“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:
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 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, 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.
