By Geraldina Colotti, on September 22, 2024.
The two top popes of the Venezuelan gusanos: Corina Machado and (In)mundo González Urrutia.
“It has never mattered to us that some European fascists vote for a resolution without any value against the sovereignty of Venezuela.” Thus, with the dignity and pride of one who feels heir to the Liberator Simon Bolivar, the president of the Venezuelan Assembly, Jorge Rodriguez, during an international press conference, commented on the decision of the European Chamber to “recognize” as “president-elect” of Venezuela, the former extreme right-wing candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia.
In the same tone was the reaction of the ambassador to the UN, Alexander Yanez, when he defined as a “ridiculous pamphlet” dictated by Washington the statement with which, in the Human Rights Council, 40 countries “denounced Nicolas Maduro”. In a subsequent statement, the Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Yvan Gil, clarified the terms, denouncing the attempt to reissue the failed Lima Group, initiated at the time of the previous self-proclamation, in 2019.
It is grotesque that it was the Argentine Foreign Minister, Diana Mondino, who guided the conduct of the group at the UN, the spokesperson of Javier Milei, who daily lowers the “chainsaw” on the basic rights of the Argentine people. It makes no sense for the representatives of European countries to define a declared and confessed coup leader like María Corina Machado as “leader of the democratic forces”. It is significant, however, that the magnate of digital platforms, Elon Musk, has received Milei with great fanfare and has now presented an award to the extreme right-wing Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni. All, evidently, great defenders of democracy. And equally “democratic” are the threats pronounced by the head of Black Water, Erik Prince, to reserve mercenary “surprises” for Venezuela, as in fact has happened, in the deafening silence of the European media.
However, even more symptomatic of the short-circuit prevailing in European countries is the vote of the “left” (liberal and imperialist) against Venezuela in the European Parliament, cast even by its representatives supposedly more sensitive to the defense of “rights”. This was the case of MEP Carola Rackete, elected by the Green and Left Alliance (AVS), who not only voted in favor of Venezuelan neo-fascism, but also in favor of Ukrainian neo-fascism, joining those who approved the use of European weapons, directly on Russian territory.
Several ecologists and members of the European left voted in favor of the war, together with the Popular Party and the liberals. The representative of the League, Matteo Salvini, spoke out, however, against the use of European weapons on Russian territory: as spokesman for those northern companies that have their interests in Russia, and certainly not against the interests of the military-industrial complex and NATO that directs it.
It is worth remembering that the environmentalist Rackete was elected by the Italian pacifist left for opposing the xenophobic policies of Salvini (now on trial) and for saving migrants in the Mediterranean, turned into a marine cemetery. Proof of how distant Chávez’s voice is when he rightly affirmed: “We need to change the system to change the climate”.
A short circuit that, while old and new fascisms advance, favored by the anomie imposed on the younger generations, reveals the “war pacifism” of a “left” without horizon, and brings back to the present the Marxist debate of the last century, which Venezuela renews.
However, in order to impose a new metaphysics, useful for the dominant system, facts and real responsibilities must disappear. And so, as the Bolivarian government denounced to the UN, the 27 victims of Machado’s “comanditos” disappear, while the denunciations for alleged human rights violations attributed to Maduro multiply.
What they are trying to reactivate at the UN is the so-called Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela, approved in 2019 by the Human Rights Council after the vote of the countries of the so-called Lima Group, which had “recognized” Guaidó, with the support of the Organization of American States (OAS).
This is a group of three international “experts” who do not report to the High Commissioner for Human Rights and express non-binding opinions, decided by an office in Panama. The mandate of the group (renewed three times) expires in September, and now a false legitimization of Mr. Urrutia’s ridiculous self-proclamation 2.0 is needed.
A farce difficult to mount between now and January 10, when the legitimate president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, will be sworn in before the parliament. That same parliament whose president, Jorge Rodriguez, was requested and recognized by Urrutia when he wanted to leave the country and take refuge in Spain.
Where will Mr. Urrutia take office, in a luxury room of the “government of Narnia”? Will Guaidó put a marzipan presidential sash on the self-proclaimed successor? Now, from Madrid, thrown by the coattails by the coup extremism of his team, the former candidate makes disjointed statements that embarrass the Spanish diplomacy itself, witness and guarantor that the whole operation took place in a relaxed atmosphere and in front of a bottle of whiskey, offered by the Spanish embassy in Caracas.
