Tag Archives: Neoliberalism

Corporate Media Target Gabbard for Her Anti-Interventionism—a Word They Can Barely Pronounce

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Tulsi Gabbard being asked by CBS‘s Stephen Colbert (3/11/19) why she doesn’t see the US as a “force for good in the world.”

By Owen Marsh

Source: FAIR

Presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard has not garnered much press coverage since announcing her bid on February 2; she’s the 13th-most-mentioned Democratic candidate on TV news, according to FAIR’s most recent count (4/14/19).

But when corporate media do talk about the Hawaii congressmember, they tend to reveal more about themselves than about her.

A veteran of the Iraq War, Gabbard is centering her presidential campaign around anti-interventionism (2/3/19): the belief that US interference in foreign countries, especially in the form of regime-change wars, increases the suffering of the citizens in those countries.

When corporate outlets talk about this anti-interventionist position, they primarily use it to negatively characterize the candidates who espouse it. Few in establishment media seem interested in going any deeper or considering the veracity of arguments raised by anti-interventionists.

The Washington Post (1/15/19) listed Gabbard’s anti-interventionism as a factor that hurts her electability in a video titled, “Why Some See Tulsi Gabbard as a Controversial 2020 Candidate.” Part of the video’s explanation: “The congresswoman has raised concern among Democrats in the past when she criticized Obama’s strategy on Iran, ISIS and Syria.”

CBS News (2/4/19) briefly interviewed Honolulu Civil Beats reporter Nick Grube regarding Gabbard’s campaign announcement. The anchors had clearly never encountered the term anti-interventionism before, struggling to even pronounce the word, then laughing and saying it “doesn’t roll off the tongue.” When asked to define the candidate’s position, Grube equated it to President Trump’s foreign policy. But “America First” rallying cries aside, it hardly seems accurate to call Trump an anti-interventionist, given his administration’s regime change efforts in Venezuela, his unilateral reimposition of sanctions on Iran (FAIR.org, 5/2/19) and his escalation of the drone wars (Daily Beast, 11/25/18).

When Gabbard appears on talkshows, she is typically on the receiving end of baseless questions coated in assumptions of military altruism. Gabbard appeared on ABC’s The View (2/20/19) and articulated her argument that US intervention does more harm than good to the people purportedly being helped. Rather than respond to any of the points she raised, however, the hosts resorted to the kinds of shallow questions that have been supporting interventionism for decades.

Sunny Hostin asked, “So should we not get involved when we see atrocities abroad?” Fellow panelist Ana Navarro elaborated:

I’m very troubled by the tweets about Venezuela that you’ve put out…. [Maduro] is not allowing humanitarian aid, he is a thug, he is a dictator, he is corrupt. And I am very supportive of what the United States is doing right now…. Why are you so against intervention in Venezuela?

On CBS’s Late Show With Stephen Colbert (3/11/19), the host resorted to old-fashioned American exceptionalism and Cold War–style paranoia to counter the congressmember:

Nature abhors a vacuum. If we are not involved in international conflicts, or trying to quell international conflicts, certainly the Russians and the Chinese will fill that vacuum…. That might destabilize the world, because the United States, however flawed, is a force for good in the world, in my opinion.

Comments like these may seem harmless; why not, after all, fight “atrocities”? In fact, they contain the same language that media have used for decades to justify interventionism and quiet dissenters.

Colbert’s exceptionalism argument, in particular, is reminiscent of the centuries-old vision of the US as a “shining city upon a hill.” It’s also a frame historically employed by media to rationalize the country’s foreign policy. As communications scholar Andrew Rojecki wrote in his 2008 research article (Political Communication, 2/4/08) on elite commentary of George W. Bush’s military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, “Over the course of the two crises, American exceptionalist themes made up a constant background presence in elite commentary and opinion.”

In other words, the assurance that Colbert has that the US has been “a force for good in the world” has paved the way for some of the greatest disasters of the modern world, including the 17-year-old war in Afghanistan (or almost 40 years, if you date from the US deliberately provoking the 1979 Soviet intervention) and the half-million-plus killed in the Iraq War. Other difficult cases for proponents of intervention include Libya, where removing an authoritarian ruler devastated the nation and brought back slave markets, and Syria, where hawks evade responsibility for the hundreds of thousands killed in a US-backed effort to overthrow the government by pretending that the US has failed to intervene.

Currently, in Venezuela, where Navarro is “very supportive of what the United States is doing,” Washington has imposed sanctions that are blamed for killing 40,000 in the last two years (CEPR, 4/25/19). Meanwhile, the US offers as a publicity stunt a convoy with “humanitarian aid” valued at less than 1 percent of the assets it has blocked Venezuela from spending.

Another easy to way to discredit anti-war critics is to accuse them of siding with the enemy (FAIR.org, 4/1/06). So it’s not much of a surprise that when Gabbard gets mentioned in establishment news, a comment about her meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is usually soon to follow.

Gabbard traveled to Syria in 2017, on what her office called a “fact-finding mission.” During her trip, she met and spoke with al-Assad, prompting the media to question her loyalties ever since, equating her meeting to tacit support of his regime. (Gabbard calls Assad a “brutal dictator,” but says US efforts to overthrow his government are “illegal and counterproductive.”)

New York Times columnist Bari Weiss appeared on the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast (1/21/19) and confidently called Gabbard an “Assad toadie.” When Rogan asked her what “toadie” meant, she couldn’t define the word, asking the show’s producer to look it up for her. (It means “sycophant”).

The New York Times (1/11/19) and Associated Press (Washington Post, 5/2/19) both identified Gabbard’s meeting with Assad as a factor that made her a controversial candidate. In an article about Gabbard’s apparent fall from grace within the Democratic party, Vox (1/17/19) characterized Gabbard’s opposition to the funding of Syrian rebels as “quasi-support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the dictator responsible for the outbreak of the Syrian civil war and the conflict’s worst atrocities.”

Interviewers from MSNBC’s Morning Joe, ABC’s The View, CBS’s Late Show and CNN’s Van Jones Show all asked Gabbard to justify her meeting with Assad, or pressured her to renounce him as an enemy. None were interested in asking even the most basic question of substance, “What did you and Assad talk about during your meeting?” The implication is clear: When it comes to those designated by the state as official enemies, communication is suspect.

So perhaps the simplest explanation for corporate media’s treatment of Gabbard is that she opposes the kind of intervention that they have historically been complicit in.

FAIR (e.g, 4/91, 3/19/07, 8/11) has documented mainstream media’s consistent support for US intervention across the globe. FAIR has also been documenting corporate media’s support for intervention in Venezuela, finding recently that zero percent of elite commentators opposed regime change in that country (4/30/19) and noting corporate media’s harsh admonishment of Bernie Sanders after he tepidly questioned US intervention in Venezuela (3/5/19).

Gabbard’s campaign is just one small piece of a larger phenomenon in the mainstream media: Space for dissenting opinions on the US’s neoliberal, interventionist foreign policies must not be allowed.

Why Are American Communities Dying?

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By Tom Chatham

Source: Project Chesapeake

Most Americans who have been around for a while know life is nothing like it used to be. When someone wanted a job one was found with a little bit of searching. Today jobs are difficult to find, especially in small communities.

When I was growing up in the 70’s, there were several car dealers in my community. There were three tractor dealers and too many mom and pop stores to count. Today there are two used car dealers and the nearest tractor dealer is twenty miles away. So how is it that we now have more people, but fewer businesses to employ them?

A nations wealth is derived from having a product to sell. That wealth needs to circulate in towns and cities to compound the wealth effect and create jobs and businesses. When wealth is not created or it is siphoned off to other places, the wealth effect can not happen, and in many cases goes into reverse. A community needs a certain amount of service related jobs to function but it also needs some type of production jobs to bring in money from the outside. This can be mining , agriculture or manufacturing type jobs, but they must exist to insure a healthy economy.

America has two major problems today. A large amount of our production is done outside the country eliminating production jobs in local communities and many of the small local businesses that kept wealth within communities have been supplanted by large corporations that siphon wealth out of communities and send it to wall street.

In the past when a small business made profit, that profit was kept in the local community because that is where the owner lived. Now, that profit leaves the community never to be seen again. With less money to circulate within the community the businesses that depend on people spending their extra dollars, have fewer customers and eventually go out of business. With fewer jobs there is that much less money circulating and the economic situation spirals down until nothing is left.

These days corporate businesses and government jobs make up the major part of many local communities. In many cases if it were not for the government jobs, many communities would no longer exist. So what do you think would happen if the government suddenly no longer had money to pay those workers? What would happen if corporate profits dropped to the point where corporate stores decided to close and cut their losses?

To some extent we are seeing this happen now in many places. Corporate stores moved in and drove small local businesses out. Then when the profits dried up the corporate stores closed leaving the community with no jobs or products to buy. With no capital in the local communities to rebuild small businesses, the people simply drive to other areas to do their shopping.

The corporate cronies and government laggards control most of the money flowing through communities now and they want to keep it that way. Any attempt to rebuild local businesses is met with luke warm results. Any business that might make a difference is either killed outright or regulated into oblivion before it can get off the ground. The county where I live has all but abandoned local businesses. The bulk of their income comes from property taxes generated by vacation homes and retirement homes of retired government employees. As long as the government pensions and paychecks continue, they see no reason to change the status quo. The result is that the younger people leave as soon as they can and the average age of the population continues to get older. As with many places today, this area has no future.

Where I live is a microcosm of the nation. Corporate and government entities continue to siphon what little money there is out of communities and just as small communities are dying, the nation will soon follow if current trends do not change. A return to small local economics is the only way to reverse some of the damage and keep our communities livable. But, do not be deceived. There is no way to undo all of the damage that has been done and even if we survive, we will only be a shadow of what we once were as a nation.

Ecuador Has Been Hit by 40 Million Cyber Attacks Since Assange’s Arrest

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By Elias Marat

Source: The Mind Unleashed

The government of Ecuador claims that the country has come under a broad and concerted cyber attack, with approximately 40 million attempts to compromise web portals connected to public institutions ever since the controversial decision to allow UK police to forcibly remove Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from their London Embassy.

Deputy Minister of Information and Communication Technologies Patricio Real told reporters that the wave of attacks began shortly after last Thursday’s arrest of Assange by British authorities. Real said that the attacks “principally come from the United States, Brazil, Holland, Germany, Romania, France, Austria and the United Kingdom, and also from here, from our territory.”

On April 11, Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno revoked the diplomatic asylum extended to Asange by the South American nation in 2012. In a legally dubious move, Quito also revoked the Ecuadorian nationality granted to Assange in 2017.

Ecuador’s El Comercio reported that the telecommunications ministry’s undersecretary of electronic government, Javier Jara, claimed that following “threats received by these groups related to Julian Assange”–such as the shadowy network Anonymous–the country began suffering “volumetric attacks.”

Volumetric attacks are a type of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in which servers are flooded with requests in an attempt to overload them with traffic, thus preventing users from accessing the network.

According to AFP, the targets included the foreign ministry, central bank, tax authorities, the office of the president, and a number of other government agencies’ websites. None of the attacks succeeded in destroying or stealing data.

The attacks also come amid the Ecuadorian government’s detention of Ola Bini, a Swedish national and software developer allegedly tied to Wikileaks who was detained last Thursday as he attempted to attend a martial arts event in Japan. Bini, as well as two unidentified Russian “hackers,” are being held for their alleged role in a “hackers’ network” based in the country. Bini, who is accused of having met with Assange 12 times, has also just been accused of playing a role in blackmail attempts targeting President Moreno.

Since 2017, Assange’s relationship with his Ecuadorean hosts sharply deteriorated amid President Lenin Moreno’s attempts to curry favor with international creditors and wealthy governments in the north such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain. Moreno began referring to Assange on various occasions as a “miserable hacker,” an “irritant,” and a “stone in the shoe” of his government.

Last year, the London embassy cut off his access to the internet for alleged political meddling following requests by Quito that he stop commenting on affairs in other countries.

Relations took a strong turn for the worse in March following the release of a batch of documents known as the “INA Papers,” which implicated the president in alleged corruption, including money-laundering, offshore bank accounts and a shell company named INA Investment Corporation that is based in Panama and was used by President Moreno’s family to procure furniture, property, and luxury goods.

It is widely speculated that while Wikileaks has still not been directly tied to the release of the INA Papers, President Moreno was enraged after personal photographs were released showing his opulent private life, including photos of the president enjoying lavish lobster breakfast-in-bed and lobster dinners–imagery considered damning by Ecuador’s electorate especially given Moreno’s prior boasting of a poverty diet of eggs and white rice, which he claimed to regularly eat as he rammed through austerity measures that led to thousands of layoffs in the poor yet resource-rich South American country.

Within Ecuador, opinions have been evenly split about Assange, with the country’s right-wing and centrists supporting the decision to end his asylum while the left and supporters of former President Rafael Correa have considered the move a scandalous act of outright prostration before the “imperialists” of the Global North.

As such, social media reactions to the government’s complaints of “cyber attacks” have provoked both outrage and mockery from the Ecuadorian public, with some social media users thanking Assange for releasing the INA Papers and others claiming that the attacks will serve as a convenient smokescreen for the country’s authorities to further plunder the public coffers of the South American country.

A Land Uncharted: the Persecution of Julian Assange

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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

By Kenn Orphan

Source: CounterPunch

“The freedom of the press is not safe. It’s over. And I think our republic is in its last days, because unauthorized disclosures of this kind are the lifeblood of a republic.”

– Daniel Ellsberg

The persecution and arrest of Julian Assange is the first and most definitive step toward full blown global fascism. The symbolism of a gravely ill journalist being manhandled by uniformed henchmen is the exact imagery it needed to send a chilling message to whistleblowers and the press. The assault and eventual dismantling of what remains of a free press has always been that first step, and it is what lies on the horizon barring mass dissent. For decades the mainstream media has acquiesced to the demands of the corporate world of high finance that now owns them outright and the military and surveillance state that informs their narrative. To be sure, many of them must be trembling at the events that unfolded in London.

That so many prominent American liberals are cheering this on is hardly surprising. History is replete with examples of how the privileged bourgeoisie are the first to capitulate to fascism. It happened in the 1930’s in Germany, Spain and Italy. It happened in the 1970’s in Argentina and Chile. It is happening now across the supposedly “democratic” western world. The animus they possess for Assange is not over his personal ethics, politics or affiliations, which are indeed open for criticism and debate. Like any human being, he is flawed. It is rooted in sore feelings over Wikileaks exposure of the machinations of the corrupt Democratic Party and their Wall Street favoured war hawk, Hillary Clinton. None of what Wikileaks revealed was untrue, but they blame the failure of their deeply flawed candidate on it nonetheless. They care little about the war crimes the platform helped expose through the courage of Chelsea Manning or the threat his persecution represents to press freedom itself.

That the fascist despot Trump has disavowed Wikileaks is hardly surprising either. After all, he may have used the leaks to his benefit, but the man who has relentlessly demonized the press will undoubtedly use this moment to his benefit again. Wikileaks as an organization isn’t perfect and, like any other media outlet, it is not beyond criticism. But nearly every major news outlet has used and published its material, without appreciation or gratitude, because it provided an unprecedented glimpse into the nefarious activities and guiding principles of the ruling elite. The veil had been finally lifted. But with the arrest of Julian Assange this makes all of those news outlets vulnerable to state or corporate repression and censure.

With the Trump administration chomping at the bit to launch a war against Iran and Venezuela, this must come as welcome news to them. After all, it was Wikileaks that exposed the war crimes of the Bush administration in Iraq, not the corporate media. So they can be assured little reporting, aside from a few courageous citizen journalists or those embedded with the troops who parrot Pentagon talking points, will be done to expose the Empire’s war crimes now.

Indeed, Trump has been given a green light with this one event to continue and expand the American Empire, moribund as it is, without reproach. And like a bloated corpse, it will undoubtedly infect and defile everything it touches. More brutal violations of the global south, more coups against democratically elected governments, and bolder acts of authoritarian cruelty at home. He has made no pretense of this. His minions, Pompeo and Bolton, are working tirelessly constructing the next war. And in the past several weeks he has purged his administration of monsters he deemed “too weak” when it comes to crackdowns against immigrants and asylum seekers. A classic tactic of all tyrants. He has anointed the rabid white supremacist, Stephen Miller, in this 21st century pogrom and has also toyed with the idea of making the military in charge of internment camps for migrants. Only a fool would not find such a thing chilling to the bone.

Indeed fascist leaders around the world, along with the military/surveillance establishment and their neoliberal enablers, are celebrating the silencing of Assange. After all, Wikileaks has represented a major thorn in their sides for a decade. From Netanyahu to Duterte to Bolsonaro to Modi and even Putin, all will be emboldened to expand their own attacks on press freedom. All of them will feel empowered to be even more unrestrained in their brutality.

We are on the eve of a sweeping, global, fascist tyranny. Thanks to the continued proliferation of nuclear arms, endless corporate and military assaults on the life sustaining biosphere, catastrophic climate change and the systematic dismantling of democracy, it is a land uncharted. Journalists, especially those who are independent of the corporate stranglehold, are being routinely and relentlessly persecuted and even murdered around the world. They are a bulwark against fascism we dare not lose. But the arrest of Assange is representative of a free press now under constant threat of annihilation. And it will without a doubt grow even more difficult for them to navigate through the mendacity of a ruthless ruling order that has become utterly unrestrained.

Kenn Orphan is an artist, sociologist, radical nature lover and weary, but committed activist. He can be reached at kennorphan.com.

Did the NY Times Violate Its Own Code of Ethics to Feature Child of Venezuelan Coup Plotter?

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After the New York Times was slammed for obscuring comedian Joanna Hausmann’s family ties to the Guaido shadow regime, her coup-plotting father appeared online to defend her with a stream of insults.

By Anya Parampil

Source: The Grayzone

When the New York Times approached me seeking permission to use video I recorded of the Washington DC “Hands Off Venezuela” protest on March 16, I hoped that somebody at the paper was seeking to atone for the Gray Lady’s demonstrably one-sided coverage of the US coup attempt against the internationally recognized Maduro government. Maybe, just maybe, the editors had had a rare bout of self-reflection and decided to produce something that gave voice to the many Americans who rejected the Trump administration’s brazen regime change operation against Venezuela.

But on April 1, I woke up to learn that my footage had been used to demonize the protesters as useful idiots by a YouTube comedian born to one of the family dynasties of Venezuela’s opposition.

The comedian in question was Joanna Hausmann, and her appearance in the supposed newspaper of record was far from funny. How could the paper justify selecting Hausmann as an authoritative voice on the situation in Venezuela when she was so closely connected to central players in the Trump administration’s coup attempt? The answer is that it couldn’t, so it simply neglected to mention her glaring conflict of interest.

I took a deep dive into Hausmann’s family history in a March 10th article for MintPress, highlighting the role Joanna’s father, Ricardo Hausmann, played in the neoliberalization of Venezuela’s economy throughout the 1980s and ’90s as an academic and eventual member of the repressive Carlos Andrés Pérez administration.

The piece was inspired by Joanna Hausmann’s Youtube harangue, “What’s Happening in Venezuela.” Despite promising “a video dedicated to ‘just the facts,’” Hausmann failed to mention that her father was serving as a top advisor to Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó while she argued in support of his self-declared “presidency.”

Ricardo Hausmann’s function within the coup government crystalized shortly following the release of Joanna’s Youtube explainer, when Guaidó selected the Harvard professor to represent his shadow regime at the Inter-American Development Bank. The Times took no issue with the fact Hausmann’s family stood to benefit from the same coup she was urging viewers to support, and like Joanna herself, neglected to disclose this ostensibly relevant information.

The Times appeared to have underestimated the intelligence of its viewers, and was subsequently bombarded with criticism for its decision to obscure Hausmann’s background.

One reader who described himself as “a Venezuelan, [who agrees] with everything [Hausmann] has to say,” complained in the comments section of the Hausmann video that the omission amounted to “an ethical error,” arguing “it should be noted that her father has a lot to gain politically and professionally should regime change happen.” The comment forced a response from the segment’s executive producer, Adam Ellick, who claimed that, while the Times was “aware of her father’s biography before publication,” it opted not to acknowledge it because “Ms. Hausmann is an independent adult woman who has built a popular following on her own.”

Ellick’s response failed to satisfy the commenter, who emphasized that “the issue here isn’t one of independence, it’s one of shared outcomes.” According to Ellick’s logic, it would be journalistically ethical to ignore Ivanka Trump’s relation to the President on the basis she is “an independent adult woman” with a fashion line of her own. Does the Times actually think we are stupid?

The backlash against Joanna’s NYT debut grew so intense, it eventually compelled her father to respond to the controversy. Following the video’s release, I tweeted criticism of the paper for its failure to disclose that “Hausmann is the daughter of Guaidó advisor Ricardo Hausmann,” linking to my article which explained that he “was instrumental in neoliberalizing and destroying Venezuela’s economy in the 90s and wants to do it again.”

The factual statement apparently outraged Professor Hausmann, who charged that my “tweet surely deserves at least an honorary mention among the year’s most sexist comments,” adding, “since Joanna is my daughter, she is not entitled to her own opinion. She must be speaking on behalf of some male figure that tells her what to say. Seriously?”

Yes, seriously! Joanna does not appear to have her “own opinion” — she has precisely the same opinion as her father, who happens to be participating in the very coup for which she was advocating. Yet even if we accept the notion that Joanna formed opinions independent from her father’s influence, the Times still had an ethical obligation to disclose her family ties – especially considering that Professor Hausmann is not her only relative actively working to achieve regime change in Caracas.

Joanna’s mother, Ana Julia Jatar, has worked for the US-funded Súmate organization, which in 2004 tried and failed to oust President Hugo Chávez via popular referendum. As I reported for MintPress, Jatar hails from a political family herself.

Jatar’s father, Braulio Jatar Dotti, was once described by an independent Chilean news site “as having been ‘in charge of eliminating the leftist groups’ in Venezuela” in the 1960s, as the government sought to violently repress the armed Revolutionary Left Movement. Jatar Dotti even published a manual called, “Disabling the Extreme Left” in 1963. With her grandfather’s history in mind, it’s no wonder that Joanna now spends her time attacking the US left for organizing to oppose war on Venezuela. Apparently, the family that attacks the left and fails to overthrow governments together stays together.

While it is important to understand the full extent to which regime change and resentment of “the left” runs through Joanna Hausmann’s veins, her father’s participation in the current coup alone should have disqualified her to pose as a neutral voice on Venezuela. The Times’ decision to ignore her background is not only offensive to viewers, but may have also violated the paper’s own ethics code. According to that code, “staff members must be sensitive that perfectly proper political activity by their spouses, family or companions may nevertheless create conflicts of interest or the appearance of conflict.” The Hausmann scandal undeniably created such a scenario for the paper.

Joanna has largely kept quiet amid the deluge of criticism, and is quick to block those who question her. (She blocked me on Twitter after I noted her father’s prominent role in the Guaidó shadow regime.) Why a grown woman professing her total independence needed her father to come to her defense should be a mystery, as RT Español reporter Helena Villar observed.

One Twitter user named Vanessa Salas, who describes herself as “a personal friend” of Joanna, recommended that I “get to know” the comedian before making “unfounded statements.” Salas insistedthat her pal was “SMART, THOUGHTFUL, and FEARLESS.” Indeed, Joanna Hausmann was so fearless that she had to rely on her friends, family, and an army of trolls to deflect from her wanton journalistic malpractice.

Joanna did eventually muster up one non-answer to critics. When a Twitter user named @unnaband asked why she neglected to mention that her “father was personally appointed by the very opposition leader” she promoted in her video, the Youtube comedian hit back: “I am proud of my dad.”

He is surely proud of her too. And among the Times editors who presided over her ethically dubious video rant, there appears to be no shame.

 

Related Video:

Inventing the Future: The Collective Joy of Mark Fisher’s ‘k-punk’

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By Michael Grasso

Source: We Are the Mutants

k-punk
By Mark Fisher
Foreword by Simon Reynolds, Edited by Darren Ambrose
Repeater Books, 2018

A little over two years ago, theorist and cultural critic Mark Fisher took his own life at the age of 48. I remember feeling numb at hearing the news; not out of sadness but more a sense of deja vu, of familiarity. I’d been through something similar already with David Foster Wallace’s suicide back in 2008; his Infinite Jest (1996) was one of the single most searing, searching moral indictments of the post-Cold War social and political order in the West, and a tremendously important work to me personally. Fisher toiled in very much the same fields in his writings. Both men had used their own struggles with depression (and in Wallace’s case, addiction) to fuel their insights into a world order that had run out of promise, of hope for the future. Wallace died two months before Barack Obama was elected, in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis; Fisher immediately after the election of Donald Trump. One American election offered (misplaced) hope, the other, a terminal kind of despair.

Over the past year or so I’ve also had the opportunity, while finishing my Master’s degree, to delve deeply into the work of cultural critic Walter Benjamin, who came to intellectual maturity in the Weimar Republic and found himself an exile with the rise of the Nazis in 1933. Like Wallace and Fisher, Benjamin used the cultural environment around him to help explain the world, to make sense of the turmoil that was roiling the once-orderly social order around him. Benjamin also killed himself, as he fled from the Nazi invasion of France in 1940 at the age of 48, just like Fisher. The parallels between all three men, to my mind, were uncanny. In the end, I feel the same thing got all three of these men: the encroaching feeling of dread at observing a world that had spun off its axis, beyond their ability to explain it.

I offer all this as a preface to my review of Mark Fisher’s collected online and unpublished writings, k-punk (Repeater Books, 2018), because I find myself thinking more often these days about the void of Fisher’s loss rather than the wealth of writings that he gave us while he was alive. And I feel like my despair essentially misunderstands what Mark Fisher was all about. The overwhelming feeling of most of the writings collected in k-punk is one of utter joy, whether it’s in celebrating a lost piece of media that Fisher wants us to know about, or his just and righteous delight in explaining exactly what late capitalism is doing to all of us.

A couple of years ago, my podcast partner Rob MacDougall and I had occasion to talk about the intellectual history of defining and preventing sexual harassment in the workplace for our podcast about WKRP in Cincinnati. And I’ll never forget the way he explained how clearly and uncompromisingly that defining a social problem can be the most important first step in combating it. He said, “Language is technology. Until you can name [something], you can’t get at it.” And I think that’s the legacy of Mark Fisher in a lot of ways. He gave us new terms—“pulp modernism,” “the precariat,” “hauntology,” “capitalist realism,” “acid communism”—that helped define not only our problems but our collective dreams for a better world. Like Benjamin before him, Fisher used his precise and profoundly moral observations of the world around him to give us a vocabulary to understand and express what is being done to us and how we can find our way out of it.

First things first: k-punk is a monster. Repeater Books has collected Fisher’s blog posts and unpublished writings in a massive 800-page tome. Given that the average length of one of these essays is about 3-4 pages, what you end up with is a bewilderingly encyclopedic collection of Fisher’s thoughts on seemingly everything. The conversion of once-hyperlink-laden web text to paper is sometimes jarring—the editor Darren Ambrose has done yeoman work in providing footnotes to mark where links to other bloggers and commenters once lay—but the reader almost never feels lost in figuring out what Fisher was trying to say. The foreword is by Fisher’s contemporary and friend, the music critic Simon Reynolds, whose seminal 2005 work on post-punk, Rip It Up and Start Again, is a favorite of mine. The same author’s 2011 Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past was, like Fisher’s work, a major inspiration for my own Master’s capstone project on nostalgia and its use in museums. Reynolds’ foreword is not only a heartfelt and deeply touching tribute to Fisher’s life and work, it also illustrates well the cultural milieu in which both men worked in the early part of this century. Getting to know someone better by reading their blog everyday is a deeply familiar mode to me and many members of my generation, and here Reynolds nails the somewhat uncanny feeling of getting to be best friends with someone you’ve only hung out with a few times in person. Probably it will be less strange for the generations who come after us. I do admit stifling a chuckle as one of the first essays in this paperback collection is a “tag five friends” meme; seeing such an essentially “online” phenomenon in print, in an esteemed cultural critic’s essay collection no less, would probably be considered “weird” in the Fisherian “weird/eerie” schema: an intruder from Outside whose alien presence inflects its surroundings.

In his foreword, Reynolds dubs Fisher a member of a disappearing breed: “the music critic as prophet.” Both Reynolds and Fisher came of age in the golden era of British publications like the NME, which treated its readers with a modicum of sophistication and intellectual respect. British music critics in the 1980s were never afraid to throw in references to contemporary political philosophers and cultural critics from the world of academia, nor were they reluctant to blur the lines between artist and critic. Fisher himself offers tribute to one of these writer-artists in “Choose Your Weapons,” an essay focusing on NME writer and Art of Noise member/ZTT Records co-founder Paul Morley, as well as his fellow NME writer Ian Penman. Reynolds sees Fisher as the clear heir to this type of rock journalist; Fisher even had his own musical group in the early 1990s, D-Generation, which peppered press releases and music with references to cultural theory.

