US Invites Authoritarian Regimes to Conference Named a ‘Summit for Democracy’ [a ‘summit for free range prisons disguised as a democracy’]

From [HERE] The US government organized a conference of its allies which it misleadingly called a “Summit for Democracy”, but which actually featured numerous anti-democratic, far-right regimes.

The State Department invited 120 global leaders to participate in the summit on March 29 and 30. They did so virtually, via video calls.

Several of the heads of state who spoke represent governments that even Western officials, corporate media outlets, and mainstream human rights organizations have admitted are authoritarian, including Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Andrzej Duda of Poland, and Narendra Modi of India.

The Joe Biden administration also invited Pakistan’s unelected coup regime, which came to power following a US-backed regime-change operation against democratically elected Prime Minister Imran Khan in April 2022. (Islamabad, however, decided not to attend, as it faces mass protests and instability at home.)

Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni participated in the summit as well. Meloni is a defender of former fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. She started her political career as the leader of the youth wing of a fascist political party founded by war criminals from Mussolini’s regime.

Meloni’s far-right political party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) still uses the same symbols and colors of Mussolini’s fascist movement. An important leader of her party has a bust of the late dictator in his house, and was investigated for doing Nazi salutes.

The Biden administration organized the first so-called “Summit for Democracy” in 2021, in attempt to unify US allies in a bloc to wage a new cold war on China and Russia, which were not invited to either summit.

These intentions were made obvious when the US pressured all invitees to sign a joint statement denouncing Russia over the proxy war in Ukraine. The left-wing governments in Brazil and Mexico refused to support Washington’s denunciation of Moscow.

For its part, China’s Foreign Ministry condemned the summit as an attempt to “draw lines between countries in the world according to US criteria and interfere in their affairs based on US interests”, in a way that “reflects how arrogant, intolerant, selfish and domineering the US has always been, and how it contravenes and tramples on democracy as part of the common values of humanity”.

The US government exposed its cynical political designs by inviting Ukraine and Taiwan to participate in the summit, despite the fact that Taiwan island is not a country, but rather a province of the People’s Republic of China.

When the US government normalized relations with China in 1972, it signed the first of three communiqués, in which it legally recognized that Taiwan is part of China.

Violating its formal diplomatic commitments, the Biden administration publicly illustrated Washington’s support for separatists in China’s Taiwan province by inviting them to both of the so-called “Summits for Democracy”.

Ukraine’s leader Volodymy Zelensky spoke at the conference as well, in spite of his brutal attack on democracy at home. Zelensky’s regime has banned all communist and socialist parties, while imposing some of the most aggressive anti-worker legislation in the world, suspending collective bargaining rights and essentially making it illegal to form a union.

Even the New York Times reluctantly acknowledged that Ukraine has imposed authoritarian control over the media. While Zelensky’s supporters maintain that this is necessary due to the ongoing war, his draconian crackdown began well before Russia invaded. In 2021, Zelensky’s regime banned critical media outletsdeemed to be “pro-Russian”, while arbitrarily persecuting and arresting opposition politicians.

Two NATO members were not invited to the so-called “Summit for Democracy”: Türkiye (formerly known as Turkey) and Hungary. This was clearly a politically motivated sign of disapproval by the Biden administration, because the two countries have tried to balance the West against Russia, maintaining good relations with both sides.

The democratically elected socialist governments in Venezuela and Nicaragua were not invited either. Instead, Washington invited right-wing US-sponsored opposition activists from both Latin American countries, including Lesther Alemán, who played a major role in a violent coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018.

Also participating in the summit was the notorious CIA cutout the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which Washington has used to meddle in foreign countries all across the planet, organizing regime-change operations and funding “color revolutions”.

As a key foreign-policy strategy, the Biden administration has weaponized rhetoric about “democracy” to advance US geopolitical interests.

In his first State of the Union address in 2022, Biden claimed that Washington’s new cold war on China and Russia was a “battle between democracy and autocracies”.

But European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said otherwise in a speech in October, criticizing the deceptive “democracies vs. authoritarians” framing. [MORE]