The worst leftists imaginable

Nick Cohen, with some home truths about Chavez, Venezuela and the credulity of the left:

[P]olitical tourists are stuck in a sexless marriage to a Britain that offers them no excitement. The proletariat has refused their entreaties to revolt. Their radical fantasies are never fulfilled. So they scour the world. For years, the top radical tourist destination, the political equivalent of the Pattaya Beach brothel, has been Chavista Venezuela. Hollywood stars, the leaders of the British Labour party and Spanish “popular resistance”, and every half-baked pseudo-left intellectual from Noam Chomsky to John Pilger has engaged in a left orientalism as they wallowed in “the other’s” exotic delights.

Venezuela stroked all their erogenous zones. Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro were anti-American and “anti-imperialist”. That both allied with imperial powers, most notably Russia, did not appear to concern them in the slightest. Venezuela, cried Seumas Milne in the Guardian, has “redistributed wealth and power, rejected western neoliberal orthodoxy, and challenged imperial domination”. What more could a breathless Western punter ask for?

Never underestimate the power worship of those who claim to speak for the powerless, or the credulity of the supposedly wised-up critical theorist. For those who yearn in their dark hearts for strong men, who can crush all enemies, Chavismo reeked of machismo, and provided the great leaders they could adore.

“Hated by the entrenched classes,” burbled a star-struck and grief-stricken Oliver Stone on the day of the leader’s death, “Hugo Chávez will live for ever in history. My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.”...

The show is over now. Their fantasies fulfilled, the western tourists have left a ruined country behind without a guilty glance over their shoulder. Venezuela looks as if it has been pillaged by a hostile army, though there has been no war....

The thoughts of Venezuelans, who watched as westerners treated their country as an ideological playground, cannot be dismissed lightly, either. “There should be a special circle in hell for them,” Thor Halvorssen, the founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, told me. The regime shot his mother and jailed his Venezuelan father. It holds his cousin, the opposition leader, Leopoldo López, as a political prisoner because he had the nerve to oppose it. Halvorssen thinks the Chavistas would not have gone so far in debasing the constitution and looting the state if it had not been able to count on a herd of bovine leftists mooing down all who raised concerns about fundamental rights.

These are the worst leftists imaginable as they show solidarity with oppressive states rather than oppressed peoples. So they stayed silent when Chávez – in the words of the International Trades Union Confederation – engaged in persistent discrimination against organised labour. They neither knew nor cared that corruption is the most brutal of burdens on the poor because the poor cannot pay bribes to obtain the services they should receive by right.

Comments

[Bob-B]

A good piece, but it would benefit from a historical perspective. Those who visited Venezuela and came back with heart-warming stories about the 'Revolution' are very similar to those who visited China during the Cultural Revolution and came back with similar stories or those who visited the Soviet Union in the 30s and did the same. It's an iron law of politics confirmed by generation after generation that the more you dislike Western liberal democracy, the more likely you are to end up supporting political regimes and forces that are much worse.

[marc]

Name and shame i will start,the BBC.

[TDK]

Agree with Bob-B.

Cohen name checks Chomsky and yet his denial of the Killing Fields of Cambodia is not mentioned. Many celebrity Chavistas are serial excusers for totalitarianism.

[Runcie Balspune]

The big red flag was rewriting the constitution to remove the term limit. If anyone thinks this was a move toward a democratic and liberal government they need their head examined, history tells you this is the first stage of tyranny, removing obstacles to keep you in power.

[sackcloth and ashes]

I read this piece yesterday.

I get the impression that Nick Cohen burnt a lot of bridges by writing it. But it was spot on.