As mentioned above and in my earlier piece on him, Fisher was never afraid to unearth a piece of forgotten media from his childhood or adolescence for examination in the cold light of our present late capitalism. His mourning for the loss of risk-taking on the part of the gatekeepers at public broadcasters such as the BBC is well-known. (I highly recommend the essay “Precarity and Paternalism” in k-punk for Fisher’s breathtaking rhetorical link between the blandness of pop culture today and the burning down of the public sphere under neoliberalism.) But what k-punk puts forth clearly (and Reynolds makes clear in his foreword) is that Fisher was never solely a backwards-looking critic. In these essays you can see him fully engaged in the contemporary cultural scene in a way that can sometimes get lost in his reputation as “the hauntology guy.” I found Fisher’s recuperation of Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly’s odd little Twilight Zone riff from 2009, The Box, to be downright essential in explaining why I liked it so much but couldn’t articulate why at the time. Ironically, Fisher avers that it is a rare piece of American hauntology (an aesthetic I’ve been desperately trying to quantify here at We Are the Mutants), with Kelly exploring the legacy of his NASA employee dad during NASA’s own final years of glory as a public agency (the late ’70s era of the Viking and Voyager probes) before the ultimately doomed Shuttle program. As someone who only gave the k-punk blog a cursory look prior to Fisher’s death, being far more familiar with his published writings, reading Fisher on the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy or on contemporary television series that I watched from the beginning, like Breaking Bad and The Americans, hit me in that same Fisherian-weird way.

Even though the essays in the k-punk collection are organized by content type—reviews of books, music, television/film, political writings, interviews—it’s easy to note Fisher’s evolution as a writer, with each content area organized chronologically within. Perhaps this is only my prejudice, but I notice in the early years of Fisher’s k-punk posts a distinct anxiety of influence with older writers and theoreticians, out of which he eventually matures. His early-’00s work centers writers and thinkers like J.G. Ballard, Franz Kafka, Dennis Potter, even Freud and Spinoza. Slavoj Žižek also looms very large, probably for no other reason than that he was (and still is) one of the only voices engaging intelligently with the political impact of the pop culture detritus of late capitalism. But it’s in this occasional early tension with Žižek that you start to see Fisher make his own conclusions, state his own thoughts. It’s not necessarily that Fisher ever makes an explicit break with Žižek; it’s just that you see him mentioned less and less and, finally, not at all.

It was in music that Fisher saw the greatest potential for social and cultural revolution. It’s become a thoroughly lazy trope among armchair cultural critics to keep quoting that bit from Plato’s Republic about how changing a society’s music will change the society, but Fisher actually convinces the reader of that idea, in a profoundly vital and contemporary context. For Fisher, mod, glam, and to a certain extent punk all offered the working classes a chance to grab the same aristocratic glamor and glory to which the bourgeoisie had always had access. (Reading Fisher on the unearthly magical “glamour” of pop stars gets me thinking about Kieron Gillen’s “gods come to earth as pop stars” comic The Wicked + the Divine; I’d be shocked if Gillen wasn’t a k-punk reader from way back.) I personally find Fisher far stronger on post-punk. His multi-part examination of The Fall and Mark E. Smith is downright essential; I thought often while reading how much I wish Fisher could have read Richard McKenna’s Sapphire And Steel-referencing encomium to Smith. A pure love of Green Gartside of Scritti Politti and his dance-floor theoretics, so beloved by that very same theory-soaked 1980s NME, shines through in several k-punk essays. Fisher’s multiple essays on the goth aesthetic (and adjunct aesthetic movements like steampunk) are insightful, even as he holds goth at a bit of a remove as compared to post-punk and dance music. His essays on the Cure, Nick Cave, and specifically Siouxsie Sioux’s visual aesthetic from early swastika-armband-wearing punk provocateur to glittering Klimt spectacle on A Kiss in the Dreamhouse are particularly good.

And it’s here in Fisher’s music writing that we see yet another evolution, this time in three phases roughly analogous to the Marxist-Fichtean dialectic. Fisher begins with an arguably essentialist, archetypal, borderline Paglian view of the aristocratic charisma inherent in pop music; moves to a canny and earnest recognition of the purely proletarian qualities of post-punk and dance music (and the paradoxically populist power of the “public information” aesthetic of hauntological music); and then shifts to an eventual synthesis of these very different conceptions of music-as-liberation.

That synthesis was to be the topic of his next book, Acid Communism, the preface for which is included at the end of k-punk: Fisher was going to look back at the origin point for neoliberalism in the 1970s and pinpoint exactly where the workers’ movement and the left had begun to lose the battle for power. Through a re-examination of the 1960s New Left under thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, Fisher locates the real revolutionary promise and potential in the bewildering flowering of popular culture that occurred in the ’60s, as well as the profound societal change that this revolution in culture propelled. “Mass culture—and music culture in particular—was a terrain of struggle rather than a dominion of capital,” Fisher notes. The true conflict of workers’ leftism vs. neoliberalism, Fisher argued, happened nearly a decade before neoliberalism’s origin point, in the struggle between the liberal Cold War orthodoxies in the West and the profoundly psychedelic movement of the youth rebelling against these staid establishment cultural tendencies. In America, of course, this series of youth movements became inexorably intertwined with resistance to the Vietnam War, perhaps to its detriment. Fisher posits instead a youth movement that worked against the assumptions of Cold War-era society on a much more elemental level. He finds much more interesting the movements where the left chafed against the High Cold War hegemony of labor-leftism in the West and indeed the very idea of work, and sees glimmers of his “acid communism” in social milieus as disparate as Paris in 1968, the British miners’ strike (aided by students) in 1972, the GM strike in Lordstown Ohio in 1972, and Bologna in 1977. The essential question asked in all these times and places: what if the revolution happens and we are in thrall to just another set of labor bureaucrats? One might answer that this actually happened with the ascension of the Baby Boomers to places of authority in the supposedly kinder, gentler, more “diverse” digital capitalism we live with today.

Obviously, virtually every bit of cultural writing that Fisher published was viewed through the prism of a leftist politics, but in the Politics and Interviews sections of k-punk, we get those politics unfiltered through any particular piece of pop culture. Here is where you see Fisher at his most passionate, his most personal, his most vital. Most important, in my mind, is his relentless insistence that capitalism kills both body and soul. While a Marxist theory of alienation is certainly nothing new, Fisher’s own personal experiences with being a member of the “precariat,” dealing with the peculiar doublethink of the purported “freedom” of the gig economy, demonstrates how the market hands us all slavery in the guise of self-actualization. And here is where Fisher’s writing intersects with his profound personal interest in public health, specifically mental health. Digital technology allows the gig worker to be relentlessly surveilled and ruthlessly “reviewed”; the disappearance of the old forms of authority and hierarchy in the workplace are distributed among one’s fellow consumers to create a web of virtual bureaucracy that creates constant cognitive dissonance and the distinct feeling that one is truly never off the job. From the ancient dream of never working to the modern reality of constantly working: Fisher thus asks us over and over if it’s any wonder we are all anxious and depressed?

