Pinochet Gasps. Castro Disappears. Raul Postures.
Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet underwent emergency surgery Sunday after suffering a heart attack.
The 91 year old former general is currently facing myriad murder, torture and human rights violations charges. Having been given last rites, he might wind up dying just in time to avoid a trial. Chilean President, Socialist Michele Bachelet, says when the viejo huevon actually dies he will not be given any grandiose state funeral. That’s good. Pinochet should be unceremoniously buried in a plain, pine box with a 24/7 armed guard posted on the grave site. Just to make sure he can’t get out.
Ailing octogenerian Fidel Castro, on the other hand, has already been lavished with the first of what promises to be numerous, public spectacles of a Roman scope to take place immediately before and after his coming demise. Though not physically present at the event, Fidel was the honored guest this weekend when the Cuban state rolled out some aging Russian tanks, batteries of anti-aircraft missiles, choppers, MIG’s, and tens of thousands of marching troops in one more old-fashioned Stalinist military parade befitting for an aging leader of a one-party dictatorship.
This is merely the first in a number of such state-sponsored street operas aimed at slowly preparing for the death of Castro. After all, the Cuban ruling elite have to be scared stiff by what will come after Fidel proves he is, alas, a mortal. I don’t think anyone knows, but the least likely possibility is the status quo ante. There are millions of poor, disproportionately black, younger Cubans who have grown up having only one papito, and upon whom they will (rightfully) blame their current portfolio of bleak perspectives. When Fidel finally checks out, when the lid is removed, their expectations are going to soar.
I find it fascinating –and quite revealing– that the Cuban state continues to treat Castro’s medical condition as a state secret. Fifty years of “revolutionary” rule, two generations of New Men, and yet not enough trust in “the people” to tell them what the condition is of the one man who holds all power over them. Wonderful.
The Cuban state won’t reveal what’s taken Castro “temporarily” out of office. Most informed observers believe El Jefe Maximo has got irreversible colon cancer.
Fidel Castro was also a no-show at the week-long conference of the Guayasmin Foundation just concluded in Havana that…celebrated the life and thought of Fidel Castro! This is what passes for intellectual life in the asphyxiated Cuban cultural world. The low point of the conference was its final resolution: the appointment of a committee to begin planning the celebration of Fidel’s 90th birthday — a decade from now! In the meantime, maybe these great thinkers can pass the time watching re-runs of Chairman Mao swimming 43 miles a day up the Yangtze River.
From where I sit, that motion to prepare for Fidel’s 90th unmasks the true totalitarian mindset. Not because there is anything sinister or repressive about such an idiotic resolution. Instead, it brashly reveals just how low Cuba’s political/cultural managers want to force down the bar of public discourse. Clamp down is more like it. This great gathering of intellectuals responds to Castro’s imminent demise with a suggestion of complete and total denial and silence. Debate? What debate?
Fidel’s kid brother, Raul, barely a spry 75 year old and effectively exercising power, meanwhile, has repeated a Cuban offer to “to resolve at the negotiating table the prolonged dispute between the United States and Cuba, if and when they accept our country’s condition that it will not tolerate any shadows over its independence.”
I’m all for that, of course. The Bush administration, however, seems too distracted by the debacle in Iraq to be seriously planning any post-Castro invasions of Cuba. The primary concern of the U.S. won’t be so much who is in power in Havana but rather how to stop millions of Cubans from trying to get here. The demand to come to the great Yuma, as Cubans calls the U.S., will actually increase when Castro punches out. What a nice little irony for which the entirety of the American political class will be unprepared.
Nice that Raul makes his offer of negotiation with the Americans — though he knows it will be turned down. More impressive would have been an offer by Raul to negotiate the coming internal domestic transition with his own people precisely to avoid conflict and to avoid offering the pretext for foreign intervention. But then again, his people are those uniformed AK-wielding troops that marched through Havana on Saturday. And likely, he’ll soon be needing them.
