Sean Penn should pack up his lavish , pull out of Hollywood and relocate to Buenos Aires. He’s already become Argentine president Cristina Kirchner’s de facto chief propagandist on the Falkands matter, so he may as well make it official. As far as the Argentines are concerned, Penn is no doubt the modern day equivalent of a medieval court jester, dancing his little jig for the amusement of the Kirchner administration.
But Penn is also successfully playing the role of the modern-day "useful idiot" so beloved of Latin American regimes,oakley, from Cuba to Venezuela to Nicaragua – the clueless Westerner acting as the international mouthpiece of some very unpleasant authoritarian rulers. Penn has been close to Venezuelan despot Hugo Chavez for some time, and has now set his sights on ingratiating himself with Cristina Kirchner, who, like her compatriot in Caracas, has embarked on and media independence. Penn himself has even called for American journalists for calling his hero Chavez a dictator.
Two weeks ago, Oscar-winner Penn over the Falklands, and urged UN-brokered negotiations over the sovereignty of the islands in that was laughable, even by Hollywood standards. Now he’s taken to the pages of The Guardian accusing Britain of (whatever that means) of Argentina with the deployment of Prince William to the Falklands. He also attacks the British press as a “transparently corrupt and non-diligent propaganda machine”. In , which I imagine even The Huffington Post would baulk at running, Penn writes:
With the deployment of the prince, whose task is helicopter search and rescue missions from an island colony with a population of about 3,000, there is the automatic deployment of warships. It is difficult to imagine that there is no correlation between the likely discovery of offshore oil reserves and the message of pre-emptive intimidation being sent by the UK to Argentina.
… The "Falklanders'" slogan is "Desire the right". Indeed this is a human desire and not the exclusive domain of Falkland Islanders. And it is the same desire for which so many Chileans and Argentinians suffered and ultimately triumphed. The recognition that the diplomatic process of the 1970s gives to some of the legitimacy of Argentinian claims should not be dispelled or denied by the great United Kingdom through the exploitation of a more recent past, or for the greed of superpowers desperate to control the natural resources of the world. God save the Queen.
One can only guess what Penn’s next move will be � offering himself as a human shield for an Argentine "retake the Falklands" flotilla, chaining himself to a British nuclear submarine, or perhaps forming a pro-Kirchner LA coalition of the willing with Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins and Oliver Stone. Whatever he does end up doing, Sean Penn’s madcap crusade over the Falklands will only reinforce the image of a Hollywood has-been who?is being used as a marionette.
