COMMENTARY: By Malcolm Evans
What have we become if to survive in our so-called “free world” we must turn a blind eye to cold-blooded genocide, must arm ourselves to oppose our major trading partner, must support a contrived war to defeat an adversary that no longer exists, (lest its new form otherwise achieves its potential) must sanction some and not others, trade with some and not others — and now must, yet again, be silent as another sovereign nation is brazenly plundered for its wealth.
US President Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela is not a “police operation” against a criminal “fugitive,” nor is it part of an “escalating pressure campaign” against a hostile regime.
It’s none of the things that the White House and our media claims, faithfully copying and pasting stories supplied by The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post.
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Blithely asserting the right to “run” Venezuela and “take” the country’s vast oil reserves, in a textbook example of the 19th century colonialism, Trump’s actions brazenly violate international law and numerous entrenched conventions. And all of it whitewashed by our media in euphemistic pseudo-legalese, to impress those gullible enough.
With Trump not only flouting the US Constitution but no longer even pretending that this is about anything other than the theft of another country’s resources, bragging that US oil companies will begin “taking a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” what does it say about us that we accept such brigandry?
How, in God’s name, have we allowed ourselves to be swayed by the dribblings of a scurrilous misogynist, the associate of a convicted paedophile and a creature so altogether odious that, in any other context, we wouldn’t be seen dead with him?
Brandishing his big black marker, Trump, the unabashed narcissist, has changed the US Constitution from; “We the People . . . ” to now read: “ME the People”!
When can we expect those we have entrusted to defend the principles we claim to represent, to stand up and say something?
Or is it simply a matter of us being too gutless ourselves, too intimidated, too craven, to break ranks, step forward and say: “The Emperor has no clothes!”
Malcolm Evans is an independent New Zealand award-winning cartoonist and commentator.
