U.S., Obama Regime, Busy as Bees, Trying to Overthrow Three Governments Simultaneously

(And Media Handmaidens Play Their Assigned Roles.)

This might be a first in U.S. Imperialist history: trying to overthrow three governments at the same time. Namely in Ukraine, Thailand, and Venezuela. It's a feat you might see in an Olympics of Imperialism, or maybe something an overachieving empire would do. There may be even more governments the U.S. is currently working to destabilize, of course; these three are just very blatant examples that are visible to the naked eye, as it were.

The coup attempt in Ukraine appears on the verge of success. The president has disappeared. His allies in parliament are jumping ship. The police are withdrawing, and if we can believe Western media reports (always a big IF, given their propensity for disinformation- aka lying) some police even have joined the “protesters.” (Maybe they can put in a word for their colleagues the rebels are holding hostage.)

One of the surefire signs of U.S. “foreign policy objectives” is how the establishment media “covers” (slants and distorts) a story. In all three cases, the clear preference of this media, and thus indirectly of the U.S. state, is obvious. In Venezuela, the U.S. media (and British and other overseas U.S. lapdog media) has demonized Hugo Chavez since Day One, not because of incompetence per se (as if they automatically oppose incompetent rulers and support competent ones) but because of the class interests Chavez openly championed, namely the “lower” classes- the majority of Venezuelans. Now that Chavez is dead, his successor Nicolas Maduro has to deal with U.S. subversion and hostility. So far on three occasions the Venezuelan government has had to expel U.S. “diplomats” trying to provoke unrest and subvert the government. The latest batch were trolling for troublemakers on college campuses. Their cover story? “Visa outreach.” Good one, State Department! You made me laugh! (I'm sure the people with Wrong Thoughts who have been put through the grinder trying to get a U.S. visa would enjoy that joke. People seeking U.S. visas go to the U.S. consulates or embassies. U.S. staff don't go hunting for people to give visas to- unless they're up to no good.)

But Maduro has shown weakness. Suddenly he's asking to talk to Obama to straighten things out with the U.S. Big mistake. Now the U.S. is going to increase the pressure, since it sees it's working. So the U.S. is coming closer to its goal of reestablishing a bourgeois class dictatorship in Venezuela.

In the case of Thailand, this clear class bias in favor of the upper classes everywhere and hostility to the majority of the world's people manifests in sympathy for the Thai minority that is rebelling against the government and even prevented voting in parts of the country. The alleged Great Devotion To Democracy that the U.S. government and media profess was nowhere on display- no condemnation of this prevention of voting, in fact barely any mention of it, much less detailed coverage. “Even” NPR and the BBC (UK) were slanted,  though if you listened carefully to the facts they presented, the facts belied the interpretation and framework those organizations placed on the situation (requiring them to ignore their own facts). In Thailand a distinct minority of the population- the elites, the privileged- is trying once again to overthrow an elected leaders. (They have one coup under their belt already, thanks to the Thai military, who drove out the brother of the current head of state, in the process violently suppressing his supporters who rallied behind him.) That time too, “the” media sided with the coupists and against the majority.

In the case of Ukraine, the media “bias” has been the most outrageous. There, violent demonstrators have occupied government buildings in the heart of Kiev, the capital, for three months, and barricaded the area. They have violently attacked police, starting with paving stones and dumping cold water on them in the freezing winter, then escalating to Molotov cocktails (homemade firebombs), and just recently shooting a policeman dead and hurling a grenade in their midst, costing another cop his leg.

Yet the Western media have presented these goons (spearheaded by fascists) as the Good Guys, and the police as the Bad Guys. New laws designed to control the violence of the “protesters” and take back the part of the capital city and government buildings held hostage by them were immediately labeled as “anti-protest laws” by propaganda organs such as NPR, the BBC, and CBS. (Those are ones I heard it on; there are probably others.) The protesters were said to be “defending their right to protest.” Western governments weighed in on this grave violation of human rights (while maintaining their silence on the real repression going on in Bahrain, to cite just one example, or Israel, or Jordan, or just about any client state or satrapy of the U.S. bloc). The “democratic West” thus maintains its consistency and continues its traditions of hypocrisy and double-standards. (For more on Ukraine go to democracynow.org and search for the interviews Stephen Cohen gave on the subject.)

