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Monday, 17 July 2006 · 4 min · Paul Smith
Just watched an excellent video documentary "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" on the coup in Venezuela in 2002 made by a team of Irish journalists who luckily were there throughout the events. You can watch it on Google Video.
Although it has had some broadcasts around the world (the BBC for example) it has been subject to a massive campaign of suppression. Violent threats being made towards the Venezuelan Amnesty International branch if the Amnesty International Film Festival in Vancouver for example decided to show it and numerous other attempts to cover it up.
I must say this is really a video version of Ten Days That Shook the World, an excellent book written by an American journalist who was in Russia at the time of the October Revolution who covered the revolution from an honest and straight forward position. Likewise this is nothing short of an excellent video of the events up until the and including coup d'état itself, and then the response of the people who mobilised to crush the American backed coup and restored the democratic government of Venezuela.
It also brilliantly shows how hypocritical the capitalists and their lackeys are. 3 years of Chavez rule and the security services never fired into demonstrators; within 3 hours of the new government being formed and the old democratic institutions being dissolved, supporters of the revolution were being shot at by security forces.
Yet the American administration and the capitalists within Venezuela itself were announcing the end of a regime with no support who oppressed the masses, and that they welcomed the new democratic government!
How wrong they were when the "unpopular" Chavez was brought back into power by the actions of the people themselves.
Of course when a capitalist or a lackey uses the term "democratic" he means nothing less than a bourgeois-democracy. The democracy of the capitalists and the capitalists alone, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and none for the people.
It also brilliantly shows how important the media is in any event. And shows Chavez' weakness at allowing such open attempts at overthrowing him violently which the privately owned stations advocate every single day. In our "democracies" of the west, TV stations that call for the overthrow of Bush or Blair would be shut down. Chavez needs to do the same, because next time it could be game over for good. Which would set back the revolution in Latin America another generation. He also needs to break the power of the capitalists, he needs a massive program of nationalisation and quickly. The bourgeoisie wield far too much power against the democratic will of the people.
They tried assassination, they succeeded in a coup and were promptly defeated, so what next? The American puppet state of Columbia will probably invade.
The Venezuelan people must be armed with the media, for them to control themselves and they must be armed with weapons, so they can decide what they fight for. Anything less puts the revolution in jeopardy.
What did Chavez do after being restored to power? Ask the people for calm. He missed a chance to mobilise the people to smash the capitalists in Venezuela for good, he also allowed the coup leaders to escape to the USA, Lenin did very similar things allowing these kind of terrorists out of jail on their "honour", what did the Kulaks do in Russia? Go to the Ukraine and burn the crops. Chavez cannot allow these people to escape abroad to build support for the opposition. These people have shown their bloodthirsty side since the first workers government in history - the Paris Commune - where they slaughtered huge swaths of the population of Paris in retaliation. These sort of people must be imprisoned, because they'll be back and they'll have no objections not only of throwing you in prison but of massacring hundreds of thousands of people, like they have done time and time again when their privileges are being threatened.
The Venezuelan revolution should have your total support, because it is right. As a Marxist this of course doesn't mean uncritical support, Marxists are highly critical of Chavez, we have seen revolutions of this nature smashed many times in the past, the economic power of the capitalists must be taken from them, Chavez has launched some programs of nationalisation; with nothing short of massive success but this is not enough, all major industries and the media must be under control of the people themselves.
Long live the revolution.
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