In Venezuela crisis, American media and accomplices provide hybrid war support to Washington
Patrice Greanville
Media Fraudulence Victimises Venezuela
BACKDROP TO INFAMY
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hile the US-instigated and supported coup continues to unfold in Venezuela, the capitalist media is literally doubling down on its longstanding campaign of defamation. We say longstanding because there has never been anything approaching fair coverage of the historical processes in Venezuela, or Latin America, for that matter, ever since Hugo Chavez launched his unexpected Bolivarian Revolution.
We noted yesterday, and documented (see this post, for example, and the sidebar below) that even the European Union—which is now also officially joining Trump in his wanton assault on Venezuela—has long used hybrid war tricks to slander and deligitimate Venezuelan leaders in an effort to open the road to more drastic assaults.
SIDEBAR: EU'S ZAKHAROV PRIZE HONORS VENEZUELAN TRAITORS
In late 2017, the European eunuchs (via the European Parliament) insulted the government and people of Venezuela by bestowing the "Zakharov Prize" on Venezuela's opposition. Now, anyone of decent and impartial character who knows anything about the history of Venezuela, and Latin America, not to mention the bag of dirty tricks used by the empire, will know immediately that such a price is not just misplaced, like giving war criminal Obama a Nobel peace award, but a sordid and calculated maneuver to weaken the Caracas revolutionary project. Two things betray the mendacious origin of this dubious distinction.
(1) Being contrary to elementary truth and justice, the Zakharov Prize is very likely a propaganda concoction dreamed up in Washington, or promulgated at its behest, in one of the European capitals now leading the pack in terms of servility to the empire. Since there are so many suspects, let us say that our prime suspects include Britain, France, Denmark, Norway (the Scandinavians have gone full tilt to the dark side), rabidly anticommunist Poland, and even Spain. We doubt that Italy had any hand in this, although, being members of the EU parliament they could have made a stink, and didn't. The label "Zakharov Prize" and its sponsor, the "European Parliament" put the latter firmly in the category of hybrid war tools, a mere NGO, doing the imperial dirty business behind the transparently manufactured human rights obsession so dear to Western liberals. Andrei Zakharov, readers will recall, was a distinguished Soviet physicist (father of the USSR' Hydrogen bomb), who later, in the 1970s, like much of his privileged social layer, and enthralled with tales of the West's putative moral superiority, "went liberal", becoming a crusader for civil rights in his country. This promptly made him a convenient saintly dissident in the West, whose media paraded him everywhere with the sole object of embarrassing Moscow. In recent years, the prize has been given to other "Russian dissidents" also supposedly standing up against "oppression" in the land of Putin, Lenin and other supposed moral reprobates.
(2) As per its own official pamhlets, the Sakharov Prize, is awarded annually by the European Parliament "for people and organizations dedicated to human rights and freedoms." It takes some historical creativity, some audacious balls, I should say, to fit the Venezuelan opposition into this description. For nowhere on earth has an entrenched and mean-spirited oligarchy ever been seen by right-thinking people as anything but a pestilential tyranny to be eliminated as soon as possible. Apparently the European Parliament does not meet such elementary standards of vision. Thus, for their sake, although I don't believe for a minute that willful blindness is curable, let us recall who these supposedly honorable gents are: they are vendepatrias.
The Spanish tongue created this wonderful portmanteau using two excellent and vivid words: vende, which means to sell, and patria, the motherland.
Even the gringo-edited Urban dictionary sports this entry, which (surprisingly) says it all:
TOP DEFINITION
vendepatriaSpanish word for traitor or Bennedict Arnold, someone who sells out their country (patria) to a perceived foreign enemy, usually for selfish material gain.
political leaders who are seen as corrupt and subservient to outside foreign interests are the ones most often branded this way, but it can also apply to wide sectors of society like the right-wing Cuban exile community in Miami that identifies strongly with the Republican Party and lobbies for a more restrictive U.S. policy towards Cuba.
Pablo called them vendepatrias because he saw them as tools of Western imperialism.
by a_las_barricadas August 17, 2008
So, yea, quite frankly, this prize is not worth a plugged nickel, especially since in this "Venezuelan opposition" we find first and foremost the United States, known worldwide for its hegemonist lawlessness, and which last time we checked was not Venezuelan at all, and did not care one iota for the well-being of Venezuelans, as demonstrated by its very long history of imperialist meddling and domination of that country, followed by a coterie of treacherous regimes all over Latin America, an abject and cowardly assembly which now routinely includes Canada, to its eternal and damnable shame.
