Despite the irony in that the US State department promises to reject democratic elections in Honduras because we are upholding our constitution, they are calling for everyone to define democracy in a video. Winners get an all-expenses paid trip to Washington D.C., New York, and Hollywood to meet with politicians and talent scouts. Even so, I say, let’s take up the challenge!
After a week of solid bad news for Honduras, our national team has beat Trinidad and Tobago 4-1 for the Soccer World Cup Qualifiers! This result places us at the top of the table with 13 points, above the US and Costa Rica. I had my doubts that we’d be able to do this, as Trinidad had beat us the last two times we had played them at home.
Two goals were by veteran player Carlos Pavón, one by team captain Amado Guevara, shown above, and a final goal by David Suazo, who hasn’t played with our team in a while.
Hillary Clinton is considering whether to call the events of June 28 in Honduras a “military coup”. Such a designation would mean automatic denial of US aid. Her reticence in doing so earlier shows just how debatable the situation is. A full two months have come and gone since the events.
A friend of mine sent me a link to an article explaining the US State Department’s coup lexical crisis. It seems the dictionary hasn’t been much help. The article is much clearer than my abortive attempts to explain the situation, and deserves your time, please read it
It’s worth remembering that it was Chávez and Zelaya, on June 25, who used the word “coup” to describe the Honduran Supreme Court and Congress’s decision to call Zelaya’s proposed referendum “unconstitutional” and “illegal”.
There were even full articles and videos (1, 2, 3) with the heading “Honduras coup” two days before Zelaya was removed, on June 25, from Telesur, El Universal (Venezuela) and Venezolana de Television. Hugo Chávez later admitted to have infitrated CNN years ago, and with Krupskaia Alis, an ex-employee of Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista regime as CNN’s Honduran correspondent, it was easy to lie to the world.
Consider this excerpt form Hitler’s Mein Kampf:
“the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”
I wonder if we’d find a copy of Mein Kampf in Chávez’s library, heavily annotated and stained from being in prison. Hitler and he were both imprisoned from failed attempts of gaining power through a coup. Their shared experience would naturally suggest the book to Chávez.
Consider also this quote, attributed to Lenin, that “A lie, told often enough, becomes the truth.” Chávez is using both these techniques liberally.
We need to extricate the lies from our minds, and expose them to the world. The danger of this is to create so much repetition, that people don’t care anymore. But continual exposure to the truth will set us free.
Image by John Keogh, used with a Creative Commons license
I ate in that restaurant many times. It was near my house. Peaceful protests indeed.
Sol Celeste is a song by The Ted Williams Show, a band I joined about a year ago. The video footage was shot by Javier Tovar, of Monterrey, and by NASA. Enjoy!
Al Jazeera’s Nicholas Muirhead emailed me Monday, to my great surprise. In the last few years, they have sought to establish themselves as a serious alternative news source, and clean up their image after being associated unfavorably with Al Qaeda.
Al Jazeera has a section on its website called The Listening Post in which they publish reports that are created from videos sent by users. Mr. Muirhead told me they are preparing a report on the overthrow of Manuel Zelaya’s government, and that someone recommended me to comment on it, because I had recently been to Honduras.
The questions he asked me to answer are below. Watch out for subtle red-flag words such as “kidnap”, and “coup” that could skew users’ answers.
Mr. Muirhead asked me to explain my point of view thoroughly, but apologized that my answers will probably be edited down to 30 seconds in order to fit the program’s format. Answering each question with two or three sentences took twenty seconds each!
To do myself justice, I uploaded the above four-minute video to YouTube. The topic is not the Honduran crisis as a whole, but only the media’s role in it.
I made a video yesterday that I meant to be my blog post of the day, but YouTube gets stuck when uploading it. After two attempts, I’m starting to lose hope. The video was a response to three questions Al-Jazeera Junior Reasearcher Nicholas Muirhead made me about Honduras
Sadly these videos don’t show Rixi Moncada’s comments, nor those of the Micheletti delegation. Those were the most interesting parts of the talks, in my opinion.
Parts 1 and 2:
Parts 3 and 4:
Parts 5 and 6:
Parts 7 through 10:
The above footage is of today’s peaceful demonstration, which surprisingly, was cursorily mentioned in a BBC article about continuing talks in Costa Rica.
Micheletti’s delegation is on its way to San Jose, Costa Rica to continue talks. Manuel Zelaya faces pressure from Hugo Chávez and other extreme left pundits for having even agreed to participate in these talks. They say that the talks are a dilatory measure backed by the United States.
Zelaya has recently declared several times that his delegation will no longer attend them. Nevertheless, I predict that Zelaya’s delegation will attend, because the alternative is Zelaya’s return to Honduras, and immediate arrest, with or without bloodshed.
A very interesting article from a Honduran source, Honduras this Week, The Civil Coup the World Overlooks, says that the real coup was led by Zelaya on Thursday July 25th, and his arrest on the 28th was the restoration of constitutional order.
The above video is from Thursday, when Zelaya led a mob of his supporters to storm the Air Force headquarters to remove the ballots for the referendum that the Supreme Court had ruled unconstitutional, and the Congress, illegal. Can the president break the law with impunity? Perhaps the most important statement Zelaya made was a casual comment that next year the country would be ruled by a constitutional assembly. What about the elections?
In this video he says that the the opposition of the Congress and the Supreme Court to his desires were “arbitrary and illegal” and constitute a “de facto coup”, and that a constituent assembly is “badly needed”. The Supreme Court and Congress are meant to be a check and balance on the Executive branch. Are they coupsters for upholding separation of the powers of the state?
Remember this is before his arrest on Sunday.
The truth is that Zelaya, stung by Congress and the Supreme Court’s independence, was plotting a coup of his own, ignoring the November elections and abusing the word “democracy” to the point of robbing it of all meaning.
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