Why Hugo Chavez Won’t Be Missed

Now that Hugo Chavez has gone to meet the arch-enemy of his Maker, it’s time to remind all and sundry just how dreadful a legacy he has left behind.

First, let’s take account of the purblind:

US filmmaker and long-time Hugo Chavez supporter Oliver Stone hailed the late Venezuelan leader as a “great hero” on Tuesday, saying he will “live forever in history.”

Actor and activist Sean Penn, another Hollywood friend to Chavez, also paid tribute saying the world’s poor had lost a “champion” and America had also lost “a friend it never knew it had.”

“JFK” and “Natural Born Killers” director Stone said: “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place.

“Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chavez will live forever in history,” he added in a statement released by his publicist, adding: “My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.”

Stone has regularly praised Chavez, whom he interviewed for a 2009 documentary “South of the Border,” exploring the outspoken Venezuelan leader’s role in bottom-up change sweeping South America.

Penn, in a statement reacting to Chavez’s death aged 58, added: “Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of Vice President (Nicolas) Maduro.

“Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion. I lost a friend I was blessed to have.

“My thoughts are with the family of President Chavez and the people of Venezuela,” he added.

Uh-huh. Let’s consider just how good Chavez has been to the people of Venezuela.

We’ll start with the fact Chavez left Venezuela in terrible shape:

Dead at 58, Hugo Chávez leaves behind a country in far worse condition than it was when he became president, its future clouded by rivals for succession in a constitutional crisis of his Bolivarian party’s making and an economy in chaos.

A former paratrooper, Mr. Chávez had a radical vision for “21st Century Socialism,” which was never fully explained. His skillful rhetoric, which filled supporters with utopian dreams, was used to justify the methodical destruction of Venezuela’s democratic institutions and the free market.

Shortly after coming to office, he rewrote the constitution to his liking and aggressively set out to rig elections and stifle adversaries in the legislative branch and the courts. Unable to brook criticism, he turned his fire on the independent news media, eventually silencing most voices of opposition by bully tactics and economic intimidation.

His Bolivarian regime rewarded supporters and punished opponents, giving rise to enormous corruption and the creation of a new class of greedy oligarchs with political connections. Unfortunately for Venezuela and for all his political skills, the president was both an incompetent executive and a worse economist.

In an energy-rich country that once knew no blackouts, electrical shortages are frequent, the result of Mr. Chávez’s plundering of the country’s public oil company. In a country that once enjoyed a thriving free market, prices are controlled and food items often scarce.

In recent weeks, while Mr. Chávez was hospitalized, Venezuela was once again forced to devalue its currency, this time by one-third. This was the inevitable outcome of a series of disastrous economic decisions that included nationalizing the telephone company and other utilities, which scared off foreign investors and spurred capital flight.

This might help explain why Venezuelans in the United States—who unlike those in Venezuela proper, are free to express their opinions—are so delighted that Chavez is dead:

Venezuelans in the U.S. cheered and expressed cautious optimism that new elections will bring change to their homeland after the death of President Hugo Chavez.

“My hope is that Venezuela will become a free country once again,” said Elizabeth Gonazalez, 52, who wore a smiley face sticker on her sweater with the words, “Venezuela without Chavez.”

A jubilant celebration broke out in the Miami suburb of Doral late Tuesday after word spread of the death of the 58-year-old leftist. Many dressed in caps and T-shirts in Venezuela’s colors of yellow, blue and red.

“He’s gone!” dozens in the largely anti-Chavez community chanted.

And why shouldn’t they be happy?

IN Caracas, Venezuela, you could tell a summit meeting mattered to Hugo Chávez when government workers touched up the city’s rubble. Before dignitaries arrived, teams with buckets and brushes would paint bright yellow lines along the route from the airport into the capital, trying to compensate for the roads’ dilapidation with flashes of color.

For really big events — say, a visit by Russia’s president — workers would make an extra effort, by also painting the rocks and debris that filled potholes.

Seated in their armor-plated cars with tinted windows, the Russians might not have noticed the glistening golden nuggets, but they would surely have recognized the idea of the Potemkin village.

[…]

That same dramatic flair deeply divided Venezuelans as he postured on the world stage and talked of restoring equilibrium between the rich countries and the rest of the world. It now obscures his real legacy, which is far less dramatic than he would have hoped. In fact, it’s mundane. Mr. Chávez, in the final analysis, was an awful manager.

