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Our thanks to Telesur for the above linked video. This is the famous "peaceful opposition" the msm keep telling us about.
Below we present an article from Consortium News that fills in some of the blanks left by the US msm, which has long reduced itself to a propaganda machine. Commentary and [bracketed notes] are by Vince Dhimos. You know, I can’t help but think of how Trump, during his campaign, kept complaining about “fake news.” This resonated with his supporters because it was mostly true. What most of his faithful fail to notice is that the pronouncement of all political movements – including the Trump movement – are predominantly propaganda, replete with fake news. The most dangerous narrative of Trump’s campaign was that the Iranians are the enemy (because it is part of the latest psychological warfare in preparation for real war, on behalf of Saudi and Israel). Nothing could be more false. The Iranian fighters like Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hezbollah and other volunteers did the job that the US was only pretending to do when it declared the phony War on Terror. Without these brave men’s contribution, it is not clear whether Syria and Russia could have ever have taken out ISIS to the extent that they have. It is a grievous injustice that the US political class and msm have for decades upheld and glorified the brutal and intolerant Saudis who supplied terrorists, training, arms and pay checks to terror while knifing the Iranians in the back. The latest Venezuela narrative blaming Maduro not only for his own failings but also for the poverty added by decades of anti-Venezuela US measures is another example of fake news that is issued and supported by both Trump and the establishment – both sides, mind you – even as his supporters insist that he is “anti-Establishment.” That is the Big Lie of our time. His regime change and invasion plans for Venezuela (not to mention his Tomahawk attacks on Syria for alleged but unproved “chemical attacks”) put him squarely in the ranks of GW Bush, Clinton and Obama. Can we stop pretending he is on the other team? There is only one team in US politics and that is the war/regime change team led by the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Saudi, Israel, the arms maker lobbies and the bankers. The evidence that Guaidó and his henchmen in the “opposition” are behind the recent blackouts in Venezuela that threaten Maduro’s presidency is overwhelming. 1. In 2010, CANVAS, the US-funded NGO that trained Guaidó, distributed a memo recommending taking advantage of power outages as a way to stir up discontent aimed at overthrowing the president. They stopped short of endorsing sabotage but the hint was understood. 2. Incredibly, Juan Guaidó has made a virtual public confession of his masterminding the recent blackouts in Venezuela. https://www.globalresearch.ca/juan-guaido-confesses-being-behind-the-sabotage-of-venezuelas-electric-system/5673104 3. Back in 2002, during the attempt to overthrow Chavez, opposition supporters besieged the Cuban embassy in Venezuela. Translation of quote from this Wikipedia entry: Some of the actions carried out against the embassy were destruction of diplomatic personnel’s autos and shut-off of the electricity and water supplies. (Algunas de las acciones tomadas contra la embajada fueron la destrucción de vehículos del personal diplomático y el cese del suministro de los servicios de electricidad y de agua.) 4. As suggested in item 3 above, the opposition was violent, not peaceful. Here is a video of the 2014 Guarimba violence by the opposition (the msm call this “peaceful” protest). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB0yF61HFYY Text box from the above video: Leopoldo López, the brains behind the death and injuries in Caracas. The State no longer has any excuses [not] to punish this murderer. Leopoldo is a close associate of Juan Guaidó within the party Voluntad Popular (People’s Will). He urged “radicalize the opposition.” The opposition is extremely violent but the US press calls it “peaceful.” Although Lopez was indeed behind the death and violence of the guarimbas, he never went to prison to serve his sentence. He has been under house arrest instead. This lenience on the part of the Maduro government gives the lie to the msm narrative that Maduro runs a “brutal regime.” By far the bulk of the violence in the protests has been due to the thugs loyal to Lopez and Guaido. 5. Evidence of US involvement in the sabotage is overt and undisguised: QUOTE FROM TEXT BELOW [highlighting is mine]: In a tweet on March 8, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo framed the electricity outage as a pivotal stage in U.S. plans for regime change: “The power outage and the devastation hurting ordinary Venezuelans is not because of the USA. It’s not because of Colombia. It’s not Ecuador or Brazil, Europe or anywhere else. Power shortages and starvation are the result of the Maduro regime’s incompetence.” At noon on March 7, during a hearing on Venezuela at the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, Sen. Marco Rubio explicitly called for the U.S. to stir “widespread unrest,” declaring that it “needs to happen” in order to achieve regime change. “Venezuela is going to enter a period of suffering no nation in our hemisphere has confronted in modern history,” Rubio proclaimed. [Now how would he know about future suffering unless it was planned in coordination with US agents like Rubio? This is in keeping with Trump’s 2017 Borges-Trump embargo, which