Is Nicolas Maduro a “dictator”? Tuesday January 6 on BFMTV, Mathilde Panot refused to answer this question. Kidnapped by American special forces in Caracas, the Venezuelan president remains incarcerated in a Brooklyn prison, accused of drug trafficking by the administration of Donald Trump, a charge undermined by the American president’s primary concern to control the oil windfall of the Bolivarian Republic. Was the question therefore inappropriate? No doubt according to the president of the LFI parliamentary group, for whom the qualification of the regime would be “a gear” – almost a backlash! – intended to justify violations of international law.
One does not prevent the other. As if human conscience were too limited to combine the denunciation of an autocratic regime and the capture of its leader, outside of any international rules. However, he had summoned the intelligence of the French: Jacques Chirac had forcefully opposed the allied invasion of Iraq in 2003 before “rejoicing” at the fall of Saddam Hussein and the Baathist regime. The rebels set up French diplomacy of the time as a model. They only have a fragmentary memory of it. Why this hemiplegia?
A very convenient way for LFI lieutenants not to challenge an objectively detestable ally. A rebel never denies his fights, that’s the whole drama. Jean-Luc Mélenchon may have distanced himself from the Maduro presidency, but it is from the so-called “Bolivarian” revolution of his predecessor Hugo Chavez that the rebellious patriarch drew his political narrative. He will never overwhelm the heir, from whom he has nevertheless kept his distance, including when Amnesty International – usually cited at will by rebels – denounces a regime “responsible for serious violations of human rights and crimes against humanity” the day after elections with contested regularities. Rebellious France will not say a word, and the most zealous of its members will work hard to defend Maduro. Poverty of campism, product of systematic support for the actors of the anti-American bloc, however despicable they may be. Misery of a movement blinded by its certainties, observing in Emmanuel Macron, in the summer of 2024, an “autocrat”, but who, in 2018, will say he feels “political sympathies” with regard to Nicolas Maduro.
Insoumise France, or the art of not naming things. The Mélenchonists and the art of misnaming them, above all. Two years ago, Danièle Obono described Hamas as a “resistance movement”, while the rebels, with one nuance, first spoke of October 7 as an “armed offensive by Palestinian forces”. Today, Sophia Chikirou is reluctant to describe the Chinese regime, led by the hegemonic PCC – the one which, among other things, tracks down and imprisons the Uighurs – as a “dictatorship”. In the meantime, Jean-Luc Mélenchon maintained that Volodymir Zelensky, the head of a martyred state, was “president of nothing” because his mandate had “come to an end”, even though the Ukrainian martial law in force since the Russian invasion prohibits the organization of presidential elections. Double standards: the “citizen revolution”, long promised by LFI, sends shivers down your spine.
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