On 26 February, Stephen Hickey, UK political coordinator at the United Nations, delivered a statement at the Security Council briefing on Venezuela that put the blame for the situation in that country on its government. He said that years of misrule and corruption have wrecked the Venezuelan economy and that the actions of the \u201cMaduro regime\u201d have led to economic collapse.<\/p>\n
He continued by talking about the recent attempts to bring \u2018aid\u2019 into the country:<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2026 use of deadly violence against his (Maduro) own people and other concerning acts of aggression to block the supply of desperately needed humanitarian aid are simply repugnant\u2026 the Maduro regime\u2019s oppressive policies affect\u2026 innocent civilians, including women and children, who lack access to essential medical and other basic supplies\u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n
He then went on to talk about journalist Jorge Ramos being reportedly detained, later to be released and deported:<\/p>\n
\u201cAs with the lack of freedom given to journalists, other essential freedoms – such as democratic ones – are simply not present in Venezuela\u2026 We stand with\u2026 Juan Guaid\u00f3 in pursuit of our shared goal to bring peace and stability to Venezuela.\u201d<\/p>\n
We can but wonder what Hickey thinks about\u00a0the\u00a0illegal and arbitrary detention<\/a>\u00a0and needless suffering<\/a>\u00a0of Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for the best part of a decade courtesy of his own government.<\/p>\n Hickey argued that the only way to achieve peace and stability is by democratic transition through free and fair presidential elections, as demanded by \u2018interim President Guaid\u00f3\u2019 and the National Assembly, in line with the Venezuelan Constitution.<\/p>\n He stated:<\/p>\n \u201cUntil this is achieved, the current humanitarian crisis caused by the Maduro regime\u2019s corrupt policies will continue\u2026 nothing short of free and fair presidential elections will do.:<\/p>\n In the meantime, Hickey called for additional sanctions against individual members of the Venezuelan government who he said had benefited from corrupt policies.<\/p>\n He concluded that:<\/p>\n \u201cThe Venezuelan people deserve a better future. They have suffered enough at the hands of the Maduro regime.\u201d<\/p>\n Something for Hickey to consider<\/strong><\/p>\n Here are a few facts for Stephen Hickey. In 2018, Maduro was re-elected president. A\u00a0section of the opposition\u00a0<\/a>boycotted the election but the boycott\u00a0failed: 9,389,056 people voted; 16 parties participated and six\u00a0candidates stood for the presidency. Maduro won 6,248,864 votes, or\u00a068 per cent. Renowned journalist\u00a0John Pilger says<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0on election day he spoke to one of the 150 foreign election observers who told him the process had been entirely fair. There was no fraud and none of the\u00a0lurid media claims stood up.<\/p>\n So what of the unelected Juan Guaid\u00f3 whom Hickey calls the \u201cinterim president\u201d?<\/p>\n Pilger notes that the Trump administration has\u00a0presented Guaid\u00f3, a\u00a0pop-up creation<\/a>\u00a0of the CIA-front National\u00a0Endowment for Democracy, as the legitimate President of Venezuela.\u00a0Guaid\u00f3 was previously unheard of by 81 percent of the Venezuelan people and has been elected by no one.<\/p>\n And what of the people who are behind him (not ordinary Venezuelan people, but his backers in Washington)? Pilger says:<\/p>\n \u201cAs his \u201cspecial envoy to Venezuela\u201d (coup master), Trump has appointed\u00a0a convicted felon, Elliot Abrams, whose intrigues in the service of\u00a0Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush helped produce the Iran-Contra\u00a0scandal in the 1980s and plunge central America into years of\u00a0blood-soaked misery.\u201d<\/p>\n Talking about the Western media biased reporting on Venezuela, Pilger adds that the country\u2019s democratic record, human rights legislation, food programmes,\u00a0healthcare initiatives and poverty reduction did not happen:<\/p>\n \u201cThe\u00a0greatest literacy program in human history did not happen, just as\u00a0the millions who march in support of Maduro and in memory of Chavez,\u00a0do not exist.\u201d<\/p>\n None of this happened in the warped world of Stephen Hickey either. He paints a wholly distorted picture of the situation in Venezuela, one which lays the blame for economic woes and their consequences at the door of Maduro and his \u2018corrupt regime\u2019. But this is a tried and tested strategy: bring a country to its knees and apportion blame on the political leaders of that country.<\/p>\n Countries like Venezuela have to a large extent been\u00a0trapped by their colonial legacy<\/a>\u00a0and have very often become single commodity producers \u2013 in this case oil \u2013 and find it difficult to expand other sectors. In effect, they have found themselves extremely vulnerable. The US can squeeze the price of the commodity upon which such countries rely, while applying sanctions and cutting off financial lifelines. It then becomes that much easier to lay the blame for the consequences on a \u2018corrupt regime\u2019.<\/p>\n Prof Michael Hudson has outlined<\/a>\u00a0how debt and the US-controlled international monetary system has backed Maduro into a corner. He argues that Venezuela has become an oil monoculture, with revenue having been spent largely on importing food and other necessities, which it could have produced itself. In the case of food at least, many countries in the Global South have been adversely affected by the \u2018globalisation of agriculture\u2019 and have had their\u00a0indigenous sectors undermined<\/a>\u00a0as a result of WTO policies and directives, debt and US-supported geopolitical lending strategies.