Now, some may think your Eyewitness is just “t’rowin’ talk” when he dubs that cartoon character on our western border, “mad”. The fella isn’t mad like “wacko” or “looney” or even a “madcap” – who is “eccentric”, or weird”. Maduro’s so mad for power, he’s willing to play out the “farce” that follows “tragedy” that Marx warned us about. A man who threatens war to hold on to power when over seven million of his citizens have fled like beggars to neighbouring countries is beyond sanity. This former bus driver proves he isn’t guided by reason – but passions of the basest kind. The kind of passion that motivates demented dictators who’re convinced they have the key to Utopia. And by golly, they don’t mind if EVERYONE has to die while they “prove” their point! Older folks remember Burnham and his “cooperative socialism” panacea, don’t you? Look how more than half of our population lives abroad!!
Maduro can talk fat, because he has fighter jets and tanks and troops manned by officers galore who’re now backing him because of Chavez’s seizure of power with their support. After all, they’ve been asked to run almost all institutions – including the sputtering oil industry now being revived by Chevron. They live high off the hog – emaciated as the latter may be!! So, yes, we GOTTA take Maduro’s megalomaniac-sounding threats seriously. Remember when he had his navy seize two of our fishing boats and their crew a couple years ago? A US vessel was in the vicinity, and he was thumbing his nose at the Americans as much as threatening us.
He must figure that with all the challenges Biden’s facing domestically – a sputtering economy, a resurgent China, plummeting polls now that Trump has signalled he’ll be running again, Biden won’t want to embark on a foreign expedition. But he chooses to ignore that one way Biden can placate the resurgent right – which received 74 million votes last time – would be to follow JFK’s lead in the sixties and show he’s tough on “commies”! At that time Guyana was on the American bad books while today, Venezuela’s earned their ire”! As the world turns – so do the tables get turned!
But the real madness is that Maduro’s basing his border threat on the claims of an angry junior lawyer who represented Venezuela at the 1899 Arbitral Commission. He lost for Chrissake!! What else do you expect him to say?? He was a mediocre lawyer? Prevost-Mallet claimed there was a “deal” between the UK and Russian arbitrators to “fix” the border in favour of the UK. The claim was published fifty years after the Award and after he’d died!
And most importantly, after all the arbitrators had died. What madness!
…and transforming swords
Not long after President Ali assumed office, he vowed to create a “Corridor of Unity and Oneness” on the East Coast. Well, today, it’s all Guyana and your Eyewitness remembers a passage from Isaiah. He paraphrases:
In days to come/ the mountain of the Corridor of Unity and Oneness / shall be established as the highest of aspirations, / and shall be raised above the fray;/ all the nations shall stream to it.
Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the Corridor of Unity, / to the house of Oneness;/ that they may teach us their ways/ and that we may walk in their paths.’/ For across the land shall go forth instruction, / and the word of the message of Oneness.
The Commission shall judge between the ethnic groups,/ and shall arbitrate for many peoples/ they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,/ and their spears into pruning-hooks;/ Groups shall not lift up sword against groups, / neither shall they learn war anymore.”
…the PNC’s disarray
Your Eyewitness keeps worrying about the survival of the PNC – essential to our democratic credentials. Could it be that some of the contestants for power want to destroy it and start anew??
