If you’ve worked with left-wing activists, you have probably met many caring and intelligent people who genuinely believe in democratic values. Until it comes to foreign policy, when many leftists begin sounding more like Alex Jones than democratic socialists. “Today, the discourse of fascists and these ‘anti-imperialist leftists’ is virtually indistinguishable,” notes Leila Al Shami, a Syrian activist and writer. Anti-imperialist leftists and their fascist counterparts would have you believe, for instance, that Assad enjoys popular support, that he is saving Syria’s sovereignty, and that every Syrian who opposes him is a terrorist. And, in Venezuela, pro-democracy demonstrators are likewise reduced to mere pawns of US imperialism.
The left has shown a confounding contempt for democratic uprisings in both Syria and Venezuela. The manner in which they have turned their backs on oppressed people sets a dangerous precedent—with potentially disastrous consequences in a world sliding toward authoritarianism.
Venezuela is now beset by the world’s largest economic collapse outside of a war zone in decades. The authoritarian government of Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, has left the country with fatal shortages of food, water and medicine. Last month’s report by UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, highlighted the abuse and systematic violence carried out by state forces, which has left Venezuelans with little confidence that they can overcome Maduro’s tightening grip on the besieged country.
All this has triggered a refugee crisis that rivals Syria’s. There has already been an exodus of some four million Venezuelans—as per the UN’s refugee agency—and the numbers are expected to grow and now threaten to destabilize the entire Latin American region.
Despite the country’s descent into full-blown chaos, many on the hard left—particularly self-described anti-imperialists—continue to defend the dictatorship in Caracas. They have failed to offer solidarity to Venezuelans trying to overcome a brutal dictatorship and either blame the humanitarian crisis on US sanctions or deny it altogether. Much like the Hands Off Syria demonstrations that glorified Assad’s mass slaughter regime, the “anti-imperialism of idiots” was certainly evident in Hands Off Venezuela rallies, during which anti-war organizations, such as Code Pink, ANSWER and International Action Center, took to the streets to lend their support to the Maduro regime, while strongly condemning US interference in Venezuela’s affairs.
These left-wing, pro-dictator anti-imperialists, who were recently honored by the regime in Venezuela, portray Maduro as a “democratically elected” leader victimized by US imperialism, while Juan Guaidó—who has been recognized by more than 50 countries as interim president—is relentlessly smeared as a “far-right puppet of the US.”
This, of course, is utter nonsense. Guaidó’s political party, Voluntad Popular, is extremely liberal and a member of the Socialist International. Guaidó is also the head of the National Assembly, Venezuela’s equivalent of Congress. “The democratic world must recognise the national assembly as the only legitimate government of Venezuela, and work with it to draw up a plan towards democratic transition. The assembly was elected in December 2015, in a vote that was universally recognised as free and fair, and the opposition controls 67% of seats,” writes Venezuelan journalist Reynaldo Trombetta.
Maduro reacted to this historic defeat by stripping the National Assembly of its powers and creating an illegitimate parallel legislature—the National Constituent Assembly—to undermine the democratically elected legislative body. Maduro then proceeded to win a sham election in 2018, the electoral process of which did “not in any way fulfill minimal conditions for free and credible elections,” according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein. Opposition candidates were thrown in jail and political opponents were banned from running.
Maduro apologists point fingers at the Americans, blaming them for Venezuela’s collapse. But this is wildly misleading and dishonest—a cynical attempt to give Maduro a free pass. The US was, prior to this year, Venezuela’s number one buyer of oil. The targeted sanctions that began in 2015 could not have caused a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude: targeted sanctions against specific individuals do not cause hyperinflation and mass starvation. And the Trump administration’s oil sanctions, which began in January of this year, were imposed well after Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis had spiraled out of control.
Yet these facts are either ignored or downplayed by Maduro’s cheerleaders in the west, who include leaders of the biggest socialist organization in the US, the Democratic Socialists of America. In April, when Guaidó’s approval rating was at 60% and Maduro’s was just 14%, the DSA wrote: “DSA stands with the people of Venezuela against the US-sponsored coup attempt led by Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López.”
