As IF Times

On a long enough time perspective, you would notice that throughout recorded history, very small groups within a given society controlled the vast majority of their populations.  There have always been hierarchies of influence and power and if you were lucky enough to have been born on the right side of this power dynamic, your life was pretty good.  If you were not so lucky, your life was spent under the dictates of those born on the fortunate side of fate.

So that was how life was for centuries.  This changed in the late 1700’s when a group of British men went across the Atlantic Ocean to eventually create an entirely new nation, completely different in structure to their old political system.  This was the genuine, “no kings” movement that occurred 250 years ago.  This was pretty radical because it was the first large scale repudiation of the entitled, hierarchal system of governance in place everywhere throughout history.  When the old colonial masters in Britain demanded that the new colony pay taxes to support the old regime, the upstart colonies banded together and declared, “nah, we’re good, we’ll keep our money here instead”.

This didn’t sit well with the British colonial empire and thus a war was declared to rein in the upstart colonies.  In the aftermath, a new nation was born, completely separate from the old colonial masters with a distinctly different type of governance.  There truly were no kings and instead a republican form of governance was formed with individuals able to express free will to create laws.

As you’d expect, this rather novel environment of freedom and liberty to choose your own life-path became quite popular and the new American colonies became the desired place for those with ambition and drive.   The United States came to represent the new world of individualism and aspiration as opposed to the old world regimes of collectivism and subjugation.  This new style of government gave rise to the incredible ascent of the United States within only a short time to become the most powerful and influential nation in the world, both economically and socially.   To paraphrase an old cliché, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  In the new United States, there were multitudes of strong links unleashed to make a very strong larger chain.  In the old colonial nations, the strength of the chain was dictated by the monarchs at the top. Thus, nations could only progress as much as the rulers permitted.

To this day, even in the 21^st century, many of the old imperial empires cling to the traditions of Kings and Queens presiding over their subjects.  Parenthetically, this dynamic also exists in the Church, but that’s another discussion. Granted, most of these roles are ceremonial, but nonetheless, such people still occupy positions of wealth and prestige within their nations.  However, most of these nations have adopted the democratic model of the United States so that their government leaders are nominally elected by their citizens.  Still, the transition hasn’t been as robust as in America because of long national traditions and sensibilities.  Whereas the US started from a clean slate, the old imperial powers still wrestled with their legacy influences. For example, the acceptance of collectivism as a mindset is quite strong on most European countries even as they pretend to admire individualism.

In the 1960’s, a few European nations, notably West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands mused that a federation of states would be more effective in countering the continued strength and influence of the United States.  In essence, they began to create the idea of the United States of Europe, or as it was finally called, the European Union, complete with a common currency and laws amongst all members.

It seemed like a great idea….at the time.

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.