Venezuela: the case for just saying “no”

There is a glorious scene in my favourite book of World War One memoirs, Emilio Lussu’s Sardinian Brigade. He describes a moment when his Italian unit is waiting to charge the Austrian lines. The pre-assault artillery barrage starts up but the fire, instead of hitting the Austrians, falls on its own, Italian positions.

While Lussu rushes about trying to restore discipline among the panicking troops, he’s struck by an astonishing sight: one machine gun unit which is under full control of its officer, a friend of his, marching in fine order – towards the rear.

“What on Earth are you doing?” shouts Lussu.

“Attacking those guns,” replies his friend.

“But they’re our guns,” he shouts back.

“They’re firing at me,” comes the calm reply, “so they’re enemy guns.”

That strikes me as a thoroughly sensible, not to say commendable, attitude. By analogous reasoning, if a government is wreaking havoc on the lives of workers and the poor, it is, by that simple fact, a government hostile to the principles of socialism. It’s crucial to bring it down, as quickly as possible. If it claims to be socialist then, as soon as we’ve got our hollow laugh out of the way, we need to devote ourselves still more urgently to the task – a false friend is far more dangerous than an open enemy.

Why do I mention that just now?

Because there seems to be a belief among certain circles of the British Left that we need to back the present government in Venezuela, on the grounds that it’s ‘socialist’. This is a ‘socialist’ government that presided over a reduction in GDP by 18.6% last year. Inflation was running at a yearly rate of 741% in February 2017. Although the official figures are different, many commentators believe that unemployment is climbing towards 20%.

The face of socialism? Not as I see it

Venezuela is sitting on the biggest oil reserves in the world. And yet it’s GDP per head is a little over $12,800 a head and falling, while even Cuba, with no oil, is running at $11,900. How long before Venezuela falls below Cuba?

There’s plenty wrong about Cuba, but at least it’s delivering a stable economy, secure if low living standards and decent healthcare, in spite of decades of US sanctions. Nicolás Maduro’s government is delivering chaos, in which the first victims are the poor and the workers it claims to protect.

Sure, the parties likely to replace his in power may well be pretty awful. At least they’re open enemies and we can get on with opposing them once they’re in office. The one controlling the regime right down is a false friend and it’s wreaking horrific damage on those it should be defending.

Marching on it at the head of a machine gun detachment probably isn’t a good idea. But doing the same thing metaphorically? It’s firing on our people, which makes it the enemy, so why not?

After all, don’t forget Stalin called himself a socialist too. He proved it by taking out 80 million people. Among whom were all the leaders, bar him, of the revolution that was supposed to bring socialism to Russia.

I got tired decades ago of being told that his successors’ governments had to be supported simply for the principles to which they paid lip service. I feel tired when I hear the same stale old rhetoric being dragged out in defence of Maduro. 

We need to find something more innovative. And actually stand up for the people we’re supposed to represent.

Obama and Peace. And what comes next

Do you remember when Barack Obama won the Nobel peace prize?

It was in October 2009. His inauguration as US President had taken place the previous January. He’d barely got his feet under the table, had hardly begun to feel his way into the job, had yet to achieve more than the already considerable feat of getting elected into that office despite being partly black.

“What’s the peace prize committee up to?” most of us wondered, “usually they honour people who’ve actually made some major contribution to peace. Are they issuing prizes for potential now, then?”

Seven years on, it’s the prize committee that looks smart, we their sceptical critics who look foolish. Insight, they showed, and above all foresight. Obama has done far more for peace, and above all far less for war, than has become the norm for Presidents since the end of the Second World War.

It’s true he wanted to go blundering into Syria, missiles blazing, but he had the good sense to be talked out of that. He kept his intervention in Libya to a minimum. He did all he could to pull troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and resisted the temptation to put more in, able to rise above the simplistic pursuit of quick fixes by military means for which Dubya Bush – and, indeed, Tony Blair – so naively fell.

He’s also shown an ability to break free from a toxic mindset. Most nations have fixations with certain issues on which they find it practically impossible to change their view. In the US, the most significant seem to be a conviction that no black can be fully the equal of a white – indeed, for many, that blacks can’t come close to equality, that force is the best approach to foreign policy, and that the widespread possession of guns protects society, instead of being the principal contributing factor to a world-leading murder rate.

Obama has shown the first of these obsessions to be wholly false, just by being who he is. The third he has never ceased to combat, even in these, the dying months of his presidency. And for the second, he has shown that the US can do better by befriending some of its enemies, without denying disagreements, than by maintaining an aggressive stance towards them.

He became the first sitting US President to visit Cuba since the revolution. The US may have a long list of grievances against Havana, and many may even be justified, but an open door leads to more hope of progress than a closed one – if only because you can talk through it, negotiate through it, even argue through it.

