Chile Redux

Putting the clamps on Venezuela

Venezuela has committed the unpardonable sin, at least in the eyes of the U.S. and Venezuelan power elite. Since 1999, it has been electing socialist governments that are feeding and healing the poor. They have also clawed back much of the nation’s mineral wealth from the ravenous oligarchy that has neglected and impoverished the people for hundreds of years.

The average American knows little about Venezuela other than what she hears on mass media. What she learns is false, cherry-picked, or lacking context.

When the mass media agree on an issue, be very, very suspicious. They usually agree for one of two reasons: First, when the truth is obvious, they would look like fools to deny it. The Earth is spherical, Grant is buried in Grant’s tomb, Iran is ruled by a corrupt theocracy.

The second reason is that the power elite are often up to no good. Men love the dark when their deeds are evil. What better way of keeping the average citizen in the dark than to repeat contradictory, irrevelant or false stories over and over again? Unanimity of the media is effective. The mental fog thrown up to obscure reality is hard to penetrate; it takes work to see through it.

Fantastical concoctions of misinformation, defamation, stories made from thin air purporting to reveal the real plot behind events,   travel by email and blogs with thousands and even millions of viewers. The originators of such misinformation usually claim to have connected the dots to reveal the true reason for the evil in the world. If the propagandist can interweave several conspiratorial tales, it multiplies their impact, much like a good mystery novel.

Their purpose is the same as bullshit: to erase the boundary between truth and falsehood. Humans have problems with contradictory narratives. We tend to seize upon the simplest story or the one that seems internally consistent. As Pooh-Bah would have said, bullshit is “merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”[1] The technique is to 1) confuse people to the extent that they don’t know what to believe, and then 2) repeat the big lie over and over until they believe. That’s the effect of the emails, irrespective of the writers’ intent.

But back to Venezuela. It should be obvious that the mass media, owned by our power elite, is presenting a united front against the the Maduro administration. Their intent is to convince Americans that the regime is corrupt, dictatorial and dangerous. Since contrary positions seldom appear in the media, the average American, having never visited Venezuela, studied its history, watched or read credible foreign news outlets, or even talked with a native Venezuelan, this propaganda is effective. Successive U.S. administrations have refined and perfected it for at least 125 years[2]

The mainstream media’s treatment of Venezula might be a little more believable if it were not so routine. Most baby boomers can recall the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Unless they do some serious research, however, they will never know the disgraceful role played by the U.S. military.

The invasion and genocide in East Timor by the Indonesian army in 1978–80 was ignored by the mass media because the U.S. encouraged the invasion. Our government even furnished arms to the invading forces. There was Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1991. U.S forces invaded Iraq in 2003, selling the invasion to Americans on the basis of lies. Going further back there was Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. The mass media, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, shamelessly parroted the government’s war propaganda until the elite finally turned against the war.

Hugo Chavaz and his successor, Madura, have been in the crosshairs of the last four U.S. administrations (including the present one). It is not hard to predict how the media spin the story. They are portraying Venezuela as a failed state, with a corrupt government. They portray Nicholas Maduro, Chavaz’s handpicked successor, as a dictator. The object, of course, is regime change. The fact that Chavez and Maduro won a majority of the votes in elections that were universally proclaimed as fair is beside the point.

Venezuela sits upon the world’s largest oil reserves, the Orinoco Basin. Big Oil wants to keep its finger on the country for one reason: The bane of the oil industry is not scarcity; on the contrary, it is overproduction. Too much oil makes the price go down. It is in the interest of Big Oil that oil remains scarce and therefore expensive. The easiest way to control the price of oil is to control its production. They strive for an optimum price point that maximizes the price of oil but does not induce people to reduce their driving or become more energy efficient.[3].

True, Venezuela is suffering from a severe decline in the price of crude oil. Oil has been the sole source of international currency that Chavez and now Maduro have used to improve the life of the poor, and the decline has put the economy in a tailspin. Inflation has rendered food harder to buy and the poorer segment of the population is suffering hardship. Unfortunately, some shortages in essential foods are the result of hoarding on the part of the businesses owned by the oligarchy.

 Jimmy Dore recently interviewed Abbe Martin from Empire Files, who has recently visited Venezuela. The interview is enlightening and strongly recommended.

From the time Chavez became president in 1999, the oligarchy has been bent on overthrowing the government he founded. In 2002, with the encouragement of the U.S., they attempted a coup. They kidnapped Chavez from the presidential palace, and flew him to a prison island in the Caribbean. They replaced Chavez with Pedro Carmona, a wealthy businessman. Carmona declared the Constitution a nullity and proceeded to round up Chavaz’s supporters.

Carmona lasted a little over a day before a mass uprising ousted him and restored Chavez to power. Carmona fled to Colombia, where he now lives. The U.S. emerged from the affair with mud on its face.

The poor in Venezuela are Indians and Negro-Indian with dark skin. A small white upper class of Spanish ancestry have oppressed and exploited them for centuries. When you watch video clips of the rioting in Venezuela, examine the skin color of the rioters. Most of the rioters have light skin, which should tell you who is actually fomenting unrest. It is an irony that members of the upper class—who are not experiencing shortages—are the ones that are rioting.

They cannot bear the loss of power to the lower classes. They are furious that the wealth that they themselves were draining from the country is now devoted to a public purposes. Although the schools, clinics, hospitals, water systems and other public works that the Chavistas are building have already improved the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of average Venezuelans, those improvements are of little concern to the upper classes. They want “their” country back like it has been for hundreds of years and out of the hands of the rabble.
It remains to be seen how this game will eventually play out.

Finally, for commentary that is also entertaining, watch a takedown of a recent show on Venezuela.

---

1. Gilbert & Sullivan, The Mikado, (1885) dialogue following No. 19.  ↩
   
2. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, linguist, author, and public intellectual: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon (1988); Reprinted edition (2002). To watch a moving and horrifying full-length film about Chomsky and the atrocities he has worked to expose, see Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992).  ↩
   
3. It is likely that we will never run out of oil. Global warming will force us (if we are wise) to reduce our production of greenhouse gases. A large percentage of greenhouse gases comes from burning oil.   ↩