"Saca tus cuentas, Vollmer!"
Today Hugo Chávez sat down with some of the few businessmen left in Venezuela to convince them, in between cites to Lenin and Mariátegui, that his Revolution can peacefully coexist with private property and that he would never, never, try to turn Venezuela into Cuba. As proof, he went so far as to offer them lower interest rates and cheap dollars as long as they became minority partners with the State in everything they do.
Putting aside the obvious tactical retreat this represents (or does it?) and the complete and utter lunacy of believing that he still sees a role for private property, one thing kept coming to mind.
When did Hugo Chávez become so darn unlikable?
Occasionally, when hearing him or watching him, your horror was usually tinged by a certain likeability for the man. If you didn't like anything about him, at least you sort of understood why people liked him.
But that's long gone. He's become a repugnant autocrat, and he can't really hide it any more.
The only people who remain convinced are the crooks, the hopelessly ideological and the co-dependent psychos. There is no one normal left in chavismo.
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from tuerkei hotel buchen on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 19:56[...] Japan signed on to provide an experiment module, also to be permanently attached to the space station base, at a similar cost. Benefit,author "The test wasn't winning the election," he said. "The true test was getting the various groups to trust ...
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It was easy
I agree with you on the change that has occurred to the guy. But it is easy to be likable when everything is in your favor, when nothing resists your charm and votes come pouring whenever you want them. But when things are getting out of hands is more difficult to transmit the same energy. His aura was really strong, I had the chance to experience it myself one time he took me inside a security circle to introduce me to “his friend Pastrana” and I understood then why so many people had fallen under his spell. But the effect is wearing off and he finds more and more difficult to look like the likeable guy he used to be. I am sure that he will continue losing his ability to establish rapport with his followers, specially now he is talking about abstract ideological things no one really understands.
the boogy man or the energy vampire ?
Moraima,
If we divide the world into "givers" and "takers", those who lean towards giving are the inwardly stronger ones who are able to give by directing their energy to others in one way or another.
Takers do the opposite- they take your energy( energy vampires).
Chavez is an extreme taker, or energy vampire.He pulls your energy to him for his own use.This is common among children, only children deserve and need our energy.Chavez gets a surplus from us.
Extreme takers have powerful auras, because so much energy has been received by others.
Once the spell is broken( ie people get tired and angry and stop giving him all their energy) Chavez's power will lessen.
It is the people who give him the power and the people who will take it away.
So in this sense, when Chavez calls himself " the people" in this unconscious sense, he is correct.He is correct but he does not know in which WAY he is correct.
What a talker!
Chavez you almost got me! But sadly for you and me, I have a minimum of intelligence and I know that your precious verb is nothing more than pure bullshit that has no real life application.
"no one normal in chavismo"
Wow. I guess this clearly establishes that you have written off a large chunk of Venezuela's population. Good luck with governing with this attitude, should your side ever win an election.
crooks & psycos
"The only people who remain convinced are the crooks, the hopelessly ideological and the co-dependent psychos. There is no one normal left in chavismo."
Let me guess there is at least 30% convinced pro-chavez in adult population, so four or six millions crook & psycos... A lot of people to put in jail or in psychiatric hospitals... Maybe you have more radical solution?
It is a big logistical challenge for your guys, Juan Cristobal: Videla et al. in Argentine achieve barely 35,000 desaparecidos...
you left out the hopelessly ideological
and that would be you (I hope!)
Not only
Juan,
I think there are the very humble and ignorant who still believe.
See: no one has explained to them any project, no one has told them about oil dependency, about creating Venezuelan products and the like. Hugo, now in problems, gets from some of his pseudo-ideologues the idea and he throws words and images to the people and they believe.
It is sad but the opposition never told them stories.
The opposition has only talked about Hugo and perhaps, just after hitting itself so often against the wall, are saying things like "improve security, education", etc. They are not saying what exactly. They are not presenting a belief in anything (but perhaps "free enterprise", go explain that now to someone who has no real education).
So still, even if there, there are quite some humble and ignorant who buy in what Hugo is saying.
I have a suggestion for them
Become Ni-nis. It's a perfectably defensible position to hold. But supporting this madness just because you think it's the only available option is really unjustifiable.
