Solidarity with the People of Venezuela!

This coming September will mark 45 years since the US helped engineer a bloody coup against the Chilean government, a government seeking to break the chains of imperial dominance and capitalist enslavement. Today the US government is at it again, engaging its enormous power to destroy a liberating project of the Venezuelan people. In the interim, US dirty hands have been present in thwarting the self-determination of peoples throughout the world, in some cases multiple times. Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, tiny Grenada, Panama-- the list of the violated goes on and on-- extending to more recently, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Honduras, and, at the moment, Venezuela.

It doesn’t matter whether the US is ruled by Republicans or Democrats. When the first whiff of national independence is detected by the global watch dogs, the alarm sounds and the political “leaders” fall in line.

Surely only the willfully blind fail to see a pattern. You don’t have to be a Marxist to grasp that the US is systematically and unilaterally reining in countries deemed by its corporate interests to be renegades. Nor do you have to study Lenin to see that this is the behavior that history associates with empires. Thus, the word “imperialism” should come easily to even those who have little or no knowledge of the scientific precision of the term.

And it is US imperialism that now holds Venezuela in a death grip.

Unlike with Chile, the facts are readily before us. In the midst of the Cold War, the US went to great lengths to disguise its intervention behind the cloak of the covert services. In the intense competition with the socialist countries, the US fought hard to appear on the world stage as a champion of democracy. US aggression hid behind the doctrine of “plausible deniability.”

But today, in the attempted subversion of Venezuelan self-determination, there are no masks, no cloaks, no double talk. The plan is out in the open. We can find public records of the millions of dollars allocated for phony human rights groups, for subversive NGOs, for opposition parties, and even for purveyors of violence. We can trace the escalation of sanctions through three administrations, sanctions designed to disrupt, cripple, and dismantle Venezuela’s economy and finances. Ironically, the Venezuelan people's US CITGO operation once offered free home heating oil to the US needy. Today, the US government is attempting to steal CITGO from the Venezuelan people.

Oppositional electoral tactics, assassination attempts, and street violence failed to provoke the Venezuelan people into rejecting the Bolivarian process. The failures, the corruption, the leadership strife, and the foreign dependency of the opposition instead led directly to the sweeping electoral victory by President Maduro in the 2018 election.

In response to the divided and demoralized opposition, the US government rallied Maduro’s enemies behind a naked plan-- a plan both desperate and extremely audacious-- to depose the legitimate government with a virtual unknown, notable for his penchant for extremism and his malleability before his US masters. Urged on by notorious gusanos-- Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senator Robert Menendez-- US operatives met with the opposition in late December/early January, according to The Wall Street Journal, and began to concretely develop the plans for a coup based upon a parallel government. An administration official reported to the WSJ that “The opposition at this point believed, and told US officials, that they needed the international community’s backing to affect the political dynamic inside Venezuela.”

The plan went forward and weeks later Vice President Pence called the dutiful puppet and told him to proceed. The next day, the young graduate of George Washington University, Juan Guaidó, stood with a gaggle of his supporters and announced that he was, in fact, the President of Venezuela. This must have come as a shock to most Venezuelans who did not recall his name on the previous May’s Presidential ballot. Yet like abject toadies, government ministers in Latin America, Canada, and the EU immediately made anti-Maduro noises, called for new elections, or even threatened to recognize the unelected President. That is the reality of Jack-in-the-Box imperialism.

The US media, willing collaborators with the coup plotters, have for years deemed Maduro a dictator, a tyrant, a murderer, and worse. They eagerly returned to those themes with horror stories and accounts of deprivation and economic duress without a mention of the draconian sanctions that bleed the Venezuelan economy. After the call for January 30 demonstrations, NPR, a particularly vicious journalistic beast (“Stop the Maduro Genocide”), reported “Protesters filled streets across Venezuela on Wednesday in a show of strength for Juan Guaidó….” Accompanying the article is a picture of a handful of demonstrators, reminiscent of the infamous toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad.

The Wall Street Journal similarly recorded the Wednesday demonstrations (see below) with the apologetic caption: “Venezuelans opposed to Nicolas Maduro protested in Caracas on Wednesday. Larger antigovernment protests are expected Saturday.”

Quite a “show of strength”!

