Prone To Failure: Proclaiming class war without a large force of armed citizens at your back is a very dangerous thing to do. Just ask Juan Guaido, Venezuela’s CIA-trained “Interim President”, how much luck he’s having overthrowing his country’s democratically-elected president without the support of either the Police or the Armed Forces.
POLICE NUMBERS just topped 13,000. Forty years ago there
were fewer than half that number – considerably fewer. Astonishingly, we now
have almost as many cops as we do soldiers. At last count the New Zealand
Defence Force numbered 14,921. Put those numbers together and the state’s
coercive potential turns out to be not far shy of 30,000 highly-trained and
fearsomely-equipped men and women. Those who allow expressions like
“revolution” and “class war” to trip so merrily off their tongues should be
required to explain where their 30,000 highly-trained and fearsomely-equipped
men and women are currently hiding – just waiting for the word.
Proclaiming class war without a large force of armed
citizens at your back is a very dangerous thing to do. Just ask Juan Guaido,
Venezuela’s CIA-trained “Interim President”, how much luck he’s having
overthrowing his country’s democratically-elected president without the support
of either the Police or the Armed Forces.
Guaido can call the Venezuelan middle-class on to the
streets and encourage his far-right student supporters to throw stones at the riot
cops, but so long as President Maduro’s police officers and soldiers remain
loyal, Guaido’s coup d’état will
remain a busted flush. In the aftermath of this past weekend’s concerted
campaign to force open Venezuela’s borders with Columbia and Brazil, Guaido’s
only real hope of success lies in the USA and its reactionary allies lending
him some armed men and women of their own.
Holding back all that stock-piled US “aid” and preventing
all those Venezuelan emigres from
flooding into the country is, therefore, crucial to the survival of Maduro’s Chavista regime. If the borders are
forced open, then the way will be clear for the US equivalent of Russia’s
“little green men” to slip across and start doing to Venezuela what Vladimir
Putin’s soldiers-in-mufti (fighting alongside local rebel groups) did in Crimea
and Eastern Ukraine. If you’ve been wondering why Maduro is going to such
lengths to prevent the breaching of his country’s borders, then wonder no more.
Not that you’ll hear the scores of journalists dispatched to
cover the “liberation” of Venezuela from its socialist “dictator” talk about
any of this. There has, to date, been almost no coverage of the fact that
neither the Red Cross nor the United Nations’ relief agencies will have a bar
of Guaido’s “humanitarian” effort. Again and again these organisations have
attempted to alert the Western media to the fact that by so thoroughly
politicising the delivery of humanitarian aid, the US and its allies have
betrayed their real (and far from humanitarian) agenda.
Had these journalists been sent to cover the Trojan War,
they’d have loudly insisted that the citizens of Troy were morally obliged to
haul the departing Greeks’ giant wooden horse inside the city walls.
Twenty-four hours later, as Troy’s temples burned, and its inhabitants were put
to the sword, these same journalists would invite the watching world to join
them in celebrating the “restoration of Trojan democracy”.
Beware of Americans bearing gifts.
The story is very similar with France’s Gillets Jaune. In spite of weeks of at times violent confrontations
with the French authorities, and thousands of arrests, the “Yellow Vests” are
no closer to their goal of evicting President Emmanuel Macron from the Élysée
Palace. Notwithstanding their profound distaste for the job they’ve been given,
the French Police continue to obey the brutal orders of their political
masters.
A revolution without arms does not remain a revolution for
very long. Just ask the unfortunate Chileans who fell under the killer blows of
General Augusto Pinochet in 1973. They may have elected Salvador Allende, a
self-described Marxist, as their President. Their Popular Unity Coalition may
have won election after election. But, as a democratic government, they were
obliged to persuade the unconvinced
half of the Chilean electorate that the revolutionary changes the Left was seeking
were worthy of their support. Not to simply impose them regardless. This they
did not do.
As Ariel Dorfman, a leading left-wing intellectual of the
tumultuous Allende years, later recalled in his bitter-sweet autobiography, Heading South, Looking North:
“It was difficult, it would take years to understand that
what was so exhilarating to us was menacing to those who felt excluded from our
vision of paradise. We evaporated them from meaning, we imagined them away in
the future, we offered them no alternative but to join us in our pilgrimage or
disappear forever, and that vision fuelled, I believe, the primal fear of the
men and women who opposed us … [T]he people we called momios, mummies, because they were so conservative, prehistoric,
bygone, passé … [W]e ended up including in that definition millions of Chileans
who … should have been with us on our journey to the new land and who, instead,
came to fear for their safety and their future.”
Our own progressive coalition government could benefit
hugely from reading Dorfman’s memoir. Proposing measures that cause a large
number of voters “to fear for their safety and their future” is never a wise
course of political action. And those who urge the government to simply ignore
and/or roll over the top of the “greedy fucks” who raise objections to its
policies should be required to answer the question which veteran left-wing
organiser, Matt McCarten, always asks of those demanding revolution and class
war:
“How big is your army?”
To be followed immediately by: “And will it defend your revolutionary
cause with the ferocity of 13,000 police officers and 14,921 members of the New
Zealand Defence Force fighting to protect the status-quo?
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 26 February 2019.
