Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Tag: Venezuela

Quoth CNN

22.12.2025 /

CNN lied! Just about all the corporate press outlets lied about Iraq, about Libya, about Syria… They are still lying through their teeth about the ongoing genocide in Palestine (all of Palestine, not just Gaza!).

They are lying for dear life to defend EU financial investments (Ponzi scheme?) in Ukraine… etc.

“Lies, lies, lies is all they’ve got!” I am quoting Max Blumenthal.

In Oliver Stone’s take on Big Finance’s ugly war on countries like Venezuela, he makes it eminently clear that the “press”, the corporate media on which we all depend, has VERY MUCH to answer for.

Kiss of death

10.12.2025 /

Today was the great day. The Nobel Peace Prize was formally awarded to the Venezuelan Ms Dracula. If you watch the video in Ben Norton’s article about her, you will hear her promise that Venezuela’s riches are up for grabs, if the USA manages to topple Maduro.

I am talking about a $1.7 trillion opportunity, not only in oil and gas, which is huge, and you know that there are opportunities, because we will open all, upstream, midstream, downstream, to all companies; but also in mining, in gold, in infrastructure, power….

This woman openly supports war against her own country! SBen Norton adds:

Machado stressed that, if Trump and Rubio can help her overthrow Maduro, she would cut Venezuela’s ties with China, Russia, and Iran, and their next plan would be to work with Washington to topple the leftist governments in Nicaragua and Cuba.

So this is what Norway is applauding? What does that make Norway?

To my knowledge handing the Nobel Peace Prize to this creature is the most ignominious official act that has ever been performed by Norway. I may well be wrong; in fact I probably am, because most Norwegians including myself have no idea of what goes on behind the scenes. Investigative journalists in Norway are few and fearful.

Discussing Venezuela’s socialism is an arduous task at the best of times in most NATO countries. NATO was, after all, formed to protect the imperial powers from the Soviet Union, although the USSR did not represent a military threat. (There is a great deal of literature on this score.)

The main danger from the Soviet Union was not military, as we were led to believe, but political: It was very important that we should not be taken in by ideas vaguely reminiscent of “communism. Yet, when the Soviet Union was dissolved, NATO was not.

So we must ask: Who was now being protected? Against what? And Why?

We know about much of USA’s active interference in European politics after the war: Operation Gladio, for instance, and US support of the brutal Greek dictatorship (1967-1974). There are plenty of declassified documents. (See f. inst. David Gibbs: Guide to using declassified documents).

There is no reason to imagine that the US is any less interested in protecting “US interests” now than it has been in the past, though we do not have access to “declassified documents” about current events.

Again, we must ask ourselves: Whose interests are “US interests”? I put to you that they are certainly not mine, probably not yours either.

At any rate, one way of protecting them appears to be by making sure that Venezuela has as few friends as possible. The Western press has been notoriously biased against Venezuelan socialism from day one of Hugo Chavez’s popular coup.

What do we hear about the so-called “democracy” that preceded the Chavez coup? Did the Venezuelan people actually benefit from it? At the time of the El Caracazo, there were no poverty statistics in Venezuela. But the very fact that traffic and business was paralysed by the sheer number of people protesting the price hikes suggests that poverty was indeed very serious. The army was ordered to suppress the protests, and when its massacres had ended, a heading read: “Venezuela obeys the IMF, pays debt with cadavers.” To this day nobody knows how many people were killed. The then Venezuelan government said: 262. Subsequently, hundreds of unmarked graves containing multiple corpses were found.

Yet, Venezuela presented itself as an “oasis”. Caracas was a copy of Miami where some people lived in the lap of luxury while the lives of the majority was as described by Dickens in Bleak House. Chavez changed that! I urge you to see John Pilger’s film The War on Democracy.

Democracy is a badly abused word. Used as an excuse to rape countries, support dictatorships, misappropriate resources, it has become a contradiction in terms. No wonder, then, that President Trump does not even pretend to attach importance to it. In the new National Security Strategy he makes no bones about intending to help himself (and the 1% in USA) to whatever a Latin American country has to offer, by hook or by crook. The document has been dubbed the Donro doctrine in that it considers Latin America USAs back yard.

Trump’s absolute disregard for formerly hyped “values” is highlighted by both the Greyzone and Geopolitical economy in articles about the release from prison of a former Honduran president and convicted drug cartel leader.

