Michael Rowan
Special for El Universal

Communism for the 21st century, like last century's version, is a mask for dictatorship. Russian Communism did not transfer the ownership of production and power to the people, as Marx desired, but to the dictator Stalin. The Chinese version did the same for Mao, the Cuban version did the same for Castro, and the Venezuelan version is doing the same for Chavez.

Marx would be pleased, however, that workers own the means of production in the USA, where most of the shares of Fortune 500 corporations are owned by worker's pension funds. Ironically, what Marx most desired was achieved by free enterprise, free labor and a free market.

The Communists have a hard time understanding that they have no economic case to make to anyone. While the free market increased GDP per capita in poor countries by 5.4 times since 1820, no Communist country has made a comparable improvement inside its borders. The exception is China, which lifted 200 million people from poverty since 1980, but Chavez should appreciate the irony of how China did that - through capitalism, trade and globalization. China's workers owe their economic improvements to the ideas of Adam Smith, not Karl Marx.

Chavez cares about power and nothing else. He now legislates without the assembly, judges without the courts, counts votes without the CNE, and counts money without the Central Bank. He wants to rule without objection in education, health, economy, media, military, and even religious affairs. Well Stalin did, too. But that didn't make him right or holy.

Chavismo is not a religion, and Jesus Christ was not a socialist. We don't need Chavez to tell us that Jesus would be at his side if he was in Venezuela today. For when we kneel in prayer, in lamentations from the Testament, beseeching God to stanch the evil and devastation that has fallen upon the people of Venezuela, we see that it is Jesus, and not Chavez, on the cross, and it is Christianity, not Communism, that He was preaching. Amen.
michaelrowan22@gmail.com