EX-US presidential candidate Pat Robertson, an ultra religious leader of the US’ ‘moral majority’ has just called for the US state to murder the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, as the best way to do the job of securing Venezuela’s oil, rather than fight ‘another $200 billion war’.
He made the call on his radio programme which is listened to by around seven million Christian bible bashers.
The fact of the matter is that his religion is capitalism, and his god is money, all the rest is window dressing, moral blather which falls to the ground at the first shock of the anti-imperialist struggle, giving way to bloodthirsty threats and actions.
Robertson belongs to a similar milieu as the born again Christian freaks that have gathered around George Bush. They have not just rediscovered the Lord after a licentious youth, they have turned the Middle East red with the blood of the Iraqi people. And they have not finished yet by a long way.
Yesterday President Bush was challenging the Sunni clergy in Iraq to make their mind up as to whether they want peace or war.
Bush was railing at them that they must support his ‘constitutional’ plan to have three federal states in Iraq, a sure fire recipe for civil war, which would however leave the US with a bigger chance of controlling oil rich northern and southern Iraq.
The US ruling class however is being defeated in Iraq and knows it. It has also been unbalanced by its failure. Now it faces the spectre of militant nationalism in South America, in Venezuela, on whose oil it depends.
The Venezuelan President, Chavez, has already survived a number of US inspired coup attempts to overthrow him, and responded by arming the workers and the poor of Venezuela, and now bases himself on them.
The straw that broke Robertson’s back, and set him shrieking, was the sight of President Chavez forming a bloc with Cuba, offering it cheap petrol, in return for Cuban doctors being seconded to Caracas, and then promising the US poor that Venezuela would provide them with cheap petrol, so that they could face up to the economic crisis.
This caused the Christian mask to drop, and be replaced by a Christian bourgeois blood lust – the call to murder Chavez and not to waste another £200 billion on another Iraq type adventure.
There is not the slightest doubt that despite all the denials, the Bush administration shares Robertson’s solution to the crisis that they face, tempered only by the realisation that ‘taking out’ Chavez might actually further inflame the situation throughout the whole of South America.
The US intends to put South America into financial chains through establishing the Cafta, the Central American Free Trade Area and then the FTAA, the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
Chavez speaks and acts for many in Central, and South America, and has the sympathy of many in the US and Canada. US imperialism and all of these plans are now being challenged, by Venezuela, Cuba and other states.
There are going to be more attempts by the Christian US bourgeoisie to foment a civil war in Venezuela, to engineer a situation where US troops can intervene to overthrow the elected and democratic government and murder its leaders.
Such schemes will be opposed by the US workers who understand that Bush and the US bosses are their enemy not any section of the populace of South America.
An alliance must be formed between the US workers and their trade unions, and the Venezuelan and Cuban masses. Its aim must be to defeat and overthrow US imperialism to go forward to socialism throughout the Americas.
