Actually, he has it right, and a lot of people get afraid when we say (incorrectly) that the Nordic countries are socialist, because they largely aren’t. The people don’t have social ownership of production and services. We might call them a welfare state, but that term seems to be unpopular these days.
Cuba is socialist, despite everyone (including Cuba herself) calling it communist. The people (via its government) owns nearly everything, but there is still money in circulation that’s used to purchase goods and services. The class system isn’t regimented like India, but class still exists. We might single out countries such as China and Cuba as being “communist” rather than “socialist” simply because they’re one party states (and China is particularly capitalist at many levels, and socialist in many industries, too).
However we don’t have a Real Academy to dictate usage, so there’s a lot of muddling of meanings. Personally, I cringe every time someone says a particular state in Europe is “socialist,” because it really minimizes the evil that socialism truly is.
Going on about socialism is just playing into the hands of people like Maduro. He’s a pretty standard kleptocrat running a crony dictatorship in a region where socialism is popular who uses socialist rhetoric to excuse his behavior; making capitalism more popular wouldn’t change his behavior, he’d just use different rhetoric to excuse it.
Stealing stuff and giving it to cronies in order to shore up your rule isn’t “socialist” behavior, it’s dictator behavior. He calls it socialist because the term is popular at home, while it makes America angry which is also popular there. Foreigners talking about the evils of socialism is exactly what he wants, it does nothing but help him.
Venezuela would be better off if he was actually socialist since presumably at least some of that stolen wealth would be used to help the populace in general, however inefficiently.
What will be interesting is where the military ends up falling in the mix. There’s been conflicting recent reports as they seem to get pulled in different directions. They may well not be necessary for the opposition to be successful in running off Maduro as long as they stay out of it.
I understand that he has a powerful private thuggery that is if anything better armed than the military, at least when it comes to non-heavy weapons. The Maduro regime is more of an organized crime ring in place of a government than it is anything else.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with our (USA) diplomats over the next three days. Maduro ordered them out of the country in 72 hours. The administration appears to be telling Maduro to fuck off with that.
It means the translator doesn’t know mucho English and used the wrong preposition. Milano is a general in (not “of”) the Venezuelan army. The Venezuelan army has 9 officer levels, he’s a 7; equivalent to a US O-7 (Major General; 2-star General) according to the chart here.
That’s part of the problem. People mis-use these words all the time… Often deliberately. There’s no shortage of Republicans who cry ‘socialism’ at anything and everything they disagree with, because it provokes an emotional reaction from people. Same thing with words like ‘fascist,’ which have essentially turned into meaningless insults rather than referring to actual political philosophies.
One of the funniest tweets I saw yesterday was a video of some Venezuelan men offering to build President Trump’s wall (and paint it) if he will help them get rid of Maduro: link
People in Pinochets regime were being arrested and prosecuted for human rights abuses decades after the dictatorship fell. Hopefully that fact isn’t lost on Maduro’s supporters. Maduro will go down eventually, and his cronies could end up in prison even if they are old men when it happens.