This is what did it for you, Bernie? Not the Princeton research? Not the genocides? Not the decades of unauthorized wars? Not the 100-mile zone? Not the “enemy combatant” designation? Not free speech zones? Not the WikiLeaks revelations? Not the Snowden revelations? Not the disaster capitalism? Not the commitment to invade The Hague if ever brought up on charges?
A $10M donation did it? That’s what makes you wonder?
Pure gold
China did not imperialize Tibet. The Mongols did.
See, the Mongols were a violent expansionist force. They occupied China and they occupied Tibet. The Chinese managed to expel the Mongols from China and rebuild their nation. Then in the early 1700, the Chinese expelled the Mongols from Tibet, freeing Tibet.
Because Tibet was unable to remain free if the Mongols would return, China established a permanent defensive military presence, establishing Tibet as a protectorate, but leaving it self-governed.
A century later the Europeans imperialized China, crushing it militarily, economically, and legally. As part of this, Tibet saw a rise in a monarchical theocracy enslaved 95% of Tibetan people, torturing and murdering them indiscriminately.
A few decades after China recovered, it returned to Tibet to free the Tibetan people from that monarchy and once against established Tibet as a self-governing independent protectorate, which it remains to this day.
In the last 400 years, I don’t think that any meaningful number of countries in the world have ever recognized Tibet as an independent state, and outside of the brutal theocratic monarchy, I don’t think the Tibetan people have ever sought to establish that they are an independent country.
Still not a good analogy because Puerto Rico was never a state of the USA. It would be more like if Long Island had been invaded by England and occupied after England beat the US in a war, and then the US had a war to kick the English off long island and then had a civil war immediately afterward and the loser fled to Long Island and said “we are the rightful government of the USA” and then Spain came by and started arming the fuck out of them while the loser of the civil war ran a fascist dictatorship for 40 years and killed tens of thousands of its own people for ever saying “maybe we could just negotiate a final surrender?”
Yes. Integration means less conflict, more collaboration, less redundancy, more dynamism, less wasteful military build up, fewer threats from the US.
One country two systems means that China provides for national defense of the entire space while Taiwan maintains a substantial amount of governing autonomy.
Think of it like Greenland choosing to be a part of Denmark to keep itself safe from the US military, except in this example Greenland would be historically part of Denmark for centuries and have a population of 99% Danes and have some parts of Greenland only 4 miles off the coast of Denmark with US troops already stationed on it training Danes on Greenland to fight the mainland.
“try using whatever your brain instead of”
Does not parse
I thought they only had one, in South Africa. Where are the other 2?
Could you restate this?
Are you comparing economic collaboration with installing military bases?
China has exactly one foreign military base. It’s in South Africa. They are very happy with it and there’s no contention.
By contrast, US military bases in Japan are notorious for raping, kidnapping, and other abuses of locals.
No. China does not also “meddle” in the rest world.
There is no “claim” to be made and there is no “reclaim” to be had against such a claim.
Taiwan is and always has been recognized as part of the country of China. That’s why the losing army in the civil war went there - because it was part of the country they were a party of.
China has stated for 70 years that the island province of Taiwan will be integrated into the rest of the governance of the country. For 50 years it has explicitly stated it will be integrated peacefully, because the CPC recognizes that doing it forcefully would actually be contradictory and create a constant guerilla warfare situation as well as invite the world’s militaries to intervene. The CPC has no intention of forcing Taiwan to integrate except if Taiwan works with foreign governments to establish a substantial and real threat to the security of the mainland.
If China waits long enough, the Western economies will collapse and Taiwan will very quickly and easily realize that the West just can’t support them anymore and when they look to see who they depend on for nearly everything, and who their relatives are and who their dominant trading partner and who can protect them militarily, it’s going to be an easy process of integrating the provincial government of Taiwan into the government of the mainland - especially since the CPC is committed to One Country Two System meaning the provincial government of Taiwan can continue operating with the same structure and same politicians and same processes as it has now.
Wait what? Kristi Noem ran DHS under Obama? What am I missing?
Because the MIC would remove him if he threatened their long term interests. It’s not hard.
435 voting members of the House. You could get 200 new people and still won’t have enough.
100 senators. Most of the country is sparsely populated. 52% of the population has 20% of the votes in the Senate. That’s unfixable.
