Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Lamenting the Berlin Wall's Fall

Via Hugo Pérez Hernáiz, this is just priceless. Aporrea, a pro-government Venezuelan news site, ran an op-ed about the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down.

It laments the occasion and yearns for the glories of the Soviet Union. Those were the days.

The wall protected the workers from the evils of capitalism, so he felt sad when it came down. It was absolutely necessary to build the wall because the United States was building a "Dollar Wall" of capitalism.

Hugo Chávez himself had rejected 20th century Marxism, preferring what he called "21st Century Socialism," which still has no real meaning but at the very least is not intended to copy the Cold War Communist model (or at least one of the models) as Cuba did. Clearly Aporrea thinks its readership would be interested in nostalgia about 20th century Soviet Marxism, though given what we know--e.g. "the people" were badly exploited--it's hard to understand why.

2 comments:

ConsDemo 5:35 PM  

I remember speaking with a Venzuelan relative who was a chvista duro and asked him why Chavez style socialism was any different than socialism from the former Soviet Bloc. He said the problem with Soviet socialism is that it was top-down while Chavista socialism was bottom up. Given Chavez was a virtual dictator, I had a hard time squaring it with reality. It turns out they suffer the same ills, albeit Venezuela is still more open than the USSR was.

Greg Weeks 9:52 AM  

It is true, though that there are a lot of initiatives coming from the ground up even while political power is firmly in the executive branch.

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