"Equality In The Ashes"

 

I remember Venezuela was a Jewel in South America Before Maduro got hold of it and trashed it and the only people that benefited from it was the inner circle and the Russians and cubans who got cheap oil. Everyone else got screwed to the wall.  Sure there was the pretty rhetoric from the universities, but the pretty rhetoric and banners didn't feed the kids so the people voted with their feet.  The ultimate condemnation.

Before the revolution hollowed it out, Venezuela was the jewel of South America. The nation stood as a powerhouse of free enterprise, fed by the richest oil reserves on earth and a flood of foreign capital, and its skyline rose as a testament to ambition.

Men built businesses. Families secured their futures. The rule of law furnished the scaffolding on which human flourishing is raised.

Income inequality existed. It always does in a dynamic society where free men are permitted to build, to risk, and to reap the reward of their labor. Disparities of wealth are the natural residue of an economy that actually produces value. But alongside that inequality stood something the Marxists can never abide: abundant opportunity.

The ladder of upward mobility was intact and load-bearing. A man could begin with nothing and forge a legacy. That was the reality of Venezuela before the ideologues arrived, promising to heal the imperfections of freedom with the guarantees of utopia.

---

The revolutionaries did precisely what they promised. They leveled the mountains of prosperity so that every man might dwell equally in the valley of despair. The dismantling of Venezuelan civilization was a systematic, bureaucratic, and deliberate execution.

The cure began with the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez, who took the reins of the state the following February and turned his wrath upon the engine of the nation's wealth. Abolishing the power to create it.

Under socialist stewardship, oil production collapsed from roughly 3.5 million barrels a day to around 800,000 and in the depths of the regime's mismanagement it sank below half a million.

We must grant the regime its due. They accomplished what every Western environmentalist only dreams of, achieving a breathtaking reduction in carbon emissions by simply crippling their own energy sector entirely.

Progress, we are reminded, demands sacrifice.

Having "fixed" the energy market, the state turned its benevolent gaze toward the grocery aisle. In 2003 the government fixed prices on four hundred basic products.

The law of cause and effect is wholly immune to political rhetoric, and the result was immediate. Farmers and manufacturers discovered that producing food at a state-mandated loss was financial suicide, so they stopped.

The fields went fallow. The shelves went bare. The government outlawed high prices and, in the same stroke, succeeded in outlawing food.

This triumph of central planning reached its apex in what Venezuelans came to call the Maduro Diet. In 2016, a survey conducted by three of Caracas's largest universities found that nearly three-quarters of the population had lost weight over the preceding year at an average of nineteen pounds per person for lack of food.

Western wellness gurus charge thousands for the privilege of a fasting retreat; the socialist state administers starvation free of charge, the ultimate weight-loss program, results guaranteed.

And by 2025, Venezuela had performed a geopolitical miracle. While the United States strained under an unprecedented influx across its southern border, Venezuela boasted virtually no illegal immigration whatsoever.

No one was sneaking in to partake of the socialist paradise.

The catch, of course, is that roughly twenty-three percent of its own population, nearly eight million souls, had fled the other way, abandoning their homes and walking hundreds of miles to escape the utopia they had been promised.

The lesson is written in the direction they were walking. No one breaks into a prison.

---

The deepest wound Venezuela suffered was a spiritual one. Socialism is a Christian heresy. It steals the Christian vocabulary of compassion, deposes God and enthrones the State, then exchanges charity for coercion.

The socialist lie promises a top-down, material equality secured through the brutal confiscation of property. It strips the individual of his free will and demands that he surrender his agency to a secular leviathan.

A power that claims the authority of heaven while operating with the malice of hell.

The inevitable result is that everyone shares in the same misery. Everyone, that is, except the ruling elite, who dine on imported steak while the people fight over scraps in the ash.

Set this demonic parody against the Christian concept of sobornost, the spiritual harmony and organic unity of believers, the communion of free men who, in love and faith, choose to bear one another's burdens.

Saint John Chrysostom fiercely thundered against greed and warned the rich of the spiritual peril of hoarded wealth, yet he never once commanded the Roman emperor to seize the grain and redistribute it at sword-point.

He summoned men to give, because a gift compelled is no gift at all, and a virtue extracted by force is no real virtue.

The whole socialist project rests on a single lie: that man can be made good by decree. But goodness is the fruit of grace freely received, and what must be freely received can never be imposed at gunpoint.

This is the chasm the ideologues will never see. Collectivism commands compliance through terror; sobornost invites communion at the foot of the Cross.

"For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another" (Galatians 5:13).

One road ends in the gulag. The other ends at the Kingdom.

---

We are now watching the progressive clerics of our own nation peddle the same poison that reduced Caracas to a beggar's colony. They wield the same rhetoric. They stoke the same envy. They promise the same impossible utopia, and they grow indignant when a man points to the ruins and asks them to account for the bodies.

So look upon the wreckage and ask the only question that matters. Why would a free people surrender their liberty, their prosperity, and their faith for a system that has produced nothing in its entire history but breadlines and mass graves?

Why would we trade the inheritance of Western civilization, built upon the bedrock of Christian moral order and the natural law, for the promise of equality in the ashes?

The ruins of Venezuela stand as a monument to the arrogance of men who imagined they could build heaven on earth without God. Let them serve as our warning. We will not be the next casualties of this tired old lie.

Deus Vult.

- Marcus Sterling