The videos and documents shown by the Bolivarian government bear witness to this but, in the media, rather than observing the merit, there is a discussion as to why they were disseminated… Respect for bourgeois legality only counts when it is necessary to line the pockets of Washington’s valets.
It is worth asking why this is happening, why Venezuela periodically jumps to the center of the world stage, becoming a hot topic even for those who do not even know where it is on the map. It is convenient for the future of the popular classes to decipher the interests hidden behind manipulated information that seeks to undermine facts and reason.
A first element should arouse suspicions: the media space used, in Europe, to attack the Latin American country as opposed to the one dedicated, for example, to Ecuador (sunk in an abyss of economic crisis and political criminality), to Argentina (where the “chainsaw madman” tramples every day all rights), or even to other big countries like Brazil and Mexico, where a noisy and violent extreme right wing tries by all means to overthrow democratic governments, using a scheme that is repeated in Colombia.
And instead, it is the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela that emerges as the quintessence of all evils: at least since it assumed that name almost 25 years ago, after a National Constituent Assembly that, in 1999, initiated a new constitution. A Magna Carta based on “participative and protagonist democracy”, and on national independence, with a broad guarantee of powers, in the spirit of the Liberator Simón Bolívar.
Previously, the massacres perpetrated by the governments of the Fourth Republic, appreciated by the U.S., were narrated in a few lines. And why, after the election of Hugo Chávez as President (December 6, 1998), did everything change? The former progressive officer of indigenous origin immediately catalyzed the fiercest hatred, unleashing the supremacist attacks that, in Europe, would fully explode only a few decades later. And which are now in full swing, with the advance of the fascism of the third millennium.
The figure of the Comandante has reactivated the old fear of the ruling classes against the wretched of the earth who organize themselves. A fear renewed later by the election of the former subway worker, Nicolás Maduro, at the head of the Bolivarian nation, and by a collective management headed by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). A burning slap in the face of the local oligarchy and a specter hovering over the victorious bourgeoisies in European countries.
It hurts that Bolivar’s “barefoot army”, mestizo and anti-hierarchical, has become “the army of all the people”, similar to the one built by Ho Chi Minh, and has so far rejected all kinds of attacks and flattery. It burns that it defends the sovereignty of the country and not the mercenary interests of U.S. imperialism.
The (manipulated) information spread in Europe on Venezuela indicates three elements that question (and unmask) the true nature of bourgeois democracy.
In the first place, by targeting a country that possesses extraordinary resources, fundamental for a capitalism in structural crisis, the attack on Venezuela unmasks the real interests that drive imperialist wars, sometimes defined as “humanitarian”. For having denounced them, giving names and surnames, the founder of the Wikileaks site, Julian Assange, almost died in prison. And after years, he could only get out at the price of being subdued, and of having “recognized” the system he had unmasked.
That Bolivarian Venezuela proudly claims its sovereignty in the face of an imperialism that submits European governments to NATO, and to a European Union (of capital and finance), which in turn submits the economies of the member states, is an unbearable truth: a truth to hide and distort by deploying all the power of the ideological apparatus of control.
And here lies the second element, the second unmasking that produces the “truth of Venezuela”, as President Maduro often says. A truth denied, distorted or discredited, as we are seeing after the presidential elections of July 28. Let’s talk about another important chapter of the systemic crisis of capitalism, the crisis of the “democratic” institutions that sustain it, both at the level of international and national organizations, emptied and demolished on the basis of the war economy and the society of control that is its correlate.
Take, for example, Italy, a country under the umbrella of NATO, its gendarme in the Mediterranean and one of its main strongholds in Europe. Since the 1980s, since the defeat and demonization of the extraordinary cycle of struggle of the 1970s, in which the popular classes tried to “do as in Russia” and build “one, one hundred, one thousand Viet Nam” as Che said, parliament has been deprived of its decision-making authority by decree.
With the passage from the First to the Second Republic (with which the Italian bourgeoisie changed sides by resorting to the courts), a neo-authoritarian involution was thus “normalized”, which ignored popular decisions (referendums and pacifist demonstrations), to the point of modifying the Italian constitution: because it repudiated war and fascism, when wars were wanted, calling them “humanitarian”; and because it prohibited the reconstitution of the fascist party, but fascism had to be “whitened”, to the point of bringing it into government, without calling it by name and surname.
