Published on 7 Jun 2018
The week of Venezuela's presidential election, John Oliver dedicated an ENTIRE episode of his HBO show "Last Week Tonight" to the country—full of distortions and highly misleading to progressive-minded people.
Responding to Oliver's major points, Empire Files producer Mike Prysner walks us through the most glaring omissions and misrepresentations.
This video response is an essential guide for progressives to understand the reality in Venezuela, the most common myths used to discredit the Chavez movement, and the role of the US government.
[[ Prysner is an Iraq war veteran and journalist. He spent a month in Venezuela during the height of the protest movement in 2017, covering the riots and economic crisis. He has been a Venezuela solidarity activist since 2006. Watch the many documentaries and interviews he produced from Venezuela at TheEmpireFiles.tv ]]
At least two thirds of all businesses in Venezuela are privately owned.
ReplyDeleteJohn Oliver describes it this way…
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Most people in the US / UK do the same thing. They have been programmed to worship their slavery.
“Venezuela is a story of epic mismanagement.”
Right. Western sanctions and embargos are irrelevant. Collusion between Venezuelan oligarchs is irrelevant. The UK theft of $1.2 billion in Venezuelan gold and the US theft of $7.1 billion in Venezuelan assets is irrelevant.
John Oliver claims that average Venezuelans are marching against the government because they are “desperate.” In reality poor Venezuelans support the government, since the government has dramatically reduced poverty. As Mike Prysner notes, the people who oppose the government are the upper class and upper middle class in Venezuela. They are angry because the Maduro government does not worship them. They are not starving or deprived.
Mike Prysner notes that under the neoliberal government before Hugo Chavez, average Venezuelans were so starving that they rioted. The right-wing pro-US government reacted by murdering 4,000 civilians in nine days (27 February 1989 – 8 March 1989). Venezuelans call this the Caracazo, meaning Caracas smack-down, or Caracas hit (as in assassination).
That was almost 500 people a day murdered. The West wants Venezuela to return to those conditions.
I hate John Oliver. When you hear the audience laughing as he cracks his anti Putin jokes, but it's about WW3, the nutter!. It's as crazy as the humans in Beneath the Planet of the Apes worshiping the atomic bomb.
ReplyDeleteI just had a look at the scene, but it was too horrible to put out on NNE's, even if it did make a good point. We might not be able to sleep tonight. I saw that film when I was 10 years old during the Cold War, and it upset me for years afterwards.
The audience laugher on Oliver’s show is so hollow that it might as well be a pre-recorded laugh track. (Maybe it is.) People laugh because of the herd instinct, not because Oliver is funny (he isn’t). People laugh in a futile attempt to tell themselves they are having fun and being entertained. People know that Oliver is an asshole, and not funny, and that the USA should not be attacking nations worldwide. And yet people laugh because…well…it’s expected.
ReplyDeleteAnother person on Comedy Central I loathe is Trevor Noah from South Africa. I watched him once when he first started in Sep 2015. That was enough. Not funny.
Regarding Beneath the Planet of the Apes, yes it was extremely disturbing, but it was meant to shock moviegoers. In people's apathy about nuclear war, they had become like the mutants in the movie.
“In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-sized star. And one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead...”
Today a lot of people seem to yearn for collective suicide via nuclear annihilation. They pray for it, imagining that it will kill only straight white males. Ugly women fantasize that it will only kill beautiful women.
The film, Omega Man, gave me nightmares as well. All those rotting bodies in cities which were once vibrant. And as for those mutants...
ReplyDeleteOmega Man is a special movie to me. I actually saw part of it being filmed in Los Angeles where I was born and raised. Filming was interrupted by the San Fernando earthquake of 9 Feb 1971, which I lived through.
ReplyDeleteOne would have to live in Los Angeles to know what I mean when I say that Omega Man had an “L.A. mood.”
I was also fond of the music soundtrack by Australian composer Ron Grainer, who did the theme to Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner TV series. The film and the music portrayed the protagonist’s sadness and loneliness.
I remember one scene where the protagonist decides to grab a new car, and imagines he is haggling with a used car salesman as dead bodies are everywhere. The music below was playing…
https://youtu.be/mZKF1EAMJWg?t=236
Charlton Heston was both the planet of the Apes and the Omega Man, and yet he he remained pro war.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteI put this out on NNE's once.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EQr9FamvfB0
Yes I know. Unfortunate. John Wayne was even worse.
ReplyDeleteAnother film that moved me was the original Fahrenheit 451 (1966). It too was about loneliness.
The 90-second opening theme was haunting…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36_zm6JkIJI
So was the end theme (4 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rah6QNYV2fw
The composer, Bernard Herrmann, did the music to one of my favorite movies of all time: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
That’s a good one about Putin. It reminds me of another video I had uploaded to YouTube and had forgotten about. Seven years go. Wow. Time flies. (I am not a “Neo-Nazi,” but there were certain aspects about National Socialism I liked.)
ReplyDeleteI never told anyone about this video. You’re the first.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k_pcJ08xFk
Same with this video. I had forgotten about this one too. Images by me, except for the historical photos. Melodramatic, but I had fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_BvzGbaPjA