December 3rd, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Pinochet should be unceremoniously buried in a plain, pine box with a 24/7 armed guard posted on the grave site. Just to make sure he can’t get out.
How about slitting his stomach and throwing him out of a helicopter into the Pacific near Chiloe, letting him ride down the Mapocho, burying him in an abandoned mine in Loquen or putting him and his Mrs. in a grave together in the Santiago main cemetery?
December 3rd, 2006 at 10:28 pm
Leaving aside value judgments on the various governments, the revival of South and Central American socialism has to be at least as disturbing to the conservative project as November’s election in the United States. Back in the Reagan days, if I’m not misremembering this, there were a number of experiments with Chicago School economics in Latin America that were far purer than anything seen in the United States. The belief on the right was that these experiments would make the population so fat, happy and middle class that they’d never dream of a welfare state again. Part of the conservative belief system is that if you pared down government programs to a minimum there would at some point be a quantum leap of national wealth produced by the private sector. If this quantum leap ever took place it apparently didn’t get to a large segment of the various populations. The problem with conservative systems is that at some point they expect the losers in the system to be good sports about losing, and they don’t cooperate.
Those looking for insight into what’s happening in Cuba could do worse than to read or re-read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Autumn of the Patriarch.” One point in particular it makes is that the effect this kind of endless personal dictatorship is to infantalize the political culture of the country, though of course Gabo never expected this point to be directed at his friend Fidel.
December 4th, 2006 at 12:02 am
I think it is time to start talking more about the internal dynamics of nations with authoritarian leaders, past and present. We talk a lot about the leaders themselves, their faults and personalities, but not about the complicity of large proportions of the population that is key to putting them in power and keeping them there. To look at examples from the past first, we can easily see that Hitler and Mussolini had huge popular bases of support. Stalin’s base was not as huge, but Communism in the Soviet Union could not have continued as long as it did without considerable complicity or acquiescence. Now fast forward, and we can make similar statements about Saddam’s rule in Iraq, Castro’s in Cuba, and George Bush’s in America. While I will leave it to Marc and others to say what Pinochet’s popular support was, he too could not have stayed in power without the support of a considerable section of the middle and upper classes who were happy to throw out the country’s democratic traditions if they did not like the results.
So again, we perhaps focus too much on the leaders and not enough on the social and political context for their rule.
December 4th, 2006 at 12:04 am
I meant to say also that Vaclav Havel wrote about this complicity very effectively, how it worked on a day to day level and the kinds of compromises people made with their consciences. Worth checking out if you have not already.
December 4th, 2006 at 12:34 am
Michael.. an excellent point. At times Pinochet had significant and most likely majority support. When he lost the 1988 plebiscite which would have kept in power another 8 years, he still got something like 44% of the vote. Frightening.
His secret service founded a hard right-wing political party –UDI– that went on to have great success into the civilian period of government. To this day it has a base among some of the poorer parts of the population which it successfully recruited through a series of patronage programs and a tough line on criminal activity.
Perhaps our commenter Timotheus who knows these folks quite well can weigh in with more details.
But suffice it to say that individual and certainly collective consciousness is a very weird animal that easily eludes logical explanations. People respond to political appeals on all sorts of strange levels.
Bottom line is that humans are born neither into original sin nor in a state of moral corruption. But, damn, it’s easy to corrupt them once they plop into the real world.
December 4th, 2006 at 1:36 am
“People respond to political appeals on all sorts of strange levels.”
The appeal of rightist leaders is often based on deep feelings, typicallly subconscious, feelings of physical insecurity.
There is a fetishization of military power, a martial obsession. It is the same impulse that draws people to see the hyperviolent crap the American film industry specializes in.
December 4th, 2006 at 4:32 am
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December 4th, 2006 at 5:03 am
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December 4th, 2006 at 5:05 am
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December 4th, 2006 at 5:48 am
Fidel’s health problem isn’t a state secret kept from the Cuban people, it is a secret kept from the United States, which on more than one occassion has tried to do him in. As you know.