Similarly, Sunday morning’s CBS News website coverage of the opposition’s Saturday demonstration carried an impressive picture of a massive march. But curiously, the marchers constituted a sea of red, the colors worn by the Chavistas. By Sunday evening, the picture was gone.

The videos of the well-to-do marchers and the pot-bangers will bring back to many of us memories of the strident, orchestrated Chilean momias who served imperialism well with overwrought drama prior to the 1973 coup.

Showing their customary spinelessness, Democrats ignored, equivocated, or hailed the coup attempt. Illinois Senator Durbin was absolutely ecstatic. The so-called progressive wing was little better. Only Tulsi Gabbard courageously and emphatically spoke against the coup, despite the fact that her Presidential campaign has come in for brutal, unprincipled attack by the media. For a sampling of shameful vulgarity by most politicians, watch Max Blumenthal’s interviews of legislators commenting on the coup attempt.

This is the moment that requires unwavering, unqualified solidarity with the Venezuelan people and their elected government. If human rights mean anything, they must be universal; they must extend to everyone regardless of whether we share their beliefs or their politics. And at the top of the rights hierarchy, as its exponents agree, is the right of self-determination, the right to find your own way, even to make your own mistakes. If all of the loud, insistent Western human rights movements are to be more than cover for Western imperialism, if they are to be more than a bludgeon to thrash societies struggling to overcome the legacies of backwardness, disunity, and instability imposed by colonial and imperial domination, then they must stand against US intervention in Venezuelan affairs. They must demand that the US remove all sanctions, cease funding factions, and recognize the Maduro government.

Isn’t it odd that a liberal intelligentsia that can understand and vigorously condemn juvenile bullying cannot grasp that the most powerful country in the world by far is bullying a small country of 32 million mainly poor people?

It is not acceptable for self-described “progressive” Democrats to give a pass to US intervention by damning the Maduro government (or any other government out of favor with the US ruling class). Opining on Venezuelan politics by those who can’t name three Venezuelan cities may make for an entertaining parlor game, but it has no bearing on the question of US intervention. US intervention is immoral, illegal, and ill-advised, whether in Venezuela, Syria, or anywhere else.

Nor is it helpful for “leftists” to use this moment to lecture their friends and foes on the true revolutionary path while giving short shrift to solidarity.

One such pundit recently conceded that: “Leftist opinion on the crisis in Venezuela tends correctly to blame American meddling and the local bourgeoisie for trying to make the people ‘cry uncle’ as Reagan infamously described his intervention in Nicaragua.” But then he went on to devote thousands of words to his own pet theory of revolutionary change. His grudging statement of solidarity was lost in his windy exercise in self-indulgence.

Our left should do better.

It’s quite simple: Hands off Venezuela.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Stirring the Energy Pot

Since February of 2017, I have written frequently about changes in the global political economy of energy and the effects of those changes on imperialist rivalries and accompanying political trends: New Developments in Political Economy: The Politics of Oil (2-6-17), US Imperialism: Changing Direction (6-25-17), More on Energy Imperialism (7-26-17), Economic Nationalism: What It Means (12-28-17).

The broad gist of these articles was that (1) the era of global economic integration was severely challenged by the 2007-2008 shock; (2) a technological revolution in energy extraction moved the US-- the leading imperialist power-- towards energy independence; (3) the failure of OPEC and others to rein in US energy production and the continuing sluggishness of growth and trade prodded the US towards a further goal of energy dominance through competition in energy markets; (4) without the burden of dependence on stable, secure international energy sources, US imperialism stepped back from its role as the primary promoter and guarantor of global integration and stability; (5) intensifying competition in the context of stagnant growth fostered the politics of economic nationalism and the promotion of national self-interest in contrast to the politics of globalism.

Since the British navy and other navies converted from coal to oil-burning vessels in the early 1900s and with the burgeoning dependence of modern militaries on oil, securing energy sources has been a strategic centerpiece of imperialist strategy.

It is not too great of an exaggeration to see German expansion in World War II as accelerated by a thirst for reliable energy supplies (Romania, Soviet Union). And the denial of energy resources to the Japanese militarists similarly prodded aggression in Southeast Asia.

