Ding, dong, Hugo is Dead, Horrible Hugo is Dead!

Bye, bye

“Chavez Vive!”, the red-shirted chavs are shouting on the streets of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela.  No, he is not – Chavez Muerto!   Thank goodness that the world is rid of another petty demagogue, a corrupt and degraded icon of the left. It's a measure of just how degenerate left wing thinking has become when a creature like this is celebrated.  Rather have no more heroes anymore than a hero like Horrible Hugo. 

By his friends shall ye know him, and lamentations are coming from the likes of Syria’s Basher Bashar al-Assad and our very own Ken Livingstone, King Newt himself. Diane Abbott, that fat thick black racist, said that his death was a ‘tragedy’ for South America. Imam George Galloway described him as ‘Spartacus.’  I wish that the Romans had got to him sooner.  “He’s Spartacus”, I would gleefully have shouted. 

Obsequies are also coming from Iran’s President Mahmoud Amadinejad.  Apparently Saint Hugo will rise from the dead, reappearing among us in the wake of Shia Islam’s long awaited Twelfth Imam, which means, of course, it will be the twelfth of never, which will be a long, long time.  Then there is the mass outpouring of woe from the readership of the Guardian, a paper, ironically, that would never have survived in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.  Hmm...maybe there is something to be said for Chavez after all. 

We go now to another delusional tyranny; we go to Cuba.  There two days of national mourning has been announced, a period of “deep and excruciating sorrow”.  It will indeed be deep and excruciating for the Castro mafia if a post-Chavez government cuts off the oil transfusions which have kept their shabby regime afloat for the past few years. 

Meanwhile, back in Caracas, the red shirts wail. Oh, woe is them.  Vice President Nicolas Maduro led the lamentations.  There he is, flailing around the place, blaming shadowy right wing and foreign forces for Chavez’ premature demise.  Apparently his cancer might have been plotted from ‘outside.’   Yes, indeed, a successful attack, code named Operation Crab! 

Not everyone is as deluded as Maduro and the hysterical canaille in Caracas.  There are those in the country who are courageously prepared to speak the truth.  “Hate and division was the only thing that he spread”, one man said.  “He did a lot of harm because there are no institutions, there is no justice.  He mistreated everyone who disagreed with his government.” 

Even so the mourning extends, yea, even so far as the United States, that is to say, even so far as the actor Sean Penn.  Apparently Chavez’ death is the hardest thing he has had to endure since trying to watch all of ex-wife Robin Wright’s series House of Cards on Netflix.  He plans to honour his late buddy by making life a ‘living hell’ for his fellow Americans.  I guess he won’t have to do very much then; his mere presence among them should be more than enough.  Penn’s counter-attack on the Great Satan will include chain-smoking, which may mean that Operation Crab will soon claim another victim.  In that sad event I expect the scenes of hysteria on the streets of Los Angeles greatly to exceed those in Caracas.

Elsewhere there is a lot of pious hand-wring, the usual guff that follows the departure of leaders like this, hated while they were alive, loved now that they are dead.  William Hague, our own Foreign Secretary, claims to have been ‘saddened’ by the event.  Personally I prefer my hypocrisy in extremely small doses.  Evo Morales, Bolivia’s indigenous and semi-literate president, said that Chavez is “more alive than ever.”  Actually he’s more dead than ever.  Amado Boudou, Argentina’s vice-President, tweeted that “one of the best has left us; you will always be with us.”  Never mind the contradiction here.  Perhaps he might like to go and find him?  I would advise him to hold his nose in the process. 

Amidst the guff there is a nugget or two of sanity. The best, I think, comes from Ed Royce, Chairman of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs.  “Hugo Chavez was a tyrant," he said “who forced the Venezuelan people to live in fear.  His death dents the alliance of anti-US leftist leaders in South America.  Good riddance to this dictator.”  Venceremos, Comrade Royce! 

The simple fact is that for all of his left-wing credentials, or rather because of his leftist credentials,  Hugo Chavez was nothing but a bully and a thug, a fascist by any other name, who did much to destroy the economy of Venezuela for the greater good of...of what, exactly?  Why, of himself and his venal, money-grubbing family.  Is there anything at all to be said in his favour?  There is this much: he over-fulfilled, Stalin-style, aspects of his own five year plan – Venezuela’s murder and inflation rates are now among the highest in the world. 

My, how it delights me to speak ill of the dead; how it delights me that Chavez has been swept off to the deepest circle of hell, where he can dance forever with the likes of the late Kim Jon-il.

The world will not record their having been there;
Heaven's mercy and its justice turn from them.
Let's not discuss them; look and pass them by...

