Thursday, 29 August 2019

Breaking the Blockade: Solidarity with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela



Hello comrades, this is Back in the USSR.  I am Siegfried, and, in contrast to last week’s episode of the show, I don’t intend on doing a whole lot of talking tonight, because, frankly, there are other people, who you’ll soon be hearing from, who can speak about this matter a lot better than I can! I’ve talked about Venezuela on this show before.  I’ve done whole episodes about the Bolivarian Revolution, Hugo Chavez, the amazing progressive gains that have been won in that country since neo-liberalism was overthrown there in the late 90s, and of the American Empire’s attempts to undermine those gains through violent coups, bloody campaigns of street violence, sabotage, and now with sanctions, blockades and threats of military invasion.  In 2015 the Obama Administration declared the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to be a “national security threat” and instituted sanctions.  Since then the Trump Administration has taken things a lot further: refusing to recognize the legitimate elected government of Venezuela under President Nicolas Maduro, imposing an outright economic embargo on the country with devastating implications for ordinary Venezuelans, and threatening direct military intervention, using that infamous phrase so beloved of American warhawks in the Pentagon and State Department, “all options are on the table”.  Even more troubling for me, as a Canadian citizen, is that Justin Trudeau and the Canadian government have been in absolute lockstep with Trump and his people in pushing for regime change in Venezuela, to the point of inflicting real atrocities on the people there.  So to get into this further, I want to play a clip from independent journalist Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone Project, whose done some of the best reporting I’ve seen on the current situation regarding Venezuela.  This is an interview he did with the Grayzone’s Aaron Mate earlier this week.


That was Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone Project.  You’re listening to Back in the USSR.  Fortunately there has been solidarity shown toward Venezuela from various progressive forces in North America, for example, you may have heard about how activists occupied the Venezuelan consulate in Washington D.C. earlier this year to prevent it from falling into the hands of Trump’s hand-picked Venezuelan representative Juan Guido and his cronies.  But people have also been travelling to Venezuela itself to show their solidarity with the people there in their struggle against US imperialism.  I want to play this one interview that appeared recently on the Real News Network, it was with Netfa Freeman of the Black Alliance for Peace, who also was part of the group of activists defending the Venezuelan consulate in Washington and who recently was in Venezuela as part of a solidarity delegation.  The spirit of internationalism expressed by this man is truly inspiring.  Please stay tuned.

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