Enough With The Hugo Chavez Hero Worship

[tKl]

[b]Chavez's Call for FARC Disarmament Takes Washington By Surprise

I personally would not want to associate with FARC or have them even in my neighborhood, so this is good, right?

FARC is a gang. Right? Correct me where I'm wrong.

[AlicetheKurious]

tkl said:

I personally would not want to associate with FARC or have them even in my neighborhood, so this is good, right?

FARC is a gang. Right? Correct me where I'm wrong.

I usually prefer to read, not comment on, threads on subjects I'm not very informed about, but I do know enough to say that even if FARC is "a gang" (maybe, maybe not), it's fighting against the truly dangerous "gang" that has driven Columbia to its knees, the government of Columbia. When faced with a big evil and a smaller evil, I tend to question the motives of those who address their outrage exclusively, or at least primarily, to the smaller evil, if evil it even is (I don't know enough about FARC).

Back to Chavez, I'm with JackRiddler on this one. The geopolitical environment has accurately been described as a 'grand chessboard', although the stakes are astronomical and the price of a miscalculation can mean life or death, prosperity or hell, for countless human beings.

Someone like Hugo Chavez doesn't have the luxury of sitting at his computer and blithely making his decisions in a vacuum. Those decisions have vital consequences that he needs to take fully into account. He is being relentlessly targeted by the Big Satan, the world's sole superpower, which essentially wants to be free to prey on his country and his people. Other nations are similarly targeted. China has its faults, but it doesn't represent nearly the kind of danger to Venezuela, and Africa and Iran, as the U.S. does.

It's very lucky for the targets of America's insatiable greed, that China has important geostrategic interests that conflict with American hegemonic plans.

Chavez would be an idiot, not to mention criminally irresponsible towards the people who depend on him, to ignore this lucky break. Faced with a monstrous global conspiracy, the rational, intelligent response is to forge strategic alliances with partners who share a common enemy and mutually compatible objectives.

Should he follow your prescription, and decide not to deal with China because of Tibet, and not to deal with the Sudanese government because of Darfur, and not to deal with Iran because...I don't know what, and not to deal with FARC because you don't like them, his country will have been conveniently isolated and fatally weakened, like a nice, ripe fruit hanging low on the tree. Should other leaders do the same, there will remain no obstacle to the New World Order, or to the murderous "gang" that will then have free rein to do with all of us exactly as they like.

Will you be "personally" happy then?

[geogeo]

Chavez drinks over 20 cups of coffee a day, gets little sleep, and I believe has sacrificed his family relationship for what he cares for. HE is of the people, he is from the poor, he was called a monkey in the Army because he wasn't all white. The poor in Venezuela, some 60 or more percent of the population, are rock solid behind him because he speaks like them and acts like them--he's churlish and rough around the edges, but they've been getting screwed by silk-talking elites for 500 years. Politics is theater to him, and he speaks in soundbites--to Venezuelans, in a call in show for hours every day. Much of what he says is for internal consumption, so it's not our business to comment. Look at all the unbelievable stuff that gets said in Europe and the US a propos to 'illegal' immigrants, or to abortion for that matter--a relatively huge taboo in much of Latin America.

You can believe zero, nothing of what gets reported about Venezuela in the foreign presss-you have to visit. It's more than just Chavez. But you have to see how they have squandered their oil wealth just as he says, and how it's as poor as countries that never had any. You also have to start by visiting other countries in Latin America that have been so screwed for so long, and yet the best the poor can get when they protest is to be coopted by some pseudo-left, liberal NGO and 'softened.'

You all seem to forget that the so-called 'Third World' used to be filled with colorful, theatrical and anti-Western leaders like Chavez; they're not really anti-Western, they're pro-nationalization. Back in the day, a leader could nationalize international companies at the drop of a hat; now it's virtual anathema.

It is never good to speak of a country as a person.

As for the FARC, they are hardly a gang. They are a guerrilla army composed of nearly 50% women, which should tell you something right there. For years, they had everything the right-wing death squads ever did blamed on them; a couple years ago they killed some civilians by accident when fighting the squad armies, and actually apologized. Again, back in the day, most countries in the world, including the US, were led to freedom from imperialist oppression by vilified guerrilla armies. It is worthwhile to remember what it took in revolutionary France to dismantle the pre-1789 system whereby the king and the pope were hand in hand, and there had been a line of kings back to Clovis, all or most in league with god.

As for Tibet, it's neither here nor there. Pre-China, Tibet was basically a patriarchal theocracy, that is to say, the dream state of Western occultism (e.g. D'Alveydre's synarchy) where everyone knows their place, like cells in ahuman body. For the US, it's nothing more than one more way to harrass China, just like Mongolia. Burma, the rest of Southeast Asia, the Koreas, and Taiwan. The rise of the Western world-state has always been predicated on the neutralization and encirclement of China; this has been known and talked about for centuries.

[American Dream]

While I support Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution, as well as Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, (though not uncritically), I can not say the same for FARC.

FARC has lost my support, and that of most of the Colombian people, as it has degenerated from what was a group of political revolutionaries into more and more of a "merely" criminal organization which kidnaps the innocent, facilitate narcotics trafficking, murder non-combatants and etc., because they are more so invested in the business of war-making than they are dedicated to the goal of human liberation.

The people running the Colombian establishment can easily match the FARC in terms of violence and criminality, so this is no apology for them. Still, I don't think it is reactionary per se to question the role of FARC in Colombian society...

[JackRiddler]

.

What geogeo and Alice said!

Anyone want to deplore China, you have a great case. Start a new thread.

[geogeo]

No, certainly not reactionary -- but again, we need to be cautious in believing anything we hear about them. I think the problem is that we overlook the kinds of things the FARC are doing in our favorite pet revolutions of the past--at least, the ones that 'succeeded.' Absolutely horrible things are done by any and all when societal change is achieved via violent revolution. I think if the FARCA were as venal and mercenary as they are made out to be, they would have long ago been coopted. They are the type of revolutionary group that stops at little in their quest, but they are not as bad as Maoists groups like the Shining Path or the one that actually has come to power, ina matter of speaking, in Nepal. But these are never as bad as the state forces they array against.

While I support Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution, as well as Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, (though not uncritically), I can not say the same for FARC.

FARC has lost my support, and that of most of the Colombian people, as it has degenerated from what was a group of political revolutionaries into more and more of a "merely" criminal organization which kidnaps the innocent, facilitate narcotics trafficking, murder non-combatants and etc., because they are more so invested in the business of war-making than they are dedicated to the goal of human liberation.

The people running the Colombian establishment can easily match the FARC in terms of violence and criminality, so this is no apology for them. Still, I don't think it is reactionary per se to question the role of FARC in Colombian society...

[JackRiddler]

.

WW4 ran some of my comments from above on a page with responses to the article, and linked back to this thread.

http://ww4report.com/node/5715

So let's return the favor.

Here's what they ran from me:

Imagine this exact same article without the same headline: the all-caps imperative (ENOUGH!) the strawman accusation (HERO WORSHIP) or a subhead that admonishes another strawman ("the Left") and a phrase that could come straight from the State Department ("repudiate Venezuelan leader"). This from a US writer during the end stages of the Bush regime, with Iran and Venezuela both targeted for attack. Yeah, the Left's big problem right now is not the paralyzed antiwar movement, but its unacknowledged man-love of Chavez.

Well, even with a headline like,

"Chavez Enters into Questionable Alliances"

it would still be full of shite, a blinders-on screed against the Officially Designated Enemies (ODEs) of the American empire, but I could have certainly read it without immediate anger.
--

Quote:
In his quest to rattle the US, Chávez has courted some other rather unsavory leaders. The Venezuelan leader for example has solidified ties with Iran and calls fundamentalist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "one of the greatest anti-imperialist fighters." Chávez added, unbelievably, that Ahmadinejad was "one of the great fighters for true peace."

--

Context and dates of these quotes and presumably meetings would be a journalistic minimum. But Kozloff's propaganda piece doesn't bother with attributions or details; "human rights campaigners say" will apparently suffice, as in the Belarus section. (Amateur. Judy Miller would at least call Curveball.)

Venezuela, Iran and pre-invasion Iraq did not choose to be targets of US-led violence. They were chosen, and logically they found each other as they maneuvered to defend. That doesn't make any of them good regimes, but it is what it is. North Korea didn't choose to be added to an axis of evil with Iran, but as a result of the threat of war evident in the phrase, Iran and NK have forged a propaganda alliance of sorts to show up the United States as both inflexible and powerless. "Authoritarian" Belarus is targeted by the international noise machine, pretty much dictatorial US ally Uzbekistan is not. And so it goes.

As for China, it exists both in practical symbiosis and a war of words with the US, with both sides wishing they could quit each other; they cannot. The rhetorical techniques employed by Kozloff are so transparent. Wanting to sell more oil to China (instead of to the American regime that tried to OVERTHROW HIM) smoothly turns into "support for China" and in turn translates into support for labor camps. But did Chavez issue a statement supporting Chinese labor camps? No, he's doing nothing different from what everyone who does business with China does.

Hey, Kozloff, presumably you're in the US. You want to boycott China, there's Wal-Mart down the block. Take your posters and go!

Kozloff at no point specifies the US "machinations" against Venezuela, as to do so would make it clear that Chavez's government has been targeted in a war by the Bush regime that is covert only to American citizens. Venezuela therefore has a right of defense - and if that means selling oil to China or pumping up Ahmedinejad, tough. It's up to the US to make peace and amends for what it has done to Venezuela, not for Kozloff to wring his hands over Chavez's necessary international alliances and yet claim he's defending the Bolivarian revolution.

The response:

World War 4 Report replies: So much disingenuous garbage here, we hardly know where to begin. If "hero worship" is a strawman, why do you hold Chávez above criticism? All our feature story headlines are in caps, and you added the exclamation point after "enough." (Trying to pull a fast one, are we?)

Go ask Amnesty International about Lukashenko's human rights record.

"It is what it is" is a meaningless tautology.

It is this kind of cynicism about human rights that costs the left so much credibility in the US and around the world.

Finally, in future readers are encouraged to keep their responses to no more than 500 words.

See our last posts on Venezuela, China and Tibet, and our last Exit Poll results.

OK!

[American Dream]

JackRiddler wrote:

WW4 ran some of my comments from above on a page with responses to the article, and linked back to this thread.

For whatever it is worth, it was Bill Weinberg of WW4 Report who first alerted me to this piece, through an interview with the author he hosted late one night on WBAI-FM. And for whatever this may be worth, I imagine that Bill Weinberg's views on 9/11 would be found disagreeable by many on this board...

[geogeo]

Way to go JR! They don't appear to be able to respond to your critique--just a lot of nitpicking. Faux-Lefties are easy to tell--they rag primarily on the hitlist supplied by the State Dept.--Belarus, not Ukraine/Caucasus states; Venezuela, not Colombia; Iran, not Saudi Arabia; etc.