There is no doubt the guy is mad
Don't tell me.
It is not that most people are like that but a meaningful group. Others are ninis who will go for the first beer if no other option is presented. But we need them as well. Hugo is going to cheat, so we cannot tell people just "don't vote for Hugo".
I believe there is no way around it: the oppo needs to come up with some ideologies, some believes, some vision or they can just pray that energy collapses completely, water as well and all the rest and maybe then people will react or they may have to go for misery for many years still.
Now that is what you think and I think, that it is madness.
A lot of people don't think so.
One example: I took a bus from Big Low center, the bus station outside Valencia and from there to the city centre and then home. Most people in those buses are very poor workers. I remember a guy getting in, a young guy, and talking about the wonders of the Soviet Union. That was 1990. That was really incredible. I did not open my mouth because I was knackered, I just kept observing the guy shocked at the whole thing. The guy praised and praised. Some people were indifferent but others listened attentively.
I am sure most who did pay attention were believing it, at least part.
I was reading the newspapers they don't read and I was listening to foreign radios and writing to people abroad while they were at most reading the baseball part of últimas noticias and watching soap operas.
Looks like he nationalized his laundry
Maybe it's me, but it looks like the turkey neck hider has gone from red to pink. This reeks of CIA dirty trickery.
Power of propaganda
I think Kepler is correct. There are probably plenty of decent (but ignorant) people who still believe in Chavez. To many of us he seems like a vulgar bufoon, and yet he connects with the masses. And we should not underestimate the power of unrelentless propaganda. And who is the target of the propaganda? The masses.
Read the following by a master of propaganda and political advertising:
“To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses? It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses … All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. The greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. … The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be. … The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out. … The broad mass of a nation does not consist of diplomats, or even professors of political law, or even individuals capable of forming a rational opinion..."
Godwin Law's notwithstanding, the above is from Hitler's Mein Kampf. We read and shudder. A shudder of recognition. As far as propaganda is concerned, nothing has changed.
And then the following (or something like it) is attributed to Goebbels:
“Repeat a lie again and again and it will become the truth.”
The issue is how to counter-attack more intelligently
Kolya
This will probably be interesting for you.
Look how they were penetrating back then (Soviet - now Russian - magazine in the eighties):
http://www.vokrugsveta.ru/vs/article/2016/
I told Juan I will comment on that article. I am not sure if I am giving too much importance to those networks they created back then (not Hugo but one of the core groups supporting him). Perhaps we need to consider them a little bit and see how we react on those places in a more pluralistic way.
Missionaries
Kepler, thanks for the link. It was actually a well written article. His description of Caracas and the ranchitos (circa 1983) was quite good and accurate, I thought. Being a communist journalist writing for a Soviet publication, he painted those Marxist activists in the barrios in a very inspiring manner. But then, more than likely those barrio Marxists were sincere and idealistic. They were the equivalent of Christian fundamentalist missionaries. Except of trying to spread Christian fundamentalism, they were trying to spread Marxism-Leninism.
Exactly: a cult
I just sent an email to Juan saying that for me they were being like Jehova Witnesses or evangelical fundamentalists...
They have their credo, their dogmas and their social works.
And it was not only in the slums. It was in places such as secondary cities across Venezuela, those cities we, the urbanites see as "monte y culebras" but that are considered cities in the US and Europe.
Back then I went from time to time to the Soviet embassy and to a "casa de la Amistad", not out of ideological reasons but because it was the only place I could get books and magazines I wanted to practice.
I learnt a little bit about those guys in that way. They thought I was one of theirs, I was just picking up the Russian stuff I was interested in and leaving right away.
Some of the oppo leaders are still discovering the poor.
Although chavismo is a mixture of very funny parts, those, the ones with some theoretical and social experience, are, an important driving force and will become more so now after the fall of some too flashy boliburgueses.
Anger is out of place in blog
Juan: I totally agree with your assessment on Chavez and chavistas, and this is your blog and you write what you want. However, one of the things that attracts people to this blog is dispasionate, insightful analysis, maybe with a good sprinkling of irony often. I found your comment on "repugnant autocrat" a bit out of place for a front page article, even if I agree with it, and the "There is no one normal left in chavismo" paragraph frankly too encompasing. We all know somebody who is a chavista, and I would hesitate to think of all of them as abnormal. I have no clue why they keep being chavistas, but some of them are still decent people. I understand the anger, but you guys are being read as a reference fron many places, and airing that position takes credibility away from you.