However, what Trump is doing is not new. The rape of Latin American and Caribbean countries has been going on for almost as long as the USA has existed. Take Haiti, for instance, conquered by the US in 1915 and occupied for 19 years with enforced racial segregation and violently suppressed rebellions resulting in the death of thousands. This disastrous period was followed by various US-supported dictatorships. You may have read the novel (or seen the film with Elisabeth Taylor):The Comedians by Graham Green, about Papa Doc and his obedient assassins? Papa was followed by an equally unappealing Baby Doc.

Finally, in 1990, Aristide won an apparently free and fair election. Alas, Aristide had some slightly socialist tendencies, so President Clinton put an end to his presidency after only a few months. And things have not improved for Haiti.

Of all the Latin American and Caribbean countries, Haiti was probably the most mistreated, but it was not the only US victim.

We know quite a lot about the coup against the Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, who wasn’t even a socialist. (We know, for inst., about the link between the Dulles brothers and United Fruit.). Everywhere in the area designated by the Monroe Doctrine as USA’s back yard, there was lucrative business for US capitalists, not for the workers nor for other stake holders. To preserve this state of affairs, a number of brutal military coups were carried out under the aegis of USA.

  • 1959‑65 Operation Rough Rider, Operation Mongoose – large‑scale sabotage, subversion, and assassination attempts against Fidel Castro’s regime
  • 1965‑70 Operation Condor, dictatorships (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia)
  • 1965‑68 Dominican Intervention (Operation Power Pack) – 22,000 troops landed to prevent perceived communist takeover
  • 1973 Operation Mongoose (continued) – intensified sabotage of Cuban sugar industry
  • 1979 Operation Just Cause (planning stage) – intelligence gathering for eventual 1999 Panama invasion
  • 1980‑84 Iran‑Contra Affair – illegal arms sales to Iran, proceeds to Contras in Nicaragua
  • 1983‑85 Operation Urgent Fury – invasion of Grenada
  • 1985‑87 Operation Phoenix – continuation of anti‑communist paramilitary support in El Salvador
  • 1989‑90 Operation Just Cause – invasion of Panama to depose Manuel  Noriega

But apart from these known coups, a lot of sneaky business has surely been going on that we don’t know much about. There was for instance Marco Rubio’s visit to Equador the other day. I don’t imagine for a moment that he went to enjoy polite conversation over a cup of coffee.

There have been at least two US-backed coup attempts in Venezuela, one in 2002 and the other in 2020. Then there was the unelected Juan Guaido whom the western powers, including Norway, ignominiously decided to consider Venezuela’s president, but who was being investigated by the FBI for aid embezzlement. He is currently still under FBI investigation. He’s in Miami, of course, that’s where upper class Venezuelans feel at home.

When the Western press explains the dramatic immigration flows from Venezuela over the past years, they refer to the disastrous economic policies of the Venezuelan government. This explanation is, however, a very cynical falsehood. The US-imposed economic sanctions, cf. the Lancet, have been strangling the economy and more or less starving the population. For years! One study affirms that sanctions caused 40,000 excess deaths in Venezuela in just one year, from 2017 to 2018.

Not only are the US 1 % and their various puppet presidents determined that a socialist government must not under any circumstances succeed, must not be allowed to inspire neighbouring nations; they are determined to get their hands on Venezuela’s oil and gold, which is precisely what Ms Dracula is promising.

President Trump’s truly hilarious excuse for forcing the USA to engage in extra-judicial killings in international waters and thus turning his country into an international pariah state is that Venezuela’s president is a “narco-terrorist”. The claim is so ludicrous it does not even deserve to be responded to yet Responsible Statecraft made the effort.

My final point is, however, not hilarious. My country’s blessing to Ms Dracula fills me with immeasurable sadness, shame and fear.

Amnesia

20.10.2025 /

For me the word “Alzheimer’s” has merely been, until now, a figure of speech. For me and my peers, I should add. Already at the age of 25 we would start referring to our impending Alzheimer’s condition to explain lost keys or phones and forgotten birthdays.

Today, waiting in a shop selling paints, I noticed an unobtrusive sign above the counter urging customers to support family members of patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Not the patients themselves, but their wives, children, etc.

I’ve been in that shop before, and not so long ago, but I never noticed the sign. It may not have been there, but then again, I may simply have been blind to it. We are, after all, blind to the infinite number of sensory impressions our brain filters decide to discard. But today my cognitive filters happened to be very attuned to the plight of spouses of people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, because today, yes, this morning even, an old friend – a very strong and physically fit man – was to be admitted to an institution where people suffering from dementia are cared for. I guess that means that he will be locked away for good. Dead to the world, to his friends, yet alive.

