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Thursday, October 8, 2009

Honduras and Colombia: the double standards of Liberalism


Preliminary note:
Liberalism as understood on planet Earth, not just in the USA, where it's often used as synonym of Social-Democracy and even Socialism. In other words: Liberalism as the paradigmatic bourgeois ideology of "free market" and "democracy".

Catalan professor, Vincenç Navarro, makes a good analysis at Rebelión of Liberal hypocrisy and double standards by comparing the cases of Honduras and Colombia. In both cases the presidents have tried to modify the legal frame in order to extend their mandates, but while in the case of Honduras many Liberals like the famous Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa have ferviently defended the coup against Zelaya on such grounds, in the case of Colombia, where human rights are a cruel joke and where the president Uribe is a well known narcotrafficant, they have not even raised a finger in protest.

Of course, he does not forget to mention historical examples of this Liberal hypocrisy, as when the Liberal Catalan and Spanish bankers financed the bloody coup of Gral. Franco or when the same kind of Liberal ideologues, like the infamous Milton Friedman, openly supported the criminal takeover of Gral. Pinochet in Chile.

He also denounces the active intervention of Colombian death squads, one of the main pillars of Uribe's fascist (ops, I mean "liberal" and "democratic" - wonder what was I thinking) power in the devastated Colombian narcostate, in the Honduran coup. Intervention that of course has not been denounced by the "liberals" like Vargas Llosa at any moment. He concludes: do you imagine what would have the liberal media said if troops of the Chávez grovernment would have arrived in Honduras to support Zelaya? Their reaction would have been hystrionic! These are examples not just of the deep incoherence of the defenders of individual freedoms but also of their double moral standards, extremely malleable according to their class interests.
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