Tag: democracy

Nobel Provocation

11th October 2025

It is hard to think of a worse candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize than US President, Donald Trump.  Not just because of the brazen campaign run by him and his supporters to try and secure the award.  The ongoing role of the US in selling arms and fuelling conflicts around the world is an even more significant factor.

Benjamin Netanyahu, given his role in the genocide perpetrated in Gaza, would be as bad a candidate.  The actual recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize 2025, Maria Corina Machado, was a shock to progressive movements arond the world, as she also has no claim to the award.  The opinion piece below by Michelle Ellner, for Venezuela Analysis, explains why.

Machado certainly wasted no time in trying to take advantage of the profile associated with the award. Her first call was to Donald Trump, to thank him for his support in stationing US warships off the coast of Venezuela. Trump’s pretext for such action has been to allegedly stop drug traffiking but the US has been looking to take advantage of Venezuela’s oil reserves for some time and is clearly stepping up the pressure now that Trump has returned to the Presidency.

Details of the aggressive nature of US actions and the fear for direct military intervention have been raised in Britain by the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign. Find out more here

https://www.venezuelasolidarity.co.uk/2025/10/08/we-will-blow-you-out-of-existence-trumps-caribbean-spectacle/

When Maria Corina Machado Wins the Nobel Peace Prize, ‘Peace’ Has Lost Its Meaning

by Michelle Ellner

Maria Corina Machado is known for her incendiary speeches 

When I saw the headline Maria Corina Machado wins the Peace Prize, I almost laughed at the absurdity. But I didn’t, because there’s nothing funny about rewarding someone whose politics have brought so much suffering. Anyone who knows what she stands for knows there’s nothing remotely peaceful about her politics.

If this is what counts as “peace” in 2025, then the prize itself has lost every ounce of credibility. I’m Venezuelan-American, and I know exactly what Machado represents.

She’s the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatization, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.

Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help “liberate” Venezuela with bombs under the banner of “freedom,” She has demanded sanctions, that silent form of warfare whose effects – as studies in The Lancet and other journals have shown – have killed more people than war, cutting off medicine, food, and energy to entire populations.

Machado has spent her entire political life promoting division, eroding Venezuela’s sovereignty and denying its people the right to live with dignity.

This is who Maria Corina Machado really is:

  • She helped lead the 2002 coup that briefly overthrew a democratically elected president, and signed the Carmona Decree that erased the Constitution and dissolved every public institution overnight.
  • She worked hand in hand with Washington to justify regime change, using her platform to demand foreign military intervention to “liberate” Venezuela through force.
  • She cheered on Donald Trump’s threats of invasion and his naval deployments in the Caribbean, a show of force that risks igniting regional war under the pretext of “combating narcotrafficking.” While Trump sent warships and froze assets, Machado stood ready to serve as his local proxy, promising to deliver Venezuela’s sovereignty on a silver platter.
  • She pushed for the U.S. sanctions that strangled the economy, knowing exactly who would pay the price: the poor, the sick, the working class. 
  • She helped construct the so-called “interim government” a Washington backed puppet show run by a self-appointed “president” who looted Venezuela’s resources abroad while children at home went hungry.
  • She vows to reopen Venezuela’s embassy in Jerusalem, aligning herself openly with the same apartheid state that bombs hospitals and calls it self-defense.
  • Now she wants to hand over the country’s oil, water, and infrastructure to private corporations. This is the same recipe that made Latin America the laboratory of neoliberal misery in the 1990s.

Machado was also one of the political architects of La Salida, the 2014 opposition campaign that called for escalated protests, including guarimba tactics. Those weren’t “peaceful protests” as the foreign press claimed; they were organized barricades meant to paralyze the country and force the government’s fall. Streets were blocked with burning trash and barbed wire, buses carrying workers were torched, and people suspected of being Chavista were beaten or killed. Even ambulances and doctors were attacked. Some Cuban medical brigades were nearly burned alive. Public buildings, food trucks, and schools were destroyed. Entire neighborhoods were held hostage by fear while opposition leaders like Machado cheered from the sidelines and called it “resistance.”

She praises Trump’s “decisive action” against what she calls a “criminal enterprise,” aligning herself with the same man who cages migrant children and tears families apart under ICE’s watch, while Venezuelan mothers search for their children disappeared by U.S. migration policies.

Machado isn’t a symbol of peace or progress. She is part of a global alliance between fascism, Zionism, and neoliberalism, an axis that justifies domination in the language of democracy and peace. In Venezuela, that alliance has meant coups, sanctions, and privatization. In Gaza, it means genocide and the erasure of a people. The ideology is the same: a belief that some lives are disposable, that sovereignty is negotiable, and that violence can be sold as order.

If Henry Kissinger could win a Peace Prize, why not María Corina Machado? Maybe next year they’ll give one to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for “compassion under occupation.”

