In one respect, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's op-ed in Wednesday's New York Times is old news—the same litany of worn-out propaganda lines that gets repeated every day on Venezuelan state media. What's new is the context. Venezuelans have grown used to the tsunami of spin, obfuscation, half-truths, and outright lies that dominate our large and growing state propaganda system. The Times' readers are likely less prepared for it.

Fact-checking the entire piece would be enough to cause an aneurysm. Instead, to give a sense of the depth of historical falsification involved, let's focus on one particular line: Maduro claims that the Bolivarian revolution "created flagship universal health care and education programs, free to our citizens nationwide."

This is roughly equivalent to President Barack Obama claiming that he created Social Security. Venezuela first established free universal primary education (for both boys and girls) back in the nineteenth century. It was 1870, in fact, when President Antonio Guzmán Blanco—the visionary military dictator who dominated politics at the time—created a mandate for the state to teach all children "morals, reading and writing the national language, practical arithmetic, the metric system and the constitution."

Granted, universal education remained more an aspiration than an on-the-ground reality for several decades, but by 1946 Venezuela's first elected, social democratic government rode to power partly due to a commitment to enact that vision. Free education, including at the university level, was an ideological cornerstone of successive governments beginning in 1958. Under the leadership of the great educational reformer Luis Beltrán Prieto Figueroa, the government created one of Latin America's first adult education institutions, INCE, in 1959, and in the 1960s pushed to increase adult literacy through the famous ACUDE program.

Maduro's mentor, Hugo Chávez, might have told him a thing or two about that: As a teenager in the '60s, Chávez volunteered as an adult literacy coach at ACUDE—one of the flagship education programs that Maduro claims didn't exist until Chávez created them.