Macron to Egypt, Sisi to Venezuela

Of course, we are not encountering the hypocrisy that Western democracy has displayed in Venezuela only in the Venezuelan case. The Venezuelan case, together with the attitudes displayed everywhere else, is an attitude that puts the cherry on top of everything. As we said before on this matter, Trump is not alone either. On this matter the European Union countries, perhaps with the exception of Greece, can also line up on the same side as Trump.

Beneath the wrath of the Western world, and of ABD in particular, toward Venezuela, the particular problems each country has had with Venezuela may be playing separate roles. It is said that, with the legacy Maduro received from Chaevez, he has put Venezuela at odds with the whole world, and that this is in fact the most important cause of the economic problems being experienced.

True, one can indeed dwell on the point that a type of socialism that was implemented dragged the country into a line of tension instead of using its resources productively and made a serious contribution to making it ungovernable. But why should this require putting all the blame on Chavez or Maduro?

For God's sake, is the entire dispute between ABD and Venezuela only a matter of capitalism? For example, is the dispute between China and ABD also about capitalism? Is China very far right now from capitalism or from integration with the world?

Is it not very clear that in the Venezuelan case we are somehow faced with a "rubbing of the nose" against an attitude of resistance, a sense of independence, that refuses to surrender to imperialism?

Undoubtedly it is no secret that countries on the line of resistance against ABD or imperialism in general have an easy way out: they throw responsibility for all of their bad governance problems onto the West, onto ABD, as a scapegoat. In the case of Iran, for example, this has by now turned into an excuse. Constantly using tensions with ABD, with Israel, with Zionism to postpone the good governance and service they owe their own peoples has turned into a mechanism for internalizing backwardness and making it a fate.

Is there something similar in Venezuela too?

It is impossible for there not to be. But this still does not give ABD the right to carry out coups there as it likes, to overthrow whichever governments it likes and take away whatever it wants. Moreover, by doing so and by regarding this as normal, nothing is done other than institutionalizing this kind of backwardness even further.

A kind of neutrality between the putschist imperialism of ABD and Maduro is in this case never permissible. This non-preference served among us for years as a choice that ends up serving putschism, the kind of neutrality experienced in the example of "neither sharia nor coup," and we experienced it many times. Because there was no real possibility called sharia, but there was always a real possibility called coup that constantly occurred and hung over our heads. That possibility became real many times, and many times it was stopped when it was on the verge of becoming real. Whereas the people who were thought to want sharia, in Turkey, both because they did not know exactly what they wanted and because they were far from expressing and realizing the common political demands in Turkey, could not even form themselves as a political camp. They were never a real possibility and threat. For that reason, when the "neither Sharia nor Coup" neutrality was expressed between extremely asymmetric forces, it was inevitably entered into the account of the stronger one.

The discourses about Venezuela's bad governance are only matters that provide legitimacy to the coup. Indeed, without such matters there would be no way for anyone to justify the coup. Every most shameless coup that took place in Turkey was accompanied by discourses of this kind. There were even cases where such discourses were based on a reality. But in those cases too, it was not long before it was understood that the perpetrators of those things were, as a complementary link of the coup, the very ones who planned the coup.

The embargo, siege and the locking up and destabilizing of political dialogue with internal allies, which lead to bad governance in Venezuela, are all part of the coup plotters' plans. When the reckoning with the coup comes, all the elements that took part in such plots in one way or another will have to account for themselves.

In the same way, in Egypt, which celebrated the 8th anniversary of its Revolution on 5 January just past, one of the few most frequently cited examples of Muhammed Morsi's failure to govern the country, when he had not even been elected a year earlier in June 2013, was the petrol queues. In an environment where the petrol distribution network was entirely in the hands of the army, what was happening was in fact only the army's disobedience of orders, a sabotage carried out to make the country look unstable. This sabotage later laid the stones of the road leading to the coup in early July.

On the anniversary of the revolution, Amnesty International published a report titled "Egypt: An Open Prison for Critics" describing the unimaginable human rights violations in the country under the Sisi regime.

Today, in the coup prisons resembling medieval dungeons, there are more than sixty thousand registered political prisoners, and these prisoners live under the harshest conditions of torture; or rather, corpses come out of among these prisoners regularly every week. The condition of the people who die unable to bear those conditions tells the world about a serious problem from which the Islamic world suffers. This, in fact, is exactly the regime wanted by those who regard a coup as legitimate because there is election fraud in Venezuela.

In this environment, French President Macron, who is struggling to cope with the Yellow Vest protests in his own country, announced that he would make an official visit to Egypt, in the 8th year of its Revolution, to improve relations with coup Egypt, which has fallen even far behind the conditions before the Revolution.

What, I wonder, does Macron, whose democracy has reached the limit of the Yellow Vest protests, hope to get from Sisi, who turned a democratic demonstration square into a lake of blood and made a grave for three thousand people? While they are at it, let them take Sisi to Venezuela as well, where the coup could never be pulled off.