Fighting Communism With Socialism Won’t Save Venezuela

Fighting Communism With Socialism Won’t Save Venezuela
 
UPDATE By Cliff Kincaid 
 
All freedom-loving people support the overthrow of the tyrannical socialist Nicolás Maduro regime in Venezuela. But President Trump’s replacement, Venezuelan National Assembly President Juan Guaido, is also a socialist. His Popular Will party is a “progressive” party and a member of the Socialist International.
 
It was President Trump who told the United Nations, “All nations of the world should resist socialism and the misery that it brings to everyone.”
 
Yet, Trump has been convinced by his advisers to intervene on behalf of Guaido, a socialist “alternative” to Maduro who has pledged an amnesty for virtually all officials of the Maduro regime, including its most corrupt bureaucrats and military officials.

Now the State Department reports:

The United States Condemns Detention of Interim President Guaido’s Family Member

02/15/2020 10:39 AM EST
Morgan Ortagus, Department Spokesperson -- 

The United States strongly condemns the detention of Juan Jose Marquez, uncle of interim President Juan Guaido, and demands his immediate release. The preposterous charges that have been put forward further exemplify the increasing desperation of Maduro and his corrupt associates. Manufacturing evidence to justify arbitrary, politically-motivated detentions is a common tool of the illegitimate former Maduro regime. We have seen it used against Roberto Marrero, Juan Requesens, Gilber Caro, and Ismael Leon, who make up a small portion of the over 350 political prisoners in Venezuela today. Such deplorable acts only delay a resolution to the tragic crisis in Venezuela that Maduro and his collaborators insist on perpetuating.

The crisis in Venezuela is what happens when the State Department uses its funding agencies, including USAID, to support “opposition” groups. Rather than promote anti-communist groups which embrace American ideas of limited government and free enterprise, USAID programs subsidize left-wing political figures and movements, often described as “civil society.” The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a federally-funded entity, does the same thing on a much larger scale. It spends more than $150 million a year on “democracy assistance” in foreign countries.
 
President Ronald Reagan started the NED program in 1983 and figured it would maintain an anti-communist bent. But neoconservatives with socialist backgrounds who support globalism and American intervention in foreign countries quickly took charge.
 
The NED’s president, Carl Gershman, who took control in 1984, is a socialist who has been associated with the Young People's Socialist League and Social Democrats, U.S.A., an offshoot of the U.S. Socialist Party. Gershman and his NED seem to have operated on the false but common assumption that communist ideology is dead and that, in the words  of liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, “democratic socialism was the most effective bulwark against totalitarianism.”
 
Trump, a skeptic of the intelligence he gets from the CIA, should demand answers from Mike Pompeo, his Secretary of State. He can’t continue to oppose socialism, as he did in that U.N. speech, if his administration supports a new socialist regime in Venezuela.
​