[News] Here’s Why Venezuela is the Vietnam of Our Time

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14540


  Here’s Why Venezuela is the Vietnam of Our Time

By Celina Della Croce - June 13, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

On April 30, 1975, the United States learned an important lesson. The 
capture of Saigon by the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN)**would mark the 
defeat of the world’s most powerful military force by an**army of 
guerrilla fighters. No matter the scale of its military, or the weight 
of the iron fist it used to maintain its power, brute force would not 
always be enough to win wars. The guerrillas possessed a key weapon that 
the U.S. did not: the support of the people.

The U.S. defeat in Vietnam caused a cataclysmic shift in its strategy of 
warfare, which today has morphed into /hybrid warfare/. To avoid another 
embarrassing defeat, the United States would need to win over hearts and 
minds <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDSmzKcTH00&feature=youtu.be>. 
Blowing people to bits would not be enough. This strategy combines 
“conventional” warfare—namely military force—with “unconventional” 
warfare—such as covert campaigns to destabilize the economy of targeted 
nations; misinformation campaigns that spread fake news and pave the way 
for intervention; and violent attacks taking the form of targeted 
assassinations, road blockades, and the incitement of violence.

The result of these hybrid wars is seen clearly today as a series of 
right-wing governments sweeps across Latin America. Venezuela, 
however—which borders both Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Iván Duque’s 
Colombia—has remained a sharp thorn in the side of U.S. imperialism and, 
consequently, at the center of U.S.-led hybrid wars. It is the domino 
that will not fall.

The unconventional war waged against Venezuela and its neighbors is a 
war that seeks to win over the hearts and minds of the people, 
convincing them to voluntarily (and often enthusiastically) align with 
the interests of global capital at their own expense. It is a battle to 
shift what Italian militant intellectual 
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/the-new-intellectual/> Antonio 
Gramsci would call common sense and to infiltrate the dominant worldview 
with the interests of capital. Writing from a fascist prison in Italy 
while World War I raged on, Gramsci tried to understand why working 
people were engaging in an ideology that was against their best 
interest. Part of the answer is a battle over ideology. It is this 
battle that the United States has been unable to win in Venezuela. In 
the words 
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/life-and-the-people-have-never-let-us-down-the-twenty-third-newsletter-2019/>**of 
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Director Vijay Prashad, 
“[t]his Revolution [has] crafted new hopes for millions of people, and 
they will fight tooth and nail to defend not this or that reform but the 
great horizon of freedom that has opened before them.”

Immense human suffering has been manufactured to lay the ground for U.S. 
intervention. Though U.S. sanctions have caused 40,000 
<https://cepr.net/publications/reports/economic-sanctions-as-collective-punishment-the-case-of-venezuela> deaths 
in one year alone (from 2017 to 2018), U.S. and corporate media have put 
the blame on the Venezuelan government for the casualties. In this 
sense, the ideological component of the hybrid war against Venezuela 
follows a long historical trend 
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-17-venezuela-and-hybrid-wars-in-latin-america/> in 
which imperial forces “economically suffocate the population of 
non-aligned countries. Having made them gasp for air, the imperialists 
blame the governments for—effectively—choking themselves.”

In its latest dossier 
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-17-venezuela-and-hybrid-wars-in-latin-america/>, 
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research details the forms that the 
hybrid war in Venezuela has taken. Using a concept elaborated by 
political analyst Andrew Korybko 
<https://orientalreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AK-Hybrid-Wars-updated.pdf>, 
the dossier discusses the aim of the war to achieve “full spectrum 
dominance”; to dominate every aspect of society including not only 
“ideological frameworks but also the full range of human emotions—how to 
understand desire and beauty, values and aesthetics—as well as all the 
dimensions of human survival—organisation of the market and production.” 
It is a war, then, to dominate one’s entire conception of reality. It is 
a war that seeks to so thoroughly squeeze the people of Venezuela that 
they are forced to adopt the solutions presented by imperialism. The 
iron grip will loosen, the U.S. promises, so long as they are willing to 
sacrifice their sovereignty and submit to the interests and the 
direction of the United States.

