The great Latin American revolutionary writer, Eduardo Galeano, once said to Vltchek, “It is time to raise old flags. It is time to un-dust them and once again gather under them.” The Revolution is not over. Communism and socialism are far from being defeated. One of the leading left-wing thinkers today, Andre Vltchek, in this collection of philosophical, revolutionary essays, explains why revolutionary optimism is so feared in the nihilistic West and, by taking us to all corners of the world, proves that people everywhere are still capable of dreaming, hoping and fighting for a much better world and for eternal ideals!

As mentioned before by Gus, we have to evolve — rather than fight with blood and bombs — into this old/new system which is to change the very sophisticated highway robbery of western "philosophy" (if we can call this a philosophy) into a more basic sharing humanism, while understanding the implications of what we do to the fragile planetary environment. As Australia reached its 25 million individual, the destruction that has been "necessary" to achieve this feat is beyond the pale — and nature pays back with droughts, floods and fire — coral bleaching and global warming. 

Donald Trump has again stirred the wrath of his critics by charging that the media can cause wars. His opponents immediately howled that he’d launched another salvo in his ongoing campaign to vilify journalists as the “enemy of the people.” They also ridiculed his contention as factually absurd. Fox News reporter Chris Wallace bluntly asked National Security Advisor John Bolton: “What wars have we caused?” Princeton University historian and CNN analyst Julian E. Zelizer epitomized the view that Trump’s charge is unfounded with a piece in The Atlantic titled, “The Press Doesn’t Cause Wars—Presidents Do.”

Zelizer and similar critics are technically correct, of course. Media outlets have no power to launch attacks on foreign countries or order U.S. troops into combat. But that view is much too narrow. As Zelizer himself admits, the new media have considerable ability to influence public opinion. Such a capacity to shape the overall narrative is not a trivial power. An irresponsible press can, and has, whipped up public sentiment in favor of military actions that subsequent evidence indicated were unnecessary and even immoral.

Two cases stand out: the Spanish-American War and the Iraq War. Historians have long recognized that jingoistic “yellow journalism,” epitomized by the newspaper chains owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, played a significant role in the former conflict. Months before the outbreak of the war, one of Hearst’s reporters wished to return home from Cuba because there was no sign of a worsening crisis. Hearst instructed him to stay, adding, “you furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” 

Hearst’s boast was hyperbolic, but the Hearst and Pulitzer papers did repeatedly hype the Spanish “threat” and beat the drums for war against Madrid. They featured stories that not only focused on but exaggerated the uglier features of Madrid’s treatment of its colonial subjects in Cuba. Those outlets also exploited the mysterious explosion that destroyed the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana’s harbor. To this day, the identity of the culprit is uncertain, but the yellow press exhibited no doubts whatever. According to their accounts, it was an outrageous attack on America by the villainous Spanish regime.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/yes-the-press-helps-sta...

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From Ricardo Vaz at IvestigAction

Venezuela was rocked this past Saturday by an attempted assassination of President Nicolas Maduro, during a public event, using drones armed with explosives. But as more details started to become available, the coverage of the mainstream media actually moved in the opposite direction: one after the other they have looked to sow doubt on the events, using words such as “apparent” or “alleged”, focusing instead on the government using this “alleged” event to step up repression. In the end, it is hard to tell apart the media coverage from the statements of John Bolton, one of the more hawkish advisers to the US president.

Although there are plenty of examples to choose from, we are going to focus on our personal champion of dishonest Venezuelan coverage – The Guardian. A quick search of Guardian headlines with “assassination attempt” shows that a qualifier such as “alleged” is never used. Be it Jacques Chirac, Guinea’s president, or even Saddam Hussein’s deputy, nobody had their assassination attempts questioned as a hoax to be used as a pretext to stamp out dissent. Such is the dishonesty of the media coverage of Venezuela. [1]

Yet this is the Guardian’s opening paragraph:

Venezuela’s opposition has warned that President Nicolas Maduro may launch a political crackdown after he accused adversaries of attempting to assassinate him with drones loaded with explosives on Saturday.”

