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Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Venezuela arrests Basque internationalist


In a still obscure incident, the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN) has arrested German-Basque internationalist activist Walter Wendelin at his arrival to Caracas.


Walter Wendelin, who has German nationality but is member of Basque internationalist movement Askapena (Freedom), arrived to Venezuela from Mexico, where he had taken part in the congress of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). According to Solidaridad Pueblo Vasco (Solidarity Basque People) his journey to Venezuela was meant to explain the new proposals of the Basque Nationalist Left.


Walter Wendelin

According to the Venezuelan Association of Friends of the Basque Country, Wendelin has not been allowed access to an attorney and has been filtered that "he will be returned to Spain", what they protest that make no sense because he has never been charged with any offense in the European kingdom.

A demonstration has been called for tomorrow at the consulate of Venezuela in Bilbao.

Sources: Askapena, Gara, La Haine, Hala Bedi Irratia (live).

This arbitrary arrest may be related to the pressure put by the Spanish regime upon Venezuela, with judges and media attacking the American republic on false grounds of collaboration with ETA and FARC.


PSUV leader resigns

In a mostly unrelated episode, Venezuela Analysis reports that the former vice-president of the ruling Socialist Unified Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Alberto Muller Rojas, has resigned from politics. His advanced age and delicate health partly explain the resignation but Muller also mentioned that in the last three months the revolutionary process in Venezuela has been wretched, "everything that is going on isn't healthy for the revolutionary process". He said that the PSUV is infiltrated by the bourgeoisie and that the government is turning away from internationalism and heading towards "petty bourgeois nationalism".

Alberto Muller said some time ago to Hugo Chávez that he sits on a scorpions' nest.

4 comments:

Kepler said...

I had written I was not coming back, but this is just too funny.
Tamara is a young Australian PSF (Pendejo Sin Frontera, a term coined by former guerrilla communist Teodoro Petkoff, now oppo leftist leading Tal Cual).

She has a little blog. If you browse some of her posts you will see she is VERY young, at least in some respects.
She has very little knowledge of Venezuelan, although she has been living in Venezuelan Mérida for some years, as part of the English speaking writers for Chavez, or for that respect world history. Communism is rather a buzz world she fell in love with recently and she is still learning the basics, but she knew she would love it, so first join, then find out, right?

Anyway: she is taking an article from Panorama. I wrote something about it all in my blog ("Another one bites the dust").

The Panorama article proper is here
That is not a chavista newspaper.

He is not saying things are just going wrong in the last three months. That is Tamara's interpretation. Luckily, your mother tongue is Spanish, judge by yourself.

Müller remains an unrepentant commie but even he knows chavismo is a farce. Of course, as always, commies will blame it on some internal far-right infiltrating the process or, as I wrote, in the Líder (in our case the comandante-presidente e hijo ilustre de Simón Bolívar) not being able to listen to the people because others prevent him from doing it or on the Salvation Army.

Chávez se salva aun thanks to the fact the opposition is split into a myriad of very tiny parties, from some microscopic far-right parties to central parties to Bandera Roja to anything.
The PCV keeps hanging on to Chavez as a lice that knows that is the last dog in the street, even if Chavez keeps insulting them and telling them that jefe es jefe. Anyway: PCV alone would not get more than 1% of the votes now.

Chavez has the petrodollars every president has, but unlike in the eighties and nineties, the average price is not 12-18 dollars, but 70>. That is a lot considering the Tierra de Gracia imports even black beans nowadays and it has a lot of oil, an awful lot.

There is another old commie, Britto García. He has a blog in French and one in Spanish. He complains recently that the state is spying on him, which should not be as he is with the process. He is pissed off with the "process" (it reminds me of Kafka's Prozess rather) because it is being weakened by "the bureaucracy". In his last post he says the Soviet Union fell down because of the Nomenklatura and its bureaucracy. Es que no les gusta admitir falla alguna en su parapeto ideológico. La culpa es de un infiltrado, el sistema es perfecto.

As for the Basque: the funny thing is that the ones trying to defend the guy's rights were PROVEA, an ONG that is described as rabid opposition and CIA pawns by chavismo. Provea even complained Chavez's people's ombudsperson did not react:

http://el-nacional.com/www/site/p_contenido.php?q=nodo/130613/Internacional/Militante-vasco-abandona-Venezuela-rumbo-a-Francia

By the way, in a previous post you mentioned a Belgian MP supporting a motion for a peaceful solution (not for ETA in itself). She belongs to a centre-right, nationalistic party, NVA, not a lefty one. They are for peace, not terrorism.

Maju said...

