Buruma on Guilty Groupies
The gifted writer Ian Buruma had an excellent piece in last Sunday’s London Times scratching away furiously at one of my favorite little rashes: those angst and guilt-ridden “intellectuals” and “artists” of the West who are always ready to worship tin-pot authoritarians (as long as they are anti-American).
Move over Cynthia Plaster-Caster and make room for a suckling Harold Pinter and Harry Belafonte… they want a crack at El Jefe’s schlong too. They are among the coterie that signed a phantasmagorical letter last year claiming there hasn’t been “a single case of torture” in Cuba since 1959. That’s right. Sure.
Of course, as Buruma sourly notes, the current flavor-of-the-month for the Strongman Groupies is none other than Hugo Chavez.
Buruma is a solid progressive and noted campaigner for global human rights. Like me, however, he’s just plain had it with the craven worshippers of power:
Hugo Chavez, the elected strongman of Venezuela, is the latest object of adulation by western “progressives†who return from jaunts in Caracas with stars in their eyes.
Chavez is not yet a Castro, let alone a Pol Pot. His fiery populist rhetoric is more in the line of Juan Peron, the Argentinian “caudilloâ€. Chavez, by the way, rather relishes this pejorative term. Neither quite left, nor quite right, he is a typical macho Latin leader, whose charisma is meant to stand for the empowerment of his people, mostly poor and darker-skinned than the urban elite.
Unlike many traditional caudillos, but like Silvio Berlusconi (who cut his coat from the same cloth), Chavez was democratically elected, in 1998, after having tried and failed to take the more traditional strongman’s route to power, by armed force in 1992. Chavez is the Latin American version of a new type of authoritarianism (Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra is the Asian version), built on a mixture of showbusiness, intimidation, paranoia, huge wealth, and public handouts to the poor. The ideal is democracy by referendum, stripped of messy party politics or independent courts…
Criticism of American policies and economic practices are necessary and often just, but why do leftists continue to discredit their critical stance by applauding strongmen who oppress and murder their own critics? Is it simply a reverse application of that famous American cold war dictum: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard� Or is it the fatal attraction to power often felt by writers and artists who feel marginal and impotent in capitalist democracies? The danger of Chavism is not a revival of communism, even though Castro is among its main boosters. Nor should anti-Americanism be our main concern. The US can take care of itself. What needs to be resisted, not just in Latin America, is the new form of populist authoritarianism...
Read Buruma’s entire piece. And then start your whining.
May 17th, 2006 at 4:29 am
The names Ian Baruma cites as lefty supplicants to tyrants do not represent the American or European “left.” Rather, they are a tiny handful of novelists and entertainers not worth mentioning, unless the point is to show how miniscule and exotic the backing the tyrants he names is among the West’s left.
Buruma notes, for example, that Pol Pot “found favour among several academics and journalists.” Several?? Surely these favourers were even more obscure and fringe than the novelists he blames as Castrophiles, which is probably why Buruma doesn’t bother to name them. And did this trickle of favor drip down during Pot’s early years as a homicidal maniac, or when he was killing as a Cold War pawn on the U.S. payroll? Surely he knows that the favour the U.S. State Dept. bestowed on Pol Pot was concrete and substantive, keeping his movement alive in its war against the occupying Vietnamese, whereas whatever kind words the “several” unnamed academics and journalists provided were risibly inert.
That is what is most absurd and irresponsible about the clumsy obsession Buruma and his ilk have with the obscure idiocies and eccentricities of the extreme left.
America’s extreme left has never had any substantive effect on the nation’s geopolitical successes or failures.
Is Castro still in control in Cuba because American leaders grew timid after semi-popular singers like Belafonte and writers like Mortimer signed letters saying El Jefe Maximo isn’t a torturer?
Or is Castro still in control of Cuba because the American right has insisted on aggression that has legitimated the dictator’s ready claims that the U.S. seeks to dictate Cuba’s fate?
I’m not trying to reduce the situation in Cuba to that dichotomy, but I do think it’s clear that the failure to free Cuba is of the same source as that which has left North Korea and Vietnam as the two other sole remaining Stalinistic dictatorships.
So why do Buruma, Marc Cooper and some others waste so much of their time on the fringe left, which is the weakest, most inert political faction in American history? I can only theorize:
Perhaps, as liberals themselves, they feel ill-equipped or simply too intellectually fatigued to repel right-wing smear tactics that conflate the extreme left with liberalism. Cooper has hinted as much with his many and fevered suggestions that the anti-war movement is crippled by its inability to vociferously enough denounce the fringe left’s oddball agenda.
