The Republic of Dissent

American and self-indulgent blindness

I love Sean Penn as an actor, but I believe that he knows nothing about the world, international politics, American politics, which would not be a shame if he could stop himself from saying things like this:

Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it. And this is mainstream media. There should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.(...) We are hypnotised by the media. Who do you know here who's gone through 14 of the most transparent elections on the globe, and has been elected democratically, as Hugo Chávez?

Penn needs to go to Niger, learn about Mamadou Tandja to find out that getting elected 'democratically' doesn't mean not been a narcissist autocrat. The reason why Sean Penn is the a symbol of American self-indulgent blindness is  too e is  blinded by his ambivalence about Americanness and his to prevalence to it to realize that its adversaries are not always what he would like his country to be. I'm willing to bet my big toe that Sean Penn has never wandered in the streets or outside of Caracas without a police escort to meet "real" Venezuelans and to ask them how they feel about their beloved leader. I'm not saying that Chavez is Hitler, but that he is not Che Guevara (not he was a hero, but at least he was somewhat of a rebel) or not even a decent head of state.

A loss for Chávez

Gene from Harry’s has an interesting post on Hugo Chávez’s defeat on a referendum, whose goal was to make it possible to run for president as many times as he wanted . Sugary excerpt:

I've never believed Chavez is uniquely evil among world leaders, or even among the very worst. I focus on him because of his inexplicably high standing among the "anti-imperialist" Left. They need to be reminded exactly whom they're supporting. I'll wait to see if the new kinder, gentler Chavez is for real. And if it is, I wonder how long some chavistas will continue to back him.

It is unfortunate, but true that too many people ant to believe that it is possible to achieve just means through unjust means. They use the fact that a country isn’t developed or Western as an excuse for the use “undemocratic” methods when their goal is either to achieve order (Musharraf is good example) or justice, which is supposedly Chávez’s objective.

The new and the bad aren't always old

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.

Hugo Chávez, Hollywood, and America

Anne Applebaum makes the following point on what she believes to be an alliance between Hollywood and Hugo Chávez:

Exhibit A is Campbell. Though better known for her taste in shoes than for her opinions about Latin American economics, she nevertheless turned up in Caracas last week gushing about the "love and encouragement" Chávez pours into his welfare programs. Wearing what a Venezuelan newspaper called "a revolutionary and exquisite white dress from the prestigious Fendi fashion house," she praised the country for its "big waterfalls." Not surprisingly, Campbell did not mention the anti-Chávez demonstrations held in Caracas the week before her visit; proposed constitutional changes designed to let Chávez remain in power indefinitely; or Chávez's record of harassing opposition leaders and the media.

But then, that wasn't the point of her visit, just as it wasn't the point when actor Sean Penn, a self-conscious "radical" and avowed enemy of the American president, spent a whole day with Chávez. Together, the actor and the president toured the countryside. "I came here looking for a great country. I found a great country," Penn declared. Of course he found a great country! Penn wanted a country where he would win adulation for his views about American politics, and the Venezuelan president happily provided it.

In fact, for the malcontents of Hollywood, academia and the catwalks, Chávez is an ideal ally. Just as the sympathetic foreigners whom Lenin called "useful idiots" once supported Russia abroad, their modern equivalents provide the Venezuelan president with legitimacy, attention and good photographs. He, in turn, helps them overcome the frustration Reed once felt--the frustration of living in an annoyingly unrevolutionary country where people have to change things by law. For all of his brilliance, Reed could not bring socialism to America. For all of his wealth, fame, media access and Hollywood power, Penn cannot oust George W. Bush. But by showing up in the company of Chávez, he can at least get a lot more attention for his opinions.

