The example of Venezuela is not the first time we have encountered the double standards of Western democracy. The case of Venezuela is just the last straw of their attitude all around the world. As we have said before, U.S. President Donald Trump isn’t alone in this at all. Maybe except for Greece, all EU countries see no problem in aligning themselves with Trump.

Maybe the anger of the Western world, especially that of the U.S., towards Venezuela stems from the specific problems each individual country has been dealing in their relations with it. It has been said that the fact that Maduro put Venezuela at loggerheads with the entire world as he assumed this policy as a legacy from Chavez has been the most important reason for the economic problems they have been dealing with. It is true that we can argue that the type of socialism applied in the country plunged it into a line of tension and made a great contribution to it becoming literally ungovernable.

However, why would this mean that it is alright to shift all the blame on to Chavez or Maduro?

For God’s sake, is the dispute between the U.S. and Venezuela only about capitalism? Or, is the dispute between China and the U.S. only about capitalism? Is China really far from capitalism or integrating into the world system? Isn’t it obvious that in Venezuela we are facing a resistance that rejects to obey imperialism or “a punishment” for a desire to become independent?

There is no doubt that countries that are resisting against U.S. imperialism or imperialism, in general, choose the easy way out and shift all the blame on to the West and the U.S. This is not a secret. In the example of Iran, for instance, this has become a frequently used excuse. To delay the good governance and service they owe to their people, using the tensions with the U.S., with Israel, and with Zionism has turned into a mechanism to interiorize their backwardness and present it as their fate.

Is there something similar going on in Venezuela?

It isn’t possible that there isn’t. However, this doesn’t mean that the U.S. can orchestrate coups whenever it wants and topple governments and eliminate whomever they want to eliminate. Moreover, when such actions take place and they came to be regarded as normal, it only institutionalizes this backwardness.

Neutrality in the fight between the putschist imperialism of U.S. and Maduro isn’t legitimate at all. This neutrality which was experienced in our country with the slogan “neither sharia nor a coup” worked for the pro-coup mindset; we experienced this many times. Because, sharia was not possible, but the coup was the reality of those times and it had a great chance of happening. That possibility was realized many times and they were barely prevented. However, the people who are thought to be pro-sharia did not even constitute a political camp in this country, both because they didn’t know exactly what they wanted and because they were far from expressing themselves and realizing their demands within the mainstream politics of Turkey. They were never a threat and success has never been possible for them. That is why, since the neutrality of “neither sharia nor a coup” was expressed in a relationship between such uneven and asymmetrical powers, it inevitably benefited the powerful side.

The discourse which states that Venezuela is not governed properly also only works for the legitimization of the coup. If it had not been these types of arguments there would be no other way to legitimize any coup. All the shameless coups that took place in Turkey were actually accompanied with these kinds of discourses. There were even some instances in which these discourses were actually based on some realities. But even in those cases, it didn’t take a long time to realize that the coup plotters actually made those realities possible as steps which lead to their coup.

The embargo, siege, destabilizing the internal political dialogue by using connections with the internal co-conspirators were all a part of the putschists’ plan, which led to the bad governance in Venezuela. When judgment day comes for the coup plotters, all these elements that took part in these conspiracies are going to be held accountable.

Similarly, one of most prominent examples given in claiming that Mohammed Morsi was not able to govern the country during the process that led to Egypt’s coup, which Egyptians commemorated on Jan.5, even though it hadn’t been even one year since he got elected, was the oil queues in the country. In an environment where the distribution of oil was totally in the hands of the military, what was experienced was actually sabotage and the insubordination of the soldiers so that they could present the country as unstable.

This sabotage paved the way for the coup that took place at the beginning of July. On the eighth anniversary of the coup, Amnesty International mentioned the unprecedented human rights violations that are taking place under Sisi’s administration with a report titled “Egypt: Open Air Prison for Critics.”

There are over sixty thousand political prisoners in coup prisons, which resemble the dungeons of the Middle Ages, and these prisoners live under the harshest conditions one can imagine; in fact, every other week new coffins emerge from them. This state of those people, who couldn’t stand those conditions, actually tells the world about a serious problem the Muslim world has been struggling with. This is the regime of those who see a coup as legitimate claiming that there was vote rigging in Venezuela’s elections. In such an environment, French President Emmanuel Macron, who had great difficulty in dealing with the protests of the Yellow Vests, announced that he is going to make an official visit to Egypt, which fell well behind its former conditions in the eighth year of its “revolution”, to develop bilateral relations.

I wonder what Macron, whose democracy is on its deathbed thanks to the protests of the yellow vests, hopes to gain from Sisi who turned a democratic protest into a blood bath? Well, then there is no reason not to send Sisi to Venezuela, where they haven’t been able to stage a coup yet.