All of these liberal Democrats signing on to this media war on Venezuela need to recognize that the corporate media is using the Venezuelan example as part of a “war on socialism” to discredit the very word socialism and everything associated with it.
Remember when Trump said before Congress that the US will never be a socialist country? Here, socialism refers to social democracy in either in name/action, which exists in 9
Remember how the entire Congress, including the vast majority of Democratic Congressmen, gave that fascist a standing ovation when he said that? And liberal Democrats dare to claim that they are on the left! They’re not on the left of anything, except maybe the left wing of Republican Party.
The corporate media and the US money/government elite (The Deep State, basically) despises anything that even smacks of socialism, especially social democracy which they truly hate because it is most likely to be implemented. This started during the Cold War but it was already going on in the Depression, when US fascists nearly staged a military coup against FDR, who they said was a Communist.
But during the Cold War the demonization of anything smacking of socialism, no matter how mild, really got under way with two bloodthirsty killers, the Dulles Brothers, who initiated the policy of Containment and created the CIA out of the wartime US intelligence agency, effectively turning the US into a militarized, national security state.
In other words, they initiated what boils down to the US Deep State or the foreign policy establishment of the United States. Note that the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about is absolutely part of this Deep State too, as it and the national security state are each part of each other.
It was during this era when the US overthrew countries all the time for the tiniest movements towards social democracy and a lot of times simply for implementing social liberalism, the ideology of the US Democratic Party!
For instance, Aristide in Haiti was overthrown for the simple reason that he raised the minimum wage.
The US Democratic Party gave complete support to both of these coups, without a single dissenting member. My “liberal Democrat” father, actually a “Cold War liberal,” a truly awful group of people, gave his complete support to the fascist coup that overthrew Aristide. Why? Because Time Magazine told him it needed to be done. My father foolishly believed that Time Magazine was a liberal or at least Centrist project though it’s never been either.
So the Democratic Party supports raising the minimum wage, sure, but overseas, if you do it, the Democratic Party will call you a Communist and overthrow you in a fascist coup! Disgusting or what?
Nationalist, Social Democratic, and even Liberal Governments Overthrown by the CIA in the Last 70 years
Arbenz in Guatemala was overthrown in 1954 simply for implementing a mild social democracy. About
Juan Bosch came to power in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and started to implement a mild social democracy. The US media demonized him as a Communist, and soon LBJ staged a fascist coup to overthrow him.
The Mossadegh government in Iran was elected in 1953 for electing a nationalist who nationalized British Petroleum’s oil and set about to implement a mild social democracy with nationalist overtones. He was overthrown by the US and UK and a fascist monarch called Reza Shah was installed and held power for the next 26 years.
A leftwing government was elected in Guyana around 1970, and the Western media went into hysterics. In reality, he was just a social democrat. The “liberal” UK soon overthrew him in a fascist coup.
The US waged economic war against Manley’s government in Jamaica in the late 80’s and early 90’s. He was never anything but a social democrat.
The Left took power in Brazil in 1964 after they won an election. In truth they were just social democrats. They were quickly overthrown in a fascist coup by generals in the military a year later.
A social democratic government that contained a few Communists was elected in 1960 in Iraq. The CIA overthrew that government in a bloody coup and installed Saddam Hussein with specific instructions to get rid of and crack down on the Communists.
Patrice Lumumba in the Congo came to power in 1964. I believe he was never anything more than a social democrat. Nevertheless, the Western media went insane, calling him a Communist. A year later he was overthrown with the help of US intelligence. It is a proven fact that Donald Rumsfeld, then working for the Defense Intelligence Agency, helped set up his arrest and subsequent execution by being tied to a tree and shot.
Both parties serve the interests of capitalism and empire. But whereas the British Empire masked its baser motives behind humanitarian rhetoric, the U.S. is more efficient and is generally not even recognized as an empire because there aren’t the old-fashioned territorial claims recognized by law and presented on maps. So the U.S. just claims humanitarian reasons for its actions abroad and doesn’t even bother styling itself as an empire.
Identity politics is a bulwark against socialism, even against mild social democracy. It works by preventing an awareness of common cause among those who aren’t near the top of society. It’s used domestically, in the U.S., to stymie any sort of labor movement, and abroad it serves to keep vassal states weak and dependent.
Why does the U.S. want to fund woke gender studies in Egypt? Probably to chip away at the social fabric of the Islamic world, which is rapidly becoming tame and much less of an obstacle to U.S. hegemony, except for Iran.
I will say, though, that self-determination isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be, since when there isn’t an outside power oppressing a region, the local peoples often just fight and oppress each other.
It’s almost like a society’s elites need to get their power fix no matter what, and if foreign populations aren’t available to lord over, then the domestic population will have to be ground down harder.
This makes sense. When I was younger I simply accepted the story about the US intervening in Latin America as a bulwark against a Soviet presence there. Then as I got a little older I took an interest in Latin American history and learned a bit about these alleged “Communist uprisings” and realized that for the most part, these were mostly just “New Deal” style reforms. I didn’t see what was so threatening to national security.
So what’s the end game? Just access to more markets to continue the capitalist Ponzi scheme? I sometimes wonder what would Latin America look like if instead of imposing right-wing dictators, we had instead helped with some Marshall Plan-style policy.