By Franz J. T. Lee

Seeing is believing, not thinking!

One of the latest international scandals is the fairy tale of Michael Moore about President Hugo Chavez Frias of Venezuela. In an excellent article Eva Golinger set the facts and records straight:

According to her: In an interview broadcast October 9 on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!,' the renowned and award-winning documentarian, Michael Moore lied vulgarly about his encounter with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez during the Venice Film Festival this past September."
(http://spanish.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=85099)

As part of the United States 'war of ideas,' of the big lies against Venezuela, she explains the fascist essence of this unfortunate interview: " ... in the end, this whole ridiculous tale told by Moore about his "meeting" with President Chavez is an attempt to avoid admitting before the US media that he met for three hours with the South American "dictator." And he probably liked it. Michael Moore is a most unfortunate coward."

Seeing is believing, not knowing!

Even Michael Moore has fallen victim of the ideological machinations, of placing blinkers on the mind and blindfolding the eyes with political propaganda and technological manipulation of the worst Goebbels genres.

Let us look at the fatal results of such imperialist corporate actions against Venezuela, of the destruction of global humanity, of its senses, mind and concrete utopian daydreams. Michael Moore is not an exception, he proves the golden rule of  betrayal of emancipatory endeavors.

Towards the middle of the 20th century, 'Freudomarxists,' like Eric Fromm, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, seriously have asked: what went wrong with the class consciousness of the metropolitan proletariat, with the working classes as a whole?

* Why did the German workers so happily vote their fascist butchers into political power?

* Why did so many global workers freely march into two world wars, into certain death, which within half a century resulted in abut 100,000,000 estimated casualties and deaths?

This was the price which humanity had to pay to rescue capitalist imperialism from a total collapse, from severe depression and recession.

Even the Marxist philosopher of hope Ernst Bloch was asking: why was it so difficult for the socialists to capture the revolutionary imagination of the European working masses?

* Why could the Third and Fourth Internationals not direct the workers toward the global class struggle?

* Why were the masses so easily abducted, convinced and destroyed by the fascists regimes?

Across the whole 20th century ... especially in the whole 'under-developed' world, including 'Soviet Russia,' 'Communist China, 'socialist Yugoslavia' and heroic Vietnam ... in spite of valiant class struggles, we could not annihilate capitalism and replace it with its direct opposite, with anti-capitalism, with scientific, philosophic socialism...

 
** Yes, sometimes it is necessary first to learn how and what to question. Only then we could give concrete answers, socialist praxis.

What is really left of all the valiant workers' struggles in Russia, China, Algeria, Southern Africa, Chile, Grenada, ... just to mention a few? Surely Cuba and Venezuela, and other class struggles, heavily attacked by world fascism, are hopes and results of what is really left.

Seeing with brains, 'theorizing'!

During the Hitler regime in Germany, the survivors claimed to have seen nothing, no concentration camps, no extermination of blacks, gypsies, communists or Jews. Something similar was happening in the apartheid regime, also in the gulags and in global Zionism. Also here in Venezuela, millions do not have the foggiest idea about the historic truth in which we are involved.

Only Seeing is deceiving ... Thinking is knowing!

What is worse: in the first place, because one sees with one's brain, millions, victims of a millennia old Mental Holocaust, many of us really could not, did not (still cannot) see anything beyond the capitalist status quo, the establishment. Because socialism is not en vogue, we had and still have no effective theoretical antidote against the ideological visions and vistas coming from capitalist topos ouranios. Across the centuries the infernal heat of this Moloch has scorched many of our human psi-factors, our erotic and exotic quintessence, our emancipatory powers. Blinded and blind-folded with tight consumer blinkers, we do not see our global Orwellian loony bin, the millions of surveillance cameras in London and elsewhere; we do not see the huge numbers of camps already constructed in the USA.

Yes, like Michael Moore, we see all over dictatorial ghosts, but we do not see the real ones right in front of our noses.

For whom do the church bells of St. Peter's Square toll?

Can the European workers, especially in Greece and France, still hear the crowing of the Gallic "Hahn" (Marx)?

Do they remember the brave communards who tried to storm heaven in Paris is 1870-1, at the eve of the birth of world imperialism?

Can we still venture beyond our immediate consumerist here and now, away from myopic ideology, from obsolete resistance methods which only fall on deaf corporate ears?

Also, we hear with our brains, which censure that which we are not supposed to register, for example, the hell of a noise below Los Alamos, since decades already.

Up to what are our Nobel Peace Prize winners?

Will we soon see "Pentagon Aliens" (Bill Lyne)?

What is in the air?

Do we smell a rat here in Merida, Venezuela?

Do we smell the smog, the toxic gases coming from the gray avalanche of cars, forming endless traffic jams? Do we smell capitalism?

Are we constructing fragrant socialism?

More questions yearning for praxical answers!

Do we smell the stench of the bloody Yankee boots coming from the military bases in Colombia?

Elsewhere do we smell the capitalist decay and putrefaction, the cesspools and quagmires?

