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After Constituent Assembly Vote, US-Backed Opposition Further Destabilizes Venezuela With Violence
Kevin Gosztola
Thursday, August 3, 2017
Kevin Gosztola — After Constituent Assembly Vote, US-Backed Opposition Further Destabilizes Venezuela With Violence
Firedoglake
After Constituent Assembly Vote, US-Backed Opposition Further Destabilizes Venezuela With Violence
Kevin Gosztola
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5 comments:
"if true"
I'm living through polemical political disputes in my own country, and I have been reading and listening for a long time the versions of both sides in a series of international crisis (Ukraine civil war, Syria civil war, Greek crisis, Trump elections, Brexit, both world wars, etc).
What I can tell from the experience I gathered is that both sides use lying propaganda. We cannot trust information of anyone involved in the dispute. They will always be biased. And there are aways some very few, rare people that may have something resembling an independent view of the facts, but you will never know who they are, unfortunately.
That's already summarize in that famous quote "the first causality in war is the truth" or something like that.
I don't believe that we can trust in US media or in Venezuela's government view. They are both lies.
I think it is needful to distinguish between lies and "spin." Pretty much everyone enhanced the narratives they tell, even those they tell themselves. Some of this is intentional and some the result of cognitive-affective bias that is subliminal.
Lying is different. It is the intentionally aimed at deceiving.
The line between persuasion and propaganda is blurry. Not all propaganda is based on lying. But lying is a tool that is frequently reported to in persuasion, and the chance of it happening increases with lower reputational risk and lower risk of being caught out.
However, when narratives are mutually exclusive, then it would seem that a party is lying, although it may be difficult to determine which one based on available evidence.
We all need to be aware of this is assessing the "news."
"I think it is needful to distinguish between lies and 'spin.'"
Agreed. Be it lies or spin, it's very difficult to believe in both sides.
I mean, people are really dying, we can't deny that. We also can't deny hyperinflation in Venezuela, and the high number of people emigrating. All that is evidence that something is wrong. I don't believe in Maduro.
But I also can't avoid to see the US and US media as some kind of imperial power with lots of interests in Venezuela. I don't believe that they have a reasonable, coherent narrative...
The Venezuela or Argentina situation today are not that different from the Venezuela or Argentina situations in the early 1990s: it is pretty bad indeed, regardless of whether the government in power is left or right wing.
It has also nothing to do with "bolivarian socialism", but with bad latin-american style governance, in the face of a collapse of oil prices. So also Saudi Arabia, surely not under a "bolivarian socialist" government, is also having huge economic problems with widespread poverty (especially among foreign indentured serf workers that have not been paid wages for a long time in many cases) and unemployment, and low wages.
The propaganda war is a bit like the Aleppo vs. Fallujah/Mosul story: fairly minor-to-average consequences of war in a city were given enormous prominence in the case of Aleppo, huge brutality and humanitarian disasters in Fallujah/Mosul are put in the backpages if mentioned at all.
The rule as always is “He's a bastard, but he's our bastard”.
Exactly, blissex.
This is just a another form of disaster capitalismdisaster capitalism. Either exploit a disaster that occurs or manufacture one to exploit.
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