For the US, declining domestic production and increasing reliance on foreign oil, particularly from the Middle East, led to greater attention to security and stability in the Middle East. The US established a powerful gendarmerie to police the region: the Shah’s Iran, Israel, and the Arabian petrostates. Billions of dollars of military hardware bolstered these watchdogs at various times in an effort to guarantee stable supplies of oil. US security services worked overtime to install stable regimes in all of the petrostates and their neighbors. US dominance was sealed with the establishment of the dollar as the petroleum-trading currency. The dominance was so complete that the US was able to use low petroleum prices as a weapon against the Soviets during the Cold War.

But matters have changed radically with the technology-enabled explosion of oil and natural gas production in the US.

The New

Writing in The Washington Post (The US is about to be the world’s top crude oil producer. Guess who didn’t see it coming, 3-7-18), Charles Lane reminds us of how matters were before: “During his 2006 ‘addicted to oil’ State of the Union address, President George W. Bush bemoaned imports from unstable parts of the world and called for replacing 75% of Middle East oil imports by 2025.” Bush, like his father, spent great efforts-- lives and wealth-- policing and bullying those “unstable” oil producers.  

Energy writer James Blas explains in Bloomberg Businessweek (The New World Order of Energy Will Be American, 1-29-18) how matters are now, how the US no longer has to “tiptoe around oil supplying nations” whether they are “friends” (Saudi Arabia) or “adversaries” (Venezuela). Instead, “energy dominance” is on the agenda.

Blas notes that the US won the battle for dominance started by Saudi Arabia in 2014 when the Saudis drove the price of West Texas crude oil down to as low as $26 a barrel through massive overproduction, expecting to cripple US shale production. Thanks to huge investments, the shale oil companies survived the attack, cut costs, and roared back. Today growth is faster than pre-2014 when prices for oil were actually much higher. And imports are now below 2.5 million barrels a day, the lowest level since record-keeping began in 1973 (imports were 12 million barrels per day in 2008).

Thanks to geo-political “flare-ups” (generally US-instigated instability), US exports at one point in 2017 hit 2 million barrels a day, mainly to Canada and the People's Republic of China (PRC). Exports are fully expected to grow even more in the future.

Venezuela is Illustrative of the US’s growing interest in disrupting oil markets to its advantage. Through disinvestment and sanctions, Venezuelan oil production dropped nearly 30% last year. Similarly, the US-NATO destruction of Libya has succeeded in disabling its oil industry. The wreckage of the Libyan energy industry means that oil prices would have to reach $78.10 per barrel for the industry to break even. With prices trending well below that number, there clearly is little chance for the Libyan industry to recover, invest, or add to the country’s sovereign wealth.

With massive corruption and an expensive war to finance, Saudi Arabia now needs $70 a barrel to merely break even. Hoping to escape from dependency on an oil regimen, the Saudis had planned a public offering (a sell-off to private interests) of its national oil company, ARAMCO. In the current unfavorable competitive environment, that move has been postponed time and time again.

Formerly a price dove-- the world’s advocate for low oil prices-- the Saudis are now desperate to achieve higher prices. Their escape plan from their losing hand in oil competition-- Vision 2030-- is endangered by modest prices. To reduce supply and increase both demand and prices, the Saudis are a strong advocate for sanctions against Iran, as are powerful energy interests within the US ruling class.

The new, competitive environment has brought forth new, unexpected alliances. Russia-- a frequent foe of Saudi foreign policy-- has recently signed a comprehensive energy agreement with Saudi Arabia. For its part, Russia is offering to take a substantial position in any future IPO of ARAMCO, boosting its prospects (along with a similar offer from the PRC). Saudi Arabia, in return has agreed to invest in Russian LNG projects and Eurasian drilling. It appears that Russia and the PRC are looking to guarantee security, stability, and cooperation among the energy-producing states, a role that the US has now abandoned with its pursuit of energy dominance and a role that is a necessary condition for peace in the region.

Because emerging US oil dominance (and sanctions: war by other means) threatens to disrupt the reliability and stability of existing petro-suppliers, the PRC has begun to negotiate crude-oil futures contracts in renminbis rather than petro-dollars.

Natural Gas

Much of the growing US animosity that is so apparent in US-Russia-PRC relations revolves around competition in the natural gas market. Through political fantasies, sanctions, threats, saber-rattling, and contrived affronts, the US has made every effort to wean Europe away from Russian natural gas, especially the expansion of pipelines to Europe promising consistent supply and favorable prices.