Something about Applebaum’s point bugs me. I think that it is the fact that she makes an overgeneralization or rather an oversimplification in order to delegitimize a point of view, which she doesn’t like or simply finds ridiculous. I’m not an admirer of Hugo Chávez and I don’t buy his rhetoric. However, he is able to be inauthentic and to claim to be a believer in social justice precisely because people like Applebaum don’t understand that when people don’t trust America’s goodness, they are willing to believe anybody who takes on the metal of anti-Americanism, by claiming to be fighting evil and imperialism. Just to take the issue of waterboarding and torture, how can someone who loves America justify the idea that the country as great as America whose ethics is epitomizes by Atticus Finch can believe that it is acceptable to torture to survive? The point is that there are always going to be politicians such as Chávez who try to be holier than thou and accuse the US to be the evil empire, what is worrisome is when they are able to become more credible than the leader of the free world.

Socialism and the brave new world

The New Left Review has a great article from Régis Debray on the history of socialism. Debray recounts the history of socialism, its evolution, and its culture. More importantly, he explains why modernity, specifically its means of communication, has led it to its crisis. Sugary excerpt:

[…] To explain: socialism was an attempt to establish a counter-medium of dissemination within a hostile milieu. Could the idea have become an ‘ideology’ if micro-circuits of solidarity had not established a mini-milieu for themselves, within this formless space? Cheap, sustainable information networks, alternative communities and counter-cultures that owed their capacity for resistance to the forces that besieged them from without. To jump the spark from written myth to social action, the electricians of workers’ emancipation had to disconnect the main cables and rig up makeshift wiring of their own. Methods of underground organizing served as a protective casing, to shield proletarian telegraphy from bourgeois jamming and interference. The romance of clandestinity was essentially a communicative pragmatism.

[…] the mediasphere seems to have stripped the diasporas of their former productivity. Dispersion used to favour intellectual creativity by stimulating written exchange. Bodies met less frequently but minds were in closer contact. […] Nowadays the militants socialize more and know less of each other’s ideas. More conversation means less controversy. The telephone destroyed the art of correspondence, and in the process diminished the moral stature of attempts at rational systematization; email has not restored it. Rarely do we pick up the phone to impart a complex sequence of principles and themes: we use it to chat. The general discourse has become indexed to the trappings of intimacy and private life. The cellphone, internet, laptop and plane are good for internationalization, but they render solidarity less organic—lethal for internationalism. They enlarge the sphere of individual relations but privatize them at the same time; they particularize even as they globalize. The cellphone is a permanent one-to-one. It drives the universal from our heads.

The crisis for socialism, then, is that even if it can resume its founding principles it cannot return to its founding cultural logic, its circuits of thought-production and dissemination. [Emphasis added].

I am not sure that I agree with Debray’s description of the crisis for socialism even though I agree with his assertion that “The demobilization of the citizen begins with the physical immobilization of the spectator.” I wonder if the crisis isn’t most of all one of lack of sophistication and of archaism. Let me explain why I mean. Although demobilization starts with immobilization, it is completed by powerlessness and a numbing nothingness created by the lack of tools to resist it, to get not only beyond the need for cellphones and television, but also the inability to use them to change the world.

Socialism is, my view, an outdated computer, which not only lacks the right software and hardware to connect to the internet and to be used as more than as typewriter. Thus, it cannot adapt to the age of spectacle and can only remain on the fringe of it by pretending that it is temporary and that eventually the world will adapt to it. For this reason, most socialist leaders of the last twenty five years have chosen courses to avoid confronting the disconnection of socialism from the brave new world. They have either ignored the socialist ideology once they got into power as Mitterrand did or they have attempted to create a great Satan to avoid fighting relevant, but unwinnable struggles since socialism no longer has effective solutions to the problems of our times as Chávez is currently doing by making the US responsible for all the ills of the world. In other words, socialist leaders when they have able to take power nowadays are either romantics who will create enemies to explain the world and socialism’s ineffectiveness or they are cold pragmatists that will use the socialist ideology and language to keep their political base, but will govern differently because they know the difference between poetry that is so to say political ideology and reality that is to say policy.

