Global Research

Venezuela

There are innumerable examples throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but three of the most notorious demonstrations of Washington, and its European cohorts incubating massive human tragedy and/or civil wars can be exemplified by Washington’s cultivation, indeed creation of toxic opposition movements whose goal is the destabilization and destruction of progressive governments and egalitarian economic and social structures. Currently, one of the most venal is Washington’s latest inamorata, or inamorato, Juan Guaido, the teflon Quisling of Venezuela, whose attempt to usurp the Presidency from democratically elected Nicolas Maduro would be comic in its ineffectiveness, were it not so tragic in its destruction of the lives of Venezuelan citizens. Venezuela, which controls the world’s largest oil reserves, among other coveted resources, is currently one of the most viciously targeted victims of imperialism, (cosmetically now described as “democracy development,” the latest rhetorical politically correct name for plunder).  Yet, Venezuela, contrary to mainstream media disinformation, seems to be enduring, with a loyal populace who are evidently capable of detecting and resisting  economic, social, and cultural manipulation, and a military who are so far unwilling to prostitute themselves.

This is a phenomenally heroic example of human integrity, and the success of socialism. President Maduro has assembled a team of brilliant leaders to represent his government, in particular, his Foreign Minister, Jorge Arreaza, an intellectual aristocrat of the highest order,  his expert Ambassador Samuel Moncada, and many others of remarkable sophistication, whose capacity to see beyond the idiocies of bourgeoise propaganda is admirable, and indeed, enviable. (There are, after all, other things in life beyond designer handbags and plastic surgery, as the young women of South Korea discovered at the arrival of Kim Yo Jong, the DPRK envoy at the Winter Olympics in Seoul, who dazzled the West by her elegant simplicity and eschewal of conspicuous consumption.)

But, as Jeffrey Sachs demonstrated, in his excellent recent essay (“Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment”), Washington’s sanctions are designed and determined to devastate and destroy the very fabric of the lives of the Venezuelan people, while making a mockery of  U.S. “concern for human rights.” And all this is being done in the name of “democracy,” which, as a result, is acquiring a putrid odor. These sanctions are a form of economic genocide.

Yesterday’s New York Times reports Elliot Abrams offering President Maduro amnesty if he resigns office, which is in staggering contrast to recent threats by U.S. Senator Marco Rubio that Maduro will suffer the same fate as Libya’s Khadafi, who was sodomized with a bayonet among other tortures prior to his murder by the opposition. President Maduro might understandably conclude that the inmates have taken over the asylum.

Ukraine

In his famous book, “The Grand Chessboard,” the late Zbigniew Brezezinski, (the architect of the US policy of  training, funding and arming of the savage Islamic jihadists to overthrow the socialist government of Najibullah in Afghanistan,) stressed, at length, the necessity of severing all relations between Russia and Ukraine, to completely isolate Russia from Europe, and force it to become an Eurasian state. Brzezinski’s policies were carried out during the Obama Administration, and this was implemented by State Department officials, led by Victoria Nuland.

If the history of US efforts to destabilize and overthrow the democratically elected presidency of Victor Yanukovich in Ukraine is written, one of the central figures is the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria (“Fuck the EU”) Nuland. And in all likelihood, she will be remembered for that famous expletive, which reveals her (and her cohorts) attitude toward illegal intervention in the sovereign affairs  of another country. The BBC published the leaked transcript of the Nuland-Pyatt phone call, which reveals the scandalous details of Nuland and Pyatt’s masterminding the overthrow of a democratically elected government, which they replaced with a neo-nazi regime more to their liking, and which has resulted in a virtual civil war in Ukraine, glorification of Ukranian Nazis such as Stefan Bandera, and ethnocide of the Russian-speaking Ukranians which bears striking similarity to the early stages of Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, which began with destroying their cultural identity.

Nuland:

“I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience.  He’s the…what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside…..I just think Klitsch going in…he’s going to be at that level working for Yatseniuk, it’s just not going to work.”

Pyatt:

“….I think you reaching out directly to Klischko helps with the personality management among the three and it gives you also a chance to move fast on all this stuff and put us behind it before they all sit down and he explains why he doesn’t like it.”

