Sometimes it is educative and healing to refresh our historical memory, to reflect about the thorny roads that we have left behind us, and to revive the dangerous rivers that we have crossed already. As such a theoretical spotlight can brighten our current daily, innovative praxis, can illuminate the past, obscure pot-holes of repetitive, ideological, reformist practices. Definitely, such evergreen trans-historic consciousness paves the revolutionary path towards future, accessible, mighty cliffs of human endeavor and victory.

As we would remember, on Sunday, May 9, 2004, on Mother's Day, some 100 members of a Colombian Paramilitary Group, in reality paid mercenaries, who sought to overthrow the Democratic Government of President Hugo Chávez, were captured in the center of the country. These mercenaries were receiving training at a farm nearby Caracas, in the municipality of Baruta, governed by the infamous, now re-elected, "putschist mayor" Radonsky; and some of the mercenaries explained, that they were being trained with the objective to attack Venezuelan military bases and to realize a coup d'etat against the government of Hugo Chávez Frías.

At the same time, we would recollect that a few days before, Giandomenico Pulitti, the government party's candidate for Mayor of Tovar, one of the municipalities of Mérida State, with excellent chances to win the coming elections, was brutally assassinated by a still unknown mercenary. And a few days before this tragedy, when the then US presidential candidate John Kerry was asked by reporter Jorge Ramos whether Venezuela's President was a dictator or not, he responded:

"Chavez is fast on the road of becoming exactly that. He is breaking the rules of democracy. I think it is very important for him to allow that referendum to take place and for this administration and others to put more visibility on what is happening so we can hold him accountable to international standards of behavior. Democracy is at risk."

Already on May 10, 2004, within the context of the real, true. current international events, we have warned that "The Next Phase of the Armed Bolivarian Revolution" has begun already. I wrote:

"However, now the national and international reaction is playing its final card: assassinations of public figures, civil war, foreign intervention. This simply means, seen from the strategy of Washington, that the current Venezuelan situation is being 'Vietnamized', 'Colombianized', "Afghanistanized" and "Iraqicized". One period of the Bolivarian Revolution, its pacific resistance, is terminating, and another one is setting in: violent self-defence, that is being ushered in by its manifold fascist and racist opponents.

"Like in Cuba, Vietnam, and now in Iraq, the sovereign, the oppressed people in its totality, has to be armed, or, which is the same, the army has to be popularized, for protracted long term resistance against all-powerful enemies, heavily armed with the most sophisticated technological arms that the world ever has seen."
(See: http://www.trinicenter.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=672)

Now, more than ever the above is true. The phase of invaluable prayers, forgiveness, impunity. dialogues, talks, commissions, conferences, reconciliation and pacifism is definitely ending now. We did not choose this road; capitalism and imperialism constructed it already since the days of the military Conquest. It is a historical fact, we are now facing Dien Bien Phu or Waterloo.

Hence, long ago already, in Venezuela, the attempts to assassinate the president, the capture of the Colombian mercenaries, part and parcel of the US "Colombia Plan", and of other plans to subjugate Latin America, has brought this reality right to the door-step of the Government Palace, of Miraflores.

On August 03, 2004, before the bogus recall referendum against President Chávez Frías, in a commentary of VHeadline, "On the eve of a continental social revolution taking place in Venezuela", we explained the immediate necessity of global solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution:

"Like never before, now, more than ever, international solidarity in deed, in práxis, has become a top priority, not only for Venezuela, but for all countries trampled down by the Washington globalized army boot. Without a drop of OPEC oil, there is nothing in the world that Bush could touch in Venezuela -- currently, Iraq is teaching Washington this bitter lesson. Against Revolutionary Cuba in arms, till today Castro remains as the greatest headache of the White House."

(See: http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=2226)

Surely, we Venezuelans hate "violence" and "terrorism", we are against all forms of human annihilation and genocide, however, surely,

"it is understandable that the game has rules, and that sometimes we have to play the Democratic Christian Russian Roulette. Also, it is logical that we have our own beliefs, interests and world outlook. Nothing 'wrong' with all these ... they are our inalienable human rights to be respected. Our history should be respected."

The problem is that these pacifist, Gandhist, humanist principles

* "do not always correspond to the trans-historic, global realities, with the bitter lessons that we have learned, from Conquest, Colonization, Christianization, Pacification, Militarization and Annihilation."

Before arming ourselves (like in Cuba) with all weapons that are necessary against a fascist mongrel, should we first wait "democratically" till "Big Brother" Bush has fetched all of us, one by one?

Already over 20 massacred peasant leaders, Pulitti, Anderson, and many others, had to believe in it. Now, who knows who is next, Chávez or Baduel? In the end, should we wait for Washington to come and bomb our small towns to rubble and dust like in Fallujah?

On September 21, 2004. in "Venezuela: From Revolution to Emancipation", we explained the real necessity of the existence of true political leaders like Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez Frías:

"Like in the case of Fidel Castro ... or of Lenin ... the 'outcasts' of bourgeois society have elevated their President Chavez to a national and international figure ... to a social reality.

"Since the days of Simon Bolivar, never ever was an individual so socialized ... and never was Venezuelan society so individualized, never was a revolution ... the first one ever to occur in Venezuelan history, so 'transcendentalized,' so near to an emancipatory exodus, out of the closed capitalist system."

http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=22861

Precisely these facts make us nearly invincible, but also exceedingly vulnerable. After Fallujah, and other fascist genocides, by now, we should realize that

"this planet has become a dangerous place to live on: a severe artificially created energy crisis is sending global production to the Moon and Mars; a practically destroyed Nature is driving billions of manual laborers into oblivion; North America's trillions budget deficit and foreign debts drive its domestic population towards Patriot Acts and Homelands; the US$ does not trust in God anymore, but God also does not bless the $ either anymore, the Euro is stealing the international show, is even flirting as a future Petro-Euro; ... "

Yes, Chávez's friendly, international relations with Cuba, Libya, Iran, India and China, with the future "Eurasia", the coming arch-enemy of North American corporate imperialism, are driving Bush and the huge corporations that he represents to genocidal megalomania. Any liberatory measures coming from the OPEC countries, a boycott of the USA or even just changing over to Petro-Euros, would immediately detonate this highly explosive global time-bomb.

Nonetheless, after this retrospective view of current world affairs, we have no choice but to defend wholeheartedly the very existence of the Bolivarian Revolution, the real possibility of emancipation. At the eleventh hour, this Venezuelan tip of the global revolutionary iceberg, is that what fascinates the world that still daydreams about human happiness, humanism, beauty, truth, love, solidarity and the future. Supporting any thing else that comes from Washington is tantamount to reckless hara-kiri, to coward capitulation vis-a-vis World Fascism.
****

fran...@cantv.net

Franz John Tennyson Lee, Ph. D (University of Frankfurt), Author, Professor Titular & Chairholder of Philosophy and Political Science, University of The Andes, Merida (Venezuela) -- http://www.franzjutta.com ; http://www.franz-lee.org ; http://www.geocities.com/juttafranz/publications00001.html

More VHeadline.com commentaries by Franz J.T. Lee

http://www.vheadline.com/lee
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=23626