Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was in tough shape this time last week. Public protests and violence have been soaring, the nation’s economy is on life support, and virtually all of the rest of Latin America is unified in opposing his recent attempts to consolidate power in his party.
Today, he’s got a very clear way out, and it emerged on Friday, when President Trump threatened to attack Venezuela militarily. This threat was virtually the best-case scenario for Maduro, whose party has a long history of positioning itself as in opposition to US aggression.
Trump’s threat, then, provides Maduro with an idea political lifeline, allowing him to both dismiss the country’s economic woes as America’s fault, and to paint the opposition as secretly in league with the United States.
The opposition absolutely saw this coming, and warned the US not to say anything about Maduro’s recent actions specifically because they feared it would divide regional opposition and offer Maduro a pretext for a crackdown. This is a lesson that the US could’ve learned any number of times in Venezuela over the years, but it still seems lost on them.
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I can understand the opposition in Venzeula might not wished to be tied to the U.S.government . As the United States is not very popular any where because of interference in every bodies business .
The opposition in Venezuela, as it is the upper-half of society and owns all the land and wealth, surely it knows full well that without the brutal imperialism of Empire USA, nationalized would be most everything that they own.
Did you notice — Those Charlottesville fascists:
1) All were white.
(2) All were men of the middle-class, all too smart to do an honest day’s hard manual labor,
all too dumb to ever be rich.
(3) All were well fed.
(4) Most all were muscle bound.
(5) All were aggressive, belligerent, obnoxious and forceful.
(6) All had a superiority complex toward the weaker, the poorer,
the uneducated and those with less whiteness of skin.
(7) All exemplified this class dictatorship called Empire USA.
What does this have to do with the current article?
You’re writing gibberish anyway. Fascist groups tend to be poor, working class people. And I’m no fascist. You’re projecting an enemy.
What’s wrong with lifting weights?
The protest was in defence of RE Lee and Stonewall. Stonewall broke Georgia law to teach blacks in Sunday school, and Lee opposed secession, called for unity after the war. Without Lee, we’d likely have kept fighting for 50 years afterwards.
Above is a fascist, who not only fulfills to perfection all (7) standards for being a fascist, also by his comment he shows what it means to think like a fascist.
Nonsense. You just want someone to dehumanise.
The political situation today is very different from the WWII era. Today anyone defending the Confederate flag is more like a native defending his lands from colonists.
Fascists, some of them anyway, seem to worship evolution and power. They want to replace humanity with something “superior”. I’m more of a Luddite, and I value God and decentralisation, tradition. You just aren’t familiar with the multitude of political ideas.
Fascists and socialists both are “managerial”. I’m very much anti-managerial. It’s a totally different way of thinking. Socialists tend to want a global government; fascists tend to want a large society that can’t be bullied, or so that they may bully. I tend to like small societies.
Logically I don’t fall into the category.
Bless your giving heart, but it must be said that when you first say that fascists are among the poor, but now say that fascists rule among the managers, surely there can be only one category that you fall into.
Fascists centralise power under managers. Their supporters tend to be poor. I was referring to James Burnham’s managerial elite. Burnham is where Orwell got some of his ideas from for 1984.
Many in the Right and Left read (in the past) and still read Burnham. He was a Trotskyite who converted to Catholicism (he might have been born Catholic, became atheist, then went back). Anyway, once he’d become conservative, he wrote these books, and because he’d been on the Left he didn’t believe in the classical liberalism of most Americans of the time. So, he injected a lot of ideas into the discourse. Also, Catholics tend to have a different political tradition in America. (I’m not Catholic, but I tend to read Catholics.)
Political discussion is not some soundbite gotcha moment. I’m explaining things to you, not trying to one-up you.
Look at Europe. I’ve followed politics for years. Who supports the fascist groups there? The poor! Those people are always saying how they have to recruit from the respectable middle class, because they have some sense that they need them. The BNP, which is quasi-fascist, often targets Labour voters in its recruitment ads.
Socialists and fascists tend to compete over the same voters. In the US, we don’t really have many actual fascists. Europe has political parties, so I see what’s going on there somewhat. A fascist group in Greece was very against the EU and the powers-that-be there. But it then called for “retaking Constantinople” and praised Alexander the Great. So, it wasn’t exactly peaceful. But you can find that same identification with Byzantium (Rome) in other nearby states. So it’s not inherently a fascist identification. Groups and ideas tend to overlap. Politics is not black and white.
Often the people we’re told to oppose are in the way of some moneyed power. Both left-wing and right-wing groups get manipulated. So, you can also take note of where the money’s coming from, who benefits. A right-wing (or left-wing) group can exist to target specific groups. Then it seeks to direct them as desired. So, the ideas aren’t necessarily directing a group but those in charge.
Often people pick up a flag and run around with it. The ideas don’t necessarily reflect the label. What can be dangerous is if a person is actively reading fascist material, and only fascist material (in a sort of bubble). And in my view, fascist material is not the only dangerous sort. The Left is very dangerous in my view.
Extremists on both sides tend to oppose the current warring. A true fascist though might want to start up his own warring. And the Left certainly also wars. But there’s a huge difference between supporting the current warring and not. A fascist who dreams of “retaking” America or conquering a foreign polity isn’t a threat if he’s working minimum wage.
Fascism tended also to rise as a resistance movement against Communism. So, we often see groups, on both the Left and Right, driven to dangerous extremes in a sense that they’ve been driven to the wall, forced into it. Fascists tend to believe they must pursue power, lest others wield it. And I believe there’s some truth to that. But powers also tend to balance. And no society lasts forever. So if a group (Left or Right) commits some terrible act to bring about its “utopia”, that utopia might then collapse 50 or 200 years later. So, it’s not worth it to do terrible things in pursuit of power.
Burnham published The Managerial Revolution only a few months after resigning as head of the Trotskyist organization in the US, so he was presumably at least nominally Trotskyist while writing it.
Then he went into the OSS, and by the time he wrote The Machiavellians (which I’ve only seen in excerpt), he seems to have decided that the managerial state he described in The Managerial Revolution could actually be a GOOD thing, and went to work with his protege William F. Buckley, Jr. to build it.
It’s not necessarily that it was *good* but that it was inevitable. So, one should make the best of it.
I also rejected one of Machiavelli’s central arguments. Machiavelli argued that a state is either expanding or it could aim to preserve itself, slowly rot. I liked the notion of slowly rotting. It’s an unintended consequence of elites. You could write a book explaining the virtues of capitalism, and I might end up reacting against it.
Anyway, just to say, I’m not a fan of Yankee capitalism (fraud and corruption to name two obvious problems) either and fractional reserve banking. Had the South remained in power, we’d have built similarly evil, maybe. But we’re not in power. So, I rather like blaming Yankees for having the audacity to be human and, like all humans, sin when they have the power to sin.
After reading pages of hate against the South, I’m pretty enraged at how everyone exaggerates our sins while whitewashing the sins of the rest of humanity, including the North, including the North today. Slavery spread everywhere it could in the US. It was opposed in the South, but those who profit triumph over those who don’t. And it was traded by the North, including by a certain group who’s supposed to not be mentioned.
The best solution is to acknowledge the heritage of everyone, including the South. Lee and Stonewall are perfectly wonderful heroes, some of the best mankind has produced.
I’ve seen the Hell in Iraq, from pictures, and I don’t understand why people are wanting to bring that to the US. Civil War here, a real civil war, would be a nightmare, perhaps actually worse than what we today call our “Civil War”.
Btw, his books are worth reading in part to understand Marxism, I think. He had no respect for classical liberalism. Later maybe he picked up some respect for it though.
Was it Burnham or Strauss who taught to seek the true meaning of a comment?
Look at the Left in the US today. (I don’t mean you when I say that.) They embrace what’s popular, for power. They seek power. In many ways, you start to see that Marxists are fascists, that the two blend together. That’s my interpretation anyway. The Marxists are just willing to do anything. They use nationalism, religion, anything for power. They persecute minorities, majorities, and exterminate competing elites, even competing ethnicities. You could say that much was done in Marx’s name that wasn’t Marxist, but that brings one to the realisation that much of this is just labeling. Anyway, power pursuit makes politics very interesting.
Classical liberals defeat socialists in a global economic battle, so socialists embrace the idea that they just have to take over the world. But socialists easily exploit the wealth gap created by capitalism. Wealth gaps historically have led to instability. So, this is a clear weakness.
And in the US, conservatives familiar with our political traditions were totally unable to resist Marxism here. Burnham introduced power politics which helps understand how politics works. Before him, we’d stand around trying to convert others to wisdom of the Founders. It didn’t work, haha.
Machiavelli though taught that a balance of power leads to freedom. So, power politics is not inherently evil. There are some unpleasant problems one has to face though. One is that too much security leads one to become weak, spoiled. Then corruption can take root. I’m not sure Burnham taught that, but that’s one thing one realises. So, if you achieve utopia, it might destroy itself by its own pleasantness. Good people don’t tend to desire power, so bad men tend to come to power. It’s the ambitious who tend to be in power, not even the capable but the ambitious. Obviously ability matters too.
