Juan Carlos Zambrana Marchetti
The United States is not an imperialist country. It can’t be, because it’s people are believers and its religion won’t permit it. The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy defines “imperialismo“ as “The action of a country or Nation to extend its control over other countries, by means of force, or through abusive economic pressures.”
As imperialism is, therefore, an abuse of gigantic scale that affects over many generations hundreds of thousands of human beings, the U.S. cannot be consciously imperialist, for it defines itself
as the people of God, in which is expressed all of His luminosity.
It has no space in its collective consciousness to take on the criminality that is common to the actions of every empire. That moral limitation, however, does not mean that the Republicans have kept themselves from exercising it, but, rather, that they have developed a masterful way to disguise their intentions by fooling the people and gaining their approval for all of its abuses.
That is why U.S. imperialism must be imposed always in the name of the highest values that ennoble the soul of a true child of God. That is also why the people of the U.S. live in a state of denial of the truth, and of the immense pain that imperialism has meant for humanity.
That pronounced degree of myopia and deafness exists because the Republicans have named themselves flag-bearers of the family values of the people, including morality, religion, and politics. Having thus captured its identity, they find it easy to drive their “conservative” doctrine deep into the soul of the people, so that the people, in a state of collective hypnosis, may approve their agenda of supremacy.
That is why, even today, a large proportion of the people of the U.S. continue to believe, for example, that Saddam Hussein was a danger to the U.S., that he had chemical weapons of mass destruction, that he was buying uranium for a nuclear bomb, and so on.
They ignore that none of that was true, and that the true motivation was control of the Middle East for its oil riches, but, most of all, they ignore the sea of blood that has been spilled in that war, because U.S. media report only the U.S. casualties.
It is because of the need to maintain that high degree of denial of the truth that even its most abusive aggressions are always waged in the name of God, liberty, democracy, and security.
The process of justification is as Biblical as the rhetoric of the Republicans who impose it. It’s called simply “demonization,” and it’s the process through which the opponent is identified as “the evil one,” and there is implanted in the mind of public opinion the aberrant idea that –for example– Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador represent a present danger to the security of the continent and of the U.S.; that their actions are anti-American and, consequently, contrary to the will of God.
The people are kept from knowing that the truth is to the contrary: that these are nations that for long have been dominated, exploited, and looted, and that their only sin is to be governed now by leaders who decided to break out from the “alignment in obedience” to the U.S., to defend what natural resources they have left, and to use them for the benefit of their peoples.
The Republican campaigns of intrigue expand their accusations until the countries at issue are declared failed states. It’s at that point that the people of the U.S. accept “in self-defense” the decision to invade, or to intervene to overthrow those governments, in order to install others that are more agreeable.
It’s really a matter of a plan of intrigues of unimaginable dimensions, designed by professionals to fool a U.S. people whose only sin is to believe.
The 17th of this month I had the opportunity to see in action that mechanism of domination, when the ultra-right Republican leadership met in the Visitor Center of the U.S. Capitol to announce their agenda and to push on Congress the beginning of this stage of demonization of the progressive governments of Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia. In order to fool public opinion, they have developed an enormous structure of legitimate organizations, all using different masks as “independent” or “non-governmental” entities.
Given that communism no longer works for demonization, and because they respect the economic power of China, the new areas of demonization today are violations of human rights and of the freedom of the press, erosion of democracy, narcotrafficking, and, of course, terrorism.
For these purposes, they depend on information produced by organizations that holding themselves out as “representative,” are in reality parallel organizations, created with high-sounding names in order to demonize in different areas the actions of the countries targeted for aggression. There are so many “legitimate” masks of imperialism that I will have to uncover them one by one.
In this first episode I will address the “violations” of human rights and “democracy” that at the forum in the Capitol were denounced, or rather read, by Mr. Javier El-Hage, from the New York City-based Foundation for Human Rights.
El-Hage had to depart from the concepts of the Interamerican Democratic Charter, and to cite other authors, in order to be able to say that “dictatorships are not only those governments that take power through coups d’etat… but authoritarian regimes (are also those that, although democratically elected,) repress the full exercise of democracy, doing away with at least one of its three fundamental elements, i.e., broad protection of civil rights, free elections, and fair competition in the political arena.”
He then said that “according to those parameters, the governments of Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia cannot continue to be considered full democracies, and, accordingly, cannot be treated as such.”
He cites as a justification to disqualify Bolivia that in 2008 “in the city of Santa Cruz, the opposition went out on the streets and destroyed the facilities of several governmental institutions, or when 50,000 supporters of president Evo Morales, many of whom were carrying firearms, threatened to march on Santa Cruz.”
He added that in Bolivia, “under the pretext of fighting against racism, a law was passed with the goal of closing communications media that are critical of the government.”
So much effort did the author of the document place in trying to resolve the incoherencies of his political and slanted analysis that he forgot abut human rights, especially in Colombia.
He forgot the political character of his organization, which acts in favor of the right in both Bolivia and Venezuela, and that they have been linked to the mercenary, separatist, and terrorist movement of Eduardo Rózsa Flores, who initiated the organization and training of a paramilitary force, in coordination with the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee, to divide Bolivia, carry out an attempt against the life of Cardinal Terrazas so as to blame the government, and even attempt to assassinate president Evo Morales Ayma.
So concerned was he about the defense of the political rights of the corporatocracy that he forgot that the struggles against poverty and for social justice are also in favor of human rights; that the Organization of American States (OAS), the Organization of the United Nations (ONU), and various other organizations have recognized in different aspects the progress in the social field in the three countries.
Finally, he forgot to say that what he calls a free press is in reality a private press, eminently political and with such a shameless agenda that it cannot even deny its partiality.
Mr. El-Hage and his organization, in reality, wear the mask of the human rights of imperialism. They are in fact powerful, but they should remember that in the age of Internet and social networking, and of the non-aligned media, the big corporations no longer have a monopoly on information. The peoples no longer will let them lie with impunity.
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