How can left-wing activists so easily dismiss the democratic uprising led by Guaidó’s supporters as a coup attempt when there are provisions within the Venezuelan Constitution that allow for an interim president? What is the rationale for balking at the opposition’s calls for free and fair elections? These democratic socialists have, ironically, sided with the autocracies that back Maduro, whose dictatorship would have likely fallen by now without Russian and Cuban intervention. Russia has loaned billions of dollars to Venezuela’s embattled government and remains their biggest supplier of weaponry; Putin has even sent troops to help Maduro maintain his iron grip. Cuba provides security and military specialists in exchange for oil. Just as the Russian and Iranian intervention rescued Assad’s brutal dictatorship, Russia and Cuba are keeping the Maduro regime afloat. Despite this, dictatorships that are perceived as anti-US are routinely heralded as bastions of anti-imperialism by the misguided left.
It has been nearly eight months since Guaidó used constitutional procedures to replace the dictator, but the military still remains in Maduro’s hands. Negotiations and protests have led nowhere, and the Trump administration—hoping for an “easy foreign policy win,” which would help it secure key states like Florida—is now expanding sanctions into an economic embargo against Venezuela. These new sanctions are unhelpful and will almost certainly exacerbate the crisis.
But promoting inaction is also unhelpful. To be sure, the US has a history of intervening in Latin America and elsewhere on behalf of tyrannical dictators, so it’s easy to see why leftists would think that history is repeating itself. But knee-jerk reactions do nothing to help oppressed people struggling for democracy. And recognizing the head of Venezuela’s last remaining democratic institution so that free and fair elections can be held does not constitute a coup.
Leftists must reassess their stance on Venezuela. The ignominious failure of chavismo must be acknowledged, regardless of one’s position on the ideological spectrum. Ideology should never subvert facts and discount human lives. Moreover, the left needs to take a hard look at the kinds of governments with which it aligns itself. It is unfathomable that dictators in Syria and Venezuela should come to be viewed as the good guys. Support for Assad and Maduro is not an anomaly: we’ve witnessed leftists rally behind murderous tyrants, such as Milošević and Gaddafi, before.
It is time for leftists to realign their values with the harsh truths of the world. Support for tyrannical dictators must never become normalized. If left-wing anti-imperialists are to be taken seriously, they must oppose western imperialism and non-western dictators alike.
31 comments
I think there’s a bit of “buyers remorse” in the fallout of the Arab Spring
It is hardly new that ‘fellow travellers’ will support far-left regimes. But cultural relativism means that even the more moderate or apolitical among us can be manipulated into ambivalence. President Bolsonaro of Brazil recently dismissed European Union criticisms of his inaction on fires in the Amazon as ‘colonialism’. Meanwhile, advocates for the Chinese one-party state latched onto the fact that a few Hong Kong protestors had waved Union Jacks and dismissed the entire movement as wishing to return to an ‘imperialist’ past. I hope those who supposedly care for civil rights and a sustainable environment will see through these ploys, but we are vulnerable to them if we forget the importance of universal human values.
I should add that, in the case of Bolsonaro, we can see right-wingers using what are usually left-wing polemics to their own advantage. Of course, if a concept is purpose-made to foment division and conflict, it should not be surprising that it will soon be turned back on those who invented it.
Chile, is the fundamental test for anyone who does not believe what this article describes. The US blockade in consequence and not the cause of the Maduro dictatorship. Maduro refuses to accept new elections with an independent electoral tribunal, simply because he would lose to any democratic candidate. In total absence of human rights, with a support of less than 10% of the population and with a regime that is sustained by the drug money that leads the second in command (Diosdado Cabello), because the logical reaction is to blame the US blockade for The disasters of the country. To those who do not believe this, come to Venezuela, walk the streets, feel the national reality and dare to criticize government corruption, growing poverty or poor public services (which have not collapsed by the US blockade but by the billionaire theft of oil revenues from previous years) and will surely arrest or expel them immediately from the country.
