There is a scene that history has repeated for a century. A Western intellectual (well-fed, well-housed, enjoying all the freedoms that his ideology claims to surpass) visits a revolutionary regime and returns amazed. André Gide upon his return from the USSR in 1936, Jean-Paul Sartre in Cuba in 1960, Jean-Luc Mélenchon (the leader of France Insoumise, the main leftist party in France) in Venezuela in 2013, calling Hugo Chávez a “giant.”
With each generation, we have the same idolization of extreme left regimes; and, each time, Western politicians take advantage of the ignorance in their countries about these regimes to say anything and make people believe they represent the ultimate utopia.
But, curiously, the locals, who live this utopia day by day, seem a little less enthusiastic than our Western moralists…
Venezuela is a textbook case, and in France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon does not tolerate criticism of the regime of his hero Hugo Chávez. Without going into details, Venezuela was, in 2001, the richest country in Latin America due to its oil reserves. Twenty years of Bolivarianism and the result is devastating, with an incredible economic recession, monumental inflation, and millions of refugees. The Chavista utopia has produced, proportionally, more refugees than war-torn Syria. This is the reality, but the French extreme left labels it as “fake news” and cried when Maduro was kidnapped.
Mélenchon was in Caracas to celebrate in 2013. He did not see the lines in front of empty hospitals, nor the Venezuelans crossing into Colombia on foot to flee from what he had applauded.
This mechanism, which is not new, was anticipated by philosophy. Karl Popper had already described it in 1945, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, for him, utopian engineering, by demanding perfection, simultaneously requires the elimination of everything that hinders it. The enemy of utopia ceases to be a political adversary and becomes a moral obstacle (and with an obstacle, there is no negotiation for the left, but rather a fight). That is why every attempt at a perfect society has ended up engendering a secret police and violence.
Raymond Aron, for his part, had already diagnosed in 1955, in The Opium of the Intellectuals, the fascination of the French left for communism as a substitute religion. The same absolute certainty that we see today, the same resistance to contrary facts, the same contempt for heretics. Sartre objected that evidence of Soviet crimes should not be disclosed… Utopia, structurally, needs ignorance to survive.
When the European extreme left describes the Bolivarian left regimes of Latin America in a novelized way, they know that with geographical distance, language barriers, and the complexity of local situations, they can present a false reality far removed from the reality of the population. In Spain, Podemos (co-founded by “academics” linked to the Chavista regime) was part of the government.
In France, La France Insoumise maintains documented ties with Cuba and Venezuela, and its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is the main figure of the left in France and could reach the second round of next year's presidential elections.
Hannah Arendt had identified the deep spring of that fascination: totalitarian ideology offers what liberal democracy is incapable of providing, certainty. In other words, a total explanation of the world, a clearly designated enemy, a bright horizon. In the face of the complexity of reality, it is a seductive proposal, especially for those who do not have to pay its price.
The 20th century killed nearly 100 million people in the name of leftist utopias. The 21st century produced Venezuela. The argument of the left has not changed, but the balance of those “experiences” is always the same: poverty and violence. Yet after so many years, there are always politicians in Europe who defend those deadly regimes in the name of the fight against inequalities. And, according to them, you are wrong to contradict them, because their broad-mindedness allows them to understand better than those who live that reality, without having to take a plane…
