-General Prosecutor Luis Artega Diaz: “The World Attacks us!!”
My, My aren’t we paranoid these days!
–Vice-President Jaua: Private insurance is a business (invented) by the IVth. Republic so that the people don’t trust the public health system
That’s why during Chavismo, public workers became privately insured like never before in the history of Venezuela, overloading private hospitals!
BTW Elias, why isn’t Hugo trusting that same system?
–PSUV leader Blanca Eekhout: “Muammar Al Gaddafi is turned into a martyr of the Libyan people. We know that with the courage that characterizes these people, the fight has just begun…his revolution gave (the Libyan people) the highest level of social Justice and human development index.”
Blanca, the man is not only dead, but nobody is fighting for him anymore. Maybe you have not heard of Lockerbie and maybe, just maybe, imagine if your martyr had spent the US$ 200 billion he had stashed away on the 6,5 million Lybians, just think, almost $30,000 per person, waiting for? Do you guys even think about what you say?
–The three medical stooges: And just to make sure we understand that Chavez is fine, a Bone Doctor, a tripa Doctor and an ofthalmologist come out and tell us Hugo is fine, because they know.
What are we to believe? His eyes are fine, his bones are fine and it has nothing to do with his digestive system? No oncologist? No urologist? No Cuban Doctor? BTW, where have you guys been since June? What compelled you to say something now, rather than, for example, June 20th to June 24h, when your patient was in intensive care? Were you there taking care of him? Why did Navarrete raise such a fuzz? And Chirinos was lying? You seem to be nine years late on that denial. Really weird…
-Hugo: “I will govern until I die.”
Well, I just don’t like that much uncertainty…
The Devil's Excrement 
October 24, 2011 at 4:02 pm
There is a difference between stupidity and ignorance.
You can be rather intelligent and yet ignorant. You can know lots of facts but do not have the intelligence to process them in the right way.
October 25, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
October 24, 2011 at 3:25 pm
Calling Juan Bimba (Joe public) stupid or ignorant is to severely underestimate Venezuelans. They might not have book-learning but they sure have street smarts as well as innate goodness and friendliness. I have collected stories by visitors to Venezuela who again and again stress the immense hospitality and good will displayed to them by Venezuelans in all walks of life but specially by el pueblo. Venezuela is my adopted country and I’ll vouch for Juan Bimba any day of the week.
To say that Chavismo is proof of stupidity or ignorance, you can apply the same logic to the Germans of the Weimar Republic. I seriously doubt that the most civilized of Europeans suddenly became barbarians. Something else was at work. Two things in fact: economic calamity and a charismatic leader.
While we didn’t reach hyper-inflation, Venezuela has had 30 to 35% annual inflation since Viernes Negro under Luis Herrera. 35% inflation wipes out your savings in an eye-blink. 35% inflation wipes out the purchasing power of your salary in an eye-blink. Combine that with corruption and unpopular economic measures and the ground is fertile for a charismatic leader to take over by promising heaven and more.
Back in 1997 there were still a lot of people who remembered Marcos Perez Jimenez fondly and welcomed the “law and order” that a military government would bring. It was the middle class plus the lower classes that gave Chavez a landslide victory. It had nothing to do with stupidity or ignorance but with hopes for a better life than under the corrupt AD-COPEI duopoly. Just like in Weimar Germany! They got Hitler, we got Chavez, both military misfits, failed coupsters, and the list of similarities is too long to list.
October 24, 2011 at 4:21 pm
the venezuelan elderly got their pensions under Chavez (don’t know for how long). suddenly an extra swath of the population was in love with him.
October 24, 2011 at 4:34 pm
Captain CCs
“economic calamity and a charismatic leader ” would not have been enough without the resentment of the Germans.
Facts without emotions don’t move much…..and blaming others is a powerful motivator.
October 24, 2011 at 2:38 pm
Headlines say over and over again that Chavez doctors say Chavez is in optimal health with no cancer. Never mind that he is bald, overweight, tires easily, and won’t tell the world what cancer he has or had.
