In Venezuela, the Maduro regime (preceded by Hugo Chávez) has managed to turn a formerly prosperous and advancing nation into a horror. To all evidence, in the recent election the people voted Maduro out. But he’s claiming victory and staying put.
The New York Times seems to have a problem when it comes to covering leftist regimes. In the 1930s, the New York Times’ Moscow reporter Walter Duranty wrote glowing stories about Stalin’s regime while it inflicted terror and famine on the Soviet Union. Last month, in reporting on the situation in Venezuela, the paper placed the blame for the nation’s woes not on the government’s collectivist policies but rather on “brutal capitalism.”
In this piece, Phil Magness looks at the paper’s astounding claim.
He writes,
In their strange attempt to reinvent Venezuela’s recent economic record as an outgrowth of “capitalism,” the newspaper ignores the obvious. Nicolas Maduro is an avowed Marxist. In a 2021 speech, he declared Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto ‘the most important political declaration in 200 years’ and professed his fidelity to Marx’s theory of historical materialism. Maduro goes on to sing praises of precursor Marxist regimes, including V.I. Lenin’s Soviet Union, Mao Zedong’s China, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba. He portrays Venezuela as the successor to this legacy and tasks his regime with implementing Marx’s ideas for the 21st century.
Of course, this is in line with the tradition of leftist propaganda that everything bad must be blamed on capitalism and socialism can never be said to have any flaws. But the Times is supposed to be a newspaper.