Editorial: The road to chaos

Throughout the 1990s, the Stalinist hermit kingdom of North Korean suffered a series of famines, which killed up to 12 percent of the country’s 22 million people. Floods and drought were typically cited as the culprits.

Just this March, the Los Angeles Times reported, “an official mouthpiece of the North Korean state” announced that more famine loomed. The spokesman warned that his countrymen “may have to go on an arduous march, a time when we will again have to eat the roots and grass,” according to the Times.

Isn’t it interesting how the destructive weather patterns and widespread starvation seem to stop at the 38th parallel, which divides the free nation of South Korea from the prison state of the North?

The point is, ideologies — and the political systems they spawn — do matter.

Half a world away, Venezuela now descends into chaos, the victim of a socialist experiment gone predictably awry. The nation, rich with natural resources and geographic advantages, has devolved into a cauldron of poverty, its people rioting in the streets in search of something to eat.

An “economic collapse of recent years has left [Venezuela] unable to produce enough food on its own or import what it needs from abroad,” the New York Times reported this week.

In response, the country’s progressive president “has tightened his grip over the food supply,” the newspaper observed. “Using emergency decrees he signed this year, the president put most food distribution in the hands of a group of citizen brigades loyal to leftists.”

In other words, get with the program, comrade, or you might starve to death.

It’s worth noting that the late Hugo Chavez, the father of the tragedy now playing out in Venezuela, was long a hero to the international left, particularly in the United States and specifically with Hollywood’s limousine liberal crowd. Celebrities such as Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, Michael Moore and Danny Glover slobbered effusive praise on Mr. Chavez the Marxist and his commitment to “social justice.”

Now, this “people’s paradise” has degenerated into a totalitarian dictatorship and economic basket case in which crime is rampant, blackouts are frequent and citizens struggle to find milk or toilet paper.

“After 15 years of chavismo, Venezuela’s democracy movement has seen through all the lies and distortions the regime can muster,” Latino activist Leopoldo Martinez blogged for The Huffington Post in 2014. “Thanks to its unsustainable economic policies, our people are getting poorer, not wealthier. Thanks to its destruction of the constitution and the separation of powers, our people are less free, not more so. It’s time for progressives around the world to understand these basic facts.”

Indeed. The millennials so eager to follow the siren song of socialism during the American presidential campaign should pay close attention to what’s happening in Venezuela.