Way Down in Venezuela, Capital Won’t Let the People Go

Can Maduro Avoid the Trap?

by CHRIS GILBERT

It was shortly after Moses’s encounter with the Burning Bush that God promised to take the people of Israel to the land of milk and honey. God, who could be extremely cryptic in his explanations (“I am that I am”), did not beat around the bush – of the either burning or extinguished variety – when it came to capturing his audience. For that reason, he did not offer houris (which might lose their charm in a few weeks) or freedom and democracy (which can ring hollow on an empty stomach) but two simple use-values: milk and honey.

In this sense – and in very few others – God is like the Venezuelan opposition. Freedom, Dictatorship, Regime Change are just words after all. Milk, sugar, and flour are things, the reality or absence of which is quite palpable. The Venezuelan opposition knows that in certain moments it can appear to be a matter of supreme indifference whether a land is run by Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, or Jebusites as long as… it is flowing with milk and honey.

The Bible, or at least most of the Old Testament, was written by hungry people. In a well-fed society, a pomegranate might inspire thoughts a beloved’s rosy cheeks, but theSong of Songs presents just the opposite fantasy; the whole of the beloved’s body transports the lover to thinking about sheep, goats, fruit and, yes, milk and honey. Or again, the despicable Esau forgoes his birthright not for a lentil field or shares in a lentil business but for a plate of lentils. All of this, along with the handful of prophets who like Ezekiel actually chow down on their prophetic calling, points to the presence of hunger, not of the passing sort but of a gnawing and persistent kind: a people who can’t get food off their minds.

In the drama called Food on the Mind that is taking place now in Venezuela, Act II “The Peace Conference” began on February 27 with Lorenzo Mendoza entering from stage right. Mendoza, who descends from the oldest Venezuelan oligarchy and perhaps even Bolívar’s sister, knows how to speak to his people. His blue-blooded family has never really left the government, usually naming or occupying the position of Minister of Agriculture, except under Chávez. Mendoza is a seasoned player who knows his part well and is also aware that to cut through the apparent conflict and bring people out of their 14-year apostasy, moralizing jeremiads will accomplish very little. Instead he proposes something more concrete. Mendoza says: The economy is what we need to talk about, not politics.

His words – which taste like milk and honey – are received by a great many in Venezuela as the possible basis of a new covenant. Indeed, Beer, Flour, Butter, Cooking Oil should all flow freely. Private business is part of the solution not the problem, Mendoza says; and he seems to be speaking the truth as these very foodstuffs in the brands sold by his giant Polar corporation (Maizeite oil, Mavesa margarine, PAN cornmeal) miraculously reappear in Caracas just two or three days after his speaking. Precisely in what the new covenant consists, on the other hand, is something which will be revealed in future days.

Humor aside, the real question and the point of this extended comparison is to reflect on why it is that private business is God and also why we, for all practical purposes, are Egyptian slaves. Or put more concretely: how is it that Mendoza and company (really the whole businessman’s class here), who have been offstage for most of the political process, can wield such tremendous power – a power amounting to control over eating or not eating, life and death? This is a power beside which political slogans, even the most carefully-forged ones, can taste like… something considerably more bitter than milk or honey.

The explanation is that capitalist society separates the political and economic spheres to a degree never before attained in history. In fact, in political terms all that a businessman needs to make profit and exercise his Olympian class power is the rule of law and formal equality before the law. The large differences in property holdings will take care of the rest. Because he has the means of production in his hands, a capitalist – or rather his social class – can legally kill a thousand poor souls by simply not hiring them or can legally make a million go hungry by just raising prices or cutting production. Alongside this kind of despotic economic power, mere political power can seem pathetic and trifling.

Today in Venezuela the capitalist class is back in action, trying to discipline the institutions of political power which, with Chávez, escaped a bit from their usually restricted field of operation. The government, which feels cornered, calls the opposition’s activity “economic warfare,” but the truth is that this is just business as usual for the capitalist class. Speculating, playing with prices, and tinkering with supply and demand is not strictly speaking a perversion of capitalism but an integral part thereof. (Is not the formula for both productive and commercial capital, M – C – M’, simply the quotidian form of speculation that makes capitalism’s world go round?)

Desperately, the government complains about the street-blocking guarimabas and other forms of violent protest. It tries to make visible the difficult situation and its faceless enemy by pointing to the violence which is overt and illegal, but the real problem is elsewhere – in the completely legal form of (economic) violence, sanctioned by the empire of law. In fact, Mendoza and company know that unless President Maduro opts – as he is very unlikely to do – for the most radical heresy, which is to deny the sacredness of private property, they will retain the upper hand.

Mendoza is popularly reckoned to be a straight shooter. That may be the case, but the opposition as a whole, which has become more sophisticated in its 14-year struggle, is in fact making a complex feint. With the guarimba, which is a blocking of streets by armed youngsters that often results in loss of life, they hope to provoke Maduro into adopting their project – the defense of a form of politics that confines itself to establishing rule of law and order while letting the economy to itself – as his own program. That way the government’s attempt to control prices, although recently upheld as constitutional by the Venezuelan Supreme Court, will simply fall into the background, and the capitalists’ economic dictatorship will continue unfettered.

