Wednesday, May 14, 2014

An American Future Glimpse?: What To Expect Under An Authoritarian Regimes

5/14/2014

TalCual: It’s the Venezuelan Students!
We are in the presence of the brave Venezuelan students, successors to those from the “Carnival of 1928,” a student movement that emerged in Caracas, who ended up making the essence of national history for more than half a century and pushed Venezuela into modernity, or those from 1958 who helped overthrow a dictatorship and inaugurated a long period of democracy in the country 


By TalCual

Juan Ramón Jiménez, a famed Spanish poet awarded with the Nobel Prize, once answered to a question that had to do with the excesses perpetrated by the Republicans, who he once backed, during the Spanish Civil War: there can be no perfection in the immensity.

It would also be the best answer, here and now, to the Government’s attempt in criminalizing protests of students at present. Repeating and trying to generalize the few excesses that some might have committed during all the peaceful demonstrations meant to save the nation from a likely collapse of the country where we live in.

A mendacious and dirty little task that will never bear fruit; the nobility and the value of the struggle of the youth for dignifying the present and the national future are imposed little by little nationwide and worldwide. And, concomitantly, the dark face of the repression from a merciless and depraved State.

It is also worth mentioning the danger there is of thinking that students are always right. The youth, while it is prone to generosity and pride, it is also to foolishness and voluntarism. And those of us who are not young anymore, we owe them both a helping hand and an inevitable criticism.

But we believe that this struggle is just. We only need to take a look at the figures of a shattered economy or the institutional debacle or crime rates going sky high or the miserable speech from the Government that incessantly mixes blatant lies with ideological nonsense and bad faith.

Younger people, who always have to take on the difficult task of building a life for themselves, are particularly sensitive to everything that blocks their future, which is exactly what this inept and corrupt regime is doing, by having wasted one of the greatest opportunities we ever had to build a country (what we can call a developed country for real) with beautiful parks, superb universities and comfortable homes for the elderly.

So this is what Venezuelans live on a daily basis, from several weeks now, with a stunning insistence, nothing has to do with the paranoid and cynical delusions of the top government and the rest of its accomplices.

But it has to do with the UN condemning the existing repression against protesters or the words of encouragement from Spanish actor Antonio Banderas or the increasing alerts from Parliaments and Ministries, just to mention very recent events. Or, seen from the dark side, with all the paramilitary groups burning the Fermín Toro University in Barquisimeto down to the ground or assaulting the headquarters of the Catholic University in Caracas now unscrupulously and with their masks off, and so forth. Or those remaining spots where the “resistance” was camping out and authorities could find nothing more than a bit of pot, some firecrackers, a few hats with the embroidered logo of the national flag and a little money in their pockets.

So we are in the presence of the brave Venezuelan students, successors to those from the “Carnival of 28,” a student movement that emerged in Caracas, who ended up making the essence of national history for more than half a century and pushed Venezuela into modernity, or those from 1958 who helped overthrow a dictatorship and inaugurated a long period of democracy in the country.

You, servicemen, policemen and all your supporters are the ones on the wrong side of history, for being the administrators of oppression and the bad guys of this action-packed film.

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