Another who’ll be missed

Posted on by

I really loved this guy, and now that he’s gone, I worry about Venezuela.

There’s a reason for the cult of personality. There seem to be phases, in revolutions and national-liberation struggles, when finding the right person is important. It’s not the only thing, it’s not the biggest thing, but it matters.

I suppose you could say that there any number of right people out there, and one of them will surely come to the fore if conditions are right.

Maybe that’s true. I’m sure it’s true that there are plenty of right people out there — mute inglorious Chavezes. I’m not so certain that they will surely come to the fore, or not any time soon, anyway.

So I’m sorry, very sorry, that Hugo is gone. He was definitely the right person, and immensely likable too, I thought. Remember his encounter with the King Of Spain?

My pensive mood, after I read of his death, was rudely interrupted by a first-class creep on one of my lefty mailing lists — let’s call him Zircon — who took the opportunity to piss on Hugo as an ‘authoritarian’ and compare him with Kim III in Korea — or is it IV now?

You’ve gotta admire these finger-wagging American leftists, if only for chutzpah. They’re quite happy to tell our subjects just how they should and should not go about kicking us out. Along these lines, Zircon has a carefully worked-out list of things the Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan upsurges should have done, and didn’t.

And here’s what he thinks ‘we’ should do:

I think we should defend the sovereignty of countries like Venezuela or Cuba but not fall into the trap of assuming that means we must support people like Hugo or Fidel or Daniel [sc Ortega — ed.]. Instead we should argue for the extension of democratic rights to all.

Not to be too obvious or anything, but Fidel and Hugo, and yes, even Daniel, back in the day, did a bit more than ‘argue’.

And ‘we’ should defend their right to revolt, but not their actual revolutions — unless, of course, they come up to our high universalist standards about ‘democratic rights’, whatever those might be. Don’t hold your breath.

Indeed, this gibberish phrase, ‘democratic rights’, seems to be Zircon’s conceptual touchstone, though it makes no sense at all.

Democracy, on any informed understanding of the term, is the negation of ‘rights’. Democracy means that the people rule. They give rights, and they take them away, as their good sovereign pleasure dictates. If you’re really into ‘rights’, you have no use for democracy; and vice versa.

But probably what Zircon really means by ‘democratic rights’ is the same thing that old Dr Karl called ‘parliamentary cretinism’: the right to cast a vote for your next slavemaster. You’ll be whipped no matter what, but you can collectively choose which hand holds the lash. Ain’t that America, as the song says.

Venezuela, during the Chavez years, was a much more interesting place than the US, in spite of the latter’s devotion to Zircon’s notion of ‘democratic rights’. Certainly more democratic; and in fact, I’d say people in Venezuela had more rights.

Sit levis terra tibi, Hugo.

11 thoughts on “Another who’ll be missed”

  1. A very fine post, Michael. I don’t suppose that great champion of our “rights,” Barack Obama, ever read that book Hugo Chavez gave him-Open Veins of Latin America. He’d have learned a lot about what makes comrades like Chavez tick if he had.

    An arrogant young wunderkind of the “left” wrote today that Chavez employed some fascist rhetoric, a la Mussolini. Then when he was criticized said he like the black shirts. Like Zircon, he has earned the right to a black eye and a broken nose.

    Fascism sees society as a bundle of sticks, with the stick people indistinguisable one from the other, but all bound together as one people, one nation. Sort of like John F.. Kennedy’s ideal of ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country. Not like Hugo Chavez at all.

  2. “I think we should defend the sovereignty of countries like Venezuela or Cuba but not fall into the trap of assuming that means we must support people like Hugo or Fidel or Daniel [sc Ortega — ed.]. Instead we should argue for the extension of democratic rights to all.”

    Oh, the unself-conscious, straight-faced, unironic presumptuousness of it all. I have a better idea: How about “we” stay the fuck out and mind our own fucking business?

  3. I suppose as an anarchist I should disapprove and blah, blah, blah. But, I have always been fond of Hugo Chavez. He did what all the bleating liberals have never done: opened the public estate to the public and let the people use it for their own ends. I mean, what’s there to dislike about a guy who shuts down oligarchic telly stations, arms unions, turns oil money into hospitals and clinics, and managed to turn one more Mossadegh-Allende-Arbenz style attempted coup into a PR nightmare for Norteamericanos?

    Also, land reform. Fuck yeah, for any constitution which allows the poor to squat the plantations and estates of the wealthy and take possession of it.

  4. From the NYT editorial on Hugo:
    “There is no denying his popularity among Venezuela’s impoverished majority. He won elections by devoting a substantial share of the country’s oil income to building public housing, creating health clinics and making affordable food available to the poorest citizens. But…”

    There’s always a “but” isn’t there? As if “building public housing, creating health clinics and making affordable food available to the poorest citizens” couldn’t possibly be enough, or somehow sinister.

  6. —- ”Not to be too obvious or anything, but Fidel and Hugo, and yes, even Daniel, back in the day, did a bit more than ‘argue’.” —-

    If you ever have the opportunity, find a copy of –
    ”La Guerrilla Fue Mi Camino” by Julio Cesar Macias.

    I don’t know whether there has been a translation but you
    no doubt read Spanish.

    Cesar Macias [or ‘Montes’, or …] helped organize the Rebel
    Armed Forces [FAR] in Guate during the 1960s, was a primary organizer
    of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor [EGP], same country but earlier 1970s,
    also fought with the FMLN in El Salvador [where he controlled a mountain near San Salvador] and the Nicaraguan FSLN.

    IOW – and if you yhink in terms of a Central American civil war – he can be understood as one of its primary leaders yet who’s ever heard of him other than the people involved and a few others.

    [CON – the book contains too much of his ‘love life’, otherwise vg]

    Slightly more – http://www.literaturaguatemalteca.org/montes2.htm
    FWIW, I met him once in early ’79,,,,,seemed a very intelligent guy.

Leave a Reply