Mick Hartley

Chavez and his successor Maduro have succeeded in driving Venezuela, a potentially wealthy country with huge oil reserves, into a state of collapse and destitution. It's been one of the most dramatic failures of modern times. Yet all the while they've been cheered on by significant sections of the British Left, including Labour leader Corbyn. A devastating piece from the historyjack blog:

The Chávez apologists are confronted with two cognitively distressing facts; that a favoured political project has failed, dragging millions into an abyss of hunger and despair in the process; and that they played an instrumental or even essential role in bringing this state of affairs about, whilst enabling the regime responsible to suppress and destroy its opposition by legitimising and even providing its conspiratorial narrative, pro bono. What is most striking in the Western socialist left’s response to Venezuela’s agony is the absence of response.

The vacuum of recognition or even acknowledgement in the face of disaster is followed by an absence of moral accountability. Knowing full-well that Venezuela is still there, suffering beyond measure, those who involved themselves intimately in the politics of a South American republic now conduct their lives “as if” nothing had happened. In a devastating article, the writer Paul Canning named this as ‘The left’s giant forgetting’. Venezuela has become a collective unperson to those who formerly proclaimed it an example for humanity’s emulation; although tacit recognition of their previous behaviour is found in some of the apologists, as in Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s deletion of any reference to ‘Venezuela’ from his website in March 2016, after two decades of promoting the Chavismo ideology in articles, demonstrations and media appearances….

It is wrong to conclude from this article and the unfolding tragedy of Venezuela that [Owen] Jones and the other British leftists who supported Chavismo were ‘Useful Idiots’. Their responsibility is ultimately far worse. The Useful Idiots of Stalin’s USSR in the 1930s had little information to go on besides official Soviet propaganda and carefully-staged tours, which they chose to naively accept….

In contrast, Human Rights Watch and other organisations provided overwhelming and easily-accessible evidence that Venezuela had during the 2000s become a dictatorship, a home to mass murder and political repression sliding towards economic and social collapse. This was or should have been self-evident to any journalist, politician or educated person who visited Venezuela even if they were under the chaperone of a tightly-managed official tour. Direct contact was not even necessary to know what was happening there. Nothing more than an Internet connection and a library card would provide the mountains of information collected on political and social conditions in the country which had not been produced by Venezuelan state media. An amateur journalist could do it. A student could do it. That salaried journalists working for broadsheet newspapers and politicians elected to represent their constituents did not do this would be scandal even without the apologetics and ideological prejudice which belies it….

From those who supported, propagandised, politically  emulated and are now silent on Chavismo and its policies in Venezuela, moral accountability is required. It is ultimately not a question of political ideology, of socialism or capitalism, but of respect for the most essential human rights. Moral accountability is inseparable from intellectual honesty. It must now be demanded from those who would have turned Britain into Venezuela and now live in the shame of denial. Corbyn’s self-conscious obliteration of Venezuela from his website is the merely the most obvious expression of shame without acknowledging guilt. The deafening silence and the vacuum of empathy for the victims of Chavismo is in itself a new moral obscenity.