VINCENT BROWNE: What's going on that we fail to recognise that in Venezuela a democratically elected President is being forced to resign by right-wing forces, aided and abetted by a "free press" and the leader of the "free world"; that we have backed our would-be new partners in the European Union into a take-it-or-leave-it corner on EU membership; that in the EU we have declared our hostility to the Islamic world by refusing to engage with Turkey; and that lawlessness on a massive scale is being indulged in by the new "protectors" of the New World Order, our friends, the Americans?
Meanwhile famine and war continue to devastate Africa and get no attention at all.
Last week the US administration intervened openly for the first time in the crisis in Venezuela. Unsurprisingly, it intervened to support the calls of the opposition groups for early presidential elections there. Apparently the Americans are worried about a democratic deficit in Venezuela.
Hugo Chavez was elected President of Venezuela in 1998 with 58 per cent of the popular vote. In 2000, under a new constitution, he contested new presidential elections and got over 60 per cent of the popular vote.
That new constitution was massively endorsed by the electorate and in new parliamentary elections his party won 80 per cent of the seats. Nobody at any time has questioned the validity of those elections.
Now an administration led by a President who got half-a-million fewer votes than his rival expresses concerns about the constitutional legitimacy of Hugo Chavez as President of Venezuela!
There was an abortive coup in April against Chavez, and the Americans were caught red-handed in the coup plot.
Now they are at it again, stoking up the powerful business interests, supported by an elite among the working class - primarily those engaged in the oil industry - to oust a leader who has defied the neo-liberal economic orthodoxy and challenged the US's self-appointed pre-eminence in world affairs.
And it has been the media in Venezuela that has been their chief instrument in this anti-democratic enterprise.
Without exception the press has been virulently anti-Chavez from the outset, and apart from the single publicly owned station - which has relatively low ratings - television has been unceasingly antagonistic, calling on people to come on to the streets to demand the resignation of the popularly elected President.
This may be a portent of what is to come in Latin America, where a left-wing President has come to office in Brazil and another in Ecuador in the last few weeks.
If they, too, defy American supremacy they can expect the tightening of the noose around the throat of their economies and "concern" about the legitimacy of their regimes. Backed up by "popular" demonstrations on the streets got up by the "free press".
Last weekend should have been a joyous moment in European history, the coming together of the peoples of western and eastern Europe and the European Union. Instead it was a sour affair, primarily because the rich west (i.e. the current member-states) defaulted on the original promise of wealth redistribution towards the east and gave the applicant countries a take-it-or-leave-it choice which will consign them to subordination in the enlarged free-market Europe.
AND in surrender to the racist drum beats of France and Germany, Europe opted to exclude Muslim Turkey from the Union indefinitely, a capitulation which Bertie Ahern thought "wise". That decision had nothing to do with Turkey's appalling human rights record - engagement in the Union would have taken care of that - but all to do with anti-Islamic prejudice.
As for American lawlessness - the illegal interdiction of a ship in the Indian Ocean carrying weapons to Yemen, the murder of five people in Yemen itself and the announced relaxation on CIA regulations concerning the murder of suspects around the world generally.
Also talk of further nuclear arms tests by the Americans and yet further plans for the covert subversion of the "free press" worldwide, through renewed propaganda campaigns.
Meanwhile in Africa . . .
War in the Ivory Coast forced more than 30,000 people to flee their homes last week. In Ethiopia over 14 million people are affected by drought. There has been a huge crop failure in Eritrea, and 1.4 million people are at risk in this tiny state.
Tens of thousands of refugees are in distress in Rwanda and Burundi where, by the way, at least 19 people were massacred last weekend. UN officials discovered 38 bodies buried in a mass grave in Kisangani in north-eastern Congo last week.
In all of Africa, according to the United Nations World Food Programme 38 million people face starvation right now and they do so in part because of unfair world trade practices, and Ireland is among the bulwarks in the way of undoing that.
Glory be.