Some Eastern European countries, mired in historic anti-Russia enmity, have welcomed US liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipments, constructing new receiving facilities. They accept inconvenience, inefficiency, and higher prices as the cost of the politically motivated anti-Russia campaign. The US is trying to browbeat the rest of Europe into giving preference to US LNG.

But the big prize is the PRC, the fastest growing natural gas market in the world. Both Russia and the US are fighting to supply natural gas: Russia has a pipeline project (GAZPROM) sales agreement to supply 1.3 trillion cubic feet a year, while the US (Cheniere Energy) has contracts to supply 1.2 million tons of LNG per year.

The recently announced selective, very selective US tariffs-- apparently really only against PRC-- likely have a covert motive. US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross suggested that increased Chinese purchases of LNG might have a happy consequence for tariffs by reducing the US-PRC trade deficit-- another shot fired in the energy wars.

Trade Tariffs

The sharpest edge of US economic nationalism is the emerging establishment and threats of trade tariffs. Short of embargo or out-and-out war, establishing disruptive trade barriers is the most hostile posture towards other nations. In the case of a powerful country like the US, tariffs constitute unabashed arrogance. As perceptive left commentators have noted, the US has always pressed its problems unto its weaker “friends,” but not with this hubris.

Lest anyone think this is a ‘Trump’ problem and not shared by fellow Republicans and Democrats, attention should be paid to what others are saying. When Trump announced the first round of tariffs directed at the PRC, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer was quoted in The Wall Street Journal: “I don’t agree with President Trump on a whole lot, but today I want to give him a big pat on the back.”

And Reuters reported on April 1 that Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, speaking in Beijing:

The Massachusetts Democrat and Trump foe, who has been touted as a potential 2020 presidential candidate despite rejecting such speculation, has said U.S. trade policy needs a rethink and that she is not afraid of tariffs.

After years of mistakenly assuming economic engagement would lead to a more open China, the U.S. government was waking up to Chinese demands for U.S. companies to give up their know-how in exchange for access to its market, Warren said.

“The whole policy was misdirected. We told ourselves a happy-face story that never fit with the facts,” Warren told reporters on Saturday, during a three-day visit to China that began on Friday.

Clearly, broad sections of the US ruling class have joined the trend towards economic nationalism.

The implications for peace or war are stark.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

The More Things Change, the More they Stay the Same

Some fifty years ago, ruling elites throughout the capitalist world settled into their overstuffed chairs and poured drinks to celebrate victory over the aspirations for independence held dear by formerly colonial peoples. In one case-- Ghana-- a popular leader, a venerated leader of African independence and African unity-- was deposed in a 1966 coup sponsored by foreign powers and carried out by national traitors. In the other case-- Guyana-- the most popular political party for decades, the most determined advocate for independence, was subverted and defeated in the rigged elections prior to the 1966 granting of formal independence.

Both Ghana and Guyana were long subjected to colonial rule, Ghana as part of Britain’s African colonial possessions and Guyana as part of the British empire’s Caribbean colonies. As pressures for independence mounted after the Second World War, both countries spawned dedicated and diligent leaders who had earned the trust of the people. Kwame Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party (CPP) and Cheddi Jagan and his People’s Progressive Party (PPP) had led their respective country’s fight for independence from the beginning, suffering imprisonment, threats, and trials.

Nkrumah and Jagan shared another characteristic as well, a characteristic that made them the pressing target of imperialism: a vision of social development outside of the confinement of capitalism. They knew that centuries of capitalist exploitation proved that escaping colonial domination would require a parallel break with capitalism and its institutions. In fact, Nkrumah wrote a pioneering work on the inevitable economic subjugation of newly liberated peoples who chose to continue on the capitalist road, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Kwame Nkrumah’s work was both brilliant in its application of Marxism and prescient in anticipating the lingering dependency of the former colonies that choose to remain tangled in the capitalist web.

Dark Days in Ghana

In his 1968 book (Dark Days in Ghana) recounting the circumstances of the coup, Nkrumah noted that many forces were arrayed against his programs from the day of formal independence in 1957. Nonetheless, he and his party were able to implement initiatives to rapidly bring social, cultural, and educational achievements to a high level. By 1961, technical and secondary school enrollment had increased 437.8% and university students 478.8% from pre-independence. In the same period, hospital beds had increased 159.9% and doctors and dentists by 220.5%. Roads increased around 50%, telephones 245.2%, and electrical power generated 38.4%. Ghana had achieved the highest per capita standard of living and highest literacy rate in Africa. And Ghana’s Seven Year Plan was to create a dramatic increase in industry, building upon the increased electrification flowing from the country’s massive Volta dam project.

