The Last Straw

 There's something for everyone to hate in Trump's new alliance with the authoritarian leadership of Venezuela. Every possible type of idealism, on either side, whether of the right or the left—no matter how debased or misguided—has taken a severe beating from this partnership made in hell. 

Neocons who thought the point of invading Venezuela was to install the democratic opposition candidate have obviously had to swallow their words. Now, they must accept that they got the war they wanted—but not the democracy. 

Liberals like me, who opposed the war, but nonetheless hoped that free elections and the return of exiled democrats might flow from it—as a sort of good side-effect from a nonetheless evil and unjustifiable operation—have been disappointed in turn. The evil war happened—but Trump has made sure that no good came of it either. 

And finally, how about the Chavista socialists in Venezuela? They too had a kind of idealism once upon a time. And if Trump had merely waged war straightforwardly on their government, they could at least still have claimed the mantle of anti-imperialist struggle. If nothing else, they would have been the underdog resisting Yankee colonialism. 

But now—all of that is gone too. Venezuela's supposed socialist leader is calling on her people to accept her new tactical alliance with Trump and start pumping the oil to their mutual profit. 

Much of the far Left appears frankly confused as to what they are supposed to do with this. I saw a contingent of them marching on the streets the other day, waving signs with slogans like "End Sanctions on Venezuela." 

That's a sentiment I would have endorsed not long ago—even when Maduro was still in power. (I don't think there's any evidence that economic sanctions effectively coerce or constrain authoritarian regimes, after all; they mostly just seem to punish the civilian population—as we saw in Iraq in the '90s and in Iran today.)

But it's also a sentiment that appears increasingly irrelevant to what's actually happening in Venezuela. The Rodriguez government appears perfectly willing to partner with Trump, to the tune of a few billion in oil profits. Venezuela's "Chavista" regime looks set on doing business with the Yankee imperialists. 

No doubt Venezuela's authoritarian leaders are aware of the evident contradiction in their policy. The New York Times describes one recent Rodriguez speech in which she conspicuously "whipsawed" between denouncing U.S. aggression in one sentence, and calling for closer ties in the next. 

People are bound to notice the paradox here. And the Venezuelan government's response to this cognitive dissonance appears to be to simply silence any questions on the matter. "Doubt is treason," according to the government's current favorite slogan. 

That may work domestically—where you have a network of police and paramilitaries who can lock up and torture any dissidents who ask impertinent questions—or who merely remind you of your own supposedly most deeply-held convictions of just the day before. 

But what is an authoritarian regime to do with an international audience that they can't directly repress? What is their message to them? What are the regime's leftist sympathizers abroad supposed to make of this? 

Even those who want to toe the party line appear to be struggling. 

In the days after Maduro's abduction, after all, I attended a coalition call with a group of "progressive" activists who organized under the slogan "Free Maduro" and called on attendees to defend Venezuela's socialist government from colonial intervention. 

Some speakers on the call even denounced political prisoners in Venezuela for committing supposed "hate speech" and "crimes against human dignity," as they put it. 

As if being imprisoned and forced to eat pasta laced with feces by your own government wasn't enough—these dissidents apparently also have to deal with braindead leftists in the United States attacking them sight-unseen—because their mere existence happens to be inconvenient for the narrative of a "heroic" Chavista revolution. 

Even at the time of the call, the message was an uneasy fit for the Left—given that anyone following Trump's statements could already see that the U.S. government was throwing its support behind the country's current "socialist" leadership, rather than the democratic opposition in exile. 

But I wonder what the activists on that call would have to say for themselves now that even Rodriguez appears to be admitting publicly that she is trying to make nice with Trump. That's surely a hard pivot to execute, for people who just days earlier were praising Rodriguez as a heroic figure who was resisting U.S. aggression. 

It is all a bit reminiscent of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The frantic efforts of leftists to re-adjust their official line in the face of the constantly shifting loyalties of the Chavista regime remind one of nothing so much as the bald-faced volte face that many Stalinists had to execute overnight in 1939—when the party line flip-flopped, in a matter of hours, from portraying Hitler as the ultimate evil, to suddenly endorsing a tactical alliance with his regime. 

Today's Chavistas are in much the same position. Mere days ago, the United States was the great enemy—the face of capitalist imperialism and exploitation. 

Now, the same people are being asked to swallow a bizarre partnership with that same ultimate adversary for the sake of extracting oil wealth. 

If there was any genuine idealist left in the Chavista camp—anyone who, against all the evidence of economic collapse and authoritarian repression, still believed that Maduro's and Rodriguez's government somehow represented a good faith effort to build socialism and resist Gringo imperialism—now is the time to get over it. 

There is truly nothing salvageable or admirable left in that regime.

If the Chavista government is not even opposed to U.S. interference in the region—then they cannot even claim to be the underdogs in the face of overwhelming U.S. military force. And that was literally the last thing they had going for them. 

I am reminded of Arthur Koestler's thoughts on the Hitler-Stalin pact, as recorded in his memoirs. 

This shameful alliance between the two dictators in 1939 wasn't exactly the "last straw" for him, in terms of his support for the Communist Party. He had actually started to break with the Stalinists a bit earlier, after what he had seen of their cynical betrayal of their allies in Spain and their general totalitarian approach to politics. 

Nevertheless, he says, he retained, for a time, a sense of guilt about his defection—and a certain grudging admiration for the Soviet Union. If nothing else, after all—it was the only and biggest government that seemed to be mounting any kind of serious resistance to fascism. Any leftists in the Popular Front era had to praise at least this aspect of their policy. 

The Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, however, removed even this last prop of the case for the Soviets. Now, they were not only dictatorial and perfidious—they were Hitler's stooges as well. They couldn't even claim in their favor that at least they were against the Nazis. Now, they were the Nazis' pals!

"That was the end," Koestler wrote in his memoirs. "F]rom then onward I no longer cared whether Hitler’s allies called me a counter-revolutionary."

So it should be with our Chavistas today. If anyone was still wavering as to whether to respect and admire their government—and to hope that it might still someday return to some respectable experiment in social democracy—this should settle the argument with finality. 

Truly, the last possible thing that government had going for it was that—if nothing else—it stood against the bullying and strong-arming and resource extraction of the U.S. empire. 

Now, it doesn't even have that. Now, they are Trump's allies. 

And no leftist worth their salt should care whether Trump's allies call them a counter-revolutionary.