By Eric Zuesse
\nStrategic-Culture.org<\/p>\n
On Monday, February 5th, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that the 14 countries of the Lima Group have now been joined (though she didn\u2019t say to what extent) by the EU, and by 8 other individual countries. The Lima Group had actually formed themselves under her direction into this new group on\u00a08 August 2017<\/a>\u00a0in order to overthrow and replace Venezuela\u2019s current President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro.\u00a0She stated<\/a>\u00a0in her February 5th announcement:<\/p>\n \u201cToday, we have been joined by our Lima Group partners, from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Saint Lucia. We have also been joined in our conversations with our partners from other countries, for this Lima Group ministerial meeting. These include Ecuador, the European Union, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n She, along with US President Donald Trump, had, all along, been the actual leaders of this international diplomatic effort, to\u00a0violate the Venezuelan Constitution blatantly<\/a>, so as to perpetrate the coup in Venezuela.<\/p>\n Her active effort to replace Venezuela\u2019s Government began with her formation of the Lima Group, nearly two years ago.<\/p>\n Canada\u2019s\u00a0Ottawa Citizen<\/em>\u00a0headlined on 19 August 2017,\u00a0\u201cChoosing Danger\u201d<\/a>, and their reporter Peter Hum interviewed Canada\u2019s Ambassador to Venezuela, Ben Rowswell, who was then retiring from the post. Rowswell said that Venezuelans who wanted an overthrow of their Government would continue to have the full support of Canada\u2019s Government: \u201c\u2018I think that some of them were sort of anx\u00adious that it (the em\u00adbassy\u2019s support for hu\u00adman rights and democ\u00adracy in Venezuela) might not con\u00adtinue after I left,\u2019 Rowswell said. \u2018I don\u2019t think they have any\u00adthing to worry about be\u00adcause Minister (of For\u00adeign Af\u00adfairs Chrys\u00adtia) Free\u00adland has Venezuela way at the top of her pri\u00ador\u00adity list.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Maybe it wasn\u2019t yet at the top of Trump\u2019s list, but it was at the top of hers. And she and Trump together\u00a0chose whom to replace Venezuela\u2019s President, Nicholas Maduro, by: Juan Guaido<\/a>. Guaido had secretly courted other Latin American leaders for this, just as Freeland had already done, by means of her secretly forming the Lima Group.<\/p>\n On 25 January 2019, the AP bannered\u00a0\u201cAP Exclusive: Anti-Maduro coalition grew from secret talks\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and reported that the man who now claims to be Venezuela\u2019s legitimate President (though he had never even run for that post), Juan Guaido, had secretly visited foreign countries in order to win their blessings for what he was planning:<\/p>\n In mid-December, Guaido quietly traveled to Washington, Colombia and Brazil to brief officials on the opposition\u2019s strategy of mass demonstrations to coincide with Maduro\u2019s expected swearing-in for a second term on Jan. 10 in the face of widespread international condemnation, according to exiled former Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma, an ally.<\/em><\/p>\n Playing a key role behind the scenes was Lima Group member Canada, whose Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland spoke to Guaido\u00a0[9 January 2019]\u00a0the night before Maduro\u2019s swearing-in ceremony\u00a0[on 10 January 2019]\u00a0to offer her government\u2019s support should he confront the socialist leader\u00a0[Maduro], the Canadian official said. Also active was Colombia, which shares a border with Venezuela and has received more than two million migrants fleeing economic chaos, along with Peru and Brazil\u2019s new far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.<\/em><\/p>\n To leave Venezuela, he sneaked across the lawless border with Colombia, so as not to raise suspicions among immigration officials who sometimes harass opposition figures at the airport and bar them from traveling abroad, said a different anti-government leader, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss security arrangements.<\/em><\/p>\n During the last days in office of Canada\u2019s Ambassador to Venezuela Rowswell, US President Donald Trump went public with his overt threat to invade Venezuela. On 11 August 2017, McClatchy\u2019s\u00a0Miami Herald<\/em>\u00a0bannered\u00a0\u201cTrump was making friends in Latin America \u2014 before he raised Venezuela \u2018military option\u2019\u201d<\/a>, and Patricia Mazzei reported that \u201cPresident Donald Trump\u2019s\u00a0unexpected suggestion Friday<\/a>that he might rely on military force to deal with Venezuela\u2019s pressing political crisis was an astonishing statement that strained not only credulity but also the White House\u2019s hard-won new friendships in Latin America.\u201d Even a spokesperson from the Atlantic Council (which is the main PR agency for NATO) was quoted as saying that \u201cUS diplomats, after weeks of carefully building the groundwork for a collective international response, suddenly find their efforts completely undercut by a ridiculously over the top and anachronistic assertion. It makes us look imperialistic and old-time. This is not how the US has behaved in decades!