Brev från Venezuela

Detta brev skrevs till fb.com/OperacionLibertad som svar på en begäran att skriva ett brev till en låtsasvän i utlandet.

Hej!

Idag är jag lite ledsen, jag har kommit fram till att bo i Venezuela är att inte ha något liv. Det är svårt att få tag i basvaror; de som styr landet struntar i att se till att det finns utbildning; där jag bor förolämpas jag för att jag tänker självständigt; allt är kaos; jag kan inte sova för att jag grubblar så mycket; jag går inte ut på gatan av rädsla för att träffas av en förlupen kula. Jag hade två fönster mot världen och för 5 månader sedan tog de den ena som var min dator, nu har jag bara kvar denna mobil utan SIM-kort för jag är rädd att de förföljer mig. Hela tiden ber jag till Gud och jag tror han måste vara trött på mig för att jag besvärar honom så mycket. Jag gör inget annat än gråter, jag hör inte nyheter för den enda återstående kanalen nu är regimens. Hur kan det “finnas Fosterland” [min anm.: en ständigt upprepad slogan är att “Nu har vi ett Fosterland”] om militären sålde sin Ära till ett främmande land och låter sig styras av kubanska militärer? De repeterar ständigt att det är demokrati och det är inte sant, studenterna blir nerslagna av skurkar på motorcyklar som jobbar åt en president som inte ens är venezolan, hur skulle jag kunna leva så? Detta är inte att leva!

Vet du vad jag kallar detta? Att tolerera, att stå emot, att hålla ut; i mitt ordförråd finns inte längre ordet FRIHET. Detta är ett land i förfall som är på väg att bli utplånat av människor som blandat ihop socialism med den fars till Revolution som här kallas “ROBULOCIÓN del siglo XXI” [min anm.: det är en ordlek med det spanska ordet “robo” som betyder stöld; istället för “tjugohundratalets omvälvning” blir det alltså “tjugohundratalets stöldvälvning”]. Det finns inget bättre namn, om jag berättade allt för dig som händer mig så skulle jag aldrig bli klar och kanske blir du överväldigad av allt detta, men det är det enda sättet för mig att berätta för dig och ventilera allt det som händer och som jag upplever, ursäkta min uppriktighet, de sanningar och allt som jag skrev, jag bara hoppas att du ser från din synvinkel att i Venezuela, redan för 14 år sedan, dog FRIHETEN.

Keila Luna

Carte desde Venezuela

Esa carta fue escrito a un amigo imaginario en el exterior, como respuesta a un pedido en la página facebook.com/OperacionLibertad

¡Hola!

Hoy estoy un poco triste, me he dado cuenta que vivir en Venezuela es no tener vida, es difícil conseguir los productos de la cesta básica, quienes gobiernan dejan a un lado la educación, donde vivo la gente me insulta por pensar diferente, todo es un caos, no duermo de tanto pensar, no salgo a la calle por temor a volver a recibir una bala perdida, tenía dos ventana al mundo y hace 5 meses se llevaron una que era mi computadora, sólo me queda este teléfono que uso sin la sim card por temor a que me persigan, cada instante le pido a Dios y creo debe estar cansado por molestarlo tanto, no hago más que llorar, no oigo noticias porque el único canal libre ahora es del gobierno, ¿ Cómo puede haber Patria si los militares vendieron su Honor a un país extranjero y se dejan mandar por militares de Cuba, viven diciendo hay democracia y no es verdad, los estudiantes son agredidos por delincuentes motorizados seguidores de un presidente que ni venezolano es, ¿ Cómo puedo vivir así ? ¡Esto no es tener vida!

¿Sabes como llamo yo a esto? Tolerar, resistir, aguantar, en mi vocabulario ya no existe la palabra LIBERTAD, este es un país en decadencia que va camino a la extinción por gente que confundió el socialismo con la farsa de Revolución conocida aquí como ROBULOCIÓN del siglo XXI, no hay otro nombre, si te contara todo por lo que paso no terminaría nunca y quizas te agobie por todo esto, pero es mi única forma de contarte y desahogarme por todo lo que estoy pasando y sintiendo, disculpa mi sinceridad, mis verdades y todo lo que te escribí, solo espero veas desde tu punto de vista que en Venezuela desde hace 14 años murió la LIBERTAD.

Keila Anerling Luna Villa

På flykt från “Castros Imperium”

Dessa 34 båtflyktingar kom till Honduras i förrgår, där Maria Conchita Alonso råkade befinna sig för att göra humanitärt arbete för de fattiga barnen. Hon är själv kubanska, hennes familj lämnade Kuba för Venezuela några år efter den så kallade revolutionen. Nu har Venezuela också dragits in i vad dessa kubaner kallar “Castros Imperium”. Utvecklingen går precis samma väg, alla möjligheter att bedriva fri företagsamhet undergrävs och människorna förvandlas till något som mest liknar boskap.

