by Ajamu Baraka, published on Black Agenda Report, August 7, 2024
It cannot be said that the U.S. has free and fair elections. Yet, the country regularly uses the false virtue of democracy to enact regime change when its interests are threatened by a nation seeking sovereignty. In Venezuela, this effort has reached a particular level of absurdity on multiple occasions – this time surpassing the sideshow that was the Trump 2020 campaign and the events of January 6th.
The dust-up on January 6, 2021, was nothing compared to an opposition in Venezuela calling for the nation’s military forces to ignore the declaration of state authorities recognizing the result of their electoral process. Instead. they collaborated with external powers involved in ongoing illegal actions to undermine the state and its democratically elected leadership.
Even Donald Trump didn’t attempt to institute a similar course of action following the 2020 elections. And even if he wanted to, it would not have been effective since then Joint Chief of Staff, Mark Milley, inserted himself into the local security decision-making process in order to countermand any orders coming from Trump. Talk about a coup! The question remains, who authorized that process?
But with the Venezuelan authorities now investigating opposition leaders Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez for “incitement to insurrection,” the U.S. public is told that this is just another example of the authoritarian nature of the Maduro “regime.” The hypocrisy here could not be more profound.
Donald Trump rejected the tradition in the U.S. of the corporate media, a media fully implicated in the ongoing partisan struggles for state power among the contending elements of the capitalist elite, anointing the winner of an election from exit polls and a percentage of the final vote. Trump’s claim of election fraud cost him votes in critical swing states and resulted in his election defeat. This outcome led to him filing between 62 and 69 lawsuits during and after the election challenging various aspects of the process from allegations of his poll watchers not being allowed to view the process to questions regarding mail-in ballots with signature differences, dates missing, and extended dates after the official day of the election being granted in various states.
The merits of those claims are not important. What is important is that Trump engaged the legal system with evidence, even if that evidence was eventually rejected. In the case of the opposition in Venezuela, authorities in the U.S. and Western Europe declared without any evidence, besides the claims of the opposition, that Maduro had lost the election.
Moreover, in the U.S. states have weeks to submit final tallies of votes – but in the case of Venezuela, the demand was made for final tallies to be made public even in the light of credible evidence that the electoral process had suffered a cyber-attack traced back to Northern Macedonia.
The U.S. Has no Moral or Political Standing to Criticize an Election Anywhere on the Planet
The infiltration by the FBI of the Trump campaign and the crude FBI move to intimate Trump with the salacious Steele dossier delivered in the style of J. Edgar Hoover by FBI director James Comey, the impeachments, banning from social media, assassination attempt and the weaponization of law – lawfare – by U.S. authorities aligned with Democrats and the coup carried out by the oligarchs in the Democrat party against their own nominee exposed the rotten core of bourgeois democracy in that party and the U.S. writ large.
There was a reason why the first post-election visit Trump made was to the headquarters of the CIA! But the breathing space he was looking for was at the expense of his national security advisor Michael Flynn who the intelligence community never forgave for busting their efforts to militarily enhance the jihadist forces in Syria as part of Obama’s war on Syria.
Venezuela has the right to self-determination and national sovereignty, which includes freedom from interference from the U.S. and its Western allies. The West has its own challenges with a resurgent right, race riots in the United Kingdom, and a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Which is to say nothing of the West’s egregious attempt to obfuscate the public from its role in aiding, abetting, and financing an ongoing genocide in Gaza.
After twenty-five years of attempts by the U.S. to destroy the Bolivarian revolutionary process in Venezuela, one would think that the resistance by the people of Venezuela to the U.S. empire would have the unqualified support of left forces in Europe and the U.S. Quite the opposite.
From Neo-Weberism and post-modernism, to the nihilistic and opportunistic offshoots of the myopic theory of afro pessimism from the group calling themselves American Descendants of Slaves (ADOS), and the white and “white-ish” left in the U.S. and Europe always seems to find a way to align themselves with the project of global white colonial/capitalist supremacy against the dark forces of authoritarianism in the global South.
That cultural and ideological alignment blinds them to their objective political and ideological collusion with the Western Colonial/capitalist (imperialist) agenda and further reduces them to useful idiots of the U.S. empire as it advances its project of ongoing hegemony in our region from Bolivia and Peru to Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The liberal claim that Trump’s 2016 victory was a result of Russia hacking coupled with numerous impeachments that never had any chance of advancing in the Senate, and the subsequent weaponization of legal system against Trump should certainly disqualify U.S. authorities from believing they have the moral and/or political legitimacy to criticize any other nation’s electoral process. Add to this the Congressman Jamie Raskin’s (D-MD) irresponsible comments in which he suggested that Democrats might attempt, through Congressional action, to evoke section three of the fourteenth amendment, the so-called “insurrection clause,” to deny Trump the ability to assume office even if he wins, further exposes the abject hypocrisy of the U.S. and its Western collaborators.
But it doesn’t because that is not how white supremacy ideology works. The arrogant assertion that Gonzalez is the rightful president of Venezuela by representatives of a party that just executed a coup against their party’s nominee in the U.S. is not even seen as a contradiction. Why? Because just as Israel is enabled to unleash a murderous genocide in Gaza with impunity, Blinken, Biden, Trump, and the U.S. state represent the power of the lords and masters of capital – and for them, there is no accountability to anyone, not even their gods.
*Featured Image: Opposition coup plotters Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez at a rally in Venezuela (left), Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 in Washington (right)
Ajamu Baraka is the Chairman of the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.