Guardian's Comment is Free censors Vcrisis | Venezuela's Corruption Exposed

17 years ago By Alek Boyd

A phone call from ITV News desk yesterday morning brought me back to the Venezuelan reality. Frankly I was completely unaware that bus driver cum Venezuela's Foreign Secretary Nicolas Maduro was to sign the disgraceful oil deal with London's Mayor Ken Livingstone in City Hall. So I did a swift research on the web and found out about the whole sham. Some clauses of the oil for propaganda 'agreement' left me wondering, for dictator Chavez is to provide up to $32 million/year in oil subsidies to comrade Red Ken but the latter and the Greater London Authority are under no legal obligation to provide any services in return to Venezuela. What a fantastic deal, surely Red Ken must be one of the most expensive advocates Hugo has ever hired. Predictably The Guardian had something in the pipeline; almost simultaneously to the inking of the agreement that isn't an article by erstwhile KGB Richard Gott was posted in Comment is Free (CIF). In a matter of minutes the brigade of leftist racist idiots -vaya redundancia...- started posting comments on how great the deal was, how the poor in Venezuela are going to benefit from it, how traffic and waste management will improve, etc.

Not to leave that sort of bullshit go unscathed I posted, as the only Venezuelan in the comment section, that the deal was nothing but a sham. A tirade of attacks against me ensued by the usual English pundits that pretend to know better than me what's in Venezuela's best interest, the sort of folks that are so detached from reality that they dare argue that I am not representative of Venezuela; they are, despite the fact that they have probably never set foot in the country, do not speak the language, do not know the culture, do not have Venezuelan relatives and family and most probably were not aware of the existence of the country before 2002. However not all was bad about the tit for tat. Case in point an exchange with one CIF user that posts as Zambini. This Zambini fellow falsely claimed that comments that I have made in the past with regards to removing Chavez from power by violent means had been deleted from this site. To be frank the episode brought back memories of Dan Burnett, the Chavez apologist behind the blog oilwars, who once said that should I discover his real identity he would buy me a ticket to Caracas from London. It took me half an hour to determine who this cocky idiot was, needless to say that I'm still waiting on his ticket promise... Stupidity seems to be a characteristic of public employees in either side of the Atlantic though. By 'blowing the whistle' Zambini must have thought that he/she was 'exposing' me before Guardian readers, as if I needed any exposing in front of such radical bunch. The funny thing is that I was able to determine that he/she is a civil servant from the GLA and spends endless hours on the internet defending Red Ken's actions and attacking anyone that opposes his policies, in this case yours truly. Zambini attempts to visit this site from a GLA server such as gate.london.gov.uk were unsuccessful, which prompted his/her commentary and I know that he/she was trying to access Vcrisis for some time ago I blocked GLA servers from accessing this site.

But the most interesting aspect about this affair is that CIF has deleted comments of mine with regards to Zambini's civil servant persona and possible connections to Red Ken and by extension the propaganda joint he runs with GLA staff at City Hall. So there you have it dear readers, censorship is not the exclusive province of third rate dictators such as Hugo Chavez for his European comrades at The Guardian are just as quick at dispensing with uncomfortable truths.