February Traumas: The Third Insurrectionary Moment of the Venezuelan Right

[Judi Lynn]

February Traumas: The Third Insurrectionary Moment of the Venezuelan Right
Written by Jeffrey R. Webber and Susan Spronk
Tuesday, 25 February 2014 20:53

“Today the counter-revolutionary Right is reactivating itself,” according to long-time Venezuelan revolutionary Roland Denis, “taking advantage of the profound deterioration that this slow revolutionary process is suffering. Its reappearance and interlacing with ‘democratic civil society’ is a clear signal to the popular movement that we either convert this moment into a creative and reactivating crisis of the collective revolutionary will, or we bid farewell to this beautiful and traumatic history that we have built over the last 25 years.”[1]

For seasoned observers of Venezuelan politics, the events of the past week are a disheartening repetition of opposition-led resistance efforts that have yet again sought to undermine political stability in the country. This is not the first time in recent history that the opposition has resorted to “extra-parliamentary” tactics, including violence, to push their political agenda. Nor is it the first time that the mainstream media has provided generous airtime to opposition demonstrations in Caracas, repeating the sob stories of upper class Venezuelans “repressed” by the government because they cannot find toilet paper on the store shelves, or in a more laughable episode, ingredients to bake a cake.[2]

As with most situations in which there has been a violent conflict over who controls the reins of the state, it is possible to find fault on both sides. As a February 22nd report by the Centre for Economic Policy Research notes, “the political allegiances” of the victims of the violence so far “and their causes of death are varied.” Of the eight deaths, two of the responsible assailants might be linked to the government, including a SEBIM agent (the Venezuelan intelligence service) who was not authorized to be at the protest. The head of SEBIM was subsequently fired and there is a warrant out for arrest of the agents who fired the shots.[3]

Over the last few weeks, the functional role of the privately-owned media viewable in Venezuela, such as the Colombian television station NTN24 which also broadcasts in Colombia, and CNN en Español, based in the US, has been to promote and consolidate a matrix of opinion and interpretation around the recent events in Venezuela: “peaceful protests” have been lined up against “excessive use of force by state security apparatuses.” This frame has found its echo in virtually all of the presidential or prime ministerial statements on the recent conflicts in Venezuela issued by Western imperialist states over the last number of days.

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/venezuela-archives-35/4715-february-traumas-the-third-insurrectionary-moment-of-the-venezuelan-right

[Peace Patriot]

1. Some notable points in this fine article...

One of the reasons that it is easy to defeat the opposition’s claims in Venezuela (at least in rational argument) is that their attempts to manufacture consent are largely based upon a series of half-truths, lies and misdemeanors. Unfortunately these misdeeds are continually parroted in the mainstream press as if they were true with no apparent need for fact-checking. For example, on February 20, The New York Times, reported that “The only television station that regularly broadcast voices critical of the government was sold last year, and the new owners have softened its news coverage.”[5] This is an outright lie according to the Carter Centre, which reported in 2013 that private TV media has about 74 percent of the audience share for news, with the state share at just 26 percent, for “recent key newsworthy events.”[6] While withering budgets for investigative journalism might be to blame for some of this inaccuracy in reporting, it is more likely that the corporate media shares the opposition’s vision of “democracy.” In such a vision, any attempt to redistribute a mere fraction of the social wealth in a way that curtails the “freedom” to accumulate capital is a threat to social justice.


As John Kerry lambasts the Maduro government, “This is not how democracies behave,” referring to the imprisonment of some instigators of the protests. By way of context and juxtaposition, on February 12, 30 students were arrested in Venezuela in the wake of barricade building, Molotov cocktail attacks, and tire burning; 7,000 protesters were arrested during the days of Occupy in 122 cities of the United States between 2011 and 2013; and 153 students were arrested in the UK during the 2010 demonstrations against 300-percent hikes in tuition.[7] This is not even to get into what British journalist Gary Younge has called an “open season on black boys” in the United States by vigilantes, and the propensity for police officers to regularly kill unarmed black men with impunity in that country.[8]


The real problem, it seems, is that democracy is supposed to entail competitive elitism and an exchange of office between bourgeois political parties (such as the Republicans and Democrats); it is not supposed to create room for alternative projects whose aim is to reform capitalism, the foundation of liberal democracy itself, by curtailing some of the “freedoms” associated with owning private property, such as controlling the media, buying elections, orchestrating corporate welfare projects, and supporting a foreign policy that keeps the world “free” for accumulation.

--from the OP (my emphasis)

Thanks so much for posting this!

[Peace Patriot]

2. More from the article...

Where were the mainstream reporters during the post-election violence in April 2013, when a dozen government supporters died at the hand of the opposition? Where were they when the Chavistas swept the municipal elections by a margin of 10 percent of the popular vote in December 2013? And where have they been every time a landowner has murdered a peasant leader?[10] --from the OP

My complaint exactly, with regard to the corporate (1%-er) media on Venezuela. It is mind-bogglingly one-sided. It's as if the CIA were writing the copy and the entirety of the corporate media--from the New York Slimes to the Miami Hairball, and from Rotters to the BBCons--JUST PARROT THAT LINE...

...over and over and over again.