December 4th, 2006 at 5:54 am
I knew it would just be a matter of moments before someone would parrot the Cuban leadership’s explanation for why Castro’s health is a state secret–and within Cuba as well as without. In fact, the threat from the United States has been the excuse for all of the undemocratic measures Castro has undertaken since the revolution. We can thank the American government for consistently providing cover for Cuban totalitarianism all these years, but that doesn’t change what it is.
December 4th, 2006 at 6:25 am
“But suffice it to say that individual and certainly collective consciousness is a very weird animal that easily eludes logical explanations. People respond to political appeals on all sorts of strange levels.”
I don’t think it’s all that mysterious.
It’s virtually an axiom of political science that all stable governments hold sway by virtue of a not-so-fluid quality called legitimacy. Whence this quality? I think it was Lenin who said “quantity has a quality all its own”. Basically, legitimacy is something like the median of benefits minus drawbacks, aggregated over the entire population. It’s not necessarily some weird illogic of the subjects, but simple self-interest of a large enough section of them. Some people lose their lives, their health, their sanity, or are deprived of all three through the depredations of the regime. Most, however, will grumble that some such tragedy befell a cousin of theirs, but won’t risk going up against the regime when it provides so many benefits and hurts only relatively few (many of them self-selected).
Saddam killed, tortured, intimidated, and made himself the object of a personality cult. But he also delivered the goods — functioning systems of medical care, education, public utilities like electricity and piped-in drinking water, the whole cornucopia of consumer goods (right down to liquor stores, operated mostly by the Christian minority but patronized by a large segment of society.) Even those presidential palaces we decry as exorbitantly wasteful were a pretty good use of oil revenue during the sanctions period — their construction created paying jobs that might not otherwise have existed. They weren’t just just expressions of metastasized ego, they were also an investment in social stability.
People in a dictatorship are loathe to rock the boat. But guess what? So are the dictators themselves. Sometimes you get your Idi Amins, your Adolf Hitlers, nutcases who gain power only to self-destruct in record time. But most authoritarian rulers have a better sense of which side their bread is buttered on. They know that if you satisfy most people, most of the time, you can usually get away with highway robbery, not to mention murder, the rest of the time. Whatever forces might converge to destabilize their rule will often destabilize the whole society to some degree, inevitably leaving some a little nostalgic for the days when they knew which way was up.
December 4th, 2006 at 7:32 am
Breaking news, Bolton will resign at end of Congressional term. Bush can’t entirely avoid the reality of the midterm elections.
December 4th, 2006 at 8:04 am
For those with cell phones, beware!
http://phonetrace.org/
December 4th, 2006 at 8:58 am
“We talk a lot about the leaders themselves, their faults and personalities, but not about the complicity of large proportions of the population that is key to putting them in power and keeping them there….the middle and upper classes who were happy to throw out the country’s democratic traditions if they did not like the results.”–Michael Balter
What are these “democratic traditions” that existed in Iraq, Cuba, Russia, Germany, Italy, etc. prior to their respective 20th century coups? Is it unfortunate that Batista didn’t continue to provide Cuba as a safe haven for the heroin trade and the mafia; that old lover of democracy?
Democratic institutions in these countries never really existed to begin with. To blame the populations is a little bit simple-minded; it furthermore reveals an ignorance of the kind of fear that exists among the populations of these areas of the world both then and now.
December 4th, 2006 at 9:32 am
All someone has to do is look at my original post to see that David has dishonestly distorted my words with ellipses. I was referring only to the democratic traditions in Chile. David, next time you engage in such slimy behavior, at least cover your tracks better.
December 4th, 2006 at 11:14 am
It isn’t hard to understand why neither side (Bush’s US or Castro’s Cuba) really wants to resolve issues since the other is such a convienent boogyman. And as for the transition I’m sure Elliot Abrams has convinced Shrub – with a little help from Jeb and his Miami Cuban electoral base – that somewhere in “Little Havana” there is a “senior Chalibi” just waiting to be greeted with flowers and sweets!
