Jose Miguel Vivanco and Daniel Wilkinson of Human Rights Watch write about their experience being thrown out of Venezuela for the crime of criticizing the Chávez government. Here’s one lovely detail:
[A] close Chávez ally in the legislature suggested on national TV that the two of us had been sharing a single hotel room where we were indulging our “weaknesses.”
Here’s another:
In the more than twenty years that Human Rights Watch has worked in Latin America, no government has ever expelled our representatives for our work, not even the right-wing dictatorships guilty of far more egregious abuses than those committed by Chávez.
As I’ve stated before, Chávez remains a hero to many on the idiot fringes of the left, including Sean Penn, who has just paid the thug a second visit. Addressing Ralph Nader supporters earlier this year, Penn insisted that we “hold politicians’ asses to the fire.” But apparently this applies only to American politicians. When it comes to Hugo Chávez’s ass, Penn would rather plant a gentle kiss.
It’s a great day at Lerterland when both Joe Lieberman and Hugo Chávez get slammed on the editorial page of the NY Times. Lieberman would like government to decide what you can see on YouTube. (He’s also campaigning hard for John McCain, a matter for another post.) Chávez is looking guiltier on the matter of helping to arm and finance Colombia’s FARC guerillas. What the editorial could have noted is that we already know Chávez is a professed ideological ally of the FARC, whose idea of social justice is to kidnap civilians and hold them in jungle for many years, while tormenting their families with ransom demands.
Kevin Spacey is the latest Hollywood figure to suck up to Chávez, who is not merely anti-American, as right-wingers like to go on about. He’s anti-progressive by every reasonable standard.
~ Seems clear enough that the Clintonistas, not the Obamites, are playing dirty politics at this stage. BET founder Robert L. Johnson, one of the most cynical operators around, has lined up behind Clinton and touched off a firestorm with comments that seemed inteded to smear Obama. Johnson’s unsavory record as a propagandist for Social Security privatization, estate tax repeal and other pet projects of the Republican right are now being widely cited. Clinton an agent of change? That line’s getting harder to sustain.
~ There’s been much talk of Michael Bloomberg’s potential Independent candidacy, but Marc Cooper notes another useless third-party development: the Green Party primary bid of Cynthia McKinney, a water-carrier for the “9/11 Truth” movement and a slinger of unrestrained anti-Obama mud. Comparing him to Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Ward Connerly, McKinney has insinuated that Obama is part of the fruits of COINTELPRO. “Anyone with even vaguely progressive inclinations ought to toss tomatoes at a charlatan like McKinney rather than applaud her,” writes Marc. “She’s an embarrassment and a fraud.” Yes indeed. I gathered signatures for Ralph Nader’s Green Party run in 1996, and I’m ashamed to see how far (and fast) they’ve fallen.
~ Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez would like to be seen as a level-headed mediator between FARC guerrillas and the Colombian government, in the wake of last week’s release of two FARC-held captives. But Chávez is in fact an unabashed supporter of the FARC kidnappers and extortionists: “…they are insurgent forces that have a political project, that have a Bolivarian project that is respected here.” It’s long been obvious that FARC is a criminal gang, operating with absolute disregard for international human rights norms, if I may understate the case. But given Chávez’s outspoken friendship with world leaders like Robert Mugabe, Alexander Lukashenko, Fidel Castro and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, this is no surprise. Sadly, soft-headed lefties continue to fall for his political intrigues.
Darcy James Argue, quite unwittingly, has tied together my two previousposts in an interesting and morally serious way: He asks why Dudamel is getting heat from some for not forcefully opposing Chávez, while Gergiev (whose work I just happened to praise unreservedly) gets a free pass on his close ties to, and explicit political support for, the odious Vladimir Putin.
This I did not know, and should have known, about Gergiev, and it’s very disturbing. Still, Stravinsky is Stravinsky, and I’ll continue to treasure the memory of what I heard last Friday. (I am on record condemning the Putin regime’s depradations, btw.)
As I wrote in DJA’s comments, there’s a difference here in that Sean Penn and other self-styled radicals are not flocking to Russia for photo-ops with Putin, whereas Chávez is being hailed as a hero by Penn and many other dunces on the American left. That’s why I and other liberals feel compelled to speak out against the Bolivarian windbag; the charge that we’re echoing the right is unfair and decontextualized.
None of this means that Dudamel, as an artist, is required to assume an outspoken political role in the matter. His work, like Gergiev’s, should be judged on musical criteria.