He recently visited Vietnam too. There’s plenty wrong in that country, above all the repression of opposition to the regime and all the usual paraphernalia of autocracy: censorship, excessive surveillance, denial of human rights. But the longest war the US has fought, and the first it has lost, achieved absolutely nothing but death and destruction in Vietnam. It’s good to see other attitudes being reinforced.

Of course, there’s a paradox: Obama’s gesture of peace towards Vietnam took the form of authorising the sale of arms to the nation… Still, it was a gesture that would cement a growing friendship, and suggests a growing trust.

Finally, Obama became the first serving US President to visit Hiroshima and the Peace Park, monument to the first of only two times that atomic weapons have ever been used. We need to remember, when we cry about the weapons of mass destruction, that the US alone has used them in anger, killing over 140,000 people immediately in Hiroshima (others died later of diseases caused by the bomb). To set some perspective, 2014 was a peak year for terrorist deaths – they reached nearly 33,000 around the world.

Barack Obama with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe
with the A-Bomb dome in the background

The Peace Park is one of the most moving places I have ever visited. It maintains a powerful sense of peace, but also of sorrow, even of awe, at what was done there. A prayer bell stands as a symbol of the horror that any faith must have feel at the atrocity booming mournfully when another visitor sounds it; nearby are glass cases full of paper cranes (the birds, not the construction plant – don’t be silly) in memory, initially, of the girl who started making them in the ultimately vain hope that it would prevent her death from leukaemia, and now in memory of all the victims of war; and standing over all, visible again and again as one wanders the paths, grim and awe-inspiring is the A-bomb dome, the strange building that somehow remained standing though choked with rubble (which has been left where it fell) while all the people inside it were killed.

Now Obama has been there, as the official representative of the nation that wreaked the destruction. And in that hallowed place, he spoke of his hope for a world that would ultimately free itself of nuclear weapons. Not probably in his lifetime, he told us, but eventually, as long as we keep pushing towards that goal.

Oh, yes, he’s a worthy recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He hadn’t shown it in his actions back then. But he has completely justified the faith of the Prize Committee.

Now we face the prospect of his successor being Donald Trump. The man not of the open door, but of the wall between peoples. The man who wants to make American great again, with a subtext of violence, domination, intolerance.

I don’t think he’ll be bothering the Nobel Peace Prize for their attention at all.

The US and counter-insurgency: not a formula for success

Imagine the following scenario.

The United States comes under attack, losing a number of lives of citizens who were expecting no aggression. The response within the country is one of horror, and a growing desire to hit back against the threat. As a result, American forces begin action around the globe, including regions not apparently in the least connected with the original outrage.

In one country, a long way from home, US troops are initially greeted as liberators from a previous autocratic regime. However, as it becomes clear that the they intend to overstay their welcome, an insurgency develops against the occupation. The US engage in a long and often brutal battle, inflicting heavy losses, including many among the civilian population. In some instances, they commit what it would be hard not to regard as war crimes.

There is no accurate count of the number of local casualties. Estimates range between 34,000 and 200,000. At no point does it become clear that the US action in any way addresses the issue that originally precipitated it.

Does that all sound drearily familiar?

Well, I’m not talking about the 9/11 attack or about the US response in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor, therefore, am I thinking of the possibly 200,000 lives lost during the US battle against the Iraq insurgency.

No. The trigger event, that whipped up the war fever in the States, was the sinking of the US cruiser Maine in Havana harbour. Why in Havana? Because Cuba was then a Spanish possession facing a local uprising for independence; the Maine was there to cow the Spanish and provide tacit support to the independence movement.

A US commission concluded she’d been struck by a mine.

Interestingly, more recent scholarship suggests that the ship blew up because of an internal explosion. It may have been caused by burning gas from the boilers reaching the magazine and the ammunition it contained.

The incident led to the Spanish-American war of 1898. US forces took on the Spanish in a number of theatres around the world, including the Philippines. Which is where the counter-insurgency I mentioned took place.

Like Cuba, the Spanish colony of the Philippines was in a state of turbulence. A struggle for independence had started two years earlier. Many in the movement at first saw the arrival of the American troops as an aid in their struggle, but it soon became clear that they weren’t there to free the islands, only to replace one form of foreign domination by another.

Mark Twain – yes, he of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn fame – outlined how few enemy soldiers were generally killed in American battles, even in the Civil War. He then described the deaths that occurred when US forces surrounded insurgents, including women and children, in the Moro crater, an extinct volcano:

...with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded... The enemy numbered six hundred – including women and children – and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.

The Moro Crater massacre
Unedifying. And sadly setting a precedent.

Were you upset about the conduct of the Iraq War? About the outrages in Abu Ghraib prison? About the senseless waste of civilian lives?

Sadly, none of these things were new. The war in the Philippines ended, in theory, in 1902. The Moro Crater massacre took place in 1906.

The conclusion? We didn’t learn much in the century that followed. And, by failing to learn from our errors, we committed them all over again – with ISIS as our reward.

A pity Mark Twain’s powerful sarcasm echoed so little with Blair and Bush when it should have.