Venezuela marks International Day of
Peace with Orwellian contradiction
By David Codrea, September 26th 2014
JPFO writer contributor, © 2014.
Nicolás Maduro
“Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro launched a nationwide disarmament program in Caracas over the weekend as the head of state tried to cap the alarming rates of violence endemic in his country, which has the second-highest homicide rate in the world behind Honduras,” Olivia Crellin of VICE News reported Tuesday. “The plan, announced on September 20 — International Day of Peace — will see the Venezuelan government establish a $47 million fund to help establish 60 centers where citizens can voluntarily surrender their firearms.”
Note that’s just to establish the aptly-pegged surrender centers. This is hardly a “buyback,” itself an intentionally deceptive term, even though the intent of some in this country (if you consider New Jersey to still be part of it) leaves little doubt the end game is the same, whether you rule in a socialist hellhole or are just trying your best to create one.
In Venezuela, the penalties for disobedience, such as “being caught with a firearm ... can land you with up to 20 years in prison,” are supposed to be enough. Demonstrably, with that homicide rate, it obviously ain’t working.
It’s not like that should surprise anyone. Four years ago, I referenced a Reuters report in a column about Sean Penn snuggling with a dictator, which noted “Homicides in Venezuela have quadrupled during President Hugo Chavez's 11 years in power, with two people murdered every hour, according to new figures from a non-governmental organization.”
Also showing “progressive” sympathies for a totalitarian who tolerated no free speech, no dissent and no independent reporting was anti-gun “Authorized Journalist” Bernd Debusmann, who fawned all over his favorite “rock star” totalitarian.
Now that Chavez is gone, new strongman Nicolas Maduro has continued and expanded on the tyranny with predictable results. For committed collectivists, no amount of control is too much, right down to sending troops to seize a toilet paper factory.
That may seem laughable, but it’s merely a symptom of much deeper outrages directly attributable to a police state in which criminal investigations are used as political tools; the judiciary are willing pawns of the administration; media is state-approved or illegal; human rights advocates can be prosecuted for treason; prison conditions are violent and deadly; and paradoxically, unions in this socialist worker’s paradise are but extensions of the ruling elites.
“Killings by security forces are a chronic problem,” Human Rights Watch noted in its 2014 World Report. “According to the most recent official statistics, law enforcement agents allegedly killed 7,998 people between January 2000 and the first third of 2009 ... [I]mpunity remains the norm.”
Venezuela represents exactly the type of “monopoly of violence” JPFO warns against in its unique message that “gun control” is the common factor in the most prevalent form of homicide, murder by government. How telling that monopoly is exactly what domestic gun-grabbers laud as the ideal, even going so far as to credit German sociologist and economist Max Weber.
What they conveniently leave out is Weber's support for approving Article 48 into the Weimar constitution, establishing "emergency powers" to bypass Reichstag consent, and allowing Adolf Hitler's rise to unchallenged power.
Gee, what could go wrong?
This is the ultimate path those who would impose total citizen defenselessness, like all those monopolies that have gone before, would lead us down. That they couch their scheming under banal terms like “common sense gun safety laws” is no matter, because they’ve let slip their end desires too many times, and too many real world examples exist, to ignore they’re playing a game of incremental gains to a deadly end goal.
That totalitarians would justify a renewed disarmament push under the banner of the International Day of Peace is simply them doing what evil, lying tyrants do. It evokes nothing so much as the one Orwellian slogan that best exemplifies Opposite Day “progressives”: More valuable 1984 category quotes, including many from George Orwell, can be found here.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
David Codrea is a field editor at GUNS Magazine, penning their monthly "Rights Watch" column. He provides regular reporting and commentary at Gun Rights Examiner and blogs at The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance. David Codrea's Archive page.
