The Venzuelan President Hugo Chavez called the American President Bush "the devil" no fewer than eight times in his address to the UN General Assembly yesterday. He even smelled the "sulfur" one day after Bush's address. A showman of the first rank, Chavez seems to have taken his show to new heights. If he were not speaking in the capacity of a state leader, it would make no practical difference to take him simply as a madman. He is, alas, a leader of our world. Consistently with his fiery rhetoric, he has been forming an alliance with the rogue regimes of the world, from Iran to Belarus, which have little in common but their antagonism to the US and their illiberal social, political, and economic agenda.

This showy, populist agenda will never bring the world any good, as has been proven time and again by previous incarnations of the same ideas by the likes of Castro and Khomeini. One would be tempted to think that this new wave would also be doomed to defeat in the same way as the old wave. But something has changed in the mean time: we live in a new era of global terrorism, which imposes a new, dangerous dynamic on the world. As a result, countering the unholy alliance between these populist governments needs all the resources that the free, individual people of the world can afford. The stakes are very high: if a critical mass of people convert to these populists' ideas, we will all be living in a new dark age of fear and tyranny.

So, we must find a way to stop these ideas from propagating, and to convince our fellow citizens not to give in to their hypnotic hold on their brains.