No, we see nothing, we hear nothing, we smell nothing ....

Do we still feel anything?

Michael Moore, instead of disseminating hoaxes about Venezuela, please, please produce true documentals about the mortal coming agony of mankind, of world fascism.

The steady stream of lies about Venezuela

As Eva Golinger points out in her books, the constant stream of lies about Venezuela and its popular President Hugo Chavez are best seen as the leading edge of an integrated strategy of destabilisation and ‘regime change’ for the socialist-oriented, oil-rich nation.

These insistent, repetitious lies do have their precedents. In 1960 the then Chilean Senator, Salvador Allende, told the Chilean Senate he had witnessed “the brutal, deliberate propaganda … day by day and minute by minute they misrepresent what has happened in Cuba”. Naturally, media channels run by large private companies could not contemplate any sympathetic view of Cuba’s socialist revolution.

However the great the danger of these constant lies about Cuba, Allende pointed out, was that they replicated preparations for the earlier US overthrow of the democratic, reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. This 1954 coup was followed by decades of US backed dictatorships and the slaughter of more than 100,000 people in that Central American country. Allende was right. In 1961 the US launched an invasion of Cuba, but failed to back it up with US ground troops, and the intervention failed. Later on Allende himself, as the popularly elected President of Chile, faced the same ferocious media attack, before being murdered in the US backed military coup of 1973.

In the case of Venezuela, we do not need to go past the London-based Economist to see good examples of the calculated dishonesty. The Economist favours more the interests of British, European and (increasingly) Asian investors, than those of US corporations. Nevertheless, on the question of opposing a socialist government in Venezuela, there is common ground; and the level of journalistic ethics is similar.

Let’s look at their recent article ‘Venezuela’s foreign policy: dreams of a different world’, delicately subtitled ‘Arms and the Tyrants’ (The Economist, September 19 2009: 52). In a short article they manage to cram in at least four important lies, along with a couple of incidental ones.

First, it is said that President Chavez, in a world tour which included arms purchases from Russia, “got what he seemed to be seeking all along: the attention of the United States”. US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton is reported as being “worried” that Venezuela’s weapons purchases “might trigger an ‘arms race’ and … are ‘serious challenge to stability’”.

The advantage of this US-centred view of the world (‘getting the attention of the US’ as a prime aim) is that it dispenses with the need to explain actual motivations. The article makes no mention of the deployment of the US Fourth Fleet off the coast of Venezuela, and downplays to a much later paragraph reference to the Obama Administration’s build up of military bases in neighbouring Colombia. No mention that the US, despite its backing for the coup against Chavez in 2002, might be a threat to Venezuelan democracy. By these devices, The Economist presents Venezuela’s seeking weapons for self defence as the only identified threat to regional stability. The threat posed by US projection of imperial power into the South American continent is not mentioned.

Second, the Chavez world tour of ‘arms and the tyrants’ is presented as a threat to the US. The “top foreign policy” of Chavez is said to be “forging an anti-American political alliance with Iran, Syria, Belarus and Russia”. His overall aim is said to be “to stir up troubles for the United States in many places at once”. Later on it is said that some of the arms purchases by Chavez “seem to be a hasty response to an agreement last month under which Colombia gave the United States facilities at seven bases for anti-drug operations”.

However no sensible observer believes seven US military bases in Colombia have anything do with ‘anti-drug operations’. To the contrary, drug cultivation and wholesale trafficking around the world – from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Colombia – has always expanded with the presence of the US military. Similarly, it is absurd to call Venezuela’s response to US military threats ‘hasty’, given that over the last century the US has intervened militarily in *every* country in Latin America (some of them several times), including in Venezuela under Chavez.

The need for Chavez and his government to build alternative investment and financial relationships is made clear by the undeniable and relentless history of US aggression against independent governments in Latin America and more recently by the US-centred financial collapse. His recent visits included countries other than those mentioned, including China.

Venezuela’s foreign policy “top priority” is far from “anti-American”. It has been to build an alliance of sovereign countries in the Americas called ALBA. There are thirty-five countries in the Americas - only US-centric views equate “American” with the USA. Mexico City’s main airport makes this point, but indicating the hall for flights to ‘the United States of North America’.

The third major lie of the article concerns Unasur, the recently created Union of South American governments, of which Venezuela is a member. The Economist asserts “[Chavez] once again failed to obtain an explicit condemnation of Colombia’s [military] base agreement with the United States from Unasur”.

It is true there was not unanimity at Unasur. Colombia asserted its right to develop new military bases and refused to provide information on them to Unasur. True also that Hilary Clinton used Venezuela’s pending arms purchase from Russia (note that the US itself had refused to resupply parts for the Venezuelan military) to deflect attention from the new US bases.

Yet most South American countries – including non-ALBA members Brazil, Argentina and Chile – spoke out strongly against the US build up in Colombia. The nine-member ALBA group went on to say they reject “the installation of military bases of the United States in Latin America and the Caribbean .. [because they] endanger the peace, threaten democracy and facilitate the hegemonic interference” of the US in the region’s affairs. Chavez is hardly ‘failing’ in his diplomacy. It is the Colombian regime of Alvaro Uribe that has become increasingly isolated amongst its neighbours.