Seriously, I think what will happen in Cuba after Fidel will please neither those who found him the Anti-Christ or considered him the preeminent statesman of Latin America. But I’m sure of one thing: if I were in Miami I wouldn’t be packing my bags just yet.
December 4th, 2006 at 11:24 am
Interesting to see how little controversy Marc Cooper’s 99th attack on Chavez and Castro have generated. I think that tedium has set in. Just like Harry’s Place’s latest attack on Islamofascism, this sort of thing grows tiresome like a Dennis Miller routine on Fox TV. Yawn.
December 4th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
Sorry I missed the Hugo debates. My brief take on that.. For one, I think Hugo’s press law ought to be taken in context. The still vicious media criticizing Hugo and in the pocket of the conservative elite who had mismanaged the country for so many decades used their media as part of the attempt to overthrow Chavez in a coup a few years back. Now, if ABC and CBS and others took an active role in supporting a coup attempt on a US president we might see a similar stiff response. Whats amazing, however, is that the coup instigators have suffered very little legal punishment. And the media continues to viciously criticize Hugo, law or no law on insults.
The man is by no means the ideal, great leader we would love to see out front of the South American shift to the left, but he is also not the bumbling fool Marc makes him out as. It takes time to transform a country with decades and decades of corrupt, mismanagement. Social welfare programs are not populist, but welcome and needed relief for helping the poor get out of their predicament. Yes, there needs to be a diversification of the Ven economy, and yes there is rampant crime and other problems. Same sad story throughout most of the Latin region. But the man has become America’s big enemy in the region because they made him that way. The man has done much to make his country a better one. And as for authoritarian dictator charges, 60 percent of Venezuelans gave him their blessing yesterday. He is elected. Time for the opposition to join the democracy — their dirty tactics are hurting themselves more than helping to overthrow a president who, as the latest press points out, is not even a threat to the rich elite in his own country.
December 4th, 2006 at 12:15 pm
Venezuela’s Media Coup, Naomi Klein, The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030303/klein
Poor Endy Chávez, outfielder for the Navegantes del Magallanes, one of Venezuela’s big baseball teams. Every time he comes up to bat, the local TV sportscasters start in with the jokes. “Here comes Chávez. No, not the pro-Cuban dictator Chávez, the other Chávez.” Or “This Chávez hits baseballs, not the Venezuelan people.”
In Venezuela, even color commentators are enlisted in the commercial media’s open bid to oust the democratically elected government of Hugo Chávez. Andrés Izarra, a Venezuelan television journalist, says that the campaign has done so much violence to truthful information on the national airwaves that the four private TV stations have effectively forfeited their right to broadcast. “I think their licenses should be revoked,” he says.
It’s the sort of extreme pronouncement one has come to expect from Chávez, known for nicknaming the stations “the four horsemen of the apocalypse.” Izarra, however, is harder to dismiss. A squeaky clean made-for-TV type, he worked as assignment editor in charge of Latin America at CNN en Español until he was hired as news production manager for Venezuela’s highest-rated newscast, El Observador on RCTV.
On April 13, 2002, the day after business leader Pedro Carmona briefly seized power, Izarra quit that job under what he describes as “extreme emotional stress.” Ever since, he has been sounding the alarm about the threat posed to democracy when the media decide to abandon journalism and pour all their persuasive powers into winning a war being waged over oil.
Venezuela’s private television stations are owned by wealthy families with serious financial stakes in defeating Chávez. Venevisión, the most-watched network, is owned by Gustavo Cisneros, a mogul dubbed “the joint venture king” by the New York Post. The Cisneros Group has partnered with many top US brands–from AOL and Coca-Cola to Pizza Hut and Playboy–becoming a gatekeeper to the Latin American market.
Cisneros is also a tireless proselytizer for continental free trade, telling the world, as he did in a 1999 profile in LatinCEO magazine, that “Latin America is now fully committed to free trade, and fully committed to globalization…. As a continent it has made a choice.” But with Latin American voters choosing politicians like Chávez, that has been looking like false advertising, selling a consensus that doesn’t exist.