October 24, 2011 at 1:14 pm
Please, take a look at least at the first 3 paragraphs from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures
I went mostly to public schools and I did not see any indoctrination in my schools, but they certainly did that in other schools.
And they were very present in universities.
Now, this infiltration thing is no conspiracy theory. These guys have more than openly talked about that. And they have done that all the time…the only thing is that some people don’t pay attention.
Douglas Bravo has talked about this and so has Chávez (although he did not use the word “infiltrated” but “nos reuíamos y conversábamos sobre”).
There has been a long tradition on this.
If any of you try to read a good book on how the comunists penetrated in Russia even the army and the Okhrana, the Czarist secret police, at the end of the XIX century, many years before the Revolution (although only WWI and German gold would enable them to break through)
The comies would recruit people in a similar fashion to some evangelical groups: getting into a bus, talking about inequality, justice, their utopia, distributing fliers…they wouldn’t be doing that in nice neighbourhoods but in those where they saw more chances. And they also worked among the low level recruits, young people who were basically functional illiterate and unlike the big generals very poor.
The Soviets had this magazine, Sputnik, like Readers’ Digest, but with a lot of leftiest ideology…and magazines similar to the Jehova Witness’ Watchtower…but about the wonders of the Soviet Union and the Evils of capitalism “and fascism” (sic). Those publications were for free or very very cheap.
http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/art/print-media/sputnik/1982/12.htm
I have written about this as well: the KGB and the Cuban secret service trained a lot of Venezuelans in “conspiracy”/intelligence stuff, which was mostly how to use masses when there were protests, etc.
It was extremely easy to get a scholarship to go to the Soviet Union. They would screen people there. Sometimes the PCV would actually suggest them someone. Most of those guys were completely inept, but some would learn a thing or too, like that gocho whose name is Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (who then ran amok).
October 24, 2011 at 12:37 pm
The fact is that when Chavez came, people were open to his ideas because many already had this indoctrination from the schools and other sources.
October 24, 2011 at 12:24 pm
There has also always been a great deal of pro- Communism taught in the Universities in Venezuela.Nobody can deny this.
October 24, 2011 at 10:56 am
On those three doctors…..
One, Fidel Ramirez, is the brother of Raphael. The family Ramirez has deep, dyed-in-the-wool communist leanings. Using the term “communist’ sounds like a silly cliche. In the case of the Ramirez family it surely is not. First, what loving mother could name one of her sons, Fidel, after a creepy, psychopathic megalomaniac who has the blood of thousands of Cubans on his hands? Fidel? Really? One must understand that people like Rafael and Fidel are the people “behind” Hugo, watching and waiting in the shadows. While Rafael is busily destroying PDVSA, Fidel shows up at press conferences, dressed as a mortician/doctor, spreading disinformation to keep the socialist boat afloat. These are the people who would have most to lose were the elections to go awry in 2012.
October 24, 2011 at 9:57 am
Of course there is an organized left which Is professionally dedicated to seizure of power. They study the methods of doing do, then put the methods to practical use.
But the methods don’t work where people are content, where they have access to education, where their children have a chance at a better life. So defeating them is pretty easy, if you are offering these social goods in a credible way. But if you offer poverty and have contempt for the intelligence and capacities of most Venezuelans, you won’t ever compete with Chavez, nor his successors.
October 24, 2011 at 12:07 pm
People always have a side of discontent side Jeffrey, and it wrong to play upon this to win people over….
playing on negative emotions to gather political momentum is unscrupulous.There are plenty of leftists here in the US, from wealthy and middle class families, even well- educated ones who fall into the trap due to the play of negative emotion.
October 24, 2011 at 1:33 pm
Jeffry,
I agree with you, but my calling Venezuelans here ignorant is not contempt, it’s I know them. Venezuelans are not an atom more or less intelligent than others. They are, on average,doing very badly in education, worst than most in America. This has been the case since the XVI century. Venezuela got its first university long after the rest of Spanish America’s regions did it…the same with printing press…and that in a region that was well behind English or French America.
And after so many years, Venezuelans came last in reading and comprehension at an international test with 41 countries and they came last in mathematics in the same year at a Unesco test with 12 other countries (way under much much much poorer Bolivia).
