UNDER SUSPICION

SCOTT PATRICK—Complaints about authoritarianism and the quashing of dissent ring hollow when the U.S. just conducted a major sales deal with Saudi Arabia, a repressive monarchy that only just months ago had one of its most prominent critics, journalist Jamal Khashoggi, murdered in Turkey.

It is also unreasonable to expect either Chavez or Maduro to have diversified the economy, fulfilled their promises to help the poor, and heal the country’s social divisions while the Venezuelan opposition was simultaneously attempting to overthrow their democratically-elected governments (with not-so-clandestine U.S. support). Yet this is implied in U.S. media coverage as the path they should have taken, and no alternative view is investigated or offered.

In November, 2010, according to emails obtained by Venezuelan security services and presented by former Justice Minister Miguel Rodríguez Torres, Guaidó, Goicoechea, and several other student activists attended a secret five-day training at the Fiesta Mexicana hotel in Mexico City. The sessions were run by Otpor, the Belgrade-based regime change trainers backed by the US government. The meeting had reportedly received the blessing of Otto Reich, a fanatically anti-Castro Cuban exile working in George W. Bush’s Department of State, and the right-wing former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

JEFF J. BROWN—Again, the West is the best at psychological deflection/reflection, attacking its enemies for the exact same things it is doing, whether it’s true or not, so that at the dinner table and water cooler, its brainwashed citizens talk about all the supposedly horrible acts China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela are committing, and not about the reality of what their truly evil, genocidal governments are in fact perpetrating at home and around the world, costing millions of lives a year.

P. GREANVILLE—n Intercept podcast by Jeremy Scahill (published Sept. 26) had an interesting and mighty revealing segment with Noam Chomsky, showing that neither Scahill nor his august guest—despite a respectable amount of cogent analysis—can be trusted to illumine left opinion on the great issues of the day, especially when it comes to US foreign policy, supposedly the forte of both discussants. This may sound harsh, unfair and even shocking to many on the left, as Scahill is often on target, spot on, until he goes off the rails. And then the glaring contradictions crop up. But, meantime, who can fail to agree with this statement:

EDUARD POPOV—In short, the Ukrainian draft budget can be summarized by the old Russian…