By FRANCISCO TORO
MONTREAL
— He came to power in the late 1990s, his energetic governing style
ushering in an era of increasing prosperity that earned him plenty of
goodwill. Luck also helped some: his rule coincided with an era of
rising oil prices, and he used the petrodollars that flooded the state’s
coffers to finance a dizzying consumption boom throughout the country.
This helped him maintain his popularity even as urban elites became more
and more disillusioned with his autocratic streak, deepening
militarism, rampant corruption and his disdain for the traditional
hallmarks of democracy.
Vladimir Putin? Hugo Chávez? Both fit the
description. Yet while many in the West tend to see through the thin
veneer of democracy that Putin has pasted over his autocratic rule of
Russia, they fail to see the Venezuelan version so clearly. Why is that?
For the last 12 years, I’ve been
writing about the accelerated collapse of constitutional government in
Venezuela, about the alarming cult of personality surrounding Chávez,
about his lack of regard for civil rights, due process of law and the
separation of powers. Online, where readers can post comments to my
articles, they nearly always come forward to defend the Chávez
government, noting its electoral legitimacy and undoubted popularity.
Sometimes they hint darkly that I must be an agent of imperialist
corporate media and have a subversive agenda. I seldom see this kind of
push-back in reaction to reports about the eerily similar Putin regime.
I
think the difference is partly a matter of marketing. Chávez’s cheerful
tropical anti-imperialism has an allure that Putin’s scowling Slavic
strongman persona will always lack. Partly, too, the difference has to
do with the demand for left-wing posturing among the Western elites that
are disgusted by the policy catastrophes in Iraq, on Wall Street and in
Greece.
But I also think that views of Chávez and Putin diverge
because of a phenomenon the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner calls
“Third Worldism”: the subconscious drive of Westerners to infantilize
the global South by mythologizing it and projecting fantasies onto
peoples rendered exotic by distance and a history of oppression.
According to Bruckner, Western leftists see the world as a confrontation
between “a spontaneous, sentimental and just Third World” and a West
that is “rapacious and cruel.” Chávez has been expertly exploiting this
interpretative shortcut for years. But it’s a trick that the rulers of
Russia — a country more or less seen as part of the rapacious and cruel
West anyway — haven’t mastered.
“It is because they are said to be
underdeveloped that the African, Indian and Chinese are better than us;
they are not ‘backward’ but premature,” Bruckner writes in his
brilliantly iconoclastic essay “The Temptation of Innocence: Living in
the Age of Entitlement.” “Their backwardness is really an advance, for
they are still in touch with the origins of the world at a time when we
are already in the twilight.”
For Bruckner, the sympathy that
radical leaders like Chávez receive from Western progressives is an
extension of the colonial mindset. When it lionizes figures like Che
Guevara — whose record is more mixed than is commonly accepted — the
Western left is implying that the people of the global South should be
happy with standards of civil liberty well below those it would consider
acceptable for itself.
Being infantilized, being told that we
Southerners have no right to expect the civil liberties that First World
progressives take for granted, being asked to tolerate authoritarianism
— this is what I’m confronted with just about every time I write about
Venezuela for an audience outside Venezuela. Go on, add a comment below:
I’m sure there’ll be some of that push-back this time, too.
Ah, if only I’d been born Russian…
Francisco Toro blogs about the Chávez era at CaracasChronicles.com.
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