http://www.sabinabecker.com/2013/07/compare-and-contrast-dissident-vs-dissident.html

Compare and Contrast: Dissident vs.
“dissident”<http://www.sabinabecker.com/2013/07/compare-and-contrast-dissident-vs-dissident.html>
July
9, 2013 — Sabina Becker

[image: snowden-vs-yoani]

“Both denounced their country. Guess which one can go home?

“Edward Snowden: Forced to seek exile in various countries for denouncing
crimes of espionage committed by the US (his country).

“Yoani Sánchez: Travels all over the world ‘denouncing’ Cuba. Comes and
goes as she pleases.

” ‘When we have eliminated the Communist threat, the normal order of things
will return.’ — Adolf Hitler”

I should also add that this picture is spy vs. spy…or rather, former spy
vs. current one. Yoani Sánchez works for the
CIA.<http://ratb.org.uk/news/cuba/311-circus-yoani-sanchez>



The ironies of the Venezuelan opposition, part
30<http://www.sabinabecker.com/2013/07/the-ironies-of-the-venezuelan-opposition-part-30.html>
July
9, 2013 — Sabina Becker

[image: prism-snowden]

*“PRISM. Coups d’état. Data of non-allied governments. Data of allied
governments. Presidential intimacies. Narco-information. Global passwords.
Hyper-Trojan viruses. Bombing co-ordinates. Secret bases. Infiltrated
agents. Double agents. Counter-triple-agent double agents. Transactions.
Social networks. Lottery results.”*

Welcome to the 30th installment of VenOpIronía! Lots of hilarious ironies
to wade through today, kiddies, so let’s get to it. First up, a little
message from the Vatican to the oppos, and to their supporters in the
church hierarchy…namely, a cease-and-desist
order:<http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/n232368.html>

*During a recent trip to the Vatican by the Apostolic Nuncio to Venezuela,
Pietro Parolini, Pope Francis asked him to tell the Venezuelan
ecclesiastical hierarchy not to mix itself up in politics, nor to take
sides.*
*

Pope Francis also asked Parolini to use his good offices to intervene so
that the student opposition members who are still camped up in the
Apostolic Nunciature in a “hunger strike” leave the place. “The Nunciature
cannot continue to be used by any political partisans of Venezuela. This is
not our role as church of Christ, which must serve toward reconciliation,”
said the Pontifex to his representative in Venezuela.

Immediately upon his return to Venezuela, Parolini expressed his
disagreement with the “hunger strike” held by student and opposition
leaders of the University of Los Andes, during his speech in the 100th
Venezuelan Episcopal Assembly, in Caracas. Another surprising detail is the
invitation from the Nuncio to the Minister of the Interior, Justice and
Peace, Rodríguez Torres, to attend the assembly.

It is known that Pietro Parolini has already informed of the Pope’s wishes
to the rest of the ecclesiastic hierarchy in the land, and asked the
students who are still in the Nunciature to abandon the seat and end the
protest, seeking out dialogue with the national government to solve the
crisis, which has pitted university authorities of opposition tendencies
against the government of President Nicolás Maduro.
*

*Last April, during the Regina Caeli oration, Pope Francis asked the
violent protesters of Venezuela to seek the “path of peace”, and exhorted
politicians and the populace to “reject firmly any type of violence, and
establish a dialogue based in truth, in mutual recognition.”*

Translation mine.

And when you have a pope with such a sniffy reptutation for his activities
(or lack of same) during the ugly days of the Argentine Junta saying that,
you know that something has turned. This is the same Venezuelan apostolic
nunciature that has shielded cop-raping thugs like Nixon Moreno from
Venezuelan justice in the past, without so much as a peep of protest from
Rome. And the archbishops and cardinals of Venezuela have long been in the
pocket of the anti-Chavista oligarchy. The last two popes tolerated and
indulged their putschism; this one has made it known that he won’t.
(Perhaps he learned something from Argentina’s past? Let us pray…)

So, it looks as though the oligarchy has been taken down a peg by the
topmost tier of the church hierarchy…the same that for the past ten years
or more has been supporting them tacitly while the Venezuelan archbishops
have been supporting them openly. I had no hope of anything changing before
this, so this was kind of a nice surprise. Looks like Pope Francis might
just be good for something besides talk, after all.

Meanwhile, at Boing Boing, there’s an oppo sneering at Edward Snowden’s
choice of 
Venezuela<http://boingboing.net/2013/07/08/snowden-and-venezuela-my-biza.html>
as
a place of refuge, and kvetching about how she and her mother had one of
their little putschist bitch sessions wiretap-recorded and played back to
the public on TV. She makes out like they’re just ordinary citizens being
spied on irrationally by a paranoid government out to “get” them, but read
down far enough, and you’ll see that they most certainly are not:

*My mother, Maruja Tarre, was an outspoken critic of the Chavez government
and she is often on television commenting on Venezuelan foreign policy. She
is a columnist for the country’s oldest newspaper, El Universal, and is
followed by thousands on Twitter. What happened to us would be like if a
Fox News talk show acquired and then aired a tape of Donna Brazile telling
her daughter the Democratic Party strategy seems to be failing.*

Nice attempt to co-opt the Dems and make out like VTV is FUX Snooze there,
Isabel Lara. But it’s not only disingenuous, it’s utterly full of shit. The
real FUX Snooze of Venezuela is Globovisión, a privately owned opposition
channel, and the paper Maruja Tarre writes for, *El Universal*, is a
far-right rag in the same vein as that station, and the *Washington Times*.
A more apt comparison is if a group of Republican conspirators against
Barack Obama were exposed in all their whiny glory on PBS.

And yes, I have heard those bitch sessions myself on both *La Hojilla*
and *Dando
y Dando*, and they did not sound like they were “edited to ridicule”
anyone. They were placed in context, and if the speakers sounded
ridiculous, it’s because they just ARE. Opposition marches against Chávez
were invariably flaccid and poorly attended; the popular support was never
there, and these two knew it. And they were pissed off at the fact. Even in
Washington, where there’s far more sympathy for their viewpoint than there
is in Caracas, these people come off as petulant rich brats who throw
periodic tantrums and are still not terribly convincing. There are only so
many times you can threaten to hold your breath and turn blue, after all.
And their racism is well known to the world at large, and unlikely to be
appreciated by a US president who, like Chavecito, is of mixed race.

Above all, though, I’m laughing at them for their inability to recognize
the tremendous irony inherent in their whole *pitiyanki* stance. They hate
their own country, and worship the United States; it’s their idea of a
capitalist paradise of freedom of speech, association, guns, overpriced
(and surprisingly shoddy) healthcare and education, and general farcical
insanity. And yet, there too, they were indubitably being wiretapped, spied
on, and having their privacy invaded nine ways till Friday. Nobody was, or
is, exempt. The NSA spied on Chavecito for several
years,<http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/9829> and
the CIA is well known to have supported every opposition “protest”,
including the ones that led up to the failed coup of ’02. The US is not
merely another police state; it’s a global police EMPIRE.

And yet this ridiculous twit, Isabel Lara, thinks *Venezuela* is the
“surveillance state”, when its authorities were only doing due diligence on
a group of known right-wing putschists with US ties, who repeatedly tried
to murder President Chávez, and who are now trying to do the same to
President Maduro — under the same old “protest” smokescreen as ever?

No, I don’t expect them to understand THAT irony, either.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Digest: <mailto:[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Post: <mailto:[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/

<*> Your email settings:
    Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join
    (Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
    [email protected] 
    [email protected]

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    [email protected]

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Reply via email to