It Has All Gone Caracas

From 13 March 1979, Queen Elizabeth II was the monarch of a People's Revolutionary Government of her Marxist-Leninist Ministers. On 25 March, it effectively suspended the 1974 Constitution by proclaiming the People's Laws, of which People's Law Number 3 declared, "The Head of State shall remain Her Majesty the Queen and her representative in this country shall continue to be the Governor-General who shall perform such functions as the People's Revolutionary Government may from time to time advise."

Then on 25 October 1983, the invasion of Grenada put the Queen at war with herself, as her father had once been. On 30 October, Margaret Thatcher told the BBC World Service that, "We in the Western democracies use our force to defend our way of life. We do not use it to walk into other people’s countries, independent sovereign territories. If you are pronouncing a new law that wherever Communism reigns against the will of the people, there the United States shall enter, then we are going to have really terrible wars in the world."

Whatever happened to Juan Guaidó? Was he not supposed to have been the "rightful" President of Venezuela? Oh, well, María Corina Machado has lost an election more recently, if only by proxy, so I suppose that it must be her now. She was given the Nobel Peace Prize for wanting to privatise PDVSA, the oil and gas company. To that end, Donald Trump put a $50 million price on the head of President Nicolás Maduro, and with Pete Hegseth launched a campaign of mass murder. Machado warmly welcomed those moves, openly coordinating with Trump towards her avowedly detailed plan for the first 100 hours after regime change. If the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to a dissident in Saudi Arabia or in North Korea, then would that person have made it to Oslo, even if too late for the ceremony? Yet Machado did. What a fearsome despot Maduro clearly was.

The stated grounds for this invasion are not even supposed to be taken seriously. Everyone knows that the real reason is to take control of the world's largest proven oil reserves and of vast reserves of gas. This is not about drugs. There is no known direct trade route in cocaine from Venezuela to the United States, where in any case the bigger problem is fentanyl. The cocaine trade through the Caribbean is mostly to supply the much more lucrative market in Europe. Prince Harry's visa has never been revoked. Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández. And Machado is a legaliser who, let the MAGA heartland understand, is also in favour of abortion. She is a cookie-cutter liberal Rightist who accordingly echoes Shabana Mahmood in naming Thatcher as her political heroine, presumably with the above caveat. She would be an Establishment Democrat in the United States, or a bog standard Labour MP in Britain. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, while Fascism is inherent in both of them, only ever arising by their joint enterprise.

Firmly in that tradition, Machado has backed the genocide of Gaza to the hilt, she has called Trump a "visionary", she has invited both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to invade Venezuela in order to install her as Trump has now done, and she joined Javier Milei and Kevin Roberts in crossing the Atlantic to address last February's Make Europe Great Again rally in Madrid, alongside Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Matteo Salvini, Andrej Babiš, Martin Helme, Krzysztof Bosak, and the host, Santiago Abascal. Organised by Patriots.eu, that rally announced that formation's first associate member. Likud. Of course. Ties are also strengthening with the BJP. Of course. Just do not mention the burning churches from Bethlehem to Bishnupur. So much for the anti-Fascism of our own dear centrists, who of course also wanted to keep us subject to the legislative will of many of these people, a condition to which they yearn to return us.

So much for the FIFA Peace Prize. So much for America First, a mantle that could not be claimed by any supporter of this adventure when seeking the Presidency of the United States. Laugh out of the room anyone who wondered "What if Russia did this in Ukraine?" or "What if China did this in Taiwan?" but who had supported the intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. And now as then, so much for wanting to stop the boats, whether from Venezuela or from Iran, where the Blairites and the Yaxley-Lennonists alike, both subcultures awash with cocaine, want to restore a monarchy while wanting to abolish the British one. To the Blairites, at least, monarchy is backward. So it must be what is best for Iranians. Think on.