Venezuela beset by American dirty tricks

For the last 70 years that has been the United States, which has possessed the world's reserve currency, the US dollar, and has maintained control over oil markets. They have done this either through alliances, with countries such as Saudi Arabia, or through war, as with the Iraq conflicts, which led to the killing of over one million people, mostly civilians.

The latest victim of this brutal intersection of big oil and big money is Venezuela, a country that has made the mistake of having the biggest oil reserves in the world, which are also of a very high quality.

The undermining of Venezuela by American dirty tricks has been going on for a long time. But now the lies and propaganda are being ratcheted up. Just as in the Iraq war or the wars with Libya and Syria, mindless media outlets are blaring out a narrative in which the 'bad guys' have to be taken out with extreme prejudice so that America and its allies can rescue the long-suffering people of that nation.

In essence, the argument (if one can call it that) is that to liberate these people we have to turn their country into rubble — and then they will have peace and democracy. A bit like bashing someone on the head with a baseball bat in order to improve their health.

Such horrible illogic, which dresses up extreme violence as the 'right thing to do', is now being used by the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. He has said of President Maduro that 'his regime is morally bankrupt, it's economically incompetent and it is profoundly corrupt. It is undemocratic to the core.'

It seems to scarcely matter that these claims are largely false. Yet it is worth pointing out that it is the US that is the country that is morally bankrupt — as has been seen with the series of aggressive, illegal wars they have fought this century. There was never any apology, for example, for invading Iraq on a false pretext, even though it was a crime of aggression. Venezuela, meanwhile, has invaded no-one.