*(Artwork by Carlos Latuff / Twitter)
U.S. military provocations against Venezuela reached another stage on April 30th after U.S.-backed oligarch Juan Guaido attempted to overthrow democratically-elected president Nicolas Maduro by way of military coup. The coup was a monumental failure. Key officials in the Venezuelan military denounced Juan Guaido and his opposition goons seeking to take power by force of arms. However, the U.S. effort to overthrow the government of Venezuela is far from over. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has stated that “all options are on the table” in Venezuela, including the option of military intervention.
While the corporate media blamed Russia for supposedly convincing Maduro to remain in the country, U.S. activists converged at the Venezuelan embassy in Washington DC. The Embassy Protection Collective was formed on April 10th to confront an organized mob of racist, right-wing opposition supporters who have been attempting to install pro-Guaido ambassador Carlos Vecchio. Vecchio fled the embassy after being drowned out by embassy occupants and their supporters on May 1st. Activists have remained at the embassy and have faced a myriad of threats to their safety. The fascistic mob has attempted several break-ins and have made incessant noise throughout all hours of the night. U.S. Secret Service and police officers provided support to the mob by failing to arrest a single person attempting to break into the embassy or violently harassing members of the collective.
One may think that such a scene would attract Antifa forces. After all, Antifa was active in confronting right-wing mobs in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. Furthermore, one may also be led to believe that individuals such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other “progressive” Democrats would also lend their support to the Embassy Protection Collective and denounce the coup. This has not been the case. Antifa forces have not shown up to protect the Venezuelan embassy and Ilhan Omar’s stance against the U.S. coup in Venezuela has found few supporters in the Democratic Party, even amongst its so-called “progressive” stars.
In an interview with The National Review, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed Omar how alone she really was in opposing the U.S. coup against Venezuela. Ocasio-Cortez dodged the question of Venezuela by stating that she would “defer to the caucus leadership on how we navigate this.” Nancy Pelosi is the leader of the House floor where Ocasio-Cortez resides. Pelosi, along with Senate leader Chuck Schumer, have both voiced support for the U.S.-backed coup in Venezuela. By deferring to Pelosi, Schumer, and their masters on Wall Street, Ocasio-Cortez has effectively traded in her “progressive” politics in support of war.
It should come as no surprise that Ocasio-Cortez supports the ongoing U.S. war toward Venezuela. Ocasio-Cortez has called the democratically-elected socialist system in Venezuela a “failed state” and a “failure in democracy.” She and others such as Ro Khanna have stated concerns about U.S. intervention while repeating the narrative of the State Department. “Progressive” Democrats have repeatedly questioned the democratic legitimacy of the Venezuelan government while failing to cite a shred of evidence. Jimmy Carter, who is hardly a socialist, has called the Venezuela’s electoral system the most democratic in the world. Unsubstantiated critique of the Venezuelan electoral system and the legitimacy of Nicolas Maduro has allowed these so-called “progressives” to legitimize imperial narratives that allow sanctions and coups to occur in the first place.
Unlike the so-called “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, Antifa is generally seen as a force outside of the U.S. electoral arena. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest are still Democrats and beholden to the same interests and pressures of the U.S. empire as any other Democrat. That is their principle weakness. Antifa, on the other hand, is a clandestine organization with a stated mission of “smashing fascism.” Yet fascism has come right to the door step of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington DC and Antifa is nowhere to be found.
Antifa and the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party are major components of the fraudulent left in the United States. The fraudulent left has deemed itself the “Resistance” to Donald Trump but has yet to oppose one of his administration’s wars or foreign policies. Antifa has not engaged in protest over U.S. support for the right-wing opposition in Venezuela and its devastating sanctions which thus far have killed forty-thousand Venezuelans. Nor has Antifa challenged the dangerous Russiagate debacle led by the Democratic Party and the U.S. intelligence apparatus. Yet Russiagate has not only escalated the threat of a war between two nuclear armed states but has also justified an unprecedented level of online censorship of independent media that has targeted groups such as Antifa.
The fraudulent left, or the “Resistance,” is only interested in a superficial opposition to Donald Trump. That’s because it is directly or indirectly aligned with the more effective evil of the ruling class, also known as the Democratic Party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ro Khanna support Medicare for All but do not dare mount a serious challenge to the military industrial complex. Doing so would mean the end to their careers in Washington. Antifa emerged in the wake of the white liberal panic that proliferated nationwide after Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Yet Antifa is silent on Trump’s foreign policies let alone the Washington Consensus of endless austerity and war.
The fraudulent left believes that an “exceptional” United States will arise once Donald Trump is ousted as president. Antifa doesn’t want to smash fascism, but rather to smash Trump. However, most workers, students, and poor people in the United States are not as interested in ridding of Donald Trump as they are in improving their material condition. While Ocasio-Cortez and other “progressive” Democrats appeal to an increasingly impoverished and growing millennial generation, they have yet to denounce the U.S. war machine in a meaningful way. The Green New Deal and Medicare For All could easily be funded through a rollback in the 750 billion USD military budget. This would require a level of political courage beyond that which exists among the forces of a fraudulent left. The fraudulent left opportunistically repeats lies in the face of the most heinous crimes of U.S. Empire, making it impossible to expect that they would defend the Venezuelan people or the people of the world from U.S.-imposed destruction.
The fraudulent left shows that we must abandon infantile anti-Trump “resistance” for a more nuanced politics that places the issue of war and peace at the forefront of all movements for social transformation. Antifa claims to want to fight fascism but fails to resist its global representations. The “progressive” Democrats claim they want to fight climate change but fail to fight one of the biggest polluters in the world, the U.S. military, or their own party leadership which resists, degrades, and attacks them at every turn. U.S.-backed opposition forces in Venezuela want to roll back the universal healthcare, the millions of housing units build for poor Venezuelan, and the protections for Afro and Indigenous Venezuelans that the Bolivarian revolution has brought to the oil rich nation. The people of Venezuela and their supporters at the Embassy Protection Collective will continue to resist the U.S. empire’s threats against Venezuelan sovereignty and self-determination. If it was up to the fraudulent left, Venezuela would be under the thumb of the U.S. empire and there would be no “resistance” at all.
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