It's about a decade too late to do any good, but nevertheless it is astonishing to me that this piece ran in The Guardian. It's about the devastation of Venezuela -- and the Western morons like Oliver Stone and Sean Penn who helped.
The show is over now. Their fantasies fulfilled, the western tourists have left a ruined country behind without a guilty glance over their shoulder. Venezuelalooks as if it has been pillaged by a hostile army, though there has been no war.And:
Never underestimate the power worship of those who claim to speak for the powerless, or the credulity of the supposedly wised-up critical theorist.And:
The thoughts of Venezuelans, who watched as westerners treated their country as an ideological playground, cannot be dismissed lightly, either. “There should be a special circle in hell for them,” Thor Halvorssen, the founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, told me. The regime shot his mother and jailed his Venezuelan father. It holds his cousin, the opposition leader, Leopoldo López, as a political prisoner because he had the nerve to oppose it. Halvorssen thinks the Chavistas would not have gone so far in debasing the constitution and looting the state if it had not been able to count on a herd of bovine leftists mooing down all who raised concerns about fundamental rights.
These are the worst leftists imaginable as they show solidarity with oppressive states rather than oppressed peoples. So they stayed silent when Chávez – in the words of the International Trades Union Confederation – engaged in persistent discrimination against organised labour. They neither knew nor cared that corruption is the most brutal of burdens on the poor because the poor cannot pay bribes to obtain the services they should receive by right.
P.S. Shouldn't Oliver Stone & Sean Penn and Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte and Noam Chomsky go visit Venezuela NOW and do something to feed the people?
