US imperialism, Venezuela, and democracy

From everything we're seeing on social media, it is about to go DOWN in Venezuela.

The US, Canada, and every South American country except Bolivia has recognized the leadership of the opposition, Juan Guaido, as the official interim president of Venezuela. Ideally, Maduro and all his cretins would give up power and leave the country voluntarily. Unfortunately, I think Chavez created (and Maduro extended) a situation where there was never going to be a peaceful solution.

Nobody wants anybody to be killed, but if you have to choose, if Pandora has already opened the box, shouldn't the original perpetrators of violence be the ones who die? This resistance to the Venezuelan government is simple self-defense. The state is defined by violence, if somebody is resisting the state, it is self-defense by definition.

The replies to this by certain left wing people or publications (like Telesur, who it's honestly hard to say shouldn't also be held liable for the human rights abuses carried out by several Latin American governments) have been variations of "But it isn't the people defending themselves from the state, it's an illegal coup against a democratic government!"

This is the argument often used against US imperialism, but is it really a useful distinction? I am an anarchist, so I recognize all government as equally illegitimate, but I'll gladly take one that actively exerts much less control over people's lives than one that is trying to micromanage every aspect of society. This isn't just a moral argument, in the sense that rights are being violated less often, but a utilitarian one - governments that try to centrally plan economies end up indirectly murdering people.

So although there is some distinction between which governments I would like to live under, "anti-imperialists" are making a purely moral argument. They say that no country has the right to dictate the sovereignty of another country. I don't disagree with this at all, in fact my issue with it is that it isn't taken far enough.

If people in the US shouldn't morally be allowed to vote and decide what happens in Venezuela, why should people in Venezuela be allowed to do the same to their neighbors? Does proximity give people the right to decide how others should live?

Somebody might object to this and say that Venezuelans all vote in their elections and the US votes in theirs and they are separate polities. This is true but ultimately meaningless. The moral reason the US can't dictate what happens in Venezuela is because it 's wrong to force people to do things just because you want them (or voted for them.)

The exact thing that most "anti-imperialists" (this mostly applies to "leftists" in this case) claim to be against, is exactly what they want on a domestic level. The US just going around the world and imposing its will is, on a moral level, the same thing as the 51% that vote for something imposing it on the other 49% of people.

If you're advocating higher taxes, banning drugs, banning guns, or voting for the government mandating ANYTHING you are doing the same thing (on a smaller scale) as the US is doing when they stage a coup on a whim.