon, but France’s geopolitical dominance over this transregional space might slip away if the country can’t regain control over its proxies after Russia’s recent advances in the CAR, Chad’s outreach to “Israel”, and Gabon’s surprise hosting of US troops.
China’s influence is also looming large all throughout Françafrique and Paris might soon feel pressured make a stand in Central Africa by either decisively supporting or opposing the Cameroonian President depending on which way it feels that the “wind is blowing”. Be that as it may, last weekend’s Cameroonian embassy stormings might force France to finally make a choice one way or the other.
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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The British political establishment is experiencing an unprecedented crisis over the issue of exiting the European Union. The Conservative government staggers from crisis to crisis over its Brexit deal while politicians off all colours bicker and argue as the UK lurches towards a potentially devastating No Deal scenario. This had lead to a huge distrust in the political class amongst the long suffering public.
As the clock ticks down towards the 29 March exit date it is worth while recalling how this crisis came about in the first place. Regardless of which Brexit option the UK takes over the next period it will not detract from the fact that there is a huge chasm between large sections of a bitterly discontented population and the political establishment that does not bode well for the future stability of a key American ally.
A recent poll of 33,000 people revealed that an overwhelming majority felt that whatever Brexit option is adopted it will not address the rampant inequalities, political alienation and disenchantment that lay behind the vote to leave the EU in 2016.
In June 2016 the UK vote to exit the EU shocked the financial and political elites and led to turmoil on global stock markets. The corporate media was full of shocked pundits lamenting the democratic decision of British people for Brexit. Brexit voters were being blamed for everything from the rise in racism against immigrant families to the increased dangers of terrorist attacks.
The corporate media both in Britain and internationally was and still are furious with the British electorate for voting for Brexit. They never saw it coming and still don’t fully understand why ordinary people voted for Brexit. More than this, they still don’t understand how the Brexit vote reveals how completely out of touch the corporate media and the political/financial elites are with the millions of working class people who voted for Brexit.
Let’s be very clear about this: the vote for Brexit was a working class rebellion against the financial and political elites of Britain who have presided over a massive redistribution of wealth in favour of the super rich leaving a fifth of the population in poverty. Analysis of the referendum vote shows how the poorer an area was the higher the vote was for Brexit.
The working class stood up to massive pressure from the Bremain camp that included: all of the mainstream political parties, the Bank of England, CBI, IMF, ECB, Obama, the World Bank and the trade union bureaucrats.
The vote for Brexit revealed how out of touch the establishment advocates of the EU are with working class people. Millions of people are struggling to get by with low wages, incessant benefit cuts, zero hour contracts, food banks and poor housing that are putting their families and communities under intense strain. On top of this, working class people suffer the most from the cuts to the welfare state and the incessant cuts to local council services.
Working class people are not stupid they can how the EU is a fundamentally undemocratic organisation that is completely unaccountable to them. The secret negotiations that took place between the EU and the Obama administration over TTIP, which members of the European Parliament had no say over, proved conclusively how this is an organisation run for the benefit of the too big to fail banks and the multi-national corporations.
They can see how the undemocratic EU has bludgeoned the people of Greece into living in permanent austerity and mass poverty despite a referendum last year that decisively rejected austerity measures. Obama’s favourite economist Paul Krugman called the EU’s intervention into Greece in 2015 a ‘coup d’etat’.
The advocates of Bremain in 2016 such as Mark Carney (ex-Goldman Sachs), then Prime Minister Cameron (from a tax avoiding banker family) then Chancellor George Osborne (son of a Baronet) warned working class people that Brexit would lower their living standards more than any other group in UK society.
However, millions of people were not taken in by the crocodile tears coming from those responsible for creating a massively unequal society. Quantitative easing and ZIRP have made the super rich fabulously richer as they have benefited from the massive bubbles on the stock market and in property. The top 10% of society own 45% of all wealth totalling over £5 trillion while the bottom 50% of society own a pathetic 9% of the wealth.
Prime Minister Cameron’s government presided over a savage attack upon welfare benefits which have led to one and half million benefit sanctions leaving people totally destitute and leading to hundreds of people committing suicide. The attack on welfare benefits for disabled people have been so severe it prompted the UN to launch an investigation into the human rights violations of disabled people. In 2018 the UN accused the UK government of ‘’systematic violations’’ of disabled people’s rights..
The political and financial elites who advocated that Britain should stay in the EU were puzzled as to why so many working class people stubbornly supported Brexit in 2016. They were and still are incapable of comprehending the anger, pain and suffering of millions of working class people who feel increasing contempt towards a political and financial elite that has no understanding of their daily lives. Over 13 million live in poverty (1 in 5 of the population) while 15 million live in inadequate housing conditions.
This inchoate anger at the daily reality that confronts them has few outlets in life. The EU referendum provided working class people with a means of sticking two fingers up at the political and financial establishment which now presides over a very divided country along lines of class and geography. This sense of alienation and disenchantment with the political establishment has only increased in the two and half years since the Brexit referendum.
The Brexit vote has led to unprecedented turmoil in both of the main political parties in Britain, particularly the Conservative Party.
The financial and political elites suffered a major defeat in 2016 Brexit vote. The Conservative Party is one of the oldest and most successful political parties in history and has served the British ruling class well for over two hundred years. Now it faces an unprecedented crisis and is unable to effectively govern.
Regardless of which Brexit option the Conservative government takes over the next period the UK will face huge challenges as the world economy continues to slow down and heads towards another devastating recession.
