Nazareth made the comment in an exclusive interview with the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) during his trip to Iran on June 10-11. He was part of a high-ranking Venezuelan delegation led by President Nicolas Maduro on the visit to Tehran.
The Venezuelan official, who also serves as his country’s vice-president for cultural and tourism affairs, told IRNA that the 20-year comprehensive document Tehran and Caracas had signed pursued specific goals in the new emerging world.
He said that the document is one of the achievements of the Venezuelan delegation’s visit to Iran and has been prepared based on the experience gained from brotherly ties between the two sides after the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Nazareth referred to Iran as a totally-independent country that has made progress in all fields in the more than 40 years after its revolution.
He said that Venezuela has been politically independent over the past two centuries and has been learning how to act independently in the past five years amid cruel sanctions imposed by the West.
But, he added, the country is not reached total economical and cultural independence yet, which needs real governance to materialize.
We should be independent like Iran in order to build a new international pole to make a new world where new relations are created among powers, the Venezuelan minister noted.
He said that the 20-year comprehensive document signed by Tehran and Caracas pursues specific goals for the new emerging world.
Those goals include a specific and effective agenda put within the framework of brotherly ties to deal with challenges and achieve co-existence as well as mutual welfare and development while helping the two countries build an axis that will serve as a priority for the world’s economies, Nazareth added.
Nothing separates Iran and Venezuela and the two will become more united, he stressed.
He also referred to the direct flights that were established between the capitals of the two countries as of June 18 and said that the move will help facilitate tourism as well as exchange of goods and manpower between the two sides.
Further in his interview, the Venezuelan minister of information criticized the West for its double-standard approach toward freedom of speech.
He made the comment in response to an IRNA question on why the media team accompanying the Venezuelan president’s delegation was stopped in a European country on their way to Iran.
He said that the West, on one hand, claims to be defending free speech but, on the other hand, silences journalists or a news network for refusing to accept its agenda.
Nazareth noted that the West is also imposing its agenda when it comes to social media because these platforms work by algorithms designed in line with Western thoughts and quieten any voice expressing opposition to them.
He said that the ban imposed on Russia’s RT news network earlier this year is an example of the West's trying to silence a channel that broadcast news never shown by Western media.
He said that the existing social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram – thanks to working with artificial intelligence progressed in line with the Western agenda – show news and stories based on the personal information these platforms have already gathered about their users.
Therefore, he added, there are numerous versions of a single story that users in different parts of the world will receive based on what the algorithm has designed for them.
To confront such a hegemony by the West in the media sector, countries should have their own domestic networks in order to prevent real facts from being destroyed, Nazareth noted.
The senior Venezuelan official continued to say that the West, to further progress its hegemonic agenda, also tries to portray certain countries as enemies and prepare the ground for military aggression against them.
He said that Iran, Venezuela, Russia, China, Cuba, and Nicaragua are some of those countries, about which the West fabricates an image and presents it to the world in millions of versions.
But what is at danger most, Nazareth noted, is the West’s infiltration into our societies to make people feel indifferent to what is going on in their countries; this way they promote individualism – something that makes it impossible to promote religious, political, and revolutionary values.
Despite military and economic sanctions as well as rifts created by the West in our countries, our revolutions have gone ahead, he said, stressing that we should find a way out of this psychological and digital warfare.
This warfare has been waged with the aim of preventing countries from attaining cultural governance and that’s what is at risk in the world, the Venezuelan official said.
Confronting that, he added, depends on what we plan for the next 100 years.
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