Will Maduro fall into this trap? So far, he seems to be taking the bait by railing primarily against the guarimba and calling for universal disarmament. It is of no help that behind Maduro are many people – among his chief cadres, not in his rank and file – whose class interest is not too different from those he confronts in the opposition. But when Maduro initiates the negotiations that are taking place this week with his first talking point as “national pacification” and his second as “the opposition should join in combating criminality,” he gives every indication of assuming the exact role that not history but rather one social class, the most powerful worldwide, is trying to assign him.

Chris Gilbert is professor of Political Science in the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela.

Blum’s Anti-Empire Report: Indoctrinating a new generation

The Anti-Empire Report #127

The utter degeneracy of the American presidency, parallel to the complete triumph of the financial sector of capitalism, is personified by the regimes of Bush-Cheney and Obama. Only lies come from their lips.

By William Blum – Published April 7th, 2014

Indoctrinating a new generation

Is there anyone out there who still believes that Barack Obama, when he’s speaking about American foreign policy, is capable of being anything like an honest man? In a March 26 talk in Belgium to “European youth”, the president fed his audience one falsehood, half-truth, blatant omission, or hypocrisy after another. If George W. Bush had made some of these statements, Obama supporters would not hesitate to shake their head, roll their eyes, or smirk. Here’s a sample:

– “In defending its actions, Russian leaders have further claimed Kosovo as a precedent – an example they say of the West interfering in the affairs of a smaller country, just as they’re doing now. But NATO only intervened after the people of Kosovo were systematically brutalized and killed for years.”

Most people who follow such things are convinced that the 1999 US/NATO bombing of the Serbian province of Kosovo took place only after the Serbian-forced deportation of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo was well underway; which is to say that the bombing was launched to stop this “ethnic cleansing”. In actuality, the systematic deportations of large numbers of people did not begin until a few days after the bombing began, and was clearly a reaction to it, born of Serbia’s extreme anger and powerlessness over the bombing. This is easily verified by looking at a daily newspaper for the few days before the bombing began the night of March 23/24, 1999, and the few days following. Or simply look at the New York Times of March 26, page 1, which reads:

… with the NATO bombing already begun, a deepening sense of fear took hold in Pristina [the main city of Kosovo] that the Serbs would now vent their rage against ethnic Albanian civilians in retaliation. [emphasis added]

On March 27, we find the first reference to a “forced march” or anything of that nature.

But the propaganda version is already set in marble.

– “And Kosovo only left Serbia after a referendum was organized, not outside the boundaries of international law, but in careful cooperation with the United Nations and with Kosovo’s neighbors. None of that even came close to happening in Crimea.”

None of that even came close to happening in Kosovo either. The story is false. The referendum the president speaks of never happened. Did the mainstream media pick up on this or on the previous example? If any reader comes across such I’d appreciate being informed.

Crimea, by the way, did have a referendum. A real one.

– “Workers and engineers gave life to the Marshall Plan … As the Iron Curtain fell here in Europe, the iron fist of apartheid was unclenched, and Nelson Mandela emerged upright, proud, from prison to lead a multiracial democracy. Latin American nations rejected dictatorship and built new democracies … “

The president might have mentioned that the main beneficiary of the Marshall Plan was US corporations , that the United States played an indispensable role in Mandela being caught and imprisoned, and that virtually all the Latin American dictatorships owed their very existence to Washington. Instead, the European youth were fed the same party line that their parents were fed, as were all Americans.

– “Yes, we believe in democracy – with elections that are free and fair.”

In this talk, the main purpose of which was to lambaste the Russians for their actions concerning Ukraine, there was no mention that the government overthrown in that country with the clear support of the United States had been democratically elected.

– “Moreover, Russia has pointed to America’s decision to go into Iraq as an example of Western hypocrisy. … But even in Iraq, America sought to work within the international system. We did not claim or annex Iraq’s territory. We did not grab its resources for our own gain. Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people and a fully sovereign Iraqi state that could make decisions about its own future.”

The US did not get UN Security Council approval for its invasion, the only approval that could legitimize the action. It occupied Iraq from one end of the country to the other for 8 years, forcing the government to privatize the oil industry and accept multinational – largely U.S.-based, oil companies’ – ownership. This endeavor was less than successful because of the violence unleashed by the invasion. The US military finally was forced to leave because the Iraqi government refused to give immunity to American soldiers for their many crimes.

