This is another very ominous video from Telesur English. It’s short – about three minutes long – but it succeeds in showing the very clear parallels between the Anglo-American coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, and Trump’s campaign against Chavez and now Maduro. In 1953 Mossadegh nationalized the Iranian oil industry, which had previously been owned by British industrialists as Anglo-Persian Oil. He wanted to use the profits from the industry to fund a variety of social and welfare programmes. We and the Americans responded by slapping on sanctions. This resulted in massive public arrest. The video also mentions sponsored assassination attempts, but this could refer to the situation now in Venezuela. The Iranian people naturally blamed the ensuing poverty on Mossadegh, and there was widespread discontent and very public displays of dissatisfaction. Mossadegh responded by suspending the constitution. This seemed to confirm that he was a dictator, reinforced by British and American propaganda. Finally, a mob paid by us and the Americans in dollars overthrew him, and he was confined to house arrest, where he died. And so began the gradual process by which the Shah gradually took power as the country’s absolute ruler.
In Venezuela the country’s oil industry was nationalized in 1976. it does, however, still possess the world’s largest oil reserves. Under Hugo Chavez, the profits from the oil industry were, like Mossadegh intended in Iran, to be used to fund a series of social programmes. America responded by imposing economic sanctions. This has resulted in widespread discontent and rioting. So Maduro has attempted to rewrite the constitution. Just as Mossadegh suspended his. And so he’s been denounced as a dictator, and Trump is now stating that he has ‘not ruled out a military option’.
The programme therefore asks if the same tactics are being used on Venezuela as they were in Iran.
I think the answer’s an unqualified ‘Yes’. America has always responded aggressively to any vaguely left-wing popular politics in South America, overthrowing left-wing or politically liberal regimes when they threaten American political or corporate interests. The most notorious examples were the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile and the 1958 coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. But they also overthrew the prime minister with us in Guyana, because he also tried to enact liberal reforms for his people. And then there was Reagan in the 1980s supporting the Fascist death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
It ain’t just Trump, of course. Killary did the same, backing a Fascist military coup in Honduras, because the previous government was enacting a series of reforms giving free education and cheap electricity to the peasants and workers, and trying to protect the land and rights of the indigenous peoples.
In fact, it’s more or less been that way since the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th century. America’s aggressive wars and seizure of territory from its Hispanic neighbours have naturally been bitterly resented, and resulted in the creation of the ideology of Arielismo. Taking its name from Shakespeare’s Tempest, this sees the people of Latin America as the indigenous victims of US colonialism. America has never been short of comprador elites willing to collaborate with them in the oppression and exploitation of their own peoples, but the resentment is still there.
As for us, Lobster in the 1990s published a scholarly article arguing that it was we British, not the Americans, who took the leading role in the Iranian coup. And it also reflects very badly on Winston Churchill. It was his government which sponsored it, just as we had seized the Iranian oil industry during the Second World War to prevent it falling into the hands of the Germans.
Tags: 'Arielismo', Amerindians, Colonialism, Coups, Death Squads, Hillary Clinton, Hugo Chavez, Jacobo Arbenz, Mohammed Mossadegh, Monroe Doctrine, Nationalisation, Oil Reserves, Peasants, Ronald Reagan, Salvador Allende, Shakespeare, TeleSur English, the Poor, The Tempest, Winston Churchill
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