Yes, I agree, the Maduro regime is garbage. It has also pssed me off that many of those who critique US foreign policy also want to swing the other way and then unquestioningly say that all the opposed regimes are necessarily great, but I see this same general pattern over and over with so many issues – if one “side” is wrong, then the other “side” must be right, when it may be that *neither* “side” is truly “right”, or it may be (even better) that there are differing degrees of right/wrong, that how much of such are in each depends on each specific issue, and that unquestioningly “siding” in a broad way, instead of taking a more fine-grained, nuanced, detail-by-detail approach, is not something we should want more of.
It is entirely valid to say the Maduro regime in Venezuela is a sack of shit *and* that the US’s siege techniques are not an ethical way to go about dealing with it and, moreover, that the US’s motives in the area are not necessarily “pure” either esp. when there’s those barrels of oil under the ground. And the most egregious part is the idea that the sanctions or “siege” technique is designed to try and “motivate” the people to overthrow the regime … like somehow they weren’t already motivated enough already.
(Interestingly, this is actually a good example of how basing one’s thinking on broad, label-based judgments, e.g. “either the US is right XOR the ‘regimes’ are right”, gets to trouble, right here. 90% of Venezuelans *hate* the Maduro regime. 90% of Chinese are *very satisfied* with their system. “The rest of the world” is not a lump, it’s 95% of all human complexity.)
Even more, I just notice how that, ironically, by fully *incorporating* the fact that the regime is brutal, instead of pushing it down, you actually get the *strongest* possible case *against* the US’s actions in the region: they’re like taking someone who’s being beaten and raped by muggers and then sticking a sword in them so they will “suffer” more so as to be “more motivated” to “fight back”. Truly sick and disgusting.
Five million migrants who have left Venezuela, seeking a better living condition in Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina or Chile, is the fundamental test for anyone who does not believe what this article describes. The US blockade in consequence and not the cause of the Maduro dictatorship. Maduro refuses to accept new elections with an independent electoral tribunal, simply because he would lose to any democratic candidate. In total absence of human rights, with a support of less than 10% of the population and with a regime that is supported by the drug money that leads the second in command (Diosdado Cabello), because the logical reaction is to blame the Americans for The disasters of the country. To those who do not believe this, come to Venezuela, walk the streets, feel the national reality and dare to criticize government corruption, growing poverty or poor public services (which have not collapsed by the US blockade but by the billionaire theft of oil revenues from previous years) and will surely arrest or expel them immediately from the country.
What is described in the article is a true description of what is happening in Venezuela and the manipulation of Maduro, to make the world think, that Venezuela’s economic problems are the fault of the US blockade. For those who live outside Venezuela, and still believe in Maduro’s lies and manipulations, I say: come and live here, and you will know how hard it is to survive in a country without human rights and without freedom of expression. Venezuela is one of the only democratic countries, which has more than 1,000 political prisoners without having been tried by the courts, and the reason is that simply expressing a political opinion contrary to Maduro, is legally not a crime, but if you must pay with your Freedom to dare to do it. Here any opinion contrary to the regime, you can cause the loss of your work (if you are a public employee) and jail if the criticism is very hard. To those who admire Maduro: come, but not as tourists, but to live here and realize what a dictatorship disguises as Democracy. It is very simple or romantic, criticize from outside a country, without knowing the root of their problems. At the end of the day, whether we like it or not, Trump is the only political leader who is doing something to get Maduro to stop exclaiming the Venezuelan people
You’ve got to be particularly naïve if you think Trump has any interest in the welfare of Venezuelan people. His interests are purely geopolitical and he is using the misery inflicted by the corrupt state capitalist regime of Maduro on the people as an excuse for US intervention
Further comment on this article here https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/venezuela/page/13/#post-189917
I can’t say anything about Venezuela but I have left wing views and I thought we should be supporting Assad rather than his opponents.
The reason is not because i have any illusuins about Assad and his regime. He is a straight forward military dictator. The issue was that the dominant groups in the opposition to Assad were far worse, brutal religous extremists and fanatics whose goals were to create a religous state through forced conversion, ethinc cleansing and genocide. A plain old corrupt and authoritarian military dictatorship which was mostly secular is far far preferrable to that. The tragedy is that the west starte doff by supporting the religous extremists under the pretence or perhaps mislead by a thin veneer of unrepresentative and powerless democracy campaigners.