Same outcome with a change in Congress
Are you serious right now? The Democrats are fully onboard. They supported the creation of DHS. The supported the expansion of border patrol. The supported the expansion of ice. They supported the expansion of local police. They supported the transfer of military surplus to the police.
The Democrats are not going to save you. They’re not Marvel heroes. They’re not even basic protestors. They haven’t done shit on decades.
Buying imports with your only revenue is exactly the problem when you use that money to destroy your own domestic farms and factories.
It certainly does when you’re a total market economy. Chavez nationalized a bunch of food production and collectivized the farms.
Venezuela’s debt tripled because the government issued billions in bonds on the open market while oil was at an all-time high of over 100 dollars a barrel
Because it was a petrostate when Chavez was elected and it was literally the only and best source of economic wealth the country had after decades of deliberate underdevelopment by compradors working with the imperialists to keep the country dependent. This is standard IMF/Word Bank shit. Venezuela didn’t become a petrostate in 1999 as part of its economic strategy. It started a revolutionary movement in 1999 on the basis of an impoverished petrostate riddled with corruption and neocolonial economics. You can’t time the markets. Chavez made the best decisions he could with limited experience, limited foresight, and the limited amount of embedded skill and experience in the community to run a country under a collectivized and nationalized model. The 2008 oil price crash was, in essence, an economic natural disaster that occurred at an incredibly fragile time for Venezuela.
You can absolutely say that they did bad a job of nationalizing and collectivizing. And of course they did, they were at the beginning of their revolutionary process. Russia’s collectivization and China’s collectivization processes went terribly before they actually solved their cycles of famines. It takes time to build these things. Venezuela’s only chance was the price of oil remaining high. They lost their bet with the market. They didn’t have many other choices. And again, if you want to present what they are, I refer you to the Monday-morning quarterbacking critique.
Being a revolutionary state that is collectivizing and nationalizing land, industry, and natural resources is not a way to get help from the international community with financial problems. The US was already engaged in covert operations by 2002, on the ground in Venezuela. By the 2008 crash, covert operations were maturing and intelligence networks were established. Venezuela was going to have to figure it out on their own. It took 9 years to go from electing Chavez to the crash. It took another 9 years before the economy showed signs of recovery, particularly through allowing USD into the economy. And then the US sanctioned Venezuela, determined that it should not recover.
I’m sure you would have done better if you were in charge.
Calling Smartmatic’s whistleblowing imperialist is a convenient way to ignore that they were the regime’s closest partners for 13 years
Such editorial restraint you have. Not mincing words are we. The regimes closest partners. Really?! Not Morales? Not Castro? Not PDVSA? Not Sidor? No, of course it was Smartmatic. I mean, who could say otherwise right?
If you spend over a decade letting capitalists run your unhackable democracy, you do not get to act shocked when they reveal how the sausages are made.
And apparently you don’t get to question the veracity of their statements even though that have plenty of financial incentives to lie. It’s such a weird thing for you to claim is unassailable. A private company? Lie?! How could they!? They had a contract with the government that lasted 13 years!!! How could they lie!!!
You people are far too credulous.
As for the report from 2019, let’s see how unbiased and fact based it is:
Expressing deep concern for the more than 4 million people compelled to leave the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and also that the 2019 Venezuela Humanitarian Response Plan identifies a population of 7 million in need because of, inter alia, violations of the rights to food and health, violence and insecurity, the collapse of basic services, the deterioration of the education system, lack of access to pre- and post-natal care, and insufficient mechanisms for protection from violence and persecution on political grounds
By this point the sanctions were well established. No mention? Just that the Bolivarian government is committing violations of the rights to food and health? US covert ops on the ground since 2002 (also well established by the time the report came out). No mention? Just that the Bolivarian government is overseeing conditions of violence and insecurity? And after all that, insufficient mechanisms for protection from violence and persecution on political grounds? My brother in Christ - this year there were literally Venezuelans openly asking for a full scale invasion in exchange for oil money. I know the UN categorizes that as “political opinion” and “freedom of expression” but give me a fucking break.
Also strongly condemns the widespread targeted repression and persecution on political grounds in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, including the excessive use of force against peaceful protests, the excessive use of force during security operations, arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment, extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances by security forces, such as the Fuerzas de Acciones Especiales and pro-government civilian armed groups
Oh man. Can you imagine? A Bolivarian revolution with pro-government civilian armed groups actually choosing to fight fellow Venezuelans? Man, I wonder what could ever cause them to do that? It couldn’t be brainwashing, do you think? Maybe there’s legitimate security concerns with subversive and counter-revolutionary action on the ground in a country that the US has been targeting for 20 years and has fully function covert operations on the ground? Maybe? No. It must be condemned as “political violence” that truncates “the fundamental human right” to choose to be a junior partner to a psychopathic genocidal empire.
