Hugo Chavez, real threat?

[Sapiens]

http://fuerzasolidaria.org/WebFS/Mul...enazaReal.html

Can someone translate the main point?

[Rajiv]

Re: Hugo Chavez, real threat?

Seems to be from right wing opposition to Chavez

From Babelfish


Documentary of 23 minutes elaborated by the Salvadoran Chapter of the civil association Shared in common Force. It explains the international project of Hugo Chavez and its serious repercussions for the region, showing the diverse aspects: bonds with the guerrilla, nexuses with the Islamic terrorism, relations with the drug trafficking; everything financed with the resources of state the oil Venezuelan. The documentary one was presented/displayed the 30 of June of 2008 in the main Salvadoran television channels.

[Guest]

Re: Hugo Chavez, real threat?

Rajiv - can you elaborate on what your impression is of this characterization? "Right Wing" carries the connotation that this news source is here indulging in mere propaganda. I skimmed through it - the distaste for Chavez is entirely evident, but it strikes me most of the points are quite factual. When you consider that he's muzzled every last independent news source openly critical of him at home, and is in the process of masticating and swallowing even the banking system to become an appendage of "his party" (translates as "to become another appendage of the Chavez personally), one might understand any independent documentary conducted from outside the country by Venezuelans could at this point indulge a mild degree of exasperation while escaping the disdainfully applied pejorative of "right wing"?

In fact the documentary remains reasonably professional in narration - it merely documents (very briefly) his use of Venezuelan oil money to dsmantle all the imperfect but still pre-existing constitutional checks upon his power, to move ever closer to complete "proletarian" control - (translate that as complete control by Chavez alone), to interpret the so-called, rhetorically enunciated "Bolivarian Revolution" to his own quirky, authoritarian and catastrophically economically illiterate liking. Nothing many of us didn't already know and already largely accept. If this is now considered merely "Right Wing" then we are at a sorry state of dumbed down political polarization as observers of the event.

As observers we are more fortunate than the protagonists. It behoves us and is incumbent on us therefore to make due scrupulous acknowledgment that the great majority of this documentary's assertions are quite factual. Really. No fluff, or taking notable liberties with facts there that I could spot.

How about according them the minimal dignity of the description : "last remaining opposition to Chavez"? :p

Seems to be from right wing opposition to Chavez

From Babelfish


Documentary of 23 minutes elaborated by the Salvadoran Chapter of the civil association Shared in common Force. It explains the international project of Hugo Chavez and its serious repercussions for the region, showing the diverse aspects: bonds with the guerrilla, nexuses with the Islamic terrorism, relations with the drug trafficking; everything financed with the resources of state the oil Venezuelan. The documentary one was presented/displayed the 30 of June of 2008 in the main Salvadoran television channels.

[Rajiv]

Re: Hugo Chavez, real threat?

The video was produced by and is featured on the web site Fuerza Solidaria, the party of Alejandro Peņa Esclusa -- who is a leader of the right wing opposition to Chavez.

Here is a wiki in Italian for you to read
Alejandro Peņa Esclusa

From a Babelfish translation

Alejandro Excluded Peņa (1954) is a Venezuelan politician, leader of the party Fuerza Solidaria.

In 1998 he was candidate to presidential in Venezuela, collecting a total of 2.424 equal ballots to 0.04%.

Member of the schism Tradition, Family and Property, movement pro-fascist, that it only allows the income to those who they demonstrate of being of pure ariana race.

The schism would have been organizzatrice of attacks [1] against Giovanni Paul II during its travel to Caracas 13 November 1984, and to the president of the United states, Ronald Reagan, as a result of which the schism has been declared outlaw in Venezuela, France, Spain and Argentina, countries where mainly it was radicata.

The 11 you open them 2002, Excluded Peņa participates to the tried coup d'3etat in Venezuela.

Alle last Venezuelan, svoltesi presidential elections in 2006, has been hurled against the head of the opposition Manuel Rosales, in order to have declared own defeat in the comparisons of the president Hugo Chavez. In its political program they puts into effect today supports the violent upsetting of the Latin American governments of centre-left and the return of military dictatorships. Between its referring politicians there are American neoconservatori atmospