Media Lens, Venezuela Blitz

These guys are usually good, at least as a corrective:

In our new book, we describe a 'Propaganda Blitz' as a fast-moving campaign to persuade the public of the need for 'action' or 'intervention' furthering elite interests. Affecting great moral outrage, corporate media line up to insist that a watershed moment has arrived – something must be done!

A classic propaganda blitz was triggered on January 23, when Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself 'interim President'. This was presented as dramatic new evidence that the people of Venezuela had finally had enough of Nicolas Maduro's 'regime'.

Read more here. And here's part two.

And, uh, no, you don't have to "love Maduro" in order to be against what's been going on, but 95% of Bright Liberals will think so, just before accusing me of being a Putin stooge. 

Actually, I agree with Chomsky: Maduro has been a disaster. More here:

What has happened to Maduro, Maduro’s revolution, the revolution in Venezuela? Is it merely a matter of corruption?

Well, Chavez did a lot of good things, but there were some fundamental problems which are clear all the way through, that’s why I never wrote anything about it. For one thing, it was top down. He was seriously interested in creating grass roots organizations, but you can’t do that from the top. They have to grow out of something in the community. You can’t order a popular revolution. So, it was always very flimsy. The other thing is, he never moved to diversify the economy, and that’s lethal. And it ended up with 95 percent of the economy, based on oil. And so as soon as the oil prices dropped, everything collapsed. The other thing is he—he wasn’t corrupt himself, which is pretty rare in Latin America, but he tolerated a lot of corruption. So, the thing was pretty rotten all the way through. And when Maduro came in, it just collapsed.

Is the situation in Nicaragua analogous?

It’s not quite that bad, but it’s similar. The Sandinista leadership, Ortega, Borge and the rest, they were pretty corrupt. Even in the ’80s, it was pretty obvious. I mean, what’s his name—Wheelock, the Minister of Agriculture, he was a militant Sandinista. He became one of the biggest landowners in Nicaragua. My daughter lived there for years. Her husband’s Nicaraguan. We went to visit once; right in a residential area there’s a huge wall which surrounds a big area in central Managua. Inside it is an estate owned by Humberto Ortega [brother of Daniel Ortega], who lives in Costa Rica where he’s a rich businessman. You have to look at their mentality. The guys who are the Sandinista leadership, not the fighters, but the leadership, they came from the Nicaraguan elite. Their feeling was, “Look, we should have it now. We should have what those guys had.” And they took it, you know. They’re very authoritarian, and a lot of corruption all the way through. So now it’s beginning to collapse.

I remember great optimism in the ’80s regarding Nicaragua, and I don’t see any cause for optimism in Latin America right now.

Well, Nicaragua was a very exciting place in the early ’80s, but the US – one of the great Reagan achievements was to destroy hope, literally. By the time he got to the late ’80s, people had basically just given up. We can’t fight this. I could see it even in simple ways; my daughter lived in a fairly poor area in Managua, — not deeply poor, but by our standards, very poor. There was a park there which had playground equipment which was all rusted. So, the kids in the neighborhood couldn’t use it. They couldn’t use the sliding boards. And half the people that live in the neighborhood are, welders, machinists, and so on. They could have taken out an afternoon and fixed up the playground equipment so their own kids could have a place to play, but they’re just sitting in the bar drinking, they’d just given up hope. The Contras war was very effective that way. It’s very hard to withstand something like brutal sanctions, terrorist war from the biggest thug on the block – it’s not easy. It was a major US success.

Oh, and read this FAIR article from 2002 on the US media's reaction to the last coup attempt. Or watch this amazing film made by a European TV crew that just happened to be in Venezuela in 2002 when the coup attempt went down:



If we didn't live in the United States of Consumerist Amnesia, people would recall ancient history. Could be useful.