Revolutionary Times

Dear nightly visitors, at the beginning of this blog I have sort of promised not to comment on politics here. I have to break that promise, as Caracas and the whole of Venezuela are at the threshold of a new era. A revolutionary era?

We first have to define "revolution". In the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, you will find the definition "open fight against authority". To that, as a historian, I might add the following: a revolution in the social sense means a change, an overturn of its structure and resulting in new social structures. I guess that Marx, Lenin, Mao, and even Mussolini and Hitler might agree with me posthumously. Because all these leaders wanted their societies to change irreversebily, and true fascism kept talking not about that marxist word "revolution", but about a new country, a new society. Which sums up to the same. All these leaders had one thing in common as well, and that was their wish to smash parliamentarian democracy to pieces. I myself think, for that reason, that fascism/nazism and communism are two sides of the same coin. Despite their ideological differences and hate for each other, their means will always be justified by their ends. Whether you have Hitler who killed millions of human beings to save the purity of his own people, or Che Guevara who, in order to save humanity, saw it necessary to kill scores of human beings with his own hands - please show me the real, essential difference between these two extremes. I never have seen it, and I still don´t. To say that Hitler killed more people than Che.... Stalin killed more than Hitler. So where is the difference between these strains of "socialism"?

After a promising start, the regime of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is bogged down by incompetence, corruption and the plain refusal of even his anarchic "socialist battalions" of redshirts to adopt a true rigourous socialist discipline. Because despite its anti-American and anti-Western ranting which sounds like a carbon copy of the Soviet era rhetoric, America is still big here. Chavists, as all other Venezuelans, love to go to Miami, shop for US goods and goodies online, drive around in the newest Chevies and Fords and keep up a US capitalist living style, with lots of beer, BBQ and parties on the beach. As a resident here, the best example I have seen of this moral duplicity of the chavist revolution was a Chevy Tahoe truck with new number plates and three stickers on its trunk: one of Chavez, one of Christ, and one of Che Guevara. If someone can explain to me the combination of a symbol of US imperialist capitalism adorned this way, in a rational way, I´ll award a prize!

Or if someone who likes Chavez can explain to me why this president called himself a Trotskyist, liking the thought of an "eternal" non-stop revolution. Anyone who can read, should know that Leon Trotsky died defending an idea contrary in all its essence to what Hugo Chavez is doing. And that idea was, that the collectivity of a party should be more powerful than the thought of its leader.

We are living in revolutionary times, so they say. But as Chairman Mao, a professional revolutionary of his time, said: a revolution is not a tea party. And to weave on this thought, there is no such thing as a "nice revolution", as Chavez has labelled his plans. He seems to have grown aware of that, judging by the way his regime has grown in a more and more authoritarian way. Anyone living in Venezuela and not closing his or her eyes to daily life, will know about the enormous damage done to the venerable structure of the Caracas Town Hall on Bolivar Square by redshirted hoodlums after their party recently lost almost the whole capital to an opposition they declared dead and buried. Or about the sacking of other townhalls by departing regime officials who before ceding their posts to the new opposition officials, left them without even PC´s to work on. They will know about the still-present bands of redshirts at strategic corners in downtown Caracas who have already shown their eagerness to attack opposition members and journalists on the streets.

But the same "socialists" won´t talk about accusing their own officials of proven massive corruption and theft of public property. Which leads me to the conclusion that Orwell was a true revolutionary. In his Animal Farm, he stated the following, attacking totalitarian regimes: at Animal Farm, everybody is equal. But some are more equal than others. Which to me, seeing a fatbellied "revolutionary" elite in this country beating with a stick in one hand on capitalism and with the other hand accepting tons of money from it, is more than true. While on the other side, a population poor in their pockets and even poorer in their minds, is still trying to grasp certain obvious facts and pull itself out of the mud of the 19th century. Venezuela and other Latin American countries have yet a long, hard way to go.

A good night to you all.