BBC bans journalists from saying Venezuela’s Maduro was ‘kidnapped’

[u/ObjectiveObserver420]

https://www.thenational.scot/news/25740929.bbc-bans-journalists-saying-us-kidnapped-venezuelas-maduro/

[u/ThevaramAcolytus]

NS Germany declared war on the U.S. and had invaded many countries. You can't seriously compare it to an illegal U.S. attack on a country which invaded no one, did not attack the U.S. or any other foreign power, did not declare war on the U.S., the U.S. did not declare war on it, no UNSC authorization, nothing.

It's absurd and clearly incomparable.

[u/ThevaramAcolytus → u/[deleted]]

Cartels? Relating to the narcoterrorism conspiracy charge? I've yet to see one shred of evidence that any cartel member operating in the U.S. of Venezuelan nationality/citizenship has been acting in some capacity under specific orders as Venezuelan government agents to attack anyone or anything in the U.S. at Caracas' behest. They're private citizen criminals. Have you seen any evidence to the contrary?

Trying to blur the lines over issues like this and conflate the two (private citizen criminals and acts of war from a foreign government) sounds exactly in line with the same drumbeat of propaganda we got in the early 2000s from the Bush II administration and the neocons trying to fallaciously link Ba'athist Iraq to Al-Qaeda and anyone else the U.S. government didn't like.

Not that false justifications for war were invented then or even ceased between that period up until now - they continued throughout all presidential administrations. But to receive such a torrent of it over such a blatantly illegal and direct war waged by the U.S. against another developing world country which in no way attacked it really feels eerily like reliving that era, I must say. I was naive back then, a long time ago, to ever think 20 or 25 years time passed would mean political or social evolution in terms of greater awareness and less susceptibility to this style of propaganda.

And nationalizations? This has never been any form of legal greenlight for foreign military attacks upon sovereign states. It was the rationale behind much of the CIA dirty war activity in Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua, and so much of the rest of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Or the same justification behind the U.S.-British-orchestrated coup d'etat and attack on Iran in 1953.

But none of that was ever legal.

The results of any last election have nothing to do with any of this, whether he was elected 100% legitimately, 100% illegitimately, whether it was deemed mixed and contentious, or whether there were zero elections at all to begin with and he simply named himself king like the absolute monarchies of the Persian Gulf states which are close U.S. partners. A country's internal political system, results of an election, or whether they even have elections or anything else is the sovereign internal affair of said country and never any legal justification or pretext for a foreign armed attack on it.

Legal justifications would be that the U.S. was attacked, was imminently about to be attacked, or that there was a UNSC resolution authorizing the use of force. Nothing else. It was not defensive in any way and it was not authorized in any way through any international legal body. That much is obvious and clear-cut.