Here is a brief summary of what Barack Obama is attempting to present as America’s moral superiority to the Russians:

The modern, educated, advanced nation of Iraq was reduced to a quasi failed state … the Americans, beginning in 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one dubious excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, tortured without inhibition, killed wantonly … the people of that unhappy land lost everything – their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives … More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile … The air, soil, water, blood, and genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects … unexploded cluster bombs lying in wait for children to pick them up … a river of blood running alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that may never be put back together again. … “It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003,” reported the Washington Post. (May 5, 2007)

How can all these mistakes, such arrogance, hypocrisy and absurdity find their way into a single international speech by the president of the United States? Is the White House budget not sufficient to hire a decent fact checker? Someone with an intellect and a social conscience? Or does the desire to score propaganda points trump everything else? Is this another symptom of the Banana-Republicization of America?

Long live the Cold War

In 1933 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union after some 15 years of severed relations following the Bolshevik Revolution. On a day in December of that year, a train was passing through Poland carrying the first American diplomats dispatched to Moscow. Amongst their number was a 29 year-old Foreign Service Officer, later to become famous as a diplomat and scholar, George Kennan. Though he was already deemed a government expert on Russia, the train provided Kennan’s first actual exposure to the Soviet Union. As he listened to his group’s escort, Russian Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, reminisce about growing up in a village the train was passing close by, and his dreams of becoming a librarian, the Princeton-educated Kennan was astonished: “We suddenly realized, or at least I did, that these people we were dealing with were human beings like ourselves, that they had been born somewhere, that they had their childhood ambitions as we had. It seemed for a brief moment we could break through and embrace these people.”

It hasn’t happened yet.

One would think that the absence in Russia of communism, of socialism, of the basic threat or challenge to the capitalist system, would be sufficient to write finis to the 70-year Cold War mentality. But the United States is virtually as hostile to 21st-century Russia as it was to 20th-century Soviet Union, surrounding Moscow with military bases, missile sites, and NATO members. Why should that be? Ideology is no longer a factor. But power remains one, specifically America’s perpetual lust for world hegemony. Russia is the only nation that (a) is a military powerhouse, and (b) doesn’t believe that the United States has a god-given-American-exceptionalism right to rule the world, and says so. By these criteria, China might qualify as a poor second. But there are no others.

Washington pretends that it doesn’t understand why Moscow should be upset by Western military encroachment, but it has no such problem when roles are reversed. Secretary of State John Kerry recently stated that Russian troops poised near eastern Ukraine are “creating a climate of fear and intimidation in Ukraine” and raising questions about Russia’s next moves and its commitment to diplomacy.

NATO – ever in need of finding a raison d’être – has now issued a declaration of [cold] war, which reads in part:

“NATO foreign ministers on Tuesday [April 1, 2014] reaffirmed their commitment to enhance the Alliance’s collective defence, agreed to further support Ukraine and to suspend NATO’s practical cooperation with Russia. ‘NATO’s greatest responsibility is to protect and defend our territory and our people. And make no mistake, this is what we will do,’ NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said. … Ministers directed Allied military authorities to develop additional measures to strengthen collective defence and deterrence against any threat of aggression against the Alliance, Mr. Fogh Rasmussen said. ‘We will make sure we have updated military plans, enhanced exercises and appropriate deployments,’ he said. NATO has already reinforced its presence on the eastern border of the Alliance, including surveillance patrols over Poland and Romania and increased numbers of fighter aircraft allocated to the NATO air policing mission in the Baltic States. … NATO Foreign Ministers also agreed to suspend all of NATO’s practical cooperation with Russia.”

Does anyone recall what NATO said in 2003 when the United States bombed and invaded Iraq with “shock and awe”, compared to the Russians now not firing a single known shot at anyone? And neither Russia nor Ukraine is even a member of NATO. Does NATO have a word to say about the right-wing coup in Ukraine, openly supported by the United States, overthrowing the elected government? Did the hypocrisy get any worse during the Cold War? Imagine that NATO had not been created in 1949. Imagine that it has never existed. What reason could one give today for its creation? Other than to provide a multi-national cover for Washington’s interventions?

One of the main differences between now and the Cold War period is that Americans at home are (not yet) persecuted or prosecuted for supporting Russia or things Russian.

But don’t worry, folks, there won’t be a big US-Russian war. For the same reason there wasn’t one during the Cold War. The United States doesn’t pick on any country which can defend itself.

Cuba … Again … Still … Forever

Is there actually a limit? Will the United States ever stop trying to overthrow the Cuban government? Entire books have been written documenting the unrelenting ways Washington has tried to get rid of tiny Cuba’s horrid socialism – from military invasion to repeated assassination attempts to an embargo that President Clinton’s National Security Advisor called “the most pervasive sanctions ever imposed on a nation in the history of mankind”. But nothing has ever come even close to succeeding. The horrid socialism keeps on inspiring people all over the world. It’s the darnedest thing. Can providing people free or remarkably affordable health care, education, housing, food and culture be all that important?

And now it’s “Cuban Twitter” – an elaborately complex system set up by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to disguise its American origins and financing, aiming to bring about a “Cuban Spring” uprising. USAID sought to first “build a Cuban audience, mostly young people; then the plan was to push them toward dissent”, hoping the messaging network “would reach critical mass so that dissidents could organize ‘smart mobs’ – mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice – that might trigger political demonstrations or ‘renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society’.” It’s too bad it’s now been exposed, because we all know how wonderful the Egyptian, Syrian, Libyan, and other “Arab Springs” have turned out.

