Posted on 05/09/2018 7:40:53 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
One of the most vivid lectures I remember from studying the Russian Revolution during my junior year abroad at St. Antony's College, at Oxford, was the one on what sealed the tsar of Russia's fate. My superb tutor and lecturer, Dr. Harold Shukman, said it was the scene in St. Petersburg, where the rather insufficiently studied photos of the era showed thousands of troops, thousands, hanging around, idle, doing nothing. They were deserters, and their choice to walk away showed the extent of just how far the tsar was gone as a force of government. This scene became the tinder and backdrop of the October Revolution of 1917.
More than a century later, half a world away in the tropics, and this time under a Soviet-derived socialism, a similar picture is forming, in Venezuela. According to Bloomberg:
Military officers are joining the exodus of Venezuelans to Colombia and Brazil, fleeing barracks and forcing President Nicolas Maduro's government to call upon retirees and militia to fill the void.
High desertion rates at bases in Caracas and the countryside are complicating security plans for the presidential election in 13 days, which by law require military custody of electoral materials and machinery at voting centers.
"The number is unknown because it used to be published in the Official Gazette. Now, it is not," said Rocio San Miguel, director of Control Ciudadano, a military watchdog group in Caracas. She said soldiers are fleeing for the same reason citizens are: "Wages are low, the quality of food and clothing isn't good."
Seems that 18,000% inflation rate reported a few days ago (another study has it at 13,779%) is having an effect on soldiers' pay, the money is effectively worthless, and hungry soldiers are not happy soldiers
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Oh-Oh! I hope Venezuela doesn’t go all Bolshevik and usher in some socialist regime to build a utopia for people ...
But I guess that’s not likely.
Loosing troops? No Problemo, Cuba can help.
Are the fleeing members of the military planning to regroup into a revolutionary army to take back Venzuela??
> Losing troops? No Problemo, Cuba can help. <
Obama once proposed some sort of national youth corps. Are those guys still around? Maybe they could go to Venezuela.
Maduro is going to get what Ceaucescue got.
Nothing will change until the Cubans leave...
One can only hope, and that those people down there get some relief.
A king, a tsar, a president ... is only one person. It is faith in him that adheres his supporters, and it is through those supporters that he exercizes any real power.
Lose faith, lose power. And who besides Sean Penn could have any faith in Maduro?
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