\u201d However, Peru\u2019s Foreign Minister, Ricardo Luna, was just as eager for a coup in Venezuela as were Trump and Freeland.<\/p>\n On 26 October 2017,\u00a0Peru\u2019s Gestion TV reported<\/a>\u00a0that Luna was the co-Chair of the meeting of the Lima Group in Toronto, which Freeland chaired, and that (as translated into English here) \u201cLuna added that the objective of the meeting of the Group of Lima \u2018is to create a propitious situation\u2019 so that the regime of Nicol\u00e1s Maduro \u2018feels obligated to negotiate\u2019 not only an exit to the crisis, \u2018but also an exit to his own regime\u2019.\u201d This gang were going to make Maduro an offer that he couldn\u2019t refuse. So, the Lima Group, which was founded by Luna and by Freeland, was taking the initiative as much and as boldly as Trump was, regardless of what NATO might think about it. The topic of that news-report, and its headline, was \u201cPeru proposes Grupo de Lima to involve the UN to face the Venezuelan crisis.\u201d Four days later, Freeland and Luna met privately at the UN, in New York, with the Secretary General, Antonio Guterres.\u00a0Inner City Press reported<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cThe title of the meeting is \u2018the situation in Venezuela and efforts by regional organizations to resolve the crisis per Chapter VIII of the UN Charter\u2019 [see it\u00a0here<\/a>] and the briefer will be not USG [Under Secretary General] Jeffrey Feltman but his Assistant, ASG [Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs] Miroslav Jenca.\u201d Jeffrey Feltman was the person who, in the secretly recorded 27 January 2014 phone-conversation in which US President Barack Obama\u2019s agent, Victoria Nuland \u2014 planning and overseeing the February 2014 coup that overthrew Ukraine\u2019s democratically elected President \u2014 instructed the US Ambassador to Ukraine, that, after Ukraine\u2019s President is ousted, Arseniy \u201cYats\u201d Yatsenyuk was to be appointed as Ukraine\u2019s \u2018interim\u2019 leader as the new Prime Minister, to replace the President.\u00a0She also said<\/a>: \u201cI talked to Jeff Feltman this morning; he had a new name for the UN guy Robert Serry. \u2026 He\u2019s now gotten both Serry and Ban ki-Moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or Tuesday. That would be great, I think, to help glue this thing, and to have the UN help glue it, and, you know, fuck the EU.\u201d So, the still Under Secretary General of the U.N, Mr. Feltman, is still America\u2019s fixer there, who \u201cglues\u201d whatever the US President orders the UN to do, and his Assistant was filling in for him that day. Therefore, if Trump and Freeland turn out to be as successful as Obama was, then the UN will \u201cglue\u201d the outcome. Chrystia Freeland happens also to be a friend of Victoria Nuland, and a passionate supporter of her coup in Ukraine.<\/p>\n Freeland\u2019s parents were Ukrainian and supported the Nazis during World War II. Cameron Pike headlined about Freeland at The Saker, on 2 February 2019,\u00a0\u201cCanada\u2019s Nazi Problem\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and opened:<\/p>\n In the 1960\u2019s the Polish government, still reeling from their role as the main course of the European \u2018meat-sandwich\u2019 that was the second world war, went on the hunt for Nazi aiders and abettors who destroyed their people. Contrary to what mainstream readers are allowed to know, WWII Nazi and Waffen SS leaders, Goebbels\u2019s publishers and editors (otherwise known as propagandists), willing and outright Nazi collaborators and vicious killers, made their way out of conquered Germany to the United States\u00a0[under CIA direction]\u00a0and to Canada, under MI-6 direction,\u00a0[and Canada]\u00a0took in 2000 of them. Most of them \u2018made their way\u2019 to Ontario and Alberta. One of them even became the President of the University of Alberta. I repeat, one of them EVEN BECAME THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA. \u2026 It was this former Waffen SS soldier-turned University President who created the Ukrainian Studies department at the U of A. \u2026 Michael Chomiak, another of these significant Nazis who were never caught, lived out his days after the war as a farmer in Alberta.\u00a0His Nazi identification documents were uncovered by the Polish Government in the 1960\u2019s<\/a>. \u201cChomiak\u2019s records show he was trained in Vienna for German espionage and propaganda operations, then promoted to run the German press machine for the Galician region of Ukraine and Poland during the 4-year occupation. So high-ranking and active in the Nazi cause was Chomiak that the Polish intelligence services were actively hunting for Chomiak until the 1980s \u2013 without knowing he had fled for safety to an Alberta farm in Canada.\u201d [Editing note: Please see\u00a0link<\/a>\u00a0for John Helmer\u2019s extensive work on uncovering Freeland\u2019s Nazi family history.] Poland was on the hunt but lost the trail because he was well hidden by their WWII \u2018ally\u2019, the British, unbeknownst to my fellow peaceful Canadians.