"The
smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit
the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate
within that spectrum." – Noam Chomsky
By
Manmeet Sahni
Part
4 - Fractured Opposition
In
December 2017, pro-opposition think tank Atlantic Council received
US$1million from the U.S. State Department to work with Venezuela's
"fractured opposition."
According
to the Miami Herald, the funds will help finance a year-long project
to "draw more international attention to the crisis, show the
public what Venezuela could look like under new leadership, and
provide the opposition and other stakeholders the tools needed to
work more cohesively together."
Jason
Marczak, director of the Atlantic Council's Adrienne Arsht Latin
America Center, told the Miami Herald: "What we're trying to
do is address the fractures within the opposition. That is then
helpful for the opposition's overall stance because what the
government wants is a divided opposition."
But
according to Alternet journalist Max Blumenthal, the Atlantic Council
is "a pro-regime-change think tank that is funded by Western
governments and their allies." It's also financed in part by
"Viktor Pinchuk, Ukrainian nationalist and longtime
friend/donor of the Clintons."
According
to Venezuelanalysis.com, this same council has pushed for "arming
Salafist militant groups against the Bashar Al-Assad regime in Syria
and lobbied for more militaristic policies toward Russia. In
Venezuela, the organization is intimately linked to the pro-United
States opposition."
Western
media often question the motives of non-traditional media trying to
portray Venezuela without bias, but rarely do they question the
motives of those opposing the Latin American nation.
For
instance, in February this year, the Wall Street Journal published a
story headlined 'Venezuela's Misery Fuels Migration on Epic Scale.'
The story quotes Tomas Paez, described as an immigration expert at
Venezuela's Central University, as saying: "Nearly 3 million
Venezuelans – a tenth of the population – have left the oil-rich
country over the past two decades of leftist rule. Almost half that
number – some 1.2 million people – have gone in the past two
years."
Venezuelanalysis.com
notes that in 2002 Paez signed his name to a quarter-page ad in the
Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional, welcoming Pedro Carmona – then
head of Venezuela's largest business federation – as the country's
new president after a U.S.-backed military coup briefly ousted
Chavez.
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