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It doesn’t really matter who is at the helm in the US, the foreign policy remains the same. Central/South America has been deemed within the sphere of influence of the United States and states resisting vassal status are punished for their crimes.
I’m guilty of not looking past the news coverage on this one was getting the impression that Maduro was not only suspect in this leadership of the country, but that his election was somehow illegitimate. However the electoral system in Venezuela is quite doing well and possesses a fair amount of resiliency, if we are to take the Carter Centre’s word for it:
“Of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored,” said former President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Centre is a respected monitor of elections around the world, “I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” By way of contrast, said Carter, the US election system, with its emphasis on campaign money, “is one of the worst”.
The picture presented to us by more mainstream media doesn’t seem to reflect the Carter Centre’s statement. There are other incongruities in coverage as well as evinced by much of what John Pilger writes in his article on Counterpunch.
“A war has been declared on Venezuela, of which the truth is “too difficult” to report.
It is too difficult to report the collapse of oil prices since 2014 as largely the result of criminal machinations by Wall Street. It is too difficult to report the blocking of Venezuela’s access to the US-dominated international financial system as sabotage. It is too difficult to report Washington’s “sanctions” against Venezuela, which have caused the loss of at least $6billion in Venezuela’s revenue since 2017, including $2billion worth of imported medicines, as illegal, or the Bank of England’s refusal to return Venezuela’s gold reserves as an act of piracy.
The former United Nations Rapporteur, Alfred de Zayas, has likened this to a “medieval siege” designed “to bring countries to their knees”. It is a criminal assault, he says. It is similar to that faced by Salvador Allende in 1970 when President Richard Nixon and his equivalent of John Bolton, Henry Kissinger, set out to “make the economy [of Chile] scream”. The long dark night of Pinochet followed.
The Guardian correspondent, Tom Phillips, has tweeted a picture of a cap on which the words in Spanish mean in local slang: “Make Venezuela fucking cool again.” The reporter as clown may be the final stage of much of mainstream journalism’s degeneration.
Should the CIA stooge Guaido and his white supremacists grab power, it will be the 68th overthrow of a sovereign government by the United States, most of them democracies. A fire sale of Venezuela’s utilities and mineral wealth will surely follow, along with the theft of the country’s oil, as outlined by John Bolton.
Under the last Washington controlled government in Caracas, poverty reached historic proportions. There was no healthcare for those could not pay. There was no universal education”
The situation in Venezuela is indeed looking grim. We are being misdirected (again) as to how and why events are unfolding as they are. We not forget the lessons of Chile (1974) and should be wary of our media coverage that is filtered through the ideological lens of American foreign policy directives.
Awkward.
The theme of triumphal music continues here at DWR.
This is great stuff.
“Morgane Oger is the Vice President of the now ruling British Columbia New Democratic Party. The BC NDP is your typical left of centre political party. They have an ambitious social justice platform, spend most of their time letting us know how virtuous they are by claiming to speak for the voiceless, and have expressed a serious interest in increasing the number of taxpayer funded human rights organizations in the province. If you’re still stuck in your leftist bubble and haven’t experienced your awakening yet, this probably sounds like your party. If you’ve had your awakening, then you can likely see right through the whole mess and are painfully aware of the fact that like most political careerists that market to the social justice vote, they are quite willing to overlook some forms of violence and hatred in order to pander to the half-baked and trendy ideologies that have not yet discovered their proper boundaries.
The placement of boundaries really is the discussion to be had here. There is a growing movement that has not yet found its boundaries, and the patience and good nature of the citizenry appears to be approaching its limits. How much are we expected to put up with while maintaining the live and let live philosophy that most reasonable people espouse?
Live and let live is a reasonable and effective approach to a maintaining a harmonious society that’s made up of individuals with many different opinions, values, and beliefs. It works pretty well and is based on the idea that you are free to do as you please as long as you are not infringing on the rights of others. This allows people the freedom to practice their religion or to practice no religion, choose who they sleep with, choose who their friends are, choose their line of work, indulge all of their own interests – as long as those interests are legal, or even to alter themselves so as to appear to be opposite their original sex . You’ll generally get no objection from reasonable people on these basic rights. So far so good.
I am of the live and let live type. I make no objections to other people’s sexual preferences, lifestyles, religious views, choice of occupation, or any of the common topics that frequently do bring objections from one’s parents or siblings. In return, I ask that others not impose their view of the world on me in a way that causes me to either have to engage in activities that I object to, or to refrain from acting to prevent an obviously immoral action. Increasingly, this bargain is being degraded by those who wish to force us to think what they tell us to think, to accept their opinions and desires as concrete and unalterable fact, and to refrain from asking questions. Here, we run into a real problem. I’m not willing to go along with being bullied into agreement. I like to ask questions and I like to understand something completely before I go along with it. I like to weigh all the evidence and then make the best decision I can, based on that evidence. Increasingly, my desire to draw my own conclusions is being challenged by a highly aggressive and occasionally violent movement.