Here’s USAID speaking after their scheme was revealed on April 3: “Cubans were able to talk among themselves, and we are proud of that.” We are thus asked to believe that normally the poor downtrodden Cubans have no good or safe way to communicate with each other. Is the US National Security Agency working for the Cuban government now?

The Associated Press, which broke the story, asks us further to believe that the “truth” about most things important in the world is being kept from the Cuban people by the Castro regime, and that the “Cuban Twitter” would have opened people’s eyes. But what information might a Cuban citizen discover online that the government would not want him to know about? I can’t imagine. Cubans are in constant touch with relatives in the US, by mail and in person. They get US television programs from Miami and other southern cities; both CNN and Telesur (Venezuela, covering Latin America) are seen regularly on Cuban television”; international conferences on all manner of political, economic and social issues are held regularly in Cuba. I’ve spoken at more than one myself. What – it must be asked – does USAID, as well as the American media, think are the great dark secrets being kept from the Cuban people by the nasty commie government?

Those who push this line sometimes point to the serious difficulty of using the Internet in Cuba. The problem is that it’s extremely slow, making certain desired usages often impractical. From an American friend living in Havana: “It’s not a question of getting or not getting internet. I get internet here. The problem is downloading something or connecting to a link takes too long on the very slow connection that exists here, so usually I/we get ‘timed out’.” But the USAID’s “Cuban Twitter”, after all, could not have functioned at all without the Internet.

Places like universities, upscale hotels, and Internet cafés get better connections, at least some of the time; however, it’s rather expensive to use at the hotels and cafés.

In any event, this isn’t a government plot to hide dangerous information. It’s a matter of technical availability and prohibitive cost, both things at least partly in the hands of the United States and American corporations. Microsoft, for example, at one point, if not at present, barred Cuba from using its Messenger instant messaging service.

Cuba and Venezuela have jointly built a fiber optic underwater cable connection that they hope will make them less reliant on the gringos; the outcome of this has not yet been reported in much detail.

The grandly named Agency for International Development does not have an honorable history; this can perhaps be captured by a couple of examples: In 1981, the agency’s director, John Gilligan, stated: “At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”

On June 21, 2012, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) issued a resolution calling for the immediate expulsion of USAID from their nine member countries, “due to the fact that we consider their presence and actions to constitute an interference which threatens the sovereignty and stability of our nations.”

USAID, the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (and the latter’s subsidiaries), together or singly, continue to be present at regime changes, or attempts at same, favorable to Washington, from “color revolutions” to “spring” uprisings, producing a large measure of chaos and suffering for our tired old world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Historian William Blum is a leading critic of US foreign policy.

Notes

William Blum, America’s Deadliest Export – Democracy: The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else, p.22-5
Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas, The Wise Men (1986), p.158
Washington Post, March 31, 2014
“NATO takes measures to reinforce collective defence, agrees on support for Ukraine”, NATO website, April 1, 2014
Sandy Berger, White House press briefing, November 14, 1997, US Newswire transcript
Associated Press, April 3 & 4, 2014
Washington Post, April 4, 2014
Associated Press, June 2, 2009
George Cotter, “Spies, strings and missionaries”, The Christian Century (Chicago), March 25, 1981, p.321

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.

Pro-Russian protesters in eastern Ukraine demand Crimean-style referendum

We present a complete dossier on this issue.

The pro-Russian and even revolutionary ferment is alive and growing in parts of Eastern Ukraine, as this demonstration in Donetsk illustrates.

By Johannes Stern, Senior Political Commentator, wsws.org

_Tensions between the Western-backed interim government in Kiev and the eastern parts of Ukraine with close economic and linguistic ties to Russia are escalating, posing the threat not only of civil war in Ukraine, but of military conflict between the imperialist powers and Russia.

Yesterday, pro-Russian protesters in eastern Ukraine’s industrial city of Donetsk set up a “people’s council” and announced the creation of a “republic of Donetsk.”

Three weeks after Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine, the council in Donetsk similarly called for a May 11 referendum on joining Russia and asked Russia to deploy “peacekeepers” to secure it. A statement of the council read: “Without support it will be hard for us to stand against the junta in Kiev… We are addressing Russian President Putin because we can only entrust our security to Russia.”

____________
AND HERE EVENTS AS SEEN BY THE IMPERIALIST PRESS (CBS This Morning)
Transcript in Appendix.

____________

The announcement followed the occupation of local administration buildings in Donetsk, Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, and the eastern city of Luhansk by anti-government protesters on Sunday. Pictures and videos of the protests showed demonstrators setting up barricades and piling up tires and barbed wire, just as pro-Western protesters did in Kiev against former president Viktor Yanukovych before he was ousted in a Western-orchestrated and fascist-led putsch on February 22.

