New Venezuela Sanctions – Are They Really About Human Rights?
New Venezuela Sanctions – Are They Really About Human Rights?
12th March, 2015 - Posted by Derek Poppert -
Last week, the U.S. government slapped Venezuela with new sanctions in the name of human rights and “national security”. An executive order describing the sanctions claims the situation in the country poses an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
To be sure, the claim that Venezuela poses an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States is self-evidently quite absurd. As for human rights, to issue sanctions from the sanctimonious place of being the voice and promoter of human rights across the world is offensive to those who can see both its falsity and the glaring double standard applied.
Indeed, these sanctions in the name of “human rights” come in the face of billions of dollars of continued U.S. military aid and arms sales to repressive and authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain - all of whom hold ghastly records of human rights violations far worse than anything that occurs inside Venezuela, including systematic repression, torture, arbitrary detention and imprisonment, stifling of dissent, lack of basic civil liberties and even, in the case of Saudi Arabia, public floggings and beheadings perpetrated by the government on a regular basis.
The hypocrisy and irony of our foreign policy shouldn’t surprise us anymore; indeed, it’s nothing new – throughout both the Cold War and the “War on Terror” we have consistently supplied friendly (i.e. capitalist and military friendly) but repressive regimes with guns, cash and support while any country remotely resembling an opposition to the neoliberal economic order was punished to the teeth. If you’re a capitalist-friendly dictator either with oil or a strategic area for military bases – and even better yet, both – human rights are but a minor side thought, perhaps mentioned and denounced, but rarely made to actually affect policy. If you’re a socialist government working against the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, on the other hand, human rights accusations and ensuing punishments come straight to the fore.
More:
http://www.globalexchange.org/blogs/peopletopeople/2015/03/12/new-venezuela-sanctions-are-they-really-about-human-rights/
