Godwin's Law - Venezuela edition

aThere are immutable laws of nature. Drop a pen, it hits the ground. Get sausages out of the fridge, your cat comes running. And mention socialism on Twitter, some bright spark will chime in with "duh, socialism bad. Look at Venezuela!".

Sometimes that bright spark happens to be the Australian Federal Finance Minister:

“The worthlessness of Venezuela’s currency is the result of inflation, 46,000% a year, which in turn is largely caused by the printing of money to finance the government’s deficit of 30% of GDP.“ #wrongdirection #budgetrepairmatters @TimWilsonMP https://t.co/15kMNkd8uW https://t.co/AXPy800uW0

— Mathias Cormann (@MathiasCormann) June 22, 2020

The thinking amongst conservatives goes that Venezuela is nominally a socialist country. Venezuela is in a bad way. Therefore, socialism is proven to be a terrible thing that ruins nations and the lives of the people who live there.

Sometimes, they make memes

Socialism must be avoided at all costs, and we must defend the robust free market capitalist democracies of Australia, the US and so on by stamping out all tools of Marxism, even if it's just "cultural Marxism", like safe schools and public broadcasting. (I am re-reading my way through Marx now, and he hasn't mentioned drag queen story time once; nor do I remember it from my last read through of Marx about 8 years ago - but I'm sure it's in there somewhere). 

But the capitalist powers that run the so-called "free world" won't allow socialism to succeed anywhere. They can't, because a thriving socialist nation would prove that free market, winner takes all capitalism is not the only system that guarantees freedom and happiness. And so the nations of the free world - oh the heck with it, I'll just say the U.S. - will do whatever it takes, including war, coups and threats, to cripple any socialist nation. And they've done so with impunity many times, a fact that the "duh, Venezuela" crowd is loathe to admit (and they're the ones saying we can't tear down statues of colonisers and slave holders because we need them there so we can learn from history). 

The U.S. has form here. Take Chile. In 1970, Chile democratically elected a socialist government under President Salvador Allende. America was terrified of the prospect of a well functioning socialist experiment in their own hemisphere, so Nixon and Kissenger launched economic warfare, determined to destabilise the Allende government by having the C.I.A. gather intelligence, ferment strikes and anger among Chile's business class, supporting black propaganda against Allende, and providing support for the 1973 coup d'état when the Chilean army and police overthrew Allende's government, installing a right wing authoritarian military regime under General Augusto Pinochet that would last 17 years. During the Pinochet years, press freedom was curtailed, books burned, public institutions purged of anyone suspected of leftist sympathies, and at least 30,000 people, from university professors to striking miners to rural farmers, murdered or "disappeared" by the government - but hey, at least they weren't socialists!  

But the U.S. didn't overtly get involved with Chile. They were still smarting from some rather unpleasant business in Vietnam. Panicked that communism in Vietnam may create a domino effect of the ideology spreading across the globe, America decided to lend military support to the South Vietnamese soldiers fighting the communist Viet Cong. 58,000 dead American soldiers later, the U.S. had to give the war up as a bad job. Jitters over Vietnam meant the U.S. decided to usurp the socialist government of Chile using the C.I.A. instead of the military. Not that many Americans wouldn't have liked military intervention in Chile. Henry Kissenger, annoyed at merely having America's thumb on the scale when he wanted his whole fist on the table, complained about the lack of recognition of the American role in the overthrow of a "communist" government, upon which Nixon remarked, "Well, we didn't – as you know – our hand doesn't show on this one."

So what does any of this have to do with the current crisis in Venezuela? Things are genuinely terrible in Venezuela and I don't want to make light of the very real suffering of the Venezuelan people. 94% of Venezuelans are living in poverty; more than half don't earn enough income to buy enough food to eat; Venezuela has the highest murder rate in the world; more than five million people have left the country. 

But it's overly simplistic to ascribe these woes purely to socialism, let alone extrapolate that Venezuela's suffering is proof that socialism is the path to human misery. 