<\/p>\n However, this is all an inconvenient truth for the likes of Hickey and the Western media. Talking about the BBC, John Pilger notes that it is \u201ctoo difficult\u201d for that media outlet to include any of this in its reporting:<\/p>\n \u201cIt is too difficult to report the collapse of oil prices since 2014 as\u00a0largely the result of criminal machinations by Wall Street. It is too\u00a0difficult to report the blocking of Venezuela\u2019s access to the\u00a0US-dominated international financial system as sabotage. It is too\u00a0difficult to report Washington\u2019s \u201csanctions\u201d against Venezuela, which\u00a0have caused the loss of at least $6 billion in Venezuela\u2019s revenue\u00a0since 2017, including $2 billion worth of imported medicines, as\u00a0illegal, or the Bank of England\u2019s refusal to return Venezuela\u2019s gold\u00a0reserves as an act of piracy.\u201d<\/p>\n None of this is up for debate by the BBC or Hickey. He sits in the UN talking about, freedom, democracy and the rights and suffering of ordinary people, while failing to acknowledge the US or the UK\u2019s own role in the denial of freedom and the perpetuation of suffering across the world.<\/p>\n From Syria to Iraq, the \u2018squeezing out of life\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n According to former French foreign minister\u00a0Roland Dumas<\/a>, Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009. And writing in The Guardian in 2013, Nafeez Ahmed discussed leaked emails from the\u00a0private intelligence firm Stratfor<\/a>, including notes from\u00a0a meeting with Pentagon officials<\/a>, that confirmed US-UK training of Syrian opposition forces since 2011 aimed at eliciting the \u201ccollapse\u201d of Assad\u2019s regime \u201cfrom within.\u201d<\/p>\n But this is where Britain and the West\u2019s concerns really lie: facilitating the geopolitical machinations of financial institutions, oil companies, arms manufacturers and profiteers. And it is\u00a0no different this time<\/a>\u00a0around with Venezuela.\u00a0Ordinary people are mere \u2018collateral damage\u2019 left dying in or fleeing war zones that the West and its allies created. The West\u2019s brutal oil and gas wars are twisted as \u2018humanitarian\u2019 interventions for public consumption.<\/p>\n In 2014, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray told a meeting at St Andrews University in Scotland that Libya is now a disaster and 15,000 people were killed when NATO (British and French jets) bombed Sirte. The made-for-public narrative about that \u2018intervention\u2019 began with some tale about Gadhafi killing his own people, which turned out to be false. Now we are hearing similar about Maduro.<\/p>\n As far as Iraq is concerned, Murray said that he knew for certain that key British officials were fully aware that there weren\u2019t any weapons of mass destruction. He said that invading Iraq wasn\u2019t a mistake, it was a lie.<\/p>\n Over a million people have been killed via the US-led or US-backed attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.\u00a0But this is the plan: to turn countries into vassal states of the US, or for those that resist to reconstruct (destroy) them into fractured territories.<\/p>\n Any eulogies to morality and humanitarianism must be seen for what they are: part of the ongoing psychological operations being waged on the public to encourage people to regard what is happening in the world as a disconnected array of events in need of Western intervention. These events are not for one minute to be regarded by the public as the planned brutality of empire and militarism.<\/p>\n Tim Anderson<\/a>\u00a0(author of \u2018The Dirty War on Syria\u2019) argues that where Syria was concerned Western culture in general favoured its worst traditions: \u201cthe \u2018imperial prerogative\u2019 for intervention\u2026 reinforced by a ferocious campaign of war propaganda.\u201d We are now seeing it again, this time with Venezuela.<\/p>\n We might well ask who is Donald Trump, John Bolton or for that matter Stephen Hickey to dictate and engineer what the future of Venezuela should be? But this is what the US with the UK in support has been doing across the globe for decades. Control of oil is key to current events in Venezuela. But there is also the subtext of destroying any tendencies towards socialism across Latin America (and elsewhere) as well as the need of Western capital to expand into or create new markets: Washington\u2019s hand-picked puppet\u00a0Juan Guaido will\u00a0facilitate the process<\/a>\u00a0and usher in a programme of\u00a0\u2018mass privatisation\u2019 and \u2018hyper-capitalism\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n In many respects, the US has learned its imperialist playbook from its former colonial master, the UK. In the book \u2018Late Victorian Holocausts<\/a>\u2019, the author Mike Davis writes that millions in India were dying of starvation when Lord Lytton (head of the British government in India) said, \u201cThere is to be no interference of any kind on the part of government with the object of reducing the price of food\u201d. He dismissed any idea of feeding the starving as \u201chumanitarian hysterics\u201d. There was plenty of food, but it was held back to preserve prices and serve the market.<\/p>\n