Let the Storm Break Loose

“Is the EU mortally wounded?”, Larry Sidentop asked in an article published in the July issue of Prospect (A crisis of belief). I hope so, Larry, I certainly hope so. I would like to update Voltaire’s observation about the Holy Roman Empire, that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. The European Union is neither European nor a union. Rather it’s the most awful hybrid, something that might very well have been created on the island of Doctor Moreau.

There they were, those ‘idealists’, the politicians and bureaucrats who tortured this creature into existence, determined that they knew what was best for the peoples of Europe. The best was to escape history, democracy and destiny; the best was to submerge our unique and varied identities in something unreal, a structure cosmopolitan beyond the definition of cosmopolitan. The reaction is setting in, touching on things that go far deeper than sovereign debt.

"Are Europeans willing to shed national identities?", another question put by Sidentop. No, the answer is coming, from Finland to France. There is no secret here. A little bit of sense, an understanding of history, should have demonstrated that change happens slowly; that it takes centuries for a common identity to emerge.

But Europe has been transformed almost overnight; transformed by rapid expansion of membership from the east; by massive migration of peoples, something, I would hazard, that has rarely been paralleled since the time of the late Roman Empire; by the abolition of so many national currencies in favour of the one size fits all euro, a unit of value that really should have been called the Procrustean (thanks Calvin!)

Above all there is the migration of power, away from national parliaments to the super bureaucracy in Brussels, a system of decision making and governance which effectively makes democracy irrelevant. As this ‘ideal’ has waxed so support for integration has waned, with half of the citizens of the EU now doubting that it is a 'good thing.'

The problem, you see, is that the European project was at root based on distrust, based on the assumption that the whole business of integration and harmonisation was too complex for ordinary people to understand. Democracy was tried and found wanting, something people who live outside of the new super state may not fully appreciate.

Earlier this decade a new constitution was devised and put to a limited vote. In both France and the Netherlands, the very heart of the original community of six, it was decisively rejected. The constitution is dead; long live the constitution. Yes, the Frankenstein monster was revived and dressed up as the Lisbon Treaty, with no need for more votes. Oh, sorry, the Irish had to keep voting until they got it right.

With Euro-sceptic parties gaining strength across the Continent, the Eurocrats may come to regret their ignorance of history. Sidentop puts the point reasonably well;

From the outset, in promoting integration, they have failed to understand how difficult it was to create the nation states of Europe—overcoming prejudices of tribe and caste, dialect and region. Creating the social solidarity and willingness to make sacrifices for other citizens, which alone offer a stable basis for political union is, inescapably, a very slow process. American national identity took a century to form. When Robert E Lee was invited by the newly elected President Abraham Lincoln to assume command of the federal armies, after 24 hours of deliberation he declined, replying that he was a Virginian before he was an American. And, after a far longer period of time, consider how imperfect European state formation remains. Separatist movements in Catalonia, northern Italy and Scotland testify to that.

Now the Greek crisis looks set to accelerate the process of integration, which means more centralisation, which means an almost complete loss of national sovereignty, of centuries of inherited tradition. It means all power to the Soviet-style technocrats of Brussels, a new kind of Orwellian state, based not on violence and intimidation but malign forms of repressive tolerance, of indifference to the popular will.

Make no mistake, democracy, meaningful democracy, in the sense of popular empowerment, is dying in Europe. We live under a tyranny far less representative, far less responsive, than that which outraged the American rebels of 1776. It really is time to take heed. Come, European people, stand up and let the storm break loose. :-)

Democracy made us nauseated

There is a museum in the town of Gori in Georgia dedicated to the life of its most famous son – Josef Stalin. So, all those nostalgic for the old Europe, the Europe of dictators and diktats, can head off in its general direction. Actually, if you are coming from the west, there is really no need to travel that far, either to the east or to the past. No, go to Belarus instead, where a tyrannical past is a living present, where Alyaksandr Lukashenko, the president, acts as something of a curator in a living Stalinist museum.

It’s all in place, a truly delightful reminder of times gone by; there are political prisoners aplenty, sudden arrests, show trails and a planned economy that, in the comforting old style, invariably overfull-fills shortages, a problem addressed by a flourishing black market.

Since last December’s fraudulent presidential election Lukashenko has been busy over-fulfilling the jails of Minsk with his former opponents, using the pretext of a bombing in the city’s subway in early April. A rather convenient excuse at that, a sort of Sergey Kirov Murder or Reichstag Fire moment, which has allowed the petty-tyrant to vilify not just his political opponents but democracy itself. “Before the elections”, he announced, “we had so much so-called democracy that it has made us nauseated.” Given the present condition of the country Belarus must be feeling so much better.

