In an exclusive interview for Al Mayadeen, the Cuban President talks about Cuba’s stance on the war in Ukraine, and his country’s relationship with Russia, China, and other countries.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel
During the second part of Al Mayadeen Media Network Chairman Ghassan Ben Jeddou’s interview with Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, the president discusses Cuba’s assessment of current alliances, in addition to its position on the war in Ukraine.
The Cuban president discussed the solid relationship that consolidates his country with Russia, China, and Iran, as well as his country’s relationship with Latin American leaders, and what he aspires for in the Arab region. He also expressed his admiration for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and his desire to visit Damascus this year.
The world that Cuba aspires to
During his interview with Al Mayadeen, Diaz-Canel said that “the assessment of alliances in today’s world must be on the current context, and on an analysis of the current situation,” noting that this is related to what happened in the world, as the world is going through a multidimensional crisis.
He stresses that the situation has also been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has plunged the world into a state of uncertainty.
Diaz-Canel added, “Instead of enforcing the language of cooperation and respect for one another, the world has resorted to imposing new sanctions and resolving conflicts using the language of war.” “This is not the world we want and I think it is not the world that the majority of people on Earth want.”
“Today,” the Cuban president said, “we need a world capable of globalizing solidarity, peace, and friendship, a world that has a system of relations that defends pluralism,” noting that “this world is being built in accordance with common values based on peace, solidarity, friendship, and pluralism, which are capable of preserving, first and foremost, the human race.”
He added that this issue was former Cuban President Fidel Castro’s concern from an early age, and it was mentioned in many of his messages to the world on various international occasions, and that Cuba aims to resolve conflicts through dialogue, and for the world to become more democratic.
The Cuban president asserted to Al Mayadeen the need to change the “current global economic system, because it is based on exploitation and inequality, serves the rich at the expense of the majority of the world’s poor, and does not offer developing countries any alternatives, as it is subject to the interests of military-industrial complexes and great Western powers.”
If “we are able to achieve alliances that contribute to achieving pluralism, understanding, respect for others, and the struggle for peace… these alliances will then be valid and supportive.”
In the same context, he refers to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of America (ALBA), the alternative adopted by Latin America to confront the ALCA Free Trade Agreement, which represents an imperialist project.
One of the most important reasons for the success of these alliances is, according to Diaz-Canel, that they are based on cooperation, solidarity, and sincere stances, and not on concepts that prioritize money and the economy.
The president stressed that the Cuban revolution is based on sharing what it has with others, and that this is what the future of the world should be like.
Blame for Russia-Ukraine war lies with Washington
Regarding Cuba’s position on the Russian-Ukrainian war, Diaz-Canel stressed that this conflict has serious consequences for the world, not just the parties involved.
The president accused Washington of using its power of influence through the media to spread Russophobia and disinformation on the origin of the conflict, labeling Russia as a culprit while concealing the real reasons behind the war.
He stressed that “the culprit in this conflict is the United States itself, which resorts to wars to solve its problems and overcome its crises,” adding that “Washington puts the interests of the military-industrial complex at the forefront, as it needs the war to sell weapons and to solve the internal problems it suffers from.”
The Cuban president indicated that the US has always sought to encircle Russia by promoting NATO expansionism on its borders, which he says Russia is aware of. The countries that are accomplices in the war will lose the most, he added, as they began to suffer from food shortages and an energy crisis, while those directly involved in the conflict are losing human lives.
The biggest beneficiary of the war, he said, is the US administration, and there need to be initiatives at the international level that facilitate the process of dialogue between the concerned parties to put an end to the war.
Diaz-Canel reiterated his country’s disapproval of the continued use of the language of war and the imposition of sanctions against Russia instead of dialogue, as these measures do not solve crises, but rather exacerbate the state of war. He added that the way Western nations are dealing with the crisis may drag the world into a possible world war.
He further wondered how Europe, which was the theater of two previous world wars, and the theater for Fascism and Nazism, is incapable of extracting the necessary lessons from history to play an effective role in avoiding a third world war.
Speaking about Cuban-Chinese relations, the president stressed that his country and China enjoy historical and friendly relations, based on common principles that bring the two countries together.
He added that his country shares convictions with China regarding a structured socialist path in both countries that takes into account the specificities of each; both countries also share strong relations at the levels of their governments, peoples, and parties (the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of Cuba).
Diaz-Canel praised the Chinese model of socialism and reform, and its establishment of a firm economic base, which transformed it into one of the world’s great powers. He added that China adopted a distinguished position in terms of cooperation and solidarity, as is the case in Cuba, referring in this context to the initiatives and proposals presented by Chinese President Xi Jinping to achieve more harmony on the global level.
The Cuban president said that during his visit to China at the end of last year, he felt assured by the clear Chinese desire to support Cuba out of its crisis. He pointed out that during the visit, decisions were taken regarding the development of bilateral relations.
He said that China is one of Cuba’s main economic partners and that it is directly involved with Cuban energy, transportation, and telecommunication projects, referring also to the wide exchange between the two countries in terms of education, culture, science, technologies, and innovation, calling China “a friend of Cuba.”
Cuba’s relationship with Russia
Regarding Cuban-Russian relations, Diaz-Canel affirmed the high level of political, economic, and commercial relations between Moscow and Havana.
He added that Russia is present in the most strategic sectors that were developed within the national plan for economic and social development in Cuba until 2030: the energy sector, transportation and communications, cybersecurity, the mineral sector, the industrial sector, and in food production.
Diaz-Canel discussed how Russia sent a plane to assist his country during the Covid-19 pandemic and placed it at the disposal of Havana to transport oxygen cylinders imported from various places in Latin America and the Caribbean. He added that while Cuba was in a crisis, Russia donated factories to help it produce oxygen, and many concentrators, as did China.
The Cuban president touched on his recent visit to Russia, pointing out that he saw that Russian President Vladimir Putin understood Cuba’s problems, and Moscow’s political and governmental will to help alleviate the problems his country suffers from. He added that since that visit, Cuba has constantly been updated with regard to the agreements with Moscow, especially concerning energy and food.
He stressed that China and Russia are friendly states, and that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin have demonstrated the will to embody a true friendship with Cuba.
During the interview with Al Mayadeen, the Cuban president did not hide his admiration for his Russian counterpart, pointing out that Putin’s speeches are rich in historical references. He added that Putin is constantly referring to lessons from history in order to reaffirm what is happening today, and what needs to be done in the future.
He added that “I don’t think it was Putin who caused the conflict with Ukraine, they were about to impose a siege on the Russian Federation,” pointing out that the Russian president is defending Russia’s interests and security.
“Dialogue with the Russian president is not impossible, but rather possible, provided that it is linked to a sincere will and without the imposition of preconditions.”
Cuba’s relationship with Iran
Speaking about Cuban-Iranian relations, the Cuban president described Iran as Cuba’s sister nation. He said that the foundations of the relationship between the two countries are based on history and mutual respect, as well as the great resistance that the two people waged in the face of imperial blockades and sanctions.
According to the Cuban president, “the Cuban and Iranian people share an understanding of resistance, courage, heroism, dignity, and defiance to the plans of imperialist power.”
He also expressed his appreciation for the Iranian leader, Sayyed Ali Khamenei, as a politician and as the leader of the Iranian Revolution, admiring his “tremendous capability for logical thinking and analysis,” also describing him as a wise leader.
The Cuban president indicated that the two countries are working on joint projects that serve the economic development of both, especially in the fields of energy and food. He pointed out that Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi might visit his country, while also expressing his desire to visit Tehran this year.
Diaz-Canel stressed to Al Mayadeen that this year will witness a deepening of relations between the two countries, and the adoption of projects that are of mutual benefit. He specified both nations share mutual projects that include scientific research, technology, and energy.
The Cuban president expressed his admiration for Iran’s culture, civilization, and resistance against aggression, and said that the technological development that Iran has achieved despite the embargo and sanctions is very important, and multifaceted, pointing out that being familiar with Iran’s development can benefit Havana.
Diaz-Canel pointed out that the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez sowed hope in Venezuela, shining throughout Latin America, and that Venezuela has always been an important country and played a key role in Latin America, especially during Chavez’s leadership of the Bolivarian Revolution.
He added that many values have come together in Chavez, as he was Bolivarian in thought par excellence, was well versed in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, and was an exceptional defender of Simon Bolivar’s thought and of the pioneers of liberation in Latin America.
The Cuban president noted that “Chavez was able, as an exemplary leader, to understand the concerns and aspirations of the Venezuelan people,” adding that the friendship between former Cuban President Fidel Castro and Chavez, “was like a father-son relationship.”
In this context, he referred to the achievements made by the two countries during the Chavez and Fidel eras, especially with regard to the ALBA.
He added that when Chavez was head of the Bolivarian Revolution, he was preparing cadres who were distinguished by their true commitment to the revolution’s path, to the Venezuelan people, and their loyalty to the revolution, referring in this context to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
The Cuban president described Maduro as a brother to Cuba, and admired how he defended the Bolivarian Revolution against all destabilization attempts planned by the US government. He pointed out that “Maduro, with his efforts and persistence, was able to achieve civil-military unity, preserve the Bolivarian Revolution, and move it forward on the path of victory.”
Cuba and Colombia
Speaking about Colombia, the Cuban president said that there is now a government in Colombia that prioritizes dialogue with Venezuela, adding that Nicolas Maduro and Gustavo Petro have agreed on a whole set of measures that also aim to ensure peace in one of Latin America’s most important regions.
Cuba and Brazil
The Cuban president also described his Brazilian counterpart, Lula da Silva, as an exceptional leader, pointing to his prominent role in extracting Brazil from its economic crisis, which turned it into a reference for what can be achieved in the policy of social justice, adding that “Lula doesn’t suit US interests, so the administration worked to discredit him by fabricating legal cases against him.”
He added that Lula did not surrender and did not accept any conditions to be imposed on him, despite his imprisonment and the pressure exerted on him to subdue him. He complimented the Brazilian president, stressing that his new projects help develop programs and investments in the country.
Cuba and Nicaragua
The Cuban president also expressed his admiration for the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, noting that it was a success the United States could not bear, and against which it launched a fierce campaign of destabilization, backed by a fierce media campaign to discredit Nicaragua.
“Therefore, I believe that whenever we want to assess the situation in Nicaragua, we must start from where we proceed in our analysis of what the Sandinista revolution contributed to in the areas of economic and social development for the Nicaraguan people, and what the Sandinista revolution means in terms of building a state with national security, and remove everything related to imperialist distortion and tampering.”
Cuba’s relationship with the Arab world
Regarding the island’s relationship with the Arab world, Diaz-Canel affirmed that Havana has good relations with Arab countries based on respect and mutual understanding of the historical and cultural specifics of each country.
He pointed out that there was space for cooperation, for the defense of common struggles, and coordination of efforts in international forums, adding that Cuba has always felt the solidarity and support of the Arab communities.
Diaz-Canel stressed that there is room to deepen the already strong ties on the economic and commercial level, as the historical foundations laid out for these relations are strong and Cuba looks to strengthen this relationship with the Arab world.
The Cuban president expressed his admiration for Syria’s courage, steadfastness, and self-confidence in the face of an aggressive campaign aimed at destroying it, noting that Syria, after many years of the unjust war against it, remained a strong and united nation.
In this context, he praised the role of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, “The Syrian president has shown sincerity to his people and has remained at the forefront without giving up… I have always seen a great deal of steadfastness and composure in him.”
Before concluding the interview with Al Mayadeen, the Cuban President renewed his support for Syria, saying that Havana will remain with the Syrian people, and condemned the ongoing Israeli aggression against it, as well as the sanctions imposed on the Syrian people.
The Cuban president expressed his desire to visit Damascus this year and admired the nation’s steadfastness and the solidity and dignity of the Syrian people.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said the ‘Axis of Resistance’ is not just confined to certain countries across the world, but it refers to all those fighting colonialism and hegemonic powers.
“The Axis of Resistance exists throughout the world; it exists in Africa, in Asia, in the Middle East, in Latin America and in the Caribbean. The Resistance also belongs to the people who are fighting against neoliberalism, racism and various forms of colonization, political, economic, cultural colonization and cyber colonization,” Maduro said in an exclusive interview with the official website of Leader of the Islamic Revolution His Eminence Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei that was published on Monday.
“All of us who fight against colonialism, all of us who fight to decolonize our minds and our people, are part of the Axis of Resistance that stands against the methods of the imperialists for imposing hegemony on the world,” he added.
Lauding the deeds of the Axis of Resistance throughout the years, Maduro said, “The 21st century is our century. It is the century of the unity of the people. It is the century in which people will be liberated. It is the century of justice and truth. Empires are in decline, and people’s projects for well-being, development and greatness have just begun. This century is our century.”
Pointing to a recent meeting with Imam Khamenei and the His Eminence’s statement about the very close relationship between Iran and Venezuela, Maduro said, “Since Commander Hugo Chavez’s first visit in 2001, Iran and Venezuela have established exemplary political, diplomatic, moral, and spiritual ties.”
“During this current trip, I’ve witnessed how there is an exemplary relationship between us in terms of our increasing cooperation. We’ve had many successes. So Imam Khamenei is right when he states that the relationship between the two countries is quite unique and extraordinary,” he noted.
Asked about his latest assertion regarding the Zionist occupation regime’s conspiracies against Venezuela through Mossad, Maduro said, “Imperialism and Zionism are conspiring against the progressive, revolutionary processes taking place in Latin America and the Caribbean, especially the Bolivarian Revolution.”
The Venezuelan president stressed, “This is because we are a true alternative, an alternative of truth and justice, an alternative of freedom, an alternative of democracy, and an alternative for realizing projects that are fully humane in the Latin American region and the Caribbean Sea. In addition to this, Mossad’s conspiracies are due to our strong position of solidarity with the Palestinian people and our support of them for their regaining their historical rights and for the Palestinian Resistance. Our support of them is strong and unique, and we will continue supporting them in this manner.”
Asked about the role of Iran’s anti-terror commander General Qassem Soleimani and the Quds Force over the last 20 years in strengthening the relationship between Tehran and Caracas, Maduro said he met General Soleimani in March and April of 2019 when he came to Venezuela during the time of US’ cyberattacks against the country’s power plants.
“I really didn’t know. I didn’t know him. I didn’t know how amazing he was, but the discussion I had with him was very pleasant. We reviewed everything during our meeting and he immediately suggested we get help from Iranian experts. Two or three days later, Iranian experts came to repair electrical services in Venezuela,” he added.
In response to a question regarding a saying by Imam Khamenei that, “If Prophet Issa [Peace upon Him] were among us today, he wouldn’t miss a moment to fight the leaders of global oppression and arrogance,” Maduro said, “We’re believing Christians. We’re the type of Christians who take action while praying and thinking. And Christ came into this world to fight the Empires. He came to confront the Roman Empires. He risked his life. He sacrificed his life to fight the Roman Empire.”
The Venezuelan leader said, “If there’s one good thing I can say about Christianity, it is its anti-imperialist nature and its seeking of truth and justice against the oppressors. I have no doubt that if Christ were among us today, he would have been at the forefront of the battle against imperialism, colonialism and all forms of oppression.”
During the interview, Maduro pointed to several meetings he had had with Imam Khamenei over the years as well as the meeting between Chavez and the Leader of the Islamic Revolution.
“I’ve always admired Imam Khamenei’s excellent memory. That he recalls the memories of those days is important. In the talks that I have had with him, he has recalled some of the conversations he had with Commander Chavez where Commander Chavez shared some of his memories about Cuba and Commander Fidel Castro. There was a time when a hurricane was heading straight toward Cuba. It was a Category 5 hurricane. A conversation took place between Fidel and Chavez. Fidel said, “Chavez! What you need to do right now is to pray. Pray for us!” Chavez started praying. That day passed and the hurricane changed its course. It didn’t cross over Cuba. Chavez called Fidel and said, “It’s a miracle!” Fidel replied, “Yes, it’s because God helps Chavez and Chavez’s friends.” In the last talk that I had with Imam Khamenei, he told me this story in a friendly, kind way in memory of Commander Chavez and Commander Fidel Castro,” he said.
“Holding a conversation with Imam Khamenei truly fills one with spirituality and wisdom. He likes the Venezuelan people. He likes the people’s ideals, and he always offers us great ideas and recommendations,” Maduro underlined.
We shouldn’t be surprised the West doesn’t understand the Iranian Islamic Revolution, even after 43 years. After all, they don’t even understand their own political revolutions.
