The New York Analysis of Policy and Government provides a two-part review of the media’s reluctance to discuss the catastrophic conditions existing in Venezuela.
There is a reason why the U.S. media downplays the Venezuelan tragedy, in which extreme shortages of food, medicine and basic supplies such as toilet paper are compounded by an authoritarian government that denies essential rights to its citizenry.
As Kevin Williamson notes in his study of socialism, “Venezuela shows what happens when socialism is appended…Venezuela has something like the kind of socialism that American socialists intend and admire…[in 2003, as reported by the Weekly Standard] 16 U.S. congressmen voiced their approval…[of Venezuelan socialism]”
Indeed, Venezuela has adopted the very policy choices endorsed by American progressives. It has produced economic collapse and utter misery for the population. That fact is far too embarrassing for the left-leaning U.S. media to adequately report on.
National Review discussed the adulation Hugo Chavez, founder of Venezuela’s socialist path, received from American leftists: “Celebrities came to sit at his feet, with Sean Penn calling him a ‘champion’ of the world’s poor, Oliver Stone celebrating him as ‘a great hero,’ Antonio Banderas citing his seizure of private businesses as a model to be emulated in the rest of the world, Michael Moore praising his use of oil for political purposes, Danny Glover celebrating him as a ‘champion of democracy.’… There is never a reckoning for the Left. An entire generation of American intellectuals found itself enraptured by the brutal, repressive, terroristic political apparatus of the Soviet Union — not only journalistic enablers like Walter Duranty of the Times and the various Hollywood reds and Communist party operatives, but the purportedly enlightened liberals at The New Republic, who were consistent apologists for Soviet brutality at home and abroad at the height of Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror. Scores of Americans, some of them in high government office, were working on behalf of one of history’s most murderous and repressive regimes — and the bad guys in that story are, in the popular imagination, the people who worked to expose that conspiracy, rather than the people who worked to advance it. Noam Chomsky has for decades been in the business of peddling excuses for every gang of murderers flying his preferred flag — the Khmer Rouge, the Sandinistas, and Mao Zedong’s regime among them.”
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Pedro Lange-Churión states that “The left acts as if all ‘leftist’ governments must be unconditionally defended, no matter how authoritarian and corrupt they become. In acting this way they hark back to the Stalinist days of unconditional allegiance to the party, or to the Cold War years when even timid critiques to the left—even within the left–produced knee-jerk attacks and excommunications. The left has failed to critique the current Venezuelan nightmare…Venezuela was news while it was good news and while Chávez could be used as a banner for the left and his antics provided comic relief. But as soon as the country began to spiral towards ruination, and Chavismo began to resemble another Latin American authoritarian regime, better to turn a blind eye. The position of the Latin American left, then, has been either to suspend a critical stance, or not to address Venezuela’s situation at all.”
As Ana Quintana notes, “In the span of just over 20 years, President Nicolás Maduro, his predecessor Hugo Chavez, and their ‘Socialism of the 21st Century’ have singlehandedly destroyed a country sitting atop of the world’s largest oil reserves. The ongoing economic crisis has bankrupted the country, and the International Monetary Fund forecasts that by midyear the inflation rate will hit 1,600 percent. While the nation is home to massive oil reserves, production is at its lowest level in over 20 years…While leader Maduro is widely unpopular, he has managed to stay in office by unlawfully consolidating power. Any doubt about the Maduro regime’s determination to keep power disappeared last month when he ordered the Supreme Court to take over the National Assembly—the last remaining government branch outside of executive control…Currently, Venezuela has over 100 political prisoners, more than even Cuba. Another victim of the regime is Francisco Marquez, a dual U.S.-Venezuelan citizen. For four months, he was tortured by his guards and the secret police.”
In 2016, Matt O’Brien, writing in the Washington Post, described Venezuela’s plight: “It’s come to this: The country with the largest oil reserves in the world can’t afford to brew its own beer, stay in its own time zone, or even have its own people show up to work more than two times a week…now the Chavista regime seems to be threatening violence of its own if the opposition succeeds in recalling President Nicolás Maduro. It’s a grim race between anarchy and civil war. How did Venezuela get here? Well, by spending more than it had and not having as much as it should. Let’s take these in reverse order. It really shouldn’t have been hard for the government to use some of its petrodollars on the poor without destroying the economy. Every other oil-rich country, after all, has figured that out. But you can’t redistribute oil profits if there aren’t oil profits to redistribute, or at least not many of them. And there weren’t after Hugo Chavez replaced people who knew what they were doing with people he knew would be loyal to him at the state-owned oil company. It didn’t help that he scared foreign oil companies off too. Or that he took money out, but didn’t put it back in, so that they can no longer turn as much of their extra-heavy crude into refined oil. Add it all up, and Venezuela’s oil production actually fell by about 25 percent between 1999 and 2013.”
The Report concludes tomorrow.