Idiots, ideology, and responsibility

Alvaro Vargas Llosa writes about the return to power of “Latin American Idiots” who are “political leaders who clung to ill-conceived political myths despite evidence to the contrary.” Llosa argues that although young Latin American Idiots are in touch with their time, they are still political ideologues who have no interest in pragmatism or with reality. Latin American Idiots believe that the economic and political situation of their countries caused by the schemes of diabolical and blood thirsty imperialists and this worldview makes them heroes because they believe that they are fighting powerful forces. Sugary excerpt:

For these young Idiots, Latin America’s condition is the result of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, followed by U.S. imperialism. These basic beliefs provide a safety valve for their grievances against a society that offers scant opportunity for social mobility. Freud might say they have deficient egos that are unable to mediate between their instincts and their idea of morality. Instead, they suppress the notion that predation and vindictiveness are wrong and rationalize their aggressiveness with elementary notions of Marxism.

Latin American Idiots have traditionally identified themselves with caudillos, those larger-than-life authoritarian figures who have dominated the region’s politics, ranting against foreign influence and republican institutions. Two leaders in particular inspire today’s Idiot: President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and President Evo Morales of Bolivia. Chávez is seen as the perfect successor to Cuba’s Fidel Castro (whom the Idiot also admires): He came to power through the ballot box, which exonerates him from the need to justify armed struggle, and he has abundant oil, which means he can put his money where his mouth is when it comes to championing social causes. The Idiot also credits Chávez with the most progressive policy of all—putting the military, that paradigm of oligarchic rule, to work on social programs. […] The current revival of the Latin American Idiot has precipitated the return of his counterparts: the patronizing American and European Idiots. Once again, important academics and writers are projecting their idealism, guilty consciences, or grievances against their own societies onto the Latin American scene, lending their names to nefarious populist causes.

Llosa’s article puzzles me because the phrase “Latin American Idiots” freezes the debate by debasing it to a third grade level. Calling Chávez and his compadres idiots does not just delegitimate them, but more importantly, it takes them off the hook because after an idiot doesn’t know any better because he follows simply his nature by acting idiotically. Is there injusticein the world? Yes. Are many countries given a raw deal because of the faults of the system? No question, but the real question is whether it means that politics should  become religions that should be contended in denouncing the faults of human beings and the sad state of the world, dividing the world between good and evil, without ever being trying to change the world. Marx called religion the opiate of the masses and the fact that Chávez and others are feeding their people  ideology instead of governing proves that they are very consicious of it.

Chávez and America

The Telegraph has an article on Chávez and his bellicose hatred of America, which makes the argument that on the contrary to what the Wall Street Journal asserted last week he isn't a big danger to America:

Mr Chávez is more a gadfly than a serious threat to continental stability. And his rhetoric – he now calls himself a communist – far outruns his actions, which so far have been cannily pragmatic.

The thing that scares me with Chávez is the fact that his anti-American rhetoric seems to have escalated and will more than likely continue to do so as long as it helps me survive politically at home and thrive in Latin America. I fear that at some point, the US will not have a Cuban missile like crisis with Venezuela and I wonder whether when it happens the situation won't lead to some kind of explosion. There are no worst attributes for a world leader than ego, money, and recklessness and Chávez possesses all three.

Enabling Chávez?

The Wall Street Journal is making the point, which is not wrong, but duplicitous and hypocritical that Chris Dodd, the senior Senator from Connecticut and Democratic presidential candidate is enabling Chávez by refusing to acknowledge that he is dangerous:

All the while, Mr. Chávez has had American enablers who excused his growing repression, or blamed it on a reaction to U.S. policy. Foremost among them has been Mr. Dodd, who has defended Mr. Chávez as "democratically elected" despite his clear trend toward authoritarianism.

I takes a lot of Chutzpah to make that point for I haven't read the Wall Street Journal Editorial board ever accusing Condi Rice of enabling Mubarak or Musharraf by shaking their hands and never acknowledging the human rights records of their respective countries are troubling. The reason for this double standard is that for the Wall Street Journal that all dictators, all authoritarian regimes aren't created equal and that authoritarian Marxism is worst than anything. Hugo Chávez is dangerous, but the threat that he poses isn't new and he isn't unique.