Every time this award is handed to an architect of violence disguised as diplomacy, it spits in the face of those who actually fight for peace: the Palestinian medics digging bodies from rubble, the journalists risking their lives in Gaza to document the truth and the humanitarian workers of the Flotilla sailing to break the siege and deliver aid to starving children in Gaza, with nothing but courage and conviction.

But real peace is not negotiated in boardrooms or awarded on stages. Real peace is built by women organizing food networks during blockades, by Indigenous communities defending rivers from extraction, by workers who refuse to be starved into obedience, by Venezuelan mothers mobilizing to demand the return of children seized under U.S. ICE and migration policies and by nations that choose sovereignty over servitude. That’s the peace Venezuela, Cuba, Palestine, and every nation of the Global South deserves.

Tell the Nobel Committee: The Peace Prize belongs to Gaza’s journalists, not María Corina Machado!

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff.

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US election – Resistance is vital

7th November 2024

Demonstrations will continue to oppose the reactionary policies of President Trump

The election of a new President in the United States is always a moment of international significance, given the role the US plays in world politics.  The Presidential election of 2024 has been described as the most consequential in a generation and there is no doubt that the re-election of Donald Trump will have profound repercussions both in the US and internationally.

Trump’s first term appointments of reactionary judges to the Supreme Court has already led to the reversal of Roe v Wade and the attack on reproductive rights in the US.  While each State can at the moment determine its own position there is no guarantee that Trump will not introduce nationwide anti-abortion legislation, under pressure from the hardline Christian evangelist lobby.

The belligerent stand taken by Trump in relation to the Black Lives Matter Movement also does not augur well for progress in the discrimination and treatment of the Black and Latino communities in the US.  While the media are making much out of the increase in Trump’s vote share amongst these communities, over the more socially liberal Kamala Harris, work is still needed to analyse the pattern of voting and the impact of many who stayed at home.

As a long standing advocate of gun laws being as relaxed as possible, US citizens cannot look forward to any action to restrain the gun lobby in the US, led by the fanatical National Rifle Association (NRA).  The consequence of lack of control over gun law in the US  saw nearly 43,000 people die from gun related violence in 2023 and any hope for that number to drop significantly under Trump is slim.

Trump has the backing of a shady grouping around the Make America Great Again (MAGA) campaign, called Project 2025: The Presidential Transition Project.

The blurb on their website states it’s mission:

“ It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.

This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. The project will build on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative Administration.”

Trump has also called for thousands of federal employees to be fired and to be replaced by workers who are appropriately vetted on the basis of their ideological belief in the limited role of federal government and personal loyalty to him, stating,

“I will require every federal employee to pass a new civil service test, demonstrating an understanding of our constitutional limited government.”

Tax cuts for the rich and cuts in public services for the rest are likely to be the reality of Trump’s policies.

On the world stage the US military industrial complex will be looking forward to continued profits as Trump will undoubtedly continue promoting the sales of US weapons and technology worldwide.

In relation to the ongoing Israeli action in the Middle East, in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran, Trump has made clear his unswerving support for Benjamin Netanyahu and the ongoing incursions by the Israel Defence Force (IDF), resulting in thousands of deaths over the past year.  Trump’s election victory was greeted enthusiastically by Netanyahu and his supporters in Tel Aviv.

In his first term as President, Trump tore up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in relation to Iran, which constrained Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for a relaxation of sanctions.  Given Trump’s belligerent tone towards Iran, allied with his support for Israel, there is a clear danger of escalation of the conflict in the Middle East.  

In relation to Ukraine Trump has been more ambivalent but the strategic objectives of the US and NATO, in encircling Russia in order to contain its influence, remain real.  However any settlement regarding Ukraine is arrived at in the short term, this wider objective will remain.

In the Indo-Pacific the military built up to counter the so called ‘threat’ of China continues, with ongoing economic and military support for Taiwan being key, along with the threat to peace in the region posed by the AUKUS alliance of the US, UK and Australia.

Any moves towards rapprochement with Cuba, mild as they were under the Obama administration, were ditched during Trump’s first term.  Cuba was added to the US state sponsors of terrorism list.  To the shame of the Biden administration this position was not reversed and the ongoing illegal blockade against Cuba, imposed by the US, will continue under a new Trump Presidency.

The ongoing CIA campaign to undermine progress in Venezuela, a long running effort to install a US friendly regime in that country, is unlikely to change under Trump,  while a clampdown upon migration from Latin America in general will reinforce the jingoism which has been a hallmark of Trump’s policies.  Trump has vowed to oversee the largest mass deportation in US history for example and has repeatedly stated that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

The Trump administration may not be characterised as fascist yet but Trump does have form.   According to John Kelly, former White House Chief of Staff, during a 2018 trip to Paris to commemorate the end of World War I, Trump told him that Hitler “did a lot of good things.”