The imperialist powers’ installation of a far-right, anti-Russian government in Kiev, which quickly moved to eliminate Russian as an official language and impose IMF austerity measures on the working class, is producing an ever more volatile and explosive situation.

In Kharkiv, clashes erupted between anti-government activists and police forces that tried to recapture the administration building. Anti-government protesters violently dispersed a demonstration of Kiev government supporters.

In Luhansk, demonstrators seized a weapons depot. The Ukrainian news agency UNIAN reported that nine people, including law enforcement officers, were injured in the attack.

The fatal shooting of a Ukrainian military officer in Crimea has further fueled tensions between the interim government in Kiev and Russia. The officer was shot in a dispute with Russian soldiers late Sunday night, according to a spokesman for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.

The mounting tensions in eastern Ukraine testify to the recklessness of the imperialist powers, which are risking not only open civil war in Ukraine, but war with Russia itself in pursuit of their economic and geo-political goals. The protests against the Kiev regime by pro-Russian forces in sections of Ukraine that were Yanukovych’s political base are the result of the Western powers’ decision to illegally oust his regime, utilizing as their shock troops ultra-nationalist and fascist forces.

The regime installed by Washington and its European allies includes ministers from the fascistic Svoboda party. It has agreed to impose International Monetary Fund dictated energy price increases that will devastate eastern Ukraine’s industries and workers.

The Ukrainian regime and its imperialist backers are blaming the anti-government protests in eastern Ukraine on Russia and seizing on them to further escalate tensions. On Monday, Ukrainian interim President Oleksander Turchinov threatened to use “anti-terrorism” measures to suppress the protests, which he denounced as a Russian conspiracy. “Yesterday the second stage of a special Russian operation began, the aim of which is to destabilize the situation in the state, overthrow the Ukrainian authorities, disrupt the election and tear our country apart,” he said.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk accused Russia of carrying out a plan “to destabilize the situation, a plan to ensure that foreign troops could cross the border and capture the territory of the country.” At a government meeting, he declared: “There is a script being written in the Russian Federation, for which there is only one purpose: the dismemberment and destruction of Ukraine and the transformation of Ukraine into the territory of slavery under the dictates of Russia.”

The ultimate goal of the imperialist powers is not only to take over Ukraine, but to dismember Russia itself. They are intensifying their provocations, threats and sanctions in an attempt to undermine the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin. For its part, the Kremlin, well aware of widespread social discontent in the Russian population, fears it could be targeted for a similar regime-change operation to that which brought down Yanukovych.

Speaking at a meeting of Russia’s Federal Security Service on Monday, Putin said that Russia was on the alert against outside agitators seeking to create ethnic strife. “We must make a clear distinction between civilized opposition to the authorities and serving foreign interests to the detriment of our own country,” he said, “We will not accept a situation such as happened in Ukraine, when in many cases it was through non-governmental organizations that the nationalist and neo-Nazi groups and militants, who became the shock troops in the anti-constitutional coup d’état, received funding from abroad.”

Washington and the European powers are seizing on the protests in Eastern Ukraine to step up their war threats against Russia. Commenting on the protests in Donetsk, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt wrote on Twitter: “Sunday pattern that pro-Russian thugs try to stir up trouble in eastern Ukraine. Heavily supported by Kremlin propaganda machine.”

Czech President Milos Zeman went further, calling for a NATO intervention in Ukraine should Russia try to move into eastern Ukraine. “The moment Russia decides to widen its territorial expansion to the eastern part of Ukraine, that is where the fun ends,” Zeman told Czech public radio. “There I would plead not only for the strictest EU sanctions, but even for military readiness of the North Atlantic Alliance, like, for example, NATO forces entering Ukrainian territory.”

Washington warned Russia against trying to annex more Ukrainian territory “overtly or covertly” and accused pro-Russian demonstrators of being paid by Moscow. “There is strong evidence suggesting some of these demonstrators were paid and were not local residents,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said on Monday. “We’re concerned about several escalatory moves in Ukraine over the weekend, and we see those as a result of increased Russian pressure on Ukraine.”

Daniel Baer, the US ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, claimed that Russia had amassed tens of thousands of troops near the border with Ukraine “not in their normal peacetime positions or garrisons.” Baer demanded that the Russian government takes steps to “de-escalate” the situation.

These statements are staggeringly hypocritical. What Carney and Baer are accusing the Kremlin of doing—intervening to politically manipulate protests in Ukraine—is precisely what the Western powers boast of having done. European Union and American officials joined anti-Yanukovych demonstrators on Kiev’s Independence Square and met with leaders of the neo-fascist Svoboda party. The Obama administration and its European allies have, according to US Undersecretary of State for Europe and Eurasia Victoria Nuland, spent some $5 billion to promote pro-Western regime-change in Ukraine since the 1990s.
______________

APPENDIX: As the Western media and the US government “see it”: a complete study in hypocrisy. Everything Russia is accused of doing was and has been done for decades by the United States and its accomplices.