Public opinion in Lebanon

Alex Harrowell has a post on a poll in Lebanon, which ranks the local population favorite’s nations and world leaders. It turns out that in Chirac is the most admired Western leader and that Hugo Chávez is as popular as Ahmadinejad.

Chávez and Joe Kennedy

The Wall Street Journal is accusing Joe Kennedy of being too close for comfort with Hugo Chávez and of there enabling a dangerous enemy of America by making a deal with to provide heating oil to low-income families. Money Quote:

But Mr. Kennedy keeps on trucking. Last week in a telephone interview with the Washington Post, he defended his Chávez subsidy deal as "morally righteous," arguing that the Citgo contribution to his nonprofit is only "one-half of one percent" of Citgo oil and product sales in the U.S.

We dialed Joe-4-Oil ourselves to ask directly whether it is also "righteous" to assist an anti-American tyrant at the expense of the Venezuelan people. In between berating our reporter for daring to ask such a thing, Mr. Kennedy said that Mr. Chávez has done "so much more" for the poor than any previous government. As for democracy, he said there was "ample room for improvement in the ways that people get elected in Venezuela as well as in Florida." Mr. Chávez chose his partner well.

I wonder if the Wall Street Journal would make the same case for every person or company, which deals with ‘enemies of the United Sates,” or if its outrage is reserved to Massachusetts Democrats who dares to deal with somebody who doesn’t believe in free markets. I think that it is easy when you are not in the position of not being able to afford heating oil to argue that you must reject help if it comes from Chávez. I would of course never accept charity from dictators, but I have the luxury of saying no without my refusal affecting my family. The Wall Street Journal avoids the ethical dilemma, which this problem poses by arguing that it doesn't exist and by implying that Joe Kennedy just doesn’t love his country enough to do the right thing. I would have made the deal with Chávez, but on the other hand, in spite of my reservations, I find it difficult to condemn those who argue that fighting poverty and helping the poor is more important than anything else. After all, if we would follow the Wall Street Journal's logic, the millions of people in the world who disagree with American policies or who have anti-American feelings shouldn't buy American products and should refuse any help from Americans.

The photo du jour

Who is the man standing next to Putin? It's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil, who will most likely be reelected by Brazilians today. Lula deserves a lot of credit because he is showing that it is possible to be on the left in Latin America without following the example of Hugo Chávez and of Fidel Castro and without falling into the trap of populism. During his first term, Lula showed that he was a pragmatist and that he was more interested in results than ideology and for all of his efforts, the people of Brazil are going to choose to reelect him, which is something that cannot be said of Chávez, who would have difficulties to win a free and fair election. For all of these reasons, I will repeat what a lot of Brazilians will be saying tonight, "Viva Lula!" He may be a tarnished hero, but he is a pragmatist and a democrat.

Food for thought : Petro-authoritarianism

“But right now, Chávez, Ahmadinejad and all their petrolist pals think we are weak and will never bite the bullet. They have our number. They know that Mr. Bush is a phony — that he always presents himself as this guy ready to make the “tough” calls, but in reality he has not asked his party, the Congress, the people, or U.S. industry to do one single hard thing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Mr. Bush prattles on about spreading democracy and freedom, but history will actually remember the Bush years as the moment when petro-authoritarianism — not freedom and democracy — spread like a wildfire and he did nothing serious to stop it.” Tom Friedman, “Fill ’Er Up With Dictators.”

