During the 2013 presidential election he claimed that Chávez’s spirit visited him in the form of “a little bird”. On another occasion, Maduro compared himself to Stalin. “I am just like Stalin. The moustache is exactly the same,” he remarked in 2015.Part of the problem of mentioning war propaganda claims is that you wind up spreading them.
The comparison extends beyond the merely aesthetic. Like Stalin, a party bureaucrat who assumed power after the pioneering Lenin, Maduro will be rembered [sic] not as the revolution’s saviour but as its gravedigger.
I'm going to make a wild guess here. I'm guessing that if Leon Trotsky, or Grigory Zinovyev, or Lev Kamenev had proclaimed themselves head of the government, had been recognized as such by the governments of the US and various European countries, made no secret about taking orders directly from Washington or London or Germany, and had declared themselves ready to accept foreign military intervention to install them as actual head of government in the USSR, they probably would not be giving public speeches and media interviews and driving around Moscow unmolested by the police two and a half weeks after they declared themselves Head Honcho. Which is the case today with Juan Guaidó in Venezuela.
Have I mentioned yet how this is one of the weirdest coup attempts I've ever heard of?
Not that it will make any difference to the characters involved in this effort speadheaded by future Great Statesman and Savior of the American Republic Mike Pence, professional warmonger and National Security Adviser John Bolton, and Iran-Contra criminal Elliott Abrams. But here's a slight bit of perspective on this particular bit of propaganda, from Jon Lee Anderson, Nicolás Maduro’s Accelerating Revolution New Yorker 12/11/2017, describing a public event:
Delcy Rodríguez, the [Constituent] assembly’s president, led a tour of an exhibition of photographs documenting the President’s life. There were photos showing him as a young union leader, with Chávez, with Fidel Castro; one showed him as a toddler wearing a mariachi’s sombrero. Rodríguez narrated as the group walked: “You’re a good man, Mr. President. Here you are with the Pope.” She came to a black-and-white image of a young Maduro, addressing a crowd with a handheld megaphone. “You’re a man of many facets, which have not been shown, because of the media lynching you’ve been subjected to, Mr. President,” she said. “But here, in the constituent assembly, we want to show you as you really are.”Also of some interest from the same article:
When the tour was over, Maduro, smiling broadly, thanked Rodríguez, and joked about how he was usually portrayed as a villainous “tropical Stalin.” Turning to the audience, he said, “No one will take the good out of me. In all my humility, here I am.” [my emphasis]
... as José (Pepe) Mujica, a left-wing former President of Uruguay, told me, “What helps Maduro most is the nature of his opposition.” The opposition is divided into three major parties and several smaller ones, with little in common other than the desire to resist Maduro. After the elections in 2015, it appeared united by the mandate to recall him but then spent months bickering over the right way to do so. During the protests, as scores of young demonstrators were killed, it was unable to convert widespread outrage into a political program. “The Venezuelan opposition is truly the gang that cannot shoot straight,” an American official who has worked for decades in the region told me. “Over the years, they’ve had every opportunity to kick out Chávez and now Maduro, and they always fuck it up.”Threat inflation is one of the worst plagues of American foreign policy. "Hitler", "Stalin" and "Munich" are three stock magic words in the incantation.
Few people in Venezuela seem to believe that the opposition speaks for the poor, or for the country’s large mixed-race population. When I visited early in Chávez’s Presidency, business executives—who were universally white—referred to him unabashedly as “that ape.” With Maduro, the disdain is subtler, but only a little: they call him “that bus driver.” In response to Maduro, the opposition has tilted even farther to the right, reaching out to conservative allies, including the government of Mariano Rajoy, in Spain. Last February, Lilian Tintori, the wife of Leopoldo López, met with Donald and Melania Trump to talk about human rights in Venezuela. (When Tintori spoke of her husband’s imprisonment, Melania reportedly commiserated that the White House could feel similarly confining.) A photograph of Tintori posing with Trump circulated in Venezuela, where it was widely seen as evidence of crass opportunism.
I wonder how long it will be before the Triad of War (Pence, Bolton, and Abrams) start calling Maduro "Hitler."
