Posted on 12/18/2004 8:31:31 AM PST by Kitten Festival
Hugo Chavez has begun to kill and repress selectively Until now, the murders -- and they add up to about 100 -- have been random.
Someone would fire at a crowd from a bridge and 20 unarmed Caracans would fall dead. There was nothing personal. The objective was to kill anybody. Or, some gunmen would fire against some peaceful demonstrators on a public square, killing Mrs. Maritza Ron, who had traveled to Venezuela to vote against Chavez. They killed her because she was there, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing personal. It could have been a child, a blind man or a taxi driver. Anybody.
That has changed. In the past several days, three people have been murdered in suspicious confrontations with the police.
(Excerpt) Read more at firmaspress.com ...
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I wish that rabbit had finished the job.
5.56mm
I couldn't say it better.
Wherever Jimmah goes, dictators and high oil prices follow.
I might have read it if you had posted the whole thing. Do we really have to excerpt "Firmas Press"?
You won't be disappointed.
Chavez and fear
Carlos Alberto Montaner
Hugo Chavez has begun to kill and repress selectively Until now, the murders -- and they add up to about 100 -- have been random.
Someone would fire at a crowd from a bridge and 20 unarmed Caracans would fall dead. There was nothing personal. The objective was to kill anybody. Or, some gunmen would fire against some peaceful demonstrators on a public square, killing Mrs. Maritza Ron, who had traveled to Venezuela to vote against Chavez. They killed her because she was there, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing personal. It could have been a child, a blind man or a taxi driver. Anybody.
That has changed. In the past several days, three people have been murdered in suspicious confrontations with the police. Apparently, the agents were looking for those responsible for the death of prosecutor Danilo Anderson, who was blown up by a bomb placed in his car.
Will they find out who was the author? Maybe. One of the key persons in the investigation of the explosion, Mr. Alberto Carias, Under Secretary for Homeland Security in the Chavez government, is a real expert on the subject. During the era of democracy, he placed his first bomb in a church. Later, he was arrested by police on 16 occasions, as he himself confessed to the media with great panache.
To these bloody deeds must be added the judiciary's harassment of the opposition. Chavez sics the prosecutors and judges on his adversaries the way someone sics the dogs in a hunt. He summons the Mayor of Baruta, Henrique Capriles Radonski, constantly before the courts. Some of the judges appointed by Chavism have received their training on the defendant's bench. The closest relationship Controls Court Judge Mikael J. Moreno has had with the law has been as a defendant in two cases of homicide with a firearm, attributed to him when he was a police officer.
It was precisely this swell judge from that swell court who issued a warrant so a large detail of armed policemen could raid the Hebraic School in Caracas, in a futile search for weapons and explosives, at a time when 1,500 innocent children were receiving instruction.
At that exact same time, no surprise, Chavez was visiting his "brothers" in Iran and later traveled to Libya to receive the prestigious Human Rights Award presented annually by that seraphic representative of the Islamic world named Khaddafi.
It's as if Chavez wanted to underline his permanent commitment to anti-Semitism, patent ever since his famous letter of solidarity with Carlos Ilich Ramirez, "The Jackal," imprisoned in Paris for a lifetime of crime motivated by his hatred for Israel. It was a way to memorialize the ever-vigorous influence exerted on the lieutenant colonel by the late Argentine fascist Enrique Ceresole, who advocated a Libyan-style dictatorship as the solution to the ills of Latin America.
Why has Chavez changed his tactics and now bares his teeth and bites with greater ferocity? Because he needs to intimidate his adversaries. He has to scare them. He has to paralyze them with fear so they will obey. Nobody can feel secure in Venezuela any longer. In the five years since Chavez has occupied the presidency, he has seized the courts, the Parliament, the armed forces and almost all the regional governments. He still has the communications media and the labor unions to go, but that will be taken care of.
To reach that goal, however, he must first frighten the Venezuelans. There is no dictatorship without obedience and no illegitimate obedience without fear. Will he achieve his purpose? Very possibly. It all depends on how much harm he's willing to inflict on the Venezuelans. Unlimited harm, it seems.
Truth is, the international community should do something to halt the escalation of violence and violations of the law unleashed by Chavez in Venezuela. After all, this spasm of repression is the direct consequence of an unpardonable international injustice: the irresponsible legitimization of the fraudulent elections of Aug. 16 by former President Jimmy Carter and the Secretary General of the OAS, Cesar Gaviria.
By validating that monstrous swindle, the Carter Center and the OAS demoralized and disarticulated the opposition, placing all of the nation's reins in Chavez's hands. Then they washed their hands and left. But that's not even the worst part. The worst part is that Chavez, arrogant and willing to kill, will metastasize throughout Latin America. We'll see.
Diciembre 14, 2004
The CIA under Bush takes some of the blame as well. Chavez was nearly overthrown, but the CIA dropped the ball and Chavez managed to recover.
Some people blame Bush for not responding quickly enough, but knowing what we know about the problems in the CIA I think the likelier explanation is that he was never properly informed what the stakes were. There are a LOT of leftists in the CIA who probably think Chavez is just fine.
It was a mistake to let Chavez live. Either the coup should have taken place successully or not at all. The worst possible outcome was a botched coup attempt.
That was a Catch-22 situation for Bush. Had he intervened at the time, he would have been cursed and damned by the media. And since he did not intervene, he's being damned for that, too.
I'm with you. If you strike the king, you must kill the king.
Thank you. Carter should not be allowed out of Georgia.
