CARACAS, AND COLOMBO

Mr. Nicholas Maduro won the Venezuelan elections after all, though the margin may be razor thin, and this has put paid to the fantasies that were harboured by the rapacious robber barons of being able to walk into Caracas after Hugo Chavez's death and rob the country dry. The Chavez type substantial majority however did not accrue to Mr. Maduro and this has given some wiggle room for the beady eyed neo-liberal rat pack to try and lay waste the city of Caracas, and force themselves into power.

Chances are very much that these desperados will not succeed. Progressive people's movements have acquired the kind of sea legs that they didn't have in those bad old days. Though Mr. Maduro is not Mr.Chavez, he could become better over time, who knows?

People are not ignorant any more about the machinations of the agents of neo-liberal capital - the robber-barons, to put it in short. From Caracas to Colombo, there is more awareness about the sinister stratagems that economic hit-men and other plain hit men use when they attempt to destabilize nations for economic or strategic gain, or both.

In our pages today, this newspaper features an article by Kalinga Seneviratne a reputed South Asian correspondent and intellectual, who details the methods of the 'democracy vendors' that use organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to create spurious narratives about the regimes they want to target.

Crying 'rape' he says is a common tactic. The method of preference is to say that Armed Forces have been going on rape sprees and make sweeping generalizations about the use of 'rape as a tactic of war', without the slightest shred of real evidence to substantiate these claims.

Do read Kalinga Seneviratne's article on the subject. The reader will learn that this tactic was tried in Syria - and, it was tried in Libya. These invented narratives acquire a life of their own when they were adopted by world broadcast networks, which are also of course generally in the pay of the forces of rapacious buccaneer rogues, highway robbers and plain multinational bandits.

It is indeed curious that self-proclaimed 'progressive leftists' (!) such as Kumar David and Wickramabahu Karunaratne indeed are joined at hip twins with these deathly forces of big money. What kind of leftists are these - and it is unfair not to factor Nimalka Fernando into the equation - that tie up with organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to support their fictional narratives aimed at destabilizing the Sri Lankan state, and by this agency, enthroning the interests of marauding neo-liberal capitalists?

Countries that have enjoyed a tradition of free speech and democracy such as Venezuela have incidentally been less susceptible to the depredations of the robber barons - and this is absolutely due to the fact that in these places, there is free thinking that makes the mass of people less impressionable and/or gullible.

In other words they are free to choose their own leaders, and free to choose their own political ideologies, and in today's informed world, they know enough not to be bamboozled by tricksters and con-artistes such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House etc.,

Nicholas Maduro's election is a telling saga on the failure of the unbridled forces of multinational Capital to force regime change through causing disaffection through the manufacture of creative but false narratives.

People outside Venezuela may have to some extent been bamboozled by the portrayal of Hugo Chavez as a dictator and 'crackpot strongman', but the people in Venezuela knew better because they had the good sense to make an educated judgement. Yet, the progressive forces of this world have been remiss in that they have collectively failed to device a way of combating false propaganda that's the stock in trade of the hit-men who covet natural resources and strategic opportunities in middle income countries such as ours. That is the next big story -- how, just how, do we strike back?