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and the efforts of superb researchers and analysts like Mark Weisbrot, and the tough investigative journalism of Eva Golinger--who has provided so many important FOIA revelations and other hard information--and the work of so many truth-seekers on Venezuela and on the leftist democracy movement throughout Latin America, and those who have spread the word on the Irish filmmakers' documentary, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," and the work of Oliver Stone in his documentary "South of the Border," and the work of many researchers, writers, leftist advocacy groups and individuals in England, Europe and the U.S., and in Latin America, is beginning to put some serious dents in the U.S./corporate media slander campaign against their bogeyman Chavez and (they never tell you) against the Left in Latin America and against the millions and millions of people who are benefiting from Leftist policies and who support and vote for Leftist leaders in Latin America. They are the "enemy," to the Corporate Rulers. They just use Chavez as a convenient punching bag--and a typically propagandistic ploy.* Remember this: The real enemy of our Corporate Rulers, in Latin America and here, is the voters and democracy itself.
The U.S./corporate lies about Venezuela are fraying at the edges--as with so many of their "Big Lie" campaigns. I'm very glad to see this happening, at long last. We should all be very encouraged to post yet more alternative information about Venezuela and other countries blessed with Leftist governments--which means they are blessed with honest elections (something we've lost here in the U.S.) and with awesome grass roots organization (something else we need to recover here). Our people need to know--and want to know--the truth. I don't have any monopoly on the truth, nor does anyone here. But I DO recognize a "Big Lie" campaign when I see it. And that is the truth about our corporate media and Chavez. They are outright lying--consistently and egregiously, and, indeed, monotonously (they all sound the same)--about Chavez, his government, Venezuela and the big Leftist movement throughout the region. Lying through their teeth, day in, day out. It is quite mind-boggling. And though none of us has any monopoly on the truth, what we CAN do is provide ALTERNATIVE information. Let the uninformed consider it all and reach for the truth themselves. This is what our Corporate Media do NOT provide--a balanced picture.
Why do people vote for Chavez, in big numbers, consistently over time--in honest elections? Why do people vote for Evo Morales? Rafael Correa? Lula da Silva? Dilma Rousseff? Cristina Fernandez? Daniel Ortega? And all the others? THE CORPORATE MEDIA NEVER TELLS YOU! They tell you all these leaders' (especially Chavez's) flaws. They never tell you why people vote for them.
I just read the most lying article about Chavez that I have ever read--and that's saying something--by Jackson Diehl in the Washington Pest, in which Diehl discusses "Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez" vs. "the democratically elected Colombian leader" Manuel Santos. It is of no interest to this propagandist that leftists are routinely murdered in Colombia--thousands of trade unionists, teachers, community activists, human rights workers, peasant farmers and others have been slaughtered by the Colombian military and its death squads--while nobody dies in Venezuela for their political views and in fact the Chavez government has greatly improved public participation and voter turnouts--and furthermore runs clean, transparent, internationally certified elections. Can Colombia even be said to have a democracy, when so many of the advocates of the poor have been murdered with near total impunity? Yet Venezuela CLEARLY has a democracy, that has CLEARLY been improved upon by the Chavez government, yet Chavez gets called a "strongman." He's a strong leftist leader, that's true--much in the mold of FDR--but he is NOT a "strongman" or "dictator" or any of the other epithets they throw at him.
Bald-faced lies. STAGGERING lies. But it's wearing thin, as "Big Lies" do--and as Spanza's post tells us. When the Corporate Rulers and War Profiteers tell such outrageous lies as the one above--that Chavez is a "strongman" while Santos is "democratically elected"--we know that panic is setting in, and when they start attacking those who call them on their lies, we know that their lies are starting to fail. People aren't believing them any more.
This OP and its rancid hit piece are a good sign.
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*(The focus on a bogeyman is typically a war profiteer tactic, which makes the use of Chavez as a bogeyman very worrisome. I am reminded of the very focused effort to make "Saddam Hussein" the issue in that U.S. war on Iraq, and to demonize that figure, when, in truth, the real target was a million innocent Iraqis who were slaughtered--about a hundred thousand in the first weeks of bombing alone, and the rest in later bombings, shootings, tortures, imprisonments, displacements, disease, deliberately induced civil mayhem and other horrors of war. The object was to brutalize and subdue the Iraqi people and to force them to do the will of the Bush Junta. Our Corporate/War Profiteer Rulers are using the SAME tactic on a DEMOCRATIC president who has had the massive support of his people and who has harmed NO ONE--and is in fact a good president. This is truly scary--not only because of the omens of another oil war, but also because it is so audacious. I hope that its audaciousness ends up backfiring on them--and Spanza's post may be a sign that it is--but this Corporate propaganda machine is very dangerous, as well as anti-democratic and corrosive of society.)
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