In Venezuela, the destructive force of socialism is at work

Where have all the Chavistas gone? Five years ago, every fashion-conscious Western radical was praising Venezuela to the skies. Sean Penn exulted in how Hugo Chávez "did incredible things for the 80 percent of the people that are very poor." Oliver Stone made an obsequious film about South American socialism, whose premiere in Venice was attended by the caudillo himself. Michael Moore hailed Chávez for eliminating 75 percent of extreme poverty. His Canadian equivalent, Naomi Klein, proudly declared her support for the beret-wearing strongman.

Suddenly, they have gone very quiet. In the UK, articles by prominent Leftists have started vanishing from the archive. The leader of Britain's Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, was a passionate defender of Chávez, as were other senior figures in his party. "Venezuela is seriously conquering poverty by emphatically rejecting neo-liberal policies," he wrote in a piece that has now disappeared from his website. "Conquering poverty?" Venezuela is in a state of unprecedented squalor: blackouts are frequent, food and medicines are running out and most state workers are on a two-day week.

Socialist selective amnesia is not new, of course: Rewriting the past was a characteristic of Soviet regimes, brilliantly dramatized in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four." The reason Leftists make such frequent use of what Orwell called "the memory hole" is that their heroes keep failing them.

The pattern is always the same. Socialists take power somewhere. Comfortable, middle-class Western Leftists rhapsodize about their achievements. Then, the regime leads, as socialist regimes invariably lead, to poverty and tyranny. At which point, without a blush, Western Leftists say that it was never properly socialist, and move on to their next Third World pin-up.

First came the USSR. While Stalin was murdering millions in the 1930s through enforced collectivization, the New York Times's Walter Duranty was filing excited copy about the success of Soviet agrarian reforms. In Britain, the dotty socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, from their comfortable home in Hampshire, extolled the revolution in their 1935 book, "Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?"