Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire
by Anya Parampil
OR Books £19.99
 

WHILE blanket Western outrage at the outcome of Venezuela’s recent elections offers more than a lesson in US imperial rabble-rousing, it can also teach us about how language is infused with power.

It can warn us, for example, about the continued dangers of swallowing Washington’s deceitful definition of democracy without reading the list of toxic ingredients on the packet.

Take the astonishing lengths to which the compliant Western media have gone to dismiss President Nicolas Maduro as a totalitarian tyrant — not least since the July 28 poll — eloquently unravelled in the Morning Star by Roger Harris and Peter Bolton.

Michel Foucault explained how language is used by the powerful to construct “truths” which are then employed in the broader exercise of political control.

The US monopoly over “truths” about Venezuela has erased the essential historical, social and geopolitical contexts of its recent development, enabling mediocre journalists to focus solely on the electoral scorecard in support of their paymasters’ mantras about voting “fraud.”

Persistent demonisation thus sets the scene for the “legitimate” use of coercion in support of “democracy” by ousting a troublesome president — which is all Washington really wants.  

True democracy, however, is social — it is all about context — to ensure citizens have an equal stake in every respect in the society over which power is shared. By treating the pursuit of democracy in Venezuela as an US game show in which whoever gains most points in a “free and fair” quiz wins the condo, Washington devalues the term for us all, while infusing it with the power to tug at the leash of poodles like Britain.

The problem, as Anya Parampil points out with articulate brilliance in Corporate Coup, is that ever since the Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chavez freed Venezuela from the grip of US avarice — satisfied for generations precisely by poisoning the country’s “democracy” to serve its corporate interests — US linguistics have been falling on deaf ears.

Parampil shows with incisive historical understanding how Washington and its allies have waged a relentless war of attrition against Venezuela in a bid to return it to the control of a treasonous, anti-democratic conservative elite loyal to Wall Street, not Caracas.

This began long before Chavez and explains his rise to power, with Parampil setting the country’s extraordinary history in the context of resistance to imperialism. Initially this was Spanish imperialism, but since the discovery of vast oil reserves, it is that of Western powers led by the US.

There is no better example of the neocolonial manipulation of a “democracy” than the postwar Puntofijo (Fixpoint) pact, by which a party duopoly shared power on terms that ensured oil was pumped to enrich everyone except Venezuelans themselves.

To Western horror, Chavez changed that by nationalising Venezuela’s vast natural resources on behalf of its long-neglected citizens. If there has been a democracy of any stripe in the country in our lifetimes, it has been solely by virtue of revolutionary chavismo.

The story since has been one of a nakedly hypocritical effort by the US to reverse this, reaching its perverse apogee in the focus of Parampil’s book: the vain attempt in 2019 to impose a 35-year-old puppet on Venezuela in the form of the opposition nobody Juan Guaido.  

Parampil chronicles in forensic detail this exercise in US coup-mongering, explaining how “the fantasy of Guaido’s presidency promptly gave way to an unprecedented campaign of financial, diplomatic, covert, and information warfare directed at the Venezuelan state.”
 
Plotters included all the usual suspects, from the Organisation of American States (OAS), oil majors and corporate media to Richard Branson, the European Union and Bank of England. This is a tale of staggering western hubris in the face of sovereignty and self-determination.

The author describes the US economic war waged against Venezuela — akin to a “medieval siege” — its kidnap of Chavez aides, its use of media to spread lies, its military plans to invade, its endless sabotage of international diplomacy, its de facto expropriation of the precious refiner Citgo... the list goes on.

Above all, Parampil delineates the new multipolar solidarity forged by Bolivarian Venezuela with countries such as Iran that have no truck with arrogant Western lectures about “democracy.”

With refreshing optimism, she concludes: “The future international landscape will not tolerate phony ideological posturing and zero-sum power plays between states.”