Maria Conchita Alonso pratar med båtflyktingar som just landat i Honduras från Kuba

Maria Conchita påpekade för mig att dessa kubaner själva benämner regimen i Havana “Castros Imperium”. Det är en term som jag tycker är både träffande och användbar. Diktaturen i Havana har byggt upp ett imperium som sträcker sig över tre kontinenter: Förutom Kuba som geologiskt sett ligger i Karibiska Havet mitt emellan Nord- och Sydamerika, så ingår Nicaragua i Nordamerika, Angola i Afrika, samt Venezuela, Ecuador och Bolivia i Sydamerika. Detta imperium finansieras av Venezuelas olja. De är också allierade med andra diktaturer, och dessa ondskans axelmakter hjälper varandra inbördes. Kuba hjälper regimen i Syrien (liksom tidigare de hjälpte Kadaffi) med propaganda, inte minst i Sverige (flera grupper som säger sig kämpa för freden och mot USAs imperialism är i verkligheten frontgrupper för ondskans axelmakter). De är också djupt kopplade till Iran, och Kubas lydstater Venezuela och Ecuador är mycket viktiga för att hjälpa Iran och Nordkorea att komma runt världssamfundets sanktioner.

Medan folken lämnas i misär och fattigdom, används pengarna till att köpa inflytande och politiskt stöd, även i Europa. Kuba håller just på att slå sönder all meningsfull högre utbildning i Venezuela, och ett antal studenter (jämte professorer och en katolsk präst) är i hungerstrejk sedan veckor tillbaka. På lördag har en riksdagskvinna från oppositionen, Maria Corina Machado, kallat till sympatidemonstration.

A Basic Requirement for Elections

A basic requirement is that the result reflects the intent of the voter. That is to say, the vote cast should not change between the moment it is cast, and the moment it is counted. From it leaves the control of the voter, to it arrives to the persons checking the result, it should remain constant. This rather self-evident requirement is apparently too self-evident to be considered in most analyses I have read. What happens if we apply it to electronic voting?

Let’s start with ceramic chips, bone fragments, twigs, and regular paper ballots with the name written on it. You write the candidate’s name (or whatever the election is for) on a physical object, and put it in the recipient of the votes, which is constructed so that nobody can remove or add votes without being detected. Due to the Laws of Nature, the physical object containing the vote will remain the same until the moment it is counted. Not so with electronic voting, however.

Electronic votes are stored in computer memory. These are read/write devices, i.e., they can be changed. A bit can be set or reset without anybody noticing. The vote is not stored as a physical object, but as the state of some atom or molecule, or group thereof. It is a fundamental difference which ought to disqualify all those machines.

Is there a way to create a reliable electronic voting system? Maybe. First off we need to use a storage device that cannot be altered. We need a PROM, a programmable read only memory. Assume that we have a memory that starts from only zeroes, and that can be changed to 1 but never back to 0. We then assign a block of memory for each candidate, and add a logical “1” for each vote cast for each candidate. A vote cast can never be subtracted. If someone adds votes in an attempt at fraud, the total votes will not match the number of voters on the voting roll. To sum up the machine would just need to sum up the number of 1’s for each candidate. By standardizing the addresses where the votes are stored, a PROM chip could be inserted in any machine for independent verification. The PROM could either be stored and replaced in the next election, or one could use an erasable kind of PROM, specifically a UVPROM which requires long exposure to strong UV light to reset. The other kind, EEPROM, can be reset invisibly with electricity, and that is not what we want. Personally I’d prefer the PROM that cannot be reset, and that they be stored as part of the national archives after the election. To implement this kind of electronic voting basically requires standardizing the format in which data is stored on the PROM. All other hardware would preferably be open-source and ideally NOT contain any programmable device, only electric hardware.

This machine would behave like having separate ballots for each race, and it would be impossible to see how individual voters voted in different elections. This is a democratic advantage compared to having a single ballot for all race.

The Axis of Evil in Latin America

The South American nation of Venezuela has been invaded by Cuba. It was accomplished without any military resistance through the help of a quisling, Hugo Chávez. After his demise Nicolás Maduro now rules the country as a puppet for Cuba. His regime is illegitimate for a number of reasons, including several blatant violations of the constitutional succession order, and a completely flawed election that, according to a source that infiltrated their network, was controlled from Cuba. In fact, yours truly knew the official “election result” with two decimals just when the polling places closed, and 4 hours before the national election council announced them, since the data sent from Cuba had been intercepted by this source and leaked.

All the institutions of the Venezuelan state are in the control of the Cuban regime: The presidency, the congress, the supreme court, the election authority, the security apparatus, and the military. Furthermore they have access to a militia composed of heavily armed thugs on motorbikes, who are kept by the regime as “storm troopers” to beat down peaceful protesters. There are also terrorists allied with the regime, such as FARC, ELN, ETA, and Hezbollah (Iran is a de facto ally of Cuba, as is, indirectly, North Korea). If all of this fails Cuba also has a hidden occupation force, an army of people who supposedly are there on “social missions” but who have access to military uniforms and weapons on short notice. They number in the tens of thousands according to most estimates. How to disentangle this?