CBS NEWSApril 8, 2014, 8:42 AM

Will Ukraine lose even more of its territory to Russia in the east?

The crisis in Ukraine is deepening with the threat of more lost territory for the central government in Kiev.

It’s sounding familiar: government offices, in the Eastern Ukraine this time, have been taken over by people claiming to be ordinary pro-Russian Ukrainians, CBS News’ Mark Phillips reported.

Russia yet again warned the Ukrainian government against taking repressive action that it says could lead to civil war. Ukrainian forces move in to evict the demonstrators, and the tension rises.

Eastern Ukrainian region declares independence

Once again, the fires are burning in Ukraine, and Moscow is being blamed for stoking the flames. Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague has accused Russia of trying to “destabilize” Ukraine.Demonstrators — said to be pro-Russian Ukrainians — have for about two days occupied government buildings in the major cities of Donetsk and Kharkiv. They demanded a referendum — the same device that was used to annex Crimea to Russia. The White House says many of the occupiers were not local and were being paid, presumably by Russian interests.

Overnight, Ukrainian forces moved in to try to reclaim the buildings in what they’re calling an “anti-terrorist” operation. The government in Kiev says 70 people were arrested, and its calling them all criminals.

But the demonstrators still control some government offices in the largely Russian-speaking, industrial heartland of Eastern Ukraine.

Play VIDEO

Ukrainian parliament breaks out in brawl

Also not for the first time, the ugliness spilled over into Ukraine’s parliament. When Pietro Simyenco, the leader of the old pro-Moscow Communist Party got up to accuse Ukraine of bringing its problems upon itself by bringing down the previous pro-Russian government, some of the other members thought they had heard enough, and a fight broke out.

And with the accusations and the fists flying, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has weighed in again, repeating Moscow’s claim that it the West, not Russia, that is destabilizing Ukraine. Lavrov called for talks, but events — not talking — seem to be driving Ukraine toward another East-West confrontation.

The Strategy of the Venezuelan Opposition and How it Works

The B u l l e t | Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 957 | March 25, 2014

Chavez-Maduro supporter.

By Steve Ellner

_The strategy and tactics of the Venezuelan opposition is a replay of events that took place leading up to the coup against Hugo Chávez on April 11, 2002 and is similar (although in some ways quite different) from the script that has been used in the Ukraine and elsewhere. The blatant distortions and in some cases lies of the media (CNN in Spanish playing a lead role) represent an essential element in the strategy.

There are two main groups that the opposition has mobilized and from all appearances the two act in coordination even though their style, and even social background, differs from one another. One group is non-violent and the other engages in acts of aggression in some cases endangering lives.

On the one hand, students and other young people carry out protests which the media and the opposition deceptively call “peaceful.” These mobilizations involve to a disproportionate extent students from private universities and operate almost exclusively in wealthy areas whose mayors (and in some cases governors) belong to the opposition. The protests are not legal, even though many of the protesters are convinced (or have been convinced by their leaders) that they are exercising the constitutional right of dissent. However, nearly all of these protests take over main avenues and highways in urban areas, typically forcing traffic to a halt and then having to pass through just one lane. It often takes hours for cars to pass through these points. In most cases the protesters consist of between 15 and 80 people, and in a few cases over one hundred.

The second group sets up barricades using garbage bags, trees, boulders and barbed wire. In addition, they have dispersed oil on roads in some cases causing fatal accidents. For an excellent description of these actions in the city of Merida near the Colombian border where the violence has been most intense, see the article by Miguel Tinker Salas, who resided there over the last month: “What is happening in Venezuela?”

Peaceful and Violent Protests

All efforts by security forces to get both situations under control have been portrayed in the private media as fierce acts of repression carried out by police, National Guardsmen and motorcyclists and other Chavistas organized as “collectives.” While the media generally recognizes that some of the protesters have engaged in violence, attention is focused on the so-called “peaceful protesters” with little acknowledgment of the chaos that they cause. Furthermore, these reports fail to point out that a large number of the victims including the fatal ones are Chávez supporters including security forces. In most violent urban protests throughout the world, the ratio of protesters to security forces who are wounded and killed ranges from 25 to one or 500 to one. Here the ratio may be in the single-digit range (a similar situation occurred in the Ukraine). Claims in the social media that the violent actions are provoked by “infiltrators” (the implication being that the infiltrators are Chavistas) are sometimes reflected in the media.

The script’s end game consists of a large “peaceful” protest that heads to the center of Caracas with a “vanguard” that creates violence and provokes shootings, resulting in deaths on all sides (protesters, Chavista civilians and security forces), thus forcing the government to resign or setting off a military coup. This scenario was exactly what occurred on April 11, 2002. On that occasion, the media and the opposition deceptively claimed that the government’s contingency plan known as “Plan Avila” consisted of widespread brutal repression. The opposition and media also falsely claimed that armed Chavista groups known as the Bolivarian Circles were poised to violently attack peaceful opposition concentrations and that these groups even had tanks at their disposal. The 20-some odd deaths on that day (consisting of both Chavistas and opposition) was the excuse to carry out a military coup, which the government of George W. Bush (which as documents demonstrate knew perfectly well who was behind the killings) used to justify its support for the de facto government headed by Pedro Carmona.