All this helps explain why, in the days leading up to the April coup, Venevisión, RCTV, Globovisión and Televen replaced regular programming with relentless anti-Chávez speeches, interrupted only for commercials calling on viewers to take to the streets: “Not one step backward. Out! Leave now!” The ads were sponsored by the oil industry, but the stations carried them free, as “public service announcements.”
They went further: On the night of the coup, Cisneros’s station played host to meetings among the plotters, including Carmona. The president of Venezuela’s broadcasting chamber co-signed the decree dissolving the elected National Assembly. And while the stations openly rejoiced at news of Chávez’s “resignation,” when pro-Chávez forces mobilized for his return a total news blackout was imposed.
Izarra says he received clear instructions: “No information on Chávez, his followers, his ministers, and all others that could in any way be related to him.” He watched with horror as his bosses actively suppressed breaking news. Izarra says that on the day of the coup, RCTV had a report from a US affiliate that Chávez had not resigned but had been kidnapped and jailed. It didn’t make the news. Mexico, Argentina and France condemned the coup and refused to recognize the new government. RCTV knew but didn’t tell.
When Chávez finally returned to the Miraflores Palace, the stations gave up on covering the news entirely. On one of the most important days in Venezuela’s history, they aired Pretty Woman and Tom & Jerry cartoons. “We had a reporter in Miraflores and knew that it had been retaken by the Chávistas,” Izarra says. “[but] the information blackout stood. That’s when it was enough for me, and I decided to leave.”
The situation hasn’t improved. During the recently ended strike organized by the oil industry, the television stations broadcast an average of 700 pro-strike advertisements every day, according to government estimates. It’s in this context that Chávez has decided to go after the TV stations in earnest, not just with fiery rhetoric but with an investigation into violations of broadcast standards and a new set of regulations. “Don’t be surprised if we start shutting down television stations,” he said at the end of January.
The threat has sparked a flurry of condemnations from the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders. And there is reason for concern: The media war in Venezuela is bloody, with attacks on both pro- and anti-Chávez media outlets. But attempts to regulate the media aren’t an “attack on press freedom,” as CPJ has claimed–quite the opposite.
Venezuela’s media, including state TV, need tough controls to insure diversity, balance and access, enforced at arm’s length from political powers. Some of Chávez’s proposals (such as an ominous clause banning speech that shows “disrespect” to government officials) overstep these bounds and could easily be used to muzzle critics. That said, it is absurd to treat Chávez as the principal threat to a free press in Venezuela. That honor clearly goes to the media owners themselves. This fact has been entirely lost on the organizations entrusted to defend press freedom around the world, still stuck in a paradigm in which all journalists just want to tell the truth and all threats come from nasty politicians and angry mobs.
This is unfortunate, because we are in desperate need of courageous defenders of a free press at the moment–and not just in Venezuela. After all, Venezuela isn’t the only country where a war is being waged over oil, where media owners have become inseparable from the forces clamoring for “regime change” and where the opposition finds itself routinely erased by the nightly news. But in the United States, unlike in Venezuela, the media and the government are on the same side.
December 4th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Well I guess Naomi Klein is another arm-chair leftist apologist for Peronism. Now why can’t Hugo be a good little boy and just those nice people from the flat world steamroller him and his people who are obviously too stupid to know what’s good for them?
December 4th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
What did Kissinger say…”we can’t allow a country to go socialist because of its own people’s irresponsibility” or some such (in regards to Chile.)
I think if the media were half as vicious to Bush as the Ven. media is towards Chavez (racism, threats etc.) then if we didn’t see Bush shutting down the media far more swiftly than Chavez. What country anywhere allows threats to their leadership over the public airwaves?
December 4th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Here is Balter’s full statement that I quoted from. The emphasis in caps is my own.
