Friday, May 04, 2007

Some autocrats never learn

Filthy LucreHoly Shit!Just So You Know

It seems that Hugo Chávez could take a lesson on the definition of insanity from Ben Franklin.  In his defense, it’s not that Chávez is repeatedly trying something that’s previously failed for him, just something that’s failed every other time a state actor has attempted to put it into place. Perhaps it’s just insanity by proxy, then.

Of course, I’m talking about his aggressive advancement of the long-vaunted ”Bolivarian Revolution“.  From the Mother Jones article linked left:

To his increasingly frustrated political opponents in Venezuela, Chavez, a former army colonel, is a leftist demagogue who stirred up a wave of class and racial resentments and rode it to the presidency, and who, in office, has dealt himself new powers at every chance, on his way to becoming an out-and-out caudillo. And to a certain school of international opinion, exemplified by The Economist magazine, Chavez is an wacky utopian who sooner or later will run the Venezuelan economy into the ground.

That introductory paragraph leads into an October 2005 interview with Richard Gott, a former correspondent for the London Guardian who seems knowledgeable and sympathetic to the fiery populism that sometimes seems the prime illuminating factor for Latin American progressive governments. The interview was done in support of his then-updated book, “Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution”:

...the first account in English to place Chavez in historical and intellectual perspective. In Gott’s sympathetic account, Chavez is a magnetic personality of the Clintonian type, “a genuinely original figure in Latin America,” a radical left-wing nationalist, to be sure, but a pragmatic improviser, and certainly no dogmatic socialist.

Among his statements during the interview, you’d find:

Okay, it’s true that Chavez, for the first time this year, has used the word “socialism"—he talks about a “21st Century Socialism"—but he’s given absolutely no indication that he wants to emulate Soviet socialism, Cuban socialism, or indeed the sort of state capitalism that existed in Europe for much of the late 20th century.
{...}
I think he [Chávez] still recognizes the significance of the ideas of Bolivar. He’s more interested in culture than in economics. All leftist revolutions in the past have been based on an economic restructuring of society.

Whoops.  Looks like Mr. Gott spoke too soon.  Because the wacky utopian, contrary to Gott’s expectations, seems to have moved even farther left, embracing something that looks a lot like Soviet/Cuban socialism, and has recently chosen to dispense with even the veneer of normal government.


Posted by Patton on 05/04/07 at 01:31 AM
Filthy Lucre • Holy Shit! • Just So You Know • Permalink