I’m writing a new book on the brutal repression of the Yellow Vests in France – which should be out before April’s election – and it’s forced me to freshen up on my modern Western political history, which begins with the French Revolution of 1789.
Ask an average Frenchman, and I have asked many – they aren’t taught much about their own revolution, and certainly not the era of Robespierre and Danton.
They are told to have – even if the average Frenchman implicitly feels this is wrong – an ambivalent attitude towards the man who did more than anyone to solidify and defend the primary principles of the French Revolution: Napoleon Bonaparte.
Nor are they taught the history of the mid-late 19th century, when the birth of Western Liberal Democracy created not just famines on purpose in places like Iran, India, Ireland and elsewhere, but the inequalities and catastrophes which literally created the Third World as we know it today. They don’t know who I am talking about when I bring up Adolphe Thiers, the French liberal politician who collaborated with the German Empire’s Bismarck to lay siege to France’s capital for months in what’s known as the Paris Commune of 1871. The treasons of Western Liberal Democracy are as hushed up as they are rewarded – Thiers became the first president of France’s Third Republic.
This is not to denigrate the average Frenchman’s intelligence whatsoever – they are denied a modern political education in a domestic intellectual famine routinely imposed by Western Liberal Democracy. Nor is France exceptional, because the same goes for places like the United States, where the greatest political system ever in the history of mankind was established… by slaveowners who waged merciless war on the aboriginal peoples.
The UK is the most screwed up, being the intractable counter-reactionary subversive of every progressive political movement since 1789, yet somehow seeing in its own mirror the beacon of fair play.
Iran’s primary revolutionary motto was to refuse defining itself in contrast to the history of others: “Neither East nor West but the Islamic Republic”. Admirable, certainly, but after 43 years Iran’s revolution has become entrenched in global political history as the most successful political revolution of our contemporary era. That’s not an opinion – who is even close?
Thus, after 43 years the Iranian Revolution must be seen as what it is: a spectacularly successful redistribution of income and political power towards the lower classes – via totally unprecedented principles and methods – in a revolution which can now only be compared with 1789 and the Soviet Union in 1917.
This is true even if the West cannot see it; even if the West, led by the UK (as always), wages war on it.
They all start the same – down with the privileges of kings and the arrogant
What is the fundamental basis of the Iranian Revolution, even more than national sovereignty? It is the abolishment of monarchy.
Monarchy: the cardinal sin of domestic politics, just as invasion is the cardinal sin of international politics.
It’s truly the root of all political evils; it creates humanity’s most appalling privileges, arrogance and anti-social behavior; it exists today all over Europe and, due to Europe’s propping up, it exists across the Muslim world; it’s truly the first globalist class! Iran continued a fight started in 1789.
Modern political history begins in 1789 because it begins with the fight against the absolute autocracy of monarchy, and humanity’s shift towards greater and greater democracy. It does not begin in 1688 with England’s Glorious Revolution because all that faux-revolution did was legitimise monarchical oligarchy, which still exists today in England, in Saudi Arabia, in Morocco, and in all monarchies because that’s what monarchy is: collusion on behalf of a few against democracy, equality and humanity.
Monarchies, we must always remember, are the worst of all theocracies: the king claims to be God on earth, and even divine. This is not just despicable but socially and politically reactionary. It took until 1789 for the Eastern Hemisphere to realise this; some have learned, but some still have not and chant “God save the Queen”.
The West is ok with monarchy. They are ok with a privileged few. They are ok with inequality. They are ok with invasions. They think Western Liberal Democracy is the apex of political morality.
That’s all not just immoral, but it’s certainly nonsense history.
It may be interesting to supporters of the Iranian Islamic Revolution to know what did Napoleon say was perhaps his biggest mistake? Restoring the property of the old nobility, whom he had allowed back to France in an amnesty.
He did these things in a misguided effort to heal a country truly torn by years of civil war, which is what all revolutions essentially require; in a country whose revolution was attacked by all the monarchies of Europe (which is to say all of Europe, as 1789 was the first salvo against aristocratic privilege, let’s recall) almost ceaselessly for 20 years. The “Napoleonic Wars” are more accurately titled “the Wars Against the French Revolution”.
If we cautiously assume that they are over, the wars against the Iranian Revolution were shorter – only the bloodiest conflict of the last quarter of the 20th century – but the multinational coalition was just as big. And it even included the USSR, let’s recall.
Why? Because of the historic political advancement behind the Iranian Islamic Revolution.
Ultimately, the French Revolution restored the nobles and thus only nationalised the wealth of the Roman Catholic clergy. They only ended monarchy. (Napoleon was voted emperor by millions of people, and the “voted” part is what made it a spectacular political advance for its era, and not just another typical monarchy.)
The Russian Revolution went further: it restored to the people the wealth of both the clergy and the monarchy, fully empowering the lower classes for the first time.
The Iranian Revolution’s genius is to also end monarchy and to fully empower the lower classes, but to not wage war on the clergy. 1979 empowered the lower classes while also elevated a politically righteous clergy, and in France, Russia, China, Cuba and elsewhere – this had never been done. The results have been a spectacular progress which puts Iran on the level of those historic political advances.
Iran has learned from the politically progressive lessons of 1789, as well as the lessons of 1917 (including not emulating their disastrously unpopular attempted eradication of religion), and now it humbly acts to create some lessons for their own people. Sadly, Iran’s acts inspire the same war by the privileged elite as they did in 1789 and 1917.
Every Iranian has witnessed the radical overturning of the political, economic and social pyramid since 1979. They also see the myriad number of failed Western client states, such as Egypt and Morocco – what Iran would have been had they not willed a popular revolution, and willed to maintain it.
Islam works politically, 1979 also proved. Even the Christian/secular/atheistic West is obsessed with Islam now – in stopping it from “competing in a free marketplace of ideas”, to use an oft-heard Western phrase. This is precisely because of the established success of 1979.
The current talk is that Washington is ready to restore the JCPOA. If so, great. If it’s followed by more stalling – perhaps this is just to give Joe Biden and the Democrats an election win for the midterms, or simply more time for their usual anti-revolutionary subversions – then we shouldn’t be surprised: Revolutionary France saw not just one but seven “Coalition Wars” to restore monarchy, privilege, feudalism, torture, inequality and the oppression of an aristocratic elite. They simply refused to make peace with the socio-political and socioeconomic advances of the French Revolution, which the French people democratically chose again and again and again.
If Iran wants to see its revolution continue it should learn from Napoleon: In 1814, during the 6th Coalition’s War Against the French Revolution, Paris – which hadn’t seen a foreign invader since Joan of Arc 400 years earlier – spectacularly fell without even a full day of fighting because the re-propertied nobles had spread defeatism, paid for subversion and colluded to reverse the French Revolution, which of course they still hated.
Iran has encouraged most exiles to return in an effort to heal the country – this is not necessarily the problem: Revolutionary France’s fault was in allowing inequality to return. Iran must ceaselessly implant the revolution’s principles and root out inequality, both political and economic – then the revolution can never be undemocratically subverted from within and from above, as both the French and Russian Revolutions ultimately were.
Disciplined and well-organized elections held in Venezuela yesterday, lead to a clear win for the ruling party. President Nicolás Maduro called it a ‘Historic Victory of the Revolution’.
#Venezuela | Election day in Venezuela has unfolded peacefully under international supervision and with remarkable discipline, as the voting population complies with COVID-19 preventive measures. pic.twitter.com/9eJteRmI4T
Venezuela's ruling United Socialist Party (PSUV) won in a landslide in today's mega-elections, winning 20 of the 23 states.
The USA tried to crush the will of the Venezuelan people, suffocating them with a murderous blockade and brutal hybrid war. But Chavismo is alive and well! pic.twitter.com/WqXPPZPnsu
After competing in Venezuela's elections today and losing badly, it's likely the US-sponsored right-wing opposition will return to trying to delegitimize the elections, boycotting future ones, because they can't win them—while seeking more US interventionhttps://t.co/LKiDgchCEV
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Let’s not mince words.
Biden and hardliners around him are like their predecessors.
They’re hostile toward virtually everything just societies hold dear — notably democracy the way it should be.
The US and West have fantasy versions, the real thing virtually banned.
Established by Hugo Chavez in 1999, continued by Nicolas Maduro, Venezuelans have governance of, by, and for everyone equitably — social democracy.
US policymakers consider it a threat of a good example — why they’ve gone all out to replace it with fascist tyranny short of hot war that remains an ominous possibility.
Since establishment of Venezuelan social democracy, US regimes from the Clinton co-presidency to Obama/Biden, then Trump, and now Biden/Harris aim to return the country to client state status.
They seek control over its vast oil resources, the world’s largest.
In 2013, Obama/Biden killed Chavez. Poisoned or infected with cancer causing substances, four major surgeries in 18 months couldn’t save him.
At the time, William Blum explained that the CIA worked diligently to develop substances that could kill without leaving a trace.”
“I Personally believe that Hugo Chavez was murdered by the United States,” he said.
Coup plots against him and Maduro failed. Other dirty tricks worked no better, including intermittent, US orchestrated, street violence.
Virtually everything US regimes threw at Venezuela to eliminate its model social democracy failed.
Further attempts are virtually certain. The US is hellbent to transform all sovereign independent nations into subservient client states.
It’s likely just a matter of time before another attempted regime change plot surfaces.
At the same time, endless US war by other means continues.
In 2015, Obama/Biden declared Bolivarian social democracy an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States (sic).”
On Wednesday, Biden/Harris reaffirmed the above, saying the following:
“(C)ircumstances described in Executive Order 13692 (2015), and subsequent executive orders issued with respect to Venezuela, have not improved (sic), and they continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States (sic).”
“Therefore in accordance with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 USC 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13692 (sic).”
Bolivarian Venezuela prioritizes peace, stability, and cooperative relations with other countries — threatening no one, surely not the USA, armed and dangerous with nuclear and other super-weapons.
Biden’s new executive order maintains a US state of war by other means on the Bolivarian Republic.
No US national emergency exists with Venezuela or any other countries. No US enemies exist.
So time and again they’re invented by US policymakers to justify what’s unjustifiable under international and US constitutional law.
On March 2, Tony Blinken’s spokesman Ned Price said the following:
His boss spoke with widely despised, usurper-in-waiting, self-declared Venezuelan president with no legitimacy Guaido.
“Blinken stressed the importance of a return to democracy in Venezuela through free and fair elections (sic).”
After Maduro’s PSUV party won an overwhelming legislative majority last December with over two-thirds public support — a landslide triumph — the EU withdrew support for Guaido as (self-declared) interim president (with no legitimacy).
Jimmy Carter called Venezuela’s electoral process “the best in the world” for good reason. Elections when held are scrupulously open, free and fair.
When Maduro was reelected in May 2018, over 150 members of the International Electoral Accompaniment Mission said the following:
“The technical and professional trustworthiness and independence of the National Electoral Council of Venezuela are uncontestable.”
The Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America, one of the observer groups, said “results communicated by the National Electoral Council reflect the will of the voters who decided to participate in the electoral process.”
Similar assessments follow all Bolivarian elections.
They shame US fantasy democracy — a totalitarian police state, masquerading as democratic.
According to Price, Blinken is “increas(ing) multilateral pressure… for a peaceful, democratic transition (sic).”
Longstanding US policy calls for eliminating Bolivarian social democracy, wanting Venezuela transformed into a vassal state under US-installed puppet rule.
The above is how the scourge of US imperialism operates worldwide.
All nations free from its control are targeted for regime change — wars by hot and/or other means its favored strategies.
Illegal sanctions are weapons of war by other means.
Blinken said they’ll remain in place to continue US maximum pressure on the country.
Venezuelan social democracy conflicts with US imperial aims to dominate planet earth, control its resources, and exploit its people everywhere.
As long as Bolivarianism exists, both right wings of the US war party won’t likely cease trying to eliminate it.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
From my youth I had a strong connection to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but I did not know precisely why. His name was mentioned in our house. His friends were friends of my parents.
Solzhenitsyn was supposed to spend a summer in the late 1970s with our family in Alaska. That was the plan, one that excited me. In preparation, I attempted to read Cancer Ward, the semi-autobiographical novel Solzhenitsyn completed in 1966, a dissection of the cancerous Soviet police state. I was 12 years old. I was unprepared for such a thing. It would be a long time before I had the maturity.
Solzhenitsyn in that spring of 1978 gave the famous commencement speech at Harvard, where he publicly shamed the country’s elite, to an America unprepared to accept such a thing. And it would be a long time before the country even had the maturity to understand and could really do so.
Solzhenitsyn did not visit us in Alaska that year.
Now, I’m over forty years older, Donald Trump is America’s 45th President, and the country is revisiting the prophet’s words. Because President Trump is up against the same angry Harvard crowd.
Under a False Flag
From the earliest days in the build up to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, as part of a purely political strategy, Vladimir Lenin attacked Tsar Nicholas II for his alleged mistreatment of Jews and publicly denounced not only all manifestations of antisemitism but everything but the kitchen sink that could be associated with it.
After the Revolution, when Lenin took power in Russia, he endorsed the establishment of special departments for Jewish affairs in both the ruling Communist Party and in the relevant ministry, the Commissariat of Nationalities, headed by Joseph Stalin. Lenin had taken note of the higher percentage of Jews in the revolutionary movement than their proportion in the population, and he initiated the promotion of Jews to higher positions in the state and party apparatus. Lenin essentially took from Oliver Cromwell’s playbook. And, voilà, an elite Jewish politburo was born.
“With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders,” said Sir Winston Churchill referring to the Soviet government.
The Bolsheviks claimed power on November 7, 1917 and two days later the fledgling government issued its famous “Decree on Peace.”
The Balfour Declaration, a letter dated November 2, 1917 from British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain, was then published on the very same day as Lenin’s “Decree on Peace.”
This was kept secret, because in 1917 the British government, through international bankers, offered a national home for Jews in Palestine, at the expense of the land and future of the Palestinians.
The promissory note to Lord Rothschild for the Zionist Federation, the Balfour Declaration, partly drafted by Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Louis Brandeis, and underwritten by U.S. Congress has cost and continues to cost American taxpayers billions of dollars a year.
The year 1917 was a very big year, indeed. A revolutionary one. A transparent cabal of British and American financiers backed Vladimir Lenin and the so-called Jewish “Bolsheviks” set out to destroy Russia and murder tens of millions of Christians, at very same time the Balfour Declaration backed by a secret cartel was signed to establish a Jewish state in the Middle East where Palestinians would be mass murdered, as if by Biblical design.
In “Under a False Flag,” Lenin described a three-phase development of capitalism, culminating in reactionary and militarist imperialism, sustaining itself through super-profits used to secure the support of an aristocracy. It is a Biblical account of opportunism. Then, in “The Deception of the People by the Slogans of Equality and Freedom,” Lenin warns about the elaborate false flag operations and deception perpetuated under the disguise of democracy.
“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves,” said Vladimir Lenin.
Much has been written about that event. Much has still gone unsaid. I plan to say some of the unsaid things.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a writer in the grand 19th century Russian literary tradition who represents our plight today to defeat violence and lies, the twin pillars of 21st century authoritarianism, in America. The twin pillars of the totalitarianism in the East in the 20th century that Solzhenitsyn warned us from that day forth.
On that day at Harvard in the 20th century, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s words had the same effect as the preaching of John the Baptist. Both had a sharp message to deliver to an audience they believed had grown complacent and morally decadent.
Solzhenitsyn tried to shake up the exact people he believed were responsible for the decline of the West and installation of a politburo, the shrill war mongers in Washington DC. Similarly, John the Baptist denounced the moral depravity of King Herod and his politburo. The politburo was the principal policymaking committee in the former Soviet Union, founded in 1917, to oversee the violence and lies of the state. It is the most appropriate word.
For his prophetic word, John the Baptist was thrown into a dirty dungeon. Then, on September 11th of that year, to be exact, his head was offered on a platter as a gift from Herod to his equally depraved daughter, Salome. In 1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was banished from the intellectual set in America. Harvard, the New York Times and DC’s politburo put his head on a metaphorical cocktail tray.
When the most influential group of American intellectuals, liberals and Neoconservatives alike, united against one man, a Russian refuge in a New England town, there was unquestionably a John the Baptist vibe. Both prophets were dismembered, dismissed for saying too much.
Speaking of prophets, the esteemed Palestinian scholar Edward W. Said wrote that “American Orientalism” is unique because it is seen almost entirely thru the prism of Israel. To be precise, the Zionist Israel of the Ashkenazi European Jews. He’s been dead for nearly 17 years. But the British are pathologically relentless in their perverse cruelty and continue to this day post mortem to brutally smear Edward Said for saying too much. He has been dismissed by the Zionist powers even in death.
Today, we simply cannot dismiss the most uncomfortable part, the distinct roles that atheist Jews have played in empire and in the installation of a suzerain or politburo in the Holy Roman, Habsburg, Russian, French, British, and American Empires, and in the outcomes of the Israel project via the World Wars and the British Zionist enterprise today. But, let’s get one thing straight. Capisce? We are talking about a policy making minority of white, liberal, atheist, intellectual elites, not Jews, in general. Not by a long shot. John the Baptist and Solzhenitsyn were warning us about the conspiracy of identity politics, not about Jews. They were warning us about rich, atheist oppressors. They were not fingering religious Jews.
I think Zionism in America today is best understood as what is left of the politburo —decades of clandestine operations of a rogue network of military-industrial complex officials and intelligence agents involved in an invisible government supporting a British enterprise. Zionism has more in common with a corporation than a religion or even a political ideology. Zionism has got little to do with religious Jews. In fact, Zionism is opposed to Judaic dogma and is thus heretical. Not to mention that Zionism is next level schismatic.
The Schismatics
Let’s start at the beginning. There are three Abrahamic religions, a group of Semitic-originated religions that claim descent from the Judaism of the ancient Israelites and the worship of the God of Abraham. According to the Hebrew calendar, this is the year 5,781. Christianity was founded 2,020 years ago, and Islam 1,450 years ago. Each religion was originally a whole one. Over time, each has encountered schism.
A schism is a division between people, usually belonging to a religious denomination. The word is most frequently applied to a split in what had previously been a single religious body, such as “the Great Schism” of Christianity in 1054 between Orthodoxy (true faith) in the East and the Roman Catholic Church in the West. Then, the Western Church became highly political and split into a million pieces.
A schismatic is a person who creates or incites schism in an organization or who is a member of a splinter group. Schismatic as an adjective means pertaining to a schism or schisms, or to those ideas or policies that are thought to lead towards or promote schism. In religion, the charge of schism is distinguished from that of heresy, since the offense of schism concerns not differences of belief or doctrine but promotion of, or the state of, division.
However, schisms frequently involve heresy, but it becomes the matter of a political point of view rather than a church law. For instance the Orthodox Church considers the Roman Catholic Church heretical but the Catholic Church says that the Orthodox Church is schismatic. Because the Orthodox Christian Church is not a political organization.
While Christianity was intended as a beautiful religion of peace, some of the schismatic pieces are heretical, politically aggressive and even war-like.
Orthodox Christianity is one of three original true Abrahamic faiths —Orthodox Christianity, Orthodox Judaism and Orthodox Islam. Each has suffered schisms and with each spilt, like cancer cells, the divisions have increased toxicity, chaos and conflict and decreased full unity and peace.
As breaks in a religion increase and church laws or canons are broken in favor of a new branch, the least canonical branches become the most political. While, there are several formal branches of Jewish faith (Reform, Conservative, Orthodox and Reconstructionist Judaism), Zionism is purely political but has somehow retained a religious imprint. This is because Zionism is a product of the British Empire, namely Western intelligence services.
The schisms within Orthodox Christianity today are regional and related to the Catholic Church, such as what has been going on in Ukraine —all orchestrated by Western intelligence services such as America’s CIA and Britain’s MI6. A schism in Orthodox Islam emerged into public consciousness at the end of the 1970s —the Sunnis and Shias. In 1978, the Islamic revolution in Iran, orchestrated, once again by the CIA and MI6, brought politics front and center.
This political strategy of cancerous attack on a faith, religious metastasis, is a fundamental aspect of atheist philosophy as it is applied in the ideologies of Nazism, Bolshevism, and Neoconservatism. It is the basic principle of divide and rule, but applied to a sovereign religion, not a sovereign state.
Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky, co-founder of the Jewish Legion of the British army in World War I in Poland, was a journalist who died as Vladimir Jabotinsky in 1940, near Hunter, New York. He founded the militant Zionist Revisionist movement that played an important role in the establishment of the State of Israel. During the 1920s and 1930s, Jabotinsky and his movement were frequently called fascist.
Polish Zionist Jabotinsky and his buddies implemented a staggering number of permutations that did divisive harm to Judaism. At the same time, the permutations enabled Polish Zionism to appeal to a broader base of supporters than any other Jewish political movement. This created an elite leadership that was vastly out of touch with the majority of Jewish people.
Sound familiar? It should. Because Zionism is the living definition of identity politics. It is a perversion. Like “angiogenesis” in a cancer, which is perversion of a normal cellular process, a perversion that is an essential requirement for the development of cancer. Thus, attempts to stop the spread of a cancer in a human body that can easily result in killing the person. The Western intelligence services attack in a political war-like fashion the immune systems of the peaceful Abrahamic religions.
In his 2008 book, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Stephen J. Sniegoski describes in great detail how Neoconservatives were the driving force behind the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, their motivation was based on their belief that American interests in the Middle East are virtually identical with the Israeli Likud party’s beliefs about Israeli interests in the region, and these mutual interests lie in destabilizing Israel’s adversaries and reconfiguring the environment rather than in the traditional American policy of stabilizing the Middle East.
They began to see McGovern and Carter Democrats and the Nixon and Ford Republicans as insufficiently devoted to anti-communism, military strength, interventionism and Israel and gravitated first to Senator Henry Jackson (D-WA) and then to the Reagan Republicans.
Sniegoski argues that, while the Neoconservatives were the driving force for the war with Iraq in 2003, the basic idea of offensive war to weaken Israel’s neighbors, induce regime change and reconfigure the region has been an element of Zionist thinking since Vladimir Jabotinsky in the 1920s.
The barbaric Zionist Jews that caused the Great Terror remained in power in the Soviet Union until Joseph Stalin had to purge (murder) them. Consequently, U.S. Senator Jackson went on to become the patron saint of those outcasted Soviet Jews and his legacy, while mostly clandestine, can be glimpsed at briefly through the Henry Jackson Society, a Transatlantic foreign policy think tank based in London. Its purpose is “the promotion of liberal democracy across the world,” and it is currently focused primarily on “supporting global democracy in the face of threats from China and Russia.” Importantly, the Henry Jackson Society in England is the sister organization to The Atlantic Council in America, a den of vipers.
“Senator Henry Jackson, the Solzhenitsyn Affair, and American Liberalism,” by Jeff Bloodworth (2006) provides a sanitized version of how Jackson exploited Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with his anti-communism campaign. Clearly, the CIA was heavily involved and poached Solzhenitsyn as its asset. And it did not go well.
For his “defense of the rights of the Jewish people,” in 1983 an international panel selected the late Senator Henry Jackson as a recipient of the first “Jabotinsky Prize: Shield of Jerusalem” award.
Identity Politics
There is a unique historical relationship between capitalism and Jews that is crucial to understanding America. Why Jews have tended to be disproportionately successful in capitalism, the Jewish role in the development of capitalism, and the role of capitalism in the fate of Jews. In a way, Jews unknowingly were the early agents of globalization.
Like today’s web strategists and technologists, Jews were keen on building networks across national borders. And like today’s high-tech entrepreneurs, the global Jewish diaspora managed to utilize this network for their benefit. Who wouldn’t? The relationship is best understood in the context of identity politics and the function of conspiracy inherent to capitalism.
Identity politics in America began in 1973, the year the first volume of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipeilago was published in the West. In fact, if you take a look at the “Solzhenitsyn affair” which involved Neoconservative U.S. Senator Henry Jackson, President Nixon, Vice President Gerald Ford, the birth of “human rights,” the Helsinki Commission, and the emigration of millions of Soviet Jewry to America, you get a much better understanding of the people who consider themselves to be the elite in U.S. today.
In response to Republican President Nixon, it was Democrat Senator Jackson and House Representative Charles Vanik who passed a bill in 1974 denying the Soviet bloc most favored nation trading status unless it granted Jews freedom to emigrate. The first piece of U.S. legislation inspired by the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” the Jackson‐Vanik amendment has acted as a catalyst in hastening Soviet Jewish emigration policies.
Since the mid-1960s, nearly half a million Jews from the former Soviet Union have settled in the United States. They constitute the largest single group of Jewish immigrants to enter the U.S. since the 1920s. Although they share kinship ties with the many American Jews whose roots are also in the pre-communist Russian empire, their lives have been shaped by different forces: the Bolshevik revolution and life in a communist state. Like American Jews, contemporary emigres are distinguished by high levels of skill and education, are urban and disproportionately professionals. Unlike most American Jews, they have had minimal exposure to formal Jewish training and Jewish religious life, and no experience with a highly organized Jewish community.
This is a tremendous piece of American history. Soviet Jews have been steadily streaming into the U.S. for decades, to the point of even insulting Israel, which campaigned hard on their behalf and had hoped to populate itself with the Jewish emigres. The U.S. has long had an open policy to Jews, which continued even after the Soviets cracked open their borders. Soviet Jews were not forced out due to war, famine or natural disaster and didn’t seek refugee status. This is an important point today. Because some may have been fleeing prosecution for crimes against humanity during the Great Terror.
Enormous resources were invested in this immigration of Soviet Jews by the U.S. Government. Accordingly, Soviet Jews in the U.S. created an ecosystem of prosperity around themselves and the Jews who mass migrated to Israel.
According to Pew, after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Israel’s largest wave of Jewish immigrants arrived from Russia and other former Soviet republics. These immigrants far outnumbered those from other countries since Israel achieved statehood. According to Pew, Soviet Jews brought a secular mindset to Israel, and more than two decades later, Jews who were born in the FSU continue to be noticeably less religious than Israeli Jews overall. Secular means atheist: 81% FSU-born Jews in Israel self-identify as secular. Importantly, 25% of Israel’s population is made up of Jews from USSR and these Soviet Jews are running Israel’s Likud government.
We must insert Canada here. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Canada has been one of the most active centers of former Soviet Jewish immigration. Toronto has attracted disproportionate numbers of immigrants: over 47% of all new immigrants to Canada have settled in Toronto in the late 1990s. About 70% of former Soviet Jewish immigrants to Canada reside in Toronto. According to the 1996 Canadian census, nationally there were about 16,000 Jews born of Russian/Soviet parents, mostly refugees – arrivals of the 1970s and 1980s.
Toronto is the most Zionist community in the world. Toronto is also an international hot spot for all types of bigotry and heinous hate crimes. Toronto is important to our story for one reason. Zionist operatives there are complete morons, so much so that they exposed with their own incompetence the biggest subversive cultural revolution in the history of the world.
Identity politics as a school of thought is Hitler’s racist ideology with a fresh coat of paint. The paint comes from an exclusive manufacturer that gives each paint color the thoughtful name of a Pantone pedigree which can used across global industries with ease.
Zionism is Slippery
Zionism is an especially slippery one, and that is its most marked characteristic.
On November 10, 1975 UN Resolution 3379 passed which defined Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. The Soviet Union originated the idea leading up to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. What national consensus influenced the Soviet Union to take such a step?
Remember, Zionists Jews played a highly disproportionate and probably decisive role effectively dominating the Soviet terror regime during its early years and in a genocide of tens of millions of Christians.
In 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 3379, which “determine(d) that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Fifteen years later, on December 16 1991, that resolution was revoked. The UN had defined Zionism as a racist ideology. It was repealed in 1991 when Israel and the U.S. initially refused to participate in the Madrid Peace Conference.
The Madrid Peace Conference, held from October 30 to November 1, 1991, marked the first time that Israeli leaders negotiated face to face with delegations from Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and, most importantly, with the Palestinians.
The year 1991 was also the year that communism fell. That year and the George H.W. Bush legacy in the Middle East —the Gulf War and the Madrid peace conference— continue to shape U.S. policy in the region a quarter century later.
Most people do not seem to understand that Jewish is not a race. However, how Jewish today is applied has subversively made it one. Jews come in all sizes, shapes and colors including black. A Jew is not just a willow thin white lady with a Harvard degree and a Park Avenue apartment full of Chanel suits who works as a staff writer at the New York Times. The Manhattan doyenne is literally the racist version.
Zionism dictates racial and religious supremacy. Israel, a state built on ethnically cleansed land, thus operates under the veil of a democracy in which the Jewish population is the exclusive beneficiary of the democratic process. However, Israel’s Jewish population is itself stratified within an ethnic hierarchy, where prosperous Ashkenazi (white Jews of European descent) dominate the economy, media and politics. In comparison, Mizrahi and Sephardi (Jews of MENA descent) suffer socio-economic hardship.
If you have ever been to Jerusalem, you know what I am describing. The disparity is shocking. It is like going to the Jim Crow South in America. It is a type of white supremacy. It is racism. It is apartheid, but even worse. It is severe brutality, communist strength brutality. This type of racism means that white lady at the New York Times can write about everybody else and decide on their narratives. Moreover, like anti-Semitism, racism is part of the racket of the Zionist Cultural Revolution.
Racism is all too evident in Israel. Ruling class Zionists cause the hardship that the Mizrahi and Sephardi suffer. Through rhetoric and vitriol they’re able to redirect anger toward African migrant communities who’re victims of greater oppression themselves. It’s a mess, but you never hear about it. The media, the Jerusalem press corps, sees to that.
Zionism is a white, Ashkenazi phenomenon, based on the denial of the Orient and the rights of both Mizrahi Jews and the Palestinians, “the other.” You could call it white supremacy and you’d be right. Solzhenitsyn detailed it in the banned book, 200 Years Together, which documents the mutual understanding between Russians and Jews of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn could have easily been writing about Neoconservatives in America.
The Zionist Cultural Revolution
There’s an uncomfortable similarity between the Zionist Neoconservatives in America —and their dedicated “intelligence community” such as the CIA and the NSA— and the Zionist Bolsheviks who ran the early Soviet terror agencies that committed all of the atrocities: NKVD, Cheka, KGB, and GRU —80% of Stalin’s Soviet government, from bottom to top. Zionists were responsible for The Great Terror and the genocides of tens of millions, “The New Martyrs” —all of those who were martyred in the years of severe persecutions against the faith and the Orthodox Church, which continues in the world for over 70 years in the 21st century.
The persecution started immediately after the 1917 October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks took over. The persecution against the faithful was purposeful and long, and surpassed in cruelty all the previous persecutions against the Church, including those by the Roman emperors in the first, second, and third centuries. The Bolsheviks created an antihuman and criminal ideology to guide rulers for decades. This ideology led to millions of victims, the people of different beliefs and social status. They began with the class struggle against the nobility and merchant class followed by the dispossession of well-to-do peasants, then resettlement and destruction of whole ethnic communities. One destruction campaign followed another and these criminal actions continued for several decades. The Russian Orthodox Church was only one of the targets of that suicidal campaign waged by the authorities against their own people.
The number is unknown, whether it was tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions, because the whole truth about those years will never be revealed. Not all the archives will ever be opened so that the records could reveal who remained faithful to the end and who stumbled. Besides, there are many forgeries in the transcripts of interrogation we use to restore the story of a given new martyr. Some recorded as having renounced their faith did not actually do that.
Revolutions are always atheist in nature. The Zionist cultural revolution is the revolution of revolutions. In fact, it seems to have been modeled on the fall of Byzantium. Atheist revolutionaries spread religious disunity and divide the majority of people as a means to gain political or territorial advantage for a minority of atheists. A revolution can manifest as an inner enemy which appears within the bowels of society to break its spirit, turning the majority into a helpless victim of the minority or suzerainty as it did in Byzantium after nearly twelve hundred years of peaceful living.
I wrote this a year ago: “I am not going to go into detail about the Neocons because there’s really not too much to say beyond the salient fact that they are a deliberately constructed social group, almost like a secret society, that has only one unifying principle: to make money and do it anyway they desire, because when you are morally bankrupt the world is your oyster of possibilities. Neoconservatives identify themselves as whomever is paying them to do so. In layman’s terms, we would call them con artists.”
From a policy perspective, the reference that makes most sense to the Neocons and racist Zionist Jews, in general, is the one instance in our country’s history of American authoritarianism — the one party terror state that was the Jim Crow South — was built on minority rule. The degree of discrimination against blacks under Jim Crow was unparalleled. Yet elite opinion at the time sanctioned it as legally-mandated white supremacy. This is exactly the same kind of warped thinking and public manipulation we see among Neocons today.
The “intelligence community” believes the U.S. was built on this superiority of white men. Their professional culture was shaped by that system. Slavery and Jim Crow may be behind us, and attitudes have no doubt become more open and tolerant over time, but they remain unchanged.
