Solidarity with Whom?

It’s hard for me to pull my head out of a big project for anything, especially if it’s a writing project. As I have recently come to understand how “neurologically weird” I am, I’ve come to accept that trait in my personality. All of the world can be collapsing around me and I’m trying to finish a piece of writing. It’ll be out in book form in a month or so: “Psychedelic Recovery: Medicines, Sacraments and Catalysts.” It will be the first book authorized by the Intergroup of Psychedelics in Recovery and I’m looking forward to taking a break for a while after that project which has swallowed the past year and a half of my life at this point. I don’t mind, and I enjoyed it and learned a lot, but meanwhile, Venezuela is a flashpoint again.

I got an odd email from someone on the left who contacted me a while back to hear my thoughts on Venezuela. I don’t know what he thought of the conversation, but what he wrote indicated my previous emails hadn’t had much of an impact on his views. He was curious about my “take” on Venezuela after the elections. I responded that I was happy to have my friend Arturo up here living with us safe and sound, but that I was “sad for all the other Venezuelans trapped under the Maduro dictatorship. In a nutshell.”

He wrote back and sent me links to an article at Common Dreams where Marcy and I hoped to publish a piece we’re writing on the July 28th Venezuelan presidential election. When I read the article I realized we didn’t have a chance to publish there: Common Dreams apparently is down with dictatorships and spreading their propaganda. I responded to my correspondent (I’ve also edited the following slightly for clarity):

“I found the article full of the usual leftist ideologizing: why do people ONLY talk about “US imperialism” and give China, Russia, and Cuba a pass for all the massive interference in Venezuela? I don’t get it, except for peoples’ ideological preferences and the need to defend them. Frankly, I’m tired of it all, and have lost my patience with people on the left who want others to live under these horrible conditions of dictatorship, failing economies and disintegrating societies just so they can be held up as examples of “Socialism” until they become so intolerable that no one can stand them. And then the Left always responds by running away from those projects as quickly as possible and proclaiming them “not really socialist after all.”  I, personally, want to see a regional boycott of the Maduro dictatorship, and I would only object to US intervention there because it would be counter-productive.

That’s my take on Venezuela. The sooner the chavistas are driven from power, the better it will be for the world, but especially for Venezuela. If the country were made a US protectorate for the next century it would be doing far better in the end than it has fared under the control of Cuba’s G2 and other Cuban communist government agencies. Compare the 40 years of democracy as a US Ally, with the 25 years of chavismo and I don’t think anyone could argue with the facts that Venezuela was far better off as a US ally. US imperialism is a mixed bag, as are many empires. Chinese and Russian imperialism aren’t so mixed, if you ask me. And migration from authoritarian regimes like Venezuela’s or Cuba is one way, straight to the US. Leftists would do themselves a favor by asking why that is. I doubt they could answer that within their own ideological framework and so then they’d have to listen to the people forced to migrate. But that won’t happen because obvious questions like this are not allowed in those circles.”

My correspondent and the author of the Common Dreams article were concerned about US intervention in Venezuela. He wrote about the distress the US sanctions had caused. Nonsense. I sent him a link to my article, published in 2013 at Counterpunch, years before US sanctions were ever on the table (they only were imposed as Maduro began to take on dictatorial powers and traffick in drugs). I talked then, with ample documentation, how Chávez had destroyed the national economy himself. When US sanctions hit, my Venezuelan friends welcomed them. “The country is already destroyed,” they told me,” maybe the sanctions will work to get rid of the guy who destroyed the country”

I later sent my correspondent this excerpt from my book since I tire of writing the same things over and over again. Leads to carpal tunnel syndrome. You know that argument, how the US is spending all this money to undermine the Venezuelan government (Chávez and Maduro). Here was my response in my memoir, Home from the Dark Side of Utopia (notes are in the index, and didn’t copy here) Starting on page 302:

Nevertheless, Venezuela is not Chile, nor are Maduro or Chávez Salvador Allende, and even the United States government is not the same government that helped overthrow Allende. While it seems probable that the Bush administration encouraged and supported the coup against Chávez in April 2002, no one has offered credible evidence of CIA plots against the Bolivarian government since that time, nor even that the Bush administration was a major player in that coup attempt.1 Moreover, given the very different international context (the absence of a Communist bloc, and the end of the Cold War), a very different executive branch under Obama, with a focus quite different from that of Richard Nixon’s, the narrative seems distinctly outdated. This is not by any means to say that imperialism is no longer a factor in international politics, but that in the post-Cold War world it uses other (mostly international) mechanisms, strategies, and tactics.

