William de Rumpel

We're meeting in a fudgy way in the middle.

Can you say that Bolivar is the kind of prototype of all these South American strongmen?

And Chavez is absolutely in this mold, isn't he?

He himself is a military officer, highly centered around that personal macho brand.

And he renames Venezuela the Bolivarian Republic.

He's absolutely consciously invoking the name of Bolivar to do what he wants to do.

Have you been following Anita closely what's going on in Venezuela now?

How far can we blame or not Bolivar for the mess at the moment?

Seven million Venezuelans fleeing, yeah.

Despite this absolutely massive oil reserves, one of the very, very largest oil reserves in the world.

A new imperialism, yeah.

And the kind of naked way in which the US has just said it's going to take over the oil reserves in Venezuela and use it.

I mean, that's the return of the Spanish and everything that Bolivar fought against is back again.

So it's a sad ending to the story.

But anyway, history goes on.

An extraordinary naked, naked way.

Turning our podcast, which we always thought of as a history podcast, into sort of current affairs podcast now.

Colonialism empires are back.

And goodbye from me, William Drimple.