Hugo Chavez

The United States has, with some exceptions, generally avoided colonizing our 'sphere of influence' directly.  We're too pragmatic and commercial for that.  Still we have been true bullies towards Latin America from time to time, and historical anger towards us from that region is not at all unjustified.  If any Latin country should choose of its own will socialism or apartness from us then of course it has the right.  The attitude among some here that it does not is unambiguously racist and imperial. 

Still there is nothing more reactionary or anti-liberty than glorifying victimhood and struggle.  I know this is easy for my priveleged ass to say, but the fact is that even if you are a true victim of history, truly oppressed, you must in good conscience accept that attaining justice is not a matter of heroism or 'winning'.  Your day of indisputable triumph when your humilated tormentors are forced to surrender moral superiority to you will never come.  No human will ever be 'Great' enough to bring that day to you, and to place such hope and sublimination of self upon a man is no path to liberty but  to eternal infantilism.  Those who truly beleive in freedom and equality would shoot every 'Great Man' in the head before they slap an imperialist. 

Chavez wasn't the Stalinist beast that some on our right label him as.  But he was a domineering, mastabatory, antidemocratic son of a bitch.  His gambit of portraying 'his people' as eternally noble underdogs forever at war with knowingly evil capitalists was pure vanity.  The appeal of this narrative to those who buy into it is nothing more moral than vanity.  Let the man's life be reminder that to be on 'The Left' is no immunity from windmill-tilting at demonized Others or patriarchial hero-cults.  "The graveyards are full" etc. 

 

 

 

*  I suppose that his wardrobe was, by Strongman standards anyway, relatively modest.  But that's only one more strike against him so far as I'm concerned.  Go full Gaddafi or go home motherfucker.