“I think it is time to start talking more about the internal dynamics of nations with authoritarian leaders, past and present. We talk a lot about the leaders themselves, their faults and personalities, BUT NOT ABOUT THE COMPLICITY OF LARGE PROPORTIONS OF THE POPULATION THAT IS KEY TO PUTTING THEM IN POWER AND KEEPING THEM THERE. To look at examples from the past first, we can easily see that Hitler and Mussolini had huge popular bases of support. Stalin’s base was not as huge, but Communism in the Soviet Union could not have continued as long as it did without considerable complicity or acquiescence. Now fast forward, and we can make similar statements about Saddam’s rule in Iraq, Castro’s in Cuba,…”
I stand behind what I said. You yourself lumped Venezuela into the same category as the other aforementioned countries.
You talk of “slimy behavior” on my part. I think that blaming the Russian population when hundreds of millions of them died by his hand during his violent years of suppressing his opposition fits quite adequately the definition of “slimy behavior.”
I could go on with your insulting and ignorant ranting, but I tire of your banality.
December 4th, 2006 at 5:54 pm
that should be, those Russians who died by Stalin’s hand during these violent year of suppressing his opposition….
December 4th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
Me encanta cuando escribes de mi paÃs natal de Chile, Marc.
Especially when you used ” el viejo huevón” !
I hope presidenta Bachelet follows through and doesn’t give the asshole a state funeral.
Justicia.
December 4th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
Sergio,
The crusty old bastard is too mean to die, apparently. He’s getting better.
December 4th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
USblues:
Thanks for posting the Klein article. I think Chavez is closer to the bumbling fool that Cooper sees than the great leader that we’d love to see. The important point that everyone seems to be missing is that he is the leader that the Venezuelan people have chosen twice (and supported during a coup). Period.
Am I alone in suspecting that alot of the above psuedo-Freudian analyses of why (at least Cuban, Iraqi and Venezuelan) people embrace authoritarian rulers has a kernal of racism to it?
That might explain thier inability to rationally factor into the equation the threat posed to the countries in question by the US…
December 4th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
You know, Cummings and Lo Cicero, I’m gonna say: shame on you. Shame for not having the courage to criticize your friends and allies when they clearly do wrong. If you don’t do it then guess who will.
The cavalier temporizing of demagogy and anti-democratic behavior has no justification, ever. Period. Full stop.
If you cared half as much for the advances or benefits generated by Chavez’ government, you would be more willing to criticize that which is unattractive and, more importantly, that which will eventually kill off his “revolution.”
if you dont understand that the eventual usurpation of democracy is fatal to any social project, no matter how “revolutionary,” then apparently you have learned nothing from the great failed social experiments of the past century.
So, I will shut up. I cast 100% support for Hugo Chavez! Hugo Chavez, right or wrong! Long Live Hugo Chavez!
December 5th, 2006 at 12:32 am
Amazing! David claims to quote from my “full statement” and then truncates it in such a way as to once again dishonestly misrepresent what I said about traditions of democracy. Then he confuses Venezuela and Chile. I don’t mind him disagreeing with my statements about complicity, but it takes a slimeball to distort someone’s statements and then lie about it twice.
On the substance of the argument:
“I think that blaming the Russian population when hundreds of millions of them died by his hand during his violent years of suppressing his opposition fits quite adequately the definition of “slimy behavior.†”
I am not aware of any evidence that Stalin personally killed anyone by his own hand. He had others do it for him, many many others. They were complicit, were they not? And so were those who convinced themselves that these acts were justified. Same for Nazi Germany, same for Pinchochet’s Chile, same for Saddam’s Iraq.
December 5th, 2006 at 12:35 am
Speaking of democracy, there is a coup brewing in Fiji at the moment. Michael Turner, will you be explaining to us why this is a good and necessary thing as you did in the case of Thailand?
December 5th, 2006 at 12:41 am
And while I am here, because I like to post in threes in the true postmodern fashion: Stalin was responsible for the deaths of a large number of people, together with those who did his dirty work, but the number of people directly killed was no where near the hundreds of millions that David and others who have no familiarity with Soviet history quote. A larger number died of famine due to collectivization efforts, of course, but engaging in wild exaggeration about the number of people directly executed and murdered does not do justice to Stalin’s victims nor to the historical record.
