Useful idiots never learn lessons of socialism

AS socialist experiments around the world fail, left-wing activists — and more — are lining up as apologists for an ideology that professes love for the poor but always ends in tyranny, writes Miranda Devine.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro recently declared victory. (Pic: AFP)

AFTER rigging the ballot, jailing opponents and starving most of the populace, it’s no surprise that Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan socialist dictator loved by Australia’s militant unions, has won a second six-year term.

Half the population didn’t even vote in Sunday’s sham election.

They’re too busy trying to survive, fighting for food from garbage dumps, and papering their walls with 50 bolivar notes, as hyperinflation runs over 6000 per cent.

Three-quarters of adult Venezuelans lost an average of 11 kilograms in body weight last year as ideology-induced famine grips the South American nation.

There are acute shortages of food and medicine amid dystopian scenes of hungry child gangs roaming the streets with machetes, and truck drivers running the gauntlet of Mad Max-style looters on lawless roads. Electricity is rationed, infant mortality is soaring and the homicide rate is among the highest in the world.

This from a country that once was the richest in Latin America, with the world’s largest crude-oil reserves.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has just claimed victory in a sham election where half of the country didn’t vote. (Pic: AFP)

To quell social unrest, President Maduro has jailed journalists, sicced the army onto protesters, is rewriting Venezuela’s constitution and last year installed an illegitimate new legislative assembly to supersede every other institution.

Earlier this month he announced the takeover of the country’s leading private bank Banesco and arrested 11 bank executives.

We’ve seen this movie before.

Venezuela’s descent into poverty and despotism follows the path of all socialist regimes.

It is a textbook case of what happens every time Marxism is put into action, and yet this murderous ideology still holds allure, as we see from the uncritical commentary about Karl Marx as his the 200th birthday is commemorated this month.

‘VENEZUELA IN TURMOIL’ AUTHOR ON MIRANDA LIVE:

And despite the calamity that has befallen Venezuela, the Western leftists who hailed it as a socialist paradise are still in denial about the root cause.

Venezuela’s Chavista socialist revolution — named for the late President Hugo Chavez — has been a two decade experiment, with Maduro taking over in 2013.

Chavez pledged his love for the poor and promised a “21st century socialism” along classic Marxist lines: redistribution of wealth, seizure of private property, nationalisation of private enterprise.

Inevitably, his policies led to runaway deficit spending, the imprisonment, torture and murder of political opponents, and an economic collapse “the steepest in modern Latin American history” according to The Economist, which also declares Venezuela “the most corrupt country in Latin America,” which is saying something.

Chavez followed the road map of “Liberation Theology”, a toxic strain of Catholic social doctrine blended with Marxism, endemic to Latin America.

The Polish Pope John Paul II, who had helped bring down communism in the 1980s, recognised the warning signs and tried to eradicate the Latin disease from his church.

But then came Pope Francis, the world’s first Latin-American pope, a critic of capitalism who reportedly is “rehabilitating liberation theology”.

John Paul II must have rolled in his grave in 2015 when Francis travelled to Bolivia and accepted a gift from the Marxist president Evo Morales of a crucifix carved into the communist symbol of a hammer and sickle.

Bolivian President Evo Morales giving Pope Francis a crucifix shaped as a hammer and sickle. (Pic: Twitter)

“I understand this work,” he said in the uproar that ensued. “For me it wasn’t an offense.”

This is a Pope who has made no secret of his dislike of Donald Trump, yet has cosied up to the communist regime in China which has been persecuting Christians.

“If anything, it is the communists who think like Christians,” he told his favourite interviewer Eugenio Scalfari in 2016.

It took a group of desperate Venezuelan bishops to turn up unannounced at the Vatican last June to implore the Pope to help “free our homeland from the claws of communism and socialism” before he made mild criticism of the regime.

As Australian Scholar Samuel Gregg of the American Acton Institute put it: “It’s very hard for the pope to blame Venezuela’s problems on the tyranny of Mammon, financial speculation, free trade agreements, arms-dealers, nefarious ‘neoliberals,’ or any of his usual list of suspects.”

The Pope is just another apologist for an ideology that professes love for the poor

but always ends in the tyranny of equality of outcomes.

He joins the ranks of left-wing celebrity activists, from Sean Penn and Naomi Klein to Noam Chomsky and Oliver Stone who have all hailed Venezuela as a socialist triumph.

Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the British Labour Party once declared: “Venezuela is seriously conquering poverty by emphatically rejecting the Neo Liberal policies of the world’s financial institutions”.

Australia had its own Chavez fan club, including Greens politicians Lee Rhiannon and Sylvia Hale, former Democrats Senator Natasha Stott Despoja, and a host of union leaders, who signed an invitation in 2007 for Chavez to come to Australia to inspire us: “We feel that our shared ideals of social justice and democracy bring us close together”, they wrote.

That was at least before Venezuela totally fell apart.

But even a few months ago the Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union and the Maritime Union of Australia, who want to inflict the same socialist ideology on Australia, were still singing Venezuela’s praises.

The Sydney branch of the MUA and the Victorian branch of the CFMEU unanimously resolved last July to “pledge our resolute solidarity with the people of Venezuela and their Bolivarian Revolution”.

This is the brains trust behind Bill Shorten.

Perhaps we should chip in for a free trip to Venezuela for the useful idiots. One-way.