Racist Neoconservatives have run Washington DC this way. The Zionist elite minority and their cult-like war machine. Their think tanks, in particular, should all be abolished like slavery and then segregation was.
What is the difference between the oppressors in the U.S. “intelligence community” and the infamous oppressors of Nazi and Soviet secret police? Nothing. The slightly longer answer to that question is that the Americans are clumsy to the point of incompetence and even more arrogant than the Germans and Russians.
“Stalin’s terror” is, in fact, Zionist terror. Anti-Jewish sentiment is widespread among people of the former USSR because Jews played a highly disproportionate and probably decisive role effectively dominating the Soviet terror regime during its early years. In turn, Neoconservatives carried this torch to America and along with the fabricated “war in Iraq” in 2003, lied their way to achieve nearly every war since World War Two.
The use of terror to revolutionize society is an historical precedent established by the Bolsheviks. We need to talk about the bullies in America’s politburo. We need to talk about their exploitation of religion. We need to talk about the British Zionist enterprise —The Saker (Andrei Raevsky) calls this the “AngloZionist Empire” —in relation to America’s alliance with Israel. We need to look at racial trouble in the U.S. and issues like “cancel culture” with respect to the Zionist Cultural Revolution.
U.S. President Trump has encouraged these conversations. You just were not aware that this is part and parcel of “draining the swamp.” He’s turned the British Zionist enterprise upside down. He’s called their bluff. Donald Trump is essentially “containing” Zionism to use a word that the Neocons understand. The Zionism he seeks to contain is the toxic part, the white supremacist ideology. For example, Trump is pushing back against the rising tide of Marxist critical theory. He’s quietly containing the Zionist cultural revolution in America. In order to contain today’s cultural threats, the oppression must be eliminated.
At the same time, Israel is rejecting that political Zionism. Slowly. It’s a process. A very slow one. Apartheid in South Africa was not resolved over night. Apartheid is a cancer in the body politic of the world. One of the largest Christian denomination, the Dutch Reformed Church (NGK), used Christian theology to argue a theological support for the Apartheid regime. The Dutch Reformed Church, with 3 million Christian members, remained the “official religion” of the Apartheid-supporting National Party.
How the Zionist regime and settler colonialism will be brought to an end is an important question to discuss. The clearest and most practical vision to date seems to be that, as in South Africa, the Zionist state will have no choice but to capitulate.
How the Zionist cultural revolution will be brought to an end is the question we all must face if we want to stop the chaos in the world. We need a mutual understanding of the answer.
Live Not By Lies
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote the essay “Live not by Lies” in 1974 on the same day in February that year that secret police broke into his apartment and arrested him. The next day he was exiled to West Germany.
Everybody today knows that the media is a horrific problem. The extent of lying in the press is simply out of control. Now we need to better understand why journalists gesticulate wildly on social media, wave their arms in the air at the New York Times, shout at the crowd from CNNand MSNBC, invent things in the Washington Post, and try to attract the fame and attention they feel they deserve in The Atlantic.
All those years ago, Solzhenitsyn attempted to inform the world that the Bolsheviks committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. And he said the fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the “fourth estate” —the press, the media, and the profession of journalism— is in the hands of the Bolshevik perpetrators. He was warning that the “fourth estate” is the “fifth column.” Today the media is visibly filled with the “intelligence community.” Simply turn on CNN; former intelligence agency officials are now political commentators.
Julian Assange reported that nearly every war that has started in the last 50 years has been a result of media lies. The “intelligence community” has him locked up in a British prison.
The Balfour Declaration was only considered to be a first step that would enable the British Government to entreat the sympathies of world Jewry, for the Entente war effort and a British Palestine. To that end, the Government quickly embarked upon an elaborate and extensive propaganda campaign. This endeavour was undertaken with the ever present advice and work of Britain’s Zionist supporters in London. Together, British officials and Zionists sought to create and disseminate the myth that the Jewish nation was about to be reborn in Palestine under British auspices, which would capture the Jewish imagination but would in no way commit the Government to anything beyond the vague terms of the Balfour Declaration.
This was the sum of British policy towards the Zionist movement for the remainder of the war and the extent of the Anglo-Zionist alliance, as it was originally conceived by the British Government. Journalism has been a British military strategy since 1917.
Journalism in America today is, in fact, Zionist “hasbara” and therefore, by design, is intended to hide the truth. Hasbara is the Israeli word for how Zionists explain to the world through the Jerusalem press corps their slaughter of Palestinians. It is almost never the truth. Zionist propaganda and the most ridiculous lies. The sole purpose of Zionist hasbara is to side step conspiracy.
For example, maybe the biggest historic example, in fact, whenever there’s an attempt to discuss ancient Christianity and its legacy of Eastern Orthodox Christianity —iconoclasm, persecution, martyrdom, and subsequently a massive, Holocaust-like, genocide of Christians— it is shut down in the same manner that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others were when speaking of Jews as perpetrators.
Simply put, the Orthodox Christian Church is not a political organization. While the Church is a global body, it does not function like a transnational corporation. Any “power” has been decentralized. Inasmuch as there is no PR, marketing, or even a spokesperson to be found, the Orthodox Church is even without the Madison Avenue language necessary to express the concept of the “New Martyrs” in secular terms.
In other words, Christian imperialism exists in the West today in the person of the Pope. In the East, it was and remains a temptation. Orthodox Christianity peacefully held the nations of Byzantium together for twelve hundred years, not imperialism. Since 1453 and the fall of Constantinople, anti-Christian forces worldwide, and destructive forces inside the broader Christian Church itself have carried out the real imperialistic plans.
Christians are the victims of worldwide persecution and this does not minimize the Holocaust nor demonetize Islam. The untold story of the 20th century is the murder of over 50 million Christians, mostly at the hands of communist and Islamic regimes. Christian genocide has continued into the 21st century. In an era when we get get statistics for nearly anything at our fingertips within seconds, some how the number of Christian lives lost to terrorism, war, genocide and mass murder is strangely missing.
It is estimated that the number of Christian martyrs during the 20th century far exceeds that of all the martyrs who died for Christ during the first three centuries of Christianity. Simply combine Christian mass murders worldwide.
The political scientist, adviser and academic who spent more than half a century at Harvard University, Samuel P. Huntington has been credited with forecasting the cultural and religious context in which a 9/11-type incident could emerge. In 1993 Huntington argued that with the collapse of communism, ideological rivalries would no longer drive global affairs. Conflict would occur between groups defined by culture, religion and identity. His thesis was propped up amid NATO’s fresh attacks on the Slavic (Orthodox Christianity) fraternity.
Huntington is the Zionist cult scholar who inspired “Israel Lobby” book by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Another Zionist cult political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski (the father of corporate media maven Mika Brzezinski), back in 1997, in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives wrote: “After the victory over communism, we need a split of Orthodoxy and the breakdown of Russia, and Ukraine, where betrayal is the norm of public morality, will help us in this.”
When Zionist Brzezinski died, Zionist Radek Sikorski, the former foreign minister of Poland and “a distinguished statesman at the Brzezinski Institute on Geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies” wrote a very telling love letter to “Zbig” in the Washington Post. Zionist Sikorski is married to an American columnist, Zionist Anne Applebaum. Applebaum and her husband serve as British foreign agents of influence. Lucas is British. Are Sikorski and Applebaum the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of the 21st century? Communists? Maybe not, but they have not been playing for Team USA. Applebaum has spent the better part of her dreadful writing career trashing the conservative Catholic majority of Poland, which is literally all of Poland. The country is at least 93% Roman Catholic in faith. Also, Anne Applebaum heavily plagiarized Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (several books worth) and censored out the parts incriminating the cabal of atheist Jews and the Anglo-American “intelligence community” or their unspeakable crimes in Soviet Russia, so there’s that.
According to U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, Brzezinski, after the collapse of communism, the Zionist West’s main opponent became the Orthodox Christian Church. The Balkan wars manufactured by NATO in the late 1990s were a manifestation of this concept. Samuel Huntington peddled an international conspiracy theory that became the cornerstone of NATO after the fall of the USSR.
I wrote this a year ago and it has taken me that long to get the full depth and vastness of the terror: “Remember, the true religions prevent the New World Order, that is the crux here. With that in mind, you should know, if you don’t already, that Orthodox Christianity is the truest form of Christianity. It just is. Don’t argue with me, just accept it. Here comes the worse part. After the devastation that NATO caused in Serbia in the 1990s people started to notice a pattern with NATO operations after the second World War, specifically that the Alliance was bombing Christians. For a person like me, I don’t normally think in such terms so that before the recent crisis in Ukraine, I myself brushed it off as a conspiracy theory. Well, guys, it is not.”
Zionist Albright spelled out the first two decades of the new millennium in 1998: “As we prepare to undertake NATO’s first post-Cold War expansion next spring, prior to the Summit, the Alliance is considering its vision for the future, and initiatives critical to preparing NATO for the 21st century.” The transparent cabal have focused on so-called “disinformation.” Check out Albright’s speech at the Atlantic Council in 2017 regarding the alleged threat of “digital disinformation.”
Life is full of disinformation, it’s called lying.
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets
The very first adventure of one of the world’s most beloved cartoon characters.
If someone would give me a handsome book deal, I’d love to do a children’s book or even young adult franchise in tribute to 1929 publication, “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets” and Belgian cartoonist Hergé, where Tintin discovers the truth about the Bolsheviks, specifically the theft of the country’s wealth by its leadership.
Listen, Vladimir Lenin was a grifter who exploited the Jews. This is a simple and easily understandable message that we ought to convey broadly. In fact, in the original book, Tintin stumbles upon the secret cache of riches that Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky have stolen from the Soviet people.
Armed with this knowledge, Tintin flees Russia with his faithful dog called Snowy returning safely to Belgium and is greeted with great pomp by the rapturous public. The ending to my book would be just as magnificent as the original. Because in my book the pathological hatred for President Trump, the Neoconservative fifth column and their think tanks in our nation’s capital would be really explosive.
I would update the story for 2020 in America and my character would visit “the Land of the Neoconservatives.” Because the Bolsheviks —Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky— were a British cabal in Russia just like the Neoconservatives are today in America. A sneaky fifth column of total frauds supported by the same dark financial structure in the City of London, in the interest of the global elite. I might even use the phrase “Davos Man” Samuel P. Huntington penned in a paper about elites and “an emerging global superclass” of “Davos men” or “gold-collar workers.”
I am actually quite serious. The mutual understanding is one that we ought to be teaching kids as soon as they can understand that conspiracy is a part of modern life. Importantly, convey the message that conspiracy aims to divide us and is a most always blamed on the victim.
No, the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 was not a Jewish plot. In fact, kids ought to learn about the function of economic conspiracies and the political perversion of the religions so they don’t grow up to be adults who fall for hate propaganda and deceitful intellectual ideologies.
To find unity, let’s bring conspiracy out of the shadows.
While Solzhenitsyn’s work was a significant contribution to such mutual understanding, many were offended by his suggestion that some Jews also need to come to terms with their sins. I take a different stand, maybe because I have the benefit of hindsight and luxury of progress. I say we need to look at ourselves. Look within U.S. foreign policy. Look at the trillions of dollars that America has sent in aid to fund the Israel project. Don’t blame the “Jooz.”
I believe that we are at an important crossroads of knowledge. It is time for everybody to take a closer inspection in the mirror to reflect on how we arrived here, in order to fully shift the understanding internally. The mirror reveals it all, crystal clear, if we’re willing to look.
The veil of the mutual understanding was lifted in Ukraine. Did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn change the course of either the East or the West? Maybe not back then. But his words have had residual impact since the Harvard speech, for certain, and we are only now really starting to appreciate them as we should, four decades later.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke of a “moral revolution” that would move beyond the excesses of modernity, yet without returning to the spiritual despotisms of the past. Because he instinctively knew that the so-called “intelligence community” was up to no good and was scheming to split peaceful religions and society, in general. The Bolsheviks had relied on those covert actions. And ascetic religions were and are the enemy of the “intelligence community,” back then and now, because these religious practices allow a man to take control of himself in a powerful way, to think for himself.
Thus, the immediate threat to American national security is our military-industrial complex and specifically its intelligence agencies that pervert religions around the world. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said it all those years ago at Harvard. But he used words we did not understand at the time. Because we were not prepared to hear them.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood that spiritual genocide, a cancer resulting from a system, like communism, can be not only be difficult to recognize—and many people are entirely unaware that this type of terror even exists.
Let’s try internal realization instead of finger pointing. When we seek knowledge about the world’s damaged bullies through compassion and understanding, we will eventually come to a state of full unity through mutual understanding. This is what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tried.
They need to understand that we know. We need to understand that they are human.
Solzhenitsyn sought to encourage a mutual understanding between Russians and Jews. He even cooperated with the CIA until it became clear that they like the Jewish politburo in the Soviet government were equally as perverted, equally as corrupted from their original course.
The mutual understanding is that the peaceful religions have been been perverted for the purpose of terror. We only now can begin to understand all of this. Because we are finally having a spiritual awakening in America.
On a policy level, this leads to better decision making. Because humility fosters critical thinking. It is also important in ending wars and in conflict resolution. It enables a policy where a nation is more likely to accept that it wrongfully provoked war. And this kind of public policy starts with education of the very young.
“It’s a universal law — intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility,” said Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Nicholas Molodyko is a writer in Chicago who writes about Western popular culture and politics in relation to the secret history of the Eastern religions. After writing professionally in the fields of public health research and international development, while working in Europe, Asia and Africa, he is now writing independently at Mediapart in France.
It is tacitly assumed that that the American information industry produces notices and descriptions of actual events. Whereas it routinely delivers a narrative of adulterated facts and improbable fiction – the whole blended with a top-down imposition of Zionist ideology masquerading as national interest. I say ‘Zionist’ because a country in which the word of command comes from elsewhere is nothing more than a province. Which may explain many events unequivocally alien to American interest.
All this the world well knows – at least the unknown percentage of those who like to think. However, especially with Venezuela, there has been, among media outlets and pundits, a remarkable recrudescence of the presumption of imbecility in the American public.
But it is unjust and unrealistic to blame large social groups for their assumed gullibility. No one can indict a people. Individuals are caught up in the workings of a mechanism that forces them into its own pattern. Only heroes can resist, and while it may be hoped that everybody will be one, it cannot be demanded or expected.
Nor the trend is limited to America. Western European media figures and sundry politicians, having been taught the art of the ridicule – often in ‘prestigious’ States-side universities – seldom fail to signalize themselves by zealous imitation.
Were we not dealing with the suffering of a people and the economic strangling of a nation to steal her resources, the sallies and patent ridicule of the puppets and puppet-masters involved would be a recurrent fund of merriment.
Nevertheless, it commonly happens to him who endeavors to obtain distinction by ridicule or censure, that he teaches others to practice his own arts against himself.
Trump and his cabal or cartel have tried inventive ways to revile the Venezuelan government. So far they have only succeeded in ridiculing themselves. And their narrative has reached peaks of paradox and parody, in the comical effort to give their news a semblance of credibility.
I will mention but a few instances later, so as not to leave a statement unproven, though most readers may already know some.
Still, for the contemporary Pangloss there may be a measure of consolation in the Trumpian Cabal’s orgy of ridicule. For the domineering powers are literally terrorized by the alternative narratives, official and unofficial, reaching the discerning public through social media, directly from Venezuela.
Therefore they wage a grotesque battle, a Waterloo of fake-news, attempting to choke the liberty of expression – which, in the instance, amounts to curbing the liberty of intelligence.
Given that the flux of alternative news is still relatively marginal, this censorious obsession shows that, even in the secret enclaves of power, some believe that we are nearing a turning point in collective perception, a consummation devoutly to be wished by us, and unwished by them.
It is historically interesting that in the 1960s the Jewish political-ideological machine was clamoring for freedom of expression, and succeeded in having the US Supreme Court declare that pornography is free-speech.
In turn, this opened the flood to a Weimar-Republic-style mass acculturation whose consequences do not need description – see Weinstein as emblem of Jewish Hollywood, and Epstein as emblem of Jewish pornography and pornomania.
But sixty years later, and in total control of all media channels – the same forces find free-speech hateful, and want their adversaries insulted without self-defense and censored without apologists. Witness the erasure of hundreds of alternative information channels from the web.
Meanwhile, that just about all Western European countries have joined in pretending to believe Trump’s charade, is no support for his credibility.
