Let me get this straight: The Gazette acts as stenographer for a couple of local activists who have occupied the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington in support — you read that right, in support — of the brutal and illegitimate regime of President Nicolás Maduro, under whose leadership Venezuela, formerly the most prosperous nation in South America, has descended into a Hobbesian nightmare of hunger, lawlessness and murderous violence.
One activist is a member of a group, the Raging Grannies, who protest for “peace and economic equality.” Well, Venezuela may not have peace, but it does seem to be close to economic equality: desperate poverty for all, save those aligned with Maduro’s government or adept at theft. And the Gazette reporter cannot bestir himself to ask these deluded, self-congratulating advocates for dictatorship, who seem incapable of imagining any crisis for which the U.S. is not primarily at fault, a single question about whether the benighted people of Venezuela might see things differently than they do, or whether our activist friends have anything to say about the role played by such foreign entities as Cuba, Russia and Iran in the current Venezuelan tragedy.
What a sickening inversion of morality and abnegation of journalistic responsibility.
John Montanari
Shutesbury