Chávez Derangement Syndrome

By Al Giordano

Hat tip to Gawker, which narrates:

Surely you're wondering what Glenn Beck was up to tonight, no? Oh, the usual, you know, insinuating that Barack Obama is a communist dictator because he condemned the military coup in Honduras, just like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez did.

No, seriously, that's Glenn Beck logic in action for you. It really is as simple as this—A) FIdel Castro condemned the coup in Honduras. B) Hugo Chavez condemned the coup in Honduras. C) Barack Obama condemned the coup in Honduras. Therefore, Barack Obama is a communist dictator just like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.

And now you know.

Everyone knows that Fox News’ Glenn Beck is a TV clown. Probably Beck even knows it. In pursuit of ratings, anything goes; crying, screaming, pouting, whatever works to gain and keep the attention of the slow class. But what’s interesting is that pundits who consider themselves “serious” people suffer from the same twisted logic as appears in that video.

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer launched into this tirade on Fox News yesterday:

On Chávez, Krauthammer says: “Yes he was elected, but Hitler was as well, and Chávez also was elected.” Krauthammer also calls the coup "preferable" to letting Honduras' elected president remain in office. “Look, a rule of thumb here is whenever you find yourself on the side of Hugo Chávez, Daniel Ortega and the Castro twins, you ought to reexamine your assumptions."

That’s Krauthammer's “rule.” Let’s extend it: former armed insurgents (Ortega and Chávez) abandoned the violent path to change opting to participate in peaceful elections instead. Following Krauthammer’s “rule,” we ought to reexamine our belief in peaceful and democratic paths to change and go back to our all-American guerrilla roots (something that clown Glenn Beck has actually suggested on multiple occasions in his flirtations with right-wing militia movements and other such tea-bagging rhetoric).

Similarly, each of those leaders cited by Krauthammer provides low cost oil to poor citizens. Under “Krauthammer’s Law” we must certainly be for jacking up the price of home heating oil on poor and working people, simply because his obsessed-upon leaders do the opposite.

Each of those leaders condemned the war in Iraq long before the American people came around to the same point of view. They were right about that, and most people know that now. Well, Krauthammer’s Law, in this case, at least makes him consistent: he’s one of the last US pundits that wishes the war would be escalated and carried on permanently.

It is simply retarded to allow others to determine where one stands simply by always taking the reactive position: “If he’s for it, we must be against it.” Fortunately, most humans have evolved beyond that stage of the reptilian brain. It’s apparently going to take the Krauthammers more generations of breeding to catch up, I guess.

Right-wing columnist Mona Charen purports to pen a column on Honduras, which ends up being a screed about Venezuela’s Chávez in five of its six paragraphs. Her arguments in favor of the coup d’etat? That Honduras' elected president Manuel Zelaya is “a Hugo Chavez acolyte,” that Chávez is “a good teacher,” that Chávez’s words could come from “Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin,” and that “Chavez might end his days the way Benito Mussolini did.”

“When Barack Obama was asked about the book Chavez handed him last April, ‘Open Veins of Latin America,’ the president said he hadn't read it,” Charen concludes. “Now I'm not so sure.”

We can now add reading any book recommended by Hugo Chávez to the CDS crowd’s list of verboten and tyrannical activities.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal – who, in 2002, was a staunch supporter of the attempted military coup in Venezuela (her anti-democracy credentials are well polished) – is virtual mother lode of much Chávez Derangement Syndrome. Her column on Honduras this week began with two words: “Hugo Chávez.” She loves the Honduran coup because she sees it as “a setback” for Chávez. In other words, Honduras should be told what it can and can’t do based on how she thinks it will help or hurt the elected leader of a different country.

Still, she seems to know the jig is up on her beloved coup plotters: “It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.”

Got it? Violent military coup plotters who destroy TV and radio stations, cut down Internet access, and arrest reporters are “patriots” in the whacky jack-booted world of O’Grady.

Matt Drudge - always looking to pander to the nuttiest common denominator - is also in on the CDS act, as can be seen from this recent headline:

Chávez Derangement Syndrome isn’t restricted to the right side of the dial in US punditry and commentary. The corporate media has done a splendid brainwash job on many self-proclaimed “progressives” too.

Yesterday, when a DKos blogger with the handle of liberalminded posted an even-handed and thoughtful diary – A Daily Kos Primer on Hugo Chavez, Pt. 1 – he was subjected to comments like these:

Chavez, who uses and abuses the power of the state to destroy all opposition, is democratic?

(It’s not clear where that commenter gets his disinformation: If “destroy all opposition” is what Chavez is doing, he’s done it without putting a single political prisoner behind bars, to the forgiving extreme that even those generals and industrialists that engineered his kidnapping in 2002 are walking free in Venezuela. He never prosecuted any of them for a crime that had they done it in, say, the United States, they’d be in maximum security prison today, two cell doors down from the Unabomber. But sufferers of CDS never let the facts get in the way of their screeching undocumented claims. They seem to know that with the US corporate media spin at their sails, simply to repeat a big lie is to increase others' unfounded belief in it.)