prevented ordinary Venezuelans from obtaining medicine and foods so that Maduro could then be blamed. It is truly diabolical. https://www.hispantv.com/noticias/venezuela/393053/maduro-bloqueo-eeuu-medicinas-alimentos-crisis-economica] Around 5 p.m. [that same day! Coincidence? Really?], the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a total and still unexplained collapse. Residents of Caracas and throughout Venezuela were immediately plunged into darkness. At 5:18 p.m., a clearly excited Rubio took to Twitter to announce the blackout [earlier that day, he had called for this to happen. Coincidence?] and claim that “backup generators have failed.” It was unclear how Rubio had obtained such specific information so soon after the outage occurred. According to Jorge Rodriguez, the communications minister of Venezuela, local authorities did not know if backup generators had failed at the time of Rubio’s tweet. [Now tell me this was NOT sabotage, and the Deep State was not in on it] Back in Caracas, Guaidó immediately set out to exploit the situation, just as his CANVAS trainers had advised over eight years before. Taking to Twitter just over an hour after Rubio, Guaidó declared, “the light will return when the usurpation [of Maduro] ends.” Like Pompeo, the self-declared president framed the blackouts as part of a regime change strategy, not an accident or error. Finally, significantly, the ringleaders of the opposition, including Guaidó and Lopez, were rich kids from the elite districts of Caracas who studied at high-ranking US universities. Their naming their party "Popular Will" is a cynical sham. They have never walked in the shoes of the poor who support Maduro. Their party should be called Oligarchs' Will. END QUOTE The below March 2019 article from Consortium News adds detail. BEGIN ARTICLE US Regime Change Blueprint Proposed Venezuelan Electricity Blackouts as ‘Watershed Event’ March 12, 2019 The group that trained Juan Guaidó and his allies laid out plans for galvanizing public unrest in a 2010 memo, Max Blumenthal reports for Grayzone. By Max Blumenthal Grayzone A September 2010 memo by a U.S.-funded soft power organization that helped train Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó and his allies identifies the potential collapse of the country’s electrical sector as “a watershed event” that “would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate.” The memo has special relevance today as Guaidó moves to exploit nationwide blackouts caused by a major failure at the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant at Guri dam – a crisis that Venezuela’s government blames on U.S. sabotage. It was authored by Srdja Popovic of the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), a Belgrade-based “democracy promotion” organization funded by the U.S. that has trained thousands of U.S.-aligned youth activists in countries where the West seeks regime change. This group reportedly hosted Guaidó and the key leaders of his Popular Will party for a series of training sessions, fashioning them into a “Generation 2007” determined to foment resistance to then-President Hugo Chavez and sabotage his plans to implement “21st century socialism” in Venezuela. In the 2010 memo, published by WikiLeaks, CANVAS’s Popovic declared, “A key to Chavez’s current weakness is the decline in the electricity sector.” Popovic explicitly identified the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant as a friction point, emphasizing that “water levels at the Guri dam are dropping, and Chavez has been unable to reduce consumption sufficiently to compensate for the deteriorating industry.” Speculating on a “grave possibility that some 70 percent of the country’s electricity grid could go dark as soon as April 2010,” the CANVAS leader stated that “an opposition group would be best served to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez and towards their needs.” Flash forward to March 2019, and the scenario outlined by Popovic is playing out almost exactly as he had imagined. On March 7, just days after Guaidó return from Colombia, where he participated in the failed and demonstrably violent Feb. 23 attempt to ram a shipment of U.S. aid across the Venezuelan border, the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a major and still unexplained collapse. Days later, electricity remains sporadic across the country. Meanwhile, Guaidó has done everything he can “to take advantage of the situation and spin it” against President Nicolas Maduro – just as his allies were urged to do over eight years before by CANVAS. Rubio Vows ‘Period of Suffering’ Venezuela has placed the blame squarely on Washington, accusing it of sabotage through a cyber-attack on its electrical infrastructure. Key players in the U.S.