Here is a good treatment of the subject: https://www.prageru.com/videos/hows-socialism-doing-venezuela
What gets me about all this is the number of people who even now are prepared to overlook Maduro’s crimes, those of Chavez before him, and the Big Picture failure of EVERYTHING they have done in Venezuela. As far as I can tell there are only two classes of people in Venezuela: a small elite who benefit from the ability to rob from the People in the name of “Social Justice”–social justice rendered in rich meals, expensive cigars, and large mansions protected by heavily armed guards–and the masses who are suffering terribly from what at best is described as food insecurity, and in many cases as outright starvation. Everything that worked no longer worked. There are no jobs. Inflation has reached the point where it is safe to assume barter is the primary medium of exchange.
Who defends this? Fine, if you want to say America interfered in many nations, we did. We prevented the Soviets from making Iran a puppet state. We prevented Communists from taking over El Salvador and Guatamala. The list could be extended, but to my mind the point is that we prevented regimes exactly like that of Hugo Chavez. They don’t seem to value principle or long disciplined political building projects in Latin America, so a case can be made that we made things worse, or at least did not help, and hurt a lot of people in the process.
But the Soviets, invariably, everywhere they went, every country their agents of influence went into, suffered terribly, and never got better, or only got better once the Communists were out of power. Look at Zimbabwe. Mugabe, on most accounts, did damage that will take 20-30 years to fix. The Soviets were behind the birth of Islamic terrorism, which ironically enough has come back to haunt Russia itself. Cuba is a wax museum stuck in the pre-Castro era, with tired air, tired people, and no hope.
And nearly all wars America took part in were started by the Soviets. Absent the Soviets and Red Chinese, the Korean and Vietnam Wars would not have happened. Would not have been started.
And even over and above all that, even if I grant that the picture of American interventions is complex, the situation in Venezuela is not. There is nothing there that is good that can or should be defended by any sane person. It is dictatorship which has destroyed economic opportunity, created mass poverty, and which rules at the point of a gun. This is the sort of thing which, if America supported it, the Commies would be up in arms about. FASCISM!! They would scream. They would call Maduro a right wing strong man, and demand his ouster.
The thing which is lost when you dissolve your emotional sensitivity in abstraction is a capacity for nuance, proportion, and consistency. If you call a regime with one set of attributes a horror in one context, that exact same sort of regime should not become good if they make the sole modification of rationalizing themselves in a different way. Whether they use national honor as a rationalizing pretext, or social justice, if there are guns pointed at everyone who dissents, it is fascist. If the freedom of the press is suppressed, it is fascist. If people marching in the streets are met with troops whose sole purpose is to disperse them and make them disappear, it is fascist.
I am astonished at the degree of mental illness I see on the internet, people with degrees, even advanced degrees, saying the most palpably silly and inexcusable things. Israel is another place where this form of lunacy clusters, and all sense of reason, consistency, and proportion vanish.