The Chávez Derangement Syndrom was in full display at DKos on Saturday night when diarist TheSocialNavigator posted this grand example of disinfo: Venezuelan Troops Land in Honduras? (The question mark was something he only added after some cooler minds asked him to please document his fantastic claim.)

Obviously, the whole world knows, three days later, that Venezuelan troops did not land in Honduras. But claims like that do regularly bring the crazies out. Another DKos commentator replied, “Chavez is almost as clinically insane as Kim Jong Il.”

One of the most vehement CDS-sufferers on DKos goes by the handle of Deaniac20. If there is a diary or comment that mentions Chávez, he and a small group of the obsessed rush in to drool their unsubstantiated slogans. To the false news about a Venezuelan military invasion of Honduras, he wrote: “not only does he support Ahamdinejad, but he is launching another Central American war. Haven't there been enough of those in the last 30 years? I thought he was against ‘imperialism.’”

Of course, typical of the CDS afflicted, he didn’t correct his claim about "another Central American war" later on. When asked to correct his repeat of the big lie, he harrumphed: “no, I will call out tyranny whenever I see it.”

Like fellow sufferers of CDS, he’ll never be able to document that what he calls “tyranny” is tyranny. He never even tries. But that doesn’t stop the CDS patients from trying to hijack any discussion on Venezuela – and now, on a coup in Honduras – by making it about a leader that is separated from Honduras geographically by four countries (Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua) and a Caribbean sea.

Usually, when I get into these discussions with some colleagues on the left who are uneasy with Chávez it becomes immediately clear that they haven’t visited Venezuela (I've reported from there extensively), and they know little-to-nothing about how brutally authoritarian the country was before Chávez was first elected in 1998. Prior to then, there was daily government censorship of newspapers, a 1989 massacre that assassinated as many as 3,000 peaceful protesters, and large numbers of political prisoners in the country's jails. But since 1998, Venezuelan newspapers, including many vehement opposition dailies, publish without censorship (Chávez eliminated the government office dedicated to that task), protesters are allowed to march freely against the government and there are zero political prisoners in the country. Those, to me, are pretty clear markers of greater freedom. What it comes down to, if you question them and listen to them, is that they are uncomfortable by his military background and by his working-class charisma. That’s pretty thin gruel on which to base claims of “dictatorship” or “authoritarian” tendencies.

Chávez, outspoken to a fault, doesn’t always help the situation (as recently when he unconditionally backed his fellow OPEC leader Ahmadinejad in Iran) but when it comes to policies and actions that the Venezuelan president does have power over – those in Venezuela – he’s a shining democrat and civil libertarian compared to every previous Venezuelan president, and he has advanced his country in the direction of greater liberties, not fewer. CDS sufferers are unwilling or incapable of making a comparison between Venezuela under Chávez and Venezuela before he arrived.

I was recently at a seminar in Boston and during the Q & A session I mentioned that, “there are zero political prisoners in Venezuela.” Three or four people there snapped their heads around and yelled, “that’s not true!”

“Oh, yeah?” I replied. “Name one!”

Their heads fell and they looked away in silence. It was clear that they had no idea but simply presumed it to be the case because of how they have been conditioned to view Venezuela and Chávez by a very distorting corporate media lens and the shenanigans of some “human rights” simulators like the serially dishonest grandstander Jose Vivanco of Human Rights Watch.

Part of the problem comes from the reach of the “oligarch diaspora” in the United States: typically, if an English-speaking person knows only one or two Latin Americans, they are typically English-speaking members of an upper class – the kind that US immigration authorities do allow in the country – that come from a very calcified and gated culture; one that fears and resents the rise of center-left democracies in the hemisphere with great irrationality. Many weak minded North Americans tend to take what one or two friends say as gospel and when combined with ratifying corporate media coverage they lose all ability to question their underlying assumptions and gullibilities.

A poster boy for the Latin American elite (indeed, he has made a career out of it) is the prominent “junior,” Alvaro Vargas Llosa. Note that he eliminated his mother’s last name from his own in order to be known as the son of the famed literary author. His column in today’s New York Times – purportedly about Honduras – is titled: The Winner Is Chávez.

Um, hello? I thought we were talking about a coup d'etat and a lot of violence that is happening right now in Honduras.

The junior Vargas Llosa laments:

“The coup leaders, who were trying to prevent Mr. Chávez from bringing Honduras into his fold, may end up giving him more strength in the region.”

In other words, Chávez has become a psychological place marker (much like Iran, in different ideological circles) for the fallen Soviet: the Cold War superpower around which all US policy was reactive. It’s a desperate and silly psychology, since Venezuela, a country of 23 million people (smaller than California) is not by any measuring stick a superpower on that scale, and it’s military is a fraction of the size of that in the US.

Reasonable people can agree to disagree on how favorably or negatively they view Chávez, but when he becomes an obsession, the determinative factor on viewing events in other lands, that’s just plain crazy. It is Glenn Beck crazy. And today, regarding a different country, Honduras, Chávez Derangement Syndrome is being manipulated to justify a bloody coup d’etat.

Update: The United Nations General Assembly has just passed a unanimous resolution condemning the coup in Honduras and demanding the return of President Manuel Zelaya to the post the people elected him to hold.