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Can anyone explain what's happening in Venezuela? Dictator Maduro hated by majority but, Trump Admin / VP Pence and Bolsonaro backing opposition?
- Thread starter Iloelemen
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Okay so I think almost everyone would agree that mediation from this point onwards is the ideal outcome if it can lead to Maduro resigning without bloodshed. But this outcome is only viable if the opposition is viewed as legitimate which is why people are okay with the major world governments recognizing their legitmacy but not with further direct involvement.
Somehow this whole ordeal has become about the US and not about the people of Venezuela, why I am not surprised...
Not only is that a Straw Man worthy of acreage in Oz, it's not the position he was responding to.
Sinn Fein was the direct political arm of a terrorist organization responsible for terrible death and destruction. The UDA was a sectarian mirror responsible for the same.
This situation is a a single elected individual politician versus a murderous military dictatorship. It's an absurd comparison.
People were defending Maduro's legitimacy not simply refusing to pick a side. It's a long thread but it's worth examining their positions. They're repeated frequently.
You're going to have to walk me through how the logic there is fundamentally different than the logic here
I honestly don't get how that's even the slightest bit of a strawman. It's taking the same logic and just applying it to another situation.
But the position I called nonsensical was that specific one. Even if everything else he wrote was amazingly on point and great analysis that one part was silly.
That's exactly what it is in most cases though.
Just look at how they never try to argue posts coming from Venezuela itself.
Gotta "both sides" for the dictator.
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Just as an opinion of "facts" in the matter about if US is backing a coup or not, I don't know if we would see "facts" after a long time. In Chile lots of people said that there weren't any intervention, Decades later, the CIA accepted that the US de-stabilized the country and spreaded fake news by funding opposing press.
I say let's not assume that there is or isn't, but let us at least have our grain of salt.
We are now ironing out the details uh? The opposition is not just Guaidó, so it is legit. I have my reserves with Guaido though
Acknowledgement of both the badness of US intervention as well as the badness of Maduro (and why it's disgusting to defend him)
i don't like talking about venezuela because 1) the discussion around it is always incredibly dumb and 2) i'm not educated enough on the subject but from what i know this is the correct take.
maduro is corrupt, abusive, authoritarian, and should absolutely not be forcibly removed from power by foreign actors including and especially the US. i hope everyone expressing well deserved concern for the people of venezuela recognize how much worse off they would be in the aftermath of any direct western intervention, overt or otherwise, because that is certainly what the right wing in this country wants.
There are few things wiser than this acknowledgement friend.
it doesn't take much education to know that american foreign policy defaults to horrifically bad
Oh I agree with you, just saying that prefacing your thoughts with this alone is significantly wiser than most of what's going on in this thread.
Honestly the only thing that would be worse than the current situation in Venezuela is a civil war. At least a US puppet right wing government would be able to get food and medicine on the shelves. Of course, I hope by the end of this situation we get something better than the previous COPEI/Accion Democratica status quo before Chavez.
i've reported three of condom's fuckin' posts for cheerleading in the time it took them to ban vela and nomis
yeah to be clear from any of my posts itt, i am absolutely not here for direct western intervention given, uh, the US's tendencies
I don't think I've ever seen a thread with this much cheering for bans. What is going on with the discourse here? This is not healthy. How is the community going to survive the primaries?
an american right wing puppet government would 100% lead to a civil war. venezuela would end up looking more like current day libya than pinochet's chile if i had to guess.
How would you react to someone claiming the Sandy Hook shooting didn't occur?
I don't want anyone banned. In fact I wish they weren't so they could get their ass back in here and answer the many questions they were asked, and provide their evidence or even quotes.
I am depressingly aware of the potential for US interference, coup-backing in the region and a long prior history of disastrous intervention and I will be the least surprised person on this thread if the US eventually fucks this up somehow, and there is almost no scenario where direct American interference will be helpful, but last night was exhausting. There's a certain flavor of whataboutism that ignores evidence of wrongdoing in a deeply intellectually suspicious manner.
