Evil Empires

By Adriaan van Ginkel

I guess that since the swastika flag was struck from German embassies world-wide in 1945, not a single government has been so demonized over the last 70 years as the one sitting in the building on your right. Not even that of the Soviet Union in its day. After Stalin got his stroke and died some days later in 1953, the Kremlin got at lengths to rid itself of the fetid blood smell of millions surrounding it since the mustached ogre from Tbilisi held his reign of terror. Soviet politics got smarter over time, and ever since the United States got historically unlucky in being branded internationally as a baby killer and a war criminal during the Vietnam War in the sixties, that image of the U.S. stuck to the rest of the world for the times to come. True, the United States were a guarantee of peace and democratic freedom to the Western nations not under the Soviet totalitarian boot, but the baby-boom generation, to which I belong, didn’t feel the gratitude of their parents when U.S. soldiers came over to free Europe from Nazi dictatorship. 

That negative image of the U.S. has never been fully erased, even after the enormous efforts the White House put into pointing out that the True Evil Empire resided in Moscow and not in Washington D.C.  Anti-imperialism and human rights were not synonymous with America, the self-proclaimed “arsenal of democracy”. After the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, global attention turned fully to the left-over superpower.  And that did no good to the international image of the U.S., really. The Soviet crimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Chechnya or Afghanistan, the downing of the KAL 007 flight in 1983, or all of Moscow’s proven involvement in international terrorism and unlimited weapon trade with whoever paid, never weighed up to what the U.S. did in the two Desert Storms, Afghanistan and Iraq. Never mind Saddam Hussein, U.S. cruise missiles were killing innocent civilians and that was what counted in public opinion. And of course, Vietnam became a part of the world’s historical conscience together with the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One might say that after 70 years, the U.S. has turned out to be a PR disaster.

Even now, a revolutionary leadership in the Oval Office – a non-white president with clearly antimilitarist, socialist and humanist tendencies, and a drive to “do things differently” – hasn’t deleted the baby-bombing blot from the U.S.’ image. Quite the contrary. Never mind the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. President Obama has failed the world opinion test with his foreign policy. Fidel Castro already predicted in 2009 that Obama would turn out to be “worse” than George W. Bush, and denied that the U.S. would ever change course. Quarrels with Israel over the relationship with Iran and the fumbling over the bloody Syrian civil war – an offshoot of the 2011 U.S. intervention into Syrian internal affairs - have without doubt damaged the reputation of Obama, who doesn’t seem to guarantee global stability as a world leader. ISIS’ reign of terror, as yet unchallenged by any serious power, is a clear proof of that. Relationships with Putin’s Russia are windy cold because of the ill-managed Ukraine/MH-17 crisis and the verbal conflict with North Korea which despite the latter’s mentally deranged leadership has always remained a protégé of Moscow. And the relationships of Obama with the EU and Asian blocks are best represented with a question mark.  

Obama has lately tried to polish up his questioned world leadership with opening up to communist Cuba, clearing the way to end the trade embargo of the impoverished island and thus close a symbolic chapter of the Cold War. But bumps have appeared lately on the road which could endanger the thawing of relations between Cuba and the U.S. The biggest bump is called Venezuela, you guessed it. 

As one door opens, the other one closes, so to speak. Cuba seems to be ready, to many, to change from a Stalinist society to a more open, democratic one (something which to my opinion remains to be seen). But as Gringo-Go-Home posters are replaced all over Cuba with pro-US shows of sympathy, Venezuela, Cuba’s junior partner, has turned extremely sour. While Cuba seems economically on the way out of orthodox socialism, Venezuela is tumbling head-first into Che Guevara world. The country is going in exactly the opposite direction, baffling even many from the left world-wide. This is to my opinion the main reason why Venezuela, the “new Cuba”, is currently in the middle of general collapse – an outdated, overruled and totally non-functioning economic structure from a dark past that has Venezuelans to their knees nowadays. 

But not only has the Chavist regime explained the collapse of Venezuelans’ standard of living with Marxist arguments that could be summed up under a euphemistic “socialist remodeling of bourgeois society”.  It points at the U.S. as the main culprit of all the country’s woes, in the best 1960’s Fidel Castro fashion. Venezuelans are made to believe, through increasingly state-controlled

media, that the U.S., the center of “murderous imperialism” together with the “world’s fascist movements” have made it their mission to destroy the Bolivarian Revolution that would bring socialism, peace and well-being to all Venezuelans, just as it had done on Cuba under the Castro’s. After all, all Cubans are dirt-poor, according to the same rhetoric, because of the U.S. trade embargo or “blockade” as they keep naming it. The rhetoric employed by the state media is, by the way, a carbon copy of tag-team partner Cuba’s, which of course comes from the Soviet era. It shows how far the Cubans have come in mentoring the Chavist leadership over the last 15 years. Mentoring, of course, not leading.

The truth looks different, as the ones who want to see it, know. Most Cubans are dirt-poor, true, but there are enough multi-nationals active on the island (except from U.S. of course) and a lot of sympathetic millionaire investments from especially Europe that have led to bitter trade disputes with the U.S. in the past. And there exists a very rich upper class on Cuba, born and grown under Fidel, whose members talk like Marx but live like Rockefeller. Which sums up the character of the Castro regime, to my own opinion. The Caribbean version of the old-time Soviet nomenklatura with all its cronyism and abuse of power, money and influence, keeping the masses dirt-poor and ignorant in the best Orwellian fashion. 

