The US military action in Venezuela to arrest President Nicolas Maduro has triggered many reactions — from geopolitical upheaval to allegations of neo-colonialism against Donald Trump. Social media takes are in the mix too, with one particularly cold one served by the Iceland Cricket handle on X.
Iceland is known for its stark and striking topography,(Representative image/Pixabay)
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“Venezuela has oil. Greenland has rare Earth minerals,” a post on Saturday by @icelandcricket noted.
“Luckily Iceland has only volcanoes, glaciers, and very average cricketers,” added the handle of the Icelandic Cricket Association, which is not a member of the International Cricket Council yet but is considered a champion of witty takes on social media.
On Sunday, it amended its X post with another one: “Our players have requested a change to the tone of this post. They did not like being referred to as ‘very average’ and instead prefer the term ‘seriously underwhelming’.” In this one too, the editing history of the X post showed it first used the word ‘underwhelming’, only later adding ‘seriously’.
The mention of “oil” was not without context though, as it hinted at the the moot question: why did the US attack Venezuela?
Soon after the extraordinary US military operation in Venezuelan capital Caracas, Trump announced that the US is going to “run” Venezuela until a power transition takes place there, and spoke of how big American companies will extract crude oil in the Latin American nation.
Venezuela has the largest known oil reserves in the world, though lack of technology and an abundance of diplomatic sanctions have meant it has not been able to convert that into massive national income.
As for the mention of Greenland in the @icelandcricket X post, that comes from Trump’s repeated assertions — in jokes and otherwise — that the US wants to take control of the territory, which is part of Denmark.
After Venezuela, Trump has issued warnings to other countries, including Colombia, and flexed “America’s might”.
Venezuela’s longtime leader Maduro is now in a New York jail where he is facing charges of participating in a narco-terrorism conspiracy. His wife Cilia Flores, a former president of the National Assembly of Venezuela, is a co-accused.
Back in Caracas, in the absence of Maduro, Venezuela’s Supreme Court ordered the country’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez to take over as the acting president.