When George Bush Jr sent his troops into Iraq back in 2003, his declared motive was the extirpation of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs and the elimination of Iraqi-sponsored terrorism. The Left dismissed his demarche as a cynical desire to annex Iraq’s oil reserves. Millions of anti-war protesters marched in capitals across sixty nations. Yet, now that Nicolas Maduro, the newly elected Venezuelan president and poster boy of the British Left wants to annex Guyana’s province of Essequibo for its oil, that very same Left has nothing to say. How can this be?
What makes the mystery greater is that Guyana qualifies perfectly as the kind of victim nation the Left adore. The indigenous Guyanese were colonised by Holland, then France and finally Britain. The African-Guyanese are the descendants of slaves who worked on the country’s plantations. Yet, there are no ‘solidarity with Guyana’ marches. Perhaps the protestors are exhausted after their intense campaigning on behalf of the Palestinians? Bellowing for Jewish genocide and ripping down posters of kidnapped Israelis is after all hard work.
More likely they are suffering from an intense bout of cognitive dissonance. Venezuela has been presented by the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and Owen Jones as a workers’ paradise where egalitarianism has been achieved through the redistribution of wealth. Yet, Ricardo Hausmann, a former Venezuelan minister and now Harvard economist, has concluded that between them Hugo Chavez, the founder of socialist Venezuela, and his successor Maduro have trashed Venezuela’s economy. Inflation runs currently at a stratospheric 282.8%. So impoverished is Venezuela that women sell their hair and professionals have fled abroad to make a better living working as cleaners, taxi drivers and waiters. Egregiously, large numbers of homeless children haunt rubbish tips looking for food. So repressive is the regime that 3 million Venezuelans have fled the country to escape arbitrary arrest. Ken Livingstone blames the US for Venezuela’s chaos, of course, which is a stock Leftist excuse for socialist pandemonium that wore thin a long time ago.
This propensity of anti-capitalist left-wingers and left-leaning liberals to eulogise nations as model socialist states, whilst failing to see the economic disasters and police states that they actually are, is a well-established one. During the 1930s, the British Left ignored stories of Soviet atrocities, dismissed them as capitalist propaganda, or explained them as necessary costs in the building of the socialist future. Historians who came into prominence in the sixties such as E H Carr and Eric Hobsbawm downplayed Bolshevik violence. Rejecting Stalin, the young Christopher Hitchens became a Trotskyist and lauded Trotsky for the rest of his life, despite the massacres his hero ordered during the Russian Civil War. (To Hitchens’ credit, after having met Chavez, he described him as a tyrant and insane.) Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s one-time adviser, has praised Stalin’s policy of rapid industrialisation without acknowledging that much of it was accomplished by slave labour. It has been left to historians such as Robert Conquest and Orlando Figes to expose to the West just how many people Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin murdered in their pursuit of the workers’ paradise.
Guyana’s president Irfaan Ali has responded to Maduro’s threat by saying that his country will defend its territory if necessary. He has also appealed for help from allies and regional partners, some of whom have defence agreements with Guyana. Most reassuringly for Ali, the United States has announced joint military exercises with the Guyanese. Ali, however, prefers to resolve the dispute peacefully and has taken the matter to the International Court of Justice. Britain, for whom Guyana is a former colony and fellow Commonwealth nation, has condemned Venezuelan aggression but is likely to leave any sabre-rattling to the US.
For Corbyn and Co, the question remains this: will they do the decent thing and admit that Venezuela is yet another example of a failed far-left state? It is very unlikely as that would undermine the ideology by which they have lived their lives. But if they do not have the integrity to admit that obvious fact, they can at least condemn Maduro’s annexationism for the sake of the 125,000 Guyanese living in Essequibo.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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