It’s as if they’re more concerned about personally having to answer for Ward Churchillism on some talk show than they are about promoting the legitimate, mainstream, popular, practical, historical positions of the American left.
The history of politicians, academics and media smearing the left and liberals with the actions of the extreme left, i.e. red baiting, is vast and devastating. It remains a cornerstone of Republican political strategy and the centerfold in every Roger Ailes Fox News Channel playbook.
The history of redbaiting and ongoing smears of anti-war liberals make Buruma’s and Cooper’s smears all the more unfortunate. Whom do they think they are protecting or enlightening? We know who’s getting tarred, that’s for sure.
Lastly, Buruma takes a predictable slap at George Galloway, accusing him of flattering Saddam. Galloway has rebutted this allegation fully and repeatedly, and it’s really a shame to see it still finds print, even if it is in the Telegraph.
May 17th, 2006 at 5:56 am
BB, the fact is that the types of folks who have been in the leadership of anti-war/”progressive” organizations lately (ANSWER here in the US, STWC and Respect in the UK), regularly offer up support, and sometimes even adulation, of some of the worst figures and regimes in world politics. If these folks are so “marginal,” then why do they get to speak at every rally? Why do they occupy positions of influence within our movement? Why are they its public face? What Marc and others have been saying for years, rightly, is that this group of folks, while undoubtedly small, has set the tone and the talking points for the rest of the anti-war movement and the left generally. And it’s one of the reasons why the movement has failed utterly in stopping the war in the first place or galvanizing any sort of meaningful opposition to it since 2003.
As for Galloway, you can’t be more ridiculous. The man has a long relationship with the Husseins, and lately he’s been singing the praises of the awful Syrian regime and those elements in Iraq that would turn that country into a theocratic nightmare if they had the chance. The man is not a leftist. He’s a shill for some of the most reactionary forces on earth. But nonetheless, he’s the public face of the anti-war movement in Britain, and a hero to many here in the US. What a farce.
Kudos to Buruma for this solid piece.
May 17th, 2006 at 6:10 am
“Chris Maisano” writes: “If these folks are so “marginal,†then why do they get to speak at every rally? Why do they occupy positions of influence within our movement?”
They organize the rallies. How can that not be obvioius to you? Should the people who organize the rallies not be allowed to speak at them? How do you propose to achieve that?
You complain that they “occupy positions of influence.” But the facts are that the only positions they occupy are at the heads of organizations they themselves operate. I can’t understand why that is a problem for you, and I see no evidence whatsoever that it’s a problem for the popular, practical, historical, mainstream anti-war movement.
You seem to want these hardcore left identity seekers with too much time on their hands to form the organizations, call the meetings, plan the rallies and volunteer on the day, then shut up and go away. Sorry if they spoil your dream parade, but it just doesn’t work that way.
These people have no influence in the democratic party and no influence in the mainstream liberal opinion media. The key location for opposition to the war in Iraq is in those places, so, sorry, the ANSWER crowd is inert, other than as straw men for intellectually fatigued liberals.
May 17th, 2006 at 6:22 am
BB,
The organizations that the fringe themselves operate have become the leading organizations of the anti-war movement on both sides of the Atlantic. That’s why I have a problem with their prominence. To just say that they’re totally marginal and have no influence on the movement is an evasion of the question at hand.
May 17th, 2006 at 7:04 am
Not whining because I expect that sort of thing from Marc Cooper – but how is the hack Ian Buruma, best known for his entire booklength hit piece on Edward Said – a “solid progressive and campaigner for human rights.” What has he done, in actuality?
To be sure he is an elegant writer with no principles, and plentyt of hunger for attentiton. Aside from pointing out the commonalities between this piece and the typeo f stuff that Jeane Kirkpatrick used to writer I’m not gonna argue with his perspective or Marc’s – I’m arguing with the categorization of Buruma.
May 17th, 2006 at 7:09 am
One other thing – I’ve read every issue of New Left Review since 1999, and I’ve yet to find any advocacy for an Anti-Imperialist movement that would include North Korea. He repeated thtis slander from Christopher Hitchens. I challenge Cooper to find an example of this slander. Also, what writers admired Pol Pot?
