[News] Ten Big Lies about Venezuela and its Revolution

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://resumen-english.org/2017/12/ten-big-lies-about-venezuela-and-its-revolution/ 



  Ten Big Lies about Venezuela and its Revolution

By Carlos E. Lippo on December 15, 2017

For many years I have had the absolute conviction that the only thing 
that the capitalist system has managed to surpass socialism in, over 
these last 100 years since the first consolidated socialist revolution 
in history took place, is in having developed a formidable propaganda 
apparatus. This propaganda machine has been used to manipulate the 
public opinion on a global scale, by accepting and even celebrating its 
supposed achievements, completely hiding its errors, failures and 
contradictions. And at the same time it has tried to do the opposite 
with all the socialist societies that have existed and still exist on 
the face of the planet.

An undeniable great achievement of the capitalist powers, based on the 
immodest use of this propaganda apparatus, has been that almost half of 
the human beings on this planet identify with their system, which is 
terribly unfair, oppressive, alienating, inequitable, predatory, 
cheating, xenophobic, misogynistic, etc., etc., etc., with freedom, 
justice, equality, democracy and in general with all the highest values 
of the human species. At the same time they have managed to attribute to 
the governments with a socialist ideology all their most aberrant 
anti-values, in the judgment of that same half of humanity.

As if this were a little thing, it is regrettable that under the 
influence of this propaganda there are a number of our comrades who 
still assume as true a great number of the fallacies widely disseminated 
by the capitalist communication apparatus. Like it was in the news about 
the erosive process commanded by those malicious traitors called 
Gorbachev and Yeltsin, which ended with the dissolution of the USSR in 
1991. This was reported by the propaganda machine to have its origin in 
a supposed economic collapse initiated in its early 1980s, when 
precisely the opposite occurred. Actually the highest levels of 
production were recorded at the end of that decade. It was only at the 
fall of the USSR when it began to register a decline in production and a 
decline in the Russian economy, which fell by 45% between 1991 and 
1998.  Those who still believe that Soviet Communism failed on its own 
should take into consideration in 1917,  Russia was one of Europe’s most 
backward countries and that between 1917 and 1991 the Soviet economy 
recorded continuous growth and that production in per capita terms and 
increased by 378% in that 74 year period.

Another lie of more or less the same caliber is the one that has been 
passed along about North Korea for more than a half century. After the 
United States had assassinated more than 2.5 million of their civilians 
and left another 5 million homeless, during the war giving rise to two 
Koreas, the lie has been that courageous North Korea has suffered 
permanent famine since then under its socialist leadership.

So far, in this century we have witnessed great deceptions widely 
disseminated by the Empire’s rogue world media to try to justify their 
fiercest invasions, each of which have been subsequently disproved, 
although only after immense damage has been caused. Such is the case of, 
the presence in Afghanistan of Osama Bin Laden, the alleged mastermind 
of the demolition of the twin towers of the WTC; the existence of 
weapons of mass destruction of all kinds in Iraq; and the aerial bombing 
of civilians in Libya by Gadhafi, all of them proven to be lies.

The Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela has been widely vilified by the 
means of the right even before its rise to power in 1999; an example of 
this was when its top leader, Commander Hugo Chávez, was falsely accused 
by Ernesto Samper, then president of Colombia, to be behind the infamous 
Colombian guerrilla attack on the Venezuelan border naval post in 1995. 
This falsehood was disseminated by the media on the right without a 
shred of evidence but was not retracted even when Chavez went to the 
neighboring country to undermine such a lie. The dirty war labs that 
create the alter reality about Venezuela started to dramatically 
increase to the stratospheric levels it is at now when Chavez declared 
the anti imperialist character of the Bolivarian Revolution on May 16, 2004.

Here we present a list of 10 of the greatest lies lodged against 
Venezuela and its Revolution in the framework of the unconventional war 
that has been applied, each of them together with a brief argument that 
in our opinion should serve to counter the misinformation:

 1. Venezuela is an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national
    security of the United States, as decreed by an executive order
    signed by Barack Obama on May 3, 2015, an absolutely fallacious
    statement that he himself dismissed 5 days later with the following
    words, /“We do not believe that Venezuela is a threat to the United
    States and the United States is not a threat to Venezuela.”/ This
    pronouncement appeared in an exclusive interview with EFE, held
    before he travelled to Panama to participate in the VII Summit of
    the Americas. He repeated the retraction again in a plenary meeting
    before all the presidents and heads of Government of all the OAS
    member nations. In spite of this, Obama extended the validity of
    that order for a year and in 2016 and shortly before his
    presidential time was up, he renewed it in early January of this year.

 2. The Venezuelan government is a dictatorship that violates human
    rights. Venezuela is a member of the UN Human Rights Council which
    approved earlier this year an outstanding grade for its second
    universal periodic review (UPR), four and a half years after having
    approved the first, far surpassing the United States which remains
    its most persistent detractor in this and many other subjects.

