Will Bogota be the next Caracas?

On this 100th anniversary of communism, Joel D. Hirst writes,

…The specter of communism, Chavez was actually a new arrival; about twenty years too late, he missed the party; not that he didn’t throw one hell of an after-party. We’re celebrating 100 years of the first appearance of that bloodthirsty ghost; a revolution, that one Bolshevik; massacres and takeovers and Tsarist assassinations. ‘Celebrating’, its the wrong word really. How do you celebrate famine, war, totalitarianism – prison camps and bonfires of books and families riven asunder? How do you celebrate the theft of ten generations of minds? And 65 million deaths – seems the only people willing to celebrate all this are the sycophants, the media and the millennials.

Then it was over – not in a mushroom cloud nor another world war, but instead extinguished in exhaustion and bread lines and the whimpering of a political system that was used up and spent, empty brittle and cold. The leaders didn’t fight, Custer’s last stand or Gallipoli, instead wandering off to lick their wounds in academia – hoping to fight another day.

…Tired as I am of writing about Venezuela, which is unsavable, I’ve decided to focus my energies for a while where there might still be time; cataloging Colombia’s flirtation with disaster. Instead of writing about a suicide, which is sort of morbid, I’m going to write now while the body is still kicking. Will future Bogota witness Caracas’s bonfires of human flesh beside a bread line? I truly hope not – but the advent of the ‘Alternative Revolutionary Party’ sure has made that end more likely.

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