Saeed Naqvi | Rein in capitalism on the rampage, or liberal democracy’s days are numbered

“The Monroe Doctrine is alive and well”, boomed Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump’s secretary of state. It was therefore legitimate for the US to find a friend to install on the Caracas throne. Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves of hydro-carbons.

Vice-president Mike Pence was asked to keep a close eye on Guaido as he shuttled between Colombia, the US and Venezuela to ascend the gaddi.

When the Guaido initiative failed, the US was at it again: the headlines are still fresh on yet another failed effort to dethrone Maduro.

Dutch foreign minister Caspar Veldkamp told Parliament that Venezuela Opposition leader Edmundo Gonzales sought refuge in the Dutch embassy. Before his papers for exile could be processed, he found cultural continuity where he’s likely to stay: Spain. It will be interesting to see what new salvo is fired for democracy. It must be galling for the US that colour revolutions no longer yield the desired results.

Western covert ops must have taken heart from developments where their own Fulbright scholar, Muhammad Yunus showed the door to Sheikh Hasina, whose emotional ties to India and practical ones with China were becoming a puzzle.

This narrative would be off the mark if the explosion of public anger at Sheikh Hasina’s dictatorship is underplayed. It possibly provided the objective conditions which outsiders exploited. It must be said scholars like Jeffrey Sachs have been quite emphatic. The state department’s Donald Lou was as active in Bangladesh and Pakistan as Victoria Nuland was in Ukraine.

While the “regime change” apparatus is still functional in the US, Europe in its post-colonial phase has little use for it. It has other ways to ward off the Left; even occasionally tipping the scales in favour of fascism.

Look at what was East Germany: Fascism has impressively opened its accounts in two states. France’s political theatre has an engaging story line: how to stop the Left?

This story actually begins at the European Union elections in June where Marine Le Pen’s right-extremist National Rally trounced Emmanuel Macron’s right-of-centre party by miles. In a funk, Mr Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called parliamentary elections. The anxious French President hoped to recover lost ground. Exactly the opposite happened. Ms Le Pen zoomed past him, with 33 per cent votes in the first round. Not very far behind was the Left. Mr Macron came third with 21 per cent. There was no absolute majority.

The Fifth Republic had it, should Ms Le Pen win the second round. The Left and Mr Macron withdrew over 200 candidates from triangular contests to prevent any division of the anti-Le Pen vote.

The trick worked, but only to the extent that it stopped Ms Le Pen. She came third, but Mr Macron and his corporate backers were in turmoil as the Left galloped way ahead. Mr Macron’s neo-con agenda would clash head-on with the Left’s socialism.

Instead of appointing a Leftist Prime Minister as the numbers in the National Assembly dictated, Mr Macron appointed Michel Barnier from the Republican stable.

Will the Socialists break ranks from the Left Front? If not, the possible backroom deals may be sinister. Will Mr Barnier’s minority government be supported by Ms Le Pen from outside? She will then control the Fifth Republic.

The people’s will, exemplified by the Left Front’s progress, will then have been effectively neutralised by the Macron-Barnier neo-con agenda.

Social welfare, price rise, healthcare, unemployment -- issues that define the lives of people, will have been replaced by migration, identity politics, Islamophobia, military budgets, the staple that fascism feeds on.

What is being played out on an epic scale in France is mainly the pattern in most Western democracies. Remember the excitement when Alexis Tsipras became the first Communist PM of Greece, the cradle of Western civilisation?

No sooner had the Communists reared its head than Germany, the EU’s biggest donor, sat on Mr Tsipras’ back. Greece’s debts would not be honoured.

In Spain, the rise of Pablo Iglesias, 39, as leader of leftist Podemos, at about the same time as Mr Tsipras in Greece, caused a frenzied response from the establishment: Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, whose huge corruption had precipitated the election which brought up Podemos, was manoeuvred into another term, corruption or no corruption. By attrition, Podemos was killed.

It was clear as daylight that Bernie Sanders was derailed by the Democratic Party’s establishment largely over his socialist image. I wrote then: “If you make Sanders impossible, you make Trump inevitable.”

Likewise, if Jeremy Corbyn is impossible, Boris Johnson is inevitable. He succeeded clowning around as Prime Minister briefly. Right-wingers in the UK Labour Party like Peter Mandelson had sworn to “undermine” Mr Corbyn.

As the Bible says: “there is nothing new under the sun”.

This has been the pattern ever since Franklin Delano Roosevelt pulled his country out of the Great Depression of the 1930s-40s by taxing the very rich to pay for welfare schemes. The Socialists, Communists and the trade unions had pressured him. The most popular American President in history who died in his fourth term ended up spawning corporate paranoia, which has not lost momentum till this day. Joseph McCarthy remains a reaction to anything resembling the New Deal. His spirit lives.

At least, in those early days of unbridled capitalism, a journalist of CBS News like Ed Murrow could single-handedly demolish McCarthy. Today, the field is left wide open for capitalist callousness.