On Saturday 20 May, a protest called by the RCG and Rock Around the Blockade (RATB) was held outside The Guardian’s offices in London to oppose The Guardian’s media war against Venezuela and the Bolivarian revolutions.
While positing itself as a ‘voice for the left’, The Guardian has actively fought against socialism for decades, perhaps nowhere more unashamedly than in Venezuela, consistently supporting US-backed attempts at destabilising the region, including the 2002 coup that attempted to depose President Chavez, forcing power out of the hands of the people and back to the ruling class. In the current wave of violent protests against the government by the reactionary, imperialist-backed opposition, the newspaper has consistently taken the side of the right-wing anti-government protests, and reported their lies and distortions. It recently called for the country’s democratically-elected socialist president Nicolas Maduro to be given ‘pariah status’. The Guardian has not interviewed any member of the Venezuelan government or its supporters, while deliberately failing to address or condemn any of the violent actions of its right-wing opponents, including attacks on hospitals, schools, and bakeries that serve the people, and which have led to a rising number of deaths – a majority of the victims being government supporters. The Guardian’s role in the conflict is to provide an ideological framework for another right-wing takeover.
Present at the protest were comrades from Bolivia, Cuba, Colombia, Ireland and Palestine, among others, reflecting that the fight against imperialism and capitalism is a global struggle and as such requires international solidarity. We recognise that many of the tactics and attacks against building socialism we can see in Venezuela have been seen before in countries such as Cuba and Chile, and so we must be ready to fight back to ensure success against reactionary forces. The protest achieved powerful international coverage, with Venezuelan President Maduro tweeting about it, along with progressive Latin American news network Telesur.
We were opposed by a very small group of counter-protestors from the right-wing, wealthier classes of Venezuela, holding signs declaring Maduro to be a dictator and killer, and calling for ‘Elections Now’. They were unable to distract us from the task of exposing the media’s lies, condemning the violent anti-socialist protests, and showing our solidarity and support for the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.
Given the power and wealth of the media in Britain, and its willingness to attack working class movements both domestically and internationally, our efforts to repel their lies and propaganda must be strong and unwavering. As long as The Guardian and media outlets like it continue to support imperialism and violence against the oppressed peoples of the world, we will continue to expose them.
For more detail on the current protests in Venezuela, and the media lies, see: evolutionarycommunist.org/americas/venezuela/4787-vb280417