It’s glaringly obvious stuff to most of us living in 2019, but again: Fisher’s moral clarity shines through and illuminates the darker corners of a world to which we’ve all slowly acquiesced. And yes, Mark Fisher did suffer from severe depression himself. One of the editorial decisions that I disagree with most is the stated decision to not include Fisher’s more “pessimistic” work from earlier in his career. Here is k-punk‘s editor Ambrose on this decision:

A very small number of early k-punk posts, e.g. on antinatalism, are excluded by virtue of the fact that they seemed wildly out of step with Mark’s overall theoretical and political development, and because they seemed to reflect a temporary enthusiasm for a dogmatic theoretical misanthropy he repudiated in his later writing and life.

You still see glimpses of this pessimism and near-nihilism in a few of the essays; a startlingly good review of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ where Fisher sees its neo-Gnostic underpinnings, or a deep intrigue with the antinatalist works of horror writer and philosopher Thomas Ligotti (who would find unexpected mass popularity with Nic Pizzolatto’s use of Ligotti in the first season of True Detective). But speaking as someone who suffers with mental illness and profound depression, let me make clear: it is absolutely reasonable to expect someone even as optimistic and positive as Fisher to occasionally look at the world with abject despair. Moreover, I believe it is more than merely reasonable, it’s necessary. To dispute or deny that anyone with a modicum of political awareness would not be occasionally nihilistically fucking depressed with the world as it is today seems a massive mistake to me.

Immediately before presenting the unfinished introduction to Acid Communism, we’re presented with two of Fisher’s most famous essays: his polemic against the contemporary left’s tendency towards ideological puritanism, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” and his personal memoir of living (and working) with depression, “Good For Nothing.” No two pieces in this book depict the central contradictions and tensions of Fisher’s ethics and philosophy more clearly. “Vampire Castle” is, in my personal opinion, one of Fisher’s greatest missteps and the one piece of his writing where I most see a distressing tendency towards a lack of empathy for his comrades. In the essay, Fisher excoriates a certain faction of the left and its tendency to center “identity politics.” He further posits that these identity-based politics are a way in which the mechanisms of late capitalist control attempt to neuter and split the political left, a profoundly “individualistic” movement rather than one that builds cross-cultural solidarity. Fisher states that humorless scolds participating in “call-out culture” are preventing the left from building true power. Every time I go back to this essay, I initially find myself seeing some some modicum of logic in Fisher’s arguments. But then I remember how much of the modern capitalism that Fisher despised is literally built on the backs of genocide, racism, slavery, colonialism. I remember all of capitalism’s own constant essentializing and dividing of the proletariat, purely on the basis of identity, a superstructure that has systematically disenfranchised entire peoples on this globe, and ultimately I react with, “This is the kind of take that only a white guy from Britain could make.” It’s tone-deaf, destructive, and has given fuel to the worst strains of white exceptionalism and disdain for so-called “idpol” on the left in the past few years. I would argue that nothing good and quite a bit that is bad has come from it.

In fact, I wish someone would’ve told Mark how harmful this piece was. I have a feeling all it would have taken is one person—a woman, a person of color, an indigenous person, someone queer—to explain to him that while there should obviously be solidarity on the left, there are profound issues of historical materialism here that stretch back centuries, unfinished work that needs a profound upheaval and seizure of power from below (and yes, to some degree the anger and fury and the positive social knock-on effects of a “call-out culture”) to even begin to deal with restoratively. I want to believe he’d understand. It can be true that the capitalist powers-that-be love watching the left devour their own over issues that might seem personalized and “individual” to a white British man, but it can also be true that the profound historical injustices inflicted on colonized peoples the world over need to be centered in any revolutionary left solidarity. Both can be true.

And then you have “Good For Nothing,” an essay that I can say confidently has saved my life, maybe several times, since I first read it a few years ago. It is overflowing with empathy: for those of us hedged in by our class identities and made to feel inferior, uneducated, unworthy, a cog in a machine that only views us for how useful we can be to an employer or to the economy. It is a crisp distillation of every piece of personal writing Fisher ever wrote about the dehumanizing and alienating collective psychological effects of neoliberalism. Most importantly, it is a clarion call for solidarity:

For some time now, one of the most successful tactics of the ruling class has been responsibilisation. Each individual member of the subordinate class is encouraged into feeling that their poverty, lack of opportunities, or unemployment, is their fault and their fault alone. Individuals will blame themselves rather than social structures, which in any case they have been induced into believing do not really exist (they are just excuses, called upon by the weak)…

Collective depression is the result of the ruling class project of resubordination. For some time now, we have increasingly accepted the idea that we are not the kind of people who can act. This isn’t a failure of will any more than an individual depressed person can “snap themselves out of it” by “pulling their socks up.” The rebuilding of class consciousness is a formidable task indeed, one that cannot be achieved by calling upon ready-made solutions—but, in spite of what our collective depression tells us, it can be done. Inventing new forms of political involvement, reviving institutions that have become decadent, converting privatised disaffection into politicised anger: all of this can happen, and when it does, who knows what is possible?

This call for collective action on a political, economic, psychological, and even spiritual level is the voice of Mark Fisher’s that I remember and hold close to my heart every day. In every one of us there is a person worthy of respect and dignity, regardless of how “useful” we might be to a boss or a manager; in all of us a person who deserves not to live a life of misery, a person worthy of joy and music and glamour. That’s the Mark Fisher who throbs under the surfaces of nearly every one of these 800 pages. k-punk is a fitting tribute to a thinker who showed us the wonder in our past and the promise in our future, if we but remembered each other and not merely ourselves.

 

Michael Grasso is a Senior Editor at We Are the Mutants. He is a Bostonian, a museum professional, and a podcaster. You can read his thoughts on museums and more on Twitter at @MuseumMichael.

Israel Lobby Rebuts Omar’s Claims About Its Immense Influence By Exerting Its Immense Influence

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

In response to criticisms made by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar that US political leaders have too much allegiance to Israel and its lobbying groups, House Democrats have put forward an entire House resolution in accordance with demands made by AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League.

“The backlash [over Omar’s comments] continued on Monday, as the Anti-Defamation League wrote a letter to Pelosi calling for a House resolution to specifically reject what the organization calls Omar’s ‘latest slur,’” Politico reports. “‘We urge you and your colleagues to send the unambiguous message that the United States Congress is no place for hate,’ the group’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote in a letter.”

“The charge of dual loyalty not only raises the ominous specter of classic anti-Semitism, but it is also deeply insulting to the millions upon millions of patriotic Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, who stand by our democratic ally, Israel,” tweeted the Israel lobbying group AIPAC on Friday in response to Omar’s comments.

“I hope @AIPAC isn’t too angry that it took Democratic House leaders almost 48 whole hours to do what they’re told to condemn their own member and will instead be understanding that it was a weekend and that’s what caused the delay,” snarked journalist Glenn Greenwald in response to the news of the House resolution.

US politicians of all faiths and in both parties have indeed been falling all over themselves in a mad scramble to tell the freshman congresswoman that she is wrong and evil for suggesting that there is undue loyalty to Israel among US politicians.

“It is disturbing that Rep. Omar continues to perpetuate hurtful anti-Semitic stereotypes that misrepresent our Jewish community,” tweeted California Congressman Juan Vargas, who is not Jewish. “Additionally, questioning support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is unacceptable,” Vargas continued, inadvertently re-stating Omar’s original argument.

