HUNGER AND REPRESSION, A POWER STRATEGY OF SOCIALISM SIGLO XXI - VENEZUELA

What interpretation can we give to the fact that a regime that claims to be the representation of the people permanently applies economic policies that always result in greater hunger for the people? It seems absurd. However, when we observe it in the light of the following analysis, the foregoing is not so absurd:
Based on more than half a century of experimentation with their own people, the Cuban advisors of the regime have convinced the ringleaders that the formula for this and any other totalitarian regime to remain indefinitely in power is very simple, it is enough to combine the Hunger with repression.

The masses will end up feeling that there is no other way out than resigning to penury and that there is no other way but to depend on the government to cover basic needs. The strategy will be more effective if it is combined with a prolonged propaganda campaign that makes the masses believe that hunger is the product of a "blockade" or an "economic war" orchestrated from abroad.

The totalitarian regime, once it has destroyed the national productive apparatus through expropriations and various restrictive measures of private enterprise, becomes the sole provider of the few goods that are still obtained. The long lines to obtain the food that is formed as a result of the above, in particular to obtain the food distributed by the regime, together with the forced registration of citizens as a condition to have an option to them, plus the systematic repression of all protest, invariably ends up turning the citizens into an amorphous mass of individuals without capacity for discernment or reflection, that is to say in zombies, since the totality of their vital energy will be concentrated in procuring the indispensable food for their survival.

This means that citizens end up without enough physical and mental strength to think about rebelling or something other than eating. This is the method of the so-called "muzzle of arepa", traditionally used in the Venezuelan countryside to domesticate animals. When it is used to "domesticate" human beings, this method becomes a sophisticated instrument of psychological domination, whose objective is to consolidate the totalitarian system indefinitely. Although the reader may be reluctant to believe it, this perverse and ruthless strategy of power is today in full development in our beloved homeland ...