Remarkably, it is the Venezuelan opposition takes precedence in an article describing an assassination attempt against Maduro. This would be akin to a report on 9/11 opening with “Al-Qaeda warns of increased US involvement in the Middle East.” Then there is the usual trick of encapsulating the events under “Maduro said”, so that all the previous work smearing Maduro can be used to discredit this version.

Several videos and testimonies, some even mentioned by the Guardian piece, corroborate the Venezuelan government’s version of events. Two drones armed with explosives targeted the stage where Maduro was giving a speech on the 81st anniversary of the National Guard. One of them, because of signal jammers, crashed in front of a nearby building. Residents testified to this, and some of them captured the events, thus demolishing the nonsensical thesis that the explosion had been due to a gas leak.

The second drone detonated closer to the stage, resulting in seven injured officers while bodyguards quickly moved to shield Maduro. Despite all this evidence The Guardian insists that “exactly what happened still remained unclear on Sunday”. Perhaps Maduro, his wife and everyone around them looked at the sky at the same time and soldiers in formation scattered as part of some devious coordinated plan to ramp up repression. We are before the Caribbean version of 9/11 Truthers.

The Venezuelan opposition, in their newly-minted Frente Amplio coalition, which is sure to have its fingerprints all over this, can count on The Guardian as a megaphone to accuse the government of “making “irresponsible” accusations without any proof” and preemptively denounce upcoming repression. Nevermind the fact that opposition leaders have repeatedly been involved in violent attempts to overthrow the government.

Also, just a few tweets later, one of the parties in the Frente Amplio, Primero Justicia, threatened Maduro with actions “like this one or worse”.

Following that we are told that “No one has claimed responsibility for the alleged assassination attempt”, although the group Soldados de Franelas, whose members are unknown, claimed this attempt as a victory, and later published a statement on a so-called Operation Fenix, read by notorious anti-government journalist Patricia Poleo in Miami [2]. The statement affirms that it is the duty of the armed forces to remove the current government which, among other things, is guilty of indoctrinating children with communism!

The Guardian then continues to find other victims, since they are not sure the assassination attempt took place, and mentions six people arrested, two of them having previously taken part in “street protests”. According to interior minister Nestor Reverol, one of those detained had been involved in the 2014 guarimbas, which were a little more than “street protests”. They involved violent barricades, shooting at bystanders, beheading motorcyclists, and a great deal more. He had been released by the government in a (clearly futile) gesture of goodwill. The second one was sought after an attack on the Paramacay barracks last year, and we can all agree that calling this a “street protest” is a bit of a stretch, even for The Guardian.

Then we are treated to two paragraphs replete with distortions. There is a mention of the economic crisis, which is fair enough but referring to an IMF prediction which is utter nonsense. Next we read that Maduro “replaced” Chavez (he was elected), that he repressed anti-government demonstrations left 100 dead (opposition violence was responsible for a large part of the casualties), and that he sidelined the opposition-led congress (they are in contempt of court) by installing (there were elections, 8M+ voted) a body stacked with loyalists (again, there were elections and 6,120 candidates ran for 545 seats).

To top it all off, there is a mention of last year’s terrorist attack by Oscar Pérez, who hijacked a helicopter and went on to throw grenades and open fire on public buildings full of people . It is priceless that The Guardian should bring this up, because back then it also ran with ludicrous theories that it might have been all a government stunt, and then had a great deal of fun looking at Pérez’s Instagram page and his past acting activities. Pérez’s repeated calls for a coup and his appearance in an anti-government protest days later were not enough for The Guardian to clarify that he actually was an anti-government terrorist.[3]

The icing on this cake of dishonesty is that Pérez was “hunted down and killed”, when even the Guardian hyperlink has the word “shootout”. Pérez and his group were surrounded by security forces, and there were videos showing him urging the soldiers to join his rebellion, while the commanding officer tried to get him to surrender. After Pérez allegedly refused, a shootout ensued in which two policemen of the FAES special forces were killed, which is not exactly the picture suggested by “hunted down and killed”.

