Hitler, Stalin, Lenin and Venezuela

Going through the electoral register in Venezuela can be fascinating. One can discover a lot about Venezuela's society there.

I just looked up to see if there were voters with a couple of weird names. I just checked out data for one state, Carabobo. As expected, I found several Stalins and a lot of Lenins. I also found 3 men whose first name is Hitler. Most Stalins, Lenins and Hitlers live in poor areas of Carabobo. Chances are those called Hitler have a darker skin colour than the average Venezuelan...which is kind of ironic, to say the least.

You can verify the IDs 13634680, 14171425 and 15591192, for instance.

Lenin's Red Terror

One thing is obvious: their parents didn't know much about history. 

Below you can see the birth year distribution of voters called Lenin in Carabobo. Those are total numbers, so the proportion of Lenins in the whole voting population must have gone down more since the eighties. One can notice already from this: the name became popular among people influenced by extreme left tendencies in the second half of the sixties and in the seventies. Curiously, the number of Lenins dropped the year when Carlos Andrés Pérez took office as president of Venezuela for the first time, in 1974. Coincidence? Saudi Venezuela.

If we are ever going to get Venezuela out of underdevelopment, we need to do something urgent about this: knowledge of history.