I recognize this can get dodgy. Along the way, DJA cites Steve Smith’s complaint that the topic of Chávez never came up during a pre-concert discussion at Carnegie. A similar thing happened last night at the Kimmel Center during an onstage chat with Jane Bunnett, a saxophone/flute specialist in Afro-Cuban jazz who has traveled extensively to Cuba to work with (and hire) Cuban musicians. Bunnett talked about how Cuba’s music conservatories are losing teachers, ostensibly because once they come to the U.S., they tend to stay, as travel restrictions make it unlikely that they’ll be able to visit again without major hassle. The elephant in the room, Fidel Castro, went unmentioned. Could it be that music teachers are leaving Cuba not because of meanie Uncle Sam, but because Cuba is a dictatorship? That possibility wasn’t explored.
Now, like Dudamel, Bunnett is not required to have a position on Castro and her art should be judged on its merits. But what was that Trotsky quote? “You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.”
I can’t let Alex Ross’s refreshing anti-Chávez comments in the The New Yorker of Dec. 3 go without praise here. Writing about Gustavo Dudamel’s recent New York appearance with the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, Ross reflects on the celebratory atmosphere during the encores:
The players don jackets with the Venezuelan national colors and swivel around, marching-band style. Delirium inevitably ensues. I joined in, although I wondered about the wisdom of putting on such a patriotic display at a time when other Venezuelan students have been protesting Hugo Chávez’s increasingly anti-democratic regime. Will Abreu’s fantastic project [Venezuela's music education network, or 'el sistema'] become a propaganda tool for a dictator-in-training? History shows that when musicians trust politicians to take care of their needs they put themselves at the politicians’ mercy. Stalin, too, was a great believer in music for the people.
These remarks are well-timed, for tomorrow, after the referendum, we will learn whether a plurality of Venezuelans have chosen to hand their liberty and future over to a sinister clown, preferring to ignore the historical warnings that Ross sets out so succinctly.
It’s almost redundant to say there’s liberal bias in the field of music and art criticism. As a proud liberal, I wouldn’t have it any other way. What I oppose is leftist bias. It’s excellent to see Ross reject the pro-Chávez mindlessness that has taken hold of many in the entertainment world (Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover), not to mention the activist left in general. Ross has set out to deflate that sort of orthodoxy before (scroll to the end), and I hope he’ll continue to do so.
See my previous posts on Chávez here, here and here. Anne Applebaum breaks down the celebrities-shilling-for-dictators phenomenon here.
To be clear: this is not to suggest that Dudamel is a shill, or undeserving of the widespread praise he has received.
Just a couple of weeks ago, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, demonstrating his contempt for the principle of free speech, “announced that foreigners who visit Venezuela and criticise his government will be escorted to the airport and expelled.”
Sean Penn doesn’t have anything to worry about.
Penn has visited Venezuela and been warmly received by Chavez. It’s fairly certain he had nothing critical to say to the man who has openly embraced Robert Mugabe, who has declared Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus “a model social state.”
Styling himself as brave and bold dissenter, Penn is in fact a bootlicker.
There is a noble left-wing tradition of opposing authoritarianism in all its forms — a tradition that this blog seeks to venerate and continue. Of course, there is also a left-wing tradition of excusing and supporting dictatorial regimes, and this is the path that Penn has chosen, making a mockery of everything he purports to represent.
Very pleased to see this savaging of Hugo Chavez in the lefty New Statesman. Alice O’Keeffe comments on the aftermath of Hugo’s shutdown of the RCTV network:
RCTV has been replaced by TVes (pronounced té vès, or “you see yourself”), a government channel that has the apparently laudable aim of moving away from a western, consumerist agenda and reflecting the “real” Venezuela. But when I tuned in at prime time on a Saturday evening, it was broadcasting an hour-long programme about the armed forces, encouraging conscription to the reserves. An army general was explaining, over footage of Iraqi insurgents waving guns, that ordinary Venezuelans had to be trained in tactics of “asymmetrical resistance”.
“What the country needs now is union, complete union between the population and the armed forces,” he said. The journalist conducting the interview smiled and nodded.
Sounds like a real democratic revolution! And who’s applauding it? Some of the very people who deplore creeping fascism and servile journalism here in the States.
Since we’re on the topic of threats to journalists, and since the Chavez regime is clearly in the business of romanticizing the violence in Iraq:
This report from John Burns on the slaying of Iraqi reporter Khalid Hassan, all of 23 years old, is essential reading. Having worked last year with a burly 26-year-old Kurdish reporter and translator, I feel a certain familiarity with Khalid:
Slumped in his seat, he called his mother, then his father, at work as a school caretaker, telling them he had been shot. “I’m O.K., Mom,” he said.
