Who needs food when the agitprop is juicy and visionary leaders are richly rewarded?
No greater love. John Pilger and Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution, johnpilger.com, February 21, 2019:
Travelling with Hugo Chavez, I soon understood the threat of Venezuela …
he carried a satchel bursting with books … For almost two hours he read into the microphone … Orwell, Dickens, Tolstoy, Zola, Hemingway, Chomsky, Neruda … (He said:) “Wine is grown here, a dark Syrah type grape”. “John, John, come up here,” said El Presidente, having watched me fall asleep in the heat and the depths of Oliver Twist. “He likes red wine,” Chavez told the cheering, whistling audience, and presented me with a bottle of “vino de la gente” … Watching Chavez with la gente (the people) made sense of a man who promised … that his every move would be subject to the will of the people … He was electorally the most popular head of state in the Western Hemisphere, probably in the world … media abuse (of his successor Nicolas Maduro) is ridiculous … as the journalist and film-maker Pablo Navarrete reported this week, Venezuela is not the catastrophe it has been painted. “There is food everywhere”.
The 1932-33 Soviet terror famine in Ukraine killed up to seven million people, but some knew better. Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine by Anna Reid, 2015:
(In Moscow in 1931) George Bernard Shaw … told a banquet in his honour that he had thrown tins of food out of the train window crossing the border from Poland, so sure was he that rumours of shortages were nonsense …
Back to those crackers about Caracas. The Greens’ Lee Rhiannon, NSW parliament, April 4, 2006:
Venezuela is remaking itself as a socially just society with priorities in literacy, health care, housing and land rights … One groundbreaking aspect … is that this country has taken over almost one third of Argentinian debt.
Art to die for. Former Greens supremo Bob Brown, federal parliament, May 14, 2008:
Venezuela is oil rich … and a strengthening democracy … Some estimate Venezuela’s oil reserves to be the largest in the world … Venezuela has huge mineral and water resources as well as enormous agriculture and tourism potential … It has stunning national parks and wildlife … The downtown museum of art in Caracas is simply the best collection of artworks I have ever seen.
Best environment the revolution can sell. Isaac Nahon-Serfaty, The Conversation, June 26, 2018:
Venezuela is on a path towards environmental devastation … (Maduro) opened a large swath of Venezuela (in the fragile ecosystems of the Orinoco region) to national and foreign mining companies … Chavez was the “father” of the idea, but Maduro implemented it to offset the decline of oil revenue at the national petroleum corporation due to alleged corruption and mismanagement … So why aren’t any of the global environmental organizations speaking out about it?
Anatoly Kurmanaev, The Wall Street Journal, May 24, 2018:
Growing up in provincial Russia (I witnessed) corruption, violence and degradation … I thought I had the street smarts to navigate Venezuela’s maddening Socialist bureaucracy and controls … What struck me … was how little the Socialist leaders cared about even the appearances of equality. They showed up at press conferences in shantytowns in motorcades of brand new armored SUVs. They toured tumbledown factories on live state TV wearing Rolexes … They shuttled journalists to decaying state-run oil fields on private jets with gilded toilet paper dispensers.