The movement that I’m referring to is the transgender movement. I’m hesitant to even call it a movement, as it’s made up of a wide range of individuals. However, it seems to behave as a movement and many of its adherents seem to be studying the same material. The reason I suspect this is that when I get into a minor argument on Twitter with a member of this movement, I can usually accurately predict the content and the outcome of the conversation very shortly after it begins. Many of these conversations are boring and irritating, but they’re necessary to have if you want to understand someone else’s position.
What I have been able to understand, so far, is that a portion of the transgender movement holds the position that a man who transitions into a woman, simply dresses as a woman, or says he sometimes feels like a woman, is the same as a woman who was born female and is therefore entitled to enter any female space he likes. Again, we have a problem here. I am quite willing to agree that he has the right to live as if he is a woman and I would never object or say that his decision is in any way morally inferior to any other way of living. Like most reasonable people, I’m willing to go along right up until the point where the behaviour begins to infringe on the rights of others. We’ve very much reached that point, and our provincial government appears to be complicit in the current aggressive overstep of the transgender movement.
It’s important to logically lay out my position that the transgender movement is overstepping its proper boundaries. In order to do that, I have to tell you something of myself. I’m an atheist. I could never be religious. This is because I fall into the category of people described by Pascal as being so made that I cannot believe. I am made this way and it is because of the way my mind works that I’m an atheist. I have no choice in the matter. I interpret information literally and I am unable to force myself into believing things that are untrue or even appear to be unlikely, based on the available evidence. I also object to compulsory enthusiasm, as this requires a similar tricking of one’s own mind. My mind is very mechanical, and it’s no surprise to me that I ended up as a machinist and an industrial mechanic. I like to design, repair, build, improve, and troubleshoot machines and their components. This work is very much in line with my nature. I was a very small child when I began taking things apart and making other things out of the parts. Proper and accurate categorization is very important to me. This is who I am and I expect others to live and let live when it comes to me.
The transgender movement looks to me to be exactly like a religion and it comes along with similar demands: an unwavering belief in implausible theories, demands of compulsory enthusiasm, and the demand that citizens and authorities look the other way while immoral actions take place under the spell of its ideology. In fact, here are some of the things that you are required believe in order to escape the hyper focused aggression of the transgender movement: That men have periods and menstrual cramps, too; that men should be allowed to enter women’s sports events if they say they’re women; that men should be allowed to enter women’s shelters if they say they feel like a woman; that men should be allowed in women’s and girl’s changing areas; that there are many genders; that people who don’t wish to have sex with a transgendered person maintain their position out of hate; that children should be exposed to the ideology of the transgender movement at an early age; that male criminals who would prefer to be in a female prison need only identify as female to make this a reality; and many other things that are being rapidly added to a growing list of preposterous ideas.
I cannot make myself believe that someone born a man can become a woman. My understanding of biology and evolutionary psychology is such that I would have to lie to myself in order to hold such an opinion. In addition to the available scientific information, my opinions are also formed by the fifty years that I have spent being alive and interacting with and observing friends, coworkers, parents, siblings, and children. I’m free, and wish to remain that way. I want to use my own mind, think my own thoughts, and I want to be honest and pursue knowledge for its own sake.
The fact that I cannot make myself believe that a man can become a woman does not alter the fact that I accept their right to try. It also doesn’t alter the fact that if it makes them happy, I support their right to engage in the pursuit of it. I treat their religion – the idea that gender is fluid – the same way that I treat other religions. I don’t even go so far as to say that they’re wrong. I simply say that, based on the available evidence, I don’t believe it and I can’t make myself believe it. I say that they’re welcome to believe it and also to live their lives as though it were true. I don’t understand why this isn’t enough for the transgender movement. I’m holding up my part of the live and let live bargain. Why won’t they?
The overstepping of the transgender movement consists of activities that I find morally reprehensible. There are constant threats of violence along with actual violence directed at feminists and lesbians from men claiming to be women. We see constant threats of financially crippling human rights complaints against those who question scientifically incorrect transgender dogma. Men are entering women’s sporting events and taking medals from female competitors. Women have been assaulted by men dressed as women in women’s change rooms. Women’s shelters now have to waste their precious resources hiring lawyers and defending themselves in court from men who feel entitled to dress as women and enter shelters where traumatized women could once find a reprieve from male violence. Young children are being indoctrinated into the transgender movement before they are old enough to understand very much at all. Some of these children are being given puberty blocking hormones and undergoing surgeries”
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