“Long Live Independent Libya! Qaddafi is facing a civil war!” proclaimed Hugo Chavez on Twitter.
I have had several rather heated debates over the last year or two about the merits of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. I have been told that, as the leader of the Latin-American countries that have freed themselves from U.S. dominance, and a fighter against Capitalism, Hugo Chavez deserves our support. He is fighting great forces, I have been told when I complained about his repression of free speech in his country. The opposition TV channels are after all controlled by rich men, who have an outsize influence created by wealth rather than by popular support.
Hugo Chavez, I’ve been told, is a good man who works hard for his people.
Well, my view is and has always been that nothing justifies taking freedom away from the people, and that all the trinkets and bribes in the world, even big and important ones like economic rights, don’t justify stifling dissent, however reactionary it may be, and that ideological repression does not stem from a lack of choice but betrays the instincts and nature of a despot. Despotism, in my opinion, cannot beget justice.
The mere fact that someone is fighting the same forces of injustice that we are does not mean that they do not represent another force of injustice. There is more than one such force afoot, just as there is more than one force, one way to promote justice.
Justice does not tolerate realpolitik, the notion that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” It is not possible, while fighting for justice, to say (as the United States likes to): “he may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.” That sort of thing never brings the desired results, and there is plenty of historical fact to support this assertion. Such an example is the slaughter of the Anarchists in the wake of the Civil War in Russia. The Bolsheviks, once they have won against the White Army, no longer needed the support of the Anarchists to survive, and, having been done with them, executed them all as competitors for power. That an act that foreshadowed the U.S.S.R. becoming just as great a force of repression and injustice as any other in History.
So how do we judge Hugo Chavez? We could judge him by his efforts to redistribute the wealth of his nation, although they seem to have been directed more at centralizing it in the hands of the State than at giving it back to the people in forms other than oil-funded subsidies; we could judge him by his rhetorical defiance of United States power, which is commendable but has yet to acheive results; or we could do so by his efforts to silence opponents of all stripes, for which there are plenty of excuses but no justification.
It is hard to judge a regime battling against such great odds, to figure out where its loyalty lies — with its people or with its power. But the crisis in Libya has given us a rare opportunity into the soul of this particular “Champion of the People:” in the battle for Libya, his loyalty lies with his good friend Muammar Qaddafi.
You can make what you will of it. On my part, I am utterly unsurprised.
