Steve Chapman makes the mistake of equating Chávezism with Communism:
Communism is dead in Russia, a shell of itself in China and just hanging on in Cuba. But Lenin's corpse has a rare reason to smile. A new workers' paradise is sprouting in Venezuela, under the direction of the sometimes clownish but always cunning President Hugo Chavez.
Most of the rest of the world learned the folly of autocratic socialism back in the 20th century, but Chavez prefers to repeat mistakes rather than learn from them. He has nationalized oil holdings, created new state-run firms, confiscated privately owned land and politicized finance, while endeavoring to take over telecommunications and power companies.
All this is part of his grand plan for "Bolivarian socialism" and "the formation of the new man." President Chavez does not dream on a small scale. "The old values of individualism, capitalism and egoism must be demolished," he says, and he is eager to get on with it, in spite of—or, maybe, because of—what else will disintegrate in the process.
In case you have lingering doubts about what sort of country he has in mind, Chavez offers a color scheme for his educational program: "red, very red." It is no coincidence that he is a close ally of Fidel Castro's Cuba. But his anti-Americanism endears him to noncommunist tyrants as well. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made multiple trips to Venezuela to embrace Chavez as "the champion, the leader of the struggle against imperialism."
[…] A phony revolution may nonetheless be a durable one. If the Venezuelans who go to the polls next month give Chavez what he wants, they are likely to discover a paradox: They can bring about dictatorship through democracy, but not the reverse.
Hugo Chávez believes in Communism as much as Vladimir Putin believes in democracy, which means as far as it serves his personal interests. Chávez doesn’t know anything about communism. He only uses communist ideology and rhetoric to try to root Chávezism into something that has a history and some meaning to his people because it promises them something new that has never existed probably because it cannot exist, the dictatorship of the proletariat although in this case, he is the proletariat as Louis XVI was the State. Thus, the mistake is to think that Chávez believes his rhetoric and that he is Che Guevara for he isn’t, he just another dictator with too much money that is trying to last and to shape history. As Mario Vargas Llosa wrote in an op-ed in Le Monde last week to approve Juan Carlos’s put down Chávez, Chávezism is about demagoguery, being uncultivated, and barbarism. Chávez believes only in himself and the benevolence of his power.
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