Hugo and the devil

I wasn't surprised by Hugo Chávez 's speech to the United Nations. In recent years, Chávez has grown increasingly confrontational as he has sensed that the US weaknesses. He realized that with the end of Castro near, to remain in power in Venezuela, he needed to enlarge his political message and to take on the US by defining his struggle as one between good and evil, between the weak and the powerful and between an hegemon and the people who are resisting its hegemony. As I have written before Chávez isn't an authentic character, he isn't a true believer; he doesn't drink his own Kool-Aid. Chávez has just decided to do the contrary on whatever the United States and Bush does. He has decided to go the left because Bush is on the right and because that is the only place left for him to go. He is a friend of Ahmadinejad and to all the enemies of the United States just because they are the enemies of the United States. Hugo Chávez survived a coup, which he believed Bush authorized; he has decided since then that to survive he needed to be something bigger than another dictator of an oil-rich country. Nevertheless, in spite of all this, I take Hugo Chávez seriously because I believe that if the US plays his game and legitimize him then he will become a bigger threat for he has something, which Castro never had and that is money, which comes of course from oil. The solution is not of course to ignore him, but to avoid the mistake that was made with Ahmadinejad and Iran, which was to use name-calling and threats of regime change to solve a lethal situation. Chávez is making a lot of noise because he feels threatened as all of those who are obsessed with the devil are because they believe that he might cause them harm. The goal for the United States should be to avoid a needless confrontation and to pacify with the situation with cooler rhetoric.

Thursday's video: Hugo Chavez at the UN

Hugo loves Fidel

Hugo Chavez visited his "friend" Fidel in the Hospital. When I saw the pictures of Chavez with Castro, I had to control myself not to say "ahhh, that's so cute!" I bet he stayed all night and that to help him fall asleep he sang "Yo Vivire" Celia Cruz's great rendition of Gloria Gaynor's hit I will survive. I have trouble believing that those two "love" each other. It is a partnership of convenience based on a hatred for a common enemy, the United States. I would dismiss it if I didn't think that Hugo Chavez could end up becoming more than a thorn to the side of the Americans by making trouble for them in Latin America and in the world (The reason for this Remember, he has something, which Castro never had, oil, and the money that comes with it). I am not one of those people who argue that confrontation is the way to go (or that we should kill him as Pat Robertson suggested). The US is going to have to find a way to control Chavez so that he will stop believing that the way for him to survive and to create a legacy for himself is to be anti-American.

Hugo Chavez isn’t Che Guevara

Hugo Chávez’s stature is growing in Latin America and in the world because he is seen as courageous leader who is daring to say No to the United States and to dream of Latin America that isn’t dominated by American power.

1. John Pilger sings the praises of Hugo Chávez in an article in the Guardian. He writes, “Chávez is, of course, a threat, especially to the United States. Like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who based their revolution on the English co-operative moment, and the moderate Allende in Chile, he offers the threat of an alternative way of developing a decent society: in other words, the threat of a good example in a continent where the majority of humanity has long suffered a Washington-designed peonage.”
2. I think he is wrong. It might true that Hugo Chávez is offering Venezuela and Latin America a choice, which it has never really had which is the choice to develop in another way, but that does not mean that the criticisms against Chávez are unwarranted and that he is a great man.
3. In a world where too often countries in Latin America and in Africa are forced to adopt harsh policies to receive foreign aids, it is important for them to have choices other than neo-liberalization especially when it is clear that civil society and governance are not strong in those countries.
4. However, I think that those who support Hugo Chávez believe that the end justifies the means and that as long as Chávez defies America and offers countries a way to develop other than by using the Washington consensus, he is great. Means are important and are everything for a leader such as Chávez who speaks so passionately about social justice and who denounces the United States for being unjust and duplicitous.
5. Hugo Chávez would be a notable and worthy adversary to the United States if in fact, he practiced what he preached and in fact, there wasn’t something heinous and reckless in his criticisms of America. It is one thing to criticize America, but it is another thing to demonize it and to blame it for all the ills of the world.
6. The problem with Chávez is not what he believes, but rather who he is, just another dictator who adopted social justice as a cause as a way to remain a power. Hugo Chávez isn’t Che Guevera. Che Guevera believed in his cause enough in his cause not only to leave everything behind including a life of relative wealth to fight for it and to die for it. Even if I do not agree with Che Guevara’s ideology (Marxism), I understand those who admire his idealism and his courage. Hugo Chávez has none of those qualities. His sole goal is power.
7. We had have seen this movie too many times to buy the Chavez’s act and to believe that there can be such a thing as benevolent dictatorship.