USB? Yeah, very good. UCV? Some faculties were very good (others very bad). UC? Same thing.
What percentage of the population was it? It was something, but it was not enough. The way we focused on that, among other factors, made the development unsustainable.
No country has ever developed when the absolute average citizen is so badly educated as in Venezuela. And our education system, which had developed from almost nothing from the forties onwards, became more and more of a farce as politics and petrodollars took possesion of Venezuelans’ souls.
If we want to make up for this the first time we need to remember what
Socrates said:
Solo sé que no sé nada.
October 24, 2011 at 9:35 am
Captainccs, I totally agree with you. That’s precisely why if Chávez disappears there is danger on both sides because Chavismo does not have a real ideology.
Miguel, the question is what does it mean to be a socialist. For instance, in my view, Canada is a socialist country because it has strong social programs.
Kepler, do not underestimate the people (el pueblo) of Venezuela, my friend.
Syd, I kind of agree with your statement in the sense that there is not “branwashing” as in a political adoctrination but the chavistas have played the divisionism and resentment card. That’s the worst that has happen the last 12 years.
October 24, 2011 at 9:41 am
Bruni,
I really don’t care much about “patriotism” even if I do care about the society I came from. So I can be pretty clear about what Venezuelans are.
I don’t feel ashamed or proud for a nationality.
And I am realistic. Venezuelans produced the Caracazo. Venezuelans voted twice for CAP and twice for Caldera.
I have said it a zillion times: it’s not that they are stupid. They are ignorant and they have lived in a cargo cult culture. It only takes a handful of people to create havoc or to entice the mob to plunder anything in Venezuela. The situation in Colombia at the mid of the XX century was less complex and look at what they had with the Violencia period.
We have a much more explosive cocktail right now. We need to be prepare to unmine the fields Chavistas have been planting for decades.
October 24, 2011 at 7:33 am
Guys, I am not saying Venezuelans are comies. They are a feudal
folk ruled by feudal rulers in a petro state. What I mean is that the extreme
left has been able to hickjack our country for quite some time now…
they did not have a chance to win in 1958 but they kept trying…and it has produce a lot of instability, even if for quite some time we managed
to avoid Colombia’s fate (thanks to oil, as education levels in Venezuela
are even worse than in Colombia)
The commies were infiltrating the military since
at least the sixties. This was a clear project, openly discussed
by the likes of Douglas Bravo et alia. And they produced
this, our golem, Hugo Chávez Frías…but also a lot of troublemakers distributed everywhere in Venezuela. And even if these people are a minority, they can entice to violence and riots
October 24, 2011 at 11:02 am
I strongly suspect you’re right about the commies infiltrating the military since the 60’s. Here’s my reason.
Prior to Machurucuto (1967), there circulated in my grade school playground, a half-sized comic book, which I believe was produced by anti-Castro forces. I say anti-Castro forces because the only strip that I remember clearly in that comic booklet was one where a bearded Castro in fatigues promised ice cream cones to those children in school who could repeat something or other (presumably revolutionary propaganda). When they çouldn’t, they didn’t get their ice cream cone, which of course produced as a response, much wailing and tears.
I couldn’t remember the rest of the vignettes because after all, unlike Supermán comics, the storyline simply did not attract.
October 24, 2011 at 7:22 am
>>>The pueblo in Venezuela is essentially “adeco”, still is, the chavismo is a variant, but it is the same feeling.<<<
Bruni is spot on. I've been saying it for a long time — it's more of the same but worse.
Before Chavez, the hard left (left of COPEI-AD) never got more that 15% of the popular vote. My best guess is that around 15% of voting Venezuelans are communists. The vast majority in center left, a milder form of socialism. After Chavez's coup failed he took the electoral route. Charisma is not enough, you need political machinery to get yourself elected. AD-COPEI was not available to him so he took what was available, that 15% hard left. Over the years many on the hard left have abandoned Chavez which is proof (at least for me) that Chavez is not about communism but about opportunism. He uses what he can and discards what is no longer useful. How long did he use the baseball players?