But Ghana could only move forward if it escaped the raw material trap that nearly all former colonies suffered as the legacy of colonialism and dependency. For Cuba, it was sugar cane, for Chile it was copper, for Guyana, it was bauxite, and for Ghana it was cocoa. Today, of course in Venezuela it is oil. In every case, the colony existed in the past only as a supplier of inexpensive raw materials for the industries of the European colonizers.

In the late 1950s the international price of cocoa rose inordinately. Nkrumah’s party shrewdly taxed the growers to utilize the surplus for social advancement, stabilizing the cost of food and other consumer goods, and supporting the diversification of the Ghanaian economy. But by 1965 the price had collapsed, thus fueling the popular discontent sparked by the enemies of socialism. Raw material prices in the international market became a weapon against socialist development. The parallel with modern day Venezuela, the collapse of oil prices, and the escalation of opposition on all fronts cannot be missed. The economic hardships in Ghana were skillfully transformed into violence. In Nkrumah’s words:

An all-out offensive is being waged against the progressive, independent states. Where the more subtle methods of economic pressure and political subversion have failed to achieve the desired result, there has been a resort to violence in order to promote a change of regime and prepare the way for the establishment of a puppet government.

In addition to manipulating the price of cocoa exports (and Ghana’s import prices of finished goods necessary for industrialization), “..imperialism withheld investment and credit guarantees from potential investors, put pressure on existing providers of credit to the Ghanaian economy, and negated applications for loans made by Ghana to American-dominated financial institutions such as the I.M.F.”

By way of self-criticism, Nkrumah reflects:

We expected opposition to our development plans from the relics of the old “opposition”, from the Anglophile intellectuals and professional elite, and of course from neo-colonists… What we did not perhaps anticipate sufficiently was the backsliding of some of our own party members… who for reasons of personal ambition, and because they only paid lip-service to socialism, sought to destroy the Party.

Corruption proved to be a major problem in Ghana, as it does in every former colony, every emerging nation. The lack of robust democratic institutions-- denied by colonial and neo-colonial domination-- inevitably produces a corrosive contempt for the common good. Nor do the colonial masters leave proper mechanisms for reining in corruption after they reluctantly accepted independence. Countries like Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina that choose the path of national independence are plagued by this conundrum.

Of course, it is the security services of the imperialist countries that plant the seeds of reaction, nourish the seeds, and organize the harvest. In Ghana, they stirred secessionist sentiments of people in Ashanti, Togoland, and the Northern region. Previously, they had used the secessionist forces in Katanga to destabilize Congo and overthrow the patriot Patrice Lumumba. In our time, ethnic and religious differences were stoked in the former Yugoslavia and throughout the Middle East, including Iraq, Libya, and Syria to destabilize independent governments.

And the monopoly media in the capitalist countries unified around the joint themes that Nkrumah was an unpopular “dictator” and his government was entirely too close to the socialist countries, particularly the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the coup, a sham event was contrived to demonstrate Nkrumah’s unpopularity.

Much publicity was given in the imperialist press and on T.V., to the pulling down of the statue of myself in front of the National Assembly building in Accra. It was made to appear as angry crowds had torn the statue from its pedestal...But it was not for nothing that no photographs could be produced to show the actual pulling down of the statue… In fact when the statue was pulled down… no unauthorized person was allowed into the area. All those who were there at the time were those brought in by the military… Even the jubilant imperialist press evidently saw nothing strange in publishing photographs of bewildered toddlers, tears running down their checks sitting on a headless statue, while the same imperialist press extolled what it described as a “most popular coup”.

One cannot miss the parallel, thirty-seven years later, with the contrived, but dramatic overturning of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, a staged media extravaganza engineered by US authorities to demonstrate Saddam’s unpopularity.

In retrospect, Nkrumah asserts:

In fact, the fault was that, from the very circumstances in which we found ourselves, we were unable to introduce more “dangerous ideas”... What went wrong in Ghana was not that we attempted to have friendly relations with the countries of the socialist world but that we maintained too friendly relations with the countries of the western bloc.

