How typical of the Left to idolise a despot who gloried in attacking America and Britain

Scenes of mass grief and hysteria have accompanied the deaths of many dictators, from the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin in 1953 to North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il in 2011.

The public mourning in Venezuela following the death this week of the country’s Socialist President Hugo Chavez from cancer at the age of 58 will be played out for weeks.

The Venezuelan people have been whipped into hysteria by the propaganda of the sinister — and aggressively anti-American — political machine Chavez left behind as his legacy.

Chavez was a brutal despot who strutted the world stage basking in the international celebrity status he gained as a result of his anti-American rhetoric and relentless attacks on Britain

His designated successor Nicolas Maduro claimed risibly that Venezuela’s President was murdered by the CIA with ‘a technology for inducing cancer’ even as he choked back tears and paid his tributes to a glorious leader.

The truth is that Chavez was a brutal despot who strutted the world stage basking in the international celebrity status he gained as a result of his anti-American rhetoric and relentless attacks on Britain.

He was a master of propaganda who deftly wooed the ‘useful idiots’ of the Left — to use the phrase Stalin applied to Britain’s Labour politicians and trade unionists — while clamping down on free speech in his own country, rigging the political system in his favour and presiding over a nation drowning in bloodshed and mired in poverty.

He befriended murderous tyrants such as Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, used his country’s vast oil wealth to support terrorist groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and helped terrorist drug-runners in Colombia whose products cause misery and death across the world.

He may not have been a genocidal maniac in the style of Kim Jong-Il or Stalin, but Chavez was one of a grotesque line of authoritarian strongmen who have been the curse of Latin America over the decades.

And yet, because of his defiant stance on the U.S. and his attacks on British ‘imperialism’, he was lionised in this country by the Left and its media mouthpieces, The Guardian and the BBC. (Perhaps that’s not so unexpected — we have to remember that a BBC reporter wept during the funeral of arch Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat.)

He may not have been a genocidal maniac in the style of Kim Jong-Il or Stalin, but Chavez was one of a grotesque line of authoritarian strongmen who have been the curse of Latin America over the decades

Dramatic scenes: The public mourning in Venezuela following the death this week of the country's Socialist President Hugo Chavez from cancer at the age of 58 will be played out for weeks

Much of the British Left is prepared to overlook all manner of ugly truths to canonise their secular saints such as Chavez. This explains why the usual suspects have been overcome with grief at the death of the Venezuelan Comandante.

Radio 4’s Today programme, the BBC’s flagship morning news show, led its bulletins with the news of Chavez’s death, according it extraordinary reverence and solemnity.

They gave air-time to his greatest British champion, former London mayor Ken Livingstone, who claimed Chavez ‘was focused on what he could do for the people of Venezuela and of course also what he could do for poor people in New York or London’. Admittedly, his views were opposed by an American commentator.

Livingstone later tweeted: ‘The best tribute for Hugo Chavez is to redouble our efforts for a world free of exploitation and colonialism. RIP.’

Diane Abbott, Labour’s Shadow Health Minister, announced his death was a ‘tragedy for Latin America and the Caribbean’.

Chavez befriended murderous tyrants such as Libya's Colonel Gaddafi and used his country's vast oil wealth to support terrorist groups

Respect Party MP George Galloway portentously tweeted: ‘Farewell Comandante Hugo Chavez champion of the poor, the oppressed everywhere. Modern day Spartacus. Rest in Peace.’

At least they did not join Chavez’s friend, Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, in comparing the departed with Jesus and the Twelfth Imam.

This Latin-American Spartacus-cum-Robin Hood was born in 1954 to parents of a modest background, and he indoctrinated himself in the revolutionary politics of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara while in the army.

Oil-rich Venezuela was so prosperous in those years that they used to say people ‘fell out of trees and into Cadillacs’. But then the price of oil fell in the late Eighties, and poverty and unemployment soared — along with visceral class hatred.

In 1992, Captain Chavez tried and failed to seize power in a coup before turning to ‘democratic’ politics, founding his own party.

Six years later, in 1998, he was elected President — and was still in office when he died.

