End of maduro - hopefully. - Page 68 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15123789
annatar1914 wrote:You'd be surprised. To some in the US, it's Castro and the Cuban Revolution in the 1950's all over again, the dominoes falling in Latin America to Communism and all that.


I'm sure many in the US government see it that way. That's for sure. There's basically a new cold war starting to warm up (did that on purpose).

My question to you is this. What do you think the US government fears more. There being socialism in Venezuela per say, or potential that a socialist Venezuela would position itself under the umbrella of China/Russia?
#15123795
Rancid wrote:I'm sure many in the US government see it that way. That's for sure. There's basically a new cold war starting to warm up (did that on purpose).

My question to you is this. What do you think the US government fears more. There being socialism in Venezuela per say, or potential that a socialist Venezuela would position itself under the umbrella of China/Russia?


Depending on circumstances within China and/or Russia, the latter. However, an indigenous popular Socialism that works for the nation and it's people is scary enough for them. I mean, read the Venezuelan Constitution, there's some ideals there...
#15123982
annatar1914 wrote:...great bandits restrain smaller bandits...

That's what Great Bandits have been telling humanity for a few thousand years.

I remember the popular girls at my high school also thought of themselves as indispensable.
Where are these popular, indispensable girls now? Who cares. :lol:
#15124002
QatzelOk wrote:That's what Great Bandits have been telling humanity for a few thousand years.

I remember the popular girls at my high school also thought of themselves as indispensable.
Where are these popular, indispensable girls now? Who cares. :lol:


No, it's just a fact of the human condition. Evil is undone by evil, the wicked restrain the wicked, the mighty strive to obtain the monopoly on force and compel other to follow rules so that there is not total chaos. People more or less work within those rules so they can have relative peace and a measure of the things they want and need in life....

...The Emperor Nero successfully plots to have his mother murdered, but his government sentences a petty but murderous bandit to death for his crimes... And local people eat and work and live their lives in order a little bit safer. The Emperor is overthrown, and better less wicked men rule in his place, and on and on it goes.
#15124257
annatar1914 wrote:No, it's just a fact of the human condition.

Not at all.

What you are describing is "the human condition when he is imprisoned in a civilization."

To confute this with a natural human state, is both dangerous and inaccurate.

You are saying that "Natural monkeys hang on the door of their cages all day."
#15124282
QatzelOk wrote:Not at all.

What you are describing is "the human condition when he is imprisoned in a civilization."

To confute this with a natural human state, is both dangerous and inaccurate.

You are saying that "Natural monkeys hang on the door of their cages all day."


Oh, and if people were given full liberty to do whatever they want they'd be as right as rain... :roll:

These lies have filled the earth with horror and bloodshed, giving a lie to this doctrine by way of the conduct of the very people who hold to it.
#15124429
annatar1914 wrote:Oh, and if people were given full liberty to do whatever they want they'd be as right as rain... :roll:

Being "right as rain" means that they'd be as good as "rain."

A lot of people (living in civilization) learn to hate the rain.

So your example is a good one about how we've been *taught* to hate and fear nature of all kinds, including our own.

Relevance to thread:

Maduro and his government is trying to deal with the poverty that automatically (not naturally) comes out of capitalism, and capitalism is trying to remove him so that it can continue to devour the world unhindered.
#15124460
UN Venezuela Report Omits US Human Rights Violations
Beyond the bias and politicization of the report, what perhaps damns it most is how it is being used.

On September 23, María Eugenia Russián, president of Fundalatin, Venezuela’s oldest human rights organization, testified to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and decried an attempt by a UNHRC fact-finding mission to erase people who were “lynched, burned alive, decapitated and murdered by extremist sectors of the Venezuelan opposition.” This fact-finding mission had published a report a week earlier that generated sensationalist headlines of “crimes against humanity” and painted a bleak picture of the situation in Venezuela.

However, the 400+ page report has been found to contain serious flaws and omissions, leading to charges that it politicizes human rights – a position backed by the Venezuelan government. But it’s not just Venezuela that has taken issue with the report: Argentina’s ambassador to the Organization of American States denounced it as “biased” and noted that “human rights are not an instrument for taking political positions.”

A parallel mission and attack on multilateralism
Moreover, even the formation of the fact-finding mission is suspect. Since 2017, Venezuela has been working with a different UN institution, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), to strengthen its capacity to guarantee human rights. This cooperation has led to technical agreements and to visits by the OHCHR to Venezuela.

