Against Degradation

In today's (Thursday) El Nacional, the poet Joaquin Marta Sosa has an essay in the editorial section of the paper, entitled "Contra la degradacion" (Against Degradation). Some excerpts:


"I think that the politics of liquidating one's enemy without a second thought (whatever the enemy's nature might be) are the serpent of the fascist, stalinist egg, and they are also reactionary.

Finally, I notice that the one similarity between Bush and Chavez is that both of them take the laurels for having produced the most terrible increase of people in poverty. With Bush, 1.7 million in the past year; with Chavez, 2.3 million. They can both give each other a heartless handshake in honor of this unprecedented flowering of poverty."

"And I read the Romanian Adam Boder, jailed early on by a self-centered, repressive and 'leftist and revolutionary' regime. He writes that 'those regimes harm a people in such a terrible manner by getting them used to a primitive and meaningless existence, by producing helpless people who cannot determine their own destiny, and whose only action is resignation or uncondicional surrender.'"

"The conversation with my acquaintance ended when I said to him, 'this is the most reactionary and retrograde government that I have ever seen and we have no option but to prevent it from ransacking our present and future.' After three seconds of silence he answered, 'you're right.' Well then, the referendum, I say now, is not a means of escaping Chavismo but instead it is a means of stopping another retrograde revolution from ruining another country and its people."