The legacy of his 14-year “socialist revolution” is apparent across Venezuela: the decay, dysfunction and blight that afflict the economy and every state institution.

Read the whole thing, which makes clear that just about everything Chavez touched turned to ashes. More from Michael Moynihan:

Chávez presided over a political epoch flush with money and lorded over a society riven by fear, deep political divisions, and ultraviolence. Consider the latest crime statistics from Observatorio Venezolano de la Violencia, which reckons that 2012 saw an astonishing 21,692 murders in the country—in a population of 29 million. Last year, I accompanied a Venezuelan journalist on his morning rounds at Caracas’s only morgue to count the previous night’s murders. As the number of dead ballooned, the Chávez regime simply stopped releasing murder statistics to the media.

All of this could have been predicted, and wasn’t particularly surprising from a president who believed that one must take the side of any enemy of the “empire.” That Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe was a “freedom fighter,” or that Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko presided over “a model of a social state.” Saddam Hussein was a “brother,” Bashar al-Assad had the “same political vision” as the Bolivarian revolutionaries in Venezuela. He saw in the madness of Col. Gaddafi an often overlooked “brilliance” (“I ask God to protect the life of our brother Muammar Gaddafi”). The brutal terrorist Carlos the Jackal, who praised the 9/11 attacks from his French jail cell, was “a good friend.” He praised and supported FARC, the terrorist organization operating in neighboring Colombia. The list is endless.

His was a poisonous influence on the region, one rah-rahed by radical fools who desired to see a thumb jammed in America’s eye, while not caring a lick for its effect on ordinary Venezuelans. In his terrific new book (fortuitously timed to publish this week) Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s VenezuelaThe Guardian’s Rory Carroll summed up the legacy of Chávez’s Venezuela as “a land of power cuts, broken escalators, shortages, queues, insecurity, bureaucracy, unreturned calls, unfilled holes, uncollected garbage.” One could add to that list grinding poverty, massive corruption, censorship, and intimidation.

This was Chávez’s reign and his legacy; extralegal, vindictive, and interested in the short-term gesture rather than the more difficult, long-term solution. From his revolutionary comrades in Cuba, he borrowed the slogan “patria, socialismo o muerte”—fatherland, socialism or death. The fatherland is a shambles, Bolivarian socialism has failed, and Comandante Chávez is dead. May the “revolution” die with him.

Quite so. It should come as no surprise that the Iranian regime is deeply saddened by Chavez’s death, having lost in Chavez an inspiration for how to annihilate a country’s prospects and oppress its people.

It’s worth noting as well that Chavez left behind a country with an unbelievably dysfunctional political system. Link:

In one neighborhood, Chávez supporters set fire to tents and mattresses used by university students who had chained themselves together in protest several days earlier to demand more information about Mr. Chávez’s condition.

“Are you happy now?” the Chávez supporters shouted as they ran through the streets with sticks. “Chávez is dead! You got what you wanted!”

Let it be noted that in Venezuela, asking for political transparency can leave you vulnerable to mob attack. More:

Shortly before announcing that Hugo Chávez died, Venezuela’s government resorted to one of the late president’s favorite ploys to try to unite his supporters: allege a conspiracy by the U.S. to destabilize the country.

Vice President Nicolás Maduro kicked out two U.S. military attachés for allegedly plotting against Venezuela and even suggested that Washington may have been behind Mr. Chávez’s cancer.

“Behind all of [the plots] are the enemies of the fatherland,” Mr. Maduro said on state television, flanked by the entire cabinet, state governors and Venezuela’s military commanders.

Mr. Maduro said that the U.S. Embassy’s Air Force attaché, Col. David Delmonaco, and another unnamed U.S. military official had approached members of the Venezuelan military and tried to recruit them into plans to “destabilize” the oil-rich South American nation. Mr. Maduro didn’t offer further details on the alleged plot.

Mr. Maduro also suggested that the country’s “historic enemies,” a phrase long used in Venezuela to refer to the U.S. and its allies, may have caused Mr. Chávez’s cancer. He said the country would likely discover in the future that Mr. Chávez “was attacked with this illness.”

This is the response of the government of a country which is going down the tubes?

And let’s remember what the last presidential election was like. Consider this story about Henrique Capriles, who challenged Chavez last year, and who is likely to challenge his successor, Maduro, in upcoming elections. Look at what he had to put up with:

Last year, government supporters threw racist and homophobic taunts at Capriles, who has Jewish roots and lost great-grandparents in the Treblinka concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during World War Two.