QED?
—PG
UNLEASHING A COLOR REVOLUTION ON VENEZUELA
"Just following regime-change orders, Sir!"
THE BOLIVARIAN PROJECT HAS BEEN THE TARGET OF A US -SPONSORED COLOR REVOLUTION FOR A LONG TIME, PRACTICALLY FROM INCEPTION, as soon as the empire's antennae determined that Comandante Chavez was for real and not just one more corrupt demagog or strongman the US elites could do business with. That means this sordid process has been in motion for at least 20 years (c. 1998). In that tumultuous period Venezuela has seen peaks and valleys in the degree of counter-revolutionary virulence created by the vendepatrias.
How do we know Venezuela has been the target of a color revolution? Because the symptoms of her social malaise—invariably imputed to some inherent "socialist inefficiency" by the presstitutes—are classical signs of intentional disruption. Let's examine this global plague in some detail.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he first rule of the hypocritical regime change book perfected by the United States is to pave the road for more drastic measures by performing a complete and extensive character assassination of the leaders, ideologies, and governments marked as "enemies" by the US ruling cliques, on account of various criteria, including but not restricted to the following (in some cases, several types of criteria overlap):
• risk of bad example: socialism works (Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, Vietnam, North Korea, Yugoslavia, Indonesia (under Sukarno))
• assertion of national sovereignty (Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, China, Libya, Chile at one point, etc.)
• enormous national wealth (Iran, and just about the whole world, for one reason or another, as the imperialists covet everything)
• strategic value (Ukraine, Yugoslavia)
• global influence competition (Russia, China)
Indeed as soon as the word comes down from the elites that so-and-so is "an enemy", the huge machinery of aggression via demonisation developed by this country is put into motion, with the mainstream media in the forefront. As we know quite well by now, the US, besides its huge whorish media apparatus, also commands tremendous power in world-known institutions such the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, and an alphabet soup of alliances ringing the world, with NATO leading the charge, plus literally scores if not hundreds of ad hoc subversive NGOs (i.e., the notorious National Endowment for Democracy-NED). These are all tools that can be readily turned into instruments to effect destabilisation on a targeted nation. In this regard, only recently have Beijing and Moscow awakened to the danger posed by such networks and began to neutralise this new-fangled "soft power" architecture with outright internal controls and global information assets of their own, countering mendacious Western narratives with narratives almost always based on truth, a reason for which they have rapidly gained ascendancy among Western publics. This development, as well as the existence of alternate information websites, have triggered a panic among the Western elites, for whom narrative control is essential to maintain their increasingly tarnished legitimacy. This, as readers already know, has triggered a vast counter-attack whose sole purpose is to destroy free speech and impose censorship in all major platforms of
THE DEMONISING OPTION
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s previously discussed, in Western political and journalisitic practice, demonising a particular nation or leader has nothing to do with facts. Truth does not enter the equation at all. America, confident of its own power, is supremely, boorishly arrogant. As Dick Cheney and other neocons have boasted, "the US makes its own reality." Thus whenever a Big Lie is floated, it's all a matter of cynical expediency based on sheer brute force—the force of a mammoth machine of disinformation speaking out of thousands of channels—largely in private hands— willing and able to march in lockstep at any given moment, and while controlling the masses consciousness, enjoying total impunity for committing crimes in the service of the empire. Such reality only encourages its replication indefinitely into the future.
Ghastly as it is, this uniformity of "fact and opinion" on a given political subject is never the product of some specific "hidden" internal memoranda concocted by media barons and filthy politicians in some out of the way place like the mafia's notorious Apalachin meeting in New York state. This fact is frequently used by so-called sophisticated journalism critics (in actuality apologists) to poo poo the notion that America's media operate as a totalitarian system.