The use of institutional artifices as weapons to undermine the popular will is very evident now in France, where the extreme right is governing, even if the majority of the votes went to the radical left. What would have happened if instead of Emmanuel Macron there had been Chavez or Maduro? And what about the genocide in Palestine, the so-called “targeted assassinations” carried out by the Zionist regime and first by the Pentagon, terrorism with impunity, when a southern country is prevented from even making a defensive reaction?
And what about the “sanctions” unilaterally and illegally imposed on countries not welcomed by Washington, but avoided by the Zionist regime even in the face of genocide of these proportions and the violation of all UN norms and resolutions? Meanwhile, on behalf of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen traveled to Ukraine to deliver to Zelensky not only a new package of European weapons and a green light to use them on Russian territory, but also to transfer to his army Russian assets “frozen” in the EU.”
The same mechanism was used against Bolivarian socialism, by stealing gold from British banks. A gigantic violation of international legality, carried out on the basis of the artifice of “recognizing” a character not elected by the people but “anointed” by the United States as “interim president of Venezuela”. A normalized and refined mechanism, because the bourgeoisie always treasures the highest point reached in the repression of the popular classes, while at the same time it dedicates itself to destroy the historical memory, to prevent them from using in their benefit the experience of past revolutions.
And so, as we see in Palestine with the policy of the colonists to impose new occupations, the same is happening with Venezuela. In view of the ridicule and failure of the previous “self-proclamation”, they are now trying to “legitimize” another one by inventing a false electoral victory, giving the impression that there was a Chavista fraud against Edmundo Gonzalez, the paper candidate of the coup leader Maria Corina Machado.
A lie that is only possible at the cost of ignoring, as the European media did, the extraordinary street demonstrations in favor of the reelected president, Nicolás Maduro. Only at the cost of ignoring that this same scheme, now used by the Venezuelan ultra-right, is the one used by the fascist international that operates between the US, Latin America and Europe: in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, etc.
And here lies the third element, which refers to the great monopolistic concentration of the media, the counterpart of economic concentration. A point that highlights the formidable short-circuit that has occurred at the ideological level, as a consequence of a semantic bombardment on a global scale, carried out in the name of the “fight against the two totalitarianisms” (Nazism and communism).
A trap that has imposed a “democratic” totalitarianism, based on metaphysics and censorship. All in the name of “pluralism” and “freedom of expression”, useful above all to deny the fierce asymmetry inherent in the contradiction between capital and labor, and between peoples and imperialism. And to impose the mantra that there are no alternatives to capitalism.
A short-circuit favored by the circularity and horizontality of social networks and platforms, which nevertheless conceals their proprietary interests, their omnipresence (with big data) and their objectives linked to unbridled consumption and social control.
A circularity and gratuitousness that would only be possible from a global governance of resources, the fruit of popular power and the ideals of equality and social justice, and not from the pursuit of profit. A vision of the world that would lead to increase the advantages of global communication in favor of the development of the species and not its destruction as is happening through the use of artificial intelligence for military purposes or to induce new addictions.
The more capital globalizes and markets are interconnected, in spite of their endemic conflict, the more it determines the fragmentation of the productive fabric and the fragmentation of the labor force, hindering the necessary project of a new unity of classes; the more capital ignores limits and frontiers, the more it raises them to the infinite masses of human beings, victims of the gigantic war against the poor that the system has unleashed, and that prevents us from uniting against the common enemy.
The more the war hegemony led by NATO imposes itself in Europe, extending its imperialist tentacles against Palestine, Russia, China and that part of Latin America which, like Venezuela, shares the ideals heroically defended by Cuba or Nicaragua, the more necessary it is to paint a world upside down and impose an adequate narrative.
Geraldine Colotti
It is in this triple key that we can understand the chain of existing complicities, at the European level, against the “truth of Venezuela”, and the rubber wall against which all evidence bounces to establish rights and wrongs, on the basis of a real democracy, peace with social justice and the common good.
Geraldina Colotti is an Italian journalist and writer, international analyst and former guerrilla fighter.