You only need to take a brief look at the news to see how the imperialist mindset is still absolutely rife in Britain.
On the one hand we've got Brexiteers telling Ireland that they should quit the European Union and the Euro in order to ally with Brexit Britain, and on the other we've got Tory government ministers confidently asserting that they've got more right to choose who serves as President of Venezuela than the Venezuelan people!
Almost a century after the declaration of the Irish Free State you might have imagined that the British establishment might have figured out that the days of Tory toffs in London telling the Irish what to do are well and truly over, yet somehow this imperialist mindset is still rife.
The BBC Today presenter John Humphrys demonstrated this entitled imperialist mindset when he publicly suggested to an Irish government minister that her country could quit the EU and join the UK!
However this absurd imperialist attitude towards Ireland is far from exclusive to establishment elites in the media and political classes. Just a few months ago literally hundreds of thousands of pro-Brexit Brits signed a petition calling for the pound to be imposed as legal tender in Ireland whether the Irish want it or not.
It's hard to figure out what's more dim-witted, the idea of creating a de facto currency union between the Pound and the Euro, or the idea that the Pound can be forced on the Republic of Ireland by means of petitioning the UK government.
Screw the fact that 92% of Irish people oppose quitting the EU, and that an even higher percentage would oppose a return to London-rule, the establishment mentality seems to be that Brexit would go a lot more smoothly if the Irish would just shut up and do as they're told, and a lot of ordinary Brits share this mindset.
These imperialist attitudes when it comes to our closest neighbours are shocking enough, but when it comes to Venezuela it's not just insulting Brextremist fantasies of renewed British dominion, deliberate interference is actual government policy.
When the British foreign minister Jeremy Hunt feels empowered to recognise coup-plotters who appoint themselves President (despite not having even stood in the 2018 Presidential election at the time) this is a whole other level of arrogance.
What gives the UK more right to determine the President of a foreign nation than the people of that nation themselves?
There is obviously no legitimate answer to this question, but the imperialist mindset always churns out justifications based on how bad the foreign head of state is, and how removal by outsiders is what's best for the people of that country.
We've got two glaring examples of how this imperialist "regime change" mentality has led to unspeakable humanitarian disasters just in recent history.
Yes Saddam Hussain and Muammar Gaddafi were authoritarian rulers, but only a madman could attempt to argue that turning Iraq and Libya into vast lawless terrorism breeding grounds full of ISIS training camps and modern day slave markets was either good for the peoples of those countries, or good for the regions as a whole.
We've been sold this imperialist turd before, yet here we are again with liberals and self-proclaimed centrists clamouring to align themselves with the hard-right to promote the imperialist "regime change" agenda in Venezuela, and desperately smearing anyone who dares raise questions about the dangers of this imperialist mindset as being nothing more than biased stooges for the latest target regime.
If you dared question it in 2003 you were smeared as a Saddam Hussain supporter, and if you question it today you're accused of being a stooge for the corrupt and incompetent Maduro government in Venezuela.
The fact that the very same arguments are being wheeled out to support imperialist "regime change" in Venezuela as were used in Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 proves that this imperialist mindset has never really faded away.
But imperialism is resurgent again now thanks to factors like Brexit, the mainstreaming of extreme-right jingoism, and the destabilisation of Venezuela in a brazen grab for corporate control of the largest proven oil reserves in the world, but it never fully diminishes in the interim periods between the waves of ultranationalist jingoism.
More evidence that this imperialist mindset has never really died down amongst the British can be found in the poll findings that huge swathes of the British public consider the British empire to have been a positive thing!
Yes of course there are some periphery positive legacies like the rail networks that British imperialists left behind, but even then the main purpose of those rail networks was to enable the looting of the invaded countries' natural resources in order to enrich the British establishment class.
The warm glow of nostalgia over rail networks, colonial buildings, and the political remnants of Commonwealth should surely be outweighed by the centuries of political repression, resource theft, racism, slavery, starvation, and outright genocide.