The champions of national independence, especially the advocates for socialism need to heed this lesson, embracing those “dangerous ideas” that drive the revolutionary process forward, strengthening the hand of the revolutionaries and weakening the hand of the opposition. Backtracking and accommodation are not options.

The West on Trial

If Nkrumah’s Ghana is an example of the engineered coup sponsored by imperialism and its toadies, if the 1966 coup is a repeat of Iran in 1953 and a precursor of Chile in 1973, then the rigged election in Guyana was the prototype for the so-called “color revolutions” sponsored by the US and its allies in the period since the demise of European socialism.

As the leading figure in the post-war independence struggle of what was then the colony known as British Guiana, Cheddi Jagan soon realized that aspirations for independence were thwarted not only by the British administration, but more decisively by the US government. After his party’s sweeping victory in the 1953 House of Assembly elections, the British sent troops and suspended the colonial constitution out of hysterical fear of a Marxist takeover.

Writing in his post-mortem account, The West on Trial: The Fight for Guyana’s Freedom, Jagan noted: “…the main cause, I believe, for the suspension of our constitution was pressure from the government of the United States… We were not surprised, therefore that the US government gave its blessing to the British gunboat diplomacy… Ostensibly, the United States was urging the colonial powers to grant independence to colonial territories. But in reality, the independence was nothing more than the nominal transfer of powers to those who either conformed or showed signs of conforming to US policies.”

From the 1961 elections, where Jagan’s PPP won its third consecutive election, gaining 20 of 35 seats, until formal independence on May 26, 1966, the US poured millions of dollars into every imaginable plan to erode the popular support of the PPP. The opposition promised huge investments and loans that would be forthcoming with a pro-capitalist government. The opposition boycotted or refused to collaborate with any and all development programs or social measures, including a budget.

The capitalist media echoed the opposition with a shrill anti-Communist campaign. “All of this was written at a time when it is alleged that we had destroyed the freedom of the press! We did not own our own daily newspaper to counter the distortions and lies of the press. This is a problem which confronts all national governments interested in change,” Jagan remarked.

Violence was sparked and fanned by the opposition, loudly labelling the PPP “authoritarian.” Racialism between African-origin and Indian-origin Guyanese was stoked. The US labor movement’s infamous AIFLD (a collaboration with the CIA) fomented strikes built upon lies and distortions.

Well-connected US columnist Drew Pearson, writing in March of 1964 explained the US involvement:

The United States permitted Cuba to go Communist purely through default and diplomatic bungling. The problem now is to look ahead and make sure we don’t make the same mistake again… in British Guiana, President Kennedy, having been badly burnt in the Bay of Pigs operations, did look ahead.

Though it was not published at the time, this was the secret reason why Kennedy took his trip to England in the summer of 1963… [It was] only because of Kennedy’s haunting worry that British Guiana would get its independence in July, 1963, and set up another Communist government under the guidance of Fidel Castro.

…[T]he main thing they agreed on was that the British would refuse to grant independence to Guiana because of the general strike against pro-Communist Prime Minister, Cheddi Jagan.

The strike was secretly inspired by a combination of US Central Intelligence money and British intelligence. [A]nother Communist government at the bottom of the one-time American lake has been temporarily stopped.

Pearson acknowledges the massive and determined campaign of destabilization that culminated in a US-sponsored coalition of US-friendly parties edging out the PPP in a calculated, delayed independence. The orchestrated campaign of rumor, lies, and promises was whipped into a powerful counterforce to a popular, independent government. In this regard, Guyana was not different from the many so-called “color revolutions” that are brought to a boil by heavily foreign-funded, non-government organizations. The Defunct AIFLD has been supplanted by Solidarity Center, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Republican and Democratic Institutes, and myriad other acronymic NGOs that serve US foreign policy in a government-funded, surreptitiously government-funded, or privately funded fashion. Their footprints are all over Georgia, Ukraine, and a host of other countries targeted by US foreign policy.

Lessons from the Past

It should be crystal clear that there is nothing new in the meddling of the US and its allies (and other imperialist centers) in the trajectory of smaller, less powerful countries; neo-colonialism and imperialism are the dominant forms of late monopoly capitalism. Nkrumah details twenty interventions in the affairs of African states alone between December 1962 and March 1967. From the Greek war of national liberation in the aftermath of the Nazi defeat to the latest CIA move, the latest sanction, the latest military threat, the US, in particular, has been promoting and forcing dependency at the expense of the national sovereignty of the peoples.

