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April 12, 2008

Chavismo and the Bolsheviks


VOLINE was an active Anarchist and also a historian of the Russian revolution. As an Anarchist he detested political power which set the Anarchists at odds with the Bolsheviks who wanted to lead and control the revolution. In his book The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921, after describing the differences between the Anarchist and the Bolshevik conceptions, VOLINE goes on to describe the Bolshevik System as it stood twenty years after it's creation. In 1939 he wrote:


The Bolshevik system wants the State-employer to be, for every citizen, the provider, the moral guide, and the distributor of rewards and penalties.

The State provides work for the citizen and assigns him to a job. The State feeds and pays him! The State supervises him; the State uses and manipulates him as it likes; the State educates and trains him; the State judges him; the State recompenses or punishes him. So [in one embodiment we find] employer, provider, protector, supervisor, educator, instructor, judge, jailer, and executioner -- all these [embodied] in a State, which, with the help of its functionaries, wants to be omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. Let him who seeks to escape it, beware!

We want to emphasize the point that the Bolshevik State (the Government) not only possesses all the material and moral goods in existence, but, what is perhaps, much more serious -- it has made itself also the perpetual repository of all truth, in all fields, historic, economic, political, social, scientific, philosophical, and others. In all fields, the Bolshevik government considers itself infallible and called upon to lead humanity. It alone possesses the truth. It alone knows where and how to direct. It alone is capable of leading the Revolution properly.

Then, logically and inevitably, it claims that the 175,000,000 people who inhabit the Russian domain also must recognize it as the only bearer of the truth, infallible, incontrovertible, sacred. And logically, inevitably, any individual or group who dares not combat that government, but simply doubts its infallibility, criticizes it, contradicts it, or blames it for anything at all, is regarded as its enemy and therefore as an enemy of the truth, and of the Revolution -- a "counter-revolutionary".

This involves a complete monopoly of opinion and thought. Any opinion, any thought, other than that of the State (or of the Government) is held to be a heresy: dangerous, inadmissible, criminal. And logically, inescapably, the punishment of heretics follows: prison, exile, execution.

The Syndicalists and the Anarchists, ferociously persecuted solely because they dared to have an independent opinion of the Revolution, knew what this meant.

As the reader can see, that system is truly that of absolute slavery of the people -- physical and moral slavery. It is, if one likes, a new and terrible Inquisition on a social level. Such is the work achieved by the Bolshevik Party.


The above describes the state of affairs in Venezuela since Chavez consolidated power just as Stalin did before him. The coercion is not only physical but also mental. The regime's opponents are persecuted while the masses are told that everything is well because now "Venezuela belongs to all of us." That slogan is true in word only because no one can do anything with "our Venezuela" unless it is mandated from above. The tampering with truth and reality has reached unreal levels.

arepa
The filling is not part of the arepa proper which is just the cornmeal based bread
To give an example, the "arepa" is Venezuela's tradition bread. So much so that to say "make ends meet" we say "round out the arepa." To say "make a living" we say "earn the arepa." The arepa is by no means restricted to Venezuela, supposedly the Colombians have 75 different ways of preparing arepas. But the point of the story is that Chavismo economics has made corn scarce and the arepa has disappeared from the Venezuelan diet. For Chavez this is not a problem, he simply decreed that the arepa is not food and therefore its disappearance is not important. As VOLINE wrote, only the totalitarian state has the truth and anyone who dares contradict it is a counter-revolutionary. Should you complain about the lack of arepas in theory you could wind up in jail.

This is the "pretty" revolution, a Latin-American remake of a despotic and failed ideology. But while the hangers-on can milk our black gold, they will make sure to stay in power.

Denny Schlesinger

The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921
VOLINE Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum


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