Of the tyranny and dysfunction in Venezuela, that is.
This morning my wife, who continues to remain stranded in a collapsing Venezuela, forwarded this email from a Venezuelan lawyer who has decided that enough is enough, he’s mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore, and is hoping to shame enough of his fellow countrymen, who have been all too passive of late, into finally saying “enough is efuckingnough!” and to take to the streets. My translation of his open letter follows:
“As happens every day, the electricity has just gone out, and who knows how fucking long we are going to be so passive or so ball-less. There is no gas, no gasoline,no water, no food, no work, etc. I tell you the truth: we are a people destined to live in continued suffering under the cruelty of this communist regime, and apparently we do not think about a future, but only of today. Remember what Venezuela was like before these communists came to screw this country over? I think that, day by day, they have been brainwashing us into a conformity so passive that nobody even thinks about protesting here anymore.
“It has been more than a year since the country suffered a blackout of several days and there is no one who has demanded or demands repairs and an explanation of why they have done nothing. I am not resigned to living in a country where every day they cut our electricity, where there is no water, gas, gasoline, food, or employment! I will not resign myself to continue being governed by a failed communist regime that only holds power to save their own skins, because they are all criminals who know that the day they hand over power they will be imprisoned for the rest of their lives! This is a call to reflect and accept the fact that we have revealed ourselves before this tyranny that is finishing us as a people and as a country. They have turned Venezuela into an embarrassment, where we went from being a country that was developing to a country where we carry a passport abroad that is cause for pity or genocidal rejection!
“People of Venezuela, it is time to put an end to all of this abuse! It is time for us to take out that rage that we carry inside of us and to tell them no more, enough! To live in these conditions of calamity and want, for no other reason than because a group of outlaws have the power to protect themselves and fill their own pockets at the expense of a people that have been physically and mentally subjugated to such an extent that no one thinks of protesting!
“It is regrettable, but it is never too late! I pray to God that the people will rise up, and that they do not fear losing their lives if necessary, but that with determination and courage we will take back the reins of a country that once was called the Republic of Venezuela!
“Attorney Juan Ignacio Rojas Palaviccini, Barquisimetano, Venezuela, who feels for and is in pain for our country called the Republic of Venezuela – with a 7-star yellow-blue-red tricolor.” [Translator’s note: the author refers here to Venezuela’s pre-Hugo Chavez flag. Chavez added an eighth star to the country’s flag to represent the Guayana Province, one of the Provinces of Venezuela established at the time of the country’s declaration of independence from Spain in 1811. Chavez and his cronies used the legacy of Simon Bolivar, Venezuela’s founding father, to legitimize his brand of nationalist socialism, a move manifestly unpopular with the anti-Chavista majority. This explains the desire by the opposition to not only oust Maduro and the remnants of Chavismo from power, but to restore the country’s original flag.]
My wife included with this letter a snapshot of a Twitter feed from a dissident news source reporting that PDVSA, the Venezuelan national oil company, is currently in such dire condition that it is only operating at bare minimum capacity, producing barely 12 million barrels of refined product per week, nowhere near enough to keep the country even minimally functional. The source further warns that if President Nicolas Maduro and the ruling criminal junta cannot arrange another “rescue importation” of refined gasoline from Iran, as they managed to do two months ago despite international sanctions (imports that did nothing to alleviate the chronic gasoline shortages that plague the country), the country will become paralyzed within a week. That’s right, folks; one of the five largest petroleum exporting countries in the world is out of gasoline. Ain’t Socialism wunnerful?
I certainly sympathize with Señor Rojas, the author of the aforequoted letter, and have long wondered why even a disarmed, demoralized people on the verge of total starvation has put up with the status quo for as long as it has, even having been rendered defenseless by having acquiesced years ago to its own disarmament.
However, I then reminded myself of the situation in THIS country, which is in nowhere near the dire straits of Venezuela, with a people mightily armed by comparison, and yet who still refuse to rise up against an ascendant Venezuela-style Marxist tyranny (albeit one much better disguised), forewarned as they clearly have been about what lies ahead. It raises the question: what will be the tipping point, the spark that ignites the full powder keg, the straw that breaks the camel’s back? If it is not mass starvation, chronic unemployment, lack of medical care leading to exorbitant death rates for all but the most well-connected, and all-pervasive hopelessness and despair, then what will be the breaking point and when will it occur? Does this vary by culture? Does each society have a different concept of what constitutes the absolutely intolerable? Most ominously, one is led to wonder if there are some societies in which there is no breaking point, in which a people are so thoroughly broken that they will resign themselves to their own extermination.
Venezuela seems to be on this path. One of Hugo Chavez’s last public comments before his death in 2013, in response to the question of what the Venezuelan people should do in response to the country’s chronic toilet paper shortage, was essentially “I guess they’re gonna just use their hands to wipe their arses.” In other words, a big, fat middle finger to the people. Choosing an uneducated, incompetent, ignorant thug like Nicolas Maduro to succeed him after his death was tantamount to raising the middle finger of his other hand.
One would think that a people with any sense of national pride or self-respect at all would have at that point stood up and said “enough!” But once again we saw another demonstration of what appears to be mankind’s genetic programming in apathy and acquiescence, as well as the inability to learn from either istory or the examples of others that should serve as warnings and lessons.
Seven years later Venezuela, its people having refused to see the path down which they were headed, despite a half century of examples from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia in the last half of the 20th Century to motivate them to navigate a different path, are suffering the inevitable effects of letting the inertia of events carry them to ruin. What will finally snap them out of it? A fuel shortage that paralyzes the country, preventing food from reaching the population and leading to mass starvation? Will this lead to desperate people with nothing left to lose using their bare hands to fight the armed thugs tasked with keeping them subjugated? If it doesn’t, then I cannot muster up a single grain of sympathy for them or a single tear of grief at their plight. My motivations at that point will be selfishly focused on doing whatever is possible to extricate my wife from the destruction – assuming that by that point it is not worldwide, something that is looking increasingly likely. given current events.
There is a lesson in Venezuela for Americans, but, Americans being who they are and the youngest generation being hopelessly brainwashed, it is extremely unlikely that they will ever learn it. My wife tells me that she wants to write a book about her experiences of the last 16 months once she returns home (may that day be soon, with God’s help. Otherwise I’ll be headed down there to join her, and they are NOT ready for me!), as well as give lectures to the American people warning them to wake the fuck up. Will it be too late by then? This November will provide us with an answer.
To Reclaim Normality 