Enigma: The New York Times Advises Shutting Up Venezuela’s Chávez!?

Sometimes the New York Times blunders near the political center and commits a few unforgivable political strategic errors which grabs the attention of   those observers who  prefer the use of reason rather than simply  nod  with a leftist reflex at the Times’ Op eds. Roger Cohen reports from Caracas[1], Venezuela with some slightly negative views on Spanish-speaking tyrants.

To wit:

“President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela hates fascists; they are central to his repertoire of insults. But he has not hesitated to deploy the imagery of death to bolster his leftist brand of petro-authoritarianism, now operating under the ludicrous banner of “Fatherland, Socialism or Death!”

Misdirection.

Here we detect a synthetic linkage between fascism and hate and death with a few slogans to amplify the report. Perhaps the author thinks that millions of Kulaks were not dispatched with hate slogans. How about Mao and Pol Pot? Read a few Soviet posters from the 1919-1924 era to see some hate against the opponents of Marxism.

The conclusion appears early in his report:

“…Latin America’s oil-gilded caudillo is getting serious about ruling for life, just like Franco and Castro.”

Then, as an afterthought he says:

“I might add Vladimir Putin to that list.”…”… Chávez has … oil revenue… and the galvanizing appeal of vitriolic anti-Americanism to concoct a 21st-century, gulag-free authoritarianism. But even Putin has not contemplated going as far as Chávez now intends to take his “Bolivarian revolution.”

Here Cohen mixes political similes by lumping Marxist dictators (and their associates like Che Guevara, but Simon Bolivar was never in Bolivia, and Che tried to start a revolution in Bolivia, his home. This is almost a simultaneous play on words and sounds.) and assorted tyrannical wannabees with monolithic anti fascists into a tangled mixture that seems to offer some ethical political demarcation line separated only by gulags.

Then:

“Foreign investment has plunged, scared off by nationalizations.”

And

“But Chávez’s grab for socialist-emperor status is grotesque and dangerous — as Fascism was — a terrible example for a region that has been consolidating democracy.”

How about substituting –As Communism was—above?

Cohen omits a frank and stark criticism of the grotesque socialist-emperor status of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim, Castro, Ho, Pot and others. He fails to show the near seamlessness between socialism with respect to Nazism and Italian forms of the Fascisti and then Franco’s unique fascist version of government in Spain. The author cannot spell out the fact that fascism was created in direct response to Bolshevism, the cancer of the 20s that sought to infect Italy, Germany in 1919 and later in Spain and other countries.. Much of the disgust and hate against fascists, called the ‘far right’ now is because those groups destroyed the Soviet Dream in many places and ‘liquidated’ Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg in Munich. These people of both the socialist, Marxist and fascist groups were all socialists of varying degree with the usual warts and defects and differing only on the salient mutual cooperation attribute with other socialists—not as they should be: properly allied against capitalism. We have to thank George Bernard Shaw who praised Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and others for their common and tautological stance  against capitalism for clarifying this point. The New York Times scurries around this fact and appears to cherry pick attributes of various leftist despots as they did with Trotsky and Stalin in the 20s. They persist in refusing to believe that Nazis, Fascisti, socialists and Communists are all brothers in the quest for private property and wealth for leftist elitists to squander and  that they  differ only in methodology not ideology. They all hate capitalists.

We soon forget that Hitler and Stalin had secret agreements to carve up much of Eastern Europe [Poland and the Balkans] to their mutual benefit. Stalin said, in effect, that he could trust the Nazis over the British. [2]

Hugo Chávez is a very ordinary Latin American Marxist who uses old, stale hammer and cycle methods of grabbing industrial wealth and resources and spending them on some Marxist dream. His potential use of firing squads is restrained only by the media. His idols are Fidel Castro, Che and other Marxists and probably the inflation monger Daniel Ortega. Cohen stops very short of summarily denouncing Communism and its manifold failures as he should. We all recall the tears Jimmy Carter shed when Ortega lost the first election in Nicaragua.

Castro’s brutal communism is usually contrasted to the lesser antics of his predecessor of 50 years ago and hailed as an ‘advance’ in social experimentation while his firing squads and brutal suppression of criticism gets little notice by the New York Times, who has frequently described Castro in glowing terms and heaped praise upon his phony health care system.[3] Cohen does mention the Mexican PRI revolution and nationalization of British Petroleum and other assets in the 20s and the refusal to let foreigners own property in Mexico (as Castro does now in Cuba) as the basis for Mexico’s disastrous economic status for seven decades. Castro moans that his country is poor due to the US embargo although the Russians, French, Irish and Canadians were always free to trade and invest in Cuba-provided there was no private ownership and no profits.  To say that Cuba is ‘gulag free’ is a joke given the many thousands who were murdered or driven away by Che and his thugs. To think that Hugo Chávez has not set up gulags and firing squads may be fair for the moment, but we must see how the elections fare before we give Chávez some kind of label different from Cheap Marxist Thug. We can all recall the leftist support for the Khmer Rouge until they became too macabre and disgusting to praise in public.

We are constantly reminded that Marxism has much to offer and that the past leaders ‘just didn’t get it right yet’ and that ‘Marxism has not yet been given a fair chance to demonstrate its splendor’ and other fluffery by the New York Times and other far-left apologists. 

Cohen ends with the summary of “what Hugo Chávez wants:”

“Venezuelans will vote Sunday in a referendum that would remove all limits on presidential re-election, grant Chávez direct control over foreign currency reserves, allow him to censor the media under a state of emergency declarable at his discretion, expand his powers to expropriate private property and create the second formally socialist nation in the Americas alongside Fidel’s.”

Hitler, we must remember, got most of that from the German Enabling Act of 1932/3, from a fair vote from the German people. Can Venezuela offer a fair vote?

We must recall that the USSR had votes too. We should recall that it was Lenin who  MAY HAVE SAID said something like this; ”It doesn’t matter who votes—it only matters who counts the votes.”     This is not fully documented but it fits the Marxist-Leninist theme. This was called Democracy in Chicago in the Daley era and in Orange County, CA when Sanchez won with unchallenged absentee ballots reputed to be sent in by illegal aliens. The definition of ‘fair’ and ‘voter’s rights’ seems to wander when viewed by the New York Times and left-liberals.

The New York Times treads softly here so as not to intimidate Latin Marxists too much. This article is as much an Anti-Fascism Education Piece as a report from some dump that is undergoing the usual Marxist revolution with song and dance. There is too much respect for Stalin and Mao to strongly attack Ortega or Castro or Chávez  directly and condemn their far-left socialism as failed communism at its worst. There is even less desire to delineate the differences between socialism, Nazism and Fascism as the apparent separation that took a century to structure with ‘education’ to establish might  defeat many leftist causes. We can not, as yet, get the New York Times to Hitlerize or Stalinize Hugo Chávez as it should.

rycK

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