WESTERN MEDDLING & HYPOCRISY

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”.

PAUL DOBSON—Speaking with self-declared ‘interim president’ Juan Guaidó on a weekly digital broadcast called Aló Embajador (Hello Ambassador) last Thursday, US Charge d’Affaires to Venezuela James Story manifested that sanctions relief would be a “mistake” under current conditions.

The Colombia-based diplomat went on to explain that the Biden White House would only consider a policy shift upon receiving “irreversible,” “conclusive” and “fundamental changes” from Caracas. While Washington’s representative offered no further details on what these changes may entail, Guaidó has previously established President Nicolás Maduro’s resignation, alongside new presidential elections, as preconditions for sanctions relief.

Story’s statements come amidst speculation over whether Biden plans to continue Donald Trump’s aggressive stance towards Venezuela or heed to domestic and international pressure for sanctions relief.

The blockade, which has hampered Caracas’s Covid-19 vaccination efforts and caused severe fuel and diesel shortages, has been condemned by a range of international actors, including United Nations General Secretary Antonio Guterres, Pope Francis, and most recently UN Special Rapporteur on the Negative Impact of Unilateral Coercive Measures Alena Douhan, who described it as “devastating” and “illegal” after visiting the country.

STEPHEN GOWANS—If this plays out as it has in the past, the news media will report that the US intelligence community has concluded that the Wuhan laboratory was the source of the pandemic. The key qualifier that the conclusion is based on no proof, will be quickly passed over and eventually forgotten, and the reality that the conclusion came from the intelligence community will be adduced as its substantiation, as if US spooks are impartial arbiters of all questions of consequence, and not part of a state apparatus that has a vested interest in discrediting a country Washington deems a near-peer competitor.

Former CIA case officer Ralph McGehee’s view of his former employer suggests what outcome we can expect from Biden’s ‘find me some evidence’ order to the intelligence community. “The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a Central Intelligence Agency,” McGehee said. Instead, “it is the covert action arm of the president’s foreign policy advisers” whose role is “reporting ‘intelligence’ justifying” the president’s positions and activities. The CIA “shapes its intelligence … to support presidential policy.” McGehee concluded that disinformation is a large part of the intelligence community’s ambit, and the US population is “the primary target audience of its lies.”  

FORREST HYLTON—Ninis (young people without education or job prospects) from urban peripheries have been the leading force on the barricades and they have faced the brunt of police terror – some of it captured on cell phone videos, including sexual assault, torture and murder – in Bogotá, Medellín, Pereira, Cartago, Buga, Tuluá, Cali, Popayán, Pasto, Bucaramanga and Barranquilla. They and their families account for perhaps half the population, and on the rare occasions they are interviewed, they say things like: ‘We have no future because they have taken everything from us, even fear. We have nothing left to lose.’ This was already true before Covid-19 hit, but lack of basic income support during the pandemic has made daily life impossible.

PATRICE GREANVILLE—The Young Turks’ persistent smears of journalists who have exposed the Syrian disinformation campaign for what it is, cynical lies to justify the West’s regime change in Damascus, is discussed here by Jimmy Dore and one of TYT’s targets, Grayzone’s journalist Aaron Maté, currently in Syria on a fact-finding mission. The show is enlightening as usual, but a couple of things need mentioning.   (1) Jimmy’s assumption that having mainstream corporate journalists on the ground in Syria would make them see the light, so to speak, and turn them into truthtellers, is terribly naive. Many of the careerist disinformers working for the West’s media know what they are doing, and a trip to Syria itself would likely not change their positions at all. It’s in fact quite possible to visualise such individuals returning to HQ to write even more “authoritative” exposés of “Assad’s crimes”. Let us recall that although the imperialist press degeneracy we see today is certainly scandalous and appalling in its cynicism and criminal performance, the US media and their counterparts in Western Europe have maintained (and some still do, such as the NYTimes as well as CNN, CBS, etc. ) “on the ground” correspondents for generations, and yet their barrage of outright lies, omissions of truth and distortions has never faltered.