Some other incidental lies adorn The Economist’s article. The magazine criticises Chavez for recognising Abkhazia and South Ossetia, claiming that these two states “were carved from Georgia last year by Russian troops”. In fact, after the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, Abkhazia and South Ossetia had never been effectively incorporated into Georgia. It was the Georgian regime’s attempt (urged on by the US) to forcibly incorporate them into Georgia (and thus also NATO) that was roundly defeated in 2008, with Russian assistance.

The article also claims that Venezuela’s generosity in supplying discount oil and gas to developing countries occurs as “Venezuela’s refineries are struggling to supply the local market”. This is false and absurd. Venezuela has massive refinery capacity and fuel in Venezuela remains by far the cheapest in the Americas.

The fourth big lie is saved up to the end, and follows on that grand tradition of the great human rights abusers accusing others to deflect attention from themselves. Chavez is said to be “cultivating” regimes that are characterised by “rigged elections, media censorship, the criminalisation of dissent and leaders for life”. Not a touch of irony, as the death squads in Colombia murder trade unionists and civil leaders unchecked, as the Obama Administration pussyfoots around the coup regime in Honduras (which deposed a Chavez ally), as election fraud and bloody war rages in Afghanistan and as the US launches missile attacks on Pakistan.

It can be tedious to document such lies. They are so common and, no sooner is one lot done than the next day’s lies appear – if not in The Economist then in the Washington Post, The Australian or The Times. These monopolies count on the vulnerable, who do not have alternate sources of information, who do not read history and are able to be swayed by crude and often racist agitation.

In the bigger picture, this is a delegitimising process, organised by the private media monopolies which, in their hatred for the sort of popular democracy led by Chavez (as also in the past by Allende), are preparing the ground for coups, wars of intervention and conquest. It has been done before and – while these monopolies remain unchecked – it will be done again.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4879

*****

Venezuela is no tyranny

As Latin Americans witness the return of dictatorship – with Honduras suffering political executions, widespread repression and condemnation from human rights organisations about curtailing of press freedoms – it seems a strange time for the media to repeat opposition allegations that Venezuela is becoming a tyranny.

Venezuela is far from the "dictatorship which has a facade of democracy" described by General Raúl Baduel, who has been accused of corruption. What kind of tyranny oversees a 70% increase of participation in presidential elections, as Chávez has, or the government holding 13 free and fair elections in 10 years?

Of course, Venezuelan society and democracy is imperfect. One example is that corruption remains a very real problem. Opponents have tried to use this issue to disparage the government, though it pre-dates the Chávez era. It is therefore ironic that when measures are taken to tackle it, as is the case in legal prosecutions, these are cited as examples of a clampdown on political freedoms. Many Chávez-supporting politicians are under investigation and it paints a distorted picture to focus only on prosecutions against those opposed to Chávez.

Taking the two most prominent cases of those aligned with the opposition. With Baduel, the military prosecutors investigating the disappearance of more than $18.6m in 2006 and 2007 while he was minister of defence have decided to prosecute. He has had all the rights to a defence lawyer and transparent trial, yet so far his defence has not produced any evidence to counter the charges of corruption.

Manuel Rosales, infamously a signatory to the decree backing the 2002 military coup against Chávez, is one of the most notorious cases. He has allegedly been unable to show the source of millions of dollars in assets both in Venezuela and abroad. He fled to Peru and requested political asylum, but being given asylum by Peru is not proof of innocence. Recently Bolivia nearly broke diplomatic relations with Peru for granting asylum to three ministers from a previous government charged with responsibility for the October 2003 massacre in which 67 people were killed by the Bolivian army.

What cannot be said of Venezuela is that the right to protest is threatened. This year alone, the opposition have staged dozens of marches free from state harassment. On numerous occasions opponents and marchers have been invited to address the nation from the National Assembly.

In contrast, it was only 20 years ago that protests were met by brutal repression in Venezuela, with the Caracazo massacre by state security forces leaving 276 dead according to official figures and up to 3,000, according to claims, once mass graves were uncovered.

The opposition's hostile views of the Chávez government dominate the Venezuelan media. But that is not the reason why some radio stations were recently closed. These were operating illegally without proper licences and continued to refuse to comply with the law. More than 200 radio stations, most of which identify with the opposition, that were also operating irregularly but did renew their franchises continue to operate freely.

Respect for democracy is intrinsic to the particular model being followed by the Chávez government. It does not resort to violence – it wins elections. In contrast, it is noteworthy that the notable elements of the Venezuelan opposition have broadly sympathised with the illegal de facto government of Micheletti in Honduras. Maybe in Honduras we have a serious glimpse of what "democracy" would have been like in Venezuela had its violent attempts to overthrow Chávez been successful?
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4875

Maria Antonieta carrillo M  cel 0416-4738502