While the Western media may be squarely focused
on the crisis in Ukraine, especially now that there’s a
recognizable “villain” in Russia, protests in Venezuela continue
even as the government holds on to power. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez
spent 14 years as president, building his idea of a “Bolivarian”
socialist revolution. During that time, he became something of a
darling to some Western leftists. Then he died and was replaced
by Nicolas Maduro, his successor, who
barely won the presidential election last year despite
mobilizing even the defense ministry for his campaign. Venezuela is
one of the most oil-rich countries in the world, but you might not
be able to tell by its economic condition, especially since Maduro
took power. The country has experienced shortages and price
controls on everything from
toilet paper to
used cars.
As usual, even with a bounty of natural resources, socialism, a
system that rejects economic realities and laws, was bound to fail.
And as the veneer of chavismo is chipped away by the ham-handed
Maduro, Venezuela’s government is finding less allies in the West
ready to defend it. Enter Mark Weisbrot, a Westerner who will
likely never have to live under the nightmare that is
full-throttled socialism, writing for the Guardian with a
vapid defense of Venezuela’s government. Forget the price controls,
forget the state violence (it was provoked, according to Weisbrot),
forget the arrest of a prominent opposition leader (the Venezuelan
government is only being “portrayed” as repressive), Venezuela is
not Ukraine, writes Weisbrot, because the conflict in Venezuela is
about rich vs. poor, left vs. right. You can read the
whole cringe-worthy thing here, but I’m only going to subject
you to the closing:
Opposition leader Henrique Capriles tried to bridge
this divide with a makeover, morphing from his prior right-wing
incarnation into Venezuela’s Lula in his presidential
campaigns, praising Chávez’s social programs and promising to
expand them. But he has gone back and forth on respect for
elections and democracy, and – outflanked by the extreme right
(Leopoldo López and María Corina Machado), last week refused offers
of dialogue by the president. At the end of the day, they are all
far too rich, elitist, and right wing (think of Mitt Romney and his
contempt for the 47%) for a country that has repeatedly voted for
candidates running on a platform of socialism.Back in 2003, because it did not control the oil industry, the
government had not yet delivered much on its promises. A
decade later, poverty and unemployment have been reduced by more
than half, extreme poverty by more than 70%, and millions have
pensions that they did not have before. Most Venezuelans are not
about to throw all this away because they have had a year and a
half of high inflation and increasing shortages. In 2012, according
to the World Bank, poverty fell by 20% – the largest
decline in the Americas. The recent problems have not gone on long
enough for most people to give up on a government that has raised
their living standards more than any other government in
decades.
“Most Venezuelans,” writes Weisbrot. It’s the kind of
intellectual dishonesty you can expect from the leftist apologists.
Remember, Maduro defeated Capriles by a razor-thin margin,
something successors of popular leaders are usually able to avoid.
But who cares when class warfare can be waged? The “47 percent”
might as well be treated like the “1 percent.” Weisbrot
conveniently whitewashes the sorry state of affairs in Venezuela,
because he gets to live in a first world country where the
every-day worries of Venezuelans are largely unimaginable. It’s not
just high inflation and shortages, for example. Venezuela has among
the weakest rules of law,
according to the World Justice Report, with more than half of
government officials involved in corruption and three-quarters of
Venezuelans feeling unsafe in their neighborhoods at night. Crime
soared under Hugo Chavez, and Venezuela is now
one of the most dangerous countries in the world; there were
nearly 28,000 murders in 2013.
The ongoing protests in Venezuela, while largely ignored in the
Western media, do in fact have something in common with the
protests that happened in Ukraine: they were both sparked, at least
in part, by a government that was
out of touch with people. In that way, Weisbrot provides a
useful lesson in how blind adherence to ideological dogmas leads to
government leaders, policy analysts, and other political operators
to be so out of touch with the people their politics and policies
hurt. The quest for socialism is only democratic insofar as a
razor-thin majority can impose its will on a minority not much
smaller than it, in the name of class warfare or envy or some
twisted misappropriation of social justice.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/P9felF
via IFTTT