https://snyder.substack.com/p/maduro-in-minneapolis
"The shadow of Maduro hangs over Minneapolis.
On January 3rd, the American military extracted the murderous dictator Nicolás
Maduro from Caracas. On January 7th, ICE killed a mother in her car in
Minnesota. These are two glimpses of a larger story about death and lies.
The abduction of Maduro was not about naming his crimes, but about ignoring
them. The worst thing that Maduro did is just what Trump is beginning to do:
killing civilians and blaming them for their own deaths. After Minneapolis,
Maduro’s lies are being repeated: in American English, by American authorities.
The thousands of extrajudicial killings in Maduro’s Venezuela were carried out
by organized death squads. These actions were described as defensive. The
Maduro regime claimed that the people they murdered were resisting government
authority, and that the men who pulled the trigger had been provoked by those
whom they murdered.
Minneapolis has just witnessed an extrajudicial killing, at the hands of ICE,
which looks more and more like a presidential paramilitary organization. The
action was, horribly, excused by the president, the vice-president, and the
director of homeland security, using the same lies as those told by Maduro’s
Venezuelan regime. The victim was resisting government authority, they said.
The man who pulled the trigger had been provoked, they said. It was not the
killer who was a terrorist. It was the mom who had just dropped off one of her
six-year-old at school.
These individual lies are part of the logic of death squads. A murderer can go
free because the government controls the story. And then the next murder is all
the easier. And suddenly this is normal and people simply disappear.
The members of Maduro’s death squads have no concern about prosecution. In
Venezuela, nothing about this has changed since the extraction of Maduro. All
that has happened is the spread of this practice to the United States. The ICE
agent who shot the mom in the face was spirited away, to be investigated by the
same federal institution, the Department of Justice, that holds Maduro.
And in both cases, it is reasonable to fear, the essential result will be the
same. The real crimes will be ignored, in the service of building up a fake
narrative that enables more real crimes. Maduro used to claim that his
opponents were part of a plot led by Trump. Now Trump can claim that his
opponents are part of a plot led by Maduro.
Maduro, having been excused for his real atrocities, is to be be tried on the
politically useful drug charges. The issue of drugs, like immigration, can be
used to accuse domestic international opponents of being part of an
international conspiracy. Maduro’s own death squads planted drugs on their
victims. We should prepare for something like this on a much grander scale:
everyone who opposes Trump is in league with the “narco-terrorists.”
That is the political sense of the arrest of Maduro. He becomes a fleshy
exhibition in Trump’s current fantasy: that Americans who want freedom and
democracy are somehow part of an international conspiracy that involves drugs
or immigration."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