But lessons can be drawn from the long, difficult struggle for national independence, a history of great sacrifice, fierce and selfless battle, but treachery as well. Nkrumah was right: The only absolute guarantee of national independence is to break the chains to capitalism, to choose the path to socialism. Among the best examples of success are the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), Cuba, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), all small nations defying the most lethal power ever assembled. When faced with the full brunt of imperialist aggression, the three governments found resolve from their faith in working people, their confidence that working people would unite and fight for a clear, radical vision of social justice, and their refusal to retreat even an inch from principle.

Moreover, borrowing Nkrumah’s words, it is necessary to embrace and press “dangerous ideas,” most necessarily, the idea of command of the state by the agents of change; independence is not possible with the enemies of independence nested in the state.

Nkrumah prefaced his book with excerpts from a letter to him from Richard Wright, the expatriate US author. Wright’s complex, often contradictory relations with progressive movements did not deter him from writing with a feverish intensity:

I say to you publicly and frankly. The burden of suffering that must be borne, impose it upon one generation!  ...Be merciful by being stern! If I lived under your regime, I’d ask for this hardness, this coldness…

Make no mistake, Kwame, they are going to come at you with words about democracy; you are going to be pinned to the wall and warned about decency; plump-faced men will mumble academic phrases about “sound” development; men of the cloth will speak unctuously of values and standards; in short, a barrage of concentrated arguments will be hurled at you to persuade you to temper the pace and drive of your movement…

And as you launch your bold programmes, as you call on your people for sacrifices, you can be confident that there are free men beyond the continent of Africa who see deeply enough into life to know and understand what you must do, what you must impose…

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

A Chapter in a Declining Empire

Everyone not yet anesthetized by the anti-Russia hysteria, should read Robert Parry’s The Rise of the New McCarthyism. The estimable Parry argues for similarities between today’s overheated political antics and those of an earlier time. He likens the relentless Russia-baiting of 2017 with the red-baiting of the post-war period often identified with Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.

But that is not quite right. Labelling the post-war delirium, characterizing the anti-Communist frenzy of the period as “McCarthyism” places far too much weight on that sole figure. True, Joe McCarthy exploited the climate, pushing the absurdity of the times to even more absurd levels. Yet we overlook the causes of the poisoned atmosphere just as surely as we would if we labelled this moment we live in as “Maddowism,” after the woman committed to exploiting the mania for ratings, after Rachel Maddow’s prodding anti-Russian sentiment to ever greater heights.

Political fever, like that of 1919 in the US, 1920-22 in Italy, the 1930s throughout Europe, 1946 and 2003 in the US, and again today in the US, is usually driven by crises-- threats or perceived threats to the system. It reflects weaknesses or vulnerabilities resulting from economic distress or international conflict. Whether the threat is real or perceived, identifiable or mythical, ruling classes use a crescendo of fear and alarm to foster an atmosphere of conformity and compliance.

During and after World War I, the Bolshevik revolution frightened the US ruling class into its first “Red scare,” an orgy of war-induced patriotism and media-crazed fear of mythical Red barbarity, an orgy resulting in mass arrests and deportations.

Similarly, the victory of the Soviet Union, the expansion of socialism, the intensifying struggles for national liberation, and a domestic left third-party challenge to two-party hegemony spurred the ruling class to spark a second Red scare. A critical mass of consensus was quickly achieved, persisting throughout the Cold War. Thus, it is misleading to say, as Parry does, that “...the 1950s version was driven by Republicans and the Right with much of the Left on the receiving end, maligned by the likes of Sen. Joe McCarthy as ‘un-American’ and as Communism’s ‘fellow travelers.’”

In fact, except for the “fellow travelers,” most of the non-Communist left and most liberals gleefully joined the red-baiting hunting party for “subversives.” Those who didn’t enthusiastically join the mob did little or nothing to diminish the campaign. Certainly, when the purges began to target the moderate anti-Communists, liberal voices did pathetically stir.

Consequently, those familiar with the history of Cold War US repression are not surprised by liberal complicity in the anti-Russia madness today. It should be no surprise that the liberals and the petty-bourgeois left betray the truth, make common cause with the forces of hate, distrust, and prejudice. In times of crisis, that’s what they too often do.

