In the past few years, more and more of real life has started to seem like a page ripped out of an overheated right-wing apocalyptic novel. You know, the kind of book where:

• The villains are one-dimensional fanatics.
• The heroes are lonely voices in the wilderness, dismissed until it’s too late.
• “Mainstream” institutions are run by clueless dupes and cowards. And,
• The plot’s events are so heavy-handedly symbolic that you roll your eyes and stop reading.

No Flour for Communion

If I hadn’t seen it at a reputable news source, that’s what I would have thought of this breaking story from the PanAm Post:

Food shortages in Venezuela have reached Catholic churches. The lack of supply of wheat flour has been even affected the preparation of the Host, the bread consecrated in the Eucharist.

Through social media, the Catholic organization Siervas de Jesús (Jesus’ Servants) requested aid and flour donations to be able to maintain the Eucharistic ceremony in different Venezuelan churches.

…

In order to produce anything, Venezuelan businesses depend on government imports of raw materials. The government controls products that enter and leave Venezuela.Victor Maldonado, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Services in Caracas, explained that flour shortages are due to the monopoly of imports of all edible goods. According to Maldonado, the Maduro government stopped importing wheat flour, which is not produced in Venezuela.

“The government monopolized the imports of all foodstuffs and everything that the government monopolizes ends up being a trap of inefficiency and corruption. The consumer must pay the price but even so companies collapse,” he said.
…
A new government measure specifies that 90% of the wheat flour should be destined to the production of salted breads with regulated prices. However, Maldonado explained that bread for daily consumption is regulated at a price below the costs of production.

A “Diabolical” Parody of the Gospel

Could any news story better point up how profoundly anti-human and anti-Christian socialism really is? Utopians, atheists and materialists created socialism. Its goal is an earthly paradise where religion is obsolete. But it’s such a failure even in material terms that it drives people to starvation and something worse.

Utopians, atheists and materialists created socialism. Its goal is an earthly paradise where religion is obsolete.

In Venezuela, it deprives them even of the bread of Heaven, the Eucharist. Five popes condemned socialism as unjust, false, tyrannical, even a “diabolical” counterfeit of Christian charity. I don’t think even they would have imagined a scenario as “on-the-nose” as this one.

Socialists pretend that government force can do what Jesus refused to: Blot out the aftereffects of the Fall of man, especially selfishness.

It imagines that instead of looking out for himself and his family, man will work selflessly for the common good. And when he refuses (of course he will refuse) the point of a bayonet can replace the cross.

Forcing Everyone Into a Godless Monastery

Socialists ignore everything we know about economics. (For instance, the fact that only prices, not government planners, can drive producers to freely meet real human needs.) They scoff at what we know about human motivations. They set up a system that might (just might) work in a devout monastery or convent. They impose it on everyone, claiming that it is “juster” than the market economy.

Socialism offers heaven on earth. But by assuming god-like powers over their fellow man, socialists make an earthly hell.

Adam Smith got it right. The free market system takes human self-seeking and harnesses it for others. In an honest market system, you cannot prosper without meeting other people’s needs. In socialism, you cannot prosper at all, except by clawing for power to bully and rob your fellow man.

Then the shortages start, as people refuse to sell their wheat at a loss, or work without pay. Socialists don’t reel back their policies and admit that they were wrong. Instead they ratchet up the coercion. Executions continue until morale improves.

Socialism Ends in Famine

A new film, Bitter Harvest, dramatizes socialism in action as it played out in Ukraine under Stalin. Stalin, a doctrinaire socialist, decided that private farming was a violation of socialism. So it is. He decided to seize the lands of the hard-working, prosperous peasantry and herd them onto collective farms.

Somewhere between 8 and 12 million people died. We’ll never know for sure. Americans didn’t know about it at all while it was happening. The main Western reporter in Ukraine, the New York Times‘ Walter Duranty, was a Stalinist sympathizer.

So he covered the whole thing up. He did such a convincing job that he won a Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times never returned it. I wonder if it still hangs on the Times’ (fake) newsroom wall.

There, too, there was no bread for the sacrament. In fact, the Communist authorities were so ruthless at confiscating all food from peasants, cannibalism broke out. Parents cooked and ate their own children. Call that the sacrament of socialism.