As IF Times

Nicolas Maduro has been removed literally from his home in Venezuela by US special forces in a precise military operation and placed in custody in a New York remand center. Very recently, Maduro publicly dared the Americans to come get him. I guess technically, Trump was invited.  Fast forward a few months, and he’s perp walked into a cell with P. Diddy in New York.

As you’d expect, the event has brought out strong opinions on both the legality and the morality of his removal.

As in all cases, there are 3 sides to any story; the opposing sides and the actual truth, which will often overlap with the opposing views. The views of most politicians can generally be ignored since their utterances are partisan and dependant on whom is funding their existence. As is well known, they are very adept on using both sides of their mouths to strongly condemn or support whatever is most determined by the polls.  Now they are boxed into supporting a dictator who had thousands of his citizens murdered during protests.

To cite such an example, we show the utterance of a Chris Murphy, the Democrat representative from Connecticut who in 2019 issued the following tweet:

Of course now, in the aftermath of the actual removal of this “dictator”, the political opposition and media mob is in an uproar over the unilateral actions of President Trump. Much of the outrage concerns the notion that the US is once again interfering with the internal politics of a nation and imposing their imperial will. Is it really a resident’s problem if they know that their neighbor is beating their spouse? Post mortems of all of the ‘regime changes’ allegedly orchestrated by the US in the past 50 years reveals that it’s never as simple as American imperialism. There are always other corporate interests at play and America is conveniently tagged as the villain.  To be sure, a nation’s business is its own business and it certainly isn’t America’s place to oversee all nations.  That was what the United Nations was created for.  As we know, the UN is essentially a drinking club for despotic nations and about as effective in maintaining world peace as paper condoms are for birth control.  This point was brought home recently by the appointment of Somalia as head of the UN security council.  Somalia; whose only expertise is in running daycares; installed as head of world security. This is Monty Python stuff.

In the case of Maduro, the number of factors which resulted in excising him from leadership are many and more likely to be revealed as time goes on. It’s unlikely that it was only about oil, or the Monroe doctrine or about an oppressive regime, or about drug shipments and money flows to terrorist groups, or about alliances with Iran and Russia, or about sending criminals to the US, or about blunting the influence of communism among neighboring stares or about secretive money flows to domestic politicians or about rigged elections. None of these by themselves are bad reasons.  In concert however, they are compelling reasons. Up until just now, politicians on both sides of the aisle railed against Maduro’s influence as noted above.

When you also observe the increasingly strong protests against the oppressive regime in Iran by their own citizens, it becomes clear that many nations are tired of being oppressed by their autocratic rulers…many of which are kept in power by cancelling elections in the case of the Ukraine and oddly, the UK, or by annulling elections altogether as did happen in Venezuela and recently in Romania. Thus, those protesting the removal of an ‘elected’ leader in Maduro are both misinformed or disingenuous.

At the end of it all, it really doesn’t matter what paid protestors and ideological NPC’s think; it’s more important to see what Venezuelans think and right now, there is an air of celebration and relief that the nation will finally emerge from their socialist hell.

Ironically, even as Venezuela appears to be emerging from this tyrannical state, the siren song of control and oppression is rising among nations once thought of as bastions of freedom, notably the commonwealth nations and much of western Europe. No wonder they’re protesting the US action.  If they could only delete the anti-state actors domestically, that would be a real victory.

There’s an old saw that says “people get the government that they deserve”. The reason that old saws reflect wisdoms is that they are proven to be correct again and again through time. This is to say that while times change, people and the predictability of human nature does not.  In our current modern era, it’s conspicuously evident that a large contingent of heretofore ‘free and democratic’ states are experiencing situations which are anything but free and democratic.

If you observe the nations where the populace is most strongly at odds with government policies, it happens to be in the nations which were once most revered for their attitudes towards personal rights and freedoms. This includes France, The United Kingdom and Canada which have all devolved into states which oddly resemble those totalitarian regimes that they notionally abhor.  They resemble Orwellian states where freedoms are vaunted but not really allowed.

One may argue that all of these governments were democratically elected and thus, must represent the collective will of their people. This would be a specious argument since in the majority of cases, the selection of political parties is usually restricted to either a bad choice, or a worse one. As discussed in a previous commentary, the choice of political parties is really created by a very small contingent of political operatives.  Thus, the choices are for the people to be democratically oppressed by villain party A or by incompetent party B.

Recently in Canada for example, there were at least 2 representatives of the opposition party not in power who crossed the floor to side with the party that is presently in power.  This was probably not how the democratic process was designed to work.  Thus, if you had cast your vote to have someone represent your views, you’re out of luck.  Welcome to the Uniparty. We shall see if this finally engenders real outrage in a docile Canadian public.

But how do politicians push policies that are so out of sync with the wishes of their constituents?  We can all guess of course.  The usual influence of money and power are probably always at the root, that’s Occam’s Razor.  But no one votes to have their lives oppressed by excessive taxation, by restriction of their movements and speech and by curtailment of their activities.  I’m pretty sure no one votes to have their online activities monitored under threat of jail, for removal of long term property rights, for wanton taxation and for cancellation of legal protests.  Unless of course you’re a New Yorker.  Say what you want about their new Mayor Mamdani, but he was at least explicit on what his agenda and platform. He may be misguided, but he is not a liar.  He got the people to believe him.  Thus, the people got what they wanted; or deserved.

In the case of the other nations mentioned above, it’s pretty certain that no one ran on the platforms that they’re trying to enforce today. Politicians learn pretty quickly what works and what works is that you pander to soft sensibilities, promise everyone a chicken in every pot and then instead give them an old shoe once elected.  Thus is perpetuated the age-old game of bait and switch.  They promise to rid your home of pests, which sounds good, but then they kill your pets too,

Recently, nations with lesser traditions of ‘democracy’ have moved en masse against their oppressive overlords, with great effect.  We saw this in Nepal, Madagascar, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Peru and now recently in Bulgaria. The fact that this hasn’t been replicated in the West is because of their traditions of lawful conduct.  Of course, the goalposts of ‘lawful conduct’ are moved all the time by Western governments, thus it may be just a matter of time.

The idea of democracy was that people in given society were to be given a voice in how the underlying society would be run. Thus, people who had a long term stake in a society would have people represent their views.  Somehow, this model has perversely turned the other way with elected people enacting programs directly at odds with their own constituents. This can be remedied if the populace decides that it must.  As is the case with any task that you hire someone to do, politicians must be made to explicitly state their goals and strategies.  ANY contradiction of these goals MUST be grounds for removal from office, not by the end of the term, but immediately. The people themselves must DEMAND this.  They cannot expect things to just work out.   Otherwise, they really do get the government they deserve.