For over a century now a disease, far more deadly than Covid, has been sweeping the world. It infects societies at every level, yet few have the will to fight it, or even know they have it, until it’s too late. Dozens of countries have succumbed and tens of millions have died.

The disease is socialism in all its forms. It is, aside for a privileged minority, impoverishing, unforgiving and often fatal. Yet, despite unambiguous evidence of wretched conditions in socialist South Yemen, China, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Laos and Ethiopia, to name a few, wilfully blind Marxist/Leninists keep the world blissfully disarmed.

In his book, Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies, Kristian Niemietz writes, ‘As long as a socialist project is in its prime, almost nobody claims that it is not real socialism’. On the contrary, he says, virtually every socialist project in history has gone through a honeymoon period during which it was enthusiastically praised by prominent Western intellectuals. Yet over the past hundred years, all of them have ended in varying degrees of dismal failure.

Writing in Forbes magazine, Rainer Zitelmann asks, ‘How can an idea that has failed so many times, in so many different variants and in so many radically different settings still be so popular?’

He explains, ‘Socialism has become a young people’s movement. Socialism has become hip and trendy. Socialists have successfully managed to distance themselves from all real-world examples of failed socialist experiments. Whenever you confront socialists with any such example, they always offer the following response: “These examples don’t prove anything at all! None of these models were ever truly socialist”’. Tellingly, the diagnosis of ‘fake socialism’ only ever comes after a collapse.

So we are told Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis is due to corruption, falling oil prices and US sanctions – anything but the rise of socialism in what was once the wealthiest country in South America.

And we are reassured China’s 260 secretly constructed forced labour camps are places of rehabilitation, not punishment. US President Biden even dismisses the mass internment of Uighur minorities as ‘a different norm’.

This latest strain of socialism did not escape from a Wuhan laboratory but has been deliberately spread from a compound adjacent to the Forbidden Palace in Beijing. Like many deadly diseases, what started as a mild irritation has become an existential threat.

While it sounds melodramatic, socialists infiltrate the free-market capitalist state like cancers invade the human body. They weaken immune systems by attacking antibodies like free speech and truth and, although malignant, trick hosts into believing they are benign. Also like cancer cells which trigger the growth of new blood vessels to provide them with energy for expansion, socialists direct resources to areas beneficial to their progression.

Driven by power and an arrogant belief in the superiority of elitist rule and a loathing of free-market capitalism, socialists argue that living with the tyranny of the few is still better than living in a competitive capitalist society which they say promotes gross inequalities. That China boasts the most billionaires in the world and suffers worse inequality than the West are inconvenient truths to be ignored.

Notwithstanding, the democratic West is in a race against time. Will it submit to full-fledged authoritarianism before China’s bid for global hegemony implodes? For while little commented upon, President Xi Jinping is confronting his own day of reckoning.

Slowing growth, an ageing population, high youth unemployment, a collapsing property market, a serious decline in exports, the worrying withdrawal of foreign capital, deflation in the industrial sector and unsustainable debt levels have drawn reprimands from the Communist party’s most senior leaders.

Xi’s failure to influence Taiwan’s recent election is another humiliating blow to the Chairman of Everything’s standing at home and abroad.

Nevertheless, Xi’s ideological commitment to central planning and iron-fist discipline is unlikely to weaken. He knows Lenin was right. The survival of his communist state depends on the world being under socialism’s impoverishing yoke.

Accordingly, Beijing is increasing its authority at the United Nations. It buys African and Pacific Island nation votes which it uses to bully a weakened West into diverting productive capital into expensive, growth-sapping climate-related exercises.

Beijing has also entered into a Sino-Iranian strategic agreement, which aligns two powerful authoritarian regimes, each with decidedly anti-Western objectives. Its sponsored agents actively engage in intellectual property theft and cyber crime, while at the same time well-placed proxies infiltrate and corrupt Western institutions, encouraging social division when and wherever possible.

That said, Xi’s domestic problems remain. They are both systemic and, intractable.

Of growing concern for Beijing, it is no longer seen as a commercial world-beater. When it comes to supply chains, business is turning increasingly to places like India.

Conspicuously, Italy, the only G7 member to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative, has quit. This decision signals an unmistakeable hardening of European attitudes to China and its global ambitions.

More importantly, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Greece, Spain and Holland are shifting to the right and are influencing European policy prescriptions. For example, while Germany still vacillates, France has dumped its renewable energy target.

There is also a growing likelihood that, despite attempts to convict him, former President Donald Trump will return to the White House in November. An anti-socialist, Trump will be pro-energy independence, border security and favour a harder line with Beijing.

Then there’s the recently elected, libertarian president of Argentina, Javier Milei. He seeks to limit union power, deregulate the economy and restrict the right to strike and protest. His reforms include privatising all state-owned companies, limiting increases in state pensions and, eliminating price controls.

Time will tell whether these developments are mere straws in the wind or fundamental shifts in ideological direction. No doubt Marxist/Leninists will view them as serious threats and do whatever it takes to regain control lest they derail their objective of socialist servitude for all.