Venezuela: Communists’ Dress Rehearsal for the USA

People Desparate for Food in Venezuela

To fully appreciate the radical left’s plan for the U.S., you need to look no further than Venezuela. Author and journalist Dinesh D’Souza, in his recent book United States of Socialism (2020), draws seven parallels between the way communists took over and ultimately destroyed Venezuela and the subversive activities of the radical left in the U.S. today:

  • In the 1960s, Venezuela ranked among the world’s richest countries. But later, Hugo Chavez, elected initially in 1998, and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, cultivated identity politics (sound familiar?), polarizing the 30% of mixed-race Venezuelans against the 70% white majority. Whites of European descent became the “foreign oppressors” and “blacks and browns” their victims. “In Venezuela, as in America, identity politics serves to topple old social and cultural hierarchies and to foster a multicultural left that then controls and dominates society.”
  • Second, Chavez attacked the entrepreneurial and productive class—“notably the Europeans, Americans, and Venezuelans who collaborated in the oil industry”—invoking their alleged greed to justify nationalizing the oil and most other industries. Similarly, the radical left in the U.S. alleges an elaborate and structurally oppressive economic system that victimizes people of color.
  • Third, Chavez rigged the government of Venezuela to ensure socialist hegemony. He dismantled the Venezuelan constitution, which had prescribed separation of powers and ensured economic and civil liberties while packing the Supreme Court. So “[t]oday there is no judicial independence, and the Venezuelan high court is a rubber stamp for the socialist regime.” Correspondingly, the American Democratic Party is working to add the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as new states to ensure permanent Democrat Party control of the Senate; to abolish the Senate filibuster rule, which would enable the Senate to pass legislation with a bare majority of votes; and to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with leftist jurists.
  • Fourth, communists in Venezuela confiscated guns by organizing a “buy-back” program to make citizens “vulnerable to the depredations of the socialist regime.” In the U.S., Democrats push “gun control” relentlessly, insisting that “weapons of war” have no place in the hands of U.S. citizens. Surrendering their personal weapons, of course, would leave Americans at the mercy of future socialist oppression.
  • Fifth, communist Venezuela enforces its edicts with roving bands of thugs—“Venezuela’s answer to Antifa.” So the lawlessness and violence that Antifa and Black Lives Matter perpetrate today in America with impunity may be only rehearsals for their role as policy enforcers if the socialist state fully materializes here.
  • Sixth, “Venezuela has designed its entire educational system to foreclose debate and free expression and to foster ideological conformity. “And that of course is the direction in which the American left has been moving education in this country.” It is widely acknowledged that U.S. high schools, colleges and even law schools have long indoctrinated students with Marxist ideology. In “The End of the Long March,” published recently in The American Mind, commentator Edward N. Luttwak said that the radical left long ago identified “the teaching staff of America’s colleges and universities” as “the weak flank of American society which they could penetrate, subvert, and then dominate.”
  • Seventh, Venezuelan socialism offers its elites opportunities to amass great wealth at the expense of an oppressed populace. Chavez apparently looted $2 billion from the Venezuelan people. In the U.S., billionaires such as George Soros and Silicon Valley magnates reputedly fund the radical left, and no doubt would feel protected under the new order.
Tear_gas_used_against_protest_in_Altamira,_Caracas;
Military Crackdown in Venezuela By Andrés E. Azpúrua – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31368145

“When we consider the major themes of Venezuelan socialism,” says D’Souza, “we can see right away that every one of them parallels the themes of the American left.”