If we're going to have open US military action in Venezuela, we have to get there because we only even go to war against "Hitler". Ho Chi Minh was "Hitler", Saddam Hussein was "Hitler", etc.
To be fair to George Eaton's piece, this is a decent capsule description of recent history and one important to remember:
Between 1998 and 2012 GDP per capita more than tripled, and the country, long exploited by an entrenched oligarchy, achieved the lowest level of inequality in the region.Venezuela is a petrostate, hugely dependent on world oil prices. It's reasonable to ask why the Chávez and Maduro regimes didn't do more to diversify the economy or invest more capital in development of the oil industry itself. Americans and Europeans have a bad habit of using "corruption" as a blanket description for the problems of any country poorer than their own. Which is partially true in Veneuela's case. But that belongs to the "curse" part of the blessing-curse of being a petrostate. That's true in good times as well as bad. And corruption doesn't stop the bonanza of high oil price years. For people who pay attention to such things, the Chávez government did have some success in promoting the construction industry and made a serious attempt to develop Venezuela's stagnant agriculture. But "keepin' 'em down on the farm" proved to be in insuperable challenge when urban opportunities generated by the oil industry were so attractice.
But its overdependence on oil – the “resource curse” that has haunted Venezuela – left it perilously exposed to a 40 per cent collapse in prices in 2014. ... The haphazard nationalisation of companies – with experienced managers removed – led to a sharp fall in investment and the rise of a new kleptocratic elite.
Does Guaidó's "government"-in-waiting have such plans? Will American TV pundits ask? (Yes, those are rhetorical questions!)
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| "Protecting" Latin America from Europe, Theodore Roosevelt style (Wikimedia Commons) |
It must be understood that under no circumstances will the United States use the Monroe Doctrine as a cloak for territorial aggression. We desire peace with all the world, but perhaps most of all with the other peoples of the American continent. There are, of course, limits to the wrongs which any self-respecting nation can endure. It is always possible that wrong actions toward this nation or toward citizens of this nation in some state unable to keep order among its own people, unable to secure justice from outsiders, and unwilling to do justice to those outsiders who treat it well, may result in our having to take action to protect our rights; but such action will not be taken with a view to territorial aggression, and it will be taken at all only with extreme reluctance and when it has become evident that every other resource has been exhausted.So I guess we don't need a Mike Pence Corollary to send in the troops to install Juan Guaidó. But with seriously bad actors like Pence, Bolton, and Abrams running the show, this will not end well. At this point, it's only a question of how much damage they will do.
Moreover, we must make it evident that we do not intend to permit the Monroe Doctrine to be used by any nation on this continent as a shield to protect it from the consequences of its own misdeeds against foreign nations. If a republic to the south of us commits a tort against a foreign nation, such as an outrage against a citizen of that nation, then the Monroe Doctrine does not force us to interfere to prevent punishment of the tort, save to see that the punishment does not assume the form of territorial occupation in any shape.
The case is more difficult when it refers to a contractual obligation. Our own government has always refused to enforce such contractual obligations on behalf of its citizens by an appeal to arms. It is much to be wished that all foreign governments would take the same view. But they do not; and in consequence we are liable at any time to be brought face to face with disagreeable alternatives. On the one hand, this country would certainly decline to go to war to prevent a foreign government from collecting a just debt; on the other hand, it is very inadvisable to permit any foreign power to take possession, even temporarily, of the custom-houses of an American republic in order to enforce the payment of its obligations; for such temporary occupation might turn into a permanent occupation.
The only escape from these alternatives may at any time be that we must ourselves undertake to bring about some arrangement by which so much as possible of a just obligation shall be paid. It is far better that this country should put through such an arrangement, rather than allow any foreign country to undertake it. To do so insures the defaulting republic from having to pay debt of an improper character under duress, while it also insures honest creditors of the republic from being passed by in the interest of dishonest or grasping creditors. Moreover, for the United States to take such a position offers the only possible way of insuring us against a clash with some foreign power. The position is, therefore, in the interest of peace as well as in the interest of justice. It is of benefit to our people; it is of benefit to foreign peoples; and most of all it is really of benefit to the people of the country concerned. [my emphasis]
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