Outside of a few notable voices, liberal/left intellectuals are buying the anti-Russia frenzy. Despite the fact that US security services have an unbroken record of lies and manipulations, they are today manufactured to be the saviors of US “democracy.” The entertainment industry has cast “deep throat” Mark Felt-- a crazed, disgruntled FBI official, bitter because he didn’t inherit the directorship from J. Edgar Hoover-- as the hero of the Watergate debacle. Industry moguls stretch credulity to portray him as the courageous forerunner of the sleazy James Comey.

How quickly the liberals have forgotten the shame of 2003, when a ruling class-induced frenzy of lies and distortions prompted an unprovoked US invasion of a sovereign country. Have the scoundrels fabricating “evidence” against Iraq left or have they been removed from the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, etc.? Or are they still there, now busy spinning lies against Russia?

Liberals and the weasel-left should heed Parry’s warning: “Arguably, if fascism or totalitarianism comes to the United States, it is more likely to arrive in the guise of “protecting democracy” from Russia or another foreign adversary than from a reality-TV clown like Donald Trump.” Apart from flirting with war, the new consensus against Putin and Russia further erodes the remaining vestiges of democratic life in the US. Fear has brought us an Orwellian destruction of privacy and freedom, along with a murderous foreign policy and, now, a shamefully uncritical conformity.

War by Other Means

If “The New McCarthyism” is an inaccurate description of our times, what would be more suitable? Perhaps “The New Cold War” would be more appropriate since US aggression is both global and endless. The US is conducting war or war-like actions in Africa, the Middle East, South America, the Caribbean, and in Asia. Any and every country that fails to accept US global leadership becomes a target for US aggression.

This constitutes a desperate attempt on the part of US elites to maintain their place at the top of the hierarchy of imperialism, their ultimate mastery over all global affairs.

After the arrogant declaration of victory in the Cold War and the presumption of global governance, matters begin to fall apart for the champions of US global dominance. Former clients like Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein began to defy US hegemony. States like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador choose paths independent of the US template for the global economy. Other states like Yugoslavia, Cuba, and DPRKorea refused to acknowledge that socialist economic relations were outlawed in the post-Soviet era. Still other states like Iran, post-Yeltsin Russia, Libya, and Syria reject US interference in their and their neighbors’ affairs. And, of course, the world’s largest economy (PPP)-- PRChina-- does not accept a subordinate role in global affairs.

In short, the US role as self-appointed world policeman has been answered with far-from-servile acceptance by the world’s people.

The US response to resistance has been violence. Uncountable deaths and injuries from invasion, occupation, and remotely-mounted attacks have been visited upon combatants and civilians alike. The stability of numerous countries has been disrupted, usually under the cynical banner of human rights. Over the last two decades or so, US imperialism has restructured its aggression, relying more and more on surrogates, drones, and economic aggression, but with the same deadly results.

Obama’s cabal of liberal interventionists has refined and expanded the tactic of imposing international sanctions, a particularly brutal, but seemingly high-minded form of aggression.

We should not deceive ourselves. International sanctions may masquerade as a mechanism of civil enforcement, but they are, in fact, acts of war-- war by other means. The current world balance of forces allows the US to cajole, intimidate or manipulate UN member states to endorse strangling the economies of US adversaries under the guise of UN sanctions. The UN virtually rubber stamps the US initiatives to cut the lifelines of countries, organizations, even corporations that dare to ignore US dictates Similarly, the EU and NATO act as sanction lapdogs.. The consequences of sanctions can be just as destructive, as death-dealing, as overt military aggression. Shamefully, even Russia and PRC-- the victims of sanctions-- have collaborated on these sanctions in recent years, an opportunistic approach meant to ingratiate themselves with US leaders.

At the same time, no UN economic sanctions have been imposed upon the serial human rights violator, the apartheid state of Israel-- merely calls, resolutions, and condemnations.

In a toxic atmosphere of incredulous “sonic” attacks charged to Cuban authorities, provocative claims of Russian government meddling in everything from the electric grid to Facebook, allegations of Venezuelan drug trafficking, suspicions of Chinese espionage, and the many other marks of induced paranoia, the fight for truth is the only escape, the only response to the ugly throes of a diseased, embattled empire. Most assuredly, the empire is in decline, though most of its citizens are unaware, sheltered by a thick curtain of deceit.

Greg Godels (Zoltan Zigedy)
zzsblogml@gmail.com