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In El American’s Idiocy of the Week, we have noticed the attempts of progressivism to whitewash the Venezuelan dictatorship. Perhaps it is due to the recent rapprochement between the Biden administration and Maduro’s oil-lubricated government, or perhaps it is nothing more than the old leftist mantra of “that wasn’t real socialism,” but the truth is that it is starting to become shameless to whitewash the dictatorship.
William Neuman, a New York Times journalist, has just published a book titled Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela, but don’t be fooled by the title into thinking it is a merciless critique of the Venezuelan socialist dictatorship, as the book does indeed get worse as it goes along.
William Neuman begins by compiling a series of dramatic testimonies from Venezuelans who tell how Venezuela has fallen apart after the governments of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. These testimonies include malnutrition due to food shortages, deaths due to lack of medicines and sanitary resources, corruption everywhere, uncontrolled crime, kidnappings, robberies, murders, political persecution, torture and disappearance of dissidents, among other things that 21st-century socialism has brought.
But after hearing all this from Venezuelans themselves, William Neuman concludes by saying that the problem is that Venezuela has not been true socialism. “Chávez was neither a Marxist nor in any real sense, despite the rhetoric, a socialist.”
You have to see how these socialist dictators are when it comes to applying socialism! They are arrogant people who think they know everything about Marxism and have not had the humility to ask people like William Neuman how to do it right.
All these intellectuals like William Neuman always crow that “it is not true socialism,” but they never share the exact and infallible golden formula of Marxism, I guess out of modesty.
Nazis and fascists can be accused of anything, but at least they found the formula of national socialism the first time and discarded it, because I don’t see anyone saying that it wasn’t true national-socialism.
Idiocy of the week: Venezuelan dictatorship is not socialist
Do not think that this New York Times journalist is an isolated thing. Journalists, artists and intellectuals forgiving and justifying absolutely everything to socialism with the cry that “it has not been done right” is as old as Marxism itself. And nowadays, examples abound such as that of William Neuman, probably trying to change the perception of the Venezuelan dictatorship, now that we are at the beginning of a great friendship.
In another recent New York Times article talking about Petro and Colombia, when mentioning Venezuela as a border country, they clarified that the Bolivarian regime was led by “authoritarians who claim the leftist banner”. As if to say that they are not true leftists, but tyrants pretending to be leftists.
Socialist alchemy has been tried by Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Castro, Chavez and so many others, but the experiment always results in misery, hunger, destruction and death. I guess according to the New York Times, none of these have been true socialists, but imposters. Or at least they have been very arrogant, because if they had wanted genuine socialism, they would have consulted the luminaries of the New York Times to implement Marxism correctly.
The Spanish newspaper El País has gone even further, just a few weeks ago published an article in which it unashamedly asserted that “capitalism run amok” had arrived in Venezuela.
For El País, the timid economic opening of some sectors by the Venezuelan dictatorship, the use of the dollar in the black market, and “the rapprochement with the United States” is an unequivocal sign of the arrival of savage capitalism and a “new neoliberal reality.” Impressive.
While it is still unclear to me whether this whitewashing of the Venezuelan dictatorship is due to idiocy or schizophrenia — or whether it is simply intended to justify the Biden administration’s rapprochement with the Venezuelan dictatorship — it is clear that it deserves El American’s Idiocy of the Week award.
Ignacio Manuel García Medina, Business Management teacher. Artist and lecturer specialized in Popular Culture for various platforms. Presenter of the program "Pop Libertario" for the Juan de Mariana Institute. Lives in the Canary Islands, Spain // Ignacio M. García Medina es profesor de Gestión de Empresas. Es miembro del Instituto Juan de Mariana y conferenciante especializado en Cultura Popular e ideas de la Libertad.
Social Networks: @ignaciomgm