Urges the Venezuelan authorities to immediately release all political prisoners
Can you imagine releasing Machado… oh wait. She’s not in prison. In fact, she was detained briefly and then released. Real murderous dictator vibes there. How is she still alive? Is it A) Venezuela isn’t just murdering the opposition or B) she’s well protected by US covert ops operating in Venezuela?
Expresses grave concern at the fact that there have been at least 6,000 killings resulting from security operations in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela since January 2018 and that, according to information analysed by the High Commissioner, many of these killings may constitute extrajudicial executions;
This report is from September 2019. That report LAUNCHED the fact finding mission. Meaning the 6K number was arrived at before fact finding began.
If you actually read each of the fact finding reports, the first doesn’t actually use “internal chain of command documents” in its methodology and only reviewed about 274 cases and only investigated 223. The methods they used were: “confidential interviews, both in-person and via secure telephone or video connections; (2) confidential documents obtained from individuals and organizations, including legal case files; (3) a call for submissions; and (4) review of open source information”. Not exactly confidence inducing.
I just went through all 5 years of fact finding reports. There is nowhere near deaths totally 5k/year. I encourage you to go through the documents yourself and find evidence for the claim of 5k/year. There is ONE claim of 5k deaths in 2018 that they claim is provided directly by the Venezuelan government. The footnote says “Provided by the Venezuelan government”. I haven’t found the actual source. The Venezuelan government denies that the number, which appears to mean that it denies having provided documented evidence for the number. That’s all I’m able to find right now, so I’m considering it hearsay until I see whatever document the UN thinks the government provided them.
I’m not an authoritarian. Dismantle the US too.
I disagree with the great Satan, but I believe all of his lies
Anyway, this has been fun. Keep simping for the empire while also claiming you hate it. They love when you do that.
I wonder why Venezuela’s debt tripled starting the year that the US tanked their ability to access debt at non-usury rates. So curious! Blowing oil revenues on imports? You don’t say? You mean they bought things with their only source of revenue. Shockingly corrupt!
Oh I don’t dismiss the chairman of the holding company that owns smartmatic as a capitalist. I dismiss him as an imperialist. The British upper class has a lot to do with oil imperialism. Just ask Iran what happened when they nationalized their oil.
I dismissed the founder and CEO of smartmatic as a capitalist because he is. He’s clearly not a Bolivarian or he wouldn’t be in bed with a British Lord building out digital voting infrastructure in the periphery. He stands to gain a lot from the capitalists coming back into power, and the chairman does as well.
As for the report, the UN claims that the Maduro regime killed 5k people but they make that claim by extrapolating from interviews, news articles, and satellite footage. There has been no corroborating evidence on the ground. It’s totally specious.
As for torture, I don’t think anyone in Venezuela is losing sleep over American spies and their collaborators getting the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that those same American spies unleashed on the world.
Look, I’m not saying the Venezuelan government is run by saints. They’ve done things that are harmful to people, they’ve killed people, and they have most definitely killed innocent people.
But the US kills almost 6k annually through prison deaths alone, and another 1000 in police custody/police homicides. Every country has black ops, every country does spy hunting, every country under attack by the US has to take calculated risks understanding that they are going to be catching innocents in the net.
And again, Maduro wasn’t wrong! Machado was literally asking US oil companies to convince the US to invade in exchange for wealthy contracts. We know for a fact that Machado and her cohort were working directly with US covert ops running money, arms, training, organizing, and facilitation. It’s not like there wasn’t a covert subversive international threat inside Venezuela. There was one and the Bolivarian Armed Forces is responsible for finding these people, disrupting their networks, and stopping their operations.
You can’t use moral logic here unless you apply it evenly, and the result of you applying it evenly would be that nearly every country would need regime change because their leaders are bloodthirsty dictators who indiscriminately commit human rights violations.
The reality is that Maduro is unpopular because 1) the economy is shambles from economic sanctions, 2) there’s still a large contingent of capitalist roaders who would rather be a junior vassal of the US and make their millions as compradors and 3) he is uncharismatic as fuck.