December 5th, 2006 at 4:25 am
“Speaking of democracy, there is a coup brewing in Fiji at the moment. Michael Turner, will you be explaining to us why this is a good and necessary thing as you did in the case of Thailand?”
Go back and look at my actual comments, Balter. I didn’t say that the Thai coup was a good thing. I said I didn’t know whether it was a bad thing (i.e., whether it might not represent a better expression of popular will than the continuation in power of a very corrupt president who was superficially “democratic” in large part by buying votes, legislators, judges …..) I still don’t know. And I don’t think you do either.
Where the preconditions of successful democracy are met, we can talk sensibly about how undermining those preconditions is wrong. Where they are not met, well … if you think the ballot box is the solution to everything, the universal political solvent, how did Iraq end up such a mess with that incredible voter turnout everybody here drooled over not so long ago? It wasn’t hard to see through it, I thought: voters were voting in their individual/communal interests, not in the Iraqi national interest. Which can still work out OK if there are the right balancing institutions in place, as there are in a mature democracy. What makes you so sure Thailand has those institutions?
December 5th, 2006 at 6:38 am
“I am not aware of any evidence that Stalin personally killed anyone by his own hand. He had others do it for him, many many others. They were complicit, were they not?”
Splitting hairs, aren’t we? Imagine the legal precedent in cases of contract killing in U.S. courts – “I didn’t personally kill them by my own hand.”
And yes, I accidently typed Venezuela instead of Chile. My mistake. Your underlying argument is still wrong, Michael.
And by the way, I didn’t quote your entire comments because of space.
December 5th, 2006 at 7:01 am
“Splitting hairs, aren’t we?”
What I am striving for is a sophisticated understanding of how dictators and authoritarian leaders in general exert their powers, and I am suggesting that there is always a certain level of complicity among the population that makes this possible. In fact, this is not a very original idea, and certainly one that serious historians of Stalinism, Nazism and all the other isms have examined. For a recent, albeit controversial example, read “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.”
What David provides is a lot of rhetoric but little sign that he wants to understand the crimes he rightly condemns and how they are allowed to happen. In other words, he is not really serious.
December 5th, 2006 at 9:08 am
At Balter’s goading, I looked into the Fiji coup situation — not expecting a black and white situation, and not finding one either. On the evidence, however, the leader of this coup may be a controversial figure, but perhaps more of a democrat (in the better sense) than the PM he ousted. (And it’s not all about the PM; Fiji’s President dissolved parliament expressly to make way for the coup, it seems.)
Fiji has a large minority (over 40%) of Indo-Fijians, who were virtual slave labor under the British, and who still don’t enjoy full citizenship rights in Fiji compared to ethnic Fijians. Fiji’s current coup leader led a counter-coup in 2000 in part to re-establish representation for Indo-Fijians, after the coup of 2000 kicked out the first Indo-Fijian PM.
The proximate provocation for the current coup was two pieces of legislation, one of which would have extended amnesty to those involved in the coup of 2000 (which involved kidnapping legislators and holding them hostage), and the other about division of rights to waterfront property that appears to unfairly favor ethnic Fijians and possibly damage the tourist industry, hurting *all* Fijians.
I challenge Michael Balter to investigate this current coup (Fiji’s fourth in two decades) and ask himself: doesn’t the leader of the current coup look a little more like a champion of equality, and an opponent of a split-level, racist system that relegates the descendants of imported forced labor to second-class citizenship? The means by which he is taking power might not be very democratic — but then again, if South Africa had had a white *majority*, would you say that the ANC was “not democratic” because it was in the minority, and used force to gain power? Certainly, there’s more to the finer sense of the word “democracy” than mere majority rule. Otherwise, the Rwanda genocide would have been merely democracy in action.