I have not yet heard from his long-suffering wife, who has had to look after him 7/24, because “he must not go out on his own, and he is very abusive and insulting and ANGRY.” Did she get him safely to the institution this morning?

I guess her story is peanuts compared to that of millions and millions of Argentinians 53 % of whom are living in poverty, while 28 % actually suffer food insecurity. Trump has promised 20 billion USD to Argentina’s notorious strongman, who will not share the money with his brow-beaten subjects. Here I quote Alex Krainer (see below): “I generally subscribe to the idea that political power attracts precisely the sort of people who should not have it.”

Meanwhile, as Trump generously squanders 20 billion of US taxpayers’ money, how are US citizens faring under shutdown? In 2023, food insecurity allegedly affected 13.5% of the US population. One or two persons out of every ten US Americans in 2023 “don’t have enough to eat and don’t know where their next meal will come from”. In 2024: 34.7 percent of single-parent households headed by women experienced food insecurity in the USA. I can’t imagine that US citizens of mean or lower income are doing any better today.

A country that claims to spread Democracy cannot even afford to feed its own population. QUE VERGUENZA!

I had lunch today with a beautiful and very hard-working psychologist. She complained that she and her equally hard-working husband had to pay taxes to feed people who worked “on the sly”, i.e. cheated on the system. “Yes,” I said, coward, that I was, “I know what you mean.” I didn’t say, as I should have, that those who earn an undeclared shilling or two in addition to the bare-bone benefits they get, are not responsible for the tremendous defence outlays that eat up a significant portion of our tax contributions, which are intended, “I remind you”, for our common good. That includes feeding people who are unable to provide for themselves.

I said none of that because a) I know that my psychologist friend is ready to crack from exhaustion, balancing work (to service a mortgage and student loans) and parenting and b) because it is true that there are people who simply don’t want to work, and I don’t know how to single them out.

So I stuck to my guns, as it were, and complained about the warmongering. “It’s no good blaming Putin, you know, or even the Chinese. Look at all the wars. They were not China’s wars, not Russia’s wars. Even Korea was not Russia’s war. Nor Vietnam. Yes, there were Communists in Korea and in Vietnam. So? None of our business!” My exhausted friend looked at me me as though wondering which of us is loosing our marbles.

***

Just how often has the US intervened militarily or otherwise to control a foreign governments? I decided to test an AI service:

Q: Please list all US military and /or secret service interventions since WWII

The result was a list of approx 30 well-known interventions. The Panama 1989 “Just Cause Operation” was not on the list, nor the Grenada 1983 “Operation urgent Fantasy”.

Q: Why have you not listed Lebanon, 1958?

A: The 1958 Lebanese crisis is indeed one of the better-known U.S. interventions of the Cold-War era, and its absence from the quick-scan list was simply an oversight rather than a judgment about its importance.

“An oversight”? Well, well, well. I shall keep that quote for future reference. AI suffers from “oversights”. As for the expression “quick-scan list”, please note that my initial question was ” list all US military …

I insisted:

Q: I repeat I am not interested in a “quick-scan ” list. I am interested in a list of all – I repeat – ALL US interventions military and/or secret service interventions since WWII.

A: Below is the most comprehensive catalog that scholars, journalists, and de‑classified archives have assembled of every U.S. military and/or intelligence‑service (CIA, NSA, DIA, etc.) intervention abroad from the end of World War II (September 1945) through the present day.

The list filled 10 A4 pages and I haven’t yet checked it, but it did nor include NED and USAID regime change operations. It ended in 2018.

So much, then, for “the present day”, when the US is bombing boats out in international waters, without warning, without cause. Each bombed boat sinks to the bottom of the sea, a wet and literal memory hole. The planned “liberation” of Venezuela is being aided and abetted by my country with its Nobel “Peace” Prize awarded to someone I would not want as a relative, not even as a distant one.

Norway has tagged along as USA’s obedient puppy, ever since WWII. Yet, it wasn’t the USA, but the USSR that saved Norway from the Germans. That is something we have forgotten.. We have graveyards all over the country full of dead Eastern European POWs who were made to work till they dropped for the German occupants during that war. Forgotten.

