French minister: The world “needs dictators like Chavez”

“He showed a strong respect for human rights.”

“In 1992, Captain Chavez tried and failed to seize power in a coup before turning to ‘democratic’ politics, founding his own party.

Six years later, in 1998, he was elected President — and was still in office when he died.

Opponents in successive elections were dismissed as ‘criminals’, ‘mafia’ and ‘oligarchs’. State funding of opposition political parties was banned and the electoral system reorganised to ensure Chavez could not lose.

Details of those who voted against Chavez were recorded and used to blight their chances of jobs, loans or benefits. His Cuban-trained police bugged the phone calls of dissenters, then aired them on TV to discredit these critics.

For in Venezuela, television was the primary tool Chavez used to destroy free debate, an inconvenient truth that is overlooked by the leftists of the BBC. He monopolised the media and held court on TV for hours, even days, at a time, with rambling monologues that involved him singing, dancing, ranting, raving and praying. Live audiences included hapless members of his Cabinet, who he would harangue and humiliate in public, culminating in an Alan Sugar style: ‘You’re fired.’

Political arrests have mushroomed and strict defamation and slander laws result in 30 months in jail for disrespecting a public official.

And this was the man who at international conferences or the UN had the gall to call George W. Bush a ‘sulphurous devil’ or Spain’s conservative Prime Minister ‘a Fascist’.

It would be farcical, but for the ruin that 13 years of misrule by Chavez has inflicted on a country with the world’s largest oil reserves outside the Middle East.

About $1 trillion of oil revenues have been squandered in an attempt to build what Chavez called ‘21st-century Socialism’. This regime has so much oil wealth it does not have to account for how it is spent.

Yet, there are chronic food shortages and the infrastructure is crumbling, with collapsing bridges and potholed roads. Electricity supply is erratic.

Nationalisation of hundreds of companies — sometimes live on TV — has resulted in a thriving black market. The environment has been ruined by reckless industrialisation. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans have sought a better life abroad.

Meanwhile, Chavez doled out Venezuelan oil on the cheap to fellow Left-wing regimes in Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua, not forgetting London — whose wide-eyed mayor Ken Livingstone wasted taxpayers’ money on visits to meet Chavez in Cuba and Venezuela.

The common denominator between Chavez and all those he supported, and who now worship him in death, is not a passionate belief in improving the lot of the poor through Socialism. It is an atavistic loathing of America and, by proxy, Britain.

How Typical of the Left to Idolise a Despot Who Gloried in Attacking America and Britain

Resist We Much on March 11, 2013 at 9:11 PM