Of course, if you’re going to make an omelet you have to break some eggs.

On the CNN website yesterday:

“The power is out — again — in Venezuela. It’s the fourth nationwide blackout in the South American country this year. Officials are blaming it on a hostile “electromagnetic attack,” but the exact cause of the outage remains unclear at this point. Power was restored to Caracas early this morning, the government said. The outages are exacerbating a broader political crisis that has gripped the country for years. Runaway inflation and food scarcity has crippled Venezuela, with tens of thousands leaving the country in a mass exodus.”

Another triumphant notch in socialism’s belt!  Glorious achievement after glorious achievement!

Of course, the problem with socialism is that it’s just never been tried correctly.  Right?

In that regard, socialism is rather like the nineteenth century diet based on tapeworms.  The rationale behind the diet was that you could eat as much as you wanted as long as you followed your meal up with a healthy portion of yummy tapeworm eggs. When they hatched, your inner tapeworms would consume most if not all of the food that you had just eaten. Unfortunately, though, if the tapeworm eggs actually hatched (which they often didn’t, because, if the scammers behind it all ever actually sent them, they might well already be dead) those tapeworms flourishing inside you could well result in brain inflammation and seizures.  But there’s an upside:  You might well have a thirty-foot-long tapeworm residing within you for the rest of your life.

But maybe, if you used those tapeworm eggs properly, they would be a wonderful dietary supplement.

Or how about strychnine as a cure for fatigue and difficulty in focusing?  Does it result in cold sweats, loss of consciousness, rapid heartbeat, and death?  Merely accidental effects.

Le Livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression, which was published in 1997 by Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Andrzej Paczkowski and several other European academics and which appeared shortly thereafter from Harvard University Press as The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, estimates the number of people killed by Communist governments at somewhere between 94 and 100 million.  The deaths were accomplished principally via genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, brutal mistreatment in labor camps, and deliberately-created famines.  This figure does not include the 25 million murders committed by the Nazis — the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (or National Socialist German Workers’ Party) — using techniques of industrialized mass extermination that were plainly modeled on the concentration camps of the Soviet Union.

Shall we try it again?  Where would be the harm?

It’s the triumph of hope over experience.

Posted from Canmore, Alberta, Canada