Those exquisite revolutionary moments: shutting up, literally, those who do not agree with you

When I started this series of posts with the suggestive title, I thought that by next week will have rolled through I would have had perhaps three posts. I was wrong, as the government is cornered into a public relations disaster. It is Friday, I have already 4 posts up and there is still three days of direct conflict to go. I am sure that more exquisitely revealing moments will come.

Yesterday I was writing “as it has been usual in such moment of crisis, cadenas start succeeding each other”. Well, today we are into our second cadena (1). This second cadena is particularly disgusting: Chavez is using the “Copa America” for political purposes: the excuse of the cadena is to inaugurate the stadium of Merida. I suppose that the Conmebol might want to look at how come Chavez can say “viva la vino tinto” and “viva la revolucion bolivariana” in the same breath inaugurating a football stadium that should host an international tournament in a few weeks (2). And what could one say about the words of the Merida state governor, Florencio Porras, who supposedly supervised the work? He thanked Chavez saying that nothing would have been possible without him. A sycophantic speech that gives nausea.

But fortunately this cadena was short. It lasted barely 15 minutes. Then again Chavez was probably very tired, he spoke for more than two hours at noon in the first cadena of the day.

That cadena was in front of some military group. I did not have the heart to watch it, I was at home for lunch and I did not want to spoil the rest of the day. But in the few minutes I watched, I could observe how Chavez was twisting Venezuelan history, of course trying to minimize the damage that the EU and US Senate declarations of yesterday meant. Need I say more? Need I go into the inaccuracies? Need I go into the vile stirring up of anti US sentiment?

Why that? Well, as I have already said when the going get tough, Chavez goes cadenas. But the timing is also crucial here. As today, Friday, is that last day of the week as far as talk shows and extensive news report are concerned, it was important that Chavez shut up the noon news services. But tonight of course he could not do yet another 2 hours cadena. The man has his physical limits after all. But right when the audience of Alo Ciudadano starts going up, he stuck in a short cadena hoping to thwart a further rise in ratings as people might think that it is all over for the evening. Chavismo mind works that simply. Last night the cadena blocked the expected apparition of Marcel Granier in Alo Ciduadano. That is OK, he is invited again tonight at 7 PM; announced loudly by Globovision, and we will see if at 7 we have yet another cadena. Maybe Chavez was just saving himself to shut up Granier once more.

So that is the only the pseudo-argument left for Chavez, silence the folks that are opposing him by using his power to enforce simultaneous broadcast. Or insulting his adversaries. He did today, with veiled words but his vice president had no such qualms. Jorge Rodriguez is on record today as saying that all those who oppose RCTV closing, those who support Granier and RCTV right to remain in the air are “cipayos”, that is, mercenaries. That is right, yours truly is now an official enemy of the regime, a mercenary working for the US and other obscure interests. That Rodriguez has no way to prove such words is immaterial, he is a bully and he uses the same power to abuse of his boss to silence any eventual opponent by disqualifying them from the start. The same and only strategy left to chavismo for a long time, a strategy that can be easily observed in the comment section of opposition blogs. These guys are one track mind ideologues.

What to do with the words of Rodriguez? Remind folks that a vice president that speaks like that could not have been possibly a fair umpire when he was directing the Venezuelan board old elections, CNE? Does that give me now the right to insult him by calling him, say, little shit? No point in wasting time on such an inferior human being, someone who has managed to go under the gutter, deep down into the sewer until at some point he will open the concentration camps where people like me will be dumped to rot. He is that type of individual, he is a killer.

So there you have today, in full splendor, chavismo intolerance, obtuseness, abuse, and what not. Two exquisite moments in a single post.

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1) a detailed explanation of what a cadena is can be found here.

2) "la vino tinto" is the national futbol/soccer team of Venezuela, for its burgundy like color. Note: Chavez is not a soccer fan, he is a baseball one. But to close RCTV, he will lower himself to recruit soccer.

-The end-