Hugo Chavez Blames Bad Weather on Capitalism
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Mark Twain, one of America’s greatest satirists, once observed, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Marxists, however, believe that man can do anything and that class enemies can be responsible for anything — now including inclement weather.

For decades, Marxists have been propagating a similar claim — that poor agricultural production in Marxist countries was caused by malcontents, called "wreckers," and bad weather. Somehow, the fertile soil of the Ukraine, which produced much of the grain needed to feed Europe under the Tsars, suddenly faced the twin problem of “wreckers” and “bad weather” and was unproductive. Even Stalin, however, did not make the jump of modern Marxists and blame bad weather itself on “wreckers.” Leaders of the Soviet Union, likewise, failed to blame capitalists when they removed incentives for agricultural production in the Soviet Union and somehow had seven decades of inclement weather.

Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s aspiring Castro, however, blames “criminal capitalism” for causing global warming, which in turn is causing heavy and destructive rains in his nation. Chavez has reached that point in Marxism that is practically indistinguishable from Voodoo. In truly primitive and ignorant societies, when someone dies or when the crops fail to grow, the superstitious and backward minds of the tribe blame a strange and capricious pantheon of gods and goddesses or black magic caused in secret by enemies. In similar dull Marxist thinking, “capitalists,” in the case of Chavez, can be blamed for doing the practically impossible.

If “criminal capitalists” could control weather, then these enemies of Chavez would be powerful indeed. With such power, ending the reign of Hugo Chavez through other means would be child’s play. However, the complexities involved in even predicting the weather are so great that our most powerful computers can only make educated guesses more than two weeks ahead in most climates. That involves only what we call “weather,” not the geological disturbances that produce truly dramatic changes in weather, such as tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanoes. These glaring facts, however, mean nothing to Marxists, whose aim is always to find some pretext by which to seize control and amass power.

The invented monster of manmade global warming is a perfect example. Gaping holes in this pseudo-science, such as the Medieval Warming Period, are simply ignored as unwelcome data. Calculated suppression of conflicting scientific opinion, as clearly shown by the East Anglia e-mail scandal, is more evidence that good science is not what the priesthood of global warming wants. The failure of global warming to predict (at all) what is happening today is also simply ignored.

Focusing on a particular economic system, such as capitalism, as the cause of planetary climate change produces the same dangerous foolishness that appeared in the Great Purge under Stalin, when those purged were compelled to confess to crimes so outlandish that only someone under the spell of totalitarianism could believe it. The value of these absurd accusations to men like Chavez and Stalin is that when their systems fail, as these systems always do, then macabre causality can be blamed. Thus, Soviet wheat harvests were the result of endless decades of unusually cold weather, for example. Wreckers, for reasons too convoluted for a rational mind to grasp, have destroyed whole sections of Soviet industry. Chavez is simply continuing the long legacy of blaming capitalism or its agents for doing the impossible. Sane people know that Mark Twain is right: Controlling the weather, except in very minor ways, is impossible. We are far too tiny, and God is far too great. But no one ever accused Marxists of being sane.