You are free to believe either of the above views. What keeps baffling me, however, is the Cold War rhetoric gushing out of the Venezuelan state media’s channels. Ever since I came here, I was looking at a déjà-vu of what I had read and seen through Soviet and Warsaw Pact media in the seventies and eighties, when I was studying Russian. In Venezuela, listening to government speeches always gave you the feeling as if 1989 had never happened and the red flag was still flying over the Kremlin. Still, I discarded it as pure rhetoric back then. And since smart brains were still to be found in Chávez’ government, like Alí Rodríguez Araque, a true Marxist-Leninist with a realist view on the world, I and many others here trusted sanity would prevail at the end in Venezuela under Chavism instead of revolutionary utopia. It turned out now that I was dead wrong.

Under Bush, the U.S. kept a surprisingly low profile with respect to the gringo-bashing and the cascade of personal insults and accusations that gushed out of late president Chávez’ mouth year after year. That changed when Obama came, who took an interest into what Venezuela’s government had to say. It pleased Chávez of course, and did lower the tone of his anti-U.S. rhetoric for a while. Towards the end of Chávez’ life, when Obama was dirtying his hands with kicking old allies like Libya’s Gaddafi and Syria’s Assad in the infamous “Arab Spring”, the dying president jumped back to his old rhetoric. Even Colombia, as an U.S. ally, got a kick or two and a lot of threats – one in the form of unabashed support of the FARC - from Caracas. When Chávez died and his minister of Foreign Affairs Nicolás Maduro succeeded him in 2013, the tone got unexpectedly worse and worse. Currently there are no ambassadors in either country and what is left of the diplomatic staffs is routinely kicked out piece-meal in a series of escalating diplomatic punches in the face. Like last week, when it was decreed that 75% of the U.S. embassy staff had two weeks to leave Venezuela. Of course, the U.S. reciprocated with own measures, which include annulments of visa and freezing of assets of prominent members of the Venezuelan state. Like a table tennis ball insults, accusations and threats ping-pong from one capital to the other. 

Yesterday however president Obama committed what I would call a big tactical error. He called Venezuela a “national threat” to the U.S.. This new escalation was greeted with revolutionary fury by Maduro and his team, who lost little time in fully capitalizing on it. Obama’s words are now seen by the state media as just an inch short of a true declaration of war, a blatant interference in the country’s internal affairs to topple Maduro, and a solid proof that the U.S. does want to invade Venezuela, after having failed – I quote - in tumbling Maduro by “paid” street rioting in 2014 and an attempt on the president’s life some weeks ago, which resulted in a wave of arrests of high military officials and the mayor of Caracas. The old Chavist slogan “the gringo is after our oil” has been pulled out again, and Maduro and his team are happily beating the anti-U.S. drums over and over again, looking for allies all over the world with similar anti-Yankee grudges. Yesterday evening Maduro asked parliament in a life TV broadcast to grant him full legislative powers in “fighting imperialism inside the country and abroad”, which most probably will be given to him. If so, Maduro will enjoy unlimited power to deal with the opposition and any dissenters within his own ranks as he pleases, thus finally installing the de facto dictatorship he was after for the last two years. 

Obama’s move was a stupid one because he didn’t anticipate that he would surrender a winning game to a president who had hopelessly cornered himself and his government in a succession of the most unwise economic measures, pushed by political opportunism and sheer ignorance of economics. His fall from power at the hands of his own party, the loss of parliament in the upcoming elections or his constitutional impeachment due in 2016 would have cleared the stage. But now, Maduro has been given the excuse to proceed, with parliamentary permission, against anyone he wants out of the way. I have the impression that the truth of this fact has not sinked yet into the Venezuelans’ conscience. But for the democratic opposition, already badly beaten and split up, Mr. Obama’s move could have devastating effects, because theoretically their leaders could now all end up in jail accused of conspiration and treason. Maduro was faring badly in 2014 in polls till the students came out and started burning tires and busses. The guarimbas of 2014 boosted his leadership amidst the Chavist faithful and the army. Now, Maduro was till recently again faring very badly in the polls because of the abysmal managing of the economy. The Obama incident will be grabbed with both hands to divert public attention from the economic disaster, pulling every string possible to boost patriotism and anti-gringo emotions already present within many people here. And from there, Maduro can now do anything. Even suspend the elections, calling out a “national emergency”. Theoretically, nothing stops him from holding power indefinitely.

Why did Obama commit such a mistake? I think it has to do with his own weakened political position after he lost the entire U.S. Congress to the Republican Party, whose most radical and anti-Obama wing is called the Tea Party. Senator Marco Rubio, a son of anti-Castro Cubans, a prominent leader of the rightist Tea Party and a presidential hopeful, has pushed for a good time to keep U.S.-Cuban relationships frozen and to move against Chavist Venezuela. I get the impression that a kind of quid pro quo, a political barter trade was closed between the president and the Republicans. Obama might get support from senator Rubio c.s. for some law or project, and in exchange he would sign the executive order putting sanctions on Venezuelan government and army members. If Obama had let it at that, he would have pulled the necessary hostile fire from Caracas, but then it would have died out. Now, with that misplaced announcement of “national threat”, Obama has given the game away and pushed the Maduro regime to a further radicalization of its policies, which will leave less and less options open for a peaceful transition of Venezuela towards a more democratic, more open form of government. 

It’s easy to view the Venezuela board game from above and give this or that opinion. But for persons like me, a strengthened president Maduro will mean a continuation and radicalization of the disastrous course we are in. And I wonder whether president Obama has said what he has said, on purpose. I truly wonder whether he has any conscience of the course he has kicked this country in. If he had continued the Bush game, and just ignored Chávez or Maduro or whoever, the rotten barn might have collapsed upon itself. But now? Who will save the people in Venezuela from what is to come? 

Thanks for your reading. Please leave a comment behind. Have a great week and till next Wednesday or earlier if there is news!  

© Adriaan van Ginkel 2015