Yet despite – or perhaps because – of this cooperation, the Lima Group, an ad hoc group of nations dedicated to regime change in Venezuela, maneuvered in the UN Human Rights Council to establish a parallel mission outside of the purview of the OHCHR. In the September 2019 debate prior to the founding of this mission, Russián said that it “seeks to thwart the advances between the Office of the High Commissioner and the Venezuelan state, hindering and duplicating its efforts.” She also made a prescient comment: “[the mission] will generate major headlines but will not contribute to resolving the situation.”

Several Venezuelan human rights organizations, including the Venezuelan Association of Jurists (AVJ), denounced the formation of the mission and the subsequent report as an attack on multilateralism. The AVJ notes that according to UN General Assembly Resolution 60/251, “the promotion and protection of human rights should be based on the principles of cooperation and genuine dialogue and aimed at strengthening the capacity of Member States.”

Neither of these principles were adhered to in the report, which means that the fact-finding mission violated the United Nation’s own guidelines. This contrasts severely with the latest update on Venezuela from the OHCHR, which notes that technical cooperation between Venezuela and the UN has led to progress in investigating 93 alleged cases of extrajudicial killings or excessive use of force, as well as the pardoning of 110 prisoners.

Flawed methodology, biased sources and egregious omissions
The first thing to note about the report is that the authors are all from countries that support Guaidó. One of them, Francisco Cox, has close ties to the Chilean Foreign Minister (Chile is one of the Latin American countries leading the charge against Venezuela). In an interview with journalist Anya Parampil, Chilean analyst Esteban Silva noted that Cox “is part of an operation against the government of Venezuela.”

Venezuelan human rights organization Sures considers that the report “lacks academic rigor” as the mission did not step foot in Venezuela “and as such never had direct access to the sources it consulted, including the victims, government officials and official records.” Lending credence to the claim of a lack of rigor is the fact that more than 50% of the report’s sources were links to social and digital media, while just 5% were NGOs.

Misión Verdad, an independent group of Venezuelan investigative journalists and analysts, wrote an exposé of the sources used in the report and found that one of these NGOs, COFAVIC (Committee of Relatives of Victims of the Caracazo), receives USAID funds and has ties to Human Rights Watch, which supports regime change and the brutal US sanctions. None of the NGOs the fact-finding mission contacted even mentioned the case of Orlando Figuera, a young Black man burned alive by anti-government protestors, which has arguably been the most infamous violation of human rights in Venezuela in recent years.

If the report were interested in balance, it would have cited or contacted Venezuelan human rights groups that document right-wing violence at protests and the devastating effects of U.S. sanctions. Five such organizations were contacted for this article: Fundalatin, AJV, Sures, Género con Clase (Gender with Class), and the Committee of Victims of the Guarimba and Ongoing Coup (guarimba is the term used for violent opposition protests in 2013, 2014 and 2017). None of them ever heard from the “independent” mission.

While victims like Figuera are ignored, another detailed critique by Misión Verdad documents the repeated “whitewashing” of political actors linked to violence by presenting them as victims. As analyst Joe Emersberger notes, the report’s treatment of opposition figure Leopoldo López ignores the leading role he has played in destabilizing Venezuela since 2002. López’s regime change strategy in 2014, ‘La Salida’, sparked opposition violence that resulted in the decapitation of Elvis Durán; he was riding a motorcycle down a street booby trapped by protestors with barbed wire. López’s name appears 61 times in the report; Durán’s does not appear at all.

As tragic as it is that a UN mission would engage in the erasure of victims of human rights violations perpetrated by government opponents, these are not even the most glaring omissions in the report. There are two ongoing mass violations of the human rights of all Venezuelans: the violent destabilization of the country by foreign and domestic actors, and the brutal U.S. sanctions. For Gisela Jiménez of Género con Clase, an organization that focuses on the rights of women and sexual diversity, currently the biggest challenge to the rights of Venezuelans is “the threat to the right to live in peace.” Russián of Fundalatin dates the biggest violation of human rights to March 2015, when then-President Obama characterized Venezuela as an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States. Since then, she notes, ”the Venezuelan people have been subjected to violations of their right to health and even the right to life, due to the embargo and the obstruction of imports of medicine, food and supplies.”

