November 9, 2007  In a bow to the great British poet WB Yeats who wrote of the darkening days of growing authoritarianism in early 20th Century Europe, we cite his gloomy SECOND COMING from 1920, (read it here) which of course has long captured the sentiments of many who sense danger for what it is.
 
Yeats wrote: 
    "Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,                                                                                        
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity....
    The darkness drops again; but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
 
Our role is neither as analyst of the great literary geniuses of England nor as geo political adventurer applying menacing, idle threats while encouraging fear mongering.

Concurrently, we will not be driven by marketing ploys to tell us that what is....is not.
 
Today, a massive marketing ploy is underway to mislead and misinform the global community writ large. This effort makes every attempt to tell us that what we do know is simply not so, as if by magic the facts become irrelevant and the unaccountable becomes enshrined. We call this paid propaganda. Others call this support for the neo communists or the Far Left or the fascists sweeping Latin America, sometimes wrongly called populism. This craven Maginot Line of misinformation leads to an expansive front of undereducated enablers of non democracy, self censoring undereducation and whole swathes of useful idiots, useful only to propagating stupidities and non facts.

Yeats addresses this as the precursor to his creeping view of evil awakening as he pens, 

    "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity....
    The darkness drops again"
 
 
To our thinking this is the most critical passage and dire analysis of the entire Yeats end of time viewpoint: innocence is cast aside while the best among us lack conviction and the courage to stand united while the worst among us are brimming with intense passion of the cult like fervors as the darkness descends.
 
In real time, Latin America suffers a sustained darkening even as the passionate cult members, also called true believers, gather in Chile to rouse their idiots by the tens of thousands called the Foro de Sao Paulo. The voices of the innocent students in Venezuela seeking support for free speech and functional democracy are drowned out by the blood lust called revenge against the so called vapid and lazy oligarchy and the so called international business leaders all of whom these cultists deem as evils which must, they believe, be replaced by automatons, citizen robots in a godless, lawless, feckless, police state controlled by one megalomaniac named Hugo Chavez who increasingly parrots Jabba the Hut of STAR WARS while calling all unemployed super models to praise his FARC and  Iranian terror state oasis of love.            
 
But Yeats achieves immortality by summing up our worst fears that when the center does not hold, anarchy wins. Innocent lives are lost as the darkness of the soul descends. And the "rough beast" of evil comes again. 
 
We are told over and over that there is no rough beast at all today and that what we know in front of our days that is truly actively aiming to wipe out mankind's advances and cherished freedoms, called the best of Western Civilization is not happening at all and instead, we should make common cause with the very thing that is the rough beast of our worst fears. Of all the most ridiculous claims on the current matters in Latin America today, Michael Shifter's stand is heading toward the top of the list as he cheerfully tells us, “It is by no means clear that even the South American governments most friendly to Chávez--Bolivia and Ecuador--are headed toward political consolidation. The constituent assembly process in Bolivia has been crippled while Ecuador's has yet to begin.

Neither of those countries possesses Venezuela's oil wealth, and both have sharper ethnic and geographic cleavages. True, Chávez's grandiose projects are buttressed by seductive rhetoric and record oil prices, but both within Venezuela and throughout the region there are signs of a growing reluctance to accept his outsized political ambitions." You can read his needing a rebuttal piece soon recent waftiness here in FOREIGN AFFAIRS, which has long been backed by Soros and his pro Chavez, anti Uribe minions which also populate US AID and many so called U.S. governmental agent's public movements for some time now.

Shifter tells us in so many words that Lula actually supports free and open media when he beavers away to buy in and buy out free speech in Brazil. Shifter also tells us that Sra. Kirchner actually worries about the fate of the Jews under the new Iranian axis of hatred in Latin America when she has not had one sleepless night in fret for the unfortunates. Neither Lula nor the Kirchners will save Latin America from any beast which has slouched into authoritarianism.

Comes now, in tandem, the loss of the previously respectable and now Soros endowed Council of the Americas to tell us “Ultimately, though, Iran’s foray into the Americas can also be viewed as an opportunity. It is an opportunity for the nations of the Americas to stand together for democratic principles and to reject behavior by those either within the region or without, that is, outside responsible hemispheric norms. Within that context, it becomes a test of the strength of democratic values and of the inter-American system as a whole. It is a test which cannot easily be ignored." Farnsworth ignores the fact that many already act on the principle there is great financial criminal advantage to doing business with Iran and that the United Nations and the USA are dead wrong to position an embargo against doing business with state sponsors of global crime and terror. Read Farnsworth's analysis that it is, however correct he is to so say urgently needed to perforce the virtues of democracy by inserting an OAS ambassador from the USA while others act upon their belief that it is just great to "Keep" Company with masters of terror for financial and political gain which aids and abets the destruction of all that Western mankind has built as a bedrock for the higher goals we all seek. (here). 
 
The company we keep is a physical symbol of how we live our lives and how we perform our daily tasks. Farnsworth starts off by telling us that jumping in to bed with Iran's deceptive mullahs is "potentially destabilizing."

Our complaint with Shifter and Farnsworth is this: the rough beast is here, has been here and grows daily: the potential to destabilize has been achieved. The instability is here and now. To ignore this is to mislead. Further, none of this is the sole fault of the USA and cannot be snappily corrected by a decent US ambassador to the OAS which has not occurred for at least 20 years of memory anyway.  Instead of blaming the USA, far better to act to replace Insulza with someone who is honest and creatively unafraid to state the facts. The OAS answers to Chavez and the anti Colombia Soros today, which is of course the company now kept by the Council and the Dialogue. The OAS cares nothing at all about the Democracy Charter and abuses this with a string of excuses such as it needs more money to be effective, it has no tools to enforce anything, and it must sell out to Chavez and Iranian criminality while supposedly maintaining unity among South America.
 
