The Real Venezuela: Making Socialism in the 21st Century by Iain Bruce
Pluto Press, £15.99
DAY after day, week after week and month after month the dishonest drivel pours out in the press and on the radio and television of the Western world about Venezuelans and the supposed dictatorship under which they live. It is inspired by the shadowy but often dim plotters of the governments of the United States and some of its allies: people in Washington’s ill-named National Endowment for Democracy, for instance, which supported the failed military coup against the elected government of President Hugo Chávez in 2002, and in Human Rights Watch, an American organisation which last year cobbled together a libel on the Venezuelan government.
This document was ridiculed by more than a hundred serious US scholars who said it was “politically motivated, as well as grossly exaggerated, based on unreliable sources, and advertising broad and sweeping allegations that are unsupported by the evidence.” The report stripped HRW, which claims to be independent, of credibility. Yet the effluent, which gives off the inescapable clinging odour of a piggery, continues to be produced and reproduced by journalists who can’t or won’t think for themselves.
These plotters and journalists are the same sort of people who push for action in the “war on terror” when their countries themselves – Britain, the US and Israel – are the principal sources of terror visited on a wide range of places from Gaza to Kabul. They are the ones who back the “war on drugs” which is scarcely less futile, cruel and unwinnable, and wink at their governments’ tolerance or promotion of the major drugs of alcohol and tobacco.
They are the sort of people – often adherents of bizarre Rocky Mountain caricatures of supposedly Christian belief – who promote the idea of a NATO, licensed to torture, as a defensive force against Islam and who try and hide the fact that this pact is the armed wing of a society whose financial, not to say moral, principles have been found wanting by a large swatches of voters in their own countries and around the world.
Yet the NEDs and the HRWs of this world have failed everywhere outside the US to convince the international community that Chávez is an illegitimate dictator. A succession of reputable scholars and authors are succeeding in turning off the taps of this nauseous effluent. The latest of these is Iain Bruce, a former Caracas correspondent for the BBC. With The Real Venezuela he has written a quirky and engaging book based largely on his experiences wandering around Chávez’ Bolivarian republic; it is his account of what he has seen, warts and all. It is neither the sort of tedious State Department/New York Times garbage which constantly excoriates the Venezuelans for not being like Uncle Sam but nor is it the uncritical panegyric beloved of those who think they are doing Chávez and the Venezuelans a favour by suspending their critical faculties about him and what he is trying to achieve.
Bruce presents a picture which is instantly recognisable to those of us who have seen attempts at social change at first hand. The process is always untidy, often unpredictable and frequently wavers between bureaucracy and a longing for the Arcadian.
He visits various chavista developments in worker control in agriculture and in industry, and witnesses the tension between those who want to see a new dawn and those who are worried at the prospect of doing things differently. Overall, he senses that no one is keen to do anything which would put in jeopardy the country’s earnings from oil exports. He writes of the efforts the leadership is making to fashion a new political party framework on the ruins of the old and he shows how Cuban experience is imparted to and received by Venezuelans. Will there be some radical extension of democracy or will society settle down to some form of subordination to existing power, he asks. And prudently concludes: “It looked as if it could go either way.”
Intriguingly, he shows how the impact of social changes in Venezuela is reaching round the world at the very moment when failed neo-liberalism breathes its last as its accompanying financial doctrines are being made literally bankrupt.
In Indonesia, Chávez’ example is being hailed by those who want to protect that country’s oil from foreign raiders. And in Egypt sellers of dates in the Cairo bazaar have got into the habit of grading the quality of their fruit by reference to well known public figures. The finest and sweetest are, he says, called “Nasrallah” after the leader of Hezbollah, with the “Chávez” grade following closely behind after Caracas kicked out Israel’s ambassador following that country’s atrocities committed against the Palestinians. The poorest and bitterest sorts, one is comforted to learn, are called “Bush”, “Blair” and “Olmert”. This book and its author are to be heartily recommended.
Hugh O’Shaughnessy
