What it must not do is remain passive, pleading for talks while the U.S. ratchets up its efforts to degrade Maduro's authority. Maduro's strategy cannot be to avoid looking bad.
Looking bad in the eyes of whom? The U.S.-defined "international community" and its NGOs? The U.S.- and capitalist-dominated mainstream media?
That is a hopeless, losing strategy. There is literally nothing Maduro can do to look good in their eyes but surrender.
The winner of this conflict will do things that "look bad." The U.S./Guaido know this and don't care, because, given U.S. domination of the media, they are confident they can control what most people see. Maduro and the Bolivarian revolution cannot let himself be blackmailed into passivity by that.
In fact, the imperialists' ability to control people's perceptions has itself been degraded by alternative media-which is why they're attacking it-and a lot of people will see a lot more than they like.
As we've seen, the U.S. has all kinds of formidable weapons to use-economic, financial, diplomatic, and military. The Maduro government can and should build as much international support as it can, but no one should imagine that Russia or China is going to war with the U.S. over Venezuela. The Bolivarian revolution will stand or fall on the power of one formidable weapon: an armed and politically committed working class.
That means the invasion calculus, the coup calculus, and the negotiation calculus will all be determined by that weapon.
It means that, in talks and/or on the street, one side or the other will win. And the side that wins will do so only because it has mobilized enough politically-committed armed power to make the other surrender-either before or after a devastating fight.
It means that the only chance for the minimization of violence (There will be blood. There already has been.) from this point forward is if the reactionaries are convinced that the politically-committed armed power of the Bolivarian forces is too great to make their calculations work.
Anybody who doesn't understand this is kidding themselves, fantastically.
Be Fidel
Lefties love Allende. Unequivocally. Because he lost.
Martyr-love ratifies virtuous, clean-hands, faux-pacifist "leftism." Safe solidarity nostalgia.
To hell with that. Allende needed to be a victor, not a martyr.
Which means he should have taken the offensive, armed the people, moved first, used whatever deadly armed force among the army and the people he could muster to arrest, disarm, and kill as many of the armed opposition fighting against him as necessary. He should have won. The alternative was what he got.
But if he had won, he would have had dirty hands, and most of the "leftists" now sanctifying him would be making sure everyone saw them constantly washing their hands of his "dictatorship." He wouldn't be Allende; he'd be Fidel.
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