I don’t recall why I’m on the Cambridge University “Hands Off Venezuela” Society mailing list. Perhaps, if any of them read this post, I’ll get taken off it. But in the meantime I’m enjoying their collective apoplexy over an astonishing memorandum between a US embassy official and the CIA. The absence of any actual scans of the memo, or quotations from it in English, does not perturb them. Yet this, I suggest, might be the reason why no respectable news agency has picked up the story, rather than, say, the news media being involved in some kind of fascist conspiracy.

The purported contents are wildly implausible. Do embassy officials often send memos documenting the details of top secret CIA operations, together with their top secret codewords? And do they often send these memos in Spanish? The bloggers are also in some disagreement over whether the operation is called Operation Pincer or Operation Pliers. All concerned seem to have failed to grasp the concept that codewords are random, and therefore not always mean and/or menacing.

The revelations emerged four days before Sunday’s referendum on Hugo Chavez’s constitutional reform. A hundred thousand (non-imaginary) protesters have taken to the streets today to tell Chavez to keep his hands off Venezuela. The constitutional reforms will “create forms of communal property, eliminate presidential term limits, and increase presidential authority.” I quote from a credible source. I wonder if, perhaps, there may be a different explanation for the convenient surfacing of this convenient memorandum.

I want to find this funny. But it scares me that so many people (including many from my country, and of my background) live in a political dreamworld, where America is the scourge of democracy; and a democratic, socialist utopia is just around the corner, if only we could shake off the Yankee Yoke. Such people don’t bat an eyelid when a man like Chavez heaps personal power on to himself, or when gangs of Islamist thugs like Hamas hijack the cause of their beloved Palestine. The truth is that America remains a fortress of democracy, in a world where the anti-American “revolutionaries” tend to be unconvinced by democracy’s merits. But, in Cloud Cuckoo Land, a nice conspiracy theory is preferable to the truth.

Filed under: democracy, foreignpolicy, jonathanbirch on November 30th, 2007