But somehow no! When asked to evaluate the British empire, more Brits will award it an overall positive legacy than admit that the ethical problems might have somewhat outweighed the benefits.
So given the massive proportion of Brits who exalt and glorify the age of empire is it any wonder that our establishment class keep embarrassing Britain on the global stage by pushing the same old imperialist nonsense that Britain has somehow got some special right to inflict our political agendas on our closest neighbours and distant peoples alike?
When they impotently try to boss the Irish around, promote their post-Brexit trade plans as being "Empire 2.0", and push deadly imperialist "regime change" agendas in places like Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Venezuela, they're actually giving a significant swathe of the British public exactly what they want.
If more of us stood up and protested against grotesque displays of ultranationalism and imperialism then perhaps the establishment class would learn to stop doing it, or at least tone it down a few levels.
But as it is now the next unbelievably arrogant insult aimed at our closest European neighbours is always just moments away, and the next Iraq-style humanitarian disaster is always looming just over the horizon.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
First things first, this article is not intended as a defence of the Maduro government in Venezuela. Anyone who attempts to present it in such a way is simply lying in a desperate attempt to discredit what they don't like reading, and don't want other people to read.
Whether you like Nicolás Maduro or not, whether you understand the multitude of internal and external factors that have created the current situation in Venezuela or not, whether you even know anything much at all about the Venezuelan political system or not, there's one thing that's undeniable: Anyone who sides with a guy who appoints himself President of a country without standing in a Presidential election is displaying utter contempt for the concept of democracy.
This is exactly what's happened in Venezuela with Juan Guaidó appointing himself President of the country despite the fact he didn't even stand in the 2018 Presidential election, let alone win it.
Thus Venezuela now has two Presidents. One who won the 2018 Presidential election and the other who didn't even participate in it and simply appointed himself because he didn't like the outcome of the ballot he didn't even contest.
The United States immediately backed this anti-democratic coup and recognised the self-appointed coup-President, just like they rushed in to back the spectacularly failed 2002 coup in the country too.
Back in 2002 the US were the only country to recognise the coup leader Pedro Carmona as President of Venezuela before the coup rapidly collapsed and Hugo Chávez returned to power within two days.
The international reaction to this 2019 coup is very different, with numerous other countries rushing to throw their support behind this unelected self-appointed fake President.
The UK foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced that the human rights defying Tory government support the unelected coup-President.
Another leader to have immediately thrown their support behind the coup-President is the recently elected Brazilian fascist Jair Bolsonaro.
Several other hard-right governments in Latin America have backed the unelected coup-President, including Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Paraguay.
None of this is remotely surprising given Britain's increasingly pathetic subservience to US foreign policy, and the massive historic divide in Latin America between US-backed right wing governments and US-opposed left-wing governments that has existed since the United States began their outrageous campaign of toppling left-leaning Latin American governments in the region decades ago.
What's ostensibly a lot more surprising is the way European liberals and self-declared centrists have been rushing to support the US-backed "regime change" that's happening in Venezuela.
Take the leader of the Liberal grouping in the European Parliament Guy Verhofstadt. His reaction to the coup attempt has been to personally recognise the self-appointed coup-President, lie that he's elected when he didn't even stand in the 2018 Presidential election, and then call for the EU to join Trump and Bolsonaro in recognising this coup leader as the legitimate President!
The very same guy who was furiously attacking Donald Trump as an "autocrat" and "a threat to Europe" back in 2017 is now wilfully sitting on Trump's knee like a yapping imperialist poodle!
Another Liberal to jump on the extraordinary 'this is a good coup' bandwagon is the centrists' darling Emmanuel Macron, who even had the gall to praise the bravery of the anti-government protesters in Venezuela as the French state brutally attacks and systematically represses the gilets jaunes protests against his own government!
Everyone knows that this US-backed coup is all about access to Venezuela's oil reserves (the biggest in the world) because Donald Trump's already publicly declared that US interventionism should be used to steal the natural resources of other nations.
It's extraordinary that so many trendy liberals and self-declared centrists are openly supporting this US imperialist "regime change" agenda while Trump's people openly talk about the prospect of making the already desperate situation even worse by launching military action in Venezuela.
They can't pretend to not understand what the motivation actually is after Trump's spelled it out for them so clearly. And it's especially alarming given the way that these people really should have learned all about the appalling consequences of imperialist "regime change" agendas after the Iraq invasion in 2003, and the destruction of Libya in 2011.
Both of these countries have been reduced to lawless terrorism breeding grounds with humanitarian conditions far worse than they ever were under the authoritarian governments of Hussain and Gadaffi.
Of course it's understandable that European liberals are no great fans of Maduro (neither am I, and I'm a leftie), but what does it tell you about their political principles when they're clamouring to align themselves with Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to support a brazenly anti-democratic coup?
Even if you believe the 2018 Presidential election in Venezuela was rigged, supporting a self-appointed coup-President who didn't even stand in the election is utterly nonsensical from a democratic point of view.
And what does it tell you about their bone-headed refusal to learn the lessons of history when they wilfully ignore the unspeakable levels of death, destruction, and suffering that imperialist "regime change" policies have caused in Iraq and Syria to support the exact same imperialist agenda in Venezuela, only this time orchestrated by an even more unstable, profit-driven, and fanatically right-wing US President than George W. Bush was?
It's beyond question that anyone supporting the self-appointed and unelected fake-President Guaidó is siding with extreme-right ideologues like Trump and Bolsonaro, refusing to learn the lessons of history about the horrific consequences of imperialist "regime change" policies, and displaying their absolute contempt for the concept of democracy.
One of the most extraordinary things is that many of these liberals and centrists pledging support for the Venezuelan coup were the ones crying the loudest when Donald Trump won the US Presidential election, and bitterly decrying the rise of far-right populism when Bolsonaro won the Brazilian Presidential election in October 2018.
But scroll forward just a few months and these same trendy liberals and self-declared centrists are now wilfully stepping in line with the extreme-right demagogues they decried when they won power to actively support the transparently anti-democratic coup they've orchestrated in Venezuela.
This farce in Venezuela is far from the first time that liberals have ended up supporting and enabling extreme-right demagogues. We can delve into history to look at the way the liberal German establishment wilfully handed power the Nazis in 1933 by making Adolf Hitler Chancellor, or we can look to current day Italy to see how the trendy liberal MS5 party have enabled the fascist Lega Nord into power by joining them in a coalition government.
The fact is that given the choice between moving leftwards towards socialism, and rightwards towards fascism, an awful lot of self-declared centrists and trendy liberals will chose the fascist option because they understand that fascism goes hand-in-hand with corporatism meaning that their financial interests will be protected.
As long as corporations and their personal financial interests are protected, a lot of liberals and self-declared centrists are willing to overlook the obvious dangers of enabling the extreme-right into power, or siding with the extreme-right axis when it comes to global politics.
This centrist willingness to overlook the dangers of fascism most often comes from the position of extreme privilege.
Most wealthy, white, westerners know they have the least to fear from fascism (unless they have leftist political sympathies) because it's always the political left, minorities, the vulnerable, and people in the developing world who bear the brunt of the persecution and suffering under extreme-right rule.
Of course people should be able to recognise the thin end of a wedge, and they should be aware of Martin Niemöller's warning about the danger of escalating fascism (see picture), but in reality these coddled liberals and centrists keep making the same mistakes over and again.
Liberals and centrists will have tantrums for a while when fanatical right-wing ideologues like Trump or Bolsonaro are elected because they hate not having things their own way, and because deep in their hearts they know the extreme-right is wrong, but when push comes to shove they repeatedly fall into line and quickly start supporting them.
The gleeful reaction of so many self-declared centrists and trendy liberals to the anti-democratic US-backed imperialist coup in Venezuela is yet another perfect illustration of their outrageous tendency to wilfully align with and support the extreme-right thanks to the shared belief in corporatism.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
An awful lot of politicians tell lies, but very few of them are as brazen about it as the disgraced Liam Fox. In an interview with Sophy Ridge he denied sending a controversial Tweet despite sitting in front of a giant picture of it.
The man
The disgraced Liam Fox was one of the very few people David Cameron ever had to expel from his cabinet. Cameron had an extraordinary tolerance for corruption and ineptitude (how else is it possible to explain his refusal to ever sack total incompetents like George Osborne, Theresa May and Iain Duncan Smith), but even Cameron's lax attitude couldn't save the disgraced Liam Fox from the treasonous mess of his own making.
The disgraced Liam Fox invited his special friend/fake security adviser Adam Werritty to sit in on all kinds of classified meetings, despite the fact that he had no official position and no security clearance.
Somehow the disgraced Liam Fox avoided the jail sentence that an ordinary soldier would have received for wilfully disclosing classified information to their friends, and he even kept his seat in parliament. All he had to do was resign in disgrace, and then pop back as a government minister a few years later.
The controversy
The idea that Britain has no disgraceful 20th Century history to bury is absolutely ridiculous. Here are just a few examples off the top of my head: The use of chemical weapons in Iraq and concentration camps in South Africa; the brutal repression of the Easter Rising in Ireland, the Amritsar massacre in India; the gifting of all of Iran's oilfields to a single private company; the 1943 Bengal Famine (over 1.5 million dead); the ethnic cleansing of Palestine; the brutal repression of the Mau Mau in Kenya; Support for the racist regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa; and the expulsion of the Chagos Islanders.
Of course Britain left many of the ex-colonies with improved ports, roads and rail networks, because they were necessary infrastructure in order carry out the vast scale of resource extraction that the empire was all about, but this infrastructure is hardly adequate compensation for the resource theft and the crimes against humanity listed above.
The backwardsness of it
School children in countries like Germany and Austria are taught about the horrors of Nazism, but British school kids are drip-fed a very sanitised Anglocentric version of history, where the horrors of the British Empire are rarely or never mentioned.
The consequence of this is that only a small minority of Germans and Austrians look back to the Third Reich with fondness and nostalgia, but astounding numbers of British people consider Britain's brutal imperialist history as something to be intensely proud of!
Liam Fox's Tweet was extraordinarily wrong because Britain is actually one of the worst offenders at burying the worst aspects of it's 20th Century history.
The denial
The astoundingly smug look that flashes across the disgraced Liam Fox's face as he says "As a point of clarification, I didn't send out a Tweet" illustrates just how comfortable he is telling lies.
Of course we're all familiar with the fact that lots of politicians tell lies and expect to get away with it, but very few of them have the absolute brazenness to lie to the public in front of a giant screen displaying the evidence that what they're saying is an outright lie.
The conspiracy theory
After denying that he sent out the Tweet the disgraced Liam Fox then outlined a conspiracy theory about how the Guardian were to blame for the controversy for supposedly Tweeting an out of context and incomplete extract from one of his speeches.
The disgraced Liam Fox's own Tweet continued to be displayed behind him as he detailed his bizarre conspiracy theory about how the nasty left-wing press were to blame for the whole thing.
The dupes
Despite getting caught red handed at giving away classified information to his special friend, the disgraced Liam Fox was reelected to his North Somerset parliamentary seat with an increased share of the vote in 2015!
It seems that it doesn't matter how corrupt the individual has proven to be, there are people in certain parts of England who would vote Tory without a second thought.
These are the kinds of people who could look at the disgraced Liam Fox smugly lying about how he never sent out the Tweet while sitting in front of a giant picture of it, and conclude that the Tory is absolutely right to pin the blame on the nasty leftie Guardian for the whole thing.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