It would be wonderful if syria was suddenly to become a democratic country but the idea that supporting a revolution dominated by the most brutal and extreme religous fanatics with a track record of atrocities against anyone with differing views was a profoundly bad idea.
Does that mean I have a contempt for the democratic uprising in Syria. No I have every respect and sympathy for those campigning for democracy but I had a realistic view that they ha dno chanc eof prevailing and were in effect albeit unwilling a stalking horse for the very worst and most brutal groups imaginable.
I see no reason to apologise for my views and opposition to my governments (UK) support for the syrian opposition as I think subsequent events have confirmed my views. Supporting the Syrian opposition was a mistake leading to catastrophic consequences to millions of people who woudl have been better of if we have left well alone. If there was a genuine mass democracy uprising in Syria with a reasonable chance of success then yes it should have been supported but there was never anything remotely close to that.
The fact is that the west chose the wrong side and lost any chance to influence Assad by doing so.
There was a mass democratic uprising and it was violently crushed by Assad well before the Islamists showed up. If they had ‘no chance’ it began by the man you say we should have been siding with violently attacking peaceful demonstrators.
If you’re going be an apologist for a tyrant at least have the decency to not lie about what happened.
‘influence Assad’ Bless!
Forgive him. It is too difficult to be an apologist for a tyrant and not to lie.
Agreed. But it is also too difficult to be an apologist for western style military intervention in places like Syria without likewise lying through your teeth. No one comes out of this smelling of roses. Regimes, like the US state in particular, have an appalling record of intervening militarily in other countries on the manifestly false premiss of being concerned about restoring/imposing democracy and human rights on them (really? think of this regime’s decades long love affair with the disgusting Saudi regime) while inventing fictional pretexts for such as interventions (remember the weapons of mass destruction Iraq was supposed to have had?). Lets not have double standards. here! Assad is a tyrant who must be condemned but so too must western countries like the US that has inflicted untold misery on the very people whose welfare it pretends to have at heart
US is not a “regime”. It’s a democracy. Of, course, it’s not perfect, but there is no such thing like “perfect democracy”, because “perfect democracy” exists only within brains of the apologists for totalitarianism 🙂
All governments are technically regimes of one sort or another. Is the US regime a “democratic regime” in the sense of embracing liberal bourgeois democratic values (such as these are)? It might just about scrape into that category – but only just! – compared to some authoritarian state capitalist regime like, say, modern-day China but that’s not saying much. The US is more an oligarchy than a democracy even in the limited bourgeois sense of the word. Its only covert apologists for totalitarianism like your good self who would sneeringly dismiss criticism of the dismal state of state of actual democracy in the West – slightly better though it may be compared to places like China – as an “apology for totalitarianism”
Cry, baby, cry 🙂
I am not inclined to cry but I am inclined to despair at the inanity and double standards of some folk on this site. Just because the Maduro regime is an obnoxious anti working class regime this does not automatically make its western opponents – particularly the US regime – whiter than white. The history of US meddling in other countries has demonstrated just how little it cares for democratic rights or the welfare of the people it pretends to want to “liberate”. It is all about geopolitics and the struggle for resources and access to markets dressed up in the rhetoric of pseudo moralistic indignation at some or other outrage committed by the government of the country US and others want to militarily intervene in to secure their own interests. Gullible people like yourself take them at their word, ,mistaking the form for the substance….
If we compare countries during there history, US is the best powerful country ever exists.
In fact, we must thank God for the existence of this great country, otherwise we would live today under a communist or fascist dictatorship. But people with a sore imagination curse this country and demand to destroy it. They always require the creation of a utopia, which always turns out to be a totalitarian dictatorship.
I’m from USSR. I know what I’m talking about.
This is rerighting events.Right from the start of armed opposition to Assad was dominated by violent extreme islamists who engaged from the very beginning in ethnic cleansing and worse of religous groups they opposed. Yes Assad violently suppressed opposition which included democracy campaigners but the west’s support was initially for islamists against a military despot. If we were going to chose the lesser of two evils we chose the worse evil. I would rather we did nothing but in fact we should be grateful to Russia for intervening successfully to defeat the brutal religous fanatics. The option of a democratic governmant to supplant Assad is something to be aspired to but was never even a remote prospect.
