plum-soup:

The idea that the Venezuelan government is somehow a worse actor than like, Turkey or Saudi Arabia is pretty hilarious, yet somehow sanctions against Venezuela have broad bipartisan support whereas key elements of the government oppose sanctions against Saudi and Turkey and have managed to either blunt or stop them. Like even if you’re coming at from an angle of “I support democracy and I don’t like how the government is treating protestors” like….the Turkish and Saudi governments (among others) engage in direct repression that is far more brutal than many of the U.S.’s enemies. The Saudis execute hundreds of people a year and the Turkish government uses paramilitaries and shit and has had a history of targeted assasinations of Kurdish and left wing activists for decades, which continues to this day. But both countries are able to absorb this violence into a legalized state-based framework where they’re fighting “terrorism” by murdering people who are asking for a better future. Meanwhile, Maduro sending the cops in to beat up a bunch of center-right protestors is justification to annihilate a country’s economy and deprive them of food and medicine for going on years now. Like obviously there are geopolitical machinations at work here that go far beyond “human rights” concerns when the US government (not just trump but his predecessors as well) has consistently disregarded those concerns in favor of building US imperial and financial power abroad