The U.S. intervention in Venezuela is floundering. In February, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was saying the Venezuelan armed forces should see that President Nicholas Maduro’s “time is up” and “change should be at hand.”
The hoped-for defections from the Venezuelan military did not happen. Now the administration is still demanding that Maduro leave office, while saying there is “no timetable” for the the regime change policy. Change, it seems, is not at hand.
Yet the impulse for U.S. intervention remains strong. While Bernie Sanders opposes the Trump administration’s policy of economic sanctions and regime, other Democratic contenders–including Joe Biden, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, and Rep. John Delaney–support it.
And then there’s the propaganda, such as the false report that Maduro’s troops burned humanitarian aid supplies. In fact, a New York Times video report showed that the blaze started when an anti-Maduro protester threw a Molotov cocktail at government troops.
And then there are cultural scripts, embedded in popular cultural, that justify intervention in Venezuela.
From The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal’s website “dedicated to original investigative journalism and analysis on war and empire,” comes a disturbing report from Venezuela about the popular video game, “Call of Duty.”
Blumenthal and co-author Ben Norton says that Venezuelan citizen journalists Orlenys Ortiz and Sancocho Power called their attention to the similarity between the plot of a 2013 first person shooter game, Call of Duty: Ghosts, and alleged acts of US sabotage against the country this March.
Blumenthal and Norton write:
Call of Duty: Ghosts is set in a dystopian future after the Middle East is nuked. A Venezuelan general comes into power, establishing a socialist style federation that spreads across Latin America like a disease, uniting all oil producing nations and expelling US citizens.
You as the player are part of an elite force of US commandos that invades the country, murders the socialist leader, and destroys his federation.
The US Special Operations forces open their assault by launching a rocket at a dam that looks strikingly similar to Venezuela’s Guri dam, an act of deliberate terror that floods the streets of Caracas.
The city is recreated in vivid detail, down to the Chavista graffiti that colors city walls.
The mission ends with the execution-style killing of Venezuela’s leader, who is shot in the back in slow motion by America’s finest. In case you weren’t sure about his commitment to socialism, he’s wearing a red beret – just like Hugo Chavez.
Is this just a harmless fantasy? Or does it have a propagandistic purpose? Blumenthal and Norton’s reporting shows the links between the gaming world and the Pentagon.
Call of Duty designer Dave Anthony was enlisted by a former Pentagon official named Stephen Grundman to advise The Art of Future War Project – an initiative of NATO’s unofficial think tank in Washington, the Atlantic Council.
The makers of another Call of Duty sequel openly boasted of working with a Pentagon advisor.
The evidence doesn’t quite prove, as Blumenthal and Norton assert that the “US military has laundered regime change propaganda through some of the world’s most popular first-person shooter games.”
But Call of Duty Ghost does show that murderous fantasies about Venezuela are a respectable pastime and are embedded in American pop culture. This sort of cultural script enables Trump/Pompeo regime policy, even as it flounders.