The economic fortunes of Venezuela have fluctuated since the mid Twentieth Century, because those fortunes are tied to oil. Oil is the backbone of the Venezuelan economy, accounting for over a quarter of GDP, and long before the advent of socialist government in Venezuela, their GDP fell and debt and inflation increased according to the whims of world oil prices. Following a punishing period in the 1990s when poverty in Venezuela tripled, Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999 on a socialist platform of redistributing wealth to the poor. There were successes in the early Chavez years. Land was distributed to the poor, infant mortality decreased, school enrollments soared, a government funded healthcare system implemented and education made free to the tertiary level. 

Chavez still has his fans

But Chavez made one colossal error above all others: failing to diversify the economy. So they were still tied to oil production, and world oil prices. The Venezuelan economy shrank as oil prices fell, and he saw off a coup attempt in 2002, despite the military appointing an interim president given immediate U.S. diplomatic recognition. Chavez was also responsible for corruption, human rights abuses and authoritarianism and a cult of personality; he died in 2013, succeeded by current President Nicolás Maduro. 

Well, current sort of President Maduro. The results of the 2018 presidential election were disputed; Maduro declared himself the winner, but on the day he was sworn in, 10 January 2019, the National Assembly declared Maduro's presidency illegitimate and announced that President of the Assembly Juan Guaidó was the true President instead. Guaidó swore himself into office even as the Supreme Court declared the National Assembly itself unconstitutional. 

Over a year later, the situation still isn't resolved. The U.S. and Western nations recognise Guaidó as president; Russia, China, Cuba, Iran and others recognise Maduro. To add to the chaos, National Assembly elections in January 2020 are in dispute as well, sanctions have been imposed, and since then there's been a little pandemic and collapse in world oil prices you may have heard about, hardly conducive to a country reliant on oil getting back on its feet - and hardly stuff that can be laid squarely at the door of socialism. 

Venezuela isn't even truly socialist at all. Outside of the government controlled oil sector, most of the economy lies in private hands. And those hands are in many pies. Even given the failure to diversify the economy from its reliance on oil, Venezuela's biggest problem lies outside ideology. Venezuela is a kleptocracy of mismanagement and corruption, a world hub for traffickers and money laundering, where prison based criminal gangs function as de facto civil authorities, profiting off illegal mines and extortion of farmers and land holders, whilst in Caracas, officials are estimated to have skimmed off $300 billion in oil revenues from 2003-2014. The whole thing adds up to what the Journal of Foreign Affairs describes as "a sprawling racketeering network clumsily hidden behind the façade of a government."

None of which proves that socialism is inevitably doomed to failure, because it's just not socialism. Venezuela isn't socialist. The means of production are not owned by the people in Venezuela. Workers don't self organise. Basic rights such as healthcare and education aren't guaranteed. And they don't even have the Gender Fairy. 

But the people who throw around "socialism" as a boogey man don't know that because they have no idea what socialism is in the first place. The "what about Venezuela" argument is a furphy. It proves nothing, except the ignorance of the arguer. 

So it's time for a Venezuelan version of Godwin's Law. Whenever Venezuela is mentioned in a discussion about socialism, it's a sure sign the person doing the mentioning has no idea what they're talking about. Especially when they're Matthias Cormann.

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Never forget: the police exist to protect property - but not yours.

Why should we defund the police? I count 14 reasons right here, defending thee statue of Captain Cook in Sydney's Hyde Park: 

 That's (at least) fourteen police officers being paid to defend a statue of a man who claimed to have discovered Australia when there'd already been people living here for 60,000 years who knew very well where the land they owned was. A man whose "discovery" led to the invasion of the Australian mainland 18 years later, with all the subsequent centuries of suffering for those original inhabitants. A man who murdered Maori people, if not Aboriginal Australians. 

 And he wasn't even an actual Captain. So much for not rewriting history. 

