An op-ed in The Hill ran with the headline “Options to get Maduro out are limited and unpleasant”

The author, Mark Feierstein, is a “senior advisor” with the Albright Stonebridge Group led by Madeleine “the price is worth it” Albright.

Needless to say, no matter how much death and destruction the US and its allies inflict on the world, foreigners abroad are not allowed to openly debate how to overthrow the US government, not unless they want to have their country bombed.

An excerpt from the op-ed states

Three in 5 Venezuelan adults, including 9 in 10 supporters of the opposition and three-quarters of unaffiliated voters, would support the military removing Maduro from office, according to a national survey I conducted for GBA Strategies in June.

So 40% don’t support a coup according to his poll, and polls in Venezuela have always been very partisan and divergent. Unsurprisingly, a pro government pollster just came up with drastically different results to a very similar question.

However, as you can see from the three cases below, even based on Feierstein’s poll, the conclusion is that about 30% support the government.

Case 1 is impossible (a negative percentage supporting a coup among government supporters)

Case 2 would mean roughly half the voters both support the government but that many of them also want it overthrown. That doesn’t make any sense at all unless they want Maduro replaced with another chavista.

Case 3 is the only scenario which renders the poll internally coherent: a negligible number of government supporters contradict themselves by saying they support the government but want it overthrown. About 30% support which is consistent with Datanalsis polls (to be clear, the ones it has done very close to elections) and actual election results. Obviously, different percentages of opposition and “neutrals” are possible in which about 30% back the government, but case 3 shows one possible coherent scenario.

Disagreeing with 30% of the population on violently ousting the government is not like disagreeing over regular government polices like taxation. Moreover, under Venezuela’s dire economic conditions, that 30% or so would be very “hard core” government support, so about 6 million people would have to very brutally repressed after any US-backed coup in order for it to succeed.

The opposition and its foreign cheerleaders will claim that this is already the case except it is the opposition who are the victims of brutal repression. Among many things that refute that characterization (like the content of Venezuela’s media’s private media every single day) is Henri Falcon’s ability to campaign all over the country during the May presidential election.

No doubt, under the guise of fighting crime and “chavista subversion” another US-backed dictatorship, like the one that briefly ruled in April of 2002, would be given carte blanche by the western media to do anything it wanted to consolidate power. The US and UK public’s astounding ignorance of the death toll from the Iraq war is only one powerful indication of what I am talking about, but there are many others. The US and its allies are always given a pass by the western media which is a very dangerous part of its killing machine.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff.