Introduction

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From the French Revolution until very recently there was only one way to overthrow a democratic government and to become a dictator, using bullets and violence. The French Revolution was bloody and the same can be said about any coups of almost all modern dictators. The method is the same with no regards whatsoever to the ideological tendency of the dictator.

But like almost any type of relationship where there is power involved, in human societies the predator evolves just as the prey and readjusts to it. In the era of political correctness, coups have improved and are now much more sophisticated because they have acquired a new characteristic with which they camouflage themselves with democratic attire to be overlooked in the field of international politics.

This way a dictator can stay in power for years before being identified by the rest of the governments as such, which is what happened with Venezuela when the current disaster was starting more than a decade ago.

In the past article I mentioned that Chavez and his political party managed to use Venezuela’s democracy to dismantle Venezuela’s democracy itself. This was possible because in Venezuela most people don’t have a proper understanding about what democracy really is.

Venezuela's vulnerability

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The trick is very simple, the sophisticated dictator convinces the people that democracy consists simply in voting. He does it by repeating it over and over again. In each speech, in each writing of the sophisticated dictator the word democracy appears and it always linked to the concept of the votes. The votes become the synonym of democracy in the minds of the people that are easy to trick. Thus, under this circumstance, a president or an initiative is more or less democratic depending on whether the population voted for it or not. In the same way, the more times the population goes to vote, the more democratic society is. This way, there is nothing stopping the dictator to do whatever he can think of, just because there are votes supporting him, no matter the craziness of his actions.

This, of course, is a misconception designed to deceive people, for example, last week after they won the presidential election on Sunday, May 20, I heard Maduro’s bragging that they have done 4 elections in the past 10 months, implying how much they “respect” people choices, the fact is of course, those elections has been rigged for a lot of years, but we will cover this later on. Democracy and votes are not the same. Voting is only a democratic tool, but its concept is not the same as voting.

The word democracy means several things

• Separation of powers: democratic governments are divided into several independent parts of each other. This is a guarantee so that no person can come and stay with all the power in the country. So if one part of the government try to abuse its power, the people can use another institution to stop it, to guarantee that the one who writes the laws is not the same as the one who executes them, and that none of them is related to the person who makes judgments and imposes verdict.

Without division of powers a president can write laws that suit him, put them into practice, and can even commit crimes against the population because he himself is practically the judge and the one deciding what is right and what is wrong. Even if a government wins elections by popular vote, if there is no separation of powers it is not a democratic government.

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• Freedom of expression and independent media: a government is not democratic if people do not have the chance to express themselves without having concern for possible consequences of any type. For that reason the media should be controlled by the citizens and not in the hands of the government. If the government is the only owner of the media, or imposes punitive measures on them for reporting things they don’t like, then the only news that people will receive are the ones that suit the government.

This will cause the criticisms of the government to be silenced. Freedom of expression is extremely important because, since the government has a total control on guns and repression (police and military), it is easier for them to commit any type of massacre against the people if they are the ones controling the media. It does not matter if the government entered by popular will, if there is no freedom of expression and independent media, it is not a democracy.

And in Venezuela, the current government has always attacked media that criticized them, the most shocking case was when they didn’t allow a popular TV channel known as RCTV to remain active.

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• Rule of law: all citizens must be equal before the law. The democratic state is neutral. There are no two classes of citizens depending on how devoted they are to the government, or any other similar criteria. In a democracy, the law is the same for everyone. If the law is applied on a particular way according to the person, it is not a democracy, regardless of how many elections there might be.

• Separation between public life and private life: the people living in a country with a democratic government have a private life outside the State. The government does not get involved in the private details of people's lives, including the countries they travel to, the history of their internet searches, the details of their bank accounts, or what they write in their private lives. If there is no space for the privacy of citizens, the state is not democratic and it does not matter how many people go to the rallies in favor of the president.

• Basic freedoms guaranteed by law: democracies respect basic rights such as the right to own property, or the right to move freely. These rights are not only in theory, in practice they must work and the democratic government must protect them. If a government forbids or limits the free movement of the people, or if it has policies that violates property rights and expropriates people’s assets, it is not a democratic government. No matter how much support they have on random polls.

• Limited time as president and multiple candidates in each election: presidential terms in democracies are short and a winner is chosen from multiple options. This guarantees that everyone will have the opportunity to be represented and no one will take power indefinitely.

In Venezuela, one of the things Chavez managed to accomplish was to allow any presidential candidate to be reelected any numbers of times without any limits whatsoever. This allowed him to participate in as many elections as he wanted.

