Hugo Chavez Esta Muerta
Time Magazine amazes me this morning. It prints one of the most intelligent and thoughtful descriptions of who and what Venezuelan Dictator Hugo Chavez was during his brief, frightening and frenetic life.
Chávez called himself a “21st century socialist.” In reality he was a throwback to the dogmatic and authoritarian 20th century socialism of Castro, Cuba’s former dictator, and to the 19th century caudillo tradition of Chávez’s demigod, South American independence hero Simón Bolívar. Chávez hoped that being democratically elected would obscure the fact that he didn’t govern all that democratically. It didn’t. So it’s tempting to dismiss him as an anachronism, a vulgar populist famous for gratuitous yanqui bashing — for calling then U.S. President George W. Bush a malodorous “devil” at the U.N. in 2006 — an erratic and messianic retro-revolutionary whose country’s vast petrowealth let him indulge his Marxist nostalgia.
For many, Hugo Chavez was a living, breathing throwback to the Cold War Era. A fitting reminder of how dead, backwards and bereft of original thought the so-called Progressives truly are. This was their icon, their Homo Universale. Ecce Homo! That man was Hugo Chavez.
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