An ex-neighbor of mine is a dyed in the wool MASista (Euro-communist) and he had (or has) a high ranking position in the Chavista government. During the events of 2002 I asked him how he could support Chavez and I got an unexpected answer: "I don't support Chavez." Puzzled I asked him: "Then what the heck are you doing in government?" I got another unexpected answer: "I believe in the system."
It is said that politics makes for strange bedfellows. It does indeed in Venezuela. Chavez uses the left to get elected. The left uses Chavez to advance their agenda. The left is disillusioned by Chavez's lack of democratic principles and quits in droves. Seeking new support, Chavez hands Venezuela to the Cubans.
Simplistic scenarios don't capture the complexity of Venezuelan politics.
October 24, 2011 at 7:37 am
BTW, many if not most of the hard left parties (MAS, MEP, MIR, etc.) are actually splinter groups chipped off AD as AD moved to the center from its communist origin.
October 24, 2011 at 10:01 am
It’s important to clarify that the AD party, per se, did not have communist origins. Its founder, Betancourt, did flirt with communism in his early 20’s, and in fact led the communist party while he was in exile in Costa Rica. But he resigned from that party (at the age of 29), and returned to Venezuela in 1937, where he founded Partido Democrático Nacional. That party became the centrist (to the left of dictatorship) AD in 1941. After a 10-year dictatorship under Pérez Jiménez, AD handily the 1958 elections, with Betancourt as leader. AD kept to a Venezuelan-defined socialist agenda.
October 24, 2011 at 7:21 am
No estoy diciendo ni lo uno ni lo otro sino todo lo contrario.
This is what I am saying:
a) people in Venezuela are particularly ignorant
b) the extreme left has been doing missionary work for decades and
decades now among those people. Bruni: you didn’t see them much
but I did, a lot, as I said, just because I was into “Russian” things.
c) this and the petrostate has made a lot of people vulnerable
for very lefty demagogues, even if all they want is to go to Disney
and have a car and have a house and have a BlackBerry…(long list)
and what they consider to be good education.
d) the extreme left has used real training on subversion since it appeared in
Europe in the XIX century. They have used that to provoke chaos,
violence, etc, for decades now. Most South Americans are not aware of this but the start of the VIolencia in Colombia or the Caracazo were much less spontaneous than what you think.
So: these are the things we have.
If you go to a barrio you may have a lot of former adecos but you will
also have a couple of gangster-lefties who are going to organise the
only thing they know how to organise when times are fit for that:
riots, chaos, etc. It’s in their textbooks. I have read them.
October 24, 2011 at 8:25 am
Kepler is correct Bruni.
I lived in Catia, late 60’s, early 70’s with some cousins who studied in el INSTITUTO PEDAGOGICO, and learned about this very thing, and the damage it was doing to their sense of personal responsibility and how it augmented their resentments( which of course plays right into lefty objectives.
Most of this kind of indoctrination was done on a purely emotional level , inciting basic hatreds,and sense of envy.
That’s why these lefties can be ‘communist’ and still move to the USA and sport all the latest material good :)…don’t you see how common this is? When I point this out to them, I often sugggest they move to a more amenable country like Belarus for example…..pero nada que ver 🙂
Charlotte NC is full of these Venezuelan lefties who worship gadgets far more than I do…The reason for this ” disconnect” is that their ideology was never something they truly understood only washed in through emotional brainwashing.
October 24, 2011 at 7:11 am
according to polls 52% of Venezuelans consider themselves to be socialists.
October 24, 2011 at 8:25 am
I doubt that most of the 52% understands the true meaning of that word.
October 24, 2011 at 6:53 am
Oh please Kepler, that’s not true. Venezuelans are not “brainwashed lefties” that’s an hyperbole by itself. The pueblo in Venezuela is essentially “adeco”, still is, the chavismo is a variant, but it is the same feeling.
As for Chávez, he is not a leftie, he is “chavista” , he would be anything as long as he stays in power. Some of those around him are the real left-wing brain-washed because many of them are the sons ans daughters of old guerrilla or communist leaders that were persecuted or blacklisted in the 60’s, so their “chavismo” is a gut feeling.