One can be certain that these attacks were approved by Chavez, or by people close to him.

This blog post has gone on for a while, so I will close it by recommending this piece by Zack Beauchamp, who is on the other side of me politically, but who is a worthy and interesting interlocutor on Twitter. He urges Democrats not to think fondly of Chavez—and isn’t it sad that some Democrats needed urging? Finally, consider this from the late and missed Christopher Hitchens regarding a 2008 trip to Venezuela:

Recent accounts of Hugo Chávez’s politicized necrophilia may seem almost too lurid to believe, but I can testify from personal experience that they may well be an understatement. In the early hours of July 16—just at the midnight hour, to be precise—Venezuela’s capo officiated at a grisly ceremony. This involved the exhumation of the mortal remains of Simón Bolívar, leader of Latin America’s rebellion against Spain, who died in 1830. According to a vividly written article by Thor Halvorssen in the July 25 Washington Post, the skeleton was picked apart—even as Chávez tweeted the proceedings for his audience—and some teeth and bone fragments were taken away for testing. The residual pieces were placed in a coffin stamped with the Chávez government’s seal. In one of the rather free-associating speeches for which he has become celebrated, Chávez appealed to Jesus Christ to restage the raising of Lazarus and reanimate Bolívar’s constituent parts. He went on:

“I had some doubts, but after seeing his remains, my heart said, ‘Yes, it is me.’ Father, is that you, or who are you? The answer: ‘It is me, but I awaken every hundred years when the people awaken.’ “

As if “channeling” this none-too-subtle identification of Chávez with the national hero, Venezuelan television was compelled to run images of Bolívar, followed by footage of the remains, and then pictures of the boss. The national anthem provided the soundtrack. Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.

If only Hugo Chavez were as obsessed with venerating the living as he was with glorifying the dead, Venezuelans may have done better under his leadership.

I’ve Never Been So Happy to Have Demonstrated Bad Timing in All My Life

So, apparently we won’t put my master plan into effect. Hugo Chavez became … oh, how shall I phrase this? … a victim of sequestration with no possibility of reversal via subsequent legislation. He joined the bleeding choir invisible. His death affords cancer a unique opportunity to improve its PR standing throughout the world.

There is little I need to add to my earlier post regarding Chavez. He was a thug and a tyrant. He violated the political and human rights of his opponents and he drove Venezuela’s economy into the ground. Deep into it. “Oh, but he won elections,” his supporters—yes, there are some—will protest. Well, if you gave control over the Venezuelan state media apparatus to me instead of to Chavez, I might have won those elections. Chavez made sure not to play on a level playing field where his political opponents might have stood a chance of beating him. He rigged the political game in his favor. It’s no wonder he won elections, but the mere winning of elections does not a democracy make. Chavez won by seizing power and resources in order to further his propaganda, and by intimidating and harassing opponents who remained brave enough to defy him. He was a great many things in his life, but “friend of liberty” was not one of those things.

Oh, and I suppose that it’s worth noting that like a great many other tyrants, Hugo Chavez was a rabid anti-Semite:

Venezuela’s Jewish community, amounting to less than 1 percent of the country’s total population of 26 million, is among the oldest in South America, dating back to the early 19th century. During the struggle for independence from Spain, the fugitive revolutionary Simón Bolívar found refuge among a group of Venezuelan Jews, some of whom later went on to fight in the ranks of his liberating army. Today, the majority of the country’s Jewish population is descended from an influx of European and North African immigrants who arrived during the years surrounding World War II. Most reside in the capital city of Caracas, comprising a tightly knit community made up of roughly equal numbers from Ashkenazi and Sephardi countries of origin.

Venezuelans pride themselves on living in an ethnic and religious melting pot. Their homeland, unlike its neighbors Argentina, Paraguay, and Chile, has no history of having harbored Nazi fugitives. Before Chávez came to power, members of the Jewish community reported little animosity from either the government or the populace, and sharply anti-Zionist rhetoric was relatively uncommon. Nor did Venezuela’s fifteen synagogues (all but one of them Orthodox) experience much of the anti-Semitic vandalism common in other Latin American countries with tiny Jewish populations. The Hebraica center—its building functions as a lavish social hub, elementary school, country club, sports facility, and gathering place for Caracas Jewry—was largely left in peace.