By the way, I have been a fan for a while, so I hope you don't mind the criticism.
Some of them are still decent people!!!!
This certainly doesn't sound fascist at all!!!!!!
"Some" of all those millions of people that vote for Chavez are still "decent people"????? In all seriousness, are you fucking crazy?
News to scary opposition wackos: One's political leaning doesn't determine whether or not one is a "decent person"!!!!!!
Both Chavistas and Oppos are decent people. They simply differ in their political opinions for god's sake!!!
Seriously, you people scare me.
I presume you like nazis too
News to scary opposition wackos: One's political leaning doesn't determine whether or not one is a "decent person"!!!!!!
News to flower-eating hippies: a person's political leanings are a consequence of the person's psychological profile.
One might argue that the term "political leaning" is as vague as it gets. And politics per se are too complicated and everyone seems to have their own definition for every term, so just because a person claims to support X (based on his own personal definition of X, which is different from everyone else's) doesn't say as much about that person as it should.
However, "dime con quien andas y te diré quien eres" is about the most accurate truism in the history of the world. If you support Hitler, Stalin, Mugabe, Ahmadinejad, El Ché, Fidel or Chavez, you are invariably either a piece of garbage whose one an only possible contribution to the world is as fertilizer or an ignorant retard. There's simply no way to avoid it.
We're not talking about a bunch of forum trolls here. The people I just mentioned are/were not "misguided people with good intentions who were forced to use harsh methods in their quest to make the world a better place." They purposely set out to cause a great amount of destruction and death. If you did not see that from a million miles away, there's something inherently wrong with you and your capacity to tell right from wrong.
PURE... FUCKING... FASCISM
"If you support Hitler, Stalin, Mugabe, Ahmadinejad, El Ché, Fidel or Chavez, you are invariably either a piece of garbage whose one an only possible contribution to the world is as fertilizer or an ignorant retard. There's simply no way to avoid it."
Agree with Babao
"The only people who remain convinced are the crooks, the hopelessly ideological and the co-dependent psychos. There is no one normal left in chavismo."
Sorry JC, pero te pasaste... I have never had any sympathy whatsoever for Chávez or chavismo, but with all honesty I found your commentary a bit offensive. Substitute 'chavismo' for 'escuálido' and you get an aporrea-grade slogan.
I have followed this blog for years and am a great admirer of what you guys do. In this blog, besides being pundit and editor you have presented yourself as someone linked / sympathizer of a major oppo party, and have written posts about political strategies for the opposition. Think about this, think about what you wrote and draw your own conclusions.
Peace man--nothing personal...
I'm considering how to weigh on this discussion
But let's get our heads straight - I never mentioned anything about "decency." You can be ideologically chavista and still be decent.
What we should be arguing about here is the definition of "normal."
Babao:the violent bear it away
Babao,
" the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away"
You say:
"We all know somebody who is a chavista, and I would hesitate to think of all of them as abnormal."
Then let's be a little dispasionate here as you say you like to be.The fact that you or I know someone who is Chavista and a nice guy or whatever is precisely beside the point.Being a nice guy and /or intelligent, does not exclude the fact that she/he might have an abnormal or unhealthy aspect in their character that hooks them to Chavismo.
It is my opinion from an attempted objective view of my friends and family that this is quite so- not that all of us don't have areas of abnormality because we all do...however the specific abnormalities that lead to the Chavez cult are present in Chavistas..otherwise they would not be hooked into such a damaging movement.
I was going to post on this, but I'll respond here instead
(My apologies, but I'm really busy today)
First off, to anyone who has criticized the language that I used, no offense taken. I would , however, like to clarify a few things.
1. I stand by what I wrote. It wasn't an slip of the tongue, and it wasn't a reaction caused by the heat of the moment. Thinking about it with a cool head, I actually believe that description encompasses pretty much everyone who is still a committed chavista.
