CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

To Stop US Militarism and Criminal Wars, We Need Universal Conscription

Photograph Source: Aviation poseidon – CC BY-SA 4.0

Driving home from my coffee at the local food co-op in a suburb just north of Philadelphia, I passed by the gas station at the local 7-ll store. Now owned by a Japanese company, 7-11 is one of the largest gas chains in the US.

I found myself thinking how back in the early years of this century, when Venezuela was headed by the hugely popular radical leftist President Hugo Chavez, a brash and charismatic former junior officer in the Venezuelan Army who was elected and re-elected four times to lead the county. Some Americans boycotted the chain’s petrol pumps because they used gas from Citgo, a company majority owned by Venezuela. Others like myself, began only filling my car’s tank at 7-11s even if a cheaper gas station was across the street, The reason for both groups’ decisions was that Chavez, a leftist nationalist who nationalized the country’s long US-owned oil companies, and who had been briefly captured in a US-backed but short-lived military coup in 2002, had in 2006 denounced then former president and one-time CIA director George H. W. Bush at the United Nations General Assembly, saying, “Yesterday, the devil came here. Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of.” He followed by making a sign of the cross and then looking up at the ceiling, his hands held together in prayer.”

Chavez had good reason for denouncing Bush, as in 2002 a military coup backed by the CIA and the US government had taken him captive, holding him at a Venezuelan........

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