No longer. Since Chávez took the oath of office at the beginning of 1999, there has been an unprecedented surge in anti-Semitism throughout Venezuela. Government-owned media outlets have published anti-Semitic tracts with increasing frequency. Pro-Chávez groups have publicly disseminated copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the early-20th-century czarist forgery outlining an alleged worldwide Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world. Prominent Jewish figures have been publicly denounced for supposed disloyalty to the “Bolívarian” cause, and “Semitic banks” have been accused of plotting against the regime. Citing suspicions of such plots, Chávez’s government has gone so far as to stage raids on Jewish elementary schools and other places of meeting. The anti-Zionism expressed by the government is steadily spilling over into street-level anti-Semitism, in which synagogues are vandalized with a frequency and viciousness never before seen in the country.

There is no reason whatsoever that so awful an individual should be missed by any decent person. And yet, some who claim to be decent people make noises vaguely resembling sorrow over Chavez’s death. One such person is Jimmy Carter, who reminds us why Americans were wrong to give him one term in office, and right to deny him a second one:

Rosalynn and I extend our condolences to the family of Hugo Chávez Frías.  We met Hugo Chávez when he was campaigning for president in 1998 and The Carter Center was invited to observe elections for the first time in Venezuela.  We returned often, for the 2000 elections, and then to facilitate dialogue during the political conflict of 2002-2004.  We came to know a man who expressed a vision to bring profound changes to his country to benefit especially those people who had felt neglected and marginalized.  Although we have not agreed with all of the methods followed by his government, we have never doubted Hugo Chávez’s commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.

Not a word spared for the victims of Chavez’s persecution. Also being morally obtuse: Representative Jose Serrano, who needs to soundly lose his next election. How much worse did Chavez have to be for Carter’s and Serrano’s eyes to have been opened?

Thankfully, we will never have to find out. Goodbye, Hugo Chavez. You will not be missed. And if you will be kind enough to indulge me, gentle readers, as a Jew, I would like to offer the following prayer—especially for the Jews in Venezuela who suffered the anti-Semitic lunacy of the Chavez regime:

                                                   .בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הַעוֹלָם שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה

When Your Enemy Is as Good as Dead, Offer to Help Him

Hugo Chavez is in a bad way and might not be long for this world. Only those who approve of Chavez’s particular brand of moral idiocy and his unique capacity to annihilate the Venezuelan economy could possibly feel badly about this, and we know what that makes those people. I suppose that it is worth noting that once upon a time, Michael Moore—who certainly approves of moral idiocy and the destruction of economies via the implementation of socialist economic policies—once made a movie about how Cuban health care might be preferable to the health care found in the United States; Chavez has received lots and lots (and lots) of treatment in Cuba. Maybe future editions of the movie ought to be received with a postscript—Cuban health care appears to have all but killed a head of state who was exceedingly friendly to the Castro brothers. Irony, thou art a cruel mistress.

Chavez may be beyond saving at this point, and is certainly does not deserve to recover from his health woes, but it wouldn’t be the world’s worst idea for the United States to offer to try to help him out via a public statement to the effect that Chavez would be welcome to come to the United States and go to any hospital he wants in order to combat the ailments a just Deity has visited on him. I put forward this idea for the following reasons:

  • It makes the United States look kind and merciful;
  • Looking kind and merciful will do more to improve our soft power than have any number of “resets” the Obama administration has tried;
  • Chavez and his regime will be flummoxed by the offer from a public relations standpoint, and …
  • There is absolutely no way that Chavez will accept the offer.

Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I count this as a win-win. The United States can make it look as though it is willing to help Chavez out, thus winning points for its humanitarian gesture. Chavez will likely refuse the generosity of the United States, look churlish as a consequence, and then will likely soon join the bleeding choir invisible. About the only way that this might—emphasis on the word “might”—go wrong is if Chavez accepts the offer, comes to the United States, kicks the bucket, and then a public relations campaign begins blaming the United States for (perhaps deliberately) causing Hugo Chavez to have an eternal meeting with Beelzebub. But I count the chances of that happening as very low indeed. And even if it does happen, how successful would any such public relations campaign be? I mean, would you buy a story claiming that Hugo Chavez was within kissing distance of Death, so the United States invited him to our shores to make sure that both sides puckered up and smooched? Even some Chavistas might have problems taking such a claim seriously.

So what is the United States waiting for? President Obama should loudly and publicly invite Hugo Chavez to take advantage of our advanced medical care, watch him and his regime sputter out a rejection of the offer, bask in the public relations coup that follows, and then pop popcorn and let nature take its course.

What’s not to love about this plan?