Nuland:

“….when I talked to Jeff Feltman (UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs) this morning, he had a new name for the UN guy Robert Serry did I write you that this morning?  OK.  He’s now gotten both Serry and (UN Secretary-General) Ban Ki-moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or Tuesday.  So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and to have the UN help glue it and, you know, Fuck the EU.”

BBC  diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus notes:

“An intriguing insight into the foreign policy process with work going on at a number of levels: Various officials attempting to marshal the Ukranian opposition, efforts to get the UN to play an active role in bolstering a deal; and the big guns waiting in the wings – US Vice-President Biden clearly being lined up to give private words of encouragement at the appropriate moment.”

Every year at the United Nations, the Russian Federation submits a resolution prohibiting the glorification of Nazism. Every year the Resolution is adopted by a majority vote, and the Resolution has consistently been opposed by only one country: the U.S. In recent years Ukraine has joined with the U.S. in opposition to the anti-nazi resolution.

Today, conditions in Ukraine are appalling, and the horrific event in Odessa, recently, where workers were trapped in a building deliberately set on fire, and were burned to death, while neo-nazis circled the building chanting neo-nazi slogans is only one among innumerable such events, in a country which had previously known peace and stability.

Perhaps, the most moving and accurate description of the destruction of the democratically elected Presidency of Victor Yanukovich was delivered in a speech by Russia’s late Ambassador Vitali Churkin on March 27, 2014 at the UN General Assembly, and it bears quoting in large part here:

Ambassador Churkin:

“The crisis was to a large extent provoked by the adventurous actions of the current political forces, which sought to break the centuries-old ties of Russia and Ukraine, by giving Kiev a false choice between either the European Union and the West or Russia.  That policy was carried out with unprecedented bluntness.  They could either sign a Ukraine-European Union association agreement, as demanded of the Ukranian Government, or they could face sanctions.  Within the ranks of anti-Government demonstrators were representatives of the European Union and the United States, who openly marched alongside them and called on them to openly carry out anti-Government actions.”

“The central square of the city –Maidan Nezalezhnosti—was turned into a militarized camp. Well-trained and equipped units of militants carried out violent attacks against law enforcement bodies and seized administrative buildings.  In one of those buildings, the trade unions building, the so-called common diversion of the Maidan was organized.  On the seventh floor of that building was a permanent staff member of the United States Embassy.  By the way, it is from that building that snipers were shooting at police and demonstrators;  that action was clearly aimed at provoking a violent overthrow of the government.  At some point, it appeared that it would be possible to stop before the situation became worse….However, someone thought that such a scenario was not sufficiently radical.  The violence continued.  Under the threat of death, President Yanukovich had to leave Kiev and then Ukraine.  The legitimate Government stopped operating in Kiev.  Violence became the rule of politics.  In the Verkhovna Rada, the parties that supported the Yanukovich majority became victims of that violence.  As a result, the Rada was reshuffled, and instead of a Government of national unity, a so-called Government of victors emerged.  The shots were called by those who conducted an armed coup, national radicals who –according to the definition of the European Parliament—preached racist, anti-semitic and xenophobic views and seemed to hate everything that was Russian and did not conceal that they considered the Ukranian allies of Nazis as their ideological ancestors.”

Violence and hatreds fester today in Ukraine, xenophobia, Russophobia, neo-nazism are the “new normal” in this “democracy?”

Hong Kong

Several years ago, Syrian Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari told me, personally, that each year recently Saudi Arabia invites at least 5,000 moslem Uighurs from the northwest of China to the pilgrimage in Mecca. The Saudis pay all their expenses, and extend their stay there for one month after all other pilgrims have left.  The Saudis train the Uighurs in religious extremism and jihad, and then return these newly minted jihadist to their homes in Xingjiang, China, where they have been primed to destabilize the region, and promote jihad, with its terrorist core.  China is not ignorant of these manoeuvers by the West, and it is attempting to restrain the metastasization of jihad terrorism elsewhere in China.  This is the origin of the re-education camps which the mainstream Western media is attempting to depict as concentration camps, violating all human rights of the Uighurs.  Carefully omitted from the Western media narrative is the background and origin of the re-education efforts by the Chinese, their efforts to eliminate the incitement to violence inculcated into these Uighur Chinese by the Saudis…and by other interested parties.

