The threat from the South

It's been a long time since I've blogged about Huga Chavez, the Venezuelan thug. It's time to do so again, though, since I just read a devastating Weekly Standard article about him. I knew Chavez, whose country controls a large part of the world's oil supply, was seeking to ally himself with the Chinese and with Castro, and that he was becoming a serious threat both to his neighbors in South America as well as to us, up here in North America. It's apparent, though, that Chavez's government, which is socialist in orientation (hence the China and Castro ties), is also becoming even more vociferously anti-Semitic than when I last blogged, and doing so in a way that has eerie, and scary, echoes of the Nazis. (There is no doubt that socialism almost always marches hand in hand with anti-Semitism -- think Nazis, Russian Communists, and the modern Left. The only exception, I guess, would be the kibbutzim in Israel, which were run on a socialist model, and which were obviously not anti-Semitic -- and which, incidentally, have survived by become capitalist enterprises.) As I've mentioned before when writing my Hugo Chavez posts, I really hope that the government is not focusing all its attention on the Middle East and North Korea, but that it spares some mental time for the problems in the South. Previous posts: Jews are always the canary in the coalmine Worries in Latin America More on the scary Hugo Chavez Is Venezuela's Chavez facing internal risks? Washington is taking on Hugo Chavez UPDATE: Hello to those of you who came here via CDR Salamander. If you've got a minute, be sure to check out the rest of this blog.