Venezuela … Masters of War

3 Aug

Come you masters of war/You that build all the guns/You that build the death planes/You that build all the bombs. Bob Dylan, 1962

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That the emerging narrative on Venezuela’s election result is too convenient – given America’s ghastly record on Latin America – to be credible? That even if claims of vote rigging do have an atom of substance, ‘punishing’ the nation’s most vulnerable citizens through sanctions of the kind that killed half a million Iraqi children – implemented by a nation that’s just cut another arms deal with those saints in Riyadh – is like slicing off a man’s hand to cure his warts? Are you thinking along these lines but don’t have the facts to counter so manifestly Washington-serving an account?

Then check out this piece in today’s Off-Guardian.

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This, also today, from Jonathan Cook’s Blog from Nazareth:

I cannot recommend the new documentary Shadow World highly enough. The military-industrial complex has created a global war machine that needs endless feeding. Wars are no longer there to be won, but to be drawn out indefinitely, enriching a tiny elite with gargantuan and ever-expanding profits …

One arms dealer calmly points out, with terrifying logic, that weapons have sell-by dates just like supermarket food. They are either used or wasted. Most often they are used. Either way, the larder must be replenished with new weapons.

The documentary explores the over-arching aims of the war industry, joining the dots between Iraq, Iran, Syria, Gaza and elsewhere.

 

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