26. WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, JUNE 16, 2021
Extraordinary
Threat: The U.S. Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in
Venezuela
by Justin Podur and Joe Emersberger. Monthly Review P, 2021.
In March 2015,
President Obama initiated sanctions against Venezuela, declaring a “national
emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national
security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in
Venezuela.” Each year, the U.S. administration has repeated this claim. But, as
Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur ague in their timely book, Extraordinary Threat, the opposite is true: It is the
U.S. policy of regime change in Venezuela that constitutes an “extraordinary
threat” to Venezuelans. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans continue to die
because of these ever-tightening U.S. sanctions, denying people daily food,
medicine, and fuel. On top of this, Venezuela has, since 2002, been subjected
to repeated coup attempts by U.S.-backed forces. In Extraordinary Threat, Emersberger and Podur tell the
story of six coup attempts against Venezuela.
This book deflates the
myths propagated about the Venezuelan government’s purported lack of electoral
legitimacy, scant human rights, and disastrous economic development record.
Contrary to accounts lobbed by the corporate media, the real target of
sustained U.S. assault on Venezuela is not the country’s claimed
authoritarianism nor its supposed corruption. It is Chavismo, the prospect that
twenty-first century socialism could be brought about through electoral and
constitutional means. This is what the U.S. empire must not allow to succeed.
I have long admired Joe Emersberger’s forensic analysis of media
propaganda that sustains the US campaign to crush democracy in Latin America.
This outstanding book written with the distinguished journalist Justin Podur
breaks the silence of ‘mainstream’ journalism’s willful distortion of
Venezuela’s struggle to survive and be free.
—John Pilger, Australian journalist and filmmaker
Much of the conventional thinking around Venezuela relies
on uncritical adoption of the mainstream opposition’s view. As Emersberger and
Podur convincingly show, important elements of that view are systematically
distorted and often demonstrably wrong. This book is a valuable antidote to
mainstream groupthink that will lead you to question much of what you thought
you knew about Venezuela during the Chávez and Maduro years. —Francisco Rodríguez, Hewlett Fellow for Public Policy,
Kellogg School for International Studies of the University of Notre Dame
From media-styled to overt mercenary incursions and
everything in between, Emersberger and Podur deconstruct the history of US
interventionism against Chavismo. —Teri Mattson, CODEPINK Latin American Campaign
Coordinator
Extraordinary Threat is a clinical deconstruction of the
US propaganda war against Venezuela that is unparalleled in its attention to
detail and local context. Emersberger and Podur’s meticulous case study has
implications far beyond Venezuela, following the path first charted by Parenti,
Chomsky and Herman in clarifying the strategic role of corporate-owned mass
media in imperialist hybrid warfare the world over. —Lucas Koernerr,
contributing editor at VenezuelaAnalysis.com
Extraordinary Threat demonstrates
that the case against foreign intervention in Venezuela goes far beyond the
argument that international sanctions are illegal by international law. Authors
Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur target “liberal” (read centrist) media outlets
and NGOs as well as politicians – from CNN, the New York Times and the Guardian
to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to Bernie Sanders. The book,
with abundant detail on every page, will be an invaluable tool for solidarity
groups. —Steve Ellner,
Associate Managing Editor of “Latin American Perspectives,” retired professor
at Venezuela’s Universidad de Oriente, and the author of over a dozen books on
Latin American politics and history
A detailed run-through of recent Venezuelan history and a
thorough debunking of its terrible media coverage: Extraordinary Threat is an extraordinary book. —Alan MacLeod, author
of Bad News from Venezuela: Twenty years of fake news and
misreporting
Seldom has a book expressed so clearly the outrages that
the USA has visited upon the Venezuelan people as this work by Joe Emersberger
and Justin Podur. What has happened to Venezuela is evidence of the erosion of
democratic principles, the prospects of peace, and the preponderance of
military chicanery that can affect any nation that the USA wishes to control
and oppress. —Maria
Páez Victor, Venezuelan-Canadian Ph.D. in Sociology
For more commentary google the book
Justin Podur is Associate Professor at the Faculty of
Environmental and Urban Change at York University. He is the author of Haiti’s New Dictatorship, Siegebreakers, and America’s Wars on Democracy in
Rwanda and the DR Congo. Joe
Emersberger is an engineer, writer, and activist based in
Canada. His writing, focused on the Western media’s coverage of the Americas,
can be found on FAIR.org, CounterPunch.org, TheCanary.co, Telesur English, and
ZComm.org.
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