The United States is keenly aware of the legacy left by colonialism, a 
legacy that it continues to exploit. Forced for centuries to develop its 
economy around the export of a single primary commodity—oil, in the case 
of Venezuela—the country is heavily reliant on the import of basic 
consumer goods, such as food and medicine. This strategy to exploit the 
weaknesses and limits of target governments is squarely in the center of 
the strategy of hybrid warfare.

Though the Bolivarian government has taken measures to increase the 
national production of food, they have remained insufficient, providing 
a weakness for the U.S. to exploit in its plan to “make the situation 
more critical,” in the words of former chief of the U.S. Southern 
Command Kurt Tidd. In his /Plan to Overthrow the Venezuelan 
Dictatorship: “Masterstroke,”/ Tidd details a number of strategies to 
this end including inducing inflation, obstructing imports, discouraging 
investors, and creating general instability. The U.S.’s decision to pour 
salt in the wounds of colonialism—if unchecked—will continue to result 
in more deaths. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research 
<https://tinyurl.com/y66627ly>, “Food imports have dropped sharply along 
with overall imports; in 2018 they were estimated at just $2.46 billion, 
as compared with $11.2 billion in 2013. They can be expected to plummet 
further in 2019, along with imports generally, contributing to 
malnutrition and stunting in children.”

This weakness has also left the country particularly vulnerable to the 
economic blockades and sanctions imposed by the United States, which 
have induced capital flight, inflation, and blocked access to credit and 
purchasers for its oil. In other words 
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-17-venezuela-and-hybrid-wars-in-latin-america/>, 
the U.S. “withdrew the basic tools that the government could have used 
to solve the crisis, and aggravated the suffering of the Venezuelan 
people.” The devastating results of this offensive provide the perfect 
opportunity for the United States’ trojan horse of humanitarian aid—as 
it has done in Haiti 
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-17-venezuela-and-hybrid-wars-in-latin-america/>—and 
lay the ground for a regime change at all costs.

What is at stake in Venezuela today expands far beyond the nation’s 
borders. The country lies at the crux of a geopolitical war waged by 
global capital, with the United States at its head, to destroy the 
threat of a people-centered agenda once and for all. The U.S. was unable 
to do this in Vietnam. It has been unable to do this in Cuba. And, so 
far, it has been unable to do this in Venezuela, though it has not 
stopped trying. Not only was Venezuela able to reduce hunger and 
inequality and improve the lives of the many since Chávez’s election, 
but it has also been able to offer key support to other nations who bear 
the weight of the heavy fist of the U.S. empire, from Cuba 
<https://www.salon.com/2019/01/04/the-cuban-revolution-60-years-on_partner/> to 
Haiti 
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/02/19/how-us-strangling-haiti-it-attempts-regime-change-venezuela>.**If 
the U.S. succeeds in destroying the Bolivarian government, it will be a 
blow to people across the world.

For the U.S., the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela must be destroyed. 
Maduro must be delegitimized. The people of Venezuela must be made to 
suffer. But, for the majority of the world’s people, we would do well to 
remember the words of Che Guevara reflecting on Vietnam: “How close and 
bright would the future appear if two, three, many Vietnams flowered on 
the face of the globe … with their repeated blows against imperialism, 
forcing it to disperse its forces under the lash of the growing hatred 
of the peoples of the world!” Venezuela is today’s Vietnam.

/This article was produced by //Globetrotter/ 
<https://independentmediainstitute.org/globetrotter/>/, a project of the 
Independent Media Institute. //Celina della Croce is a coordinator at 
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/> as well as an organizer, activist, 
and advocate for social justice. Prior to joining Tricontinental 
Institute, she worked in the labor movement with the Service Employees 
Union and the Fight for 15, organizing for economic, racial and 
immigrant justice./

/The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not 
necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff./

-- 
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