In the past few years, certain events have mounted serious challenges to what were previously held to be “universal truths” by Western society. The ongoing financial crisis has generated debate on a global scale about the future and viability of capitalism, just as the governments which continue to prop up that capitalist system, in spite of popular revulsion, have contributed to a weakening of the notion that Western representative political systems are the paradigm of democracy.
As hundreds of thousands of European citizens take to the streets to protest against the economic restructuring of their economy and the associated police brutality required to deliver austerity measures at the end of a bayonet, and as bankers and their lobbying institutions continue to crack the whip over national governments to steamroller these reforms through, the hoax of Liberal democracy in the face of the power of the market has been tangibly laid bare for all to see.
Venezuela is perhaps one of the best examples of how the fallout produced from the collision between a crisis of capitalism and a crisis of representative democracy can produce popular revolution, which can seep out of these cracks and begin to create something new. It is this fact which explains why the international media, and at this historical juncture in particular, so manically seeks to discredit the Chavez government and the embryo of an alternative society that it represents in Venezuela.
With the Venezuelan elections now looming, and with Chavez’s approval ratings stubbornly hovering around the 57% mark, it would seem that the international media has stepped up its “disinformation” campaign against the Bolivarian revolution with renewed urgency, producing the kind of biased, baseless and manipulative stories about the “persecution” of opposition presidential candidate, Capriles Radonski, that have been filling the corporate press’ Latin American correspondence pages for weeks. [...]