I don't know what's Provea. In any case your source says: "Destacaron que la detención es una muestra del tipo de cooperación que Madrid espera de Venezuela".

So, they are licking Zapatero's boots, never mind that he is nobody and that who really rules Spain is the Bourbon and the rabid fascist Right (PP, Opus Dei, the Vatican, Banco Santander, BBVA, El Corte Inglés, Repsol, the N'Drangheta, etc.), who mostly hate Chávez' Venezuela because they can't exploit it as a colony, as used to be the case.

It's very strange that he's been expelled to France: with German nationality, South Basque residence (I imagine) and Mexican origin (where he had no problems in spite of being ruled by a far right government).

As for the rest, I am communist and I won't accept ever that private individuals are allowed to rob the people and accumulate wealth beyond what is reasonable and necessary. If Chávez and the PSUV in the end fail (not the first time), something else will come that will take their place. It's law of life and anyhow Capitalism is dead: only a mafioso speculator conglomerate remains and is just a matter of time that they fall victim of their own greed and selfishness, which is unable to solve or even address the real problems of the people, of humankind.

Humankind is what matters.

However Humankind is now facing itself: in a matter of decades it has to show itself able to address its own might or succumb and go extinct. Communism or extinction, that's the question.

Kepler said...

Well, it is definitely better to be a communist than a Jehova witness: you have no problem with blood transfusion.

As for Venezuela and Spain: Diosdado, one of the big "revolutionaries", signed, among others, a very bad deal for Venezuela so that Spanish businesses managed to sell at a huge overprice the construction of several power plants to Venezuela. Spanish companies get almost one billion dollars more than they should, Diosdado Cabello will probably be able to finance his life after Hugo is history.
There have been other very obscure deals. There are less open tenders now under Chavismo than before.
Marx was saying the end was close...and you keep saying that. You probably interpret Marx as others interpret the book of Revelations: we are talking about Marxist years!

Sure enough the environment is in a critical stage and there is overpopulation. That is not going to be solved by getting communism.
Until now you haven't figured out why it always fails: "it was not the real thing", "there were Troja horses", "there was WW2", etc.

Maju said...

"you have no problem with blood transfusion".

Except if it's from those AB mutants I guess. :P

"Marx was saying the end was close..."

You have not read much Marx, have you? Just cheap versions in nacomedia.

Marx lived at the early phase of Capitalism, yet he understood the phases to come: Fordism and Toyotism, though he called them "formal subsumption" and "real subsumption of Work into Capital". That's pretty bright considering he lived in the 19th century, even before mass production was invented.

He completely missed the ecological problematic though, which may be even more central.

Whatever the case, we have gone through the "formal" disciplinary phase and the "real" social phase. I have lived all my life in the latter and it's time is over, that's crystal clear.

However these things are not ruled by inexorable heavenly destinies but by more real, material, forces. And there is always more than one outcome possible at every crisis. In fact crisis are evolutionary punctuations, periods of uncertainty in the pure sense of the term: a lot of different paths are open and it's up to us to take this or that.

So in the end it's up to us.

The Russian, Chinese or Cuban revolutions were not in Marx' script. People made them happen. However they belong to the pre-1968 era, to the disciplinary Fordist era and can't be good examples to follow therefore. They also happened at the margins of the Capitalist civilization, not at the core, as Marx "predicted". This part is anyhow better explained by Lenin and his theory of imperialism.

But the end of Capitalism does not need to be the end of Humankind. We can avoid that. However we have to make it happen: it won't happen alone.

"Sure enough the environment is in a critical stage and there is overpopulation. That is not going to be solved by getting communism".

There's not such overpopulation: most people live on so little that their ecological impact is ridiculously low. It's the core Capitalist countries which cause most of the damage, as well as de-regulation and market-craze.

A socialist global system could forbid bottom trawling and direct the economy towards renewable energies, as well as cutting much of the useless production, what in turn should result in lighter work journeys and more free time, much needed to both enjoy life and participate in the administration of our reality at local and other levels.

You're so naive that you seem to think that market forces can solve the problems they have generated. That's absolutely impossible because they only have one goal: greed... at the expense of anything.

They are robbing us of everything: our production, our lives and our planet. It can't last forever of course but the longer we take to deal with them, the harder will be to fix the damage.

There's a great episode of "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series (great educative bestseller), maybe inspired in Swift's Laputa or maybe in real life, where a huge (armed) flying building has laid bare a whole planet... only to supply for a party. But eventually there's nothing else to plunder and the party is over. That's the situation we live now.

Time to fix things or time to go extinct. The planet can live without us. And we can live without parasites.