John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MARKO MARJANOVIC IN CHECKPOINT ASIA
“This Is How Russia Keeps Venezuela Exporting Oil Despite US Sanctions
“With a little help from Rosneft under-siege Venezuela still manages to sell 500,000 bpd monthly”
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Response to a comment which said, “So why sanction Venezuela? it is not because her economy is Socialist or that her Socialism is not panning out as well as Caracas planned. If that was the reason then over 60% to 70% of the world's economies would also qualify for sanctions due to bad performance. The only conclusion I can arrive is that Venezuela under both Chavez and Maduro took a strong anti Israeli stand.”
I wouldn't doubt that that represents a part of the motive. Remember, Israel is part and parcel of America’s empire, a highly privileged and influential imperial colony in the Middle East.
However, the United States has done many ugly interventions over the matters of socialized governments or nationalized industries.
And it very much does want to reclaim Latin America for the Planter Class which cooperate historically so well with its policies.
The Lima Group is just part of an effort to drive new groups of "bad guys" from the continent.
Look at the new pressures on Cuba, Nicaragua, the coup in Bolivia, and the change in government in Brazil, which was certainly precipitated with behind-the-scenes management by CIA and State Department.
The United States is being hyper-aggressive now across Latin America.
I do wish the mass of Americans raised some objections, but they don't really.
Coups, interventions, and wars over such matters seem just fine with the large majority of Americans, people who have no investment with what the elites are doing but side with them through emotions conditioned by decades of disinformation and propaganda in their press and from their politicians, including both parties.
Look at the pathetic Elizabeth Warren's statements on the subject. Some liberal.
And a recent American poll shows a large majority of Americans supporting such interventions.
Minding your own business and civility and respect for rule of law just are not fundamental American values.
They are qualities vaguely associated with sissies and losers and the unpatriotic. Such attitudes reflect lifetimes immersed in the environment generated by corporate press, financially-compromised politicians in both parties, countless "think tanks" and promotional organizations supported by billionaires and corporations, the work of ugly outfits like the FBI, and just the intense hype of the Cold War, something which still echoes rather loudly in America.
It really is a huge, not-so-subtle hate campaign on a continuous basis. Indeed, now with Trump and his close associates it has burst out with some renewed vehemence. Imagine, just quietly accepting the fact that America, on at least two occasions, turned off all the fridges of Venezuela’s millions of ordinary people with attacks on the power grid? And also turned off the power for all kinds of life-saving machines? And its harsh embargo starves people and deprives them of medicine.
I've thought most of my life that a fundamental lack of empathy was savagely displayed by the American population during the Vietnam War.
Some tears and demonstrations for the 60 thousand of their own dead (a relatively tiny number over a 10-year war) while ignoring completely a true holocaust of about 3 million killed, a holocaust which included leaving behind a landscape of bomb craters and landmines and just saturated with poisons like Agent Orange.
Even making a hero of someone like John McCain, a lifelong nasty piece of work who was bombing civilians in a city when he was shot down. But the establishment required some symbol of American sacrifice given all that wilful horror and destruction inflicted on others for no reason, so a fake hero was manufactured.
Just a complete hell created for what? And you can even add to the toll, the million or so horribly killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Those monsters were enabled to take control because of America's constant interference in the country’s strictly neutral government, resulting in its collapse. And America never lifted a finger against “the Killing Fields.”
All that done in the name of the American people. And against the vague and meaningless threat of others’ belief in a different economic system. However mistaken that belief might have been, the incineration of millions was hardly helpful. It wasn’t even sane. It represented the mass burning of witches at the stake.
And the impulse remains alive in America.
It represents the unavoidable corruption of near-absolute power. Exceptionalism. I'll do it because I can, and I want to. A drummed-up Patriotism almost as poisonous as the fascism of 1930s’ Europe.
Indeed, an eminent American journalist and historian, who reported on the rise of Hitler, William L Shirer, said once that perhaps America would be the first country to go fascist voluntarily, so evident at the time were sympathetic voices and acts in American society.