October 24, 2011 at 11:47 pm
I agree only with the second paragraph (“as for Chavez, …, he’s a chavista”). I don’t agree with “the pueblo in Venezuela is essentially adeco”. The AD party had already lost all credibility well before HC won the 1998 election. I’d actually say most Venezuelans don’t identify themselves with AD. The last truly adeco president was Lusinchi (1984-1989). Arguably, any Venezuelan of voting age from then to today, about 20% of the total population, hasn’t or doesn’t think of themselves as adeco. I wouldn’t write AD off (that’d be a huge mistake), but they’re a spectre of what they used to be in the first two or three periods of democracy in Venezuela (that is, prior to HC’s dictatorship).
October 25, 2011 at 12:56 am
Adeco does not necessarily mean being for AD. Adeco may simply mean an attitude. Millions of current Chavistas are just adecos going with the one in power.
October 25, 2011 at 1:59 pm
Yes, I get it. Yours and Brunilde’s definition of adeco is very broad/loose. I just don’t agree with it (I think it is so loose it doesn’t apply). Anyway, it just may be a matter of opinion.
October 24, 2011 at 6:06 am
We need to educate those people.
The thing is: who of us have the time to do so? Not me. Not Miguel, not Metodex. But someone has to do it. Somehow our politicians have to build networks.
See: those lefties were preaching for many decades not just in the main cities but in many secondary ones. They really were acting like Jehova witnesses or Pentecostals…very similar fashion. And they taught their myths and had someone spreading the “news”.
Here I put an article from 1983 from the Soviet “Vokrug Svjeta” (Around the World), machine-translated (thus some things were not translated properly)
When I have time, I will actually translate the stuff into Spanish and connect it to some of the guys who are still alive within Chavismo and send that to our políticos.
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vokrugsveta.ru%2Fvs%2Farticle%2F2016%2F&sl=ru&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8
That brain washing didn’t come overnight.
These guys have been doing this in the world for over 150 years.
They started doing that in Venezuela at the end of Gómez’s reign but mostly from the late fifties. They found a population with an abysmal education level and they had an easy prey.
And we still have to learn to counter-act.
October 24, 2011 at 12:46 am
Wether we like it or not, this is what feeds the venezuelan people.That is what Venezuela is eating right now, along with the promise of “Patria” and “sovereignty” wich nobody yet knows the meaning of.
Sadly,el pueblo believes aaaaaall of it. They are glad to take it.
October 24, 2011 at 11:19 am
Ah, so this is the meaning of “Come mierda”. Now I’ve got it.
October 23, 2011 at 10:12 pm
“Luego del triunfo de la Revolución, dirigida por Gaddafi, logró alcanzar por fin … el mayor … índice de desarrollo humano de la región.”
This is strictly true. However, as with all that these imbeciles sputter, context is lacking. Of course, with all that oil money they are ahead … in Africa!
But, look at the list of countries by human development index. Libya is below Cuba! Billions and billions of petrodollars have been unable to build a place better than the prison of the Caribbean. So much for human development.
Human Development Index Ranking (2010)
53. Cuba
55. Libya
77. Venezuela
172. Zimbabwe
Venezuela? Oh, we are aiming at dethroning Zimbabwe. In this regard, the outlook is pretty good.
October 23, 2011 at 10:06 pm
No, no EVERYONE in Libya was perfectly happy. Everyone was equal and all that. Very egalitarian. lol.
Why is it that “leftists” seem to believe every idiotic piece of propaganda from leftist dictatorships?
October 23, 2011 at 9:17 pm
Great article, Devil. You are in Chiguire territory…
October 23, 2011 at 9:23 pm
Sorry, Chiguire is in a class by himself…
October 23, 2011 at 8:46 pm
The parade of bolivarian clowns. If their leader is an ignorant imbecile, they could be no less …
October 23, 2011 at 9:15 pm
Jajajaaja!!Dumb begets dumber..
October 23, 2011 at 8:40 pm
It is hard to lie about, hide, or cure lead poison…ask gaddafi.
October 23, 2011 at 9:07 pm
Good grief! We’re doing it via the ballot box. We’re not Libyans! 🙄