The masses are suffering economically and have been for years. Under Maduro, food production for major domestic food crops more than doubled and national food availability more than quadrupled. That’s astounding given their situation. The masses still want the Bolivarian revolution to proceed. They do not want to become a neocolony again. But they want the suffering to end. And all the US has to do is stop the crime against humanity that is collective punishment.
The idea that we need to focus on the unconfirmed 5k people killed by the government instead of the multiple thousands killed by the sanctions and the 20 years of violent subversion that the US has been enacting is a clear sign that you don’t have your priorities straight. Or rather, you do, but they are aligned with the empire.
I disagree with Satan, but I believe all his lies
The US sanctions regime for nVenezuela back in 2006 restricted its access to credit markets, they weren’t “formal sanctions” but they were government actions to economically harm Venezuela. That caused a debt trap for the country which weighed the economy down and it never recovered.
The voting machine company that made those claims has a British Lord as a Chairman, and the CEO of the company is a capitalist in Venezuela. Hardly an unbiased source.
And the UN republished reports that are specious pretty often. Instead of arguing from authority about the UN says this or that, read the actual report. They don’t have proof of the numbers dead that they claim. They have speculation based on research methods including interviewing emigres and looking at satellite images. They don’t have researchers on the ground figuring it out, they are publishing numbers with plenty of room for interpretation.
Don’t believe everything you read.
The UN has always characterized anti-subversive activities as human rights abuses. They’ve done it in a dozen countries. And again, they don’t actually have documentation of crimes against humanity. Read their own report.
In 2013, Maduro was incredibly popular. Hell, in 2019 he was incredibly popular. So despite the fact that he felt it was critical to prevent the American-aligned party, who was actively calling for a US invasion, from taking power, he was still their by the will of the people for at least 8 of those 12 years.
The claims that Maduro was a dictator are primarily biased readings of a conflict between the US and the anti-imperialists in Venezuela. The US first started organizing regime change in Venezuela 25 years ago. The first attempt was staffed by Venezuelans, but funded, organized, trained, and facilitated by the US. The sanctions have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans and driven poverty and hunger to levels of desperation. This is why there’s been millions of emigres.
For 25 years the US has been sending covert operations staff to Venezuela, training people who would like to overturn the government against the will of the people, and when Maduro stepped into office he became part of that battle. His choice was to hunt the subversive elements in the country and purge them, with or without murder. Even at the worst estimates of his body count, which are based entirely on speculative evidence and just sort of guessing based on satellite imagery and interviews with poor hungry people (who will say anything for safe passage and food for their kids), he has some far less violence than the US has to Venezuela in the same time frame.
This is not a choice between a dictator and a US intervention. These are interrelated processes. The crack down on dissent is a result of the president of Venezuela securing the country against US subversion. If the US wasn’t subverting, the president wouldn’t be cracking down. We know this because it happens in the run up to nearly all historical regime changes run by the US. Iran under Mossadegh also nationalized the oil fields, just like Chavez, and he was also popular, just like Chavez, but when the US and UK started building the operations for the coup, Mossadegh had to find them and stop them. If he didn’t, they would harm the Iranian people. He spent a couple years getting more and more draconian on his attempts to find the spies and subversives and purge them. And he lost in the end.
Maduro was not wrong that there were literally US spies and special ops all over the country. He was not wrong that the opposition party was working with them. He was not wrong that they were trying to harm the Venezuelan people for money and power. But he failed to stop them.
So now we’re left with the question - should he have purged harder, or should have done it differently? And the only way you can answer that question is if you understand what the government of Venezuela was doing for the last 25 years since Chavez first took office. You need to know how they were working to prevent this sort of outcome, what things they did implement, and then you need to study what other governments have implemented and whether Maduro could have done it differently.
And at that point you’ll hopefully be humble enough to realize that you’re Monday-morning-quarterbacking running a fucking country when you’re up against a US regime change operation and that you really have no ground to stand on to critique Maduro as a dictator who needed to be stopped for the good of his people.
I mean you did compare them and you’re still comparing them. You’re saying they’re both bad. That’s literally a comparison.
China is selling arms to anyone and everyone that wants them. Is that meddling or mercantilism?
By comparison, the US is committing mass murder almost daily.
No, they’re not both “bad”. The US is atrocious and China is selling weapons to bad people.