“But serious question: How is it anti-Semitic to question Christian Republican allegiance to Israel?” asked journalist Rania Khalek in response to the controversy. “Because it’s people like Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Marco Rubio who Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib were initially called anti-Semitic for challenging on loyalty to Israel.”

It is indeed interesting that the label “antisemitism” is being pinned on an argument directed at mostly non-Jewish lawmakers and not at Jews at all. It is also interesting that the House resolution’s current text twists that reality on its head by falsely implying that the comments were directed at Jewish politicians. The most Omar-specific parts of the resolution read as follows:

Whereas the definition further includes ‘‘accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations’’;

Whereas the myth of dual loyalty, including allegations that Jews should be suspected of being disloyal neighbors or citizens, has been used to marginalize and persecute the Jewish people for centuries for being a stateless minority;

Whereas accusing Jews of dual loyalty because they support Israel, whether out of a religious connection, a commitment to Jewish self-determination after millennia of persecution, or an appreciation for shared values and interests, suggests that Jews cannot be patriotic Americans and trusted neighbors, when Jews have served our Nation since its founding, whether in public life or military service;

Whereas accusations of dual loyalty generally have an insidious, bigoted history, including (1) the discriminatory internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II on the basis of race; (2) the Dreyfuss affair; when Alfred Dreyfuss, a Jewish French artillery captain was falsely convicted of passing secrets to Germany based on his Jewish background; (3) when the loyalty of President John F. Kennedy was questioned because of his Catholic faith; and (4) the post-9/11 conditions faced by Muslim-Americans in the United States, including unfounded, vicious attacks on and threats to Muslim-American Members of Congress;

Omar’s comments have nothing to do with Jews, Judaism or Jewishness, but with the geopolitical entanglements between the US and a nation which currently serves as an outpost for US military agendas in the Middle East. It’s a basic, unassailable fact that the agenda to maintain this relationship holds immense sway in America’s capitol, which is why the only arguments you see against it are fallacious, dishonest, irrelevant, or even prove it to be true.

“It is so disingenuous of some of these members of Congress who are lining up to condemn these questioning voices as if they have no campaign finance interest in the outcome,” former congressman Brian Baird told the New York Times today. “If one dares to criticize Israel or dares to criticize AIPAC, one gets branded anti-Semitic, and that’s a danger to a democratic republic.”

Ilhan Omar has sparked one of the most interesting conversations happening in America today, and the smear campaign against her has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism, but with silencing that conversation. The social engineers are not interested in fighting religious bigotry, they are interested in shutting her up.

In an increasingly neoliberalism-weary world, the old smear tactics of labeling a dissident voice a “communist” or a “socialist” don’t pack the kind of punching power they used to, so new ones are needed. The propagandists have been field testing them for a while now, and whenever a successful prototype rolls off the conveyor belt you quickly see it shipped around the world. Smears of Kremlin servitude found purchase in the US, and it wasn’t long before we saw the BBC posing an image of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn against the backdrop of the Kremlin wearing what was made to resemble a Soviet-era hat. Antisemitism smears found purchase against Corbyn in the UK, and it wasn’t long before we saw those same smear tactics used across the pond against Ilhan Omar. If an imperial smear field tests well in our new political climate, you can be certain you’ll see it used elsewhere within the empire before long.

https://twitter.com/PrettyBadLefty/status/1102748288309231618

This bogus concern trolling about antisemitism has always been about smearing, and the smearing has always been about narrative control. If they can manipulate the public into distrusting someone who voices a dissenting narrative, they can keep that dissenting narrative from entering the bloodstream of mainstream consciousness. The need to keep a nuclear-armed branch of the US-centralized empire in the heart of the most crucial strategic location on earth is too important for our rulers to allow its fate to be left in the hands of the democratic process, so they control the narrative about it with extreme aggression and smear anyone who questions it. That’s all this has ever been.

A Nonviolent Strategy to Defeat a US Military Invasion of Venezuela

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By Robert J. Burrowes

To the People of Venezuela

Recently I wrote an article explaining how you could defeat, using nonviolent strategy, the US coup attempt that is taking place in your country. See ‘A Nonviolent Strategy to Defeat the US Coup Attempt in Venezuela’.

I would like to complement that article by now briefly explaining how you can also defeat a military invasion by the United States and any collaborating invaders by using a strategy of nonviolent defense as well.

In making this suggestion, I acknowledge the extraordinary difficulties inflicted on Venezuela by the US sanctions imposed over many years as part of its ‘undeclared war against Venezuela’ (partly designed to destroy its progressive social banking model), explained straightforwardly by Ellen Brown in her article ‘The Venezuela Myth Keeping Us From Transforming Our Economy’ as well as alternative proposals to resolve the crisis, ranging from that by several governments to facilitate dialogue between the Venezuelan government and the opposition – see, for example, ‘Russia Proposes Venezuelan “Peaceful Measures” Initiative to UN’ – to Stephen Lendman’s suggestion that a peacekeeping force be deployed to Venezuela by such countries as Russia, China and non-aligned nations. See ‘Save Venezuelan Sovereignty: Oil Economy Destabilized. Peace-keeping Role by Russia, China, Non-alligned Nations?’

I understand that your first reaction to the idea of a strategy of nonviolent defense might be one of scepticism or even outright disbelief. However, if you are willing to consider what I write below, I will briefly explain why a strategy of nonviolent defense is theoretically and empirically sound, has often been successful in a wide range of contexts in the past, and why I believe it is important and how it can be done.

Of course, I am well aware that this history of successful nonviolent defense is little known because it has been, and still is, suppressed. And yet the history of nonviolent resistance in many diverse contexts clearly demonstrates that a strategy of nonviolent defense has the best chance of defending your country while minimizing the death and destruction in doing so (which does not mean that it would be without cost).

Moreover, if you want to read many carefully documented historical accounts of nonviolent struggles that were successful against military opponents, including those that were ruthlessly violent, you can do so in The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach. The book also carefully explains why these successes occurred without incurring heavy casualties on the defense, particularly in comparison to military campaigns and guerrilla struggles.

In my view then, the idea of implementing a strategy of nonviolent defense is important to consider for two essential reasons.

First, you are dealing with an opponent that is insane – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ with a more detailed explanation in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ – incredibly ignorant – see this interview of US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo ‘Venezuelan military will realize Maduro’s time is up: Mike Pompeo’ which is critiqued in these articles ‘Pompeo: America “obligated” to fight “Hezbollah” in Venezuela to save “duly elected” Guaido’ and ‘Pompeo Attempts to Link Iran, Hezbollah to Crisis in Venezuela’ – and grotesquely violent – see ‘The History – and Hypocrisy – of US Meddling in Venezuela’ and Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II – that, history teaches us, is highly likely to destroy your country to gain the geostrategic advantage and natural resources that control of your country offers, as the people of Iraq and Libya, for example, can testify.

And second: no matter how committed and courageous are the (loyal) members of your military forces and civilian militia (the National Bolivarian Militia of Venezuela), and the military forces of any allies who will stand with you in the defense of Venezuela, even a ‘successful’ outcome, such as that which Syria may be on the verge of ‘celebrating’, will only come at enormous cost in terms of human lives, infrastructure (including national heritage), ecological impact and time, all of which can be far more gainfully employed to continue building Venezuela, including overcoming outstanding problems, as you decide.

