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GILBERT DOCTOROW says: “In my reductionist approach, the summit has one driver behind it, namely to put a cap on an arms race that the United States is losing, if it has not already irrevocably lost, and to prevent the adverse shift in the strategic balance against America from getting still worse. The side benefit would be to strike down planned military expenditures budgeted for well over a trillion dollars to modernize the nuclear triad alone. This would thereby free funds for the massive infrastructure investments that Biden is presently trying to push through Congress…”

A wide variety of critics of Marxism-Leninism, beginning with liberals and outright rightwingers and fascists, plus anarchists and libertarians of many stripes, accuse Marxist-Leninists of being inherently “authoritarian”, despotic and tyrannical. Their criticism is usually directed at nations where anti-imperialists have conquered power (Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, and the “pink tide in Latin America”, Iran, etc.) This is Michael Parenti’s insight on this important issue. 

PETER BOLTON—I myself argued in a 2016 essay for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs that an economic war waged by a domestic societal elite, and abetted by the United States, has been a major cause of the crisis. Though dismissed by critics of Chavismo as a conspiracy theory, there is, in fact, ample evidence of an economic war against the Venezuelan government ever since Hugo Chavez was first elected in 1998. The so-called oil strike, for instance, (in reality a management-led lockout) was a transparent attempt to bring about regime change by crippling the economy. Cases of hoarding goods and deliberately disrupting supply chains on the part of the opposition-friendly private business sector, meanwhile, have been well-documented.

JOHN HELMER—According to Steenhuis, the US was asked once again “if there is any possibility to take cognizance of the [satellite] data” and for the court to judge the satellite evidence in its verdict. The Dutch request explicitly asked the Americans “to offer the investigating judge, as a judge, the same opportunity as the public prosecutor [Minks] received in August 2016, which was to have the opportunity during an intelligence briefing by the officer of the Director of National Intelligence to see the [satellite] data that are at the basis of this memorandum and to make an official record” [Min 40:49].

The official US reply, dated April 22, 2021, was: “we have concluded that the circumstances and considerations previously described remain unchanged. Thus, regrettably, we are unable to provide assistance beyond that outlined in the memorandum from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence dated 23 August 2016” [Min 41:30].

CALEB MAUPIN—Forerunners of the “color revolutions”, Caleb discusses the CIA-supported Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Czech “Prague Spring” of 1968, the latter term symbolising the coming in from the frozen cold of communist tyranny. Every nation that heeded the capitalist siren song of the West became a corrupt neoliberal regime, warns Caleb. And each of these regimes were at the time of their birth hailed as great improvements over communism by many people who still define themselves as being anti-imperialist and “on the left”.