For “Western European countries” means their politicians. And all know well that avarice is an insatiate and universal passion – since the enjoyment of almost every object that can afford a pleasure to the different tastes and tempers of mankind, may be procured by the possession of wealth. Consequently, politicians at large rarely cease to follow the easiest path to keep, maintain and increase their wealth and emoluments. And shameless servility to the moment’s master is the commonest formula.
For one thing, the Trump cartel assumed that any populace worldwide, with its immemorial and traditional levity, would applaud any change of masters, if accompanied by suitable fanfare and the promise or prospects of bread and circuses.
Hence they believed that the Venezuelans would promptly switch their allegiance to the service of a US appointed puppet. While the fanfare could adequately dissemble the plotters’ appetite for plunder.
In one of his often-quoted related pronouncements, Trump said that,
“The problem with Venezuela is not that socialism was poorly implemented, but that socialism was faithfully implemented.”
Far from me to oppose an “ism” with another. The various ‘isms’, as used, are not fruitful principles, nor even explanatory formulae. They are rather names of diseases, for they express some element in excess, some dangerous and abusing exaggeration.
Consider ‘globalism’, ‘neo-liberalism,’ ‘fascism’, ‘communism’, ‘socialism,’ ‘radicalism’, etc. If there may be something positive in them (and there is some good sometimes in sundry “isms”) it slips through these categories.
To compare, traditional medicine classified men according to whether they were ‘sanguineous’, ‘bilious’ or ‘nervous’. But someone in good health is none of the above. Equally, a state contains (or should contain) opposing points of view, holding them as in a chemical combination, much as all colors are contained in a beam of light.
But for Trump and the deep state behind him – though it has been the same since Reagan – neo-liberal capitalism is a dogma, which to dispute is heresy, and to doubt infamy.
The recurrent self-praising claim by media pundits and politicians about America being a democracy is either misleading and cretinous information or bold and imaginative fiction. Whereas actually, in some ways, the United States is a socialist state.
For example, government statistics, easily verifiable online, show that in 2018 there were 40 million people on food stamps (read ‘very poor’). And social programs with different names but similar scope exist in every state, to provide healthcare for those on food stamps and others. Furthermore, the very ‘social security’ system has socialism imprinted in its name.
Applying the same broad analysis to the economy at large, let’s say that in one case a state-owned enterprise produces something needed. In another case a private company lobbies the state to receive the same money that the state company would have spent to manufacture the same product.
Given that both instances involve human beings, is one state ‘socialist’ because it produces directly what it needs, and another ‘capitalist’ because it lets a non-state-owned company produce the same thing?
This is not advocating one method versus another – but only to suggest that a state-owned enterprise does not imply that the state itself is ‘socialist’. In fact in many countries, including the US, the state owns many enterprises, partially or completely.
The argument is purely theoretical, and it excludes many related insoluble dilemmas and controversial questions. For example whether a state or a privately owned enterprise is more subject to corruption, etc.
Nevertheless, I do not think that Venezuela’s ‘socialism’ is the cause of Trump’s uncouth bullying, contempt and coarse insults. For, as much as it is concealed, Venezuela is actually a mixed economy.
Now, cause and effect in history can be more-or-less arbitrary patterns into which we can weave events to render them significant. Nevertheless, in the instance, greed for Venezuela’s resources cannot be, in my view, the sole explanation.
Behind Trump’s contempt and insults there is a psychological engine and the whole weight of the historical-cultural machine that actually keeps America running.
Especially the Americans (and the fever began with the industrial revolution), know very little of a state of feeling that involves a sense of rest, of deep quiet, silence within and without, a quietly burning fire, a sense of comfort, existence in its simplest form. And I apologize for the generalization that always excludes the many exceptions.
For them life is devouring and incessant activity. They are eager for gold, for power, for dominion; the aim is to crush men and to enslave nature. They show an obstinate interest in means, but little thought for the end. They confound being with individual being, and the expansion of the self with happiness — while tending to ignore the unchangeable and the eternal.
It could be described as living at the periphery of our own essence for being unable to penetrate to its core. They are excited, ardent, positive, because they are also superficial. ‘Superficial’ may suggest less intelligent but the opposite is true. Superficiality and intelligence are anything but incompatible.
Why so much effort, noise, struggle and greed? It seems a mere stunning and deafening of the self.
When death comes they recognize that it is so. — why not then admit it sooner?
Activity is beautiful when, in some ways, it also partakes of the divine in the Greek sense — that is to say, when it is spent in the service of that which does not fade and transcends the mere domain of matter.
Some readers may argue that what is true for America also applies elsewhere, in Europe for example. As I repeat, short of dogmatic assertions, the idea here is but an attempt to find a cause for a culture.
For, unlike America, Europe had, in the XIX century, the romantic movement, which thoroughly influenced millions across the continent. Its literature affected the mode of thought of multiple generations in different countries. Romanticism swept through Europe at the very time when education became universal. And I include the Russian classics as powerful agents for suggesting or imprinting images and perceptions of a view of life that could not possibly be more un-American.
Before virtually crossing to the Venezuelan shores and interpreting their view of things I should add another qualifying proposition.
An analyst or interpreter of current events (just as any historian of the past), depends on his own judgment as to what is important in human life. Even when he rigorously confines himself to one selected political or cultural phase of a country, he still has decided on what constitutes the best outcome of that phase, and on what constitutes an outcome of degradation.
The whole judgment on ideas and actions (in the instance on what happens in Venezuela), depends upon such implicit presuppositions. You cannot rate wisdom or folly, progress or decadence, except in relation to some standard of judgment and to some end in view. For, in considering the flow and the history of ideas, the notion of mere knowledge is an abstraction. Accessories of emotion and purpose always accompany knowledge.
In the instance and for what is worth, an image still comes to my mind, when I compare Venezuela with other South-American countries. In 2014 Brazil held the world’s soccer championship. Multiple TV stations from different countries could not mask on their screens that, not many yards away from a stadium, began the favelas, living emblems of almost unimaginable degradation.
Considering that stadiums and infrastructures built for such colossal events routinely decay into ruins after little time of use, a question arises as to their intrinsic and extrinsic worth.
In contrast, and even according to UN official statistics, the so-called Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela succeeded in dramatically reducing the number of people in dire poverty, while almost eliminating illiteracy. That programs of such scope are costly requires no demonstration. Whether it is preferable to invest in mass sports or in the relief of masses from illiteracy and degrading poverty, is a question that only single individuals can answer.
But it took the spirit and guts of Hugo Chavez to affect such a veritable revolution, possibly at a time when the US was not paying much attention, engaged as it was in bombing Yugoslavia and in establishing whether Clinton had or never had sex with that woman.
He who applauds the resurrection of a people, otherwise condemned as the irrelevant accessory of idle elites – who use the poor as a gauge to affirm their own ‘betterness’ – cannot feel but some sympathy towards the Bolivarian revolution. And he would feel so even without awareness of the enormous challenges and mixture of successes and defeats that accompany all epoch-making upheavals.
As for the Trump’s Cabal it would be interesting, anthropologically speaking, to understand the grotesque sociology of this flock. Their manners, as exhibited towards Venezuela, have shown a remarkable display of depravity – uniting the crimes that typically prevail among those immune from self-analysis, with the vices that spring from the abuse of power and immunity from prosecution.
Among the clowns of the Cabal, Marco Rubio deserves a special (dis)honorable mention, as the representative of a world upside-down. Including his showing a picture of Gheddafi assassinated and covered in blood, while threatening Maduro with the same outcome, should he not accede to American demands. As if the despotic power – which could take Gheddafi’s life without a trial and stigmatized his memory without proof – had any claim on using patent murder as an example of righteousness to be replicated.
Actually, I strongly doubt whether Rubio would even understand the implication of his words and gesture. Either he is a moron with the entertainment value of a tap-dancing oyster, or his head is as empty as a eunuch’s underpants.
Rubio is a senator (!) and, if I am not mistaken, was even spoken of as a candidate for president (!). Which prompts me to agree with Pythagoras that souls of animals infuse themselves into the trunks of men.
The happily departed Bolton is an equal competitor for the Olympic medal of ridicule. In the latest failed coup attempt, he proclaimed that Maduro was about to leave Venezuela for Cuba when ‘the Russians’ prevented him from boarding the plane.
As Jose’ Rodriguez – Venezuela’s Minister of Information – explained and documented on television, that ambulating Pinocchio called Guaido’ had assured Bolton that he had already corrupted and paid-off a sufficient number of generals so as to make the coup a done-deal. That wasn’t true but Bolton believed it.
All the while, the succeeding events of the failed coup make up the script of a proper farce.
Including Mike Pence’s outstanding arrogance when, in the UN assembly, had the gall to tell the Foreign Minister of Venezuela that he should not be there. As if the US had a divine right to make and unmake world governments at will. With his performance Mike Pence demonstrated to be worth less than six pence.
Of Pompeo it could perhaps be said what the historian Napier said of the British ambassador to Germany during the 1930s, “He is obtuse enough to be a menace, and yet not stupid enough to be innocuous.”
All in all, the Trump’s Cabal includes ambitious individuals, seemingly untaught or unable to observe, reason, deduce and infer, unless observation be blindness and madness logic.
Trump keeps labeling Nicolas Maduro as ‘corrupt’ and a ‘dictator’. Both words belong to the no-man’s-land of lexical ambiguity.
As for dictatorship, there have been six presidential elections, in Venezuela, since 2002. And, as readers who have followed the events know, in the last 2018 elections, the Trump Cabal ordered the opposition not to present candidates, after they had formally agreed to do so.
I will not offend the readers by proving what they already know – that charges of dictatorship may be levied against Trump and sundry predecessors on much stronger grounds.
The issue of corruption is trickier. I doubt if anyone who worked in, or had to do with, large corporations or government, never met with evidence of corruption. Without even touching on lobbying, a peculiar institution for bribing, bulldozing, and corrupting the legislators who are supposed to represent the people’s interests. Or on ‘financial engineering’, an inventive euphemism to suggest monetary genius instead of monetary fraud.
For what is worth, unable as I am to find a reliable method for measuring and assessing corruption, I pretend to do what Balzac did when he wrote his novels, though I write none.
He kept on his desk the Dictionary of Physiognomy – a monumental work in four massive volumes, written by the Swiss Abbot Johann Lavater, in the 18th century. In his novels, Balzac used Lavater’s physiognomy extensively. So that his characters, being accurately described as they are, cannot but logically behave as they do.
Physiognomy had its era of success and popularity before being dismissed as a pseudoscience. Though I suspect that many use it unconsciously when forming their first impression of an individual.
With all necessary reservations, amateurishly and therefore inaccurately, I suggest that Trump’s physiognomy reads, “Everything has a price and money buys everything. Conscience is but a word that cowards use to keep the strong in awe. Power (via money acquired from any source) is my conscience, my tool of operation and my law.”
For brevity’s sake I will not describe individual facial components of the specific physiognomy – as Lavater does in his work.
As a corollary derived from Trump’s physiognomy, “twitting” is the ideal communication tool and perfect match for his character. In his hands a ‘tweet’ means “I say so because it is and that’s it.”
By the way I am not passing judgment – however difficult it may be, the application of physiognomy should not be affected by emotional or philosophical preferences.
In fact, assuming his physiognomic profile correct, Trump is ethically consistent. Whereas, in my view, the other members of his Cabal are not. Routinely, they cannot even pretend to the smooth face of hypocrisy. They are sincere only when they are arrogant.
Again I do not pretend to be right. Two men observing the same person, or even object, will describe it diversely, according to the point of view from which either beholds it. Still, truth being the legitimate object of observation and history, it is better that she should be sought-for by many than few, lest for want of seekers, among the mists of prejudice and the false lights of interest, she’d be lost altogether.
Comparing Trump with Maduro, the difference could not be greater. Maduro’s physiognomy suggests that he takes his job as a mission. And that he has a frightful understanding of what Venezuela would revert to, if the Anglo-Zionists and their ‘lameculos’ took over. His oratory is incomparable with Trump’s. It is helped by the inherent majesty of the Spanish language, but is also evidence of a long and careful self-training and study. A remarkable achievement in itself, considering that Maduro’s political path began as a union leader among bus drivers.
For their own self-respect, we may think that the Venezuelan opposition should contain characters with greater respectability than what the world has seen so far.
The ‘interim’ president Guaido’ was recently shown holding an empty milk jug in the air while claiming that he had not enough money to buy milk for his daughter. Almost simultaneously, Venezuelan intelligence had caught Guaido’s assistant Marrero texting with other coup organizers. They were arguing about how and to assign and distribute among themselves the hundreds of millions that Uncle Sam had confiscated from the accounts of the Venezuelan bank in the US. A bank that is (was) necessary to handle the sales of Venezuelan oil to the US.
Among other exploits, Guaido’ had already ridiculed himself for believing the two Russian pranksters (’bromistas’ in Venezuelan Spanish), who faked a call from the President of Switzerland. In which the ‘president’ asked Guaido’ if the accounts of the Venezuelan government in Switzerland should be reassigned to Guaido’s name, and he agreed. And, when prompted by the bromistas, he also agreed to support the Russian pro-US candidate Navalny in a future attempt to unseat Putin.
In a theater, bad actors feel embarrassed towards the audience for their poor performance. With Venezuela it’s the audience that feels embarrassed for the actors.
Following the developments of the ongoing attempted Venezuelan coup, also yields some unusual and curious perspectives, along with the possibility of discovering other interesting Guaido’-style characters.
Readers may remember Victoria Nuland, Obama’s and Hillary’s factotum in Ukraine – passed into history for her “F-the-Europeans” pronouncement, while discussing which puppets to appoint in the US-financed, post-coup Ukrainian government.
Maybe some readers do not yet know that Victoria Nuland has a Venezuelan equivalent in the shape of a Vanessa Neumann, familiarly referred-to in the European press as “The Cracker from Caracas.”
As Wikipedia explains, Neumann is the “Venezuelan” (meaning Guaido’s) ambassador to “the court of St. James” (meaning England). Though Wikipedia modestly adds that, “The administration of Nicolás Maduro does not recognize Guaido’s diplomats.”
Besides also being Jewish, Neumann has the usual impeccable curriculum of the Vanity-Fair intellectualoids, who can read and therefore believe they can think, ever swimming with the tide of pomp that beats upon the high shores of the world. And of whom French author George Bernanos said that, “The intellectual is so often an imbecile that we should consider him as such, until he (or she) has demonstrated the contrary.”
Like others of that ilk, Neumann is the apotheosis of fake, but I mention her here for her involvement in a not-so-well-known ramification of the so-far unsuccessful coup in Venezuela.
Between Venezuela and Guyana there is a disputed territory, apparently an Eldorado of natural resources, called the Essequibo. The roots of the dispute lay in the 1600 when the Northern Provinces of Holland declared independence from Spain. The sequence of events being intricate, a summary is mandatory.
When Venezuela declared independence from Spain in 1810, thanks to Simon Bolivar, she also claimed the Essequibo as successor to the Spanish empire. For the Spaniards had originally discovered the region, established their sovereignty, settled and exercised political control.
In the meantime England also laid claims, and since England had helped Venezuela in her struggle for independence, Venezuela did not, at the time, interfere with the British claim.
Jumping many intermediate steps and disputes, in 1966 there was an agreement between Venezuela and the now independent Guyana, to delay a final decision on the settlement of the Essequibo. Even so, Venezuela maintains her claim to the rightful ownership of the territory.
Vanessa Neumann comes into the picture thanks to a telling conversation on the Essequibo between her and an assistant to Guaido’ called Manuel Avendano (link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjaSN_Hiq1I).
It appears that Neumann, or Guaido’, or both had already agreed – even prior to the attempted coup – to give ownership of the Essequibo to various American companies for exploitation.
Neumann tells Avendano that during her participation to an impending meeting of the so-called “Group of Lima” (read, the South-American countries supporting a coup in Venezuela) she will not answer any questions on the subject of the Essequibo, raised by the Guyana representative. Apparently the representative had already asked her about the related post-coup government’s intention. Or rather, officially, as she explains, “we will continue to uphold the line that we intend to appropriate ourselves of the Essequibo” – whereas they have already given it away to the American multinationals.
The current legitimate Venezuelan government has declared that the Neumann-Guaido’s arbitrary pronouncement on the Essequibo is evidence of treason by the ‘coupistas.’
Why Maduro allows Guaido’ to roam free in Venezuela, while he continues to plot for her subjugation by the US, is a puzzle for me and (I think) for those unfamiliar with the subtle tools of diplomacy. Though it is reasonable to guess that the more Guaido’ speaks and moves, the more he makes an ass of himself, hence discomposing his own cause – but it is only a supposition.
