Venezuela's New Leaders Begin Their March Toward Total Control
Source: New York Times
Members of President Nicolás Maduro’s governing party marched triumphantly into Venezuela’s Capitol building on Friday, calling to order a 545-member body with plans to rewrite the Constitution and consolidate their power over the nation.
The constituent assembly, as the group is called, took a symbolic jab at their political rivals, parading through the gates of the legislative chamber holding portraits of former President Hugo Chávez, which were taken down just last year after opposition parties won control of the National Assembly.
“This assembly didn’t emerge from nothing,” said Delcy Rodríguez, a former foreign minister close to Mr. Maduro who will lead the body. “It has dodged the obstacles thrown in its way by those who resist democracy.”
The convening of the assembly was the culmination of an ambitious plan by the president to secure political control over Venezuela. In a contentious election on Sunday, Mr. Maduro instructed Venezuelans to choose delegates from a list of allies in the governing party. Voters were not given the option of rejecting the plan.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/world/americas/venezuela-constituent-assembly-maduro.html
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"Vote JA! Or else!" 
You can read pages and pages of Soviet-era crap and never see the word "Central Committee" or whoever the caesar of the day was.
There's a nice work out under the pseudonym "Peter Fidelius" called Jazyk a moc (Language and power) that looks at the quirky way oppressive systems use language. It's not Lakovian or post-modernist. It simply examines the central logical fallacy underpinning a lot of Marxist discourse: Manipulation of terms in order to convince those at the shallow end of the thinking pool that what they're doing is right. They're people who think in terms of surface symbols instead of what those symbols (such as words) really refer to.
For example, who's against "democracy"? It's good. You can call your pet dog "democracy" or reserve the word for what comes out of either end of your pet dog, and some will reflexively nod, "Democracy good. Ugg hungry now. Feed Ugg." And by "Ugg" I mean the nodder doing the talking.
So Fidelius cites a lot of sources where democracy means "power to the majority of the people, with some safeguard for their rights and due process." But it shifts meanings until finally "democracy" is pretty much whatever a few people say it is. Along the way, those knuckledraggers who don't believe in the right values and virtues are excluded from being people in the democracy, because only those who have the right ideas are allowed to have a say.
"Democracy" may start out as respecting all the people as people, but as it goes from the beginning to the end "democracy" acquires set values and then the demos is stricted to fewer and fewer people, then the authority to speak for the demos is restricted to their leaders who are the true preachers of those set values and who should be followed, and then the set of leaders is restricted from applying to low-ranking people to just the very top honchos. Then "democracy" means doing what the top leaders say. They change the definition in subtle ways as the discourse continues. Unless you're careful about such changes in meaning and spot them, you get snookered. Either you are left saying, "No, I'm against democracy and power held by the people" and can't figure out how you got there, or you're left with a really abstract argument about definitions and various kinds of changes in definitions and how this is a logical fallacy. 
Chavez was doing this kind of language manipulation early on. Castro did it. A fair number of people at DU do it--as soon as you say, "In this democracy, you don't take into account those people over there because they're not really people" you've taken one of the first two steps: "We the people" has changed it's meaning from "we the people" to "me and the people I agree with". As soon as you say, "Yes, but there's only one set of right values for a democracy to think about" you've taken the other step, reinforcing step 1 and also saying that some kinds of thinking are bad and shouldn't be discussed or, eventually, allowed to be said (or, eventually, thought). The first leads to authoritarianism, apartheid, oligarchy. You can have an everyday thugocracy with that. You don't work against the thugs in charge, you pay your bribes, and life's brutal but survivable. Unless you're in a theocracy, that covers most of human urban and social history. The second leads to the ideology-based repressive regimes that the 20th century was so noted for. Those are truly nasty, since every word and every act can be interpreted as loyalty or disloyalty to the Cause. You have to watch your thinking to avoid suspicion--not just "am I out to overthrow the government?" kinds of suspicion, but "Am I a traitor to the official ideology and set of values?" In that kind of society, you need to know what is proper and true according to the policy requirements issued that day. Hence "politically correct." Yesterday we are in favor of closer collaboration with Germany, with economic agreements and cultural exchanges; today they're bad guys, and if you miss that switch, decided by a few people at the top, you've committeed a thought crime and potential treason by repeating the mantra, "Germany is our friend" when the government edict time stamped 3:03 a.m. that morning reads "Germany is our enemy."
For members of the Venezuelan constituent assembly, the government is the Democracy (tm), and what the government, Maduro, says are Democratic values (tm). It's built into their language code. To say "Democracy" is to have an implicit "Maduro" or "Chavez". To say "Democratic values" is to say "Maduro's values". To disagree with them is to be opposed to democracy and democratic values. To oppose them is to hate democracy. In this context, the opposite of "democracy" is "rule by the consent of all the people by leaders elected by a majority vote of the entire population."
It is a very thick, tarry oil. It takes a special refinery to process it. No one wants it when they can get all of the light Iraqi, Iranian or Saudi crude they can handle at $50/barrel.
Maduro is a nutcase.