The Chavista government has learnt from the experience of April 11. President Nicolás Maduro and the mayor of Caracas’ “Libertador” municipality where the popular sectors are concentrated have adamantly refused to allow the demonstrators to go from the wealthy eastern part of Caracas to the downtown area. Time and time again the protestors organize marches designed to reach the city’s center even though they have not been given permits. CNN and the media in general harp on the government’s failure to issue a marching permit as an example of the restriction on democratic liberty, without mentioning that the government has good reason to prevent marches from reaching the downtown area.

The phony issue of government repression raised by the opposition and the private media is an essential part of the script. Without the issue there is really no justification for the opposition’s sole demand for regime change embodied in the slogan “salida” (exit). Certainly there are pressing problems in Venezuela including shortages of basic (and some non-basic) commodities, inflation and delinquency. But these problems do not justify the overthrow of the government. If these were the issues, people in general would say “wait until the next elections and vote the Chavistas out of office.” Obviously, the opposition’s strategy is either create conditions that may set off a coup (which is highly unlikely given the military’s well demonstrated loyalty) or (much more likely) bring about a wearing out process in which in the next electoral cycle the average voter supports opposition candidates who distance themselves from the violence allegedly coming from both sides. •

Professor Steve Ellner has taught at the Universidad de Oriente in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, since 1977. He is the author of many books on Venezuelan politics, including his latest Latin America’s Radical Left. This article first appeared on theVenezuelanalysis.com website.

Comments

#2 davidg 2014-03-26 10:52 EDT
USA pattern
Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, Haiti 1915, South Ossettia and much of the middle East. Pattern. Anglo-North Americans including Canadians are the most amnesiac and brainwashed on the planet.

#1 Richard Moore 2014-03-25 00:32 EDT
Orange Revolutions in liberated territories
Not much hope for Orange Revolution tactics in Venezuela, Bolivia, etc. The purpose might be to create a background story to provide an excuse for an eventual intervention.

Obama’s ProtoWar Against Russia and China

Nuclear Brinksmanship

One of China’s Air Force strategic bombers. Far more advanced craft is being developed. China is no longer a backwater nation in weapons designs. (Public domain)

by ERIC SOMMER

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]ussia and China are both under attack by a multi-pronged U.S.-led ‘proto-war’ which could erupt into ‘hot war’ or even nuclear war. ‘Protowar’ or ‘proto-warfare’ is the term I have coined to describe the use of multiple methods intended to weaken, destabilize, and in the limit-case destroy a targeted government without the need to engage in direct military warfare.

Protowar methods include threats against the targeted country; economic sanctions; military encirclement around its borders. cyber-warfare, drone warfare, and use of proxy forces from within or from outside the country for political and/or military action against the local government.

U.S.-led protowars also invariably include propaganda campaigns against the targeted governments. The media campaigns are waged by the five giant media conglomerates which now control 90% of the U.S. media and which are directly linked to the U.S. foreign-policy establishment through various means including corporate memberships in the Committee for Foreign Relations.

You can recognize these media campaigns because they frequently employ the words ‘human rights’ or ‘democracy’ as the pretext for U.S. state protowars against other countries. Sometimes, of course, these words cannot possibly be applied at all, as in the massive support currently given to the murderous military dictatorship in Egypt or the midevilist kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In these cases the U.S. media and government substitute the words ‘U.S. National Interest’ for ‘human rights’ as the pretext for targeting another country.

Proto-warfare often precedes, or leads up to, hot wars, as when a decade of economic sanctions, media demonization, and media-supported lies about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ led up to the Iraq war. Thousands of young American men and women were sent over to kill and be killed, or to be injured or traumatized, to say nothing of the up to a million Iraqis who died as a result of the war. However, Iraq did not possess nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, so there was no danger of a nuclear conflagration. Matters are much different with respect to Russia and China, both nuclear powers.

The ProtoWar Against Russia and China

U.S.-led proto-warfare against Russia and China has a number of elements. To begin with, it conforms to two popular doctrines in U.S. foreign policy circles. The first doctrine states that the U.S. must never allow another super-power to emerge, and must remain the unchallenged dominant force on Earth. This doctrine is clearly set-out in the original version of the U.S. Defence Department policy document known as ‘the Wolfowitz doctrine:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

The document containing this statement and similar notions was changed for public consumption after the original provoked an outcry when it was leaked to the press.

The second doctrine underpinning proto-warfare against Russia and China is that U.S. dominance of the planet depends on control of the Eurasian land mass, on which Russia and China occupy key positions. This doctrine has been heavily promoted by former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. “For America,” he has written, ” the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… Eurasia is the globes largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the worlds’ three most advanced and economically productive regions… Eurasia is thus the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.