Enough talking about Hugo Chavez. Time to roll back his influence in Latin America. Secretary Rice, John Negroponte, and Peter Goss are all saying the right things, but where is the action plan? We need to increase support from DoD (which is silent)and, most all, Congress. Write your representatives and Senators, as well as SECDEF, to let them know that action on Chavez is imperative.
The Tyrannicide and the Catholic Church.
There is nothing improper about the commentaries made by the Evangelical preacher, Pat Robertson, referring to the possible tyrannicide of the Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chavez.
Tyrannicide has been sanctioned as morally compatible with the teachings of the Catholic Church, based on the social doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas. Chavez has reaffirmed his intentions of establishing in Venezuela a genocidal regime following the Cuban model and the commands of Fidel Castro.
What are we going to wait for?, Allow Chavez to surpass Castro’s dreadful record of 20,000 shot by firing squads, and for more than half million of Venezuelans to suffer political imprisonment as the Cubans have suffered in Castro’s dungeons inside the Island prison of Cuba.
Chavez, like Hitler, was elected democratically only to become a dictator later. Castro kept well hidden his aims of establishing a Stalinist regimen in Cuba until he consolidated this power over the Cuban people. But, as Hitler exposed his diabolic plan in “Mein Kamp”, Chavez has no only openly and publicly bragged about his plans of imposing a communist regimen following the Cuban model, but he has put Venezuela under Castro’s control using his thugs and repressive apparatus to keep subjugated the people of Venezuela.
If Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez’s life had been terminated, how many lives would have been saved and how much suffering humanity would have been spared.
In fact, tyrannicide is so justified that His Holiness Pius XII gave his approval for the plot by a group from the German’s army intelligence service planning to kill Hitler.
For St. Thomas Aquinas, tyrannicide is to opt for the lesser of two evils. Pacifism is a morally correct personal option, but is an option that is morally unaceptable for the state. A person might choose not to resist an aggression to the extreme of loosing his life, but a government has the duty to defend his people.
A pacifist might loose his life without offering resistance; but he cannot impassible allow in his presence the murder of an innocent person. Those are basic principles of Catholic teachings that are being ignored in the middle of the assault of the totalitarian correct ideological movement where political correct positions prevail even though they might be morally incorrect options.
The Carter-Chavez Connection
By Steven F. Hayward
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 26, 2004
In this morning’s Wall Street Journal online edition, Jimmy Carter attempts to respond to critics of his role in legitimizing the recent Venezuelan referendum on the loathsome Hugo Chavez regime. The nub of the problem is this: While exit polls conducted by the very reliable American firm of Penn, Schoen, and Berland showed Chavez losing by a large margin (59 – 41), the official results put Chavez free and clear by a vote of 58 to 41 percent.
How could the exit polls be nearly 40 points off? The short answer is, they weren’t. Chavez, whose anti-democratic, pro-Castro sympathies are openly proclaimed (he tried to block the constitutionally-mandated referendum for months), stole the election. “I think it was massive fraud,” Doug Schoen told Michael Barone at U.S. News and World Report. “Our internal sourcing tells us that there was fraud in the [Venezuelan] central commission.” There are widespread reports of irregularities and evidence of fraud, many of them ably recorded by Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the Wall Street Journal last week. Carter is untroubled by any of this, and declares that Chavez won “fair and square.”
The remarkable thing about Carter’s “rebuttal” to his critics is that he does not offer any refutation of the criticisms. Instead, his article reads like a puff-piece for the wonderful character of the Carter Center, and offers up a fog of sentimentality. “The Carter Center has monitored more than 50 troubled democratic elections, all of them either highly contentious or a nation's first experience with democracy,” he writes, neglecting to tell readers that he has opposed the use of independent exit polls in most of those elections. In this case, Carter simply waives away the exit poll results as though they didn’t exist. Incredibly he writes: “During the voting day, opposition leaders claimed to have exit-poll data showing the government losing by 20 percentage points, and this erroneous information was distributed widely.” Erroneous information? Carter apparently believes that he is not only entitled to his own opinion, but also to his own facts. (Neither does he answer or rebut any other specific allegations about the election.)
Carter has a long history of coddling dictators and blessing their elections, and among his complex motivations is his determination to override American foreign policy when it suits him. In the famous 1990 election in Nicaragua, Carter, along with most of the liberal Democratic establishment in Washington, openly hungered for a Sandinista victory as a way of discrediting the Reagan-Bush support for the Contras. Sandinista strongman Daniel Ortega had visited Carter in the U.S. and called him “a good friend,” and Carter consistently downplayed or excused reports of Sandinista pre-election thuggery and voter intimidation. When the early vote count showed the Sandinistas losing by a landslide, the Sandinista junta ordered a news blackout and appeared on the brink of canceling the election. Although Carter pressured the Sandinistas to relent, he also told opposition candidate Violetta Chamorro not to claim victory until Ortega had conceded defeat—potentially disastrous advice if Ortega had ignored Carter and nullified the election. Carter returned to the U.S. bitterly disappointed that his Sandinista pals had been turned out. (Among other ridiculous things Carter said about Nicaragua under Communist rule was that there was “as much free enterprise, private ownership, as exists in Great Britain.”)
There is speculation that Carter blessed Chavez’s stolen election to prevent further violence, but it should also be kept in mind that Carter also enjoys seeing the interests of the United States, especially when defined by Republican presidents, humiliated. Chavez’s anti-Americanism will now intensify, thanks in part to the worst ex-President in American history, who has never been content to let his four years of ruinous rule be his last public deed.
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