By Paul T Horgan
We may not have a Brexit plan, but there definitely seems to be a Vexit plan by the Left. Vexit? It is the exit plan for the Left as civilisation collapses in Venezuela.
The first part of the Left’s Vexit plan is to blame a collapse in the price of oil for Venezuela’s current predicament. This is not true. Socialist price controls were causing food to start to disappear from the shelves in 2006.
The second part of the plan is to blame American sanctions for the collapse of the Venezuelan economy. This fell flat earlier this month when Andrew Neil demanded of Ken Livingstone exactly which sanctions had led Venezuela to this terminal state of permanent crisis. Livingstone’s weak answer was that he was just repeating what he had been told by the Venezuelan ambassador. The representative of the Bolivarian revolution in the United Kingdom is hardly an objective source. Livingstone was made to look like a doddering old idiot.
The third, and so far most successful, part of the plan is deflection. When former, and possibly current, cheerleaders of Maduro’s illegal regime are challenged to acknowledge that the country’s failure is due to socialism, they will almost immediately demand to know why similar attention is not being focused on Saudi Arabia or Honduras. So far, every interviewer has been gullible enough to allow this Soviet-style whataboutism to take over the discussion.
It is possible to remain objective and state with confidence that the quality of life in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, despite the various social restrictions and harsh practices based on tradition and religion, is substantially superior to the quality of life in Socialist Venezuela.
Both economies suffered from the fall in the price of oil. While this has resulted in millions of starving Venezuelan refugees fleeing the country, the Saudi response has been to impose a tax on the employment of migrant workers to have their employers let them go and the simultaneous encouragement of Saudi nationals to replace them.
It is ironic that people are starving in a country based on Bolivarian ‘liberation’ while they remain well-fed under an absolute monarchy. Socialism has ruined one country, while another that is ruled almost exclusively by one family has endured.
The Left also criticise Saudi’s military operations in Yemen. It is not unreasonable for a country to ensure that is borders are secure. Sharing a border with a country with a long history of civil war does make that a challenge. However, the Left are taking sides.
There is a proxy war taking place between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Yemen. The Left are Iran’s cheerleaders to the point that some of them have taken money and worked for the Iranian state. Saudi will not allow a client state of Iran to exist in the Arabian peninsula on its borders. If Iran was not backing the rebels, it is likely the war would be over already, with the legitimate government triumphant. The Left are also guilty of muddled thinking, confusing Venezuela’s disastrous social and economic policies with Saudi’s defensive foreign and military policies.
More people have been murdered in peace-time Venezuela over the past four years than have been killed in the Yemen civil war.
The next area of complaint is over the civilian casualties in Yemen due to Saudi aerial strikes, especially by precision-guided munitions. It is fanciful to imagine that Saudi Air Force generals get up in the mornings and, feeling a bit bored, decide randomly to bomb built-up areas in Yemen. It is likely that the rebel forces make use of human shields to protect their operations against Saudi-backed forces. Saudi Arabia has had to endure rocket bombardment from Yemen; these rockets probably do not originate from missile silos, but from mobile launchers in built-up areas. Civilian vehicles are probably used to transport weapons.
It also has to be asked why, given the lack of a rebel air force, Saudi Arabia uses expensive guided weapons launched from high-altitude supersonic aircraft rather than large numbers of cheap dumb bombs dropped from lower altitudes if it is not because the rebels possess anti-aircraft missiles, and also that the Saudis do not want to area-bomb their opponents. Collateral damage is an unfortunate feature of every war. Tens of thousands of French civilians were killed by Allied artillery and bombs during the battle of Normandy. This did not result in a call to stop fighting the Nazis and halt the liberation of France.
But the Left never explore the issue in such detail. They rely on their traditional antipathy to Western-supporting countries and sympathetic footage provided or controlled by the rebels. Despite the reports of government excess such as assassination, and some unsavoury employers of migrant labour, the overwhelming majority of people definitely have better lives in the Saudi Arabia kingdom than their counterparts do under the Bolivarian republic’s socialism. That is the fault of socialism, not the virtue of the absolute monarchy. Saudi Arabia does have a right to secure its borders and retaliate against its attackers.
People also ignore the fact that by driving millions of starving refugees into neighbouring countries because of its Socialist policies, Venezuela is already intervening in the affairs of its neighbours. Venezuela’s government is also complicit in the export of cocaine across the world, which is another form of state interference in the affairs of other countries.
Civil wars are and always have been the bloodiest of conflicts compared with wars between nations. So it is not a surprise that there is a lot of human suffering in Yemen. Saudi Arabia is not responsible for this. The people of Yemen decided to settle their differences using conflict.
So this is the Vexit plan by the Left. So far, most interviewers seem too thick or supine to have cottoned on to this. Hopefully this article will be a primer if they can be bothered to lift their noses out of the pages of the Guardian or the Morning Star.