Given that Russia and China openly support and assist Venezuela, we may still hold some hope that evil may not prevail. While waiting for the verdict of time, that infallible controverter of false opinions.
On April 25th, I gave a talk on some of what I had seen in Venezuela, March-April, sharing photos and clips–with an emphasis of allowing people to hear voices our media generally silences or pretends don’t exist.
In Q & A, the issue of discrimination and racism in Venezuela was raised. This eloquent Venezuelan musician replied to the question so articulately, and disturbingly, that I asked him to re-address it on camera after the event.
Do listen to his words not only on the racism that still exists (not only in Venezuela but in media portrayal of Venezuelans), that in the 80s there actually was a crisis, unlike today, and that the people won’t let their revolution end.
Excerpts:
“In 1999, for the 1st time every in any country in South America, a law was passed to not discriminate against people of colour. People that never had a voice now have one and will never give it up again. You can go to the remotest area in my country and everybody can read. Everybody knows their rights and knows that their voice counts.” <!–more CONTINUE READING–>
“In Venezuela, its a racism that’s very alive, but hidden under class status. When you come to Canada, you just don’t see Venezuelans that look like me, at all. Or even if you go to the States, anywhere you go, you’re not gonna see Venezuelans that look like me.”
“What the Canadian public, the American public and the international community are watching is a huge Hollywood show.”
“I have a challenge for anyone in the opposition to simply answer one question: What would they do different? What is their plan? If they’re planning to go back to those great old days (sarcasm), the people are not having it. Two million militias, old people, young people, everybody knows what the United States is doing. My mother is 70, she’s about to join the militia!”
I am continuing to try to understand what is really happening in Venezuela by talking to those who actually know that and, following my interview with Michael Hudson, it is today it is my immense privilege and honor to present you with a full interview I made with His Excellency Mr. Jorge Valero, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. Permanent Representative of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to the United Nations Office and other international organizations in Geneva.
I am immensely grateful to Ambassador Valero for taking the time to answer my questions in extenso just a few days away from what might well turn out to be a US false flag or even invasion of Venezuela (promised to all by Trump and Guaido for the 23rd of February). May God grant him and the Venezuelan people the wisdom, courage and strength to defeat the Empire!
The Saker
——-
The Saker: My first question is about you personally. There is a Wikipedia entry under your name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Valero) but since Wikipedia is, at best, a hit-and-miss kind of source, what could you tell our readers about yourself which they ought to know before we turn to the issue of the current situation in Venezuela?
Ambassador Valero: I was born in Valera, State of Trujillo, Venezuela on November 8th, 1946. I graduated from the University of Los Andes (ULA, for its acronym in Spanish) as a historian. I did my graduate studies at the University College London, in Latin American Studies. I am an expert in diplomatic archives. I was an undergraduate professor and the University of Los Andes and a graduate professor at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV, for its acronym in Spanish). I was elected as a Congressman to the Legislative Assembly of the State of Trujillo, and later Congressman to the National Congress. I was Venezuela’s Ambassador to the Korean Republic. When, President Chávez, was elected in 1998; he appointed me as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. I presided the Presidential Commission appointed by President Chávez, which was in charge of organizing the II OPEC Summit, in Caracas on September 2000. I have been Ambassador – Permanent Representative of Venezuela to the OAS; the UN – New York and currently to the UNOG. I have written a literary work in various genres. More than 20 essays; poetry; diplomacy and social-political analysis. Dozens of national and international conferences.
The Saker: One of the major efforts of Hugo Chavez was to establish a number of multi-lateral frameworks and agreements like the ALBA, CELAC, UNASUR, and projects like the SUCRE, the Petrocaribe, TeleSUR or PetroSUR. How effective have these frameworks and projects been in supporting the Venezuelan struggle against US imperialism? Do you feel that these entities are playing a helpful role or not?
Ambassador Valero: Hugo Chávez was a paradigm of Latin American and Caribbean integration. In this regard, he was a key factor in the creation of ALBA, UNASUR, CELAC, PETROCARIBE, and TELESUR. Chávez reclaimed the integrationist ideology of our Liberator Simón Bolívar, who prosed the creation of “La Patria Grande,Nuestroamericana” (Great Our American Homeland), to defend the interests of our peoples and face any foreign threat raising the flags of unity, peace, sovereignty and self-determination of the peoples. PETROCARIBE is a solidary initiative in favor of developing countries, notably, the countries of our Caribbean surroundings that benefit from an oil bill with discounts and with long payment terms. Chávez has also been a paradigm in the promotion of a multi-polar world, where foreign affairs are founded by sovereign equality of States, overcoming the decaying North American Empire unilateralism. Thus, the Empire’s fury has been unleashed against the Bolivarian Revolution: coups d’état, oil sabotage, the promotion of violence and terrorism against the Venezuelan people. Henceforth, the continuous coup d’état promoted by the supremacist-racist-xenophobic and war-mongering government of Donald Trump that aims to impose a governing puppet and the threats of a military invasion in our homeland, which are part of the above-described context.
Hugo Chávez advocated for a new type and renewed multilateralism. Respect for the founding principles of international law and the Charter of the United Nations. Multilateralism is disrupted by Trump’s government, which has disregarded universal agreements on climate change; withdrawn from both UNESCO and the Human Rights Council; disregarded the agreement on the peaceful use of atomic energy with Iran, signed by USA, Germany, France, United Kingdom, China and the European Union; retraced the path to normalizing the bilateral relations with Cuba; unleashes a commercial war against China, and threatens the Russian Federation with an atomic war in his dispute to control outer space. Vis-à-vis those reckless and aggressive policies that threaten human existence it is necessary to raise the flags of multilateralism even higher.
The Saker: The Empire has created the so-called “Lima Group” which is just a typical trick to bypass the UN or legitimate regional organizations. This is exactly what the USA did with the so-called “friends of Syria,” and the goal is the same: to overthrow a democratically elected legitimate government and replace it with a vassal puppet regime. Yet countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru all agreed to participate in this anti-Venezuelan farce. How do you explain such a betrayal by so many of these Latin American countries? Does their agreement to betray Venezuela and serve the Empire’s interest not show that these states have no real sovereignty or foreign policy and that they are all de-facto US colonies?
Ambassador Valero: Certainly, the self-proclaimed “Lima Group” is a cartel made up of satellite governments of the imperial government to break Latin American and Caribbean unity, and, due to the failure of using the Ministry of the Colonies, which is the OAS to isolate Venezuela in this organization. The empire and its minions couldn’t approve Article 20 of Inter-American Democratic Charter of the Permanent Council of the OAS and resort to the United Nations Security Council, where they also failed. The creation of puppet governments by the US is not new. It has happened in Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria. The puppets imposed in those countries where supported by armed terrorist groups, including, mercenary armies trained and financed from abroad.
Nevertheless, in Venezuela, the puppet has no support from the people nor the military, since in our country there is a consistent and patriotic civilian-military alliance, which guarantees and will guarantee -come what may- the defense of the sovereign and sacred jurisdiction of Simon Bolivar’s homeland. The US satellite governments against Venezuela are a minority even in Latin America and the Caribbean. Of the 193 countries that make up the United Nations only 34 support the puppet, which translates into 17.6%. For example, a single country in Africa and there are 54. One in Oceania and there are 15. One in the Middle East and there are 16. 15 countries in Europe, and there are 50. And 16 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and there are 35. You are right, the satellite countries that follow the Empire’s orders have no autonomous and sovereign foreign policy. Some of these governments, particularly, in Latin America are presided by people that have a criminal background: drug trafficking, corruption, genocide, paramilitarism, sexual offenses. Some are the result of a coup d’état.
The Saker: Another interesting initiative was the creation of Petro-cryptocurrency. Now with the inflation making the Bolivar almost useless, how effective do you believe this alternative currency is to 1) bypass US sanctions, and sabotage and 2) serve as an alternative currency to help the Venezuelan economy recover from its current plight?
Ambassador Valero: The Petro-cryptocurrency was created to free us from the tyranny of the US dollar in the international financial market. Therefore, Trump’s government has established Draconian measures to block the flow of this cryptocurrency. Incidentally, the economic war and the unilateral coercive measures bring about galloping inflation, migration and relocation of people abroad. We are blocked from accessing the capital markets. They rob the Venezuelan State’s property in the US. They kidnap the Venezuelan State’s bank accounts in that country. The unilateral coercive measures and the sanctions cause, as expressed by the former UN Independent Expert, Alfred de Zayas, death and suffering. Measures against international law and the Charter of the United Nations and deny the Venezuelan people their human rights. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures, Idriss Jazairy acknowledged this.
The Saker: Russia and China have been working on an alternative to the SWIFT. Is that something the Venezuelan government is also looking into?
Ambassador Valero: Experts from China and Russia provide expert advice to the Venezuelan State to successfully overcome the financial blockage and criminal sanctions of Trump’s government.
The Saker: What can you tell us about the current state of the Venezuelan petrochemicals industry? Now that the US has stolen 7 BILLION dollars belonging to PDVSA, how can the PDVSA continue to operate after being robbed from such a huge sum of money? At what levels is Venezuela currently producing and refining oil?
Ambassador Valero: The damage caused to the Venezuelan economy surpasses 35 billion dollars in the blockade of assets and accounts. They try to rob the Venezuelan peoples from the company CITGO that operates in Dallas, Texas that distributes gasoline and fuels to thousands of gas stations in the US East Coast. The Bolivarian government will undertake all the necessary legal actions to avoid that the Trump government steals the national patrimony. PDVSA, our national oil company, is completely deployed to guarantee the production, distribution, and commercialization of our crude oil. We have found new partners in the hydrocarbon’s market in the world, mainly, China, Russia, India, and Turkey.
The Saker: Since the US-backed coup attempt by Guaido, there has been remarkably little actual violence in the streets of Venezuela, and all the signs point to the fact that Guaido does not have the support of a majority of the people. Yet he sure does have enough support within some sectors of the Venezuelan society (the kind of folks who go and protest against Nicolas Maduro while carrying US flags). How did the government succeed in preventing that minority from doing in Venezuela what was done in Libya and Syria: instigate enough violence to justify a “humanitarian” foreign intervention? In Kiev, there were snipers shooting at both the security forces and the protestors (which also happened in Caracas in 2002 I believe), and I was expecting that to happen in Caracas, but it did not (at least so far). How do you explain this?
Ambassador Valero: Since the National Constituent Assembly was elected peace reigns in the republic.
The puppet that the US aims to impose has neither the people nor the military’s support to disrupt public peace. In general, in Venezuela, there is peace and tranquility. The Venezuelan people love peace. Peace is an essential part of State policies. Nevertheless, terrorist and violent groups financed from abroad, especially, the USA and Colombia act in popular districts in some cities in the country. The puppet and the puppeteer, Trump’s government try to disrupt public peace. They call to destroy the democratic rule of law and justice in Venezuela. They refuse to dialogue and promote intolerance and violence. The puppet asks the puppeteer to send US troops to invade our homeland. Infertile calls since our people remain presto to defend our participatory and protagonist democracy, as well as, the democratic institutions.
Trump’s government tries to reproduce the format that the Empire used in Syria and Libya: a parallel transition government. Prepares mercenaries in neighboring countries to foray in the national territory. They aimed to use the OAS and the Human Rights Council. Remember that Libya was expelled from the Human Rights Council through a Resolution, which was later confirmed by the UN General Assembly immediately after a Resolution was approved in the Security Council, which approved the creation of a no-fly zone. What followed is well known: cask missiles against Libya that caused thousands of deaths and destruction in civilian and military infrastructure. Trump’s government wants to implement the same strategy against Venezuela. He has called upon the Security Council to validate his objective for a military invasion in Venezuela. Fortunately, for both world and regional peace, the governments of Russia and China declared that they would use their right to veto in the UN Security Council to block such criminal objective.
Peace in our region is crucial. CELAC proclaimed Latin America and the Caribbean as a zone of peace. A military invasion from Trump’s government in Venezuela will have continental and worldwide consequences. President Nicolás Maduro affirmed that a Yankee invasion would create a new Vietnam.
The Saker: Does Venezuela feel sufficiently supported at the UN in general and at the UNSC specifically by Russia and China or do you feel that Venezuela needs more help from these countries?
Ambassador Valero: Russia and China are Venezuela’s strategic allies. With these two military, commercial, and technologic powers we have cooperation agreements in many fields. Likewise, Venezuela has abundant solidary backing and support from most of the countries in the world.
On January 26, 2019, Trump’s government indented to condemn Venezuela in the Security Council. They ran off with their tails between their legs, since no resolution was approved against our country. Most of the permanent and non-permanent members of this Council rejected the interventionist objective, and, contrarily approved to promote dialogue among Venezuelans. We are in a condition to overcome motu proprio our challenges. The dialogue between the government and the opposition, without preconditions, is the path to follow. Henceforth, our government has enthusiastically supported the “Montevideo Mechanism” proposed by the governments of Mexico, Uruguay, Bolivia and the member countries of CARICOM.
The Saker: It is pretty obvious that Mr. Guaido has committed a number of violations of the Venezuelan law ranging from calling for an illegal demonstration to being involved in an anti-constitutional coup attempt. In a normal situation, that man ought to be legally charged and prosecuted for his crimes (including, in my opinion, subversion and treason). Yet the USA threatened to go to war against Venezuela (aka “serious consequences“) if Guaido is arrested which, by itself, is a gross violation of international law and of the UN Charter. What can, in your opinion, the Venezuelan government do to do what any other government would do and restore law in order without risking providing a pretext for a US invasion?
Ambassador Valero: The puppet has continuously violated the Bolivarian Constitution. Likewise, he disregarded the fundamental tenets of international law and the Charter of the United Nations. The Venezuelan State is made up of five powers. If something has characterized, the Bolivarian government is being a devoted defender of the independence of each of those powers. It will be the National Constituent Assembly and the Public Ministry who will make the necessary decisions. And you are right: these are crimes of subversion and treason. Breaking democratic legality and wrongfully usurping functions should not be tolerated.
The puppet’s permanent calls for violence and destabilization, his self-proclamation in a street in Caracas, and his call for a foreign military intervention place him against all nation and international law. Makes him a criminal that should be punished with the force of the Venezuelan laws.
The Saker: Speaking of a possible US invasion – do you believe that these are just the usual empty threat of Donald Trump or do you think that there is actually a real risk of overt US military aggression against your country? How about the covert aggression already taking place? What can you tell us about US/Colombian (some say Israeli?) covert operations against Venezuela?
Ambassador Valero: Donald Trump’s threats are not empty. The aggression is in full swing. Trump is the bombastic spokesman of war and foreign intervention. His threats are part of the Empire’s recolonizing goals. The government of Uncle Sam’s nation and its allies and lackeys impose neoliberal policies on the peoples of the world. Trump dusted off the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary. Recruits and trains mercenaries in its military bases in Colombia. Prepares his arsenal to wage war against Venezuela. This is why we should turn a blind eye to provocations. The governments of the US and Colombia are experts creating false positives.
We insist: the threat of a military foray by the empire is a possibility that should not be ruled out. Both our people and our National Bolivarian Armed Forces (FANB, for its acronym in Spanish) are prepared to react with heroism and determination in case of such an event. Patriotism has rekindled as never before in history. We are ready to guarantee our definite independence.
Venezuela became the subject of discussion in the whole world. Our natural wealth, our geographic location in the American hemisphere, our political tenet of building a model of society where social justice prevails, our relations of solidarity and cooperation with the other countries of the world, our firm decision of being a free and sovereign country, emancipated from all sorts of domination make us –as people say- the crown jewel.
The Saker: It is pretty clear that the Israelis have never forgiven Hugo Chavez for speaking up for Palestinian rights and for openly denouncing Israeli policies. As far as you know, are the Israelis currently involved in anti-Venezuelan activities including economic sabotage, political subversion, covert operations, etc.? How relevant is Israel in what is going on today?
Ambassador Valero: The Israeli government has nothing to forgive us for. Our condition of sovereign country grants us the right to decide how we relate to other countries in the world. Defending the Palestinian cause is in the center of our foreign policy. We denounce in multilateral for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. Demanded the cessation of the cessation of the occupation of the Gaza Strip, to end the extermination policy of Israel against Palestine and the Occupied Arab Territories. We recognize Palestine as a free and sovereign country with which we hold strong bonds of cooperation. There lies Israel’s hatred against the Bolivarian Revolution. It is no news that this government is involved in the interventionist plans against our country. The Israeli government bets on the overthrowing of President Nicolás Maduro, by Donald Trump’s government. It has recognized his puppet.