We had Venezuelan citizens, directly impacted and hurting and opining, being dismissed or ignored. Sympathetic posters being directly accused (and willfully misrepresented and paraphrased) of directly wishing for both US intervention and "imperialist' ambition simply for pointing out the fact that Maduro is an incompetent crook and Venezuela is in crisis, or for noting that the US is one of many countries now officially recognizing the opposition candidate.
Time and time again they were asked to quite the posters they'd accused, and time and time again they ignored that demand and simply repeated their prior baseless accusations.
And none of them have addressed the reality of Maduro's new bodyguard and what future that hints at. And that's a thing that's happening and contains actual boots on the ground. If they were CIA bodyguards (which has of course happened in the past) it wouldn't be ignored or dismissed and is pertinent to the conversation at hand.
I think that's a massive false equivalency. One issue is over a value judgement, and the other is over a matter-of-fact. In fact if I was being mean I'd say you should get banned for making such a false equivalency.
But I don't think a community where people constantly bellow for people that disagree with them to be banned is healthy. So I don't think you should get banned for that. Frankly I don't think Sandy Hook deniers should be banned just for that, though I think conspiratorial thinking will lead to posting behavior that warrants a ban.
Easy. Have an actual discussion instead of posting the same meaningless tweet over and over again, and stop bringing up an imaginary US intervention until there is proof it is happening.
Oh and don't take the side of the fascist, illegitimate, unpopular and murderous dictator. That's kind of important, I guess.
Ironically, I felt more western paternalism, colonialist sort of language from these tankies who pretend to be woke.
I'm not exactly seeing paragons for well reasoned debate in the liberals here.
I don't know, I've absolutely seen posters do this and get away with it.
We fundamentally disagree on the necessary approach. And I dont think comparing people denying the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela to people denying Sandy Hook is an unreasonable analogy.
Is Maduro's regime impact on Venezuelan lives a matter of value judgement? or a matter of fact?
Right, and I'm saying wanting to ban pretty much everyone to your left isn't healthy for the community. Part of the problem with your approach is it's totally built on the assumption that you're already right.
The unreasonableness was over the logic of the comparison itself. I pointed out it was a "value judgement" as opposed to a "matter-of-fact."
I'm not talking about emotional weight or anything. I think that's a bad way to analyze anything.
this is just as disingenuous as any post from a teenage irony tankie on twitter. we may not be currently blockading caracas with nuclear warships but to act like american interference is unthinkable until the bombs start dropping is dumb as hell, especially when our current sanctions are at least part of the reason common people in venezuela are suffering right now. and don't feed me any lines about humanitarian concerns when we're financially backing more than half the world's dictatorships and our conservative party is openly saying that we should move in and hand state assets over to private american interests:
There are ways to measure impact that would be object based, but obviously calling it good or bad and then comparing the goodness or the badness to alternatives consist of value judgments.
This is incredibly obvious. I'm honestly baffled as to how someone couldn't pick up on that. If that didn't immediately come to you what do you think value is?
I was personally thinking of Pinochet's Chile. That said, I can see you have a point, that can also be a result considering the instability.
I don't get why it's so unreasonable to point out the opposition leader endorses Balsanaro and that is an eyebrow raiser. And people then point out Trump congratulated a new mexican president, like the US is remotely in the same kind of situation or the guy opposing Maduro is in the same position as the president of the United States. Why can't that help contribute to his already questionable political positions?
Yeah. I mean, every single one of the major powers that supports/condemns Maduro isn't there for the people, Rusia and China too, it's just the other imperialism. I am of the opinion that the US intervention has been way worse, but that's beyond the point here.
I think that Maduro should've step aside long ago, the fact that he won the election by 51% when Chavez had the majority of people behind him (thanks to propaganda and for being much better than the 40 years of right wing government before him) said a lot. I remember that time and talking to friends we were worried about the fact that Venezuela had a lot to solve to keep the socialist project up. And clearly, that didn't happen.
Because it's a generic diplomatic statement the likes of which any head of state (or wanna-be head of state) is going to be putting out there. State diplomacy has a lot of bullshit butter-up flowery language.
