It's easy to like Hugo Chavez (the Noam Chomsky
quoting, calling G. Dub the devil, Presidente of Venezuela) - from a
distance.
It's much more difficult to like him up close, where
he lives, where he is creating his reality of neighborhood snitches,
political goon squads, shrill Marxist-Lenist dogma, the Chavez cult
of personality, impending totalitarianism.
Venezuela has a brutal legacy of colonialism, slavery, capitalism,
capitalism on steroids. There is much about Chavez that is about
chickens coming to roost, about the United States and the corporate
culture of greed making its bed, and now having to lay in it.
But the last message of Marxist/Leninist/Castroism, Chavez's message
is to go with the historic resentment. The message is to hate, be
angry, be resentful, see the world in terms of class, class enemies.
The message is to go to the murderous place where resentment and
anger will always go.
Chavez in working the historic resentment will take Venezuela to even
more greedy, more brutal places.
Nations and peoples deserve the governments they get. A majority of
Venezuelans know that Chavez is a fucking lunatic. They vote for him
anyways, just as the Germans knew that Hitler was a
fucking lunatic and voted for him anyways, just as the people of the United States voted for Gee Dub in 2004 when they knew he was a fucking lunatic surrounded by fucking lunatics.
Soon Casto will die. Chavez will take up the bloody
sceptre of the failed, murderous orthodox dogma of
Marxist/Lenist/Castroism. He will go where all his predecessors went.
He will go to the bloodbaths that stained the 20th Century and will
surely stain the 21st.
And there will come a day when leftists will regret their support of
Chavez just as the leftists of the 1930's regreted their support of
Stalin.