The Saker: Finally, what is your guess as to what will happen in the short-term to mid-term future? Do you believe that the Guiado coup has already failed or do you believe that this was only a temporary setback for the Empire and that now we will see more and further attempts at crushing the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela and the rest of Latin America?
Ambassador Valero: The civilian-military union is categorically defeating the coup d’état. Nevertheless, the empire will not stop in its destabilizing and coup-mongering pretentions against the Bolivarian Revolution. As it has been demonstrated our people are inspired by the legacy of our liberators and the supreme commander Hugo Chávez Frías. And at the avant-garde of the fight for our sovereignty and self-determination is President Nicolás Maduro. Chavismo is the new face of being Venezuelan.
The Venezuelan people will resist with heroism and patriotic spirit the constant siege of Trump’s government. The Bolivarian Revolution conceived a new nation project, which aims to obtain happiness, equality, equity, freedom, and brotherhood of all Venezuelans. These are inherent principles of our democracy and the Venezuelan way of socialism.
The Venezuelan people have resisted with dignity and stoicism the terrible conditions it has been subjected to due to the imperial pretensions of impeding the advance of our revolutionary process. No foreign power and its domestic pawns will be able to stop the triumphal march of the Bolivarian Revolution.
The Saker:Your Excellency, thank you for granting me this interview!
Michel Chossudovsky talks to Bonnie Faulkner on Guns and Butter.
We discuss the economic and political crisis in Venezuela, its history as an oil proxy nation since the discovery of oil in 1918, through successive dictatorships, coups d’etats, a fake nationalization of the oil industry, the Chavista movement and destabilization through financial warfare, with a special emphasis on Michel Chossudovsky’s personal experience there conducting a study on poverty in 1975 as Advisor to the Venezuelan Minister of Planning.
The study commissioned by the Ministry of Planning (CORDIPLAN) (involving an interdiscilinary research team) headed by Michel Chossudovsky was entitled: “Venezuela: La Mapa de la Pobreza”. (Venezuela: The Poverty Map)
The report provided detailed estimates of poverty, focussing on nutrition, education, health, housing, employment and income distribution.
It also addressed the role of government policy. Venezuela’s oil wealth was not used to build schools and hospitals. The oil surplus was largely recycled into the hands of the oil giants and the local elites.
Upon its release, the draft report was confiscated by the Minister of Planning. It was subsequently shelved on orders of the Cabinet (Consejo de Ministros) of President Carlos Perez.
Michel Chossudovsky brought it out as a book in 1978, which created a bombshell. It dispelled the myth of “La Venezuela Millionaria”.
In the period prior to the Bolivarian Revolution, extending into the 1990s, the levels of poverty were abysmally high.
“More than 70 percent of the Venezuelan population did not meet minimum calorie and protein requirements, while approximately 45 percent were suffering from extreme undernourishment.
More than half of Venezuelan children suffered from some degree of malnutrition.
Infant mortality was exceedingly high.
23 percent of the Venezuelan population was illiterate. The rate of functional illiteracy was of the order of 42%.
One child in four was totally marginalized from the educational system (not even registered in the first grade of primary school).
More than half the children of school age never entered high school.
A majority of the population had little or no access to health care services.
Half the urban population had no access to an adequate system of running water within their home.
Unemployment was rampant.
More than 30 percent of the total workforce was unemployed or underemployed, while 67 percent of those employed in non-agricultural activities received a salary which did not enable them to meet basic human needs (food, health, housing, clothing, etc.).
Three-quarters of the labor force were receiving revenues below the minimum subsistence wage.”
(Michel Chossudovsky, excerpts from La Miseria en Venezuela, Vadell, Caracas, 1978, translated from Spanish)
The objectives of the US led Coup:
Install a US proxy regime,
Confiscate the country’s extensive oil wealth (Venezuela has the largest oil reserves Worldwide),
Impoverish the Venezuelan people.
TRANSCRIPT
This is Guns and Butter
Michel Chossudovsky: I think concretely also we understood that poverty was not the result of a scarcity of resources, because this was an oil-producing economy, but all the oil revenues were going into private hands. Of course, the big-oil U.S. was behind it. But what we understood was that it was the governments which were responsible for poverty.
I’m Bonnie Faulkner.Today on Guns and Butter, Michel Chossudovsky. Today’s show: Venezuela: From Oil Proxy to the Bolivarian Movement and Sabotage. Michel Chossudovsky is an economist and the Founder, Director and Editor of the Center for Research on Globalization, based in Montreal, Quebec. He is the author of 11 books including The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September Eleventh and America’s War on Terrorism. Today we discuss the economic and political crisis in Venezuela, its history as an oil proxy nation since the discovery of oil in 1918, through successive dictatorships, the Chavista movement and destabilization, with a special emphasis on Michel Chossudovsky’s personal experience there conducting a study on poverty as Advisor to the Minister of Planning.
Bonnie Faulkner: Michel Chossudovsky, welcome.
Michel Chossudovsky: I’m delighted again to be on Guns and Butter.
Bonnie Faulkner: The president of Venezuela’s National Assembly since February 5th, Juan Guaidó, declared that he has temporarily assumed presidential powers, promising to hold free elections and end Nicolas Maduro’s “dictatorship.” President Trump announced that the U.S. would recognize Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela. According to The Wall Street Journal, Vice President Mike Pence called Guaidó the night before his announcement and pledged that the Trump administration would support him. Trump refused to rule out military action. In your recent article, Regime Change and Speakers of the Legislature: Nancy Pelosi vs. Juan Guaidó, Self-proclaimed President of Venezuela, you intimate that Trump’s declaration might constitute a dangerous precedent for him. Why?
Michel Chossudovsky: Well, ironically, the position of Speaker of the National Assembly of Venezuela, which is held by Juan Guaidó, is in some regards comparable to that of the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and, of course, the leader of the majority party, the Democrats, which is currently held by Nancy Pelosi. There are certain differences from the constitutional standpoint, but what President Trump has intimated in declaring that the Speaker of the National Assembly of Venezuela is the interim president of Venezuela is tantamount to saying, “Hey, Donald Trump, what about Nancy Pelosi?” Somebody might intimate, either a U.S. politician including perhaps even President Maduro of Venezuela, “We would like Nancy Pelosi to be the President of the United States, and then, of course, we’ll go to the UN Security Council to have it endorsed.”
That illustrates the ridicule of political discourse but also the shear fantasy of U.S. foreign policy, that they should provide legitimacy to a Speaker of the House because they don’t like the President. Well, I don’t like the president of the United States of America and a lot of people don’t like him, but do we want to have Nancy Pelosi as our interim president? That, in fact, is something which could evolve in the current context of confrontation between President Trump and the Democratic Party, which now controls the U.S. House of Representatives.
Bonnie Faulkner: It looks like the Democrats in Congress are also threatening President Maduro. The House Foreign Affairs Committee has tweeted out, “We refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Maduro’s presidency. That’s why members are joining to introduce legislation to support the people of Venezuela and hold the illegitimate president accountable for the crisis he created.” So this is a bipartisan effort to unseat Maduro.
Michel Chossudovsky: Precisely. It is a novelty in relation to regime change. We have military coups in Venezuela going back to the early 20th century – a whole bunch of military coups. We have color revolutions, which instigate protest movements. That is already ongoing in Venezuela. Then we have this new formula of intimating that we don’t like the President; have him replaced by the Speaker of the House. And that’s, of course, a very dangerous discourse because, as I mentioned, it could backlash onto President Trump himself.
Bonnie Faulkner: Venezuela’s crisis came before the UN Security Council on Saturday, but they took no action because there was no agreement. Russia and China backed Maduro but France, Britain, Spain and Germany said they would recognize Juan Guaidó as president unless Venezuela calls a new presidential election within eight days. So here we have European nations demanding that Venezuela hold another election. Did Nicolas Maduro win the presidency of Venezuela democratically or not?
Michel Chossudovsky: He won the presidency of Venezuela democratically with a large majority. Conversely, France’s President Macron also won the presidential election with a rather feeble majority and nobody is questioning Macron’s presidency. Well, in fact, some people are because we have the Yellow Vest movement throughout France. That doesn’t seem to be making the headlines anymore and people are endorsing President Macron.
Well, there are several issues. These European leaders don’t have the support of their respective populations. In Venezuela support for President Maduro is divided, but that’s I think something that happens in a large number of countries. It’s not any different. The opposition is controlling the National Assembly but nonetheless, President Maduro gets a majority of support of the Venezuelan population.
The fact of the matter is that all these leaders in Europe are, first of all, caving in to U.S. foreign policy; they are essentially behaving as U.S. proxies. At the same time, their behavior and management of the republics that they represent, not including the United Kingdom, which is also in a big mess – well, one might say, how can they get away with this? Under a constitutional democracy, how is it that they could actually support the United States in calling for the Speaker of the National Assembly of Venezuela to become president of the country? It’s an absurd proposition, and that this would then get to the United Nations Security Council is even more absurd.
What should get to the United Nations Security Council is the mode of interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign country through the financing of opposition groups, the financing of terrorists and so on who are involved in triggering the protest movement and so on. It’s an evolving situation. It has certain features resembling in fact the Euromaidan in Ukraine. And, of course, the end objective is to unseat the president.
Now, he has very strong grassroots support because the Bolivarian Revolution has indeed led to major changes in the country, major achievements, under very contradictory circumstances as well as divisions within the Bolivarian movement.
I have been going back and forth to Venezuela for a very long period since I started very early in my career when I became Advisor to the Minister of Planning in the Carlos Andrés Pérez government of the mid-‘70s. I know the country inside-out.
It’s a very complex process, and I think people have to understand first of all that Venezuela has the largest oil reserves worldwide – more than Saudi Arabia – both traditional crude as well as tar sands, which are extensive but also very easy to manage and produce compared to those of Canada, for instance. What is at stake there is the battle for oil.
Historically, Venezuela has been an oil economy from its inception in 1918 when oil was discovered in the Maracaibo Bay. Then you had a whole series of military dictators.
The most prominent was, of course, Juan Vicente Gómez, who was really a proxy of the United States and big oil.
So big oil has controlled this country from the early 20th century and it was only in the ‘90s with the Bolivarian Revolution that they actually started to repeal this control of big oil with the government of Chávez, which essentially started to implement some major changes and shifts in the nature of state management, but under very contradictory circumstances, which I guess we’ll be discussing.
Bonnie Faulkner: How did you first get involved in Venezuela? Did you first go there in 1975, and under what auspices?
Michel Chossudovsky: Actually, one of my close friends when I was studying at the University of Manchester in economics was a person named Gumersindo Rodriguez. Now, Gumersindo Rodriguez was a bit older than I. He was active in the MIR, Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionaria, which was a leftist faction of the Democratic Action Party, Acción Democratica. He had close links to one of the prominent presidents, which was Romulo Betancourt, (left) but at the same time he was – to some extent the MIR were considered as renegades.
He went off to study in the UK and then when he returned and a new Acción Democratica government was formed he became Minister of Planning. And then he called me up and we met in New York. He said, “Would you like to come down, etc., to Caracas to work for the Planning Ministry as my Advisor?” I accepted and I went down in mid-1975 during the school break at the University of Ottawa.
Initially he wanted me to write his speeches, so I started writing his speeches. After a while I said, “Listen, Gumersindo, I would like to do something more substantive and set up a research group on poverty in this country, which is a serious issue.” So he said, “Okay, Michel. Go ahead. Set up the group. You have all the resources you need.”
I set up a group of about half-a-dozen people with consultants at the university and so on. I was a young researcher. It was a very challenging project. Very carefully we looked at concepts of what defines the standard of living, in other words, nutrition, education, health, employment, income distribution, the environment, the access to running water, the levels of malnutrition. We defined what was called a minimum family income, and this was supported with very careful analysis at the statistical level. I had a professor in nutrition at the university who advised me on various aspects.
This report was done in three months. It was a big push. I had to go back to Ottawa to the university in September where I was teaching economics, so we managed to finish the first draft of the report in a matter of months. We came up with incredible results, that the abysmal levels of poverty, largely basing our analysis on national statistics, the various surveys which were available, household budget surveys, the census data and also the input of a large number of intellectuals and so on. But not so much field work because simply we didn’t really have the time to do that. But we came up with results.
I think concretely also we understood that poverty was not the result of a scarcity of resources,because this was an oil-producing economy, but all the oil revenues were going into private hands. Of course, the big-oil U.S. was behind it. But what we understood was that it was the governments which were responsible for poverty because they weren’t recycling the oil revenues to a societal project. They weren’t using the oil revenues to finance education, health and so on, and the levels of unemployment were exceedingly high and so on.
Now, this is the background of poverty which prevailed when the Bolivarian Revolution occurred. I should mention that much of our data was based on the 1970s, but the 1980s were far worse, because then you had what was called El Caracazo in 1989, which was a process of economic and social collapse. It was instigated by the IMF. It led to hyperinflation, so it was a sort of classical neo-liberal intervention with strong economic medicine [shock therapy] where the prices of consumer goods went sky high. That happened in 1989.
Now, what I think is very important to underscore is that Venezuela in the 1970s and ‘80swas a very poor country with a lot of resources, namely oil, and that oil went into private hands. That was despite the fact that the oil industry was nationalized in 1975. Now, I should mention that when I arrived at the Ministry of Planning in 1975, that coincided more or less with the nationalization of the oil industry. But it was a fake nationalization.
Bonnie Faulkner: How do you mean a fake nationalization?
Michel Chossudovsky: Well, legally it was nationalization, but it was ultimately understood that the big oil companies were complicit in this nationalization and that they would get all the benefits and so on. And then also when it was nationalized, of course, there were payments to the oil companies. It was implemented by the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez and there was no question of actually saying, “Well, we’ve got the oil; what are we going to do with it?” The pattern of appropriation continued, the corruption within the state apparatus and so on.
Ironically, I was asked to draft a text which was to be used for the nationalization speech, which was a very important document, because it defined, what are you doing to do with the oil. Idrafted an analysis of this, essentially saying the following: that the oil revenues would be recycled to a societal project alleviating poverty.It was explained conceptually that the oil money now belongs to the country and not to the oil companies, and consequently this is the avenue that we choose.
There was a drafting committee and they contacted me. I knew all these people; they were on the same floor in the Ministry of Planning building. But then the nationalization speech was read and published, and it was simply political rhetoric. It didn’t have any substantive perspective as to how these oil revenues would be used to improve the livelihood of the Venezuelan people, and that is something which Chavez actually formulated many years later. The Bolivarian Revolution said, yes, the oil is going to improve the conditions of the Venezuelan population and particularly the people who are below the poverty line.
Now, I should mention and that’s so important, we undertook an estimate of undernourishment, people who do not meet minimum calorie requirements, and we arrived at figures in excess of 70% of the Venezuelan population. That was part of the report which I submitted to the government at the time. I contacted my friend [medical doctor] at the university who specialized in nutrition and said, “This seems to be horrendously high.” His response, “No. You’re absolutely on. Your estimates are on the whole conservative.” He had focused also on the impacts on child malnutrition and so on. We had estimates of that as well from secondary sources.
That was the picture which existed in the mid-70s in Venezuela, an exceedingly poor country with tremendous wealth. That tremendous wealth, of course, was being appropriated and the elites in Venezuela were, of course, complicit in the role of the oil companies and the United States. The Rockefellers were involved. I knew about this because I was also very close to the Minister of Planning.
Now, what happened to our report? That’s very important. We submitted the report. I went back to Canada and my colleagues submitted the report to the minister. In fact, what happened is the moment I had instructed my colleague to have copies made of the report and to circulate this report within the ministries. Immediately upon having the photocopied 20 or 30 copies of the report the driver of the Minister of Planning – he [the Minister] was a very powerful figure – came in and confiscated everything. They confiscated everything. Then the team was dismissed and then when I returned to Caracas in early ’76 I still had an office but I was all by myself and, in fact, I had absolutely no functions or activities assigned to me. My team had been dispersed. They were still there, we still spoke, but we were not working as a team anymore.
What has happened is, first, that report was confiscated by the Minister of Planning and then it was shelved by the Council of Ministers of the Carlos Andrés Pérez government. The Council of Ministers reviewed it and said, “No, we don’t want it.”
The reasons they didn’t want it wasn’t the figures on poverty; it was how we analyzed the role of the state.
The state creates poverty.
Mind you, we have the same thing in the United States of America. The state creates poverty. Why? Because it spends more than $700 billion on so-called defense.