The facts are this: there is no unity any more in Latin America: it is now a continent divided. The OAS is the last place on earth one would find truth tellers.

Furthermore, the OAS has enough money and has enough resources to be effective but sadly refuses to do much more than jet around and craft misinformation under the false guise that they are helpful when none but the worst have been helped by their sheltering misapplication of democracy's freedoms.
 
And finally, we have issue with Farnsworth: Argentina's nascent efforts to stand for bringing global masters of terror to justice is too much, too, little too late to be meaningful and has belatedly and finally referred their own problems to Interpol which rarely if ever gets their man. Justice delayed is justice denied and Argentina has performed an unwholesome delay in any show of strength against their burgeoning Iranian residents who live and breathe in Argentina to raise money to fight against what Argentina is supposed to stand for. Do any seriously think that the Chavez bought and sold Kirchner famille will actually stand up to the Chavez-Iranian-Ecuadorean triangle while graciously taking his millions in cash? Worse yet is the misinformation that Brazil is not pursuing remilitarization and will be a lead producer of essential nuclear bomb building components. Lula himself has agreed to boost the restart of the only temporarily shut down of the Brazilian bomb component business. Obviously Farnsworth took the bait in his rush to tell us how wonderful are the Kirchners and Lula, whose own governments have descended in to the furthest reaches of corruption by all accounts.
 
But Yeats reserves special attention in his tale for those who sell out and manipulate. "The best lack all conviction" he writes. This is seen as the core of the problem which ushers in crime, terror or the "rough beast." It is a lesson best learned soon. Indeed, Yeats points out that it is not just the loss of some few convictions but the loss of even a few translates to the loss of all convictions. One cannot have a meager few convictions and succeed at holding any meaningful convictions. In other words, one looses credibility and abets the "rough beast" by vainly attempting to jigger and manipulate convictions of purpose, normally translated to ethics and principles. When the "best lack all conviction" then and then only does the "rough beast" slouch and move.
 
Things are in motion now in Latin America. All matters are unstable except in a few pockets of shifting stability growing now in Peru, Colombia and Chile.

Divided now is the continent between the have democracy and the have nots for democracy. The center does not hold and anarchy, seen by its offspring called rampant murder and crime, thrive now. One half of the continent rejects rule of law and enshrines the rule of non-law known to Russian mobsters for decades.

One half of the continent has been bought out by the Chavez-Russo-Iranian mafias. Education and health care and all human services are truncated, subservient to fake claims that only the state can control health and education while liberties have withered and in 1/2 of the region are now effectively dead. The practice of politics is dead now and is only controlled by the bags of cash flown around by Chavez and his Cuban, KGB-style trained personal minders installed across Latin America to groom, continuously surveil, and control their agents and "business partners." While this may be beneficial only to derivatives traders who amass grand profit these days for their rackets, it is not good for women, children, families, animals, the innocents and the almost innocent. Law and order is gone now in one half of the continent. Free and open speech and media is gone now in one half the continent, replaced by Chavez's business partners from Iran who have no interest in the truth. The "rough beast" is among us, slouching now and widening now.  Things HAVE fallen apart and all is in motion now.
 
We take great issue however with Yeats in his dire warnings because he offers no hope. We remind that there is hope- there is always hope. Our hope today is that good men and true- and women- stand on principle fully even as this epic struggle is upon us. Hope itself can never be manipulated nor debased by the vain hope that hope alone will deliver the sanctity we cherish in our daily lives. Hope is different from grace and neither gives us a free pass to perform our responsibilities to ourselves and our progeny. Being innocently irresponsible drowns and kills off innocence. There is no reason whatsoever that all of Latin America cannot at last free itself from its own selfishness which now borders on the criminal and continent wide addictions to manipulating the facts of life.

Farnsworth is right that we are known by the company we keep and we hold him accountable for the company he does now keep to keep his pockets lined. We know what to do and we are not afraid. Shifter cheerfully tells us that there are growing signs of rejection for Chavez's power play. He incorrectly misleads and cites Ecuador as just such a pillar of strength. We can only ponder what "facts" he relies on. There is no one at all standing to defend liberty's pillars in Ecuador and all is in place now, safely secured by conceit and deceit to insure the finality of the Chavez-Correa-Iran marriage of monetary convenience called the new Bolivarian constitutional bloc. Insulza calls this democracy. We call it criminal. Had Shifter read even Correa's Manifesto, sometimes called the Constituent Assembly's new Bolivarian constitution, he would have seen what we see: there is not a chance for any informed debate or changing what Correa and Chavez have already set in stone. The deal is done and the fix is in. All cleverly couched behind the fake promise that this helps the poor by killing freedom called the evil oligarchy [also a falsity]. But Shifter wants us to believe the lie that magically freedoms still exist in Ecuador when they do not and that all will be well when Chavez and Correa control everything as they already do in any meaningful sense. There is no choice at all except abject surrender or a newly reformed unified peaceful civil disobedience by Ecuadoreans to save their national souls. Just ask the Venezuelans: they know what happens when a few good men do nothing. They are daily living the worst horror of the "rough beast" - spending between $15 to $40 billion and more on weapons of offense now-aided and abetted when
    "The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity..."
 
Do you know what your convictions are and what you stand for? Do you have the courage to reinsert your convictions even under the pressure of the widening gyre, in whatever debilitating or irresponsible personal, familial or public form it takes? The center can hold and grow: Anarchy does not need to succeed.

To succeed, the best need only...reactivate what has been lost:  their convictions
 
-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis