A few days ago, economists put out a report stating Venezuela's collapse was the worst seen of any country not at war.  The New York Times did a superb piece illustrating that war effect in words with a disturbing front-page picture of a starving child dying on a ragged bed.  Sadly, the paper left off the word "socialism," which is kind of like building the Chrysler tower and forgetting to put the ornate steeple on.

I argued that those two things overlap.  Socialism in fact is war — against property, trade, human nature, and human beings.  It never provides for its people, no matter what it's advertising, because it can't.  It fails every time it's tried.

But take a look at some recent pictures from Venezuela via Javier Chirinos:

Así amanecen todas las terminales del país, llenos de niños abandonados que buscan refugio del frío y donde dormir.

¿Recuerdan cuando dijeron que acabarían con los niños de la calle?
Hoy la historia es otra, esta es la verdadera cara del socialismo y su miseria. pic.twitter.com/FpKKjG3dGd

— Javier Chirinos (@Javier_Chirinos) May 20, 2019

It's as if a bomb went off.  It's indistinguishable from an image of a country in the rubble of war. These are horrible pictures, and the victims are helpless children, poorest of the entire world's poor, lying about at port entries like ragdolls, the discarded refuse of socialist glory in the name of "the people."  The late, unlamented Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez vowed to end all children living on the streets.  He lied, because his socialism always lies.

Venezuela's great democratic leader, Maria Corina Machado, in a new essay for PanamPost, writes that the country is indeed at war:

What is entrenched in Venezuela is a regime of another nature, never before present in the Hemisphere. It is made up of the worst mafias in the world that, in addition, develops an unconventional war in our country.

This type of war, also called asymmetric, is waged on multiple planes, starting with the fundamental one, which is the plane of the minds. Hence, the importance that tyranny gives to psychological operations and the immense investment they make to influence public opinion, national and international, positioning their own narrative.

In this sense, the Maduro regime, supported by Cuban propaganda experience and the means of dissemination of other powers of the world, has been effective in the construction of false matrices, with the aim of dismantling external forces, diluting the credible threat and demoralizing to the Venezuelans.

They operate on three fundamental myths: the first, that an external operation in Venezuela would be a massive and conventional military occupation. The second, that the attempt of an external action that entails the exit of the regime would generate a civil war. And the third, that a peaceful transition, has to incorporate the regime's criminal mafias as part of the transitional government.

 War.  This is what war looks like — the war of all the socialism.

From Cuba, it's the same sort of picture:

Image credit: Lyman Erskine via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Kind of looks like a country at war, does it not?  No bombs dropped — the only thing that descended was socialism, and the picture speaks for itself.

Here is a superb Washington Times essay by Ike Brannan, spotted by Babalu, describing what these pictures mean:

The sad little fact that confronts anyone who comes here with two open eyes is that 60 years of statism has resulted in an utterly ruined city and a completely impoverished citizenry. That some old buildings are still standing is of little consequence.

The town smells like the 1960s, thanks in part to the smell of burning garbage wafting over the town from a dump on the town's outskirts, along with the emissions from automobiles from the 1950s and the odd Lada. I was unprepared for pungent air pollution triggering a Proustian-like memory, but we all have our eccentricities.

The old city's famed architecture does have some charms, but it is not remarkably different than similar enclaves I've visited across Latin America except for the unfortunate fact that the buildings are almost completely unkempt and in danger of disintegrating. Here and there are ones that have completely collapsed. People have died from this lack of upkeep.

War again.  It's the look of a nation at war.

Socialism = War.

App image credit: Twitter screen shot.