The report in the context of a hybrid war
Beyond the bias and politicization of the report, what perhaps damns it most is how it is being used. The omissions on the impact of coups and sanctions enable regime change operatives such as Elliott Abrams, U.S. special representative for Iran and Venezuela, to cite the report as evidence of crimes against humanity while, in the same breath, threatening to cut off Venezuela’s diesel supplies, which has drawn widespread condemnation from NGOs across the political spectrum for the devastating effect it would have on the Venezuelan people.

The report was similarly used by Senators Marco Rubio and Ben Cardin, who referenced it in a letter to the European Union in which they expressed “deep concern” over EU talks with the Maduro government and urged the EU to not monitor Venezuela’s parliamentary elections. This blatant attempt at interfering in and attempting to delegitimize Venezuela’s elections went uncovered by mainstream media, which focused all of their attention on the UNHCR report.

Furthermore, the timing of the report was also suspect, coming just a week before the 2020 UN General Assembly. Its purpose in this regard is clear: to add fuel to the fire in Venezuela and to shift the spotlight from U.S. allies with their own human rights issues. The timely release allowed Colombian president Duque and Chilean president Piñera to cite it and Venezuela in their general assembly speeches. In Colombia, 64 massacres have taken place this year alone, while the Piñera government in Chile was almost brought down by his government’s excessive use of force against peaceful protestors. Yet it was Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaidó who made the headlines, invoking the report while calling on the international community to exercise its “responsibility to protect” in a YouTube webinar on the sidelines of the General Assembly. The responsibility to protect is a doctrine used as the justification for military aggressions against Libya and Syria, among others.

The fact-finding mission has produced a document that is currently being employed in the furtherance of sanctions, electoral interference and threats of war. To put it another way, the UNHCR report on the human rights of Venezuelans will likely lead to even more suffering for Venezuelans. In the words of Fundalatin President Russián, the threat to the human rights of Venezuelans “becomes graver because of the behavior by powerful states, who in the name of human rights, seek a foreign military intervention in Venezuela.”
https://www.mintpressnews.com/un-venezu ... ns/271677/


The psychopathy against Venezuela continues.


But not all nations are psychopathic.
#15124468
annatar1914 wrote:Oh, and if people were given full liberty to do whatever they want they'd be as right as rain... :roll:


Liberty doesn't mean everybody just does whatever they want, it means nobody interfering in the lives of others without strong, overriding justification.

A right isn't like a natural law of the universe, when I say I have a right to do something or to abstain from doing something all I'm saying is there is no sufficient rational justification for coercive interference and so any attempt at coercive interference provides me with sufficient rational justification for fending off that interference by any and all means necessary.
#15124472
QatzelOk wrote:Being "right as rain" means that they'd be as good as "rain."

A lot of people (living in civilization) learn to hate the rain.

So your example is a good one about how we've been *taught* to hate and fear nature of all kinds, including our own.

Relevance to thread:

Maduro and his government is trying to deal with the poverty that automatically (not naturally) comes out of capitalism, and capitalism is trying to remove him so that it can continue to devour the world unhindered.


I think that it's safe to say that I'm well aware of the sinful structures built up within decadent civilizations, being what they call a ''Socialist'' of some kind. But, I cannot deny the effect of sinful personal decisions and personal responsibility for an aggregate collective immorality, either.
#15124475
Sivad wrote:Liberty doesn't mean everybody just does whatever they want, it means nobody interfering in the lives of others without strong, overriding justification.

A right isn't like a natural law of the universe, when I say I have a right to do something or to abstain from doing something all I'm saying is there is no sufficient rational justification for coercive interference and so any attempt at coercive interference provides me with sufficient rational justification for fending off that interference by any and all means necessary.


I don't buy into the Libertarian modern idea that ''Liberty'' exists as a state of complete freedom. To me, Liberty is the freedom from external compulsion but that freedom from inner compulsions does not exist in the natural scheme of things (grace is another matter).
#15124660
Sivad wrote:I don't know if I would go that far, the resources were nationalized for the benefit of someone but I doubt it was for "the people's" benefit.


About capitalism worrying about socialist success stories, he wrote:Nobody's losing sleep over that. :lol:

In this thread, Sivad, you have made it clear that Latin American socialism can never win because you don't believe it can win. Your only proof about this is that... rich countries like your own are constantly terrorizing them into poverty and violence.