Care to speculate how such protesters would be handled in any Western capital? Based on the violent repression of peaceful protesters in the U.S., for example, most recently the Occupy Movement, we can confidently predict a bloodbath would be the response. During the black riots in American cities, “looters” were shot by the scores by State Police, local police, and National Guardsmen. (Scores of dead were the “official” count in the various cities, a count which isn't trustworthy of course because the repressive state and Federal governments doing the killing were issuing those numbers, meaning they had an incentive to lowball the numbers. The corporate propaganda media faithfully transmitted these death tolls to the public as “fact.”) Airborne Divisions were even kept stateside instead of going to Vietnam to fight there, in order to have a reliable domestic-suppression force. Yet Obama has the nerve to threaten the Ukrainian government with “consequences” if they “cross that line” and refuse his demand to withdraw security forces from the scene of the occupation! At the same time, Obama blamed “the violence” entirely on the regime, with the U.S. media (and BBC) marching in lockstep behind this line. Obama imposed a Catch-22 on the Ukrainian president, simultaneously demanding that he withdraw the police, AND "end the violence." Since the protesters are committing violence, police action is required to end violence. [1]

Now, I don't care who rules Ukraine, or whether the ELECTED president of Ukraine signs or doesn't sign a trade deal with the EU. He was going to sign, and Russian pressure apparently caused him to change his mind. It's also a fact that Europe and the U.S. have been aggressively pushing the border of their economic and military sphere right up to the border of Russia ever since the Soviet Union collapsed. (Wonder how the U.S. would react if the Russians were grabbing Canada and Mexico into their sphere! It would probably be war.)

The U.S. and EU aren't even willing to wait for the next Ukrainian presidential election next year- apparently they don't want to risk “losing.” (As if it should be any of their business.) Hence the drive for the coup. The fact is, the people of Ukraine are divided as to which way their country should lean- East or West. This is a fact rarely alluded to in the mendacious media “coverage,” which assiduously gives the impression that the entire Ukrainian people are rising up against an intolerable regime.(Not jumping into bed with the EU by signing a trade treaty apparently is beyond the pale.) [2]

It's a textbook example of how a small nation that doesn't do EXACTLY what the U.S. Empire and its lackeys demand has its government overthrown. There are numerous such cases- two of the most notorious being Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954. As in the current Ukraine case, the demands in those cases were also economic. [3]

Obama is a classic overachiever, a very dangerous personality type to have as U.S. Emperor. With the immense destructive power of the U.S. at his disposal, such a character, with an ego-driven mania for “accomplishments,” can do tremendous harm in the world- and Obama has certainly caused his share of misery, suffering, and death so far. He has also inflicted lasting damage on human rights inside the U.S., by his lead role in the destruction of personal privacy via the omnisurveillance system centered around the NSA, which he has championed and protected (and attempted to sneak past the people under a cloak of secrecy- hence the revilement of whistleblower Edward Snowden by the establishment power structure.) [4]

1] To mention just a couple of examples of the repression of peaceful Occupy protesters, in “liberal” New York City, OBEYING a police order was cause to be pepper-sprayed and/or arrested by the police and falsely charged with crimes. The facts are well-established. The police led 750 marchers onto a bridge in order to capture them and take them into captivity and falsely charge them. And there's the notorious case of the vicious Inspector Anthony Bologna, who gratuitously pepper-sprayed two women who were standing exactly where he had ordered them to stand. Obviously Bologna is a reactionary fanatic who hates his political/ideological enemies (enemies in his mind- unfortunately most of the victimized dissidents haven't figured out that the police are their enemies, despite ample evidence over many years- violent assault, false arrests, malicious prosecutions, infiltration, surveillance, sabotage, disruption- everything a police state like the U.S. does to dissidents). Unfortunately for Bologna, he forgot to take them into a back room in a police lair to torture them, instead doing it right on the street in front of numerous witnesses and being recorded in his criminal act. Police Commissar Raymond Kelly, Master of Repression, was forced to dock Bologna a few days of paid vacation time as a result. Pretty mild punishment for a high-ranking officer publicly committing a malicious assault. Bologna maintained his rank, power, and authority in the New York City Police. (Known as the NYPD.)

2] American reporter David Stern let slip on the BBC the morning of February 22 that “as much as 46%” of Ukrainians support the overthrow movement. I.e. Maximally, less than half of Ukrainians want to oust the president by force. Real democratic. Notice that Stern and BBC waited until the coup is almost complete to mention this rather significant fact.

