What are Corbyn’s Venezuelan critics actually doing to help?

The victims of foreign dictatorships have become chips in our political games. In our corner of the rich world, for instance, the suffering of Venezuela matters only because Jeremy’s Corbyn’s enemies can use it to attack his support for the Chavist regime when it was unchallengeable, and his cowardly equivocation when the inevitable catastrophe followed. Saudi Arabia matters only because leftists can use it to damn the British establishment’s bootlicking support for the House of Saud and its suppression of democratic, women’s and minority rights.

Yet the smallest concern of the Venezuelans is the praise the western far left lavished on their corrupt and massively incompetent dictators. I don’t mean that individual human rights campaigners are not filled with a well-merited contempt when they see comfortable western socialists condemning the citizens of a poor country to an oppression they would never endure without protest at home. As I have said before, Corbyn, Noam Chomsky, Sean Penn and their kind are the political equivalent of sex tourists.