While even mainstream liberals have supported the racist, imperialist coup in Venezuela — and the transparent propaganda of our woefully corrupt corporate media and the Trump administration — America’s few remaining progressives have championed the respected independent journalists who have given voice to the Venezuelan majority: the mestizos and Afro-Venezuelans whom the corporate media has worked overtime to disappear from our national discussion.
Millions of Venezuelans have voted to elect President Nicolas Maduro, whose party has won 23 of Venezuela’s last 25 national elections in transparent, auditable, internationally monitored elections that Jimmy Carter once called “the best in the world.”
Yet the U.S. political/media establishment has responded to the Venezuelan majority by naming its own preferred “president” and seizing even more of Venezuela’s wealth and assets, preventing much food and medicine from entering the country — in what the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has called a “crime against humanity,” likening U.S. sanctions to a “medieval siege,” emphasizing that Washington is using starvation as a weapon of war.
Despite the devastating effect of massive, multi-pronged economic sabotage — orchestrated by Venezuela’s imperialist/racist/predatory foreign enemies in Washington, DC — the government of Nicolas Maduro has been subsidizing food and other aid to the Venezuelan people (contrary to Western propaganda), as documented in the videos presented to the United Nations by two of America’s few remaining independent journalists, Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate.
After the last two decades of assassination attempts on Venezuela’s chosen leaders, extreme violence aimed at Venezuela’s robust democratic institutions, and coordinated economic sabotage, none of this is surprising… except to those who blithely gulp down MSM/government propaganda.
But the rest of the world, 75% of which opposes this coup, knows better.
While Reuters, CNN, the AP, and the New York Times have followed FoxNews into the dark universe of neo-fascist “journalism” — uncritically regurgitating official propaganda in support of war and corporate rule — America’s finest independent journalists have consistently gotten this story right… that is why they’ve been given a platform at the United Nations. In a badly corrupted media environment that does little more than “manufacture consent,” they are truth-tellers. A rarity.
(The non-corporate media, all that remains of the free press, have been getting this story right from the beginning. They’ve even forced the New York Times to correct the record about the U.S. “aid” trucks the Colombians and right-wing exiles tried to ram through the border… and then set on fire with their Molotov cocktails.)
Kudos to Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate for exposing themselves to vicious smears, simply because they’ve given voice to 80% of Venezuelans — especially the poor and oppressed who have supported the Chavista movement from the beginning.
While many nominal liberals spout empty platitudes about their support for the media — while championing those who have degraded and corrupted the institution while demonizing independent journalists — there remain a number of us who legitimately value honest reporting and side with the vulnerable instead of the powerful.