Much of the United States will be waking up to the hangover of a second Trump administration.  The broad anti-MAGA coalition will continue to mobilise against the reactionary legislation Trump is bound to introduce. The Communist Party USA is calling for a renewed resistance movement to build the anti-fascist front that has been developing over recent years.  Resistance is not only possible but vital, for the people of the US and the world.

New definition, old habits

24th March 2024

Just Stop Oil protests – extremist activity?

The British government’s New definition of extremism (2024) published in mid March may not establish a House Committee on un-British Activities but is certainly a step in the direction of the anti-communist witch hunts which were a feature of life in the post war United States.  Michael Gove is unlikely to be in office as long as US witch finder general, Senator Joseph McCarthy, but his ‘new definition’ is certainly a step in the direction of McCarthyism, smuggling in a number of constraints under the umbrella of tackling Islamist or neo-Nazi extremism.

In defining behaviour that could constitute extremism the new definition includes,

“Attempts to undermine, overturn, or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights.” 

This definition of necessity presumes acceptance of the implied interpretation of ‘liberal parliamentary democracy’ as well as a shared understanding of what constitute ‘democratic rights’.

The terminology is typical of the smokescreen used under capitalism to shroud its illiberal and anti-democratic core in language designed to make the system appear fair and just.

The capitalist system will allow liberalism up to the point at which it sees the danger of exposure or any threat to the status quo.  The various tools at its disposal, including the press and social media, smear campaigns, use of the security services, and ultimately the threat or use of force, can be deployed in varying ways to head off any perceived danger.

The recent period of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party from 2015 -19 is a case in point.  Although representing a relatively mild threat to the established order the popularity of Corbyn’s message, highlighting glaring disparities between rich and poor; inequalities across class, race and gender; and the concentration of power and influence in the hands of a few corporations and bankers in the City of London, was deemed to be too close to the truth to be allowed to take root.

The systematic character assassination of Corbyn, and the subsequent eradication of any radical dimension to Labour policy under Kier Starmer, illustrates the establishment response to even a mild threat. 

The presentation of politics as a choice of who governs, between the Tories and Labour, with perennial pro-capitalist Liberal Democrats occasionally called upon to prop up the system, makes a mockery of the idea of ‘liberal democracy’ as there is essentially no choice to be made.  Capitalism, which is the system of the ruling class, run by the ruling class, for the ruling class, will always win on these terms!

Labour administrations have provided nuance, at least in domestic policy.  However, even the most democratic achievement of Labour, the National Health Service, is under threat from the intrusion of the private sector and the danger of healthcare not being free at the point of use, or at least more difficult to access.  In foreign policy there has been universal consensus between the leadership of the main political parties on all major issues from the invasion of Iraq to the deployment of Trident nuclear submarines.

When it comes to ‘democratic rights’ there is an equivalent sleight of hand in defining terms and emphasis.  Democratic rights under capitalism are usually reduced to being able to vote for the political party of your choice with some degree of freedom of expression and assembly permitted.  There is no right to employment however, or housing, as the jobless and homeless will testify.  The NHS may be the pride of social policy in Britain but access to healthcare in the United States for example, self styled leaders of the ‘free world’, is very much dependent upon ability to pay.  Democratic rights are defined in terms which suit the ruling class and do not challenge its endemic failings, to be able to feed, house and employ its citizens.

The ‘new definition’ claims that the first duty of government is “to keep our citizens safe and our country secure”.  Citizens sleeping on the streets, going hungry for lack of food, or struggling to find work are hardly ‘safe’.    Nor is a country secure that makes itself a potential target by cravenly supporting the militarist adventures of the United States and NATO, or positioning itself as the enemy of progress by supporting the ongoing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Force.

The Tories and the main architect of the ‘new definition’, Michael Gove, will no doubt claim that the intention of the guidance is not to target those with strong opposition views but only those seeking to promote “violence, hatred or intolerance”.  The Left, it is claimed, should have no fear for they are not the objects of the guidance, being neither Islamist nor neo-Nazi extremists.

However, little more than a few strokes of the proverbial pen could see that position change.  Given the more draconian powers the police have under the Public Order Act 2023, which bans any act “which interferes with the use or operation of any key national infrastructure in England and Wales”, which could include protest on the public highway, taking the ‘new definition’ at face value would appear to be naïve at best.

Not surprisingly the Labour leadership have made no commitment to repeal the legislation, being afraid that they will be characterised as not being tough enough on crime if they commit to do so. With a General Election looming the issues of tackling extremism and public order are likely to be played up by the Tories, who see these as issues on which they can win votes.  Labour simply aping the Tories will convince no-one but is likely to alienate many.    

Pressure upon Labour when in opposition or in office, from mass extra Parliamentary action and from the wider labour movement, will be vital if there is to be any prospect of changing the legislative landscape for political activity in Britain.  That such action could be deemed ‘extremist’ may deter the fainthearted but without such action there is every prospect that worse will follow.  There may be a ‘new definition’ but for the British ruling class, old habits die hard.