Third World Authoritarianism as Consequence of Progressive Failure

People rag on Saddam, or Castro or Maduro — or Iran. How exactly is a country supposed to fight an insidious Empire? To ensure its freedom when reformers are easily struck down?

[Been sick….Just put out the news release “Trump’s Threats to Iran: What’s the Record of ‘Humanitarian Intervention’?”]

It’s hard for me not to wonder the last few days about reformers who have been displaced in many countries by the CIA or other US government elements.

Mosaddegh in Iran in 1954.

Allende in Chile in 1973.

Aristide in Haiti in 2004.

Zelaya in Honduras in 2009.

Are just a few.

“Liberals” in the US and elsewhere have been unable or unwilling to stop their governments from ousting such reformers.

How does a country wanting to have an independent path do that without having some authoritarian features?

The Empire has so many tools at its disposal in addition to outright intervention: Media demonization, economic sanctions to make the economy scream, deniable biowarfare, bribery, spying and surveillance, false flags….

Isn’t the “liberal” crit of these governments a sort of self-crit of their own apparent¹ failure?

That is, anyone in the US criticizing those governments for being repressive is kind of criticizing themselves for their failure to protect governments that were less repressive.

Nor did they hold any US government officials accountable for the crimes involved after the fact. They have even failed to hold officials accountable for their role in the outright Gaza genocide. Genocidal Trump gets away with proclaiming himself the head of the laughably Orwellian “Board of Peace” even as Israel openly plots a ramping up of its genocide.

But some of these people want to sit in judgment of targeted governments that might not want to be ordered around by the genocidal Empire.

The US government just bombed Venezuela and abducted its president on absurd pretexts and Amnesty International demands “Venezuela: Arbitrary Detentions Must End and All Victims Must Be Immediately Released.”

The group’s action alert criticizing the US government attack on Venezuela labels it a violation of international law, but doesn’t demand Maduro be released, or call for Trump’s impeachment.

Bernie Sanders in 2015 slammed Hugo Chavez as a “dead communist dictator”.

Do these so-called liberals have any self-awareness?

I recently highlighted the documentary ‘The Revolution Will not be Televised’.” It shows Venezuelans bravely flooding the streets and undoing a coup, as many are trying to do again. It also shows the coup plotters like business mogul Pedro Carmona claiming to be president for about 70 hours. After the short-lived coup was overturned, he was placed under house arrest, from which he escaped. He now lives a cushy life in Miami. House arrest. One would have thought that such a treasonous person would have been executed on the spot.

But no, he wasn’t and the opposition kept growing and working and planning and scheming with the CIA and Trump and co until they had their chance and took out Maduro.

Maybe these “liberals” and “human rights” workers should ensure that the US government doesn’t obliterate targeted countries so that they might be able to abide by pristine human rights standards that the officials at Amnesty International and their funders demand.

How exactly is a country supposed to ensure its freedom when reformers are easily struck down?

People mostly talk about freedom in terms of the individual.

But there’s another kind of freedom given our nation state system.

What of the freedom of a nation?

For a people?

To chart their own course?

To not be an appendage of Empire?

How exactly is that to be accomplished?

Unsurprisingly, countries that stand against imperialism are the ones targeted by it:

1. This presumes such “liberals” and “progressives” etc are not just part of the imperial con, offering little more than rhetoric.