Conor Kenny
Staff Writer
When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward – or go back. He who now talks about the “freedom of the press” goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt underwent treatment for his crippling polio sickness at the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, his opponents were using his physical limitations against him in the press, and questioning whether such a man was fit to govern the United States of America. It has often been said that were television around at the time, someone in such ill health would never have been able to get elected in the first place. Indeed, this is quite possible when one considers how the big man would often try and deceive the public, giving them the impression he could walk by having people on either side of him prop up his massive upper torso as he propelled himself off them with his elephantine strength. In the end, this illness was never really a problem in Roosevelt’s political life, as can be noted by the unprecedented amount of time he managed to stay in office. News this week that Hugo Chavez’s second cycle of radiation treatment has been successful is to be treated with this story in mind, although his critics in the Venezuelan press will no doubt view things differently. One suspects, however, that his illness is not really the problem.
As with Roosevelt, Chavez’s sickness will probably end up being the proximate cause of his death, and like the late US President, this should have no bearing on the matter of whether or not he can govern effectively. Transparency is more often that not noble, but one should consider a minor difference between the two cases – the US media often chose to cover up Roosevelt’s ill health of their own accord, while the vehemently hostile Venezuelan press has been as far removed from helpful to Chavez as is possible. This hostility largely stems from one main grievance – they consider him to be stripping away the freedom of the press in Caracas. The BBC also chose to characterize this as despotism, running a story in 2006 under the headline “Chavez to shut down opposition TV”. This was the truth, but not by any means the whole truth. The “opposition TV” channel in question, “Radio Caracas Television” had, after many years of fervent inimicalness towards the President, plumbed new depths when they eventually called for his assassination in a live broadcast. And rather than shut them down, Chavez had merely decided that he didn’t particularly want to renew the license of a television station that committed treason. Imagine if the BBC openly called for someone to kill David Cameron. Not having their license renewed would be the last of Mark Thompson’s worries.
This entire image of Chavez as a dictator is remarkably surreal. As the mighty Noam Chomsky notes in his brilliant book, “Hopes and Prospects”, Chavez is about as unpopular in the Venezuelan press as George W. Bush was before he left office. If Venezuela were an authoritarian Orwellian police state, such hostility would not be allowed to exist. A general litmus test for what is or isn’t a totalitarian dictatorship should surely be applied in the following way. If one walks down a street in such a country, and hears people calling their President a moron, you can be fairly sure that it isn’t all that despotic. In the spirit of continuing the initial parallel, Roosevelt was also often viewed in his early days in power as a potential dictator.
I personally take the view that Chavez has been good for Venezuela. The triumphant spread of socialism in Latin America no doubt unnerves many in the US, something which makes its success even sweeter. He has put all the substantial oil profits in the country towards housing and services for the poor, and has often acted as a fearless and outspoken opponent of American interference in the region. But if Henrique Capriles, a 39-year-old governor with an admirable profusion of charisma, manages to beat Chavez in the upcoming elections, then that is the choice of the Venezuelan people. Because after all, and it’s high time people realized it – Venezuela is a democracy.
