NOBLE PEACE PRIZE RECIPIENT AND VENEZUELAN OPPOSITION LEADER MARIA CORINA MACHADO WARNS NEW YORK: "THE FALSE PROMISES OF SOCIALISM RUINED MY COUNTRY"

Maria Corina Machado

People line up to buy food at a supermarket in San Cristobal, about 410 miles (660 km) southwest of Caracas, Venezuela Feb. 27, 2014

In a recent intervire with Bari Weiss of The Free Press she explained: “The goal of an open society is to have people live with dignity. And in order to have dignity you have to be autonomous as an individual. And that is precisely what socialism takes away ”

“When government promises to give you everything, it eventually takes everything: your autonomy, your choices, your freedom" she explained.

She also cautioned that people were warning Venezuelans to reject socialism by pointing to the failures of Cuba. Nobody took the warnings seriously -- we had a thriving middle class and what we thought was a strong democracy she explained. In the end - "we ended up worse than Cuba."

Over the past 100 years or so, socialist experiments around the world unleashed a vast tide of tyranny, starvation, and mass murder on a scale never seen before in human history. Socialism was implemented in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Maoist China, Chavez-Maduro’s Venezuela, and other places. In every one of these places, it has failed.

As American writer Joshua Muravchik. observes in his 2019 Wall Street Journal article on socialism, “It’s hard to think of another idea that has been tried and failed as many times in as many ways or at a steeper price in human suffering.”

But this generation of socialists is trying to convince this generation of young idealists that they are different. Not so writes Matthew Xiao in the Cornell Review:

"In the eyes of today’s democratic socialists, the earlier socialist leaders failed because they were “authoritarian socialists” who believed in a strictly hierarchical, top-down bureaucracy and “perverted” socialism’s noble ideals—if, instead, our socialist government is led by public-spirited people whose beliefs are rooted in democratic principles, then we will achieve real socialism and all will be well. The problem, they argue, has never been the socialist horse, but the jockeys who rode it and led it astray.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

When today’s socialists talk about building a non-authoritarian socialist government rooted in democratic and humanitarian principles, they are far from original. In fact, that has always been what the earlier socialists said they would achieve. Aimed at improving the lot of the common people and creating a more egalitarian society, the early socialist movements emerged primarily as a reaction to the inhumane working conditions and yawning wealth disparities in industrialized Europe."

Empowering working-class people, dismantling societal hierarchies, and ensuring a more equitable distribution of goods and services have always been the early rallying cries socialist leaders who went on to create brutal totalitarian regimes and societies of poverty and misery.