26. WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, JUNE 16, 2021
Extraordinary Threat: The U.S. Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela
by Justin Podur and Joe Emersberger. Monthly Review P, 2021.
In March 2015, President Obama initiated sanctions against Venezuela, declaring a “national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.” Each year, the U.S. administration has repeated this claim. But, as Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur ague in their timely book, Extraordinary Threat, the opposite is true: It is the U.S. policy of regime change in Venezuela that constitutes an “extraordinary threat” to Venezuelans. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans continue to die because of these ever-tightening U.S. sanctions, denying people daily food, medicine, and fuel. On top of this, Venezuela has, since 2002, been subjected to repeated coup attempts by U.S.-backed forces. In Extraordinary Threat, Emersberger and Podur tell the story of six coup attempts against Venezuela.
This book deflates the myths propagated about the Venezuelan government’s purported lack of electoral legitimacy, scant human rights, and disastrous economic development record. Contrary to accounts lobbed by the corporate media, the real target of sustained U.S. assault on Venezuela is not the country’s claimed authoritarianism nor its supposed corruption. It is Chavismo, the prospect that twenty-first century socialism could be brought about through electoral and constitutional means. This is what the U.S. empire must not allow to succeed.
I have long admired Joe Emersberger’s forensic analysis of media propaganda that sustains the US campaign to crush democracy in Latin America. This outstanding book written with the distinguished journalist Justin Podur breaks the silence of ‘mainstream’ journalism’s willful distortion of Venezuela’s struggle to survive and be free. —John Pilger, Australian journalist and filmmaker
Much of the conventional thinking around Venezuela relies on uncritical adoption of the mainstream opposition’s view. As Emersberger and Podur convincingly show, important elements of that view are systematically distorted and often demonstrably wrong. This book is a valuable antidote to mainstream groupthink that will lead you to question much of what you thought you knew about Venezuela during the Chávez and Maduro years. —Francisco Rodríguez, Hewlett Fellow for Public Policy, Kellogg School for International Studies of the University of Notre Dame
From media-styled to overt mercenary incursions and everything in between, Emersberger and Podur deconstruct the history of US interventionism against Chavismo. —Teri Mattson, CODEPINK Latin American Campaign Coordinator
Extraordinary Threat is a clinical deconstruction of the US propaganda war against Venezuela that is unparalleled in its attention to detail and local context. Emersberger and Podur’s meticulous case study has implications far beyond Venezuela, following the path first charted by Parenti, Chomsky and Herman in clarifying the strategic role of corporate-owned mass media in imperialist hybrid warfare the world over. —Lucas Koernerr, contributing editor at VenezuelaAnalysis.com
Extraordinary Threat demonstrates that the case against foreign intervention in Venezuela goes far beyond the argument that international sanctions are illegal by international law. Authors Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur target “liberal” (read centrist) media outlets and NGOs as well as politicians – from CNN, the New York Times and the Guardian to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to Bernie Sanders. The book, with abundant detail on every page, will be an invaluable tool for solidarity groups. —Steve Ellner, Associate Managing Editor of “Latin American Perspectives,” retired professor at Venezuela’s Universidad de Oriente, and the author of over a dozen books on Latin American politics and history
A detailed run-through of recent Venezuelan history and a thorough debunking of its terrible media coverage: Extraordinary Threat is an extraordinary book. —Alan MacLeod, author of Bad News from Venezuela: Twenty years of fake news and misreporting
Seldom has a book expressed so clearly the outrages that the USA has visited upon the Venezuelan people as this work by Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur. What has happened to Venezuela is evidence of the erosion of democratic principles, the prospects of peace, and the preponderance of military chicanery that can affect any nation that the USA wishes to control and oppress. —Maria Páez Victor, Venezuelan-Canadian Ph.D. in Sociology
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Justin Podur is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. He is the author of Haiti’s New Dictatorship, Siegebreakers, and America’s Wars on Democracy in Rwanda and the DR Congo. Joe Emersberger is an engineer, writer, and activist based in Canada. His writing, focused on the Western media’s coverage of the Americas, can be found on FAIR.org, CounterPunch.org, TheCanary.co, Telesur English, and ZComm.org.