By Monica Showalter
\nAmerican Thinker<\/p>\n
Think it can’t happen here?<\/p>\n
It can happen here.<\/p>\n
That’s the warning from a young woman from Venezuela, who has seen the statue-topplings before \u2014 and the street-renamings, (and the\u00a0flag-alterings<\/a>, and the\u00a0name-changings<\/a>) along\u00a0the destruction of history, and knows exactly where it leads.<\/p>\n She made this powerful video here:<\/p>\n https:\/\/twitter.com\/PolitiKurd\/status\/1275156623317745669?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1275156623317745669%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com%2Fblog%2F2020%2F06%2Fwhere_the_statuetoppling_leads.html<\/p>\n “Why do I even worry about some silly little statues coming down?\u00a0\u00a0Or some silly little street names changing?\u00a0\u00a0Why do I care?\u00a0\u00a0It’s because the last time I didn’t care about this, I was a teenager.\u00a0\u00a0I have already lived through this thing, when I was living in Venezuela\u00a0” she begins.<\/p>\n “Statues came down, [Hugo] Ch\u00e1vez didn’t want the history displayed.\u00a0\u00a0Then he changed the street names, then came the (school) curriculum, then some movies couldn’t be shown on certain TV channels.\u00a0\u00a0And so on, and so forth…<\/p>\n “You guys think it can’t happen to you.\u00a0\u00a0I’ve heard this so many times.\u00a0\u00a0But always be on\u00a0guard, never believe that something can’t happen to you.\u00a0\u00a0You need to guard your country and your society or it will be destroyed.”<\/p>\n She\u00a0concludes<\/a>: “And there’s clearly a lot of people wanting to destroy the U.S.”<\/p>\n Why is what she says so powerful?\u00a0\u00a0Because it’s true.<\/p>\n It really happened that way in Venezuela.\u00a0\u00a0The\u00a0statue-topplings<\/a>\u00a0began in 2004 and were dismissed then as disturbing but still largely a Chavista clown show for the cameras at the time.<\/p>\n When I visited Venezuela in late 2005, the trajectory of her warning \u2014 from statue-topplings to curriculum change, was advancing.\u00a0\u00a0I\u00a0was privileged to experience the “curriculum” changes that followed firsthand from the red-shirted Chavista “Bolivarian Circles” in the shantytowns \u2014 where they invited me to come in and sample the communist\u00a0propaganda \u2014 conducted by 1960s backwash professors of complete ignorance but total ideological zeal, to bored, disconsolate peasants who simply wanted the paycheck that came at the end for attending.<\/p>\n I also recall the dismissals of anything truly terrible happening at the time.\u00a0\u00a0I went to an investment banking conference\u00a0in Caracas, where the suits said the government was “very strong” but there was nothing to worry about, things would eventually correct themselves, and in any case, there was still money to be made for the bold.<\/p>\n I also talked to the small shopkeepers, their walls sprayed with Marxist FARC graffiti, who told me exactly the opposite.<\/p>\n Among many Venezuelans, there were stories about flight.\u00a0\u00a0There was terror about crime and lawlessness and criminals being allowed to rampage to keep the population docile.\u00a0\u00a0There were conversations about whether it would be wise to collaborate with the CIA.\u00a0\u00a0There were warnings about not talking too loudly, even in English, in restaurants.\u00a0\u00a0There was resigned talk about stolen elections \u2014 from the people who actually had them stolen from them.\u00a0\u00a0There was talk about what families should do if someone were to be taken in a\u00a0kidnapping.\u00a0\u00a0There were Cubans there, too, exiles who fled the Castro regime and made a new life for themselves in Venezuela, who made the same warnings this young woman made, about where the statue-toppling was going to lead.<\/p>\n It was a\u00a0helluva lot.\u00a0\u00a0But there was always sense back then, in 2005, that life was still normal, that what was causing unhappiness was still recoverable if they could just protest and vote hard enough.\u00a0\u00a0Faucets would work.\u00a0\u00a0Police could be called.\u00a0\u00a0Newspapers would be delivered.\u00a0\u00a0Some of the media coverage was still untainted.\u00a0\u00a0Mail would be delivered.\u00a0\u00a0Elections could be won.<\/p>\n It’s not like that now.<\/p>\n And here’s the scary thing she didn’t bring up.<\/p>\n Who are the people wreaking havoc on the U.S. with the statue-topplings?\u00a0\u00a0Who are their leaders?\u00a0\u00a0Who is causing this turmoil so redolent of what happened in Venezuela?\u00a0\u00a0The Black Lives Matter leaders\u00a0are people who openly worship what’s going on in Venezuela.\u00a0\u00a0They’re, in their own words, “trained Marxists,” and they’ve made pilgrimages to Caracas itself, even as the rest of the world could see what a disaster it became.\u00a0\u00a0They take Venezuela as not a warning, but a model.<\/p>\n According to the\u00a0PanAmPost<\/a>:<\/p>\n In December 2015 Black Lives Matter sent a delegation, headed by the organization’s co-founder, Opal Tometi, to act as observers during the Venezuelan Parliamentary elections of that year. The Maduro regime did not allow accreditation for observers from the Organization of American States, the UN, or the EU. The only accredited observers where from regimes and organizations friendly to the “revolutionary cause.”<\/p>\n Later that same month Tometi penned\u00a0an article<\/a>\u00a0where she espouses, word for word, the regime’s standard text for international propaganda. “In these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among\u00a0the best in the world<\/a>\u00a0,” wrote Tometi about one of the world’s most corrupt voting systems in history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n …and as I wrote about\u00a0earlier this month<\/a>:<\/p>\n Thus far, there\u00a0have been accurate-looking comparisons of these riots and loot-fests hitting the U.S. on a mass scale to the doings of the\u00a0Palestinian Authority<\/a>\u00a0and parallels to the events of the\u00a0Russian<\/a>\u00a0and French Revolutions.\u00a0\u00a0They are useful as pointers.\u00a0\u00a0But the one place that really shows evidence of\u00a0instigation\u00a0is the failed state of Venezuela and its controlling agent, Cuba.\u00a0\u00a0In this case, it’s not just the similarities in the end result \u2014 the mass riots that engulfed much of South America’s conservative-led states\u00a0last year are remarkably similar to what is happening now in the States.\u00a0\u00a0There’s actual evidence of collusion.<\/p>\n Here are some photos of Black Lives Matter founder Opal Tometi\u00a0whooping it up with Venezuela’s malevolent dictator in Harlem[.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now we have the still small voice of\u00a0experience coming as a warning from a young woman from Venezuela, Elizabeth Rogliani. She’s bound to be ignored, as Russian\u00a0exiles were ignored<\/a>\u00a0with their warnings. She’s bound to be ridiculed, as Cuban exiles were with their warnings.<\/p>\n But what she said was true.<\/p>\n It’s pretty obvious a plan has been set in motion. It’s pretty obvious it’s at least partly Made in Venezuela.<\/p>\n And the picture they have planned for us, based on this woman who knows firsthand, is extremely destructive, and way beyond ugly. One only hopes that somehow, its excellence and power will ensure it be heeded. Her last line:\u00a0“And there’s clearly a lot of people wanting to destroy the U.S.” is probably the most chilling of all.<\/p>\n Image credit:\u00a0Twitter screen shot<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n