The thing that the nations backing him have in common is that they're in the Americas and most of the SA ones neighbor the country, and all of them are feeling the impact of the humanitarian crisis to some degree or another.
Funkypapa's post about Cuba explains everything about why Rubio is so vocal about this.
Well, Pinochet's Chile had two major economic crisis thanks to extreme neoliberal politics. In '78 and '82, with almost 30% of unemployement and huge poverty issues. It also had economic sanctions because of Human Rights violations. Chile recovered but not thanks to his team of "Chicago Boys"
Sure it raises eyebrows I'm just hoping for more information on him, because he's the leader of a party that's officially part of Socialist International, so the constant referring to him as being "far right" seems a bit unearned.
also he killed thousands and abused/tortured/raped/otherwise traumatized hundreds of thousands over decades
the alternative would have to be catastrophically bad to make a pinochet-style dictatorship look preferable
Believe me, I know. Like I said, my hope is for a new status quo better than the pre Chavez one.
But the goal is to asses whether or not he's going to be a good leader who genuinely wants to improve things for his people? And he can't possible conceive of the message an endorsement like that is gonna send to people? If he's an independent agent he wouldn't have made that tweet, no big deal. I doubt anything like that would have prevented him from receiving the support of someone like Bolsanaro. How is he unable to calculate the political ramifications of that? Is he just overly eager to receive any kind of support in his fight, i.e. an outright opportunist?
hosni mubarak's political party was part of the socialist international, it means very little at this point
Sure sure. I lived in Venezuela for 17 years. I heard Chavez and Maduro talk about how the Empire (what Chavez called the US) was responsible for everything wrong in Venezuela. An economic war of sorts. At any point a coup was going to happen, backed by the US, and remove Chavez or Maduro from power.
And the years went by. And they kept blaming the empire. And Chavez died. And the economy collapsed. And it was the empire's fault. And Maduro took over and promised to fix it. And jailed hundreds of opposition politicians. And things kept getting worse. And it was still the empire's fault.
I left Venezuela. And the economic war was still going. And any day now the empire was surely going to attack Venezuela. And things kept getting worse and worse. But this time Maduro was actually going to fix it. And the empire stopped him, again. He almost died multiple times, surely the empire tried but he always survived. And the coup, oh it was coming.
And here we are. Is this, finally, after all these years, the coup? Will the empire win? Nah, the armed forces will murder a few more Venezuelans, jail Guaido and some other opposition leaders and the empire that never came has been defeated!
Well, US backing Guaido receipts is behind subscription:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-call...uncertain-new-course-in-venezuela-11548430259
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-call...uncertain-new-course-in-venezuela-11548430259
So would you put Guaido and the People's Will's policies on the same level as Mubarak and the National Democratic Party? I just want to know more about the guy and the party and what makes them right wing but no one has any details for me.
I think it was clear after the appropriations bill set aside 20 million dollars to promote democracy in Venezuela.
I get that you think we allocated that money to stage coups and subvert neutral countries, but I think that's just because you don't understand the American appropriations process. We have a separate line item for the coups budget.
That's totally unrelated.
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no, i'm just saying that SI is a toothless organization and membership hasn't meant anything for a very long time
This is all correct.
Also I really would like to understand why people keep calling Guiado far-right. Like what are they referencing?
i've been asking that and no one has provided an answer. the closest we've gotten is a tweet congratulating bolsonaro for winning the election, which i agree doesn't look great, but it's also, like, good thing socialist champion maduro doesn't hang around with far right governments
Guiado has been the "leader" of his party for 3 weeks, I don't think much is known of him in particular. And I put "leader" in quotes because the real leader of the party is Leopoldo Lopez, who is currently under house arrest.
It's primarily the fact that Guaidó has the headline support of Trump and Bolsonaro, and thus the assumption is that he must agree with them (or them with him) on some level, rather than it being a case of appealing to a global superpower and a regional power. That could of course make him liable to be influenced by them if he were to more directly receive aid from them - financial and/or military assistance is rarely free after all - but as of yet nothing has specifically happened as far as I can tell.
Is his party far-right at all then? Because at a quick search it seems centrist or center-left at worst.
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