What Bolivarians can point to, with compelling evidence, are programs that fit with the post-Cold War US government policy of “democracy promotion” in Latin America or what is in fact polyarchy, “a system in which a small group actually rules, and participation in decision making by the majority is confined to choosing among competing elites in tightly controlled electoral processes.”2 Bolivarian supporters point to the $15 million-dollar-a-year program the US government has for training Venezuelan opposition activists in the use of social media or the $5 million per year to “help civil society to promote institutional transparency, engage diverse constituencies in the democratic process, and defend human rights.”3 As threatened as some activists might feel by money the US spends on promoting “transparency” and engaging “diverse constituencies in the democratic process” or defending human rights in Venezuela, it’s not out of proportion to what the US spends in other countries of Latin America.4 Indeed, as Corrales and Penfold write, “aid provided by the United States to non-state actors in Venezuela seems puny in comparison to aid allocated to other nations, and to the level of funds the Venezuelan government itself has spent abroad.”5

As an example of the latter we could cite the Bolivarian funding of the internal opposition—in the US. Perhaps the most egregious incident of Bolivarian lobbying went through CITGO as it sought to hinder provisions in the Clean Air Act perceived to negatively affect its interests. In that particular case the amount came to well over US $100,000 paid out to the Dukto Group, subsidiary of DCS, according to Casto Ocando.6 Compare that to the $53,400 the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funneled to the Venezuelan opposition during the Referendum against Chavez in 2004.7 While there is always the possibility the US has a “black budget” for destabilizing the Bolivarian government, what it spends publicly to fund “democracy promotion” projects in Venezuela is chump change compared to what Chávez was tossing around in the US during the oil boom: In 2004 alone he spent over ten times that, precisely US$553,699.43, funding the Washington-based Venezuelan Information Office for salaries and expenses in order to improve his image in the US.8 And then there’s the case of Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu who seems to have been key to the vetoing of a US Senate bill to sanction Venezuelan human rights violators after she was lobbied by Patton and Boggs, a firm representing CITGO in the US.9 In all, Casto Ocando’s research on the Bolivarian “interventions” in the US total over 500 pages and he estimates from the information he compiled that the Bolivarian government has spent over US $300 million, lobbying, influencing, propagandizing, and otherwise “interfering in the internal affairs” of the United States.10 At current rates of US funding to “democracy” programs in Venezuela, it would take sixty years to catch up to what Chávez spent on influence in the US.

Bolivarian oil money appears to have paid off in the US left’s media reporting on Venezuela. In an email Z Magazine sent out as a fundraising plea, editor Michael Albert acknowledged that, starting in mid 2014, when student demonstrations and protests were still ubiquitous in Venezuela, Z Magazine began receiving up to $10,000 per month from TeleSur, an amount that Albert openly admitted had sustained the magazine through that time.11 TeleSur is a television channel started by Hugo Chávez and supposedly funded by various governments in South America, although 70% of its start-up money and, more importantly, its direction and its political “line,” come from the Bolivarian government.12 Whether or not, or to what degree these Bolivarian petrodollars shaped Z Magazine’s political line is an open question, but it’s noteworthy that its communications site, Znet, only published its first article critical of Venezuela after the money was cut off.13 In any case, money that came into the coffers of left media has served to shore up a solid pro-Bolivarian consensus on the international left that only began to crack with Chávez’s death.”

Finally, what bothers me so much about the Common Dreams article and other leftists when they parade out this ridiculous trope about US influence on Venezuelans is the patronizing attitude that underlies it. They can’t believe the People of Venezuela could conceivably vote against socialism in their majority and in Venezuela by a 2/3 majority in both the December National Assembly elections of 2015 and in the July 28, 2024 presidential election. Venezuelans wouldn’t, couldn’t vote against socialism or Maduro, or Bolivarianism by simply analyzing the problem with their own minds and making their decisions based on their knowledge of their reality and their experience of it. It had to have been the US propaganda that did it!

One day some of these socialists may wake up to their dream of socialism and recognize it for the nightmare it actually is. Socialism will come to an end in Venezuela not because they believed the capitalist propaganda, but because, like most people in Eastern Europe, the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and elsewhere, they actually experienced socialism. I find it interesting that socialism still has vitality only where it has never existed. Maybe the left could think about that for a while, eh?