Opponents in successive elections were dismissed as ‘criminals’, ‘mafia’ and ‘oligarchs’. State funding of opposition political parties was banned and the electoral system reorganised to ensure Chavez could not lose.

Details of those who voted against Chavez were recorded and used to blight their chances of jobs, loans or benefits. His Cuban-trained police bugged the phone calls of dissenters, then aired them on TV to discredit these critics.

For in Venezuela, television was the primary tool Chavez used to destroy free debate, an inconvenient truth that is overlooked by the leftists of the BBC.

He monopolised the media and held court on TV for hours, even days, at a time, with rambling monologues that involved him singing, dancing, ranting, raving and praying.

Live audiences included hapless members of his Cabinet, who he would harangue and humiliate in public, culminating in an Alan Sugar style: ‘You’re fired.’

There was usually an obligatory phone call to his father-figure Fidel Castro, whose country Chavez kept afloat for years with so much free oil that the Cubans could export it.

Chavez doled out Venezuelan oil to fellow Left-wing regimes in Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and London - whose mayor Ken Livingstone (right) wasted taxpayers' money on visits to meet Chavez in Cuba and Venezuela

This Latin-American Spartacus-cum-Robin Hood was born in 1954 to parents of a modest background, and he indoctrinated himself in the revolutionary politics of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara while in the army

Controversial: At international conferences or the UN Chavez had the gall to call George W. Bush a 'sulphurous devil' or Spain's conservative Prime Minister 'a Fascist'

He used one TV programme to attack the Queen over the Falklands, making a direct appeal to Buckingham Palace. ‘Look, England, how long are you going to be in Las Malvinas? Mrs Queen of England, I’m talking to you,’ he said. ‘The time for empires is over, haven’t you noticed?’

He described British control of the islands as ‘anti-historic and irrational’, and asked ‘why the English speak of democracy but still have a Queen’.

In one marathon four-day TV session, Chavez sent ten tank battalions as live entertainment to a tense border stand-off with Colombia.

The complete collapse in law and order in his country meant crime spiralled out of control, with an average 16,000 kidnappings and 18,000 murders a year, many related to a thriving trade in drugs.

The capital Caracas has a murder rate that dwarfs Baghdad and Kabul combined, and the country is one of the deadliest on the planet with 160,000 murders during his time as President — a four-fold increase on the period before he took office. But you will never hear this on state TV or radio, because they were, of course, Chavez controlled.

Powerful: Hugo Chavez monopolised the media and held court on TV for hours, even days, at a time

Political arrests have mushroomed and strict defamation and slander laws result in 30 months in jail for disrespecting a public official.

And this was the man who at international conferences or the UN had the gall to call George W. Bush a ‘sulphurous devil’ or Spain’s conservative Prime Minister ‘a Fascist’.

It would be farcical, but for the ruin that 13 years of misrule by Chavez has inflicted on a country with the world’s largest oil reserves outside the Middle East.

About $1 trillion of oil revenues have been squandered in an attempt to build what Chavez called ‘21st-century Socialism’. This regime has so much oil wealth it does not have to account for how it is spent.

Yet, there are chronic food shortages and the infrastructure is crumbling, with collapsing bridges and potholed roads. Electricity supply is erratic.

Nationalisation of hundreds of companies — sometimes live on TV — has resulted in a thriving black market. The environment has been ruined by reckless industrialisation. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans have sought a better life abroad.

Meanwhile, Chavez doled out Venezuelan oil on the cheap to fellow Left-wing regimes in Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua, not forgetting London — whose wide-eyed mayor Ken Livingstone wasted taxpayers’ money on visits to meet Chavez in Cuba and Venezuela.

The common denominator between Chavez and all those he supported, and who now worship him in death, is not a passionate belief in improving the lot of the poor through Socialism. It is an atavistic loathing of America and, by proxy, Britain.

Chavez blamed the U.S. as the hidden hand responsible for all the world’s ills. But no matter how crude his views of the Great Satan, they are widely shared among Britain’s bien-pensant circles, where the fatuous notion that the Americans ‘gave’ him cancer will soon join such canards as the CIA crashing planes into the World Trade Centre to provoke a war.