-directed coup attempt have done little to dispel the accusation. In a tweet on March 8, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo framed the electricity outage as a pivotal stage in U.S. plans for regime change: “The power outage and the devastation hurting ordinary Venezuelans is not because of the USA. It’s not because of Colombia. It’s not Ecuador or Brazil, Europe or anywhere else. Power shortages and starvation are the result of the Maduro regime’s incompetence.” At noon on March 7, during a hearing on Venezuela at the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, Sen. Marco Rubio explicitly called for the U.S. to stir “widespread unrest,” declaring that it “needs to happen” in order to achieve regime change. “Venezuela is going to enter a period of suffering no nation in our hemisphere has confronted in modern history,” Rubio proclaimed. Around 5 p.m. [that same day!], the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a total and still unexplained collapse. Residents of Caracas and throughout Venezuela were immediately plunged into darkness. At 5:18 p.m., a clearly excited Rubio took to Twitter to announce the blackout and claim that “backup generators have failed.” It was unclear how Rubio had obtained such specific information so soon after the outage occurred. According to Jorge Rodriguez, the communications minister of Venezuela, local authorities did not know if backup generators had failed at the time of Rubio’s tweet. [Now tell me this was NOT sabotage, and the Deep State was in on it] Back in Caracas, Guaidó immediately set out to exploit the situation, just as his CANVAS trainers had advised over eight years before. Taking to Twitter just over an hour after Rubio, Guaidó declared, “the light will return when the usurpation [of Maduro] ends.” Like Pompeo, the self-declared president framed the blackouts as part of a regime change strategy, not an accident or error. Two days later, Guaidó was at the center of an opposition rally he convened in affluent eastern Caracas, bellowing into a megaphone: “Article 187 when the time comes. We need to be in the streets, mobilized. It depends on us, not on anybody else.” Article 187 establishes the right of the National Assembly “to authorize the use of Venezuelan military missions abroad or foreign in the country.” [Ok, Article 187 says foreign military missions can be authorized in Venezuela, and Guaidó et al. invoke this article to justify US interference, but when it’s Russians the US msm screams it is unconstitutional! You can’t have it both ways.] Upon his mention of the constitutional article, Guaidó’s supporters responded, “Intervention! Intervention!” Exploiting Crisis As Dan Cohen and I reported here at the Grayzone, Guaidó’s rise to prominence – and the coup plot that he has been appointed to oversee – is the product of a decade-long project overseen by the Belgrade-based CANVAS outfit. CANVAS is a spinoff of Otpor, a Serbian protest group founded by Srdja Popovic in 1998 at the University of Belgrade. Otpor, which means “resistance” in Serbian, was the student group that worked alongside U.S. soft power organizations to mobilize the protests that eventually toppled the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. CANVAS has been funded largely through the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cut-out that functions as the U.S. government’s main arm of promoting regime change. According to leaked internal emails from Stratfor, an intelligence firm known as the “shadow CIA,” CANVAS “may have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle.” [Read about the CIA-based founding of NED at William Blum's blog.] A leaked email from a Stratfor staffer noted that after they ousted Milosevic, “the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS… or in other words an ‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions. They are still hooked into U.S. funding and basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic governments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).” Stratfor subsequently revealed that CANVAS “turned its attention to Venezuela” in 2005, after training opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime change operations across Eastern Europe. In September 2010, as Venezuela headed for a parliamentary election, CANVAS produced a series of memos outlining the plans they had hatched with “non-formal actors” like Guaidó and his cadre of student activists to bring down Chavez. “This is the first opportunity for the opposition to get back into a position of power,” Popovic wrote at the time. In his memo on electricity outages, Popovic highlighted the importance of the Venezuelan military in achieving regime change. “Alliances with the military could be critical because in such a situation of massive public unrest and rejection of the presidency,” the CANVAS founder wrote, “malcontent sectors of the military will likely decide to intervene, but only if they believe they have sufficient support.” While the scenario Popovic envisioned failed to materialize in 2010, it perfectly describes the situation gripping Venezuela today as an opposition leader cultivated by CANVAS seeks to spin the crisis against Maduro while calling on the military to break ranks. Since the Grayzone exposed the deep ties between CANVAS and Guaidó’s Popular Will party, Popovic has attempted to publicly distance himself from his record of training Venezuela’s opposition. Today, however, Popovic’s 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages reads like a blueprint for the strategy that Guaidó and his patrons in Washington have actively implemented. Whether or not the blackout is the result of external sabotage, it represents the “watershed event” that CANVAS has prepared its Venezuelan cadres for. Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling “Republican Gomorrah,” “Goliath,” “The Fifty One Day War” and “The Management of Savagery,” which will be published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including “Killing Gaza” and “Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie.” Blumenthal founded the Grayzone Project in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions. END ARTICLE Relevant: https://it-tvs.com/tv/why-the-cia-won%E2%80%99t-give-up-on-venezuela-interview-with-eva-golinger-v9AcrvknLEU.html
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