Since then, USA has had to feed its war industry. Without wars, no industry, it seems. Wars and make-belief are what USA has to offer the rest of the world. And we curtsy; we say ‘thank you’, and we award Peace Prizes, grant exceptions to International Law as required, and blame the Russians.

For decades Norwegians have been breastfed lies about Venezuela’s “evil dictators”. Yes, millions of Venezuelans have fled from their country and Norwegians think they know why. Apparently, the sanctions have also gone down memory holes.

Glenn Greenwald suggests that Venezuela’s non-existent drug cartels are a poor excuse for going to war. Instead Trump could claim Venezuela has weapons of mass destruction. WMD would at least represent a serious threat to US security.

USA needs Venezuela’s oil, or rather, as explained by Alex Krainer, the oil as “bank collateral”.

Democracy has nothing to do with US regime change operations. Ever.

Sanctions

14.03.2024 /

I definitely don’t like the way women are treated in Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. And I most emphatically do not approve of putting dissidents in prison, either. And as for torture… no! no! no! (If you tortured me to force me to endorse torture, I would probably give in, but those who love me, and their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren – and there may be many of them – would make sure that you and your lot (and offspring) never sleep easy.)

Nevertheless, the idea that a pompous king or emperor and his court should stride through the corridors of the world, passing judgements and rigorous sentences on “misbehaving” members of the global community is repugnant. All the more so, if said king or emperor is himself decadent and given to all sorts of vices (including torture!)

Vice President Harris is reputed to have been “tough on crime” in her past. (I gather she is not popular in her current position either.) Anybody who has had anything to do with miscreants will know that harsh punishments stimulate, rather than diminish, destructive urges. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are not the rule. Rather than tell you what you know – about US criminal justice, that is – I shall simply refer you to a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report:

In the United Kingdom, reoffending rates also topped 70 per cent in some prisons, according to statistics from the Ministry of Justice. Many offenders, even after severe sentences of imprisonment, repeatedly fail to desist from crime and reintegrate into the community as law-abiding citizens. Imprisonment, in itself, is incapable of addressing the offenders’ social integration issues. [highlighted by me]

…

… In addition to the costs of law enforcement and investigating and prosecuting crimes, there are the costs of imprisonment, as well as the costs to the victims and the community.

Consider also the effects of prison overcrowding and smouldering community anger. Look at Haiti now!

So it is, not only with individual delinquents, but also with nations.

The US should know that patriotic sentiment – nationalism, if you will – is something to be reckoned with. In spite of the near civil-war-situation in the USA, US Americans love their country passionately. Iranians do too. Iran was, after all, practically the cradle of civilisation. Iranians have a history and cultural heritage compared to which US history and cultural heritage is still in kindergarten. The same applies to China and even to Russia, where historical awareness and pride is a force that ignorant US politicians have disregarded. (That the US establishment is so unbelievably ignorant should terrify US voters.)

As for Cuba and Venezuela, relatively new countries, they have been heroic in the extreme: Like the USA they stood up to the colonial power, but they have since also stood up to the North American bully! And they are proud of their heroism. (Note, by the way, how many US Americans and Europeans have loved Cuba.)

By the time it was Venezuela’s turn to suffer the tightening of the sanction screws, the Western press was better prepared than they had been after the Cuban revolution to unleash defamation campaigns against Hugo Chavez. Even John Pilger could not save Chavez’ reputation in the West. But Venezuelans, and a very large (probably growing) proportion of Latin Americans warmly revere the late Hugo Chavez, which is one reason why Maduro is still comfortably seated.

Unfortunately, the USA has no respect for Democracy in Venezuela, or for that matter in any other country that resists US political and economic control, which is why they have applied sanctions that more or less kill off Venezuelans.

Quoting a CEPR (Center for Economic and Policy Research) report:

According to the National Survey on Living Conditions (ENCOVI by its acronym in Spanish), an annual survey of living conditions administered by three Venezuelan universities, there was a 31 percent increase in general mortality from 2017 to 2018. This would imply an increase of more than 40,000 deaths. This would be a large loss of civilian life even in an armed conflict, and it is virtually certain that the US economic sanctions made a substantial contribution to these deaths. … As noted above, the impact of the August 2017 sanctions on the collapse of oil production and therefore access to imports was quite immediate…[highlighted by me]

The United States first imposed sanctions targeting the Venezuelan government in 2015.

