Editorial Note: We do share all parts of this piece but the last paragraph that seems like a tracing of AOC words about Venezuela on Periscope a few weeks back. But the analysis on media warfare and our responsibility is excellent.
OpEd by El Diario (Spain)
When the light returns to Venezuela we will see and perhaps we will know if the blackout of these days is the last sign of inefficiency and abandonment in a country devastated economically and socially, or if it has been a sabotage on a large scale (hypothesis very possible: for years military powers have been capable of collapsing the basic infrastructure of a country without launching a single missile).
When the light returns to Venezuela we will see and perhaps we will know everything that happened in these last few months, and that now we do not see. Sometimes the pupils get used to the darkness and you end up seeing something, like the trucks burned with “humanitarian aid” on the Colombian border. The big media have needed two weeks to see what some already saw (and denounced) the same day: that the fire did not come from the Venezuelan side, but from those who accompanied such “humanitarian” trucks with Molotov cocktails. The accusation against the Venezuelan authorities occupied covers and newscasts of half the planet, but the correction is in the interior pages, typical secondary effect of the lack of vision in a blackout. When the light returns to Venezuela we will see everything that we do not see now, as it happened in other countries invaded, attacked or destabilized.
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Any war, interference, coup d’état or revolution of colors is preceded by a blackout. Or several blackouts: the media is the first, but from time to time we forget the old maxim that “the truth is the first victim of war”, which is not a phrase from a breakfast cup but a confirmed truism in each conflict. The information blackout does not imply darkness but quite the opposite: a lot of light, so much that it dazzles, blinds, burns. In the case of Venezuela, two decades under a powerful flashlight and a magnifying lens, often deforming.
Along with the information blackout, all “humanitarian” interference is accompanied by a legal blackout: the fuses of international legality are leaking, the facts are already accomplished, which set precedents and facilitate future breaches of the same legality. In the Venezuelan case, the blatant interference, evident in the unprecedented episode of the trucks (with two countries, Colombia and Brazil, facilitating a violation of borders), opens new paths for future interference.
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Not only information and legality go into the dark: also, unfortunately, our critical judgment suffers a blackout. We do not see, and often we do not want to see. A blackout that has a lot of amnesia: it impresses how in each new conflict we forget what happened in previous conflicts, the information intoxication that we swallowed, the disappointment when discovering the truth when it was already late. Once again we disengage, we settle for the simplifying tweet and the self-fulfilling prophecies, we accept rules of the game with traps and rigged debates.
I recognize that I do not know what is happening in Venezuela. But I do know what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya and so many other countries. I am not indifferent to the true suffering of the Venezuelan people or its democratic deterioration, as I was not indifferent to all those peoples who did not improve their lives or win democracy after being invaded, bombed or disintegrated, losing sovereignty in return. Will it happen again now? Will we be surprised and outraged once again when the light comes back? Don’t we learn?
Translated by JRE/EF