All in all, it seems like the US Empire, its allies and the stenographers in the mainstream media are trying to play a game in which they never lose. They constantly call for a coup, even report on foiled attempts[4], but when something actually takes place, the reaction is along the lines of “the US/Colombia/Venezuelan opposition had nothing to do with this coup/assassination attempt which maybe did not even happen”. Had it succeeded, as the 2002 coup did briefly, they would be celebrating “a victory for freedom”. Since it failed, it was all in the dictator’s imagination! But the crackdown is certain, which will then justify people wanting to kill Maduro or attempt a coup, and the cycle starts again.

The reactionary plotting against the Bolivarian Revolution by the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, their northern masters and the latter’s regional puppets, only now and then materialises into actual operations or terrorist attacks. But there is a constant set of background assumptions being created to endorse and provide cover for these actions, and this is achieved through the western media’s systematically dishonest coverage of Venezuela.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/08/11/venezuela-assassination-attempt-madu...

Venezuela has the largest known oil reserves in the world, but under the leadership of Nicolas Maduro, its hospitals lack equipment, medicines, food, anesthetics and even pens. The doctors who remain face a daily struggle to treat patients with little more than hope.

read more:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-country-of-hunger-inside-the-deep-suffering-in-venezuela-s-hospitals-a-1221061.html

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And so says Der Spiegel... But before one starts condemning, one has to look at the situation... Maduro is trying to run a country which is under severe sanctions from the USA, thus also from many other rich countries in the world. Why? Because Maduro is running a "socialist" government. The USA HATE socialist governments. Cuba has helped Venezuela before with sending doctors and hospital staff, and the situation is not as bad as Der Spiegel makes out. 

I could take pictures of hospital in the USA that would give the same impression of "poverty". Similar stints from the Western press have been done in Russia, in China and other countries such as Syria and Libya. Remember that it has been estimated that about half a million kids died in Iraq during the 1990s for lack of medical support, because the country was also under severe sanctions from the USA and their cronies.

So Maduro got re-elected because most of the poor people have now a better life than under the previous capitalistic regimes that were somewhat corrupt and in bed with the US multinationals. Chavez changed this to reclaim Venezuela for the Venezuelan people — including the poor. He paid with his life. Such socialist ideals are not easy to achieve when the USA (and/with the local rich people) are trying to get you out of the way by whatever means at their disposal. They tried the same caper in other countries before — including Indonesia, etc...

Articles like that of Der Spiegel are not helping the kids:

The government provides little money to the hospitals, but won't allow any aid into the country either. Doing so would make it clear that Maduro's autocratic government has failed. According to UNICEF, 15 percent of all children in Venezuela are undernourished.

Why is Maduro refusing help or aid? Cuba did help. But help from the West comes with strings attached and won't be coming unless the country returns to ugly exploitative capitalism.

According to the latest figures, more than 18 per cent of kids are obese (this is quite more than "fat") in the USA. What does this mean? It means that these US kids are badly fed, often living on junk food and carbonated sugar drinks. They have a great chance of having diabetes type 2 before turning 40.

On top of this, about 16.6 million kids in the USA are counted as undernourished. So there.

And in regard to the "exploitation" of oil, Maduro may be doing the planet a favour. "The state oil company, however, didn't have enough money for investment." Why is this so? Straight away, "corruption" is brought forward by the media such as Der Spiegel, (all without any proofs)  when the demands and restrictions made by the US empire are the real causes for "alleged" problems.

Can Maduro reduce these problems? Most likely. It's a question of trends. In Venezuela, the trend of the number of children who are malnourished is going down... In the USA, the trend is going up — as well as the trend in number of kids who are "obese".

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