2. What is normal? I think that is where the disagreements lie. To me (and we are on totally subjective territory here), a normal voter is someone who likes politicians to be balanced and respectful, someone who wants the country to develop, who understands that private property and private enterprise are necessary for that, who believes in alternative democracy, and who realizes that Venezuela is in desperate need for some dialogue and finding common ground. My point is that chavismo has ceased to provide any and all of that. We crossed that line a long time ago. Therefore, anyone who supports Chavez at this time, who genuinely buys into his whole shtick, actually believes in what Chavez is saying and what he stands for. That, in my book, does not qualify as normal.
3. Just because a chavista isn't normal doesn't mean I hate them, it doesn't mean they are not decent people (many probably are), and it doesn't mean we can't have a dialogue. It simply means they aren't normal, see above. It also means it's pretty much useless to try and convince them - we should focus on our base and Ni-nis, and simply forget the hope of ever bringing those people around. If they do, great, but let's not kid ourselves.
4. There are people whose main reason for liking Chavez personally was because they liked the guy (just like in the US , millions voted for Bush over Gore because they thought it would be fun to have a beer with him). However, the normal ones that fell under that behavior cannot continue to support Chavez. The man has simply become an abrasive, disagreeable character. That's not petty, it's something I believe to be true from watching his evolution. And let's face it, you know you agree with me.
5. There were also those who liked Chavez mostly because they thought the alternative was worse. But seriously, with a recession, double digit inflation, devaluation, constant blackouts and soaring crime - can they really continue making that case? And if they do - can you honestly say they are normal? It simply makes no sense - most, if not all, of the normal ones who thought this way are comfortable Ni-nis at this point, or have switched to the opposition.
6. Then there are the rest - the crooks, the hopeless ideologues and the co-dependent psychos, as I posted. I admit the language is "uncharitable", as my mother would say, but seriously - how far off am I? A lot of what remains in chavismo resembles too much of a cult, and the sporadic appearance of PSFs in this comments forum is a constant reminder that the people who continue to follow this madness ... have issues. Even the ignorant ones, the people who don't know any better but continue to support the government in spite of all its failings, fall into the category of the co-dependent. After you filter out the ones that have an unhealthy obsession with the man, the ones that honesty think that the USSR and Cuba are great role models, and the ones that are making out like bandits - is there anyone else left?
Have a good weekend everyone.
And the ignorant...
... nothing wrong with your description of chavismo in my opinion Juan. You just need to add "the ignorant" and voilá, you've described chavismo perfectly.
the ignorant?
And I will actually take my word about them being simply "ignorant", they are ignorant in some things, not in others, just like many on our side.
Most of the poor who are still supporting Hugo have very low formal education levels, but in reality what they ignore on this issue, things about how dictators develop and economy works, is not really more than what many within our opposition ignores.
They just did not have the support and privileges we took for granted. Above all, they did not have the education at home and that more often than not generates a vicious circle so hard to break, a circle many who are among the privileged would not have broken had they been under similar circumstances. I think the few that can tell the difference are the ones who grew with such parents and "made it".
I would say there are millions "on our side" who are just as ignorant: they ignore the squalor in which others live, the historical conditions, they ignore how their life style often does not correspond to their productivity but is a product of a very sick, injustice economy based on oil exports with badly distributed revenues, etc.
They would irrationally protest in the same way were petrol prices to be risen and they do so when the Bolivar gets devalued, no matter what.
And how ignorant can someone be to be opposition and still not take the time to develop a party plan, to go and reach for the average population living outside the Globovision hubs?
How is it possible they don't have the balls to speak out about the country having 12 social democratic parties and 12 liberal parties?
I really wonder how many of our leaders really care.
Take a look at Notitarde's latest (this link will become invalid after today and moved to another place):
http://www.notitarde.com/pais/pais2.html
To me, chavismo is a highly destructive force, but many of the opposition leaders have no project for Venezuela and they never did anything for reducing the inequalities nor would they do unless forced. They have nothing more than "bandAids", they don't produce a plan for improving society's health.
Give the Man a Break
I don't there's anyone normal left in Venezuela, Chavista or otherwise. Chavez nos enloquecio a todos despues de mas de una decada en el poder.
If you think about it I'm right, from a certain point of view. Our society has been warped in ways that are simply unrecognizable in the pre-Chavez era.