<\/em><\/p>\n Chomiac was Chrystia Freeland\u2019s father. Chrystia Freeland loves him very much and is unshakably loyal to his memory and to his far-right beliefs, which she proudly supports. She also is a close friend of George Soros, who likewise is entirely unembarrassed at, and unapologietic about, his having, as a supposed Christian child in Hungary, helped the Nazis take the property of other Jews, before they were sent off to the concentration camps. He chose to do that \u2014 help the Nazi regime \u2014 rather than die as a Jew himself. Of course, subsequently, he founded the rabidly anti-Russian Open Society Foundation and other political \u2018charities\u2019 to tax-exempt his global political donations. Soros, too, is a passionate supporter of the US coup in Ukraine and of Ukraine\u2019s far-right, and helped to finance (tax-exempt via his International Renaissance Fund) Obama\u2019s Ukrainian coup by being one of the three top donors to Hromadske TV, which\u00a0propagandized for slaughtering at least one and a half million of the people in the far eastern region of Ukraine<\/a>, where Obama\u2019s\u00a0imposed far-right Ukrainian government<\/a>\u00a0was totally rejected. It\u2019s the region that had voted over 90% for the Ukrainian President whom Obama-Nuland overthrew, and George Soros was a top funder of such exterminationist propaganda. So, it\u2019s reasonable that his fellow anti-Russian fanatic, Freeland, is a friend of his.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the \u201cliberal\u201d side of fascism. The \u201cconservative\u201d side of it is represented by such people as John Bolton and\u00a0the Koch brothers<\/a>.<\/p>\n Of course, the man whom the US and Canadian regimes and the Lima Group are trying to install as Venezuela\u2019s President, Juan Guaido, had been well groomed for that job, but not by political and electoral experience, of which he has almost none, but by his foreign sponsors. On 29 January 2019 the Gray Zone Project bannered\u00a0\u201cThe Making of Juan Guaid\u00f3: How the US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela\u2019s Coup Leader\u201d<\/a>, and their two star investigative journalists, Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal, opened: \u201cJuan Guaid\u00f3 is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington\u2019s elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, he has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization.\u201d This report also noted that \u201cThe \u2018real work\u2019 began two years later, in 2007, when Guaid\u00f3 graduated from Andr\u00e9s Bello Catholic University of Caracas. He moved to Washington, DC to enroll in the Governance and Political Management Program at George Washington University, under the tutelage of Venezuelan economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top Latin American neoliberal economists. Berrizbeitia is a former executive director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) [and the IMF is a central part the operation that\u2019s described in John Perkins\u2019s now-classic\u00a0Confessions of an Economic Hit Man<\/em>] who spent more than a decade working in the Venezuelan energy sector, under the old oligarchic regime that was ousted by Ch\u00e1vez.\u201d Moreover, \u201dStratfor and CANVAS \u2013 key advisors of Guaid\u00f3 and his anti-government cadre \u2013 devised a shockingly cynical\u00a0plan<\/a>\u00a0to drive a dagger through the heart of the Bolivarian revolution. The scheme hinged on a 70% collapse of the country\u2019s electrical system by as early as April 2010.\u201d Etc. This is how \u2018democracy\u2019 now functions. It\u2019s not democracy \u2014 it is fascism. The euphemisms for it are \u201cneoliberalism\u201d and \u201cneoconservatism.\u201d<\/p>\n Regardless of whether or not the Trump-Freeland-Luna program for Venezuela succeeds, democracy and human rights won\u2019t be advanced by it; but, if it succeeds,\u00a0the fortunes of US-and-allied\u00a0billionaires<\/strong>\u00a0will be<\/a>. It\u2019s part of their global\u00a0privatization<\/a>\u00a0program.<\/p>\n PS:\u00a0If you want to understand what was the historical context where\u00a0Inner City Press reported<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cThe title of the meeting is \u2018the situation in Venezuela and efforts by regional organizations to resolve the crisis per Chapter VIII of the UN Charter\u2019\u201d; then\u00a0Luk Van Langenhove<\/a>\u00a0has\u00a0summarized<\/a>\u00a0that context, by saying: \u201cFew invocations of Chapter VIII\u2019s provisions were made during the cold war period. But when the bipolar world system collapsed and spawned new global security threats, the explosion of local and regional armed conflicts provoked a renewed interest in regional organizations and their role in the maintenance of regional peace and security. The United Nations was forced to acknowledge its inability to solely bear the responsibility for providing peace and security worldwide.