The reaction on HN to what just happened in Venezuela is exhausting and revealing. People who have never lived under socialism, communism, dictatorship, or military rule speak with total confidence while dismissing those who have.

More than 8 million Venezuelans have fled their country, one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. They are celebrating. You are being critical. That alone should give pause.

Those condemning this action (and almost defending the oppressors) have never:

  - Lived under a dictatorship where dissent leads to prison, torture, rape or disappearance
  - Watched the military and police become criminal enterprises
  - Seen private property and entire industries seized by the state, as happened under Chávez and Maduro
  - Experienced the collapse that follows decades of corruption, repression, and ideological control

Latin America knows this story well. Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Venezuela have followed different paths with the same outcomes: repression, exile, fear, and destroyed civil society. Venezuela didn’t “fail suddenly.” It was dismantled over decades through nationalization, purges, censorship, and military collusion with organized crime.

If you claim to care about migrants, human rights, or the oppressed, you cannot only care after people escape. You cannot oppose every serious attempt to end regimes that jail, torture, and kill their own citizens while calling yourself humanitarian. That is not morality, it’s distance.

Is oil involved? Of course. Venezuela’s oil industry, built with foreign investment, was expropriated, looted, and mismanaged into ruin. But this is also about state-backed criminal networks, narcotrafficking, and regional destabilization that have killed hundreds of thousands beyond Venezuela’s borders.

If you had lived under these conditions, if your family had been broken by fear, disappearance, or exile, you would not be citing abstract “international law” to defend your oppressors. You would be hoping, every night, that someone powerful enough would intervene.

What’s missing here isn’t compassion. It is context.

Before defending dictators from the safety of a functioning democracy, have the self-awareness to ask whether you understand the reality you’re judging. Otherwise what comes through isn’t moral clarity, it’s ignorance dressed up as virtue.

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