First we have to look at the larger picture. The three maps show the world at WWI, WWII, and now. The present map does not represent a (hot) war, but to some extent it does represent a new cold war. North Korea and Iran are under embargoes. They are clearly de facto-allies, sharing some of the embargoed military technology: Missiles and nukes. What is equally certain but less discussed in Europe is that Cuba is also an ally of Iran. However, Cuba is acting through what was until just a year ago a seemingly democratic front: Venezuela. In reality Venezuela is a nation occupied by Cuba, and the democratic facade is maintained with the help of sham elections, assisted by an opposition that has for years sworn that there is no fraud, even though it has been proven scientifically that elections have been stolen since at least 2004.

Green = western democracies and their allies, orange = the enemy, light orange = assisting the enemies to various degrees. Grey were neutral, white are neutral or hard to define.

Two things differ between the WWI and WWII maps on the one hand, and the present situation on the other. First, there is a change of geographic location. With the help of Cuba, the new axis of evil has got a strong foothold on the American double-continent. For the first time they are in America’s back yard. Venezuela was the first target, and it provided the oil revenues that made it possible to co-opt the other democracies and install electoral dictatorships in them as well. Apart from the countries marked here, there are several more that are in the process, such as Argentina.

Second, the new axis of evil does not have a strong domestic military production capability in terms of conventional warfare. They depend on Russia and China for things like tanks and fighter planes, although Iran is trying to produce them domestically. However, they cannot face the allies in a conventional war. They instead rely on asymmetric warfare, war of attrition, and terrorism. The most successful strategy has been been developed by Cuba: to use intelligence and corruption to take over target nations from the inside with the help of a quisling, while maintaining the impression of democracy. This has given them the added advantage of being able to use these pseudo-independent nations to propel their propaganda.

Most important of these efforts is the international news television network TeleSur, based in Venezuela, which is a pure propaganda outlet whose message is as controlled from Havana, Cuba, as the reporting of Pravda was controlled from the Kremlin. But without the link being visible to credulous reporters in the West who picked up their stories and based their world view of Latin America on it.

After analyzing the present situation, several facts become obvious: First, the clandestinely occupied countries are not at peace. They are in a state of war and under occupation. This means that military action against the invader is justifiable under international law, taking into account the laws of war.

Second, the occupying force in Venezuela has deployed considerable resources in terms on unconventional warfare in order to prevent a liberation. The national military remains only on paper. In reality it is disarmed and rather toothless. There is little if any effective defense against a foreign invasion, and the little there is, is provided by Cuban or Russian military personnel. On the other hand, there is a huge militia that is inefficient against a traditional military, but capable of beating down a popular uprising almost regardless of its size. Tens of thousands of thugs on motorbikes have been provided with automatic guns in order to savagely slaughter unarmed demonstrators. Furthermore large swaths of Venezuela are controlled by drug-smuggling terrorist guerrillas. Finally, Cuba has a “sleeping army” of tens of thousands of troops, pretending to be doing social work, but in reality just being on notice to take on their Venezuelan style army uniform. Unlike the real Venezuelan army, these Cubans do have access to weapons and ammo.

There is of course no way for anybody to know if it is possible or not for the Venezuela armed forces to stage a successful mutiny and defeat the Cuban occupation force. What is clear, however, and the point of this article, is that they would act in accordance with their constitution and international law in doing so.

As far as a civilian uprising is concerned, I don’t see that it would have any chance of succeeding. Venezuela is not like Tunisia or Egypt. It is not run by a domestic dictator whose security forces can abandon him. Venezuela is run by a cruel and vicious foreign dictatorship, one of the worst on the planet. Recall Angola: When the opposition claimed that there had been fraud in the elections, the Cuba-supported dictator (who is still in office!) murdered tens of thousands of the supporters of the opposition candidate – as well as his negotiating team. More recently we remember Gaddafi, another friend of Cuba. Castro pulled out all stops to try to help him stay in power, and had no qualms about his shooting down tens of thousands of unarmed civilian demonstrators (Castro used his Venezuelan propaganda machine TeleSur). Still ongoing is the civil war in Syria, Assad being another of Castro’s friends. Same thing: Shoot’em down, as long as the dictator wins no price seems to high to pay. Everything can be fixed with propaganda (and – amazingly – there are “peace” groups in Europe that are making Assad’s case right now; the Cuban propaganda machine is very efficient in Europe).

Although I don’t believe that USA would intervene, ironically it would probably be rather easy, since the Cubans have disarmed the Venezuelan armed forces. Just as one example, the fighter planes and their weaponry are not even kept in the same state, for fear that the air force might think of trying to assassin the president, as Pinochet did with Allende on September 11, 1973. Moreover, the American planes are no longer operational, and the Venezuelan pilots don’t seem to get training on the Russian jets. Most of what the military is doing seems to be smuggling cocaine, nowadays.

In spite of these difficulties the regime is very weak, since the economy of the nation is collapsing, there are acute food shortages, and people are plundering stores for food. The militia may well turn against the regime one day, and all might dissolve in chaos. Or alternatively, a Cuban regime will be introduced, with the population totally controlled by a despotic regime. The development is going fast now.