That Juan Guaido, 41, has in his CV described himself as the “ex President of Venezuela – 2019-2023” is not all fiction. Even when the world sleeps, the leader of the Free World is in relentless pursuit of replacing dictatorships with democracy worldwide. Replacing Nicolas Maduro in Caracas with Guaido was one such enterprise.
“The Munro doctrine is alive and well” boomed Rex Tillerson, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of State. It was therefore legitimate for United States’ agencies to find a friend to be installed on the throne in Caracas. Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves of hydrocarbons.
Vice President Mike Pence was given charge to keep a steady gaze on Guaido as he commuted between Colombia, the US and Venezuela to somehow ascend the gaddi.
As soon as the failed Guaido initiative became part of global amnesia, the leader of the Free World was dutifully at it again. Headlines are still fresh about yet another failed effort to dethrone Maduro.
Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp told Parliament that Venezuela opposition leader Edmundo Gonzales has sought refuge in the Dutch Embassy. Before his papers for exile in the Netherlands could be processed, he found cultural continuity where he is now likely to stay – Spain.
It would be interesting to see what new salvo is fired for democracy. It must be galling for the US agencies that colour revolutions are no longer giving the desired results.
Western covert operations must have taken heart from developments where their very own Fulbright scholar, Mohammad Yunus has shown the door to Shaikh Hasina, whose emotional ties to India and practical ones with China were becoming something of a puzzle.
This narrative would be woefully off the mark if the explosion of public anger at Sheikh Hasina’s dictatorship is underplayed. It possibly provided the objective conditions which outsiders have exploited.
It must be added in parenthesis that scholars like Jeffrey Sachs have been quite emphatic. State Department’s Donald Lou has been as active in Bangladesh and Pakistan as Victoria Nuland was in Ukraine.
While “regime change” apparatus is still functional in the US, Europe in its post colonial phase is having no use for it. It has other ways to ward off the Left – occasionally tipping the scales even in favour of fascism.
Look at what was East Germany, fascism has quite impressively opened its accounts in two states. Political theatre in France has an engaging storyline: how to stop the Left?
This story actually begins at the European Union elections in June where Marine Le Pen’s Right extremist, National Rally, trounced Emmanuel Macron’s Right-of-Centre Ensemble by miles. In a state of funk Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called for national elections.
The anxious French President hoped to recover lost ground. Exactly the opposite happened. Le Pen zoomed past him with 33% votes in the first round.
Not very far behind was the Left Alliance. Macron came third with 21%. Here was no absolute majority.
The fifth Republic had had it, should Le Pen win the second round. A fascist as President of France? The Left front and Macron withdrew over 200 candidates from triangular contests to prevent a division of anti Le Pen vote.
The trick worked but only to the extent that it stopped Le Pen. She came third, but Macron and his corporate supporters were in turmoil because the Left Front galloped way ahead. Macron’s neo-con agenda would clash head on with the Left Front’s socialism.
Instead of appointing a Left front Prime Minister as numbers in the National Assembly dictate, Macron placed the mantle on Michel Barnier from the Republican stable.
Will the Socialist break ranks from the Left front? If not, the possible backroom deals could be sinister. Suppose, Barnier’s minority government is supported by Le Pen from the outside? She will then control the fifth republic.
People’s will as expressed by the progress of the Left front, will have been effectively neutralised by Macron-Barnier’s neo-cons agenda.
Social welfare, price rise, health care, unemployment – issues that define the lives of people, will have been replaced by migration, identity politics, Islamophobia, military budgets, the staple that fascism feeds on.
What is being played out on an epic scale in France is more or less the pattern in most western democracies. Remember the excitement that was generated when Alexis Tsipras became the first communist Prime Minister of Greece, the cradle of western civilization?
No sooner had Communist reared its head in a European country than Germany, the biggest donor in the European Union, sat on Tsipras’s back. Greece’s debts would not be honoured.
In Spain the rise of 39-year-old Pablo Iglesias as leader of leftist Podemos, at about the same time as Tsipras in Greece, caused a frenzied response from the establishment.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy whose unspeakable corruption had precipitated the election which brought up Podemos was manoeuvred into another term, corruption or no corruption. By attrition Podemos was killed.
It was clear as daylight that Bernie Sanders was derailed by the Democratic Party establishment largely for his socialist image. I wrote then: “If you make Sanders impossible, you make Trump inevitable.”
Likewise, if Jeremy Corbyn is impossible, Boris Johnson becomes inevitable. He succeeded clowning around as Prime Minister briefly. Right wingers in the Labour party like Peter Mandelson had sworn to “undermine” Corbyn.
As the Bible says: “there is no new thing under the sun.”
This had been the pattern ever since Franklin Delano Roosevelt pulled his country out of the Great Depression of the 30s and 40s by taxing the very rich to pay for the welfare schemes. The socialist, communist and the unions had pressured him.
The most popular American President in history who died in his fourth term ended up spawning corporate paranoia which has not lost momentum to this day.
Joseph McCarthy remains a reaction to anything resembling the New Deal. His spirit lives. At Least in those early days of unbridled capitalism, a journalist of ‘CBS News’, like Ed Murrow could single handedly demolish McCarthy. Today the field is wide open for capitalist callousness.
Saeed Naqvi is a well known journalist and author. The viewx expressed here sre the writer’s own.