In America, conformity with the media owners' political predilections—invariably favoring the plutocratic outlook at home and abroad— is subtly or overtly enforced by the top producers and editors. Needless to say, for the careerist sort this is a quickly acquired instinct that goes beyond self-preservation. Reinforcing this tendency is the fact that journalists, despite their conceit of "independent thinking", are also shaped early by the all-enveloping culture, and often share its biases and pro-capitalist assumptions. Contrary to what many Americans might think, America is a highly ideological and ideologised society, albeit one in which the fantasy of social unanimity about the mode of economic organisation, and the absence of real social conflict, are both kept well outside any possibility of national debate. Herbert Schiller, a pioneer in the study of modern political propaganda, sketched out the situation well in his keystone essay, The Packaged Consciousness:
The fundamental similarity of the informational material and cultural messages that each of the mass media independently transmits makes it necessary to view the communications systern as a totality. The media are mutually and continuously reinforcing. Since they operate according to commercial rules, rely on advertising, and are tied tightly to the corporate economy and its worldview, both in their own structure and in their relationships with sponsors, the media constitute an industry, not an aggregation of independent, freewheeling informational entrepreneurs, each offering a highly individualistic product. By need and by design, therefore, the images and messages they purvey, are, with few exceptions, constructed to achieve similar objectives, which are, simply put, profitability and the affirmation and maintenance of the private ownership consumerist society...
It is generally agreed that television is the most powerful medium; certainly its influence as a purveyor of the system’s values cannot be overstated. All the same, television, no matter how powerful, itself depends on the absence of dissonant stimuli in other media. Each of the informational channels makes its unique contribution, but the result is the same–the consolidation of the status quo. (1)
Demonisation is also a warning system
[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ince wholesale slander and defamation of leaders or entire nations in the imperial crosshairs is standard operating procedure, an evil that never fails to materialise, by now, anyone or any group intending to make serious changes anywhere on this planet without the consent of the Global Godfather in Washington, should brace themselves for a veritable cascade of lies and vitriol soon to come crashing on their heads, a campaign that will prove unrelenting. In fact, as we have seen in almost all cases, once started, this barrage of demonisation will not stop, to the point of becoming tedious. And America and her abject vassal states have the personnel and means to deliver this polluted informational storm. For if there is something the Anglo-American civilisation excels at is the production of am ungodly number of vile mass communicators, media whores willing and ready to do the bidding of the powerful for the sake of their squalid careers. Blood money, at its most repugnant, since these presstitutes facilitate the devastation and murder not of merely one or a handful of individuals, heinous enough, but often of millions.
A cursory review of the media landscape today suggests that Fox leads the pack, as usual mentally-deforming and insidious to the hilt, but all the US and much of the Western mainstream media is in on this filthy job, the character assassination of a nation and its leaders who simply wish to chart their own course without meddling by US imperialism. (Fox's particular perversity is that by catering to the working class, and the extreme right, it fills their minds with chauvinist/exceptionalist crap.) Note that all of these voices speak of "widespread corruption" and "socialism" in the same breadth, to imply they are inseparable, which is blatantly false, and bloviating self-righteously about their targets' putative evils, as if the US, the world's most powerful capitalist entity, were not also a glaring example of runaway incurable corruption and off-the-charts global criminality.
Naturally, the double standard can only exist when you eliminate or simply do not even know or care to know the historical context, in this case the erasure of ANY explanation for the economic chaos in Venezuela, a situation jointly created by US illegal sanctions and the collaboration of the Venezuelan oligarchy, bent on disrupting the economy to cause disaffection with the government. This criminal and cynical tactic has been used on scores of nations, including Russia, Chile, Iran, Nicaragua, China, North Korea, and similar countries determined to remain sovereign in their international and external affairs. That the Western presstitutes have only indifference or contempt for that undeniable right is evidence of their own moral bankrutpcy. For all their pretensions and high-falutin titles, they are enemies of humanity, and should be regarded as such.
Below, a sampler of this filth.
—PG
That US meddling and economic sanctions have caused much of the turmoil in Venezuela is never mentioned, leaving the public to infer that all the chaos is directly caused only by "Maduro's dictatorial socialist regime." In case after case, all the media voices affirm the same script. The nauseating arrogance of imperialist goons like Pompeo needs no further comment.
1. FOX NETWORK
Published on Jan 24, 2019
3. CBS NETWORK
This one, by a guy named Gutfeld, an out and out big lying apologist for capitalism, is as vile as it gets. Brace yourselves.
Published on Jan 24, 2019
7. NBC NETWORK
Cavalierly, as if the whole world agreed, NBC, one of the largest US "news" networks, calls Maduro's election victory "a sham", precisely the State Department's putschist line.
8. FINANCIAL TIMES NETWORK
When it comes to telling the truth about Venezuela, their vaunted economic literacy suddenly vanishes.
9. CBS NETWORK
Just in case you thought that Americans alone have cornered vileness in reporting on Venezuela, watch this clip by CBC, one of Canada's leading networks. It shows that the Canadian media is now as filthy as their servile neoliberal government.
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6. NEW YORK TIMES NETWORK