Episode Details

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Joining us on this edition of the News Review, we have podcaster and journalist Esha Krishnaswamy joining us from St. Petersburg. We also have editor of Veterans Today, Kevin Barrett, who's joining us from Saidiya, Morocco. Welcome to the program, to the both of you. Let's start off with Ms. Krishnaswamy. Esha, please break down this political row that exists right now between Spain and Venezuela. Help us better understand the components of this.

Esha Krishnaswamy: Well, this is not the first time that Spain has granted asylum to members of the Venezuelan opposition. They also granted asylum to Leopoldo Lopez, who was also part of the Venezuelan opposition. And what most people don't realize is that the Venezuelan opposition engages in both paramilitary activities and extreme violent activities. In 2017, after the elections, they engaged in a breathtaking amount of violence. And even this year, after the elections, they engaged in a breathtaking amount of violence.

And what is also interesting is that they're supported by the US, the State Department, the (CIA front) National Endowment for Democracy. And in this year, they engaged in kind of many color revolution type tricks. I interviewed a journalist, Brian Mayer, and he was telling me the story where after the polls closed, the opposition got together many people in the station and had cameras and said, open the poll, let us vote, let us vote. But it was after the polls had closed. And they've burned down pharmacies, they've burned down many infrastructure.

So it's not a peaceful opposition. And basically, they know that if they allow the votes to be fully counted, they're going to lose. So their idea is to cry fraud early. And what Spain is doing is trying to delegitimize the election, even though almost every international observer has said that it was conducted freely and fairly. And so that is kind of why they've recognized González as the winner, even though the results show the opposite.

Kevin Barrett, please share with us your perspective on this diplomatic row between Spain and Venezuela, and where does this stance from Madrid come from?

Well, Madrid is, of course, part of NATO, which is U.S.-occupied Europe. So more often than not, the capitals of the European vassal states will go along with whatever they're told to do by their American masters. And in this case, the Anglo-Zionist empire that's in some ways headquartered in Washington, D.C., wants to overthrow this Bolivarian government in Venezuela and has been working at this now for decades because Venezuela sits on enormous oil resources.

Prior to the Bolivarian revolution, the American big oil interests and of course the strategic interests that depend on control of resources to control the world really needed to try to reverse that. And so they've been working to try to overthrow the Venezuelan government now consistently for decades. And unfortunately, Spain—which every now and then is capable of taking a slightly independent position by being a little more open to legally going after the Zionists for genocide than the Americans are, things like that—but they're not willing to completely buck their masters and support the Bolivarian Revolution, far from it.

So that's what's really behind this. It's really just like with the so-called war between Ukraine and Russia, which is actually a war between the U.S. and Russia. And likewise,

what we see here is not really a problem between Spain and Venezuela per se, even though they think of it that way because Spain has a history of colonizing Latin America.

But in fact, it's a conflict between the American empire and this recalcitrant country of Venezuela that thinks that it has the right to control its own oil resources.

Staying with you, Mr. Barrett, when it comes to countries