What's also ignored in the Western media propaganda offensive is the fact that eastern Ukraine is economically dependent on Russia, and the people there favor not alienating Moscow as a result. They're Ukrainians too, not just the cop-killers in Kiev. (They've killed about a dozen cops so far, by the way, a fact Western media now hides by lumping the police deaths in with all deaths, as in "X number of people have died in the violence," implying they're all dead coupsters.)

3] In Iran, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh committed the grave crime of deciding that his nation should get more than a negligible share of revenues from Iranian oil. The British oil firm British Petroleum (now the criminal, incorrigible polluter BP) ran to its government, which got the U.S. to help in a joint CIA-MI-6 coup. In the case of Guatemala, President Jacobo Arbenz naively thought that he could appropriate unused land held by the United Fruit Company, and pay compensation in the value that United Fruit had stated on its Guatemalan tax returns for the land, and allow poor peasants a shot at a decent living. This was an unconscionable theft in UFC's eyes, so they went whining to the U.S. Government, where two former elite corporate lawyers from the criminal firm Sullivan and Cromwell, now had their bloody paws on the top levers of power- Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and his brother Allen, Director of Central Intelligence. (CIA boss.) In short order they got President Eisenhower on board to brand Arbenz a “communist” and arrange a CIA coup there (as in Iran). In both cases, the coups ended democracy in both countries, and it hasn't returned. In both countries, massive slaughters of civilians ensued in the following decades, carried out by state terrorist regimes coached by the U.S., especially the CIA, U.S. military, and State Department.

If Arbenz had read up on history, he might have realized how dangerous his move was. The U.S. already had a history, going back at least aa century, of attacking Latin American nations whenever some rich Americans were displeased with a situation. For example, in 1854, a century before the Guatemalan coup, it was necessary for the U.S. Navy to burn down the Nicaraguan port town of San Juan del Norte. Why? Because when American plutocrat Cornelius Vanderbilt sailed his yacht into town, the local authorities had the effrontery to try and levy port charges on his boat. Clearly a corrective lesson for the natives was in order. This also nicely illustrates, as do most such cases of U.S. imperial criminality, that ultimately U.S. power is deployed on behalf of American plutocratic interests, whether corporate or even individual, as in this case. And no crumb is too small for the Big Dog to snatch away from the world's poor.

Yes, that really happened. It's amazing all the dirty shit in American history that those in power manage to bury with barely a trace that it ever happened. Of course, this is only possible because of the willing assistance provided by such accomplices as “teachers,” “professors,” “scholars,” and “journalists,” the main indoctrinators and keepers of “truth.” A handful of actual historians, such as the late Howard Zinn, have rescued the interred bones of history from the enforced amnesia of establishment guardian priests of ideological rectitude.

Here's an excerpt from a presentation by Noam Chomsky in 1985 that mentions some of the U.S.' depredations in Latin America, which the U.S. Imperium still calls “our hemisphere,” as in “we own it.” (See the glorious “Monroe Doctrine,” which declared the Western hemisphere off-limits to European imperialisms. “Our” doesn't mean “we happen to be located here,” it means “it's ours.”) Chomsky insightfully illuminates the sham pretexts the U.S. uses for its aggression and domination.

The full talk is on youtube.com, titled “Noam Chomsky Lessons of Vietnam 1985 FULL Speech (RARE).”

Someone better tell Maduro he's not dealing with reasonable people.

4] By the way, the BBC in the last couple of days referred to Edward Snowden as “infamous,” as in “the infamous Edward Snowden,” like it's an objective fact. And that wasn't in a commentary, but the intro to a “news” piece, offered as a matter-of-fact-descriptive. They don't even call Bashir al-Assad that! (The Butcher of Syria.) They've outdone even U.S. “news” organs with that one. (Some people are of the opinion that Snowden is “infamous.” It is not a fact and far from a universal view. Some regard him as a hero. Thus the BBC could have called him “hero Edward Snowden” with equal validity. A more neutral, objective term would be whistleblower. NOT "leaker"- leakers are anonymous. And they're usually "officials" hiding behind anonymity to plant propaganda in the media. Most thinks the establishment media calls "leaks" are really propaganda plants by those in state power.)

Anyway, Thank You, “Great” Britain, for being so slavishly and sycophantically loyal to your U.S. masters! I know the U.S. imperialists take you for granted, so I'll thank you on their behalf, you rotten propagandist wankers.