As if to stand as a grim reminder of what the left has in store for the United States, socialist ruled Venezuela is in its death throws as food riots rage on. Over the past three years the nation on the northernmost shore of South America has been in steady decline and over the last ten months, the population has descended into poverty and civil unrest. People have resorted to eating their own pets, with more than 75% of the population driven into severe poverty.
In 2014 the number of Venezuelans living in poverty was calculated at 25%. So what has happened? With a centralized system of controlled, the universal nationalization of industry, and just one export good to balance their economy on Venezuela seemed to be in a state of grace, until global demand for their oil crashed.
Now, while the socialist government places paying off foreign debts ahead of the wellbeing of its citizens the nation has been thrown into chaos. One year ago this month, president Nicolas Maduro signed a state of emergency decree on live television shortly before blaming the United States for ordering the military coup against his administration.
The desperate state that the people of Venezuela are in has been consistently overshadowed by infighting between factions of the government. But behind the official noise and clamor pharmacies and grocery stores have been looted. Hospitals are depleted, unsanitary, and ill-equipped. Massive mobs battle for scraps and an El-Nino storm wiped out the country’s hydro-electric energy infrastructure. Protesters and police clash on a regular basis. All of this goes on while the people sit on top of one of the world’s largest oil deposits which the country cannot sell.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, socialists refuse to see the error of their ways- praising a system that has never worked in the history of modern civilization. Apologists say the riots are being incited by militant forces that do not represent the people. They defend Maduro, who blames the U.S. for the dire straits his country has fallen into. They have no comment to make about the poor economic policy which left the entire nation dependent on a single export product. But most disturbing is the absolute refusal of the American left to recognize the abysmal failure that the communist/socialist experiment has been time and time again.
Wherever communism has been tried it has led to massive starvation, thought crime, a surveillance state, violent suppression of political dissent, intense widespread poverty, cults of personality, and all manner of human rights abuses.
Getty performed a poll recently which reveals that young Americans are frightfully ignorant about the dismal history of communism. They polled 2300 people and found that among baby boomers 80% said communism is dangerous and 91% of elderly respondents agreed. But just 55% of millennials were aware of the nearly 400 million deaths that have been caused by communist regimes over the past 150 years.
It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to diagnose the cause of the problem as the inadequacy of the American education system. Not only are students not taught about the immense death toll of communism, but they are taught that it, like democracy, is a legitimate system of government. Fascism, which is really only a form of socialism, and has a far smaller death toll in the 20th century, yet is portrayed as the ultimate evil. It’s a touchy argument because anyone who even vaguely appears to defend fascism is immediately labeled as a Nazi, white supremacist, monster.
Part of the problem is that the political spectrum we are taught to believe in is a complete fiction. We are told that the extreme right is akin to fascism, and the extreme left is akin to communism. We are expected to believe that they rank in merit from horrible to wonderful in this order; Fascism, Communism, Socialism.
The truth is that socialism is merely a watered down version of communism- and communism has the greatest death toll of any political system in history.
Western conservatism- contrary to prevailing wisdom- contains the belief that the individual is sovereign, that property rights are human rights- and as such are inalienable, that the state must be watched closely, and that the power of the state must be ruthlessly curtailed. Western conservatism is the time tested result of a study of history which has shown us that any movement which places the state above the human is necessarily anti-human.
If the left does not learn this lesson from history, and the current plight of Venezuela, there is good reason to doubt they will ever learn it.
~ American Liberty Report