May 17th, 2006 at 7:36 am
Bunker, I suspect that you’re in denial about the left’s automatic anti-American posture. Whenever there are sides to choose, the left, in almost unanimous unison, jump on the sides of our enemies or critics. For various reason, the American way threatens the agenda of those on the left, and they counter that with criticism of their own country–especially when the leaders are conservatives, which is still no excuse.
When Elian Gonazalez was snatched crying by Clinton and Reno’s assault squad pointing automatic weapons at him and the relatives of his dead mother to whom she was escaping from Cuba and who were providing loving care for the child, and when that Justice(?) Department shipped Elian back to Castro, the left cheered.
When the worst President and ex-President in my life (much worse than Bush) visited Castro in Cuba and hugged him in a love fest, the left praised that as detente–despite official U.S. policy against such contact and Castro using Carter as a stooge for propaganda purposes.
I think that he people on the left described by this article do represent the attitudes of the majority of that persuasion. It’s their automatic reaction to find fault with America.
BTW, the U.S. recently added Venezuela to its axis of evil and banned selling of weapons to them. But, a peaceful ruler like Chavez, concerned more for spending for his people, doesn’t need and wouldn’t use weapons–would he? An automatic reaction of the left, though, is to say that he needs them to defend against the U.S. Am I right? So, Iran needs nuclear weapons because of the U.S., too.
When will the left wake up and back the right side?
May 17th, 2006 at 9:35 am
The idea that Chavez is not so bad because he’s ‘only’ a Juan Peron-type should be chilling to anyone who knows what happened to Argentina after Peron’s various sojourns in the presidency. The country still hasn’t recovered from the fatal attraction exercised by Juan and Evita, who combined some humane, reasonable and decent initiatives with the crudest populist demogoguery. After the Perons came neonazi dictatorship, a period of neo-peronist looting and finally total collapse. Poor Venezuela if they have to repeat that sorry history.
May 17th, 2006 at 9:38 am
When Elian Gonazalez was snatched crying by Clinton and Reno’s assault squad pointing automatic weapons at him and the relatives of his dead mother to whom she was escaping from Cuba and who were providing loving care for the child, and when that Justice(?) Department shipped Elian back to Castro, the left cheered.
So did that notorious leftie Steve Largent.
Carter gave hope to dissidents in Cuba.
That’s according to the dissidents:
When will the rightwing learn that a baldfaced lie gains no truth through mindless repetition?
May 17th, 2006 at 9:58 am
As for Ian Buruma’s article, I have but two words: Yá Basta!
There are more strawmen here than a roadshow production of the Wizard of Oz. So he totes out Harold Pinter and Harry Belafonte, while ignoring left-leaning think tanks like the Center for International Programs and their position regarding Chávez:
There’s not a word in there I disagree with. Adam Siacson, who wrote regularly testifies before Congress on LatAm issues.
Not a word about Human Rights Watch’s criticisms of Chavez. Not a word about AI’s reports on human rights in Venezuela.
He makes no mention of the late Susan Sontag’s public excoriation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez for failing to condemn the crackdown on dissidents or José Saramago’s break with Castro over the dissidents and the execution of the hijackers.
May 17th, 2006 at 11:08 am
marc, i support your pummeling the fringe left for many of their views, which i think ultimately are damaging for left causes as a whole but moreso are just downright hypocritical and loony. that said, i think for those of you who have never set foot in south america, this region and its countries are complex and not so easily understood just by reading the various slants presented to you on your computer screen.
for ex., take the frequent characterization of leftists presidents in the region by the so-called experts (whom most often are conservative, pro-neoliberal thinkers in denial about the failure of “el modelo”) quoted almost religously by mainstream media that these leaders are “populists” because they, heaven forbid, do what democracies are designed to do and respond to the wishes of the majority. when rightist heads of state have on the other hand exclusively pandered to the interests of their backers, the corporate heads, the wealthy, generals and other fools, do they get some such vague, demonizing label? i rarely hear of rightist politicians called populist except when a rare few occasionally try to make appeals to the poor.
in the final analysis, i don’t think chavez is a threat to the u.s. or anyone else in the region. and he is no castro and not peron. but he can be rightly criticized for some of his authoritation moves. but lets put that in context.
