advertisement

SSN on Facebook SSN on Twitter SSN on YouTube RSS Feed

5 Comments
Politics

Marco Rubio Applauds the Trump Administration's Opposition to the Maduro Regime

February 5, 2019 - 11:00am

From his perch as the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Transnational Crime, Civilian Security, Democracy, Human Rights, and Global Women’s Issues, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., continues to praise the Trump administration for its opposition to the Maduro regime in Venezuela. 

Rubio announced on Monday that  Chargé d’affaires of the Embassy of Venezuela to the United States Carlos Vecchio will be his official guest when President Donald Trump gives the State of the Union address on Tuesday night. 

“Vecchio, a Venezuelan lawyer and co-founder of the opposition party Voluntad Popular, fled Maduro’s narco-terrorist tyranny in 2014 and is currently living in exile. Following the inauguration of Provisional President Juan Guaidó, Vecchio was appointed by the National Assembly as Chargé d’affaires at the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, D.C,” Rubio’s office noted. 

“For years, Carlos witnessed first-hand the Maduro regime’s repression and egregious human rights abuses,” Rubio said. “Since living in exile from 2014, Vecchio has been a tireless advocate for the restoration of democracy and freedom of his beloved homeland. I’m honored to host the Venezuelan Embassy’s Chargé d’affaires in the Capitol on Tuesday, and I anticipate President Trump will reemphasize his Administration’s stance against tyrannical leaders in Latin America and in support of the people of Venezuela.”

Reaching out to South Florida’s Venezuelan community, Rubio appeared at an event in Doral with Vice President Mike Pence on Friday.

“Let me just begin by thanking the president of the United States and his vice president,” Rubio said. “And I want to tell you something about them, there has never been a moment where I’ve had to convince them to care about this issue. In fact, I do not recall a conversation I have had with either one of them in the last two years in which the topic of Venezuela was not raised by them. They deserve tremendous credit for that and for the work they’ve done. 

“This is not the first visit of the vice president to this community,” Rubio added. “He was here less than a year ago or about a year ago to talk about this topic. But I told him and I believe this will be the last time he has to come here for an event like this because there will never again have to be an event like this. The next event will be free and fair elections in Venezuela for the people of Venezuela.”

Comments

In Venezuela, the crisis stems entirely from external interference coming from the United States, which has economically strangled Venezuela for over a decade. The methodology is that of sanctions and economic destabilization, the same as has been applied against Cuba over more than 50 years, albeit in that case unsuccessfully. Chavez and Maduro have drawn the ire of the global elites by blocking their international oil corporations from access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest in the world. It must be noted that Venezuela is one of the most important members of OPEC, with Riyadh and Moscow advancing the creation of an oil conglomerate known as OPEC +, with Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela as influential members. The West is of course deploying the “democracy promotion” canard to justify its shenanigans in Venezuela, one of its go-to tactics drawn from its well-used PSYOP toolkit.

The protests seen in France and the interference in the domestic politics of Venezuela highlight Western double standards, which stand in contrast to the respect for international law maintained by China, India and Russia. In France on November 17, 2018, hundreds of thousands of citizens, angered by the diminishing quality of their lives, the social iniquity in the country, and the widening gap between rich and poor, took to the streets in protest. The protests can easily be encapsulated in the following slogan: “We the people against you the elite.”

here has clearly been US backing for the street protests organized to try and drive Maduro out of office and bring an end to the socialist administration started by Hugo Chavez in 1998. Since the assembly member Juan Guaido announced he was in effect the real president of Venezuela he has had backing not just from the US, but the UK, France, Spain, Colombia, Canada, Australia, Brazil and the European Parliament. Guaido is clearly no more than a puppet of Donald Trump and could easily be the key player in a coup to overthrow the democratically elected regime. Last week, Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez accused America of conspiring to topple her president in order to seize the country’s oil reserves. She announced that their response would be “Get your Yankee hands off the oil industry.” Given the number of European countries lining up behind Trump’s plot, it was good to see the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn coming out strongly against the call for sanctions: “We oppose outside interference in Venezuela… there needs to be a dialogue and a negotiated settlement to overcome the crisis.”

The only thing keeping the public from using its numbers to force an end to imperialist warmongering is that most people lack a deep understanding of how horrific and widespread it is, and the only thing preventing them from developing that understanding is propaganda. By regurgitating the propaganda narratives being spouted by neoconservative death cultists like Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams, you are helping them pave the road to acts of mass slaughter as sure as if you were perpetrating it yourself.

All US-led military agendas begin with propaganda. If the public were allowed to see the reality of war with fresh eyes, they would all instantly recoil in horror and adamantly demand its immediate end. The only reason the US-centralized empire is able to sow death and destruction around the world without this happening is because of propaganda, which is why Americans are the most aggressively propagandized people in the world: the violent agendas of the most powerful military force ever assembled are far too important to be left up to the will of the citizenry. So before they can launch missiles, planes, and ships, they launch propaganda. They launch mass media psyops. They launch narrative control campaigns to make sure that Americans hate the leader of Targeted Nation X and want the people of Targeted Nation X to have Freedom and Democracy™. Day after day after day, they seed the idea that Targeted Leader X “must go”, until the story has become so thoroughly indoctrinated that it almost looks like the US and its allies have no choice but to intervene with increasingly violent measures. When you help advance those propaganda narratives, you are actively facilitating the first steps of war in a very real way. It’s the same as if you personally picked up a rifle and began picking people off; the only difference is that you’re participating in an earlier stage of the bloodshed rather than a later one. The people are just as dead in the end as if you personally had killed them with your own hands, you just helped with an earlier part of the mechanizations of war rather than a later one. Hell, the one firing the bullets is arguably in a more moral position, because at least they’re putting something on the line and reckoning sincerely with the reality of what they’re doing. The one hiding behind a keyboard and acting as a pro bono war propagandist while inserting “…but I oppose direct interventionism” at the end is vastly more cowardly and dishonest. In the end, the one with the gun is just delivering the bullet that was put in the mail by the propagandist. Life pro tip: If you find yourself cheering for the same "people's uprising" in a foreign nation that the US State Department says you should cheer for, it's because you've been propagandized. Please revise your media consumption habits and critical thinking skills accordingly.

Comments are now closed.

politics
advertisement
advertisement
Live streaming of WBOB Talk Radio, a Sunshine State News Radio Partner.

advertisement