If in order to be a democratic president it is not enough to be elected by the majority, then to be a dictator it is not enough to gain power without the support of the majority. If this were the case when an elected president becomes unable to continue and a temporal government is created until new elections are held, that temporal president would be a dictator. But it is not the case obviously. A dictator is a person who does not respect the separation of powers, who undermines freedom of expression, who replaces the law by its whims, who eliminates the separation between public life and private life and who ignores the fundamental rights of the people.

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It is interesting to realize that every person who comes to power usually tries to increase the power of his government and in the same way, tries to reduce these democratic principles. Every democracy is a state of constant tension between the rulers and the laws. The laws seek to protect democratic principles over time and therefore are stable and in theory the modifications should be very little, only corrections that are made over time. It is the same reason why presidential terms in democracies are so short. It is very difficult for a person who such a limited time to substantially change the bases of the government he is leading. For these reasons democracy can be considered as a very valuable tradition that is handed down from generation to generation that must be protected and its functioning must be understood.

If dictators manipulate everything to make everyone believe that democracy is nothing more than just votes, this allows them to enable measures that are dictatorial, by simply using popular votes and call them "democratic" measures. I will give an example that happened in Venezuela so that this is well understood.

In the past, as mentioned before, the dictators remained in power under military threat. Staying decades in power is a clearly dictatorial measure. Now imagine that instead of using military power, the government then asks the people if they want the president to have the possibility of being always a candidate for the presidency over and over and over again, the people decide to vote in favor and the president remains in his position for several decades. Can something like this be called democratic? Of course not. But there is even more.

These masters of manipulations create initiatives to "make our democracy stronger" through "the popular will" such as referendums, popular elections and plebiscites, but simultaneously they destroy each and every one of the real democratic qualities there might be, they eliminate the separation of powers, they monopolize the media or at least the majority of it, they start to change laws for others more obscure ones they can modify at any time they wish. To give you a random example, while the population is busy voting for something insignificant like which should be the color in the parliament walls, these manipulators are sabotaging the division of powers, changing the laws of the game according to their pleasure, changing the judges for corrupt ones that can punish whomever the president chooses, and eliminate all civil liberties one by one. And they make some people believe this is called a "real democracy".

Since it is impossible to carry this out without people’s support, it becomes an image game so they will disguise themselves as big democrats, and when they speak they say exactly what the people want to hear even if that goes against their true intentions. They promise things that in advance they know they can not fulfill, they tell lie after lie because the only things that matters to the is winning votes by any means, even faking them. Years later, when the modern dictator has already won and democracy has been destroyed, he starts to show his true face and intentions.

And example of this manipulation happened in the last presidential election from a few days ago on Sunday May 20, Maduro’s offered 10 million Bolivares as a “bonus” to anyone who voted for him (he was buying votes without any shame), as of now, 10 million Bolivares is about 10 American dollars but the amount of dollars will constantly decrease because of the high inflation, still it is more than the minimum monthly wage. The thing is he offered that so poor and easy to manipulate people went there and voted for him, and only after the election was finished, the entity responsible for hosting the election and announcing the winner called CNE (and controlled by the government) “forbade” the president to give away the bonus, so the 10 million Bolivares he promised to his supporters were never delivered.

Construction worker Josue Valecillos, 54, in Chavez’s home state of Barinas said volunteers scanned his card on a phone and vowed a quick transfer. “They offered me 10 million bolivars,” said Maduro supporter Valecillos. | Source

Conclusion

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In order to manipulate someone, the manipulated individual needs to have a certain lack of knowledge or understanding about the subject in question, this makes him extremely vulnerable if a manipulator can identify it.

The most valuable thing anyone can have, is proper knowledge and understanding about how the world works, especially when it comes to politics and how people think.

In Venezuela, thanks to several factors, like a population that probably wasn’t aware of the risks involved in giving support to someone like Chavez and the different measures he applied throughout his time as president, a complete plan to subvert democracy was successfully implemented, and with the help of high oil prices, these people had anything they needed to accomplish their “revolution”. So much so, they even “helped” political allies in other countries with the hopes of creating sort of a network of governments all with the same ways and goals.

In the next entry we will start to analyze in a more in depth way, what was the plan they had to subvert Venezuela’s democracy, for now, anyone reading this and previous articles can at least start to understand how did they manage to amass so much power and bring so much destruction afterwards.

As always, thanks for reading!