An off-duty policeman in a gasoline station line told Mr. Hassan’s father what came next. A second car with gunmen, an Opel Vectra, seeing Mr. Hassan on his cellphone, pulled forward and fired two fatal shots into Mr. Hassan’s head and neck. [...] After his parents separated during his teenage years, Mr. Hassan supported his mother and four sisters, all under 18, by selling cosmetics door to door and, for the last four years, using a polished colloquial English learned through movies, for The New York Times.
Grieve for Khalid Hassan and his stricken family.
P.S. — from NY Times reporter Ed Wong:
“A reader mentioned contributing money to the fund for Khalid’s family. If you’re interested, please send an email to foreign@nytimes.com. Write ‘fund for Khalid Hassan’s family’ in the subject line. The foreign desk will get back to you with more information.”
Morgan Tsvangirai (pictured at left), leader of Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change, has been savagely beaten by Robert Mugabe’s thugs; thankfully he is up and walking and was able to appear in court. His crime? Opposing a regime that has reduced Zimbabweans to hunting mice for food, and that has managed to halve the country’s average life expectancy since 1990.
For the last week or so we’ve heard about the heated diplomatic face-off in Latin America between President Bush and Hugo Chavez, the firebrand president of Venezuela. If Chavez were a genuine campaigner for global justice, he’d be supporting Morgan Tsvangirai and his democratic comrades. But look at the second photo. He’s not. This is the heroic alternative to the Bush agenda? No, it’s the same old same old from the authoritarian wing of the left.
Interesting to note that just this week, New York City Councilman Charles Barron condemned an off-duty officer for killing a man who apparently opened fire with a 9-millimeter inside a Brooklyn nightclub. Barron, as I’ve noted before, is an enthusiastic supporter of the police-state regime of Robert Mugabe. Seems that police brutality is perfectly alright with Barron, as long as it’s carried out by a decrepit former Marxist rebel.
Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has made this UN General Assembly an event to remember, referring to President Bush as “the devil.” Interesting that he should resort to religious symbology. During Ahmadinejad’s recent Venezuela visit, Chavez declared that Islam is “revolutionary.” (In fairness, he said the same of Christianity, though he probably didn’t have “Jesus Camp” in mind.) Marc Cooper notes that Chavez also called the UN “worthless,” a view he apparently shares with our own John Bolton.
NPR reported this a.m. that Chavez received a standing ovation after his speech at Cooper Union. Like many of those doing the applauding, Chavez represents the authoritarian, nonprogressive wing of the left. The world leaders he champions — Castro, Mugabe, Qadafi, Ahmadinejad, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus — are trampling on the rights of their people. It may be emotionally satisfying to applaud Chavez’s anti-Bushism, but one must look squarely at what Chavez is for, not just what he is against. The same is true when evaluating the far-left sects in this country: The World Can’t Wait (Revolutionary Communist Party), ANSWER (Ramsey Clark/International Action Center), the International Socialist Organization and so forth. There can be little doubt that these groups led the cheering section in CU’s Great Hall.
Chavez very much needs Bush. He exploits Bush’s (entirely justified) unpopularity in ways that are masterful, but also insidious. He can say things about Bush he could never say about any Democrat. In America, after six years of Republican rule by the worst president in our history, we’re all too ready to indulge a character like this. Behind Chavez’s overbaked rhetoric is something one can’t wave aside: Our president is harming the foundations of the republic, assiduously, every day. Go here to see him dodge, spin, and carry on like an insane person on the subject of torture and the Geneva Conventions.
But Chavez is not the alternative — he’s a friend to antidemocratic thugs the world over. His foreign policy is as manically self-interested as those he criticizes. Yet with the aid of deluded propagandists like Harry Belafonte, Chavez has convinced many on the left that he is a human-rights champion. Just last night in an elevator, I heard several music students quoting his “devil” remark with delight. Chavez’s moral credibility is becoming conventional wisdom. It’s in fact nonsense.
[P.S. Here is a sycophantic account of Chavez's Cooper Union speech. I liked this:
"Chavez thanks The Global Women's Strike for their hard work, and Mary and the others jump up with their banner of support. He thanks others, including a contingent of rabbis with buttons, 'A JEW NOT A ZIONIST.' The youngest rabbi runs a giant bouquet to the stage, which the police shift and block."
I don't like the way the term "self-hating Jew" gets thrown around, but in this case the shoe might really fit.]
