Comment by monerozcash
5 days ago
What if he was the leader of a brutal coup and the legitimately elected government requested foreign help to have him removed?
It's really really difficult to paint this as inherently bad, it's hard to see how the conclusion here doesn't entirely depend on how you feel about the results of the previous Venezuelan elections.
It shouldn’t be difficult to see this as bad, but I guess the future will tell. I hope for the sake of the Venezuelan population things go better than the last time the US decided to initiate regime change.
Depends on the point of view. I certainly agree that there are many very good reasons to see this as bad, but I don't think that concerns about Venezuela's national sovereignty rank very highly on that list.
From the perspective that regime change often goes horribly wrong? Absolutely.
From the point of view that Maduro was effectively in charge of a coup that the real elected candidates were desperately seeking foreign support to stop? Harder to see the intervention as bad, as it is probably the only way to rectify the situation.
There's no doubt that this heavily depends on one's personal views, so there's no obvious answers. At least the concern about regime change is fact-based and pretty much universal, regardless of personal beliefs. The concern about whether or not it's right or wrong for the US to go and arrest Maduro depends largely on how one views the recent Venezuelan election results, and therefore inherently relies on some major assumptions on matters where we're unlikely to ever see conclusive proof.
Of course, there are also pretty good technical reasons to believe the electoral receipts published by the Venezuelan opposition. I believe they would have been pretty much impossible to fake. That topic and others related to it have been pretty much endlessly discussed on HN already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123155
“The concern about whether or not it's right or wrong for the US to go and arrest Maduro depends largely on how one views the recent Venezuelan election results”
Again, no it doesn’t. It’s the unilateral extraterritorial interventionism that’s the problem. I have no time for Maduro or his administration.
And if you think this intervention is about protecting democracy I have a bridge to sell you.
16 replies →