Way back in 1943, the FDR administration encouraged one of the worst (and unintentionally funny) films of all time called “Mission to Moscow” to be made.  (Every now and then it turns up on PBS or TCM.) It was based on the memoirs of the idiotic former U.S. Ambassador to the USSR  a political hack named Joseph Davies. In it the USSR was shown to be a wonderful place run by a wise and beneficent ruler named Joseph Stalin. The purge trials were shown to be based on a real fear of “sabotage” supported by Nazi Germany and Leon Trotsky and the defendants to really be “fifth columnists”. Needless to say the film was laughed at and the director , the great Michael Curtiz (“Casablanca”),  and the star Walter Huston, had a hard time living it down and each tried to pass the buck to the White House. The film was designed to drum up enthusiasm for the US-USSR wartime alliance. The shelves in Moscow were shown to be full of goods, and Muscovites were all  smiling, happy people going about their business, and of course no gulags. Watch the Soviet “peace propaganda” in this film clip.

Take a peek at Mission to Moscow and then read about Oliver Stone’s paean to the tyrant Hugo Chavez.

by Ann McElhinney

Just like Oliver Stone I have recently returned from a trip to Venezuela.

I have been a journalist in some pretty unusual places that have more than a few security issues. I have investigated some unsavory people in places such as Romania, Uzbekistan,Cambodia and Uganda. I went undercover in Indonesia and ended up ensuring that one particularly cruel and crooked mother and daughter team received lengthy jail sentences in the other Jakarta Hilton

But out of all these places and scenarios I can honestly say that Caracas is the scariest place I have ever been.

It feels and is lawless. The people have the despair of those who know their lives should be better but are beaten down by the everyday misery of watching their savings and futures disappear. Murders and kidnappings are endemic. There is a small area of Caracas that is safe for foreigners during the day. At night you have to be careful everywhere. Poverty and high prices seem to increase along with the oil revenues that are kept or misspent by the government.

Whilst I was there Hugo Chavez, the country’s president, did one of his regular Sunday broadcasts. These 4 hour homages to himself are a feature of life in Venezuela, that and shortages of things like milk, bottled water and toilet paper. During the broadcast Chavez is seen walking through an old part of Caracas with the local mayor. His red-shirted entourage surround him. He points to a jewelry shop and asks what it is. When he is told he immediately shouts, Expropriate! Expropriate! He goes on to repeat this action on a number of other small jewelry shops in the area before moving on and reminding his audience of how great he is.

The only TV channel in the country that questions the president was also the only TV channel to interview the devastated owners of the jewelry shops that had just been seized by the government. Shell-shocked, the owners told how they had been operating for 30 and 40 years and now had nothing. Last week the owner of this TV station had to flee the country because an arrest warrant was issued claiming that a car dealership he ran was “hoarding cars.”

Read the rest – Why Oliver Stone’s ‘South of the Border’ flopped South of the border