while its election process may not be perfect, and not completely abuse-free, venezuela, as the us state department human rights report acknowledges, and as the oas and the carter center have confirmed, has a functioning, fair election process. the complaints from the opposition about the elections board there being biased and not transparent, such complaints have so far not impaired the ability of the people to change its leaders. the complaints lobbed by the opposition there are at best in the same category as the similar complaints we have about the election in the united states. take florida and gore vs. bush, for example. or the alleged irregularities by election authorities in states like ohio during the 2004 presidential election. the biggest reason the legislative branch, and the presidency, are in the hands of chavez is chavez’s popularity among the majority poor and ineffective leadership among the opposition. and the politicians that came prior to chavez were not much to brag about. as the OAS secretary general said recently of the opposition’s boycott of legislative elections last december:
“We had a problem with the Venezuelan opposition, which assured us that they would not withdraw from the [electoral] process if certain conditions were met. These were met and, despite this, they withdrew.” Insulza continued, “if the path of abstention is chosen, then one cannot complain that the entire parliament is in the hands of one’s political adversary.”
the two areas of legitimate, major concern in today’s venezuela are press freedoms and the judiciary. still largely controlled by the opposition on the right, most of the media continues with its anti-chavez bias and attacks despite a much criticized law passed in december 2004 that beefed up libel and slander provisions for insults of the president and state institutions. the supreme court also in fact ruled in october of last year against a libel suit filed by the government against a newspaper for an editorial it put out criticizing a judge. but the law still has an intimidating effect and it gives the state the potential to obstruct freedom of the press sometime down the line. the so-called leftist “groupies” who support chavez ought to press him to do away with it.
the largest authoritarian mis-step so far has been the chavez machine increasing the size of the supreme court and then filling those posts with its allies. the result is in fact a severely compromised judiciary whose independence is in doubt. (on the other hand, the judiciary that came before was nothing to write home about.)
in sum, while i denounce the authoritarian moves made by chavez, and am not a fan of all of his policy choices, i have doubts for example about his management of the economy, chavez is not as much of a boogie man as he is being painted as in the media. he is a loud mouth, whose love of power could ultimately turn him into a full-fledged authoritarian bad man in the class mentioned by buruma and others, but up to now he falls short of that category. his greatest fault is his inability to develop respectful relations with the venezuelan opposition on the right. but thats not all his fault, either.
May 17th, 2006 at 11:24 am
What Randy said…both times.
May 17th, 2006 at 11:44 am
Randy does have a point, but does the average person know what the Center for International Programs is or pay attention to reports and statements released by HRW and Amnesty? Unfortunately, I don’t think so. The Pinters, Galloways, and ANSWERs of the world are, I think, representative of the left for many people – and that’s really bad for us.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
Oh come on. Chavez is just like Franklin Roosevelt to hear some tell it.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
You actually believe that ANSWER and Harold Pinter are more familiar and important in the general public’s mind than Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch ?
What planet are you communicating from ?
I, incidentally, have moderately liberal friends – the kind of people who thought we should go after bin Laden in Afghanistan and were disappointed by the failure to do so effectively – who saw the Iraq war as pure hype and potential disaster, went to the big demos in the Bay Area for which, presumably, ANSWER got the parade permits and more-or-less owned the podium – and they couldn’t tell you the first thing about who/what ANSWER is or represents, never heard of Worker’s World Party, and certainly have no clue nor interest in the arcana of Brit ultra-leftism being batted about here. They know all about Amnesty International, of course.
I really think that the sectarians on the left can be identified first and foremost by their penchant to engage in this mutual navel-gazing/slinging-and-arrowing that assumes that there is, in fact, a left in the U.S. outside of the left-liberal wing of the Democratic Party that anyone who could be construed as a normal person/average citizen knows or cares about. There isn’t and they don’t. (Yeah, yeah…Michael Moore ! A guy who makes movies and sells books !) I used to lament the lack of a radical left with political credibility (as opposed to occasional cultural impact) when I was young and stupid, but increasingly I think it’s a real plus for the country. Let the right-wing own the bulk of the people who cling to crackpot theories, faith-based belief systems, apocalyptic predictions and unhinged ideologies.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
Chris,
What tires me about this argument is that it offers no solution except that those of us on the left (if Marc is to be believed) have to spend a great deal of our time denouncing kooks on our side of the political spectrum. This argument has devolved to the point of being cant. It also plays into the hands of the right. Whatever time we spend criticizing the likes of Harold Pinter, et al, is less time spent advocating for issues we believe in.
I have said this countless times and I will say it again. I am responsible for my actions and statements; not Harry Belafonte’s, not Harold Pinter’s, not Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s. Mine.
I refuse to do an auto-dá-fé every time some kook shoots off their mouth. Yá basta!
