Obama continues to humiliate and embarrass free men on his sanctioning of evil tour across the world.(video hat tip Kasper)
Barack Obama has said the US seeks a "new beginning" with Cuba and an "equal partnership" with all the nations of the Americas.
Below: Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, right, hands President Barack Obama
the book entitled, "The Open Veins of Latin America," by Uruguayan
writer Eduardo Galeano.
Embracing dictators and torturers. Welcome to the Post America America.
At President Obama's meeting with the heads of South American countries this morning, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stood, walked over to him, and presented him with a copy of "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent" by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano.
Obama politely posed for a photograph with Chavez, shook his hand, and accepted the gift.
The book, first published in Spanish in 1971, offers a critique of the consequences of 500 years of European and U.S. colonization of Latin America.
"The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing," the book begins. "Our part of the world, known today as Latin America, was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations. Centuries passed, and Latin America perfected its role."
Galeano writes that while the era of "lodes of gold" and "mountains of silver" has passed, "our region still works as a menial laborer. It continues to exist at the service of others' needs, as a source of oil and iron, of copper and meat, of fruit and coffee, the raw materials and foods destined for rich countries which profit more from consuming them than Latin America does from producing them."
At another point in the book, Galeano writes: "Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others."
The book also criticizes the U.S. for "spreading and imposing family planning. ... In Latin America it is more hygienic and effective to kill future guerillas in the womb that in the mountains or the streets."
[...]
At the start of the first plenary session at the Summit of the Americas later this morning, President Obama was asked what he thought of Chavez’s gift.
“You know, I thought it was one of Chavez’s books," Obama answered. "I was going to give him one of mine.”
What an embarrassment.
One review of the book on Amazon reads,
Please stop this man. The fantasy of blaming the US and Europe for the problems in Latin America has caused a lot of damage in Latin America. Unfortunately, a great number of Latin American leaders of the last century follow this filosophy [sp]and adopt a kind of nationalism and socialism that just puts more latin americans in misery.
