John Bolton, the face of Trump’s capitalism at its ugliest.

If you want a proven extreme rightwing war-monger as your National Security Advisor, you can do no better than this man, appointed to that post by Trump. In or out of office, he has backed US military involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen.  He is a proponent of the first use of nuclear weapons (Bomb the buggers to kingdom-come and ask questions afterwards). Reports of his preparing for military intervention in Venezuela, on the basis of his hawk-ish record, can be believed. He has denied that immediate military measures planned, but emphasises that everything is on the table. Trump’s record of unpredictability suggests that anything could happen at any time.

Manifest destiny

The United States, for most of the past two hundred years, with minor rest periods, such as the isolationist years of the 1930s and early 1940s (when the Great Depression gave the capitalists greater things to worry about), has considered that its  “manifest destiny”  is to rule the world. The concept started off as the god-given right to let nothing and nobody stand in the way of Americans driving westwards across the North American continent(Just as the Spanish and Portuguese had marauded their way across South America), committing genocide on the way. Manifest destiny was then embodied in the Monroe Doctrine, which originally committed the American government to driving European powers (Particularly England and Spain, of course) out of North and South America. Then in 1823, the US government confirmed the doctrine as giving it the right to dominate the entire western hemisphere. Monroe has held ever since and thus it is that South and Central America are to be controlled as Washington’s backyard, regardless of the wishes of the people who live there, who thereby become mere “unpeople”, to use George Orwell’s term, which can usefully be applied to people whose interests and very existence can be ignored when they stand in the way of American policy. The Monroe doctrine is loved by Trump, who reflects it in his America First, America First bluster and silly hat. It also backs the dominion theology of the evangelical right, who take literally the Bible’s dangerous nonsense that God gave man  – American man, in particular –  dominion over the whole of His creation, so that there is no need to worry about climate change or mass extinction of plant and animal species, because God will provide.

Venezuela’s oil

Venezuela is the latest victim. It has the world’s largest known reserves of oil and the US moguls cannot wait to get their hands back on it.

Iraq

Why were Bush father and son, together with poodle Blair, so eager to invade Iraq?

Libya

Why was Bush junior, together with poodle David Cameron, so eager to help depose Muamma Gaddafi, unleashing the protracted murderous chaos in Libya?

Why did the CIA, in 1953, aided and abetted by MI6, depose the secular, progressive Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadegh, sowing the seeds of the present-day mad-mullah regime?

Suez

Why did Britain, France and Israel wage the disastrous Suez war in 1956?

I had been a university student for only a month, when I had to blow a whole week’s allowance on the train fare to London, in order to join my first ever political demonstration in Trafalgar Square, called to demand an immediate end to the war. Egypt had been invaded as punishment for nationalising a bit of its own territory, the Suez Canal, the quickest route to and from the oil-rich Gulf.  The invasion of Egypt was a criminal act and it cost Britain dearly and lost Prime Minister Anthony Eden his job.

Syria

Why is the USA so intent on bringing about regime change in Syria, helping to make this country hell on earth?

Iran

Why is the USA so intent on undermining the economy of Iran?

Why has Washington worked so hard, expending billions of dollars, to undermine the leftist governments of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela?

All these questions can be answered with a single word: oil.

Apart from the years of the two world wars, the foreign policies of The USA and Britain, throughout the 20th century and on into the 21st century, have been overwhelmingly devoted to the imperialist protection of their oil supplies by having as much control as possible over the Middle East and any other part of the world with rich reserves of oil.

My personal political awakening came at the age of 16, when in 1953 I read in my Father’s newspaper that Britain’s 2-years old Tory government had colluded with the USA in deposing Mossadegh, the Prime Minister of Persia (as Iran  was then called) in a military coup, because his leftist government intended to nationalise the massive oil industry. This struck my young self as being so “unfair”. After all Britain’s post-war Labour government had nationalised several industries, so why shouldn’t Persia do the same!

Venezuela

Venezuela won its freedom from the Spanish colonial power in 1821. There was then one autocratic regime after another until the first democratic governments in the 1950s. Exploitative regimes, subordinate to the USA, survived on oil royalties, allowing most of the profits to be exported and failing to invest in diversification of the country’s weak economy, which remained dependent on oil, coffee, gold and cocoa.  Apart from oil extraction, the revenues of which benefited the multinational giants, the biggest industry was corruption, which enriched a tiny elite and left the vast majority of the population in various degrees of poverty.

Chavez and Maduro

Hugo Chavez, who was elected President in 1999, holding office until his premature death in 2013, nationalised the oil industry and used its revenues to finance massive programmes of improvement in housing, health, education and the elimination of poverty. The USA inspired and financed a coup attempt in 2002, which failed. Venezuela’s continued defiance of American foreign policy requirements and denial of access to its oil riches have incensed Washington.

Maduro has aimed to build on Chavez’s legacy, but the global economic crisis led to a crash in commodity prices in 2014 and saw the price of oil plummet, taking a sharp nose-dive from August 2017, creating severe problems for the country’s economy, which the USA has sought to exploit ruthlessly, by imposing a programme of sanctions, all aimed at undermining Maduro’s government.

The USA wants only subordinate governments in its backyard. The economy of any disobedient country must be squeezed until the pips squeak. At various times, this policy has been applied to most countries in South America, quickly bringing the wayward child to heel. The policy has been applied to Cuba for 60 years and has failed. Hence the labelling of Cuba as a terrorist state, which is utter baloney. The squeeze was put on Chavez’s government and still Venezuela resisted. With the inauguration of Maduro on January 10th, Trump’s ego could take no more and so stronger punishments had to be applied. But for the sanctions, 50 per cent of Venezuela’s oil would go to US refineries. That has been blocked, decimating Maduro’s economy. Not only is Venezuela starved of dollar income, it is also denied credit. These two sanctions result in an inability to import medicines, food and other goods.  Hence the empty shops and sabotaged hospitals.  Any country or company infringing Trump’s sanctions is liable to be hounded with multi-million dollar fines.

The plan is to bring down the Maduro government and support a new compliant regime.

The hyper-inflation is not the result of socialist planning; it is the direct consequence of the externally imposed sanctions.  It could be swiftly cured by issuing a new currency with its value pegged to a stable currency, such as the dollar. Britain and the EU, if their professed concern for the plight of the people of Venezuela were genuine, would give financial support for such a move, but they are too subservient to Trump.

 

Neo-liberalism, red in tooth and claw

Laying the ground for an eventual coup against Maduro, the USA has implemented interventionist measures which have been honed to perfection in use elsewhere in South America, generously funding rightwing oppositionist groups. There have been crocodile tears for the dire poverty of the mass of Venezuelans while manipulating sanctions in order to make their conditions worse. If the regime should fall  – and make no mistake, democratic reform is not the objective  –  Trump, Bolton and the EU will be satisfied with nothing less than regime change. Then would come the shock treatment as practiced in Chile after the fall of Salvador Allende.  Venezuela would suffer the full blast of neo-liberal economics as developed by the Chicago Boys, who studied the theories of Milton Friedman (Margaret Thatcher’s inspirational economist) of the Chicago University Business School and ruthlessly applied them in Chile under the dictatorship of Pinochet: privatisation of public sector assets, deregulation of the banks and all industries. Strict curbs on trade unions, abolition of political parties and deeply penetrating austerity for all public services. Unemployment, inflation and poverty will grow, but the rich will get richer, while foreign investors will have a wonderful time. The vultures are circling, awaiting this outcome.

There are precedents for all this in South America.

Brazil

The USA, under President Kennedy, engineered a coup in Brazil in 1964. President Goulart, a left-winger, was deposed in favour of Ranieri. Civil rights  were suspended, all political parties were abolished. Thousands suffered abduction, torture, “disappearance”, or exile.

In 1968 I was a British delegate to the International Festival for Youth and Students in Sofia. A handful of students from Brazil had managed to get there clandestinely by circuitous routes and had to keep their presence anonymous for fear of the consequences when they returned home.

Uruguay

It was the turn of Uruguay in 1971, when Juan Bordaberry became President. He dissolved the National Assembly and ruled by decree. He did Washington’s bidding and so he enjoyed the backing of his own military and the USA.

Chile

It was Chile’s turn in 1973.  The people of Chile had the audacity to elect a left-winger to the presidency. Richard Nixon and the CIA inspired and funded oppositional organisations and organised a coup. Their creature was Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973 to 1981, backed by the USA throughout. During those years, between 1,200 and 3,200 were executed for alleged political crimes, some 80,000 were interned, many of them being tortured and thousands escaped into exile.

The suffering of the Chilean people under Pinochet is vividly portrayed in the play, Death and the Maiden, by Ariel Dorfman.

When Pinochet was eventually displaced, he was prosecuted for embezzling state funds to the tune of 28 million US dollars.  300 criminal charges were laid against him for human rights abuses.

He visited London in 1998, welcomed as a bosom-pal, by Thatcher.  He was arrested under an international criminal warrant, but released by Jack Straw, who was then Labour Home Secretary.

This indelible stain on Straw’s record must be added to his discrediting in the Chilcot Iraq Report and for his boasting to journalists in a sting operation that he acted “under the radar” in getting changes in EU rules on behalf of a company which paid him £60,000 a year.

Nicaragua

The socialist Sandinista liberation movement in Nicaragua was opposed by rightwing terrorist groups, the Contras, funded and armed by the USA. Because Congress opposed support for the Contras, funds for them were clandestinely raised by selling armaments to Iran, despite an embargo on all such arms sales, Israel secretly acting as the intermediary. When it all came out, demonstrating that key figures in the Reagan administration were the guilty parties, George W Bush gave them a presidential pardon. The Contra’s were a terrorist organisation, adept at assassinating individuals as well as mass killings, but they were Washington’s terrorists and so they were OK.

It is no surprise that the extreme rightwing president of Brazil has backed intervention in Venezuela. He has repeatedly emphasised how allergic he is to anything with a trace of socialism. It is no surprise that our own Tory government was so eager to join the US bandwagon. The special relationship has to be kept alive, no matter where it leads. It would have been more appropriate for Jeremy Hunt to call on President Bashir of Sudan to step down. After all, as the ex-colonial power, we should be taking an interest in the suffering of the Sudanese people. It must be an embarrassment to many of our Remainers that the EU so promptly leapt aboard.

Venezuela clearly has severe problems, egregiously aggravated by US sanctions and other forms of interference. The stricken economy has bred corruption. The people are clearly suffering hunger and abuses of civil rights. But the crocodile tears of Trump, Brazil, the EU and Britain are nothing but rank hypocrisy.

Contrast the huffing and puffing about Venezuela by  British MPs with their delicate whispers about the appalling cruelty of the medieval regime in Saudi Arabia, continuing to sell it armaments. Why so tolerant?  Again, the answer is oil.

Juan Guaido, the usurper-in-waiting, describes himself as a centrist. So does Tony Blair. It is not an honourable place on the political spectrum. It is an opportunist place.

Guaido must be familiar with the recent history of South America and the crimes committed in pursuit of the Monroe doctrine. Does he really wish to be Venezuela’s Pinochet?

Things are moving fast in this unhappy country. This cannot be my last word on the matter.