Exactly. As if leaving Maduro in power is somehow better for Venezuelans than an external intervention. Things could not be worse than they have been.

> why so many on HN support him

Because "anything orange man does is bad, no matter what."

Many of the replies to my comment ascribe support for Maduro where there is none. However, I’m still sorry for what we have done. I don’t think there was a single motivation behind it aside from acquiring Venezuelan oil and gold reserves through thinly veiled piracy. Anyone who says we did it to topple a dictator is a rube or myrmidon. Too many unpredictable outcomes have been birthed from government foolishness like this in the past for me to believe it will end any differently.

All the best to you and your family and friends. For what it’s worth (not much I’m sure) many of us didn’t vote for this and are aghast.

Funny how no one listens to real Venezuelans speaking. As a chinese I understand you fully. Everyone hates dictators, but sometimes the alternative isn’t just necessarily better as people might hope. Transition is gonna be long and painful.

At least there is hope of… something changing for the better though? With Maduro out.

Incorrect, actually! I’d encourage you to learn about the history of empire and violent conquest. What you learn may surprise you!

> The social media posts of on a web forum represent the ideological position of an entire nation.

I believe it’s naive to assign Reddit and social media “discourse” any importance. Anything else is an exercise is confirming your already held bias.

Why does the post on a website by some people (who says they are even Venezuelan?) allow you to make the claim a nation “ doesn’t think thing through”?

Yes, let's pretend this didn't happen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_1992_Venezuelan_coup_...

And the election he stole last year?

Lybia is a tribal country that has always been divided between its eastern and western part. Gaddafi married a bride from the opposing tribe to seal an alliance and bring stability to the country.

The "revolution" was done by the Tripoli (western) tribe, against the Cyrenaica (eastern) one - it was more a civil war starting than a popular uprising.

Gaddafi could have indeed crushed them, bring back order to the country, avoiding the current long lasting chaos, civil war, open slavery, migrant waves and so on.

It's hard to evaluate situations with a westerner mind, in countries that are structured around very different cultural norms, and with deep ethnic divisions. "Democracy" is not the silver bullet it those cases, and maybe we should acknowledge that.

That's the false history of the felon Nicolas Sarkozy, who is going to prison for the crimes he did in Libya for his personal enrichment [0].

The reason France and its crook leader invaded Libya was, according to public reports[1], because they had negotiated back-room deals with anti-Qaddafi rebels for oil. 35% of Libya's oil production in exchange for French support. Literally a war for oil.

Qaddafi's atrocities were real, but they were never the motivation of the French-lead bombing of Libya. That was a false rationalization made up to manufacture public consent. Manufacture consent for a failed intervention, that left Libya worse off than it had ever been.

> "was approved by the full UN Security Council"

Whose members actually knew about the corrupt oil deal[2], and chose to go along with the fraud, lying to their own people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_financing_in_the_2007_F... ("Libyan financing in the 2007 French presidential election")

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/01/libya-oil ("The new Tripoli government has denied the existence of a reported secret deal by which French companies would control more than a third of Libya's oil production in return for Paris's support for the revolution")

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/libyan-oil-gold-and-qaddafi-... ("Libyan Oil, Gold, and Qaddafi: The Strange Email Sidney Blumenthal Sent Hillary Clinton In 2011")

Gaddafi was trying to establish a gold-backed "arab" currency system and wanted to sell his oil using it. This was a threat to the US dollar so Obama was very happy to see Sarkozy knock at his door asking to go get the oil themselves lol

Venezuela was not a society held together by a strongman unlike Iraq/Libya/Syria. It also does not have the religious or tribal divides those places did. The country was already on the brink of collapse from a combination of sanctions and truly astronomical levels of corruption. There has been a roughly 70% economic decline over the past decade and while there is no longer hyperinflation, inflation in 2025 was at least 200%. Panama would be a more appropriate reference point.

You made the exact point of the parent comment.

Everyone remembers the bad ones only.

What about Germany and Japan after WWII? What about South Korea?

How much worse could you get from a society where 80% of people are living in extreme poverty and where in a good year inflation is 250%? Maduro was not some great guarantor of stability who kept a divided society together. For instance about half the prisons are run under the so called pranato system which means they are literally run by the inmates. I think it's reasonable to say that almost anyone would be better than him.

Pretty much everyone who wasn't in on the CADIVI scam or the subsidized gasoline racket or selling $0.05 screws to PDVSA for $75 stands to benefit from a new government. Many corrupt dictators understand that stealing a small percentage of a bigger pie is a more stable arrangement that can ultimately be more profitable in the long run but the clan that ran Venezuela was so greedy they wanted to take everything as fast as possible.

I'm not sure he has enough support in the deep state to pull it off.