I am, of course, oversimplifying. However, I don’t expect that conveying the full complexity of the situation would be anything but a waste of time if all I was trying to do is convince Michael Balter. After all, here he is boldly theorizing what political scientists have known all along:
“What I am striving for is a sophisticated understanding of how dictators and authoritarian leaders in general exert their powers, and I am suggesting that there is always a certain level of complicity among the population that makes this possible.”
Well, duh. Especially if you consider the average totalitarian subject’s defense (“I was just keeping my head down while trying to get along in life”) as being tantamount to “complicity.” I wouldn’t call it “complicity”. It’s more like a combination of fatalism and common sense. And is that such a sin? After all, there isn’t much Mario Savio in the soul of the average person anywhere.
December 5th, 2006 at 10:09 am
Really, all I am going to say is that so far Turner is two for two in defending the Thailand and Fiji coups. I will leave it to others to debate the issue as I have made my viewpoint clear, which is that I do not condone military coups against elected governments under any circumstances. To do so means that we simply pick and choose the coups we like, and there are no principles.
December 5th, 2006 at 11:08 am
I really don’t understand what Marc is asking – I DO criticize my allies when they make mistakes. In actual left circles,
December 5th, 2006 at 11:10 am
(cont.) I’ve been lectured for questioning certain things about Chavez. So to say “Shame on You” can easily be turned around. What “allies” (such as coup plotters and US government agencies) of yours do you criticize? The same torturers of Padilla are helping your pals in Venezuela….is that sensible?
December 5th, 2006 at 11:55 am
Democracy, shamocracy, when the US makes its so-called democracy work then we fervent American democrats can rightly preach to others.
As Rafael Correa said in an interview after winning the Ecuadorian presidential election last week, the Washington Consensus was a Washington Consensus and not a Western Hemisphere Consensus — its flawed neoliberal policy was imposed upon the region by Washington and it failed miserably. Now, as the region tries to develop alternative models of development, Washington and its neoliberal fans cynically resort to dividing the Latin left (the oversimplistic crap “good left, bad left” shitted about by Jorge Castanenda, for ex.) and calling them populist when they dare to deviate from the so-called “Consensus.” In the case of Hugo, the “democrats” of Washington help foster a military coup d’etat attempt to protect oil and free markets at the expense of people and then are suprised when Chavez does not embrace them with love and affection? Not to stick up for Hugo’s excesses, he has overstepped in some areas, as have many heads of state in our own country, but the sum of his flaws does not nearly equate the overblown rhetoric said against him. I am surprised, Marc, that you have bought it all — there are two sides, the unfortunate, negative side of Chavez is in large part the result of dirty, sordid manipulation and tactics by the same people who sought to oust him in a coup. Where are your articulate barbs when it comes to these hypocrites?
The new political conflict in the region is not right versus left, the right has already sunk in most of Latin America. The new conflict is over those who want people-centered development versus those who want free market-centered development. The word populism is being bantied about by right wing ideologues like Jorge Castaneda and Alvaro Vargas Llosa to attack those who want fair trade not free trade, those who value social justice over merciless free market ideology which places inflation rates above joblessness and long-term sustainable development.
December 6th, 2006 at 5:29 am
Isn’t your argument, though, Michael, applicable to supposedly free democracies such as the U.S.? What is even the point of blogging in our easy chairs at home and nagging about Bush, Iraq, ______in lieu of activism? Shouldn’t we point the finger at ourselves for what is going on in Iraq?
There is a difference here in the US 2006 in contrast to the examples you cited: Free speech and the right to organize are a lot easier to do here in the states. If you lived in Germany circa 1933, or Iraq 1968-present, or Cuba in the 1950′s; it was hard enough just to put food on the table. It is a tribute to the dire economic and socio-political conditions of those societies that made “throwing out the bums” so difficult. Anyone living under Communist rule in the old Soviet Union can tell you that resistance was futile.
In Iraq, it is a fact that the overwhelming majority of the people there do not hate Americans per se, and they certainly did not like living under Hussein’s rule. However, when you don’t own the guns, and have no butter besides, changing the political structure is quite difficult. I think that you overestimate things. Just my opinion.
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