So the Foreign Office is preparing to load up planes with humanitarian aid for Venezuela. How noble. How tragic.
How utterly predictable. The collapse of Venezuela is not an act of God or a mere failure of policy. It is a masterclass in how to destroy a nation through ideology, incompetence, and sheer theatrical madness.
And now, as the rubble of Caracas is sifted for survivors, the British taxpayer is expected to pick up the tab for a mess we did not create. The parallels to the late Roman Empire are impossible to ignore: bread and circuses, or in this case, lentils and departure lounges. One can almost hear the echo of Juvenal’s cynical sigh.
The Maduro regime, that grotesque parody of revolution, has done what every failed state does: it has turned its people into beggars while the elites sip their imported whisky. But our response is equally telling. We send aid, not to solve the crisis, but to assuage our own guilt.
It is a form of moral hygiene, a way to feel good about ourselves without asking the hard questions. Like the Victorian missionaries who brought Bibles to starving Irish peasants, we cling to the illusion that charity can substitute for justice. But the real scandal is that this crisis was entirely preventable.
Venezuela sits on the largest oil reserves on the planet. It had every advantage. Yet it chose the path of economic suicide, nationalising industries, printing money like confetti, and persecuting anyone who dared to dissent.
And now we, the responsible nations, must scrape together aid packages while the dictatorship continues its grim farce. The British flights are a symbol of our own decadence. We have lost the will to confront tyranny, so we send tinned goods instead.
It is the foreign policy of abdication. Meanwhile, the rescuers sift through rubble in Caracas, searching for bodies. But the real rubble is the wreckage of a once-promising nation, and no amount of aid will rebuild that.
The tragedy is that we have learned nothing from history. The fall of Rome was not brought about by barbarians at the gates, but by internal rot, by a system that forgot how to produce, how to defend itself, how to govern. Venezuela is that rot made flesh.
And our response? A flight to the airport. It would be laughable if it were not so heartbreaking.
