It should not be a moment of rejoicing, but when despots in
Office bite the dust such as Saddam Hussein, Ghadaffi and now Chavez and
possibly soon Assad, it forewarns of that which is natural. Change is inevitable.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and
there is nowhere for them to hide from what they have done to their countries.
There are always people who defend their action, and how they fought the
foreign multinational and US interests and that is why they lost the fight in
the end, but none of that washes, when they destroy the lives of their own
countrymen for interests that are personal and not patriotic, by the misuse of
the name patriotism.
They all come in a moment of euphoria and depart as scoundrels.
We can see similarities here in Sri Lanka, and hope that
these patterns do not repeat on our shores, but I expect it to be a wake-up
call, for forgiveness, even at the eleventh hour before the curtain falls, to
make amends to the destructive powers, not apparent to the destroyer under the
influence of power.
It is only when one is able to realize the error of one’s
ways will one even make an attempt at change or make some transformation, so that one
looks towards a legacy in history. After all that is all you leave behind. No
matter what you do, if your legacy is that of a murderer it is difficult for
history to erase that. See what is quietly becoming of Prabarkaran, a man who
despite it all led his people like pied piper right into the lake to drown,
never to resurface, all for the sake of a misguided notion of self importance.
We do not want another Praba behave-alike from our shores in the not too
distant future, taking with him all his sycophants into the proverbial lake
from where they will never return.
Leadership must empower one’s subjects to identify right from
wrong, good from bad, and then carry out the righteous and the good. No harm comes
to a person who honestly and sincerely believes in these simple tenets. One complicates
one’s own leadership when it is mixed with megalomaniacal projects, ideas and myths
that fail to materialize.
Let us excise ourselves from the bad, replace it with thee good,
and help the country prosper by the use of our brains, and a plan, that guides people’s
minds towards positive energy and thoughts, and thereby overcome the many real world
obstacles in achieving our dreams. In this way the man made obstacles will diminish
and we will be able to obtain a degree of achievement that is NOT measured in wealth
and power, but in a state where the citizens are content!
Here is a different view of Chavez
ReplyDeletehttp://www.gregpalast.com/vaya-con-dios-hugo-chavez-mi-amigo/
Some excerpts
Just after Bush's inauguration in 2001, Chavez' congress voted in a new "Law of Hydrocarbons." Henceforth, Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell Oil and Chevron would get to keep 70% of the sales revenues from the crude they sucked out of Venezuela. Not bad, considering the price of oil was rising toward $100 a barrel.
But to the oil companies, which had bitch-slapped Venezeula's prior government into giving them 84% of the sales price, a cut to 70% was "no bueno." Worse, Venezuela had been charging a joke of a royalty – just one percent – on "heavy" crude from the Orinoco Basin. Chavez told Exxon and friends they'd now have to pay 16.6%.
Clearly, Chavez had to be taught a lesson about the etiquette of dealings with Big Oil.
On April 11, 2002, President Chavez was kidnapped at gunpoint and flown to an island prison in the Caribbean Sea. On April 12, Pedro Carmona, a business partner of the US oil companies and president of the nation's Chamber of Commerce, declared himself President of Venezuela – giving a whole new meaning to the term, "corporate takeover."