 3. Venezuela is a narco-state; what happens in reality is that our
    neighborhood situation with Colombia, which is the world’s largest
    producer/exporter of cocaine, has unwittingly made us a country of
    transit of this drug to the United States the world’s largest
    consumer of it. The fallacious accusation remains despite the fact
    that the UN has repeatedly declared us “a country free of illicit
    crops”, most recently in August 2016

 4. Venezuela is isolated in the global context; something that is
    absolutely contradictory to the fact that Venezuela, which has
    recently become a temporary member of the UN Security Council, is
    occupying, until 2019, the pro-tempore presidency of the Non-Aligned
    Movement (NAM), involving more than 120 countries representing more
    than 55% of the world’s population. Venezuela has had many recent
    diplomatic victories in the UN Security Council, the UN General
    Assembly and the Organization of American States (OAS) over the
    Empire and its allies during this year with support of many nations
    and a multitude of grassroots solidarity organizations on the world
    level.

 5. Venezuela suffers a humanitarian crisis in the health sector is a
    fabrication promoted by the Department of State and the Southern
    Command to lay the justification of a military invasion. We will not
    deny that we are suffering from a major shortage of medicines and
    medical supplies of foreign origin whose importation must be
    controlled by the Revolutionary Government but this process is being
    boycotted on the orders of the Empire, like in a recent case where
    the Government of Colombia, forbade the sale of medicines against
    malaria to Venezuela and another case by the financial firm
    Euroclear, which for 6 weeks has been blocking $450 million
    earmarked primarily for the purchase of drugs and food abroad.
    Despite the terrible economic war that the Empire and its allies
    have been applying on us for years, we remain one of the few
    countries in the world that has totally free medical care for the
    people.

 6. The economic measures of the revolutionary government have generated
    an acute food crisis, but the truth is that during the years of the
    revolution, production has increased to 85% of all the food we
    consume. What happens is that this production is controlled by two
    large corporations of transnational capital monopolies that decide
    what they place and what they keep out of the market that leads to
    generating scarcity. It also occurs that a large amount of the food
    we produce or import is expended at very low prices because it is
    subsidized by the Government for the benefit of the people, but much
    of it is being illegally diverted to neighboring countries, as is
    the case of Colombia where at times food prices have risen 40% due
    to the smuggling promoted by the forces of the narco-militarism in
    complicity with the Colombian government.

 7. Venezuela is part of the “Axis of Evil”, together with Russia, China
    and Iran, when in reality Venezuela, in complete control of its
    sovereignty, is a firm believer in the need to contribute to create
    a multipolar world. It maintains excellent relations of a diplomatic
    nature, commercial, cultural and military cooperation with these
    countries. Let’s not forget that since 2007 an official memorandum
    of the United States National Security Agency (NSA) included
    Venezuela among its six “priority targets”, along with China,
    Russia, North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

 8. Venezuela is in default, is only true in the self-fulfilling
    prophecy of financial risk rating companies, which have long been
    suggesting in establishing indicators higher for Venezuela than for
    those with similar economies and even smaller countries like Jamaica
    and Panama who are not oil exporters nor do they have other
    strategic resources. This despite our country being in absolute
    peace and able to certify the largest reserves of hydrocarbons on
    the planet that enjoyed world oil prices of more than 100 dollars
    per barrel. What has really happened is that Venezuela, which during
    President Maduro’s government has paid a little more than $70
    billion for financial debt, is experiencing serious difficulties in
    honoring the payments in dollars due to U.S. sanctions that prevent
    the repatriation of CITGO’s dividends in that currency causing
    Venezuela to have to refinance creditor debt. Likewise, the company
    Euroclear in addition to improperly withholding our funds in dollars
    keeps illegally blocking securities (bonds) issued by the Republic
    for an amount of $1.2 billion, which is why PDVSA has requested a
    grace period of 30 days to be able to pay the vouchers of the bonds
    with maturity in the months of November and December of this year.

 9. The Venezuelan revolutionary government refuses to call elections; a
    huge lie that produces deep hilarity when one takes into
    consideration that the governments of Chávez and Maduro have held a
    world record for having had 23 elections, in the 20 years of
    Revolution. It should be noted that during that period there was
    only one postponement of a regional election that was requested by
    the opposition, which was a referendum to revoke the presidential
    mandate that was not possible because it did not meet the law
    requirements. Such a huge fallacy has its origin in the fact that
    the Empire and its allies intend to force us to hold an early
    presidential election, which by law must be carried out in December
    of the year 2018.

10. The Venezuelan opposition is the majority and is democratic; which 
are two unsustainable lies. First it is irrefutable fact that the 
opposition has lost 20 of the 22 electoral processes carried out until 
now and have been defeated in the most recent regional process in which 
the forces of the revolution obtained 18 out of the 23 disputed state 
governorates. In terms of proving that this is a deeply anti-democratic 
opposition, it would suffice to say that it has participated in the 
following; A successful coup d’état (April 2002); An oil sabotage 
stoppage (December 2002 — February 2003); Countless failed attempts at 
coup d’états; three bloody days of terrorism resulting in countless 
fatalities in May 2003, from February to May 2014, and from April to 
July 2017. This opposition has only recognized the legitimacy of the two 
elections; the two in which they won.

http://razonesdecuba.cubadebate.cu/articulos/diez-grandes-mentiras-sobre-venezuela-y-su-revolucion/

Source: Cubadebate

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20171219/394f5860/attachment.htm>