The smell of sulphur

By Peter Boyle

Comment:When George Bush addressed the UN General Assembly he spoke like an angry deity admonishing the great majority of people of the world.

But Bush’s arrogant pretensions were punctured by President Hugo Chavez of the revolutionary government of Venezuela the next day.

“The Devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the Devil was here, in this very place. This table from where I speak still smells like sulfur. Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, in this same hall the President of the United States, who I call ‘The Devil’, came here talking as if he owned the world.”The hall broke out into spontaneous laughter and applause. Not from the seats of the US delegation. They had been vacated.<br/><br/>The Devil was not amused and his minion, US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, dismissed Chavez’ speech as" comic-strip approach to international affairs.

However, Chavez speech spoke to people of world much more effectively than Bush’s bully’s lecture.

If you haven’t watched this Chavez speech to the UN you can access it here

This blogsite is one of several very useful sites wet up by Green Left Weekly supporter Dave Riley. Chronic health problems keep Dave housebound much of the time but he’s worked out that he can do a lot of activism via the internet. He is working hard to give our internet outreach a multimedia dimension.

Another blogsite that Dave maintains is called VenSol Here you can listen to regular audio recordings by volunteers Jim McIlroy and Coral Wynter at Green Left Weekly’s Caracas bureau in Venezuela.

Jim and Coral return to Australia at the end of this year and we would like to continue this very valuable listerning and reporting post at the heart of the new wave of progressive change in Latin America. But if we are going to do this we need to make our $250,000 fighting fund target by the end of this year.

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