Just to add, partly in political science the divide is often said to be over ideas when in truth ideas are not the divide.
A perception today is that white colonialism is “right wing” while everyone resisting white colonialism is “left wing”. As a result, people with very conservative, traditional ideas can be labeled as “left wing”. And they can even read Marxist material. Yet they don’t to my eyes look to be left-wing.
I assume they don’t like right-wing material, because it tends to be written by white people during a time when whites were strong. So, reading the stuff makes them sick.
But in my view, ideas matter. Politics is like a math problem. So, any ethnic group, any religious group, can believe in any political ideas.
And I also believe the current divide is not whites vs. global-victims-of-whites but globalism vs. those-in-the-way.
So, in my view, any ethnic group, any religion that opposes globalism is my ally. Even if in their minds I’m the enemy. Because I’m white, and no one likes white people bc colonialism/American empire, etc.
Fascists use propaganda 🙂 You’re much more of a fascist than I’ll ever be.
“Without Lee, we’d likely have kept fighting for 50 years afterwards.”
Actually, 150 and counting, even with Lee.
Nonsense. There’s no guerilla war here like one sees in South America.
The natives in Central and South America tend to be oppressed and fight against the dominant groups. They actually fight. In the South, we serve in the military, cheer on the latest American idiocy. There’s no war here.
“Trump’s threat, then, provides Maduro with an idea political lifeline, allowing him to both dismiss the country’s economic woes as America’s fault, and to paint the opposition as secretly in league with the United States.”
Yeah, the problem is that the country’s economic woes do, at least in part, stem from American sabotage and much of the opposition is quite openly in league with the United States vis a vis the National Endowment for Democracy. You don’t have to be a disgruntled Chavista such as myself to realize that Maduro isn’t the only problem in Venezuela, he’s not even the worst. Just follow the money and abandon your tired anti-communist bias.
Oil price falling and their failure to invest in oil production are some of their chief problems…
I admire sovereignty, but a society has to invest.
Look at how S. Korea pulled itself up from total poverty. It manipulated the US into investing in it and giving it good trade deals. That’s how to build. Just cheer whatever the latest slogan of the US is, and take our money. Or do the same to China, someone else.
China, Japan, S. Korea: All built themselves from nothing. So has India. Trade is a key part. Anyone can copy them. Once the US falls in economic status, the free money will end. Asia knows how to grow.
Ideology is great and all, but Venezeula needs investment capital before it can chart its own destiny. Just copy Asia. China is no democracy. America loves investing in China.
Jason Ditz — Fiction
The upper-half of society in Venezuela, they own all the land, wealth, political power and until 2002, only they received an education, only they received healthcare.
So, Trump threatening a military invasion, this made the upper-half feel good, the lower-half feel bad and it changed nothing in the political realm.
The Socialist Party represents the impoverished lower-half of society, the Opposition Party represents the upper-half that owns all the land and wealth and because the elections are so close, the major issues effecting the economy never get resolved.
For though President Maduro wants to nationalize all the millions and billions of the rich and achieve full socialism, he needs a larger support of the voters.
Japan has a large middle class. I believe S. Korea does as well. Japan kept out immigration, so their wages rose. Japan also allowed the US military to defend it, didn’t need to pay for defence. Supporting Japan’s elderly is expensive though.
Few like to admit, but part of NK’s problem is it spends so much on defence. SK, similarly, lets the US defend it.
I’m not a believer that they built their societies themselves in a sense. What’s happened is the US transferred its productive capital to them. SK kept its people poor, so in a sense they lived below their means. And it protected industry. As a result, it grew rich. Now, they earn pretty well.
I agree there are serious problems in the power balance of capitalist states. I just meant that it’s good to copy their success to attract US capital. Once you have it, then you could switch to another model, try it out.
A model has to work though. People don’t realise, but slavery worked extremely well in the US. It would have spread to the North had the climate been suitable. It’s tough to resist a system that works. Those who said “No” remained poor. Those who used slaves grew rich. That inability to resist slavery suggests we almost can’t resist modern society as it is. We can try to improve it though.
If slavery is progress then count me out. As for Japan and Korea, their middle classes are shrinking with the rest of the capitalist world and they remain prisoners of the American military machine. Ask Jeju and Ryukyu how safe they feel with their farmlands demolished, their shores polluted and their daughters raped. The last great Japanese isolationist was Yukio Mishima and he committed ritualistic suicide to protest his country’s subjugation.