\u201d So, \u201cduring the cold war period,\u201d this provision of\u00a0the UN Charter<\/a>\u00a0remained virtually inactive. Then, suddenly, after 1991, when the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact military alliance to counter America\u2019s NATO military alliance, all ended (with no concessions being made on the American side<\/a>), America could no longer use \u2018communism\u2019 as a \u2018justification\u2019 to invade or perpetrate coups against foreign governments that were friendly toward or else allied with Russia. So, now, this provision of the UN\u2019s Charter became activated by the US and its allies, in order to be able to say that The West\u2019s coups and invasions aren\u2019t actually to build-out the US empire, but are instead for (in the terms of this part of the UN\u2019s Charter) \u201cthe maintenance of international peace and security\u201d \u2014 so as to \u2018authorize\u2019 coups and international invasions by the US and its vassal nations, such as are the members of NATO. This is what US President G.H.W. Bush had in mind to rely upon, when he told the leaders of the US regime\u2019s vassal states, secretly at Camp David, on the night of 24 February 1990, that the \u2018Cold War\u2019 would now continue secretly on the US-allied side, against Russia and against any nation\u2019s leaders (such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Viktor Yanukovych) that aren\u2019t hostile toward Russia, by Bush\u2019s saying then to them, that\u00a0no compromise must ever be allowed \u201cwith Moscow,\u201d because \u201cTo hell with that! We prevailed, they didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0In other words, whereas the UN had been set up by FDR to evolve ultimately into the global democratic federation of nation-states \u2014 a democratic world-government \u2014 so as to become the sole possessor of control over all strategic weaponry, and thus to become the democratic republic of the entire world authorized to settle international disputes peacefully, the subterranean Nazis and other fascists whom US President Truman and the Bilderberg group represented, were determined that the US and its vassal nations would ultimately become the dictatorship over all nations, the entire world. That\u2019s what Ukraine, and now Venezuela, and many other US coups and invasions, are \u2014 and have been \u2014 really about. It\u2019s about the \u2018peace\u2019 of the graveyard, NOT any democracy, anywhere at all.<\/p>\n That\u2019s their dream. They want to monopolize the corruption everywhere,\u00a0not\u00a0to end it, anywhere. And that\u2019s why they distort and blatantly lie\u00a0about Venezuela\u2019s democratic constitution now<\/a>, just as they did\u00a0about Ukraine\u2019s democratic constitution in February 2014<\/a>. It\u2019s, essentially, a lawless international gang of billionaire thugs. It is\u00a0the international Deep State<\/a>. It consists of the under 2,000 people who are international billionaires in the US and secondarily in the US-allied countries, and of those billionaires\u2019 millions of hirees.\u00a0585 of those under-2,000 are Americans.<\/a>\u00a0But the wealthiest person on the planet isn\u2019t even listed on any of the standard lists of billionaires, and he is\u00a0the King of Saudi Arabia<\/a>. That person is the US aristocracy\u2019s #1 international ally, because ever since the 1970s when gold no longer backed the US dollar but instead oil did, that person\u2019s decisions have enabled the US dollar to continue as being the world\u2019s reserve currency, no matter how big the US economy\u2019s trade deficits are, and no matter how high the US Government\u2019s fiscal deficits are.<\/p>\n Below those billionaires (and trillionaire), and below their millions of hirees, are the billions of serfs; and, below those, at the very bottom, are the\u00a0approximately 40 million slaves<\/a>, and the many\u00a0millions imprisoned<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 virtually all of whom have extremely low (if any) net worth at all, since slavery and imprisonment are, in the real world, only for the very poor, not at all for the international gangsters, except for a very few exceptions (such as, perhaps, \u201cEl Chapo\u201d).<\/p>\n The billionaires command, and the governments obey; that\u2019s \u2018democracy\u2019, and it\u2019s \u2018the rule of law\u2019, today. Everything to the contrary is propaganda, such as that what Trump-Freeland-Luna want for Venezuela is to decrease corruption and to increase democracy and human rights.<\/p>\n At least the more blatant fascist John Bolton was honest when he said on January 28th:\u00a0\u201cIt will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0But he would have been lots more honest if he had acknowledged, instead, that \u201cIt will make a big difference to the United States\u00a0billionaires\u00a0economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.\u201d This is all that the fascists ever\u00a0really\u00a0<\/em>cared about. Mussolini called it \u201ccorporationism<\/a>.\u201d Now, decades in the wake of the Allies\u2019 supposed \u2018victory against fascism\u2019 \u2014 against the Axis powers \u2014 in WW II, we all (at least the realists) are acknowledging that we clearly are staring in the face the raw fact that fascism has finally won, or at least very nearly totally won, in the world.<\/p>\n Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, died; but their ideological followers today rule the world, and FDR would be turning in his grave.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Screen-Shot-2019-02-07-at-2.35.27-PM.png\")
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