The show trails of people like Andrei Sannikov, a former diplomat who stood against the Stalin manqué in the election, are clearly intended as an entertainment, intended to distract people from the lamentable state of the economy. As the Economist reported, unable to sustain his pre-election promise to raise salaries, Lukashenka has been obliged to devalue the currency by as much as 30%, thereby wiping out the value of savings.

Oh, but it’s not his fault, he protests; no, it’s all the fault of foreigners who threaten Belarus from abroad, waging "a bitter information and political war" against the country. Who these wicked foreigners, the ghosts of Lukashenko’s febrile imagination, are is just a tad difficult to determine. Doubtless they include Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, who refused to sit in the same room as him during the recent Chernobyl commemoration in the Ukraine. Never at a loss for the most fitting kind of words, Lukashenko responded with a witty broadside: “I don’t want to talk about types like Barroso and other morons and arseholes and the like.”

Alas for this particular Stalinist moron and arsehole his world is moving in ever decreasing circles. Under threat from international human rights lawyers, busy gathering material for a real trial, the places he can go in safety diminish by the day. In the end we may find that old dictators never die; they simply fade into irrelevance, or into Minsk, which probably amounts to the same thing.

Zapping Clouds

I managed to catch that tub-thumping clot Hugo Chávez doing his bit in Copenhagen, looking every bit like the cheap gangster he so clearly is. He continues to ‘do his bit’ in Venezuela, his fiefdom, looking for scapegoats to explain away the miserable failure of his socialist tyranny, to explain away the fact that this oil-rich country is plagued by power cuts and water shortages.

There is a Chávez-style solution for the latter. Venezuelans have been told to stop singing in the shower, thus cutting down the time spent there. Meanwhile, El Comandante will fly with Cuban scientists, zapping clouds to make them rain. You think I’m joking? No, I’m not! He’s also warned Venezuelans to watch out for fat people, seemingly another cause of the country’s woes. The latter I take to be an indication that resources are being unequally distributed, the fatties getting more, a fair assumption when one looks at the presidential torso.

He’s a joke; his government is a joke, though some of his attempted scapegoating carries potentially serious consequences, including his admonition for the country to prepare for war with neighbouring Colombia. But the woes of Venezuela have nothing do with showering divas, fatties or Columbians and everything to do with the promotion of ‘Chavistas’ to important posts for which they are totally unfitted. Rubbish rots in the streets and inflation is now well into double figures. The inefficient command economy has encouraged a vibrant black market in a country that already has a horrific crime rate, with Caracas being one of the most violent cities on earth.

It’s the usual story with socialists and socialism everywhere, the usual story of geese and golden eggs, creating poverty where once was riches. To do this in a place like Venezuela really is some achievement. I suspect that Chávez would even turn El Dorado into the land of dust. Not much to sing in the shower about. :-))

Thinking about Burma

Will the military dictatorship in Burma, Myamnar, if you prefer, survive? An interesting question, I think. I would have to say that Burma shows the very same structural factors that have served to weaken democracy in Pakistan, on the other side of the Indian Subcontinent: it has a strong military tradition, a fairly weak civil society, and a fear of national disintegration. The situation in Burma is further complicated by a fear of outside intervention.

Remember, too, that Burma did not gain its independence by the same political process at work in India and Pakistan. Rather, it emerged as a result of the war against Japanese occupation, involving local Burmese as well as Allied forces. This mean that the significant leaders who emerged in 1945 all had a military, rather than a civilian background. It's one of history's ironies that the greatest of these leaders, Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, the voice of the democratic opposition, is also the iconic figure who has helped sustain the special place of the military in Burmese politics

This has also been supported, as I have said, by the relative weakness of civil society. During the days of British rule the native Burmese played very little part in managing day to day affairs, with administrators being recruited from among colonial Britons or Indians. Excluded from the civil service, the ethnic Burmese nevertheless formed an important part of the police and the army. Although an embryonic native middle-class was beginning to emerge in the course of the early twentieth century, it was almost completely wiped out in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Fear of national disintegration has roots in the early evolution of the Burmese state. In the two hundred years prior to the advent of the British in the 1820s, the Burmese kings had expanded their control out of the lowlands into areas inhabited by different ethnic and linguistic groups. The Shan, the Karen, the Arakanese, the Mon, the Chin, the Karenni and the Kachin, all non-Burmese speaking, now make up approximately one third of the total population, occupying two-thirds of the national territory. Fears that these centrifugal forces will destroy the integrity of the nation have been fueled by the long-standing insurgencies of the Shan and the Karen. The opportunity this might provide for foreign intervention has strengthened the army's sense of paranoia, creating a siege mentality and a persistent mood of xenophobia amongst the generals. As far as the military is concerned it is they who are the guardians of the nation, the one guarantee that Burma will survive as a unitary state