In pursuit of Eurasian dominance a whole gamut of protowar tools are now being used by the U.S. in its campaigns against Russia and China. Militarily, the U.S.-led Nato military alliance has progressively squeezed Russia’s’ strategic space by enlisting one former Russian aligned state in Eastern Europe after another. Now, with a U.S.-supported coup-imposed government in power in Kiev, there is open talk of Nato also incorporating Ukraine, a country right on Russia’s’ border.

To help U.S. readers understand the significance of Natos’ movement around Russia, imagine that from South America, up through central America, and up to Mexico and Canada, one country after another was being integrated into a Russian-dominated military system.

Russia’s Sukhoi Su-34 is an advanced tactical strike fighter. Russia currently has many more advanced planes, some surpassing the US designs. (Wikimedia)

Other current protowar actions against Russia include economic sanctions; the use of the Ukraine crisis as a pretext to mobilize more U.S. and other Nato forces in Eastern Europe for purposes of intimidating or threatening Russia; and the publication by the U.S. media conglomerates of an unending series of lies, half-truths, and obscurantism’s regarding the Ukraine, in order to demonize Russia and prepare the U.S. public to accept whatever actions the U.S. state and military chooses to take.

On the other side of Eurasia, U.S. military encirclement of China has also recently proceeded apace. Military bases and transfers of billions of dollars in military equipment have been positioned around China for years in areas such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.

Now, with the Obama administrations’ so-called ‘pivot to Asia’, a new more ambitious program called ‘Air-Sea battle plan’ involves deployment of large amounts of very hi-tech military systems and equipment in the pacific area all aimed at China.

At the same time, new U.S. military bases are being opened across the Pacific arena, from the Philippines to Australia, with no other conceivable target but China.

In conjunction with this Pacific military build-up, the U.S.state is attempting to use previously minor disputes over ownership of maritime resources to turn a number of smaller Asian nations into proxies to help it destabilize China. These nations include Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines. By offering its support, and in some cases promises of military assistance in any maritime conflict with China, the U.S. has stoked the ambitions and aggressive nationalist tendencies of these smaller nations vis-a-vis China.

Coinciding with the military build-up against China is extensive cyber-penetration of China by the U.S. NSA (National Security Agency), as revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

This penetration includes wholesale capture of hundreds of thousands or millions of Chinese mobile text messages; the monitoring of mobile phone conversations of Chinese leaders; and serious intrusions into the computer network backbone system of Beijings’ Tsinghua university, which is linked to large numbers of Chinese research centers including labs engaged in sensitive military-related work.

The NSA has also penetrated and compromised the server computers made by Chinese Huaweii, a giant telecommunications equipment and networking company, whose equipment is used throughout China and around the world.

Russia's strategic deterrent comprises the submarine fleet armed with ICBMs. (Photo: Russian Pacific Fleet).

Russia’s strategic deterrent comprises an advanced submarine fleet armed with ICBMs. (Photo: Russian Pacific Fleet).

It should be noted – and emphasized – that the U.S. government has never apologized or stated that these cyber-attacks on China will stop.

Other U.S.attempts to destabilize China include political and economic support for separatist movements by some members of ethnic minorities in the Chinese provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet. Since the 1950’s, first the CIA and later the so-called “National Endowment for Democracy’, which is funded by the U.S. government, have transferred millions of dollars to the so-called Tibetan government-in-Exile in India. Both sets of money transfers are in the public domain, due to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

At the same time, a so-called ‘East Turkistani Government In Exile’ claiming to represent XInjiang province was formed in Washington DC in 2004. On his way to the Beijing Olympics in 2008l, then President George W. Bush stopped by the see one of the leaders-in-exile of the Xinjaing separatist movement.

To put all these U.S. protowar actions against China in perspective, we need to consider who is really the aggressive actor in Asia. The U.S. has over 650 military bases in other peoples’ countries, including Asia, while China has none. The U.S. is impinging militarily and politically in China’s backyard; China is not interfering in U.S. relations or military activities in the U.S. backyard. The U.S. has a doctrine of global supremacy; China has no such doctrine and basically wishes to be left alone to develop economically and to engage in economic trade with other nations.

Russian BUK anti-aircraft battery.

The danger of the U.S.Eurasian protowar erupting into hot war – or even nuclear war – stems from a single factor: Previous U.S.-led protowars which erupted into hot wars were against countries like Serbia, Iraq, or Libya. Those countries did not have nuclear weapons and could not effectively defend themselves against U.S. military and other pressures Russia and China are in a different category – they are nuclear- armed and can defend themselves.

The U.S. state presumably does not intend to provoke a hot war with Russia and China.. But directing intensive protowar against powerful nuclear-armed states is to risk the possibility of ‘sleep walking’ into the abyss through miscalculation, or through a gradual hightening of conflicts which finally go out of control. In 1914, with the European powers of the day already on edge, it took just the assassination of a minor duke in a peripheral country to trigger World War I. As an old adage has it, “If you play with fire, you may get burned.”

Eric Sommer is an international journalist.

What is $1 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?