Terry Glavin: Venezuela and the Canadian Left

...Strongman-president Nicolas Maduro’s efforts to shut everybody up have extended to censoring Twitter, kicking CNN out of the country and putting local journalists in prison.

Not that this sort of jackbootery is an especially new turn for Venezuela’s Havana-backed ruling class. From the outset, Bolivarianism has been nothing more than a gumbo of Stalinist thuggery, personality-cult inanity, national chauvinism and crude, populist lumpen-baiting.

Taking its name from the great colonial-era Latin American liberator Simon Bolivar, the dogma was concocted by Hugo Chavez, the lieutenant-colonel who burst onto the scene at the head of a failed military coup in 1992 that left at least 178 dead. Chavez went on to become Venezuela’s famously unhinged caudillo, the friend and confidante of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the fetish object of such celebrity riff-raff as supermodel Naomi Campbell, crackpot movie director Oliver Stone and Hollywood B-Listers Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.

In Canada, El Commandante’s fan base carries on, goose-steeping in and out of the mouldering crypts of Israel Apartheid Week, Hands Off Iran and Canada-Cuba friendship clubs, moaning obediently into megaphones about CIA plots, Yanqui imperialism and whatever other cribbings they can manage to remember from that column the Toronto Star’s Linda McQuaig wrote after Chavez died last year, the one where Chavez shows up as “a feisty mix of Robin Hood, Che Guevara and Michael Bublé.”