The following is a guest post by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, Hon. Chaplain of The Freedom Association.
Miguel Rodríguez Torres, a Venezuelan general who served as President Maduro’s interior minister in 2013 and 2014, has warned that his country is on the verge of civil war. Large riots and protests have intensified in every major city, including the working class neighborhoods which once firmly supported Maduro’s government.
The protests began after judges supportive of Maduro attempted to dissolve the opposition-controlled Congress last March. This move, combined with starvation because of shortages of everything from food to basic necessities such as toilet paper, has made Venezuela dangerously unstable. Drugs and other medical necessities are in short supply, rendering the hospitals dysfunctional.
Venezuela has a higher murder rate than any country on earth. There is widespread brutality by the police and the army, imprisonment without trial and torture. A few weeks ago a Venezuelan journalist reported, "People just disappear."
Three-quarters of Venezuelans have lost critical amounts of body weight, and women are making themselves sterile in order to avoid having another mouth to feed
All this is happening in a rich country which has reserves of oil greater than anywhere else in the world, including Saudi Arabia. It is not difficult to identify the cause of such a catastrophe – the establishment of a Marxist dictatorship by Hugo Chavez and its continuation by Maduro.
I have already written about the parlous state of Venezuela, but I am compelled to do so again because the terrifying events taking place in that country could, very easily and very quickly, happen in Britain. All that is required is a Labour government under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn – not an unlikely event. Owing to the stupendous incompetence and ineptitude of Theresa May – particularly demonstrated by her alienation of traditional Tory support by her disastrous election manifesto – Corbyn’s party is eight points ahead in the opinion polls. The minority Conservative government is extremely precarious and it could be defeated anytime in a vote of no confidence. This would let in a Corbyn government so far to the left that it would make Michael Foot’s extreme socialist manifesto of 1983 – “the longest suicide note in history” - look like an agenda paper of the Conservative Monday Club.
This disaster would be brought about by the present shambles of the Tory party and the votes of an infantilized youth movement so politically ignorant that its members regard Corbyn as a charismatic leader and a man of principle.
So we ought to examine these principles. Corbyn and his cronies, allied with a militant trades union movement, have more than once declared their intention to sponsor “a season of co-ordinated strikes culminating in a Red October” which would install the Labour leader in Number Ten. Corbyn’s reckless tax, public spending and wholesale renationalization policies would bankrupt the country in quick time.
And that is not the half of it. Britain has a nuclear deterrent, but Corbyn has told all our potential enemies that he would never order its use. When is a deterrent not a deterrent? When it’s Mr Corbyn’s deterrent. Corbyn regards the state of Israel as a pariah and he has repeatedly refused to rebuke members of his party who have expressed violent anti-Semitic views. He has an organized rabble of supporters ready to take to the streets in all those 300,000 extra members who were allowed to affiliate to the party at £3 a time
There is worse. Only months after the IRA’s Brighton bomb of 1984, designed to wipe out Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet, Corbyn invited its perpetrators, the Irish Republican leadership, to visit him in the House of Commons. Corbyn is a supporter of terrorists of many hues – refusing to condemn Palestinian violence against Israel and affectionately describing Hamas and Hezbollah as “our friends.” And, to return to Venezuela, Corbyn says of the architect of its destruction Hugo Chavez, “He did a lot of good for Venezuela and the wider world.”
Corbyn stands in a long line of vicious ideologues going back to Lenin and Stalin, continuing through Ceausescu and his beloved Chavez and currently represented by the murderous Maduro
All it needs is a general election victory for Corbyn to condemn Britain to the catastrophe and devastation which we see today in Venezuela. In jihadist, imperialistic Islam, we face an external enemy. In Corbyn and his gang we are beset by the enemy within.