Once again, China must simultaneously confront engineered terrorism in its northwest, a trade war with the USA, and another “Color Revolution,” in Hong Kong, the last one, picturesquely titled the “Umbrella Revolution” occurred in 2013, and at that time there was also a violent terrorist attack in Beijing, as I know, since I was there at that time.

And once again, the US and European mainstream media and various government and quasi government entities are supporting destabilization of the government in Hong Kong, with an August 6 meeting between US Consulate Official Julie Eadeh and Hong Kong opposition figures Martin Lee, Anson Chan (who also met with Vice-President Pence in March) and Joshua Wong of “Occupy Central” in 2014.

Opposition protests have escalated in violence, with protesters now hurling Molotov cocktails at police.  There is evidence that some of the most extreme provocative violent actions are, in fact, the work of agent provocateurs, and allegations are made that CIA infiltration is attempting to force the authorities to violent repression that can then be likened to the Tiennamen Square events of 1989.  There was, however, even then, evidence that the Tiennamen protests, which had been peaceful for an extended period, but then suddenly escalated to violence, was the result of infiltration by agents, seeking to provoke the government to violent repression, which could then be used to discredit it.  This provocative tactic is well known.

The current destabilization of Hong Kong in the name of “democracy” has become so chaotic that even as mainstream a US publication as “Newsweek” featured an article on August 12, 2019 headlined: “China Warns of Terrorism in Hong Kong Protests, Says U.S. is Supporting it.” “In the past few days, Hong Kong’s radical demonstrators have repeatedly attacked police officers with extremely dangerous tools, which already constitutes serious violent crimes and has begun to show signs of terrorism,” Yang Guang, a spokesperson for the Chinese State Council’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office,” condemning petrol bomb attacks against police, and other violent actions.  On August 14 CBS reported that those “peaceful, non-violent, pro-democracy” protesters had smashed to the ground two unarmed men, whom they wantonly accused of sympathy with the government, and these defenseless men were kicked, beaten, punched and drenched in ice water;  one of the men “was bound with cable ties and left on the ground in a fetal position,” unaided, until “finally emergency workers were allowed to take them away.”

The U.S. and the U.K. support these violent demonstrations, with U.S. Vice President Pence, State Secretary Pompeo, and John Bolton openly meeting Hong Kong opposition figures. According to Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunyang,

“Senior U.S. politicians met and engaged with anti-China rabble-rousers in Hong Kong, propped up violent and illegal activities and undermined Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability…I’d like to ask the US this question again:  what is the true intention behind your behaviors relating to Hong Kong?”

Spokesperson Hua’s question is virtually rhetorical. The motive for the multi-pronged effort to weaken and destabilize China in the Northwest, in Hong Kong, through economic trade wars, and escalated pressures is obvious. China’s denial to permit an American warship to dock in Qingdao on August 29 is an inevitable reaction to U.S. provocations, including the Trump administration’s decision to pursue an $8 billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan. The U.S. cannot tolerate the competition of a China on the ascendency, and will do everything, so far, covert, to disintegrate and collapse the world’s second largest economy.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ultimate nightmare is an alliance, or close cooperation between China and Russia. On April 28, 2017 China Daily headlined: “China, Russia Note Strategic Importance Tied To Relationship,” reporting: “The mutual trust and cooperation between Russia and China are stronger now than at any time in the past.” Though Brzezinski’s hope of severing relations between Russia and Ukraine has become a reality, at least at this time, Brzezinski’s nightmare of close ties between Russia and China may next become a reality, brought about by those very short-sighted zero-sum policies pursued by the West.

These abhorrent “color revolutions” bear resemblance to the ravages of Attilla the Hun, and the nations fostering them  are themselves decaying of their own greed and moral degeneracy, as can be observed by any visitor to the capitols of Washington, London, Paris, etc., with their crowds of homeless, impoverished citizens sleeping in the gutters, deprived of all dignity and  hope, but nevertheless bearing within themselves the potential to ultimately resist their destitution, and end this intolerable affront to humanity.

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Carla Stea is Global Research’s correspondent at United Nations Headquarters, New York, N.Y.