We have to exist in thr world as it is not thr world as we would wish it to be.
US involvement in Syria was an effort to defeat ISIS, not Assad. We learned what the effect of ignoring terrorist uprisings in the middle east has on our freedoms in 2001. Al-Quaeda entered Syria in 2004 and under the leadership of Ayyub al-Masri morphed into an ISIS caliphate. The reason the US went in on the side of the rebels was because while they were fighting Assad’s brutal regime, they were also fighting ISIS, a cause the US supported. Assad was being propped up by Russia against the rebels, so they were in an unwinnable position with two enemies vying for their destruction. To view US involvement in Syria simply as an action against Assad is simply nonsensical. If that were the case, the US would have removed Assad from power long ago.
You know, you dont have to support the oppressive state capitalist Maduro regime in order to see that Juan Guaidó, is little more than a puppet of US capitalism and that his claims to be a democratic representative of the wishes of people is pretentious twaddle. This article perpetuates the same naïve binary thinking it accuses the Hard Left of espousing. Genuine socialists support neither Maduro not his liberal critics. Neither of these have the interests of the workers at heart https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2019/no-1375-march-2019/what-is-happening-in-venezuela/
No true Scotsman
The predictable retort of those who want to shut their eyes and close their ears to the evidence. If you bothered to read the link, Andrew Miller, you will discover that some of us have never supported either the state capitalist Maduro regime or its liberal capitalist critics. The enemy of an enemy is not necessarily a friend
The idea of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ gets you part way there, but there’s something more fundamental. It’s a product of a kind of binary thinking about group identity and an obsession with ‘power’. If power & oppression rest in capitalism, the West (as imperialists), White men etc anything that opposes them by definition must be oppressed, on the side of the oppressed & powerless.
Once you see the world through that lens, then anything that complicates it (left wing authoritarian governments, Hamas, repugnant forms of political violence etc) are either to be dismissed as smears, ignored entirely or justified as a form of legitimate resistance to the forces of oppression.
Until the left can return to a position based on values as opposed group identity a division of the world into the good & the evil, then nothing will improve.
the left has openly abandoned and defied the value of freedom of speech and thought (because our enemies began taking a liking to it), the most fundamental value to this thing called liberalism. I have to conclude that the left has no real values any longer. just tribal signifiers.
But Andrew Miller you are perpetuating the same kind of binary thinking you accuse the left of engaging in. Only in your case it is the West who are the goodies and the (admittedly obnoxious) regimes such as Maduro’s or Assad’s who are the badies. Why cant you bring yourself to say a “plague on both their houses”?
So then do you also reject that same “binary thinking” and validate the idea that perhaps the reality of the world is that *all* of the following may simultaneously be true in it, and *more*?:
1. Maduro’s regime is a sack of shit, *AND*
2. The US’s siege warfare tactics on the country are extremely unethical, of dubious utility and questionable motivation, *AND*
3. *BOTH* Hamas *AND* Israeli government are guilty of atrocity in many instances, *AND*
4. Despite this, in that particular case, it is not equally balanced, either, but rather that there *is* a clear erosive effect occurring to the benefit of one side at the great expense of the other, *AND*
5. On this same Planet Earth, there is a nation of China, where that a complex and oft-misunderstood regime *has* produced some serious instances of malfeasance, *AND*
6. this regime has ALSO been one of those most successful at rapidly getting a LOT of people OUT of poverty, *AND*
7. that Mao is DEAD, and has been so for 40-50 years now,
8. *AND* on and on and on…
?
it’s the classic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” trap. if I had to guess, I’d say that accounts for most of the support of tyrants and dictators across the political spectrum. .
There is nothing strange about this. Leftists hate democracy and love dictatorship because they are well aware that their crazy ideas can only be realized by leaders such as Pol Pot.
Sad but true, dear Shanelle 🙁
Authoritarian dictatorships especially so.