The Background

As I know that you are well aware, given the declared interest of the US elite in stealing your natural resources, including oil – see, for example, ‘“Good for business”: Trump adviser Bolton admits US interest in Venezuela’s “oil capabilities”’ and ‘Regime Change for Profit: Chevron, Halliburton Cheer On US Venezuela Coup’ – the US elite has long interfered with – see, for example, ‘US Influence in Venezuela Is Part of a Two Centuries-old Imperial Plan’ – and threatened military invasion of Venezuela to seize control of these resources in clear violation of international law. For recent examples only, see ‘Trump pressed aides on Venezuela invasion, US official says’ and ‘Time for talks “long passed”: US weaponizes aid amid push for regime change in Venezuela’.

Consequently, the US administration has finally used the pretext of an unfair election result in 2018 to call for the overthrow of your government despite the widely accepted result, verified by independent sources, and even the testimony of a former US president that your electoral system is without peer. See ‘Former US President Carter: Venezuelan Electoral System “Best in the World”’.

Moreover, the US puppet Juan Guaidó, anointed by the US to replace your elected President, has effectively indicated his support for US intervention, which clearly reveals where his loyalties lie, his willingness to now provide a pretext for a US invasion, and his complete disregard for the well-being of those Venezuelans who will inevitably be killed, injured and/or dispossessed during an invasion to support the ‘neocon regime-changers’ in Washington. See ‘Venezuela’s self-proclaimed “president” Guaido isn’t ruling out “authorizing” US intervention’ and ‘The Cynicism of Empire: Sen. Rubio Tells Venezuelans to Overthrow Their Government… or Starve!’

This threat of military intervention, as the historical record clearly demonstrates, has every prospect of being carried out. See ‘Before Venezuela: The long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America’ and ‘Overthrowing other people’s governments: The Master List’.

Despite this threat, as you are aware, President Nicolás Maduro has persisted in offering to discuss the issues arising from this conflict while also calling on the international community to ‘“Stop Trump’s insane actions!” Venezuela’s Maduro talks to RT about avoiding war’ and even writing an appeal to the people of the United States which, of course, was ignored by the corporate media so that it does not even reach a wide audience. See ‘An Open Letter to the People of the United States from President Nicolas Maduro’.

While I applaud your President for his persistent calls for dialogue to resolve this issue – for a recent example, see ‘Maduro Asks International Community to End US’s Threats of War’ – there are simply three realities that make it highly unlikely that his call will be heeded, whether by the US administration that has already rejected such a call – see ‘Time for talks “long passed”: US weaponizes aid amid push for regime change in Venezuela’ – or by the international community, a substantial section of which has already declared their support for the US puppet Juan Guaidó, who has been carefully groomed for a decade for the role he is now playing. See ‘The Making of Juan Guaidó: How the US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela’s Coup Leader’.

These three realities are those I mentioned above: You are dealing with an insane, incredibly ignorant and grotesquely violent opponent: an elite that seeks geopolitical control and endless resources for profit no matter what the cost to fellow human beings and the biosphere, as the record demonstrates.

Moreover, in seeking to secure its objectives, the US elite will endeavour to control the narrative in relation to Venezuela. Hence, as you have noticed, the corporate media is lying prodigiously about Venezuela as it ‘beats the drums of war’. See, for example, ‘Dissecting the jingoistic media coverage of the Venezuela crisis’, ‘Venezuela Blitz – Part 1: Tyrants Don’t Have Free Elections’, ‘Venezuela Blitz – Part 2: Press Freedom, Sanctions And Oil’ and ‘The BBC and Venezuela: bias and lies’.

For you and those of us outside Venezuela who have some knowledge of your country’s history, we are well aware of the enormous gains made by the Bolivarian movement, despite the enormously damaged country that the movement inherited. See, for example, ‘Venezuela: From Oil Proxy to the Bolivarian Movement and Sabotage’.

This progress, of course, does not mean that all problems have been resolved, most of which have been exacerbated by the sanctions imposed in recent years by the United States government. See, for example, the report by Alfred de Zayas on behalf of the United Nations Human Rights Council – ‘Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on his mission to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and Ecuador’ – which identified the crisis the US ‘economic warfare’ was precipitating. See ‘Former UN Rapporteur: US Sanctions Against Venezuela Causing Economic and Humanitarian Crisis’.

Defending Against a US Military Invasion of Venezuela

So, while your effort to defeat the coup attempt continues, even if the United States military invades Venezuela before or after this issue is resolved, you have the powerful option of resisting any invasion effectively by employing a strategy of nonviolent defense.

I have explained the essential points of this strategy on the website Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy. The pages of this website provide clear guidance on how to easily plan and then implement the twelve components of this strategy.

If you like, you can see a diagrammatic representation of this strategy by looking at the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel.

And on the Strategic Aims page you can see the basic list of 30 strategic goals necessary to defeat a military invasion. These strategic goals can easily be adopted, modified and/or added to if necessary, in accordance with your precise circumstances as you decide.

If you want to read a straightforward account of how to plan and conduct a nonviolent tactic so that it has strategic impact, you can do so here: ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’.

This will require awareness of the difference between ‘The Political Objective and Strategic Goal of Nonviolent Actions’.

And, to ensure that the military violence directed against you is made as difficult as possible to perpetrate and, in many cases, does not eventuate, you are welcome to consider the 20 points designed to ensure that you are ‘Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’ whenever you take nonviolent action to defend yourselves when repression is a risk. This information is useful for both neutralizing violent provocateurs but also to ensure that invading military forces are compelled to deal with complex emotional and moral issues that do not arise against a violent opponent who is threatening them, and which will lead some, and perhaps very many, to desist as the historical record clearly documents. Again, for many examples, see The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach.

Conclusion

The US government and its sycophantic allies might not invade Venezuela. It may transpire that the diplomatic and other efforts of your government to defeat the coup and avert a US-led military invasion of Venezuela will be successful. There is also a fracturing of the opposition forces within Venezuela, in several ways, which works against the success of ongoing efforts to remove your government. See ‘Venezuela Regime Change “Made in the USA”’.

However, the extensive historical evidence of US interventions in violation of international law, the geostrategic and natural resource advantages that will accrue to the US elite from an invasion that removes your elected government, the anointment of a puppet president of Venezuela, the recent posturing and declarations by key members of the US administration and many US-allied governments, and the manufacture of public acquiescence by the corporate media all point heavily in the direction of invasion. And, as you are well aware, it is wise to treat this possibility seriously.

The elite conducting these preparatory moves is insane and, if it attacks Venezuela, there is a serious risk it will destroy your country as it has destroyed Iraq and Libya, especially if it meets significant military resistance. Their insanity precludes them caring about you, the people of Venezuela (even as they present any intervention as ‘humanitarian’). See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’. They care about nothing more than geostrategic advantage, eliminating progressive elements of your society’s development, and seizing your natural resources from which they can profit enormously.

Nevertheless, a strategy of nonviolent defense would enable you to defend yourselves and enable every last member of your population, irrespective of age and ability, to be strategically involved, as well as any solidarity activists overseas. It would also minimize the loss of life and destruction inflicted on your country.

Importantly, even if you suffer setbacks, unless and until you accept outright defeat, your strategy of nonviolent defense, ongoingly refined to maintain effective strategic coordination and to retain the initiative, will ultimately prevail.

As always, however, whether or not you decide to consider/adopt my suggestion, you have my solidarity.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.