Since then, sanctions have multiplied to the point that millions of ragged Venezuelans have turned into unwelcome itinerant paupers roaming the rest of the South American continent where they constitute as seriously a destabilising demographic force as the Central American immigrants to the USA. Decades of US regime change operations and support for vicious dictatorships in all of Latin America are the root cause of all of this displacement.

Sanctions particularly affect health care (medicines and gear), cf. The Lancet

Soon after imposing economic sanctions on a country, many essential life-saving drugs become unavailable. Even production of some drugs being manufactured in a country is decreased, or even stopped, because of a shortage in basic ingredients or spare machine parts that are necessary for drug production. The price of drugs increases to a level that people with low income can barely afford. …Lack of spare parts affects not only medical devices but also other necessary infrastructures such as electric generators; frequent power cuts cause serious problems (loss of vaccines, drugs, ventilators, monitors, etc). Hundreds of thousands of people die in silence from diseases.

Have those who approve of sanctioning a country considered the surviving victims’ hatred, accumulated incrementally year by year? Have those who design US foreign policy any idea of the growing global contempt for the US “rules-based order”?

  • What rules?
  • Who made the rules?
  • And why do the so-called “rules” – whatever they are – not apply to the USA?
  • Why do NO rules apply to the USA?

Listen to this angry but extraordinarily knowledgeable young man, Ben Norton, explain Latin American anger.

Remarkably, the Maduro government has survived. According to MintPress as at March 2022:

The government in Caracas, however, somehow survived for reasons that differ, depending on the political position of the analysts. In Venezuela, much credence is being given to the country’s socialist values, the resilience of the people and to the Bolivarian movement. The anti-Maduro forces in the US, centred mostly in Florida, blame Maduro’s survival on Washington’s lack of resolve. A third factor, which is often overlooked, is Russia.

I would like to add, though, a detail that does not seem to interest the mainstream media or even Mintpress: The Venezuelan authorities prioritised food imports and food subsidies according to another CEPR report.

Food imports in 2020 are similar to those in 2017 ($2.0 billion in 2017, $1.8 billion in 2020) despite total imports and GDP falling by around 50 percent during that period. The decline in import capacity that occurred after 2016 did not lead to lower food import levels because the government found a way to prioritize food imports. An overhaul of public sector food assistance policies, and in particular the launch of a system of nationwide distribution of food packages (known by the acronym CLAP, for Local Committees of Supply and Production) to families in need in 2016, appears to have played an important role in addressing food insecurity. In 2020, the subsidy received by families through the CLAP system was $855 million, or almost 50 percent of the country’s total food imports. [highlighted by me]

Venezuela is not the only country whose population is being castigated by the USA. The above CEPR report which examines the effect of “sanctions”, includes three detailed “case studies”: Iran, Afghanistan and Venezuela.

The so-called “Democratic” USA arrogantly disregards the global majority of countries that condemn the imposition of sanctions all over the place.

Yes, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was in contravention of International Law. Yes, yes and yes.

But US unilateral sanctions are also in contravention of International Law!

Articles 39 and 41 of the United Nations Charter empower the UN Security Council to adopt “measures not involving the use of armed force” in response to the existence of “any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression”:

Article 39: The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

Venezuela represented no “threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression”. Ever. The USA just didn’t like the Venezuelan administration.

Once upon a time…

27.02.2019 /

Not so very long ago, there was a country where most of the people were very poor, and some were very well off. By dint of solidarity, self-sacrifice and organisation, the people who were very poor were able to elect a president who was actually willing do to his very best for them, even to die for them. During his presidency, things changed for the better for the vast majority of the country’s population.

You will no doubt have heard of the country, its people and their president, as it was was a democratic country which was killed, as it were, together with its democratically elected president, by a barbarous, US-supported coup d’etat on 11 September 1973.

We tend to think of ugly dictatorships in terms of ugly presidents wearing sunglasses. Pinochet was no doubt ugly and he did indeed wear sunglasses, but I do not believe that he killed Chile. It takes more than a man or two to kill a democracy, and Pinochet was anything but charismatic, far less brilliant.

I would like to recommend an interesting documentary about the run-up to the coup. It tells us a great deal about the mechanisms behind the political scene in a country split between the wealthy few and the innumerable poor. As at today, the film can be found on Youtube. It is called The Battle of Chile Part I (IMDb gives it 8.3)

I believe that Chile never really recovered from the trauma of dictatorship. I fear that the lesson they learnt there was that democracy only applies if it favours those who already have more than enough. For Chileans, what has been happening in Venezuela is sadly deja vue.

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