 Inspired by the worldwide push to topple statues of invaders, colonisers, slave traders and other assorted arseholes, protesters in Sydney intimated online that the statue of Cook has to go. Of course our Prime Minister Scott Morrison says we should keep the statue and his equally useless offsider, Anthony Albanese, agrees with him. 

 Morrison only had to say the word and it was done. Police swarmed to defend the statue from the braying hordes. Crimes of family violence go unchecked because of lack of police resources, but there is plenty of funding to protect statues of dead white men and strip search kids for drugs at music festivals (though never race attendees - or parliamentarians).

 When Rio Tinto blew 46,000 year old Aboriginal heritage sites to smithereens, when BHP announced they planned to do the same, there were no posses of police there to protect the sites. In fact there's a legal mechanism in place to allow such destruction for the sake of mining. But heaven forbid a statue gets pulled down. 

 At the Black Lives Matter protest in Sydney last weekend, the police refused to join the crowds in taking a knee. I'm glad they didn't. Why should they get to pretend they're the good guys for PR purposes when they were attacking protesters with pepper spray hours later, and they're upholding the systems of oppression at all times? Because that's what the police are for. No one joins the police because they want to challenge the systems of oppression. They join the police to uphold them. It's legal to destroy sacred sites if you've a mining permit but not threaten a statue, and anyone who joins the police is saying "that sounds fair and reasonable, sign me up". 

 Of course if you yourself call the police to report your house has been broken into, your property destroyed, chances are they'll never find the culprit. Lack of resources, you see. And anyone who's ever tried to report a sexual assault to the police knows they aren't there to protect your body. The police are there to uphold the system. White statues, not black lives.

QAnon - the truth is out there

Proponents of QAnon - the theory that says that a cabal of Deep State, Satanist Elite Paedophiles are secretly running the world - urge scoffers to "do their own research" into Q. Seems that the evidence of all this devil worshipping sex trafficking is either unavailable to the mainstream media, with all their contacts, research and insiders, or ignored by them - thousands and thousands of people in a struggling industry ignoring a story that would both greatly benefit their business and protect children, all because they want to protect the paedophiles involved. Without the fourth estate willing to expose the secretive, child abusing, Lucifer adoring types who run the world, the only thing stopping them is the tireless efforts of Donald Trump, working quietly to bring the whole thing down, supported by his rag tag band of patriots and believers, adamant that the proof of all this is out there for the ordinary citizen to find, if only they take the time to look.  

I went to scoff but came away convinced. I'm convinced Donald Trump is quietly letting the whole Prince of Darkness sex slavery thing get away with it, for whatever reasons of his own.

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Imprisoned First Australians prove the rest of us are racist

Last weekend 100,000 of us turned up to join in the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, focusing in Australia on Indigenous deaths in custody. 

Since the 1991 Royal Commission into deaths in custody, there have been a further 437 deaths without a single conviction for criminal responsibility. None of the recommendations were adopted. 

The protests in Australia had nothing to do with wanting to be like the Americans, or thinking it looked like fun, or wanting to score social justice points. The protests were lead and organised by Aboriginal people who had lost loved ones in the racist prison system and were calling out for justice, and we went to say enough is enough.

Yet the usual flying monkeys had their simple answers ready. "If Aboriginal people stopped committing so much crime, they wouldn't go to jail and they wouldn't die in jail. Nothing to do with racism."

It has everything to do with racism. 

Aboriginal people are incarcerated at roughly ten times - that's 1000% - of non-Aboriginal Australians.

Indigenous incarceration rates prove Australia is a racist country.

You think that the reason Aboriginal people are imprisoned at ten times the rate of non Aboriginal people because they commit ten times the amount of crime? Then you're a racist. And the fact that a lot of people think this proves Australia is a racist country. 

You realise that there's other factors contributing to high rates of Indigenous incarceration, such as the legacy of dispossession, targeted policing, and disparities in sentencing? These are all the systemic factors in play because Australia is a racist country. 

There's no way around this. We have a massive problem, and we have to get it out of the trenches of the cultural wars and face it and deal with it.