These are not the poor and most certainly not the starving. As it chances I have a great deal of life experience working amongst seriously deprived, hungry and despairing people. I know the gaunt face of want and the desperate glance of need. Look at these Guaido supporters, one by one by one. This designer spectacled, well-coiffed, elegantly dressed, sleekly jowled group does not know hunger. This group does not know want. This is a proper right wing gathering, a gathering of the nicely off section of society. This is a group of those who have corruptly been siphoning Venezuela’s great wealth for decades and who want to make sure the gravy train flows properly in their direction again. It is, in short, a group of exactly the kind of people you would expect to support a CIA coup.
Those manicured hands raised in the air will never throw rocks, or get involved in violence unless against a peasant strapped to a chair for them. It is not this crowd which will suffer as public disorder is manipulated and directed by the CIA. These wealthy ones are immune, just as Davos serves as nothing but an annual reminder of how very poorly God aims avalanches.
There is real suffering in Venezuela. The CIA is working hard to stoke violence, and the genuine poor will soon start to die, both in those egged on to riot and in the security services. But do not get taken in by the complete nonsense that this is a popular, democratic revolution. It is not. It is yet another barefaced CIA regime change coup.
These are not the poor and most certainly not the starving. As it chances I have a great deal of life experience working amongst seriously deprived, hungry and despairing people. I know the gaunt face of want and the desperate glance of need. Look at these Guaido supporters, one by one by one. This designer spectacled, well-coiffed, elegantly dressed, sleekly jowled group does not know hunger. This group does not know want.
This is a proper right wing gathering, a gathering of the nicely off section of society. This is a group of those who have corruptly been siphoning Venezuela’s great wealth for decades and who want to make sure the gravy train flows properly in their direction again. It is, in short, a group of exactly the kind of people you would expect to support a CIA coup.
Those manicured hands raised in the air will never throw rocks, or get involved in violence unless against a peasant strapped to a chair for them. It is not this crowd which will suffer as public disorder is manipulated and directed by the CIA. These wealthy ones are immune, just as Davos serves as nothing but an annual reminder of how very poorly God aims avalanches.
There is real suffering in Venezuela. The CIA is working hard to stoke violence, and the genuine poor will soon start to die, both in those egged on to riot and in the security services. But do not get taken in by the complete nonsense that this is a popular, democratic revolution. It is not. It is yet another barefaced CIA regime change coup....Free Venezuela! — Because deposing the democratically elected government of Iran under Prime Minister Mossadegh and installing the Shah as a Western puppet through a CIA/MI6 coup d'etat worked so well. Oh, wait!
We may be tempted to personalize these matters but in my experience that would not be correct, although in some cases it likely is. Having known some of the elite, both domestic and foreign, including Latin America, I found them very nice people, and I certainly do not think that they they believe that they are acting out of line with either reality or immorally.
The problem is with the system, with capitalism being the next iteration of feudalism and bringing along much of the same ideological baggage with it, such as class privilege. History seldom if ever wipes the slate clean.
The problem is with the software, so to speak. While humans are wired pretty much the same, they have different operating systems (world views) and different applications that run on these operating systems, to stretch the analogy. What each takes to be "reality" is a product of one's world view.
Within a world view, different ideologies compete. Thus, the elite of a society may have a general world view with factions of it espousing different ideologies, while the "little people" (Alan Simpson) and "deplorables" (Hillary Clinton) have another world view within which there are also different ideologies. This implies not only different values and criteria but also different construction of "facts."
From the dialectical point of view, either Hegelian idealistic or Marxist materialistic, this is the working out of the dynamics of human development — evolution — in a broad sense that includes both genetic and cultural — "nature and nurture" — that unfolds itself in a series of historical moments characterized by its distinctive Zeitgeist.
Within this historically determined dynamic, internal "contradictions — Widerspruch means "contradiction" and and also "opposition" and "conflict" — arise. Moments succeed each other as wave rising in the ocean and breaking on the beach as the rising and falling waves interact, sometime violently, especially as the wave that is about to fall begins to crest.
Just as capitalism succeeded feudalism as the next wave; so too, the world is now in the process of transformation to the next iteration in the historical dialectic. Those who are privileged in the present wave generally resist this transformation based on their dominant ideology, which is "bourgeois liberalism." They overlook the parallels of the present day ownership classes to the aristocracies and lesser privileged classes under feudalism.
If we lose wight of the big picture, we get sucked into the details and lose awareness of the forest for the the trees.
This present conflict that is now engulfing the world is an iteration of the ongoing class struggle writ large in the news as the torch passes into new hands and the ancien régime — the "liberal world order" — struggles to maintain its control.
The most recent struggle was between fascism and liberalism, with liberalism winning. Yet, certain aspects of fascism were brought along, sometimes consciously and intentionally as with the integration of formerly fascist forces into the coalition against "Soviet communism."
Now the struggle is between the victorious liberalism and a resurgent traditionalism, one one hand, and a mostly victorious capitalism against the next iteration of socialism.
It would be a great mistake to personalize this dynamic at the expense of missing the essence of what is unfolding. This has to be viewed in terms of the overall dynamic of world history and evolutionary theory. Perennial wisdom also put this into perspective but not "naturalistically."
At any rate, much of this focus is in the process of shifting as the threat of climate change becomes more recognized publicly. In addition, the millennial generation has recently become the largest, replacing the boomers. These two conditions, one ecological and other demographic, are going to predominate.
Climate change is going to change the fundamental dynamic of energy use, which will affect everything. There is as yet no solution on the table that experts agree will meet the challenge that humanity faces. Much of the world is still in denial. When that is no longer possible, the historical dynamic will shift like tectonic plates. There will be "earthquakes."
Shifting demographics will shift political control to a new generation that is digitally native as the world enters the next age, with the Industrial Age that replaced by the Agricultural Age now being replaced by the Digital Age. This implies not only new ideologies but rise of a different mindset.
We are in a phase transition from one state to another. Buckle up!
Craig Murray Blog
The Vultures of Caracas
Craig Murray, formerly British ambassador to Uzbekistan and Rector of the University of Dundee
When Western imperialists launch a regime change operation, they often use stoke racism and use it as a weapon. For instance, the photo above (in Craig Murray's blog post) shows that 99.9% of the upper class and upper middle class Venezuelan protesters against President Maduro are white.
ReplyDeleteIt Brazil, 99.9% of the upper class and upper middle class protesters against President Rousseff were white.
In Iran, the failed “Green Revolution” of 1995 (supported by Washington) was led by affluent fair-skinned Iranians. So fair they may as well be called white.
Anglo-American leftists cheer this racism. For Anglo-American leftists, only Anglo-American males have “white privilege” and “male privilege.” Only straight white Anglo-American males are “racists” and “rapists” and “homophobes.” However straight white males are fine when they rule foreign lands.
Regarding the shortages in Venezuelan stores, the oligarchs make sure that this only occurs in poor neighborhoods, never in affluent white neighborhoods.
After the Western powers complete their coup, and they reduce the target nation to pure neoliberalism, most of the whites who cheered for the coup are reduced to poverty, since neoliberalism splits societies into the extremely rich and extremely poor.
Most of the morons seen in the photo above will join the 99%. Their misery will be caused by neoliberalism (which they cheered for) but they will blame it on “socialism” and people of color.
Venezuela will again become a neoliberal nightmare.
Meanwhile in the US and UK, leftists will resume attacking "white privilege" and "toxic masculinity." And they will continue to cheer when white males launch every foreign coup.