Bullying proves (to you) that smart people are losers - that any attempt to change our nasty and suicidal way of managing ourselves will fail because, as you suggest, other systems are for losers, and any ostensible altruism or benevolence from other systems is fake news.

Liberty doesn't mean everybody just does whatever they want, it means nobody interfering in the lives of others without strong, overriding justification.

Yes, and if all the world's other cultures are losers and suckers, then the bullies (NATO, Israel, USA) have an "overriding justification" to interfere in their lives.

You have just unpacked how ordinary people are encouraged to commit atrocities against the defenseless.
#15124951
skinster wrote:Outsiders just can't stop interfering with Venezuela and some eejits genuinely believe that this is about helping the Venezuelan people.




:lol: The reason why Venezuela has so much economic problems and shortages is because of corruption and general economic incompetence. It is laughable to think that in the 21st century you can't feed your own people because somebody is blocking you from buying something. Stop shilling for Maduro and Chavez and live up to the outcome that your champions have created: poverty, despair, shortages, starvation, death....
#15125093
JohnRawls wrote::lol: The reason why Venezuela has so much economic problems and shortages is because of corruption and general economic incompetence. It is laughable to think that in the 21st century you can't feed your own people because somebody is blocking you from buying something. Stop shilling for Maduro and Chavez and live up to the outcome that your champions have created: poverty, despair, shortages, starvation, death....



It's easier to look externally to blame everyone else for your own problems. :) Such is the history of humanity.

That's always a great tell on someone's personality or character. When faced with issues, do they blame everyone else, or reflect on themselves? this is applicable to individual humans, communities, cities, nations.
#15125116
Rancid wrote:It's easier to look externally to blame everyone else for your own problems. :) Such is the history of humanity.

The USA has 800 bases and interferes in the politics of almost all countries on the planet.

The World's Jeffrey Dahmer

To ask the crushed victims of the Deathstar to "blame themselves" for their own problems that are mostly externally-caused, is like Jeffrey Dahmer asking a visiting policeman to consider the semi-conscious victims lying around his apartment to be "losers and suckers." The police were said to have fallen for Jeffrey's charms and rhetoric a few times, leaving his victims to rot in their drilled-open skulls while "blaming" the victims for their own state.

No agency = no blame

When did the rich elites EVER let the ordinary people of Venezuela do their own thing? Because if you're never given the freedom to do your own thing, then any blame for systemic failure belongs on those who controlled your course of action. The elite.

Rancid my honorable and good-natured colleague, though you often show a great ability to reason and to politely debate (in soundbites), you have a class consciousness-based worldview that is as narrow as a slot in a banking machine.
Last edited by QatzelOk on 05 Oct 2020 17:40, edited 1 time in total.
#15125125
QatzelOk wrote:Rancid my honorable and good-natured colleague, though you often show a great ability to reason and to politely debate (in soundbites), you have a class consciousness-based worldview that is as narrow as a slot in a banking machine.


I know I come off that way, but whether this particular point about my personal character is true or not, the statement I made earlier is still valid. My comment was also more about the individuals posting on this thread, than Venezuela itself.

Anyway, yes, of course there's interference in Venezuela (not just the US either). My previous statement doesn't deny interference either.
#15125232
UK Court Decision on Venezuela Gold Deals Blow to Regime Change Efforts





JohnRawls wrote::lol: The reason why Venezuela has so much economic problems and shortages is because of corruption and general economic incompetence. It is laughable to think that in the 21st century you can't feed your own people because somebody is blocking you from buying something. Stop shilling for Maduro and Chavez and live up to the outcome that your champions have created: poverty, despair, shortages, starvation, death....


Yeah, American sanctions and British theft of Venezuelan gold (AKA economic war) and attacks by drones by people affiliated with U.S. politicians and attacks by Americans that got their asses handed to them by Venezuelan fishermen have absolutely nothing to do with any of this.

If what you said was true - it's not - there wouldn't be any of the above and America would allow Venezuela to destroy itself naturally, but that's not the case at all.

In the real world, Venezuela is one of many countries under Western attack today. Denying this is for the stupid that shill for Empire and warmongers in general.



People should watch that second video above and learn a few things ^

And lastly, for the useful idiots ITT:
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