May 17th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
“The Pinters, Galloways, and ANSWERs of the world are, I think, representative of the left for many people – and that’s really bad for us.”
Just to put your comment in perspective, the first time I ever heard of Pinter, Galloway, and ANSWER was on this very website. I’ve been on the left since high school, worked with Catholic peace and justice organizations in college (including the Catholic Worker), non-denominational Christian social justice organizations post-college, and never once heard of these groups. Incidentally, I grew up and went to college in the Midwest, where we don’t look to coastal groups to guide our organizational events. So your “many people” is, as usual, a coastal generalization useless to us Heartlanders. In other words, the “who leads the left” hand-wringing and loon-fearing is, for the vast majority of us on the left, simply irrelevant. We find there’s too much actual work to do instead.
May 17th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
To echo Rich, as a reasonably solid though coastal leftist, I must admit I’d never heard of ANSWER before coming to this site. I think it’s useful to distinguish between the U.S and Europe; in the U.S. the fringe types are fringier and farther between. The very notion that folks like Galloway and Answer could stand for the left just underlines the current weakness of this political persuasion; these guys are filling a vacuum. Even so, I think very few people are aware of them and genuinely associate the left with stereotypes from the 60′s, along with Barbara Streisand, Michael Moore and a few of the better known bogeymen from the 70′s and 80′s tossed in.
May 17th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Buruma says that Hugo Chavez is a Latin American version of Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra. I imagine most people here, and most especially Cooper, wouldn’t bother to check out what Shinawatra really stands for. Buruma himself can’t be blamed since he fell off a horse a couple of years ago and can’t be for his occasional outbursts of stupidity and illogic.
Does this sound like Hugo Chavez:
EGAT directors resign amid workers’ protests PRIVATISATION:
By AMY KAZMIN
DATELINE: BANGKOK
Directors of the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand have resigned en masse after failing to quell workers’ protests against plans to partially privatise the utility.
Thaksin Shinawatra, prime minister, is hoping the new board will help the government overcome resistance to the planned Dollars 1.7bn public offering of EGAT shares, which was to take place in mid-May.
In an embarrassing political setback, Mr Thaksin was last month forced to postpone the share sale, after mass demonstrations by unions that represent EGAT’s 30,000 employees.
The government wants to sell a 25 per cent stake in the utility to the public as a step towards improving the agency’s efficiency, but also to boost the market capitalisation of the Thai stock market.
All over the world, Hugo Chavez is lambasted for trying to establish another Cuba in Venezuela, but only in Rupert Murdoch’s London Times can Buruma get away with comparing to him to a head of state who is hated by the trade unions for privatization. This is the same Murdoch who owns FOX-TV and the NY Post. Buruma, brain damage and all, is his kind of guy.
It is fascinating that both he and Cooper are journalism professors. Your first reaction would be one of astonishment that such ineptitude could be rewarded. But in thinking about the role of the media in American society, their teaching students about how to do journalism makes *perfect sense*.
May 17th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
most comments on the blog miss the real issue and are instead hung up in the useless left vs. extreme left debate. the real issue ought to be are journalists like marc cooper and buruma exaggerating the evils of hugo chavez? is he another castro, or not? if he is the second coming of castro, then why is it that his government is elected, regularly holds elections, allows active opposition parties, has a critical press, has a mixed economy with a vibrant though not always successful private sector. in other words, to use buruma’s words, the government allows venezuelans to scream if they want to. that does not sound like cuba.
May 17th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
For the record:
“In the late 1970s, Galloway was a founding member of the Campaign Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq (CARDRI), which campaigned against Saddam Hussein’s regime in response to its suppression of the Iraqi Communist Party. He was critical of America and Britain’s later role in supporting Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War and was involved in protests at Iraq’s cultural centre in London in the 1980s.
Giving evidence in his libel case against the Daily Telegraph newspaper in 2004, Galloway testified that he regarded Saddam as a “bestial dictator” and would have welcomed his removal from power, but not by means of a military attack on Iraq. Galloway also pointed that he was a prominent critic of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s, as well as of the role of Margaret Thatcher’s government in supporting arms sales to Iraq during the Iran/Iraq war. Labour MP Tam Dalyell said during the controversy over whether Galloway should be expelled from the Labour Party that “in the mid-1980s there was only one MP that I can recollect making speeches about human rights in Iraq and this was George Galloway.” [24] When the issue of Galloway’s meetings with Saddam Hussein is raised, including before the U.S. Senate, Galloway has argued that he had met Saddam “exactly the same number of times as U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns.” [25]”
cut’n'paste from Wikipedia. You’d think Galloway’s slavish critics would at least bother to Google their overheated allegations…
May 17th, 2006 at 7:43 pm
right, bunkerbuster.
the wikipedia encyclopedia is far from authoritative. anyone can make up your own bio and publish it there. its a public access encyclopedia that it seems galloways’s pr team has learned how to manipulate.