So we have that logic, but it was very clear that that kind of analysis could not go public. It couldn’t go public. It was only a couple of years later that I took the report and I brought it out as a book. It was published in 1978 and it became an immediate best seller. The first edition was sold out in nine days. It was adopted at the colleges and universities and high schools across Venezuela because it broke a myth. It broke the myth of what they call La Venezuela Miliónaria, that this was a rich country, sort of the Latin Saudi Arabia so to speak. But the social realities were otherwise.
Now when we look at what is happening in Venezuela today and where the U.S. policymakers say, “We want to come to the rescue of the people who have been impoverished,” this is a nonsensical statement. The history of Venezuela was a history of poverty right until Chavez became president. They retained that level of poverty and exclusion. Not to say that there aren’t very serious contradictions within the Bolivarian movement; that’s another issue.
I think that we have to assess what Venezuela was historically, starting with the dictatorships throughout – the last dictatorship was repealed in 1958. That was the dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez (left). But then you have a sort of bipartisan framework between what was called Acción Democratica, Democratic Action, and Copei, which were the Christian Democrats. It was a bipartisan structure very similar to that of the United States, going from one to the other and largely serving the interests of the elites rather than the broader population.
Bonnie Faulkner: You have said that Venezuela in 1918, basically, when oil was discovered, it became an oil colony. What was Venezuela like before oil was discovered? Do you have any idea?
Michel Chossudovsky: It was essentially an agrarian society, which was dominated by landlords. There were regional powers. What in Latin America are called los caudillos. In other words, these were essentially landlords and leaders in various regions of Venezuela, and it was largely an agrarian society producing coffee and cacao.
In fact, they would say, if somebody becomes a big landlord or a Caudillo, they would call him a Gran Cacao, which indicated that cacao (cocoa) was a – you could say that Venezuela was a cash crop economy, exporting coffee and cocoa to the Western markets, very similar to what we have in Central America, for instance.
Of course, it still had the legacy of Simon Bolivar in Caracas, an urban society which goes back to the Spanish colony, but it didn’t really have any particular momentum in terms of wealth formation until the emergence of oil in 1918. That is when U.S. big oil became involved in Venezuela, and it was essentially an oil colony of the United States, and a very important oil colony of the United States due to geography as well, because it’s not in the Middle East; it’s right there, very close to the United States.
So that was really ultimately the transition and that’s where, first of all, we saw more of the centralization of political power within the country and the development of an elite which were serving the interests of the oil companies.
Bonnie Faulkner: But then even before oil was discovered in 1918, Venezuela was still controlled by the elites. Was there crushing poverty then, as well?
Michel Chossudovsky: Well, there was certainly crushing poverty during that period, but what I’m suggesting there is that that crushing poverty was not alleviated with the discovery of oil. What happened is that the discovery of oil first of all created conditions of displacement of the agrarian economy. Agricultural production started to decline dramatically, and oil became essentially the sole industry in the country. There has been, or there was during the Bolivarian period under Chavez, concern that the rural economy had been more or less abandoned, and that was also the consequences of big oil.
Bonnie Faulkner: So then in 1992, Hugo Chavéz stages a coup d’état. Could you talk about Venezuela under Hugo Chavéz? Now, you’ve met him personally, haven’t you?
Michel Chossudovsky: Yes, I met him personally, rather briefly, when I attended the sessions of the Latin American Parliament. I think what was striking was that, first of all, he acknowledged the report which was published as a book entitled in Spanish, La Miseria en Venezuela, and he also intimated he would like me to get involved in an update of that – well, it wouldn’t be an update – a contemporary review of poverty, so that we could actually compare poverty in the 1970s to poverty in the early 2000s.
That proposal was discussed but it never really got off the ground. Had I been involved in doing a new poverty analysis, it would, of course, have been done in a very, very different way to what we did in the 1970s. But I still think that the analysis has to be made. The historical levels of poverty are there, and I had the opportunity of undertaking the study and releasing that information to the broader public in Venezuela.
As I mentioned, that destroyed a myth, the narrative that Venezuela in relation to other countries in Latin America was a rich country. It wasn’t a rich country. It was a country with tremendous wealth and a poor population with serious social divisions and high levels of inequality. That is what U.S. Foreign policy wants to restore. They want to restore Venezuela as a subordinate country with a poor population and elites that are aligned with the United States. That is the nature of the crisis which is ongoing today in Venezuela.
Bonnie Faulkner: Well, now, how would you assess the effect that Hugo Chavéz and his government had on Venezuela?
Michel Chossudovsky: This is a very complex process, because when Chavéz arrived to power initially, his first presidency was in 1999, and he became President in 1999 and then he continued again in 2007 until his death in 2013. The nature of the Venezuelan state apparatus was such that it was very difficult to start implementing reforms within the state apparatus. I knew that from the very beginning when I put together the team of people. I had a representative from the Ministry of Health and it turned out that she was sustaining essentially an elitist vision of health, and eventually I asked her to withdraw from the research group.
What Hugo Chavéz inherited was a structure of government which was very much still centered on the previous periods and required tremendous reform. You couldn’t simply go in and start instructing the officials to do this and that. There had to be a major reform of the state apparatus.
Now, what he did instead was to create projects which were parallel to the state system. Those were called the Misiones. They had also sort of grassroots. So there was a gradual process of reform of the state apparatus and at the same time there were activities which were grassroots which took place outside the realm let’s say of ministerial politics. They were geared towards literacy, education, health. They had tremendous support also from the Cuban doctors. In some regards, these were very successful undertakings.
I should mention from my own understanding is that there were serious divisions within the Bolivarian movement and I think also mistakes from the point of view as far as Chavez is concerned. From my standpoint, one of the biggest mistakes was to have, at an earlier period created, a United Socialist Party rather than a coalition. In other words, the intent of Chavéz was to create a political party which would be the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, of which he was also the leader, rather than create a coalition of parties which would gather different segments of Venezuelan society. So the thing became very polarized.
I should say there were divisions within the Chavista movement. There was also corruption within the Chavista movement. It was very difficult for the state to disassociate itself with the Venezuelan lobby groups, which were the rich families of Venezuela. But nonetheless, the results of this process were historically significant because first of all, the oil industry was already nationalized – well, it was nationalized by Carlos Andrés Pérez – but it was never really applied as a national process. And what Chavéz did was essentially to render this nationalization of petroleum as an active and key component in the recycling of revenue into the financing of social projects rather than into private hands. And that, of course, was ongoing. And the country had the resources to undertake these projects.
So that is the background. I should mention that – and that’s a separate issue – that there were already attempts to destabilize Chavéz from the presidency right from the outset, and it came as a result of the National Endowment for Democracy and its various actions in Venezuela in support of so-called opposition groups. I recall, again, and I should mention it, that in the 2012 elections, which Chavéz won, there was an attempt by various foundations, the NED but also Germany’s Hanns Seidel Foundation to support the opposition candidate. So there was direct interference in the electoral process.
Bonnie Faulkner: Were you saying that one of the ways that Hugo Chavéz tried to implement reform was not through reforming the government itself, but by creating a sort of a parallel structure. Is that what you were saying?
Michel Chossudovsky: Yes, that was certainly what occurred. Reforms were taking place within the state apparatus and the parallel structures were also there, and they were eventually linked up. But at the outset it was very difficult for the new government to come in and introduce major reforms in the state apparatus.
They then had a process of constitutional reform, which Chavéz implemented, and they created a constitutional assembly, which was the object of controversy. We’re dealing with a very complex process, because throughout his presidency up to his death there were conspiracies to destabilize the government, and there were people within the government who were playing a dirty game. I think that was clear. In fact, even to some extent Chavéz let that happen. There were contracts allocated with the Ministry of Public Works and so on. There were various cases of corruption within the Bolivarian government and there were serious problems regarding the structure of the state apparatus.
But it’s not to say that this was not known. But at the same time there was a grassroots movement. There was a process of democratization at the grassroots. I think that what was achieved was remarkable within a relatively short period of time. The historical levels of poverty were alleviated.
Bonnie Faulkner: It sounds like corruption played a very big part in Venezuela before Hugo Chavéz’s coup d’état and after his coup d’état when he got in charge. Many people are claiming that Venezuela’s economic collapse presently is linked to its socialist policies. What are Venezuela’s socialist policies and what do you make of this claim?
Michel Chossudovsky: I think that’s a little bit of a misnomer because, first of all, Venezuela was not a socialist economy. It was essentially a capitalist economy. What happened is that the government nationalized certain key industries. It created what were called the Communal Councils, it had the Misiones, which were largely focusing on issues of housing, healthcare and so on, but the economy was essentially a capitalist economy, a market economy. If you go to Caracas you see it. I think there was a socialist process which had been implemented but by no means was this a full-fledged socialist economy.
I think if we compare it to other Latin American countries, Venezuela in a sense would divorce itself from the so-called Washington consensus, namely the economic and social policies imposed by the Bretton Woods Institutions, e.g., World Bank, International Monetary Fund. It had its own structure for participatory democracy which were in some regards quite successful, particularly the Misiones.
In fact, the failures that we’re now seeing, rising consumer prices, hyperinflation, those are engineered. They’re engineered by manipulations of the foreign exchange market.We know this kind of mechanism because it’s what characterized the last months of the Chilean government of Salvador Allende in 1973 (left), where persistently the national currency was under attack leading to hyperinflation and so on and so forth. We might say that it’s part of the IMF, World Bank, Federal Reserve “remedy,” or action. It’s very easy for Wall Street to destabilize currencies. It’s been applied in many, many countries.
I recall when I was in Peru in the early ‘90s when President Alberto Fujimori came to power that in a single day the price of fuel went up 30 times, and that was following the IMF measures. Well, in the case of Venezuela, the manipulation is ongoing. The exchange rate is manipulated, and it is triggering poverty. There’s no question about it, that these acts of sabotage and financial warfare are creating abysmal poverty.
But that was not the result of a government policy; it was the result of intervention in the currency markets by speculators, and this is something which is well known and understood. If you want to destroy a country, you destroy its currency.
I should mention that I’ve had meetings with people at the Central Bank – not recently, but when I went to Venezuela some seven or eight years ago, I had those meetings at the Central Bank. The Central Bank of Venezuela did not really implement significant changes in the management of monetary policy which would avert this kind of action. But what I can say quite rightly is that if there’s poverty today in Venezuela it is not due to the Bolivarian Revolution; it is due to the fact that there are measures of sabotage and financial warfare which have been introduced with the view to undermining the Bolivarian missions in health, housing and so on simply by manipulating the currency markets, and that generates hyperinflation.
Bonnie Faulkner: How exactly does Wall Street attack a nation’s currency? What about the currency in Venezuela? Is it what you have referred to as a dollarized economy or not?
Michel Chossudovsky: I think it is a dollarized economy. That even prevailed before Chavez arrived to power. In other words, there’s a dual currency system. There’s the bolivar on the one hand, the national currency, and the dollar, and there’s a black market. And when there’s a black market which is unregulated – they never really manage to regulate the black market – when it’s unregulated well that’s what happens. People save in dollars because the national currency is very unstable and so on.
I think there were failures on the part of the Central Bank of Venezuela to ultimately come to terms with this issue. One of the reasons for that is that many of the people who were there, whom I knew, were of the old guard. They’re trained in monetary policy and macroeconomics and there was a need for some very careful reforms within the monetary system and mechanisms to protect the currency. That was fundamental.
Now, there’s also another element which played a role and that was the collapse of the oil market. That’s clear. The fact that the oil prices are exceedingly low backlashes on oil-producing countries, but that also affected other countries.
Bonnie Faulkner: And that oil collapse was manipulated, correct?
Michel Chossudovsky: The oil market collapse was manipulated, yes. I think the oil collapse was manipulated. There are mechanisms – I don’t want to get into that because it’s rather technical – but there are mechanisms of pushing prices of commodities up or down through speculative actions on the commodity exchanges. It’s well known and understood. There are ways of pushing currencies up and down through speculative actions. We know that from the 1997 Asian crisis, how the South Korean won collapsed. Those mechanisms are there. In economic jargon we call that naked short selling. When you introduce a naked short selling operation against a currency, it collapses, but there are ways for governments to actually avoid this short selling of their currencies. They have to regulate the currency market and unfortunately, in Venezuela that did not take place. Some proposals were put forth but they were never effective in protecting the currency.
Bonnie Faulkner: I’ve read that Venezuela is in debt to the tune of 60 billion. Does that debt have to be repaid in dollars?
Michel Chossudovsky: I presume that is a dollar debt, yes. It’s an external debt.
Bonnie Faulkner: How would they earn the dollars – by selling the oil?
Michel Chossudovsky: They’d sell the oil. I remind you that 60 billion dollars of external debt is not unduly high when you have oil revenues, but I expect that that debt was also accumulated with the collapse of the oil market. But, of course, yes, there are debt servicing obligations to repay that debt – of course, if there are problems of debt repayment then the creditors can implement measures which are detrimental to the Venezuelan economy and they’re doing it. There are a whole series of acts of sabotage. Just recently we see that the Bank of England has said, no, you can’t repatriate the gold that you’ve deposited in the Bank of England. They had gold deposited in the Bank of England which belongs to Venezuela and the response of the Bank of England said no, you can’t have it back. That’s another act of sabotage.
Bonnie Faulkner: It looks like Citgo, Venezuela’s main foreign energy asset, could be a target of the overthrow of Maduro, with the money from oil exports being sent to Guaidó instead of the Maduro government. I read that John Bolton was setting that out as a priority.
Michel Chossudovsky: Yeah, well, this is something which could have devastating consequences. But I don’t see it. First of all, there are institutional mechanisms as to how Guaidó would actually take control of these revenues. He’s not a government; he’s an individual. But what I think that what they’re doing now is to engineer mechanisms which will further destabilize the Venezuelan economy and also trigger some form of regime change.
Now, there’s another thing I’d like to mention, which I think is very important. What has been the response to this crisis? I saw recently a statement by a number of progressive authors and it essentially says that there should be mediation or negotiation between both sides. I think that that is something which is rather much misunderstood. There cannot be mediation between the government of Venezuela and a proxy for U.S. intelligence, which is Guaidó. In other words, what is being proposed is essentially to have a negotiated settlement between both sides, between the interim president, Juan Guaidó and the President of Venezuela, Maduro. In fact, Maduro has fallen for that proposal and has had I think some discussions with Guaidó or said he’s open to having conversations with him.
I think it should be obvious that this proposal is redundant and contradictory, because the leader of the National Assembly Juan Guaidó is a U.S. proxy. He’s an instrument of a foreign government who will then be negotiating on behalf of Washington.
Now, there’s always been negotiations within the Bolivarian process with opposition groups. They’ve always negotiated and discussed. But here, we’re dealing with something which is quite specific. You can’t negotiate with Juan Guaidó. He’s a U.S. proxy. And you can’t negotiate with the U.S. government. Well, there are internal divisions within Venezuela, but the President of Venezuela cannot negotiate with individuals who are committed to overthrowing the constitutionally elected President and replacing him with the Speaker of the House.
I think in Western countries we have to certainly take a stance and simply reject this opening by our governments, which are supporting the Speaker of the House and portraying him as an interim president of Venezuela. That’s the stance that we have to take.
There are certainly avenues of debate and negotiation within Venezuela, but it is very difficult for that to occur with a country which is under attack, which is the result of sabotage, financial warfare in the currency markets, threats to confiscate the revenues occurring from their oil exports, freezing the gold reserves in the Bank of England or freezing the accounts of assets overseas and so on. That is what has to stop and then there may be a period of transition where the country can restore its activities of normal government.
Bonnie Faulkner: Michel Chossudovsky, thank you.
Michel Chossudovsky: Thank you. Delighted to be on the program. Our thoughts today are with the people of Venezuela.
I’ve been speaking with Michel Chossudovsky. Today’s show has been: Venezuela: From Oil Proxy to the Bolivarian Movement and Sabotage.
Professor Michel Chossudovsky is the Founder, Director and Editor of the Center for Research on Globalization, based in Montreal, Quebec.
The Global Research website, globalresearch.ca, publishes news articles, commentary, background research and analysis.
Michel Chossudovsky is the author of eleven books including The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order and War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September Eleventh. Visit globalresearch.ca.
Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. Visit us at gunsandbutter.org to listen to past programs, comment on shows, or join our email list to receive our newsletter that includes recent shows and updates. Email us at faulkner@gunsandbutter.org.
It also addressed the role of government policy. Venezuela’s oil wealth was not used to build schools and hospitals. The oil surplus was largely recycled into the hands of the oil giants and the local elites.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 