May 17th, 2006 at 10:26 pm
Anon:
Why are you unwilling to shoulder any burden of proof whatsoever?
People here made allegations against Galloway. I provided some counter evidence.
You raise doubts about my evidence, yet provide none of your own. It takes 2 minutes to Google for this stuff and the fact that you decline to do even that much says a lot about how you arrive at your opinions about Mr. Galloway.
You can find Mr. Galloway’s riposte to similar attacks here:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=8776
May 20th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
“And then start your whining…”
Marc,
I really like most of what you write and I enjoy unembarrassed independent commentary from the left, rejecting any group-think. I’m also glad to see you take on the sinister and preposterous elements of the left. But why this dialogue-of-the-deaf approach to the subject of Venezuela?
You have great experience of Latin America, you know what it is like to be poor there, you know what is going through the minds of Chavez voters and you have direct experience from Chile of the Latin American right and US regional policy.
So why insist on shoving these issues aside to discuss Venezuela through such a restrictive prism and then insist that people on the left who don’t express their criticism of Chavez in the same tone are engaging in acts of power-worship? If you are going to condemn Chavez in the name of internationalism, fine, but that same international sentiment should grant some room for considering the viewpoint of the Venezuelan electorate.
You could at least do the subject the justice of laying out the issues in a reasonable fashion – Buruma writes an article on Venzeuela without mentioning the opposition, the military coup of 2002 – a 48-hour dictatorship which was widely applauded in the West – or the Caracazo of 1989, a huge massacre of pre-Chavez Venezuela we have all decided to forget. I guess we just got over it and moved on with our lives. Or perhaps we just never bothered to learn that it had happened in the first place.
The rest of Buruma’s article consists of the usual cliche – a brief run-down of Western intellectuals who supported tyranny, restricted entirely to the left. An important lesson in history rendered useless by its intensely selective recollection and reproduced in a right-wing paper (and yes, that is an important point – George Orwell refused to print his justified criticisms of the left in right-wing papers and even refused to allow a journal to publish Animal Farm because it wasn’t sufficiently left-wing). Orwell’s stance was highly principled, unlike many of those who wrongly imagine that they are treading in his foot-steps.
And then there’s the neat sub-heading that Chavez is a ‘dictator-in-waiting’ (waiting for what, another election? Another plebiscite? What is slowing him down?) – a dictator to be, as in ‘not actually a dictator’. You will recall this rhetoric from Chile in 1970-3 and how it was used to pave the way for an actual dictatorship (and one that received many plaudits from Western intellectuals and groupies and still does, as you know).
I’m glad you gave some space to my friend Johann Hari whose enthusiasm for the government of Venezuela stems from his experience of the country and comes despite his strong condemnation of dictators like Castro and lefties who apologise for them.
But even then, you give space to a genuine progressive like Hari grudgingly. I think this approach considerably weakens your ability to successfully challenge groups like ANSWER and the World Workers’ Party, if you will insist that many of your own readers are just a bunch of whiners if they take issue with you on these pretty serious matters.
You’re absolutely right that criticism of Chavez should be a part of the left’s dialogue on Venezuela, but your unwillingness to engage with any other aspect of the debate does you little credit.
____________________________________
Oh, and BunkerBuster, George Galloway really is a crook:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=457&row=0
Greg Palast’s expose is pretty devastating and Galloway’s reply does not begin to answer it.
May 21st, 2006 at 11:24 pm
Probably the easiest way to deal with these so-called left-wing dictators is simply to make it plain that they are not left-wing, but fascists.
Many people forget that fascist dictatorships also mostly provide health care and education. Providing health care and education does not make a regime left-wing.
Denounce Castro, Chavez, Mugabe, etc. as fascists and move on. Also recognize that a lot of the supporters of these regimes(Chomsky, Pinter, Pilger, Belafonte, Galloway) are themselves not really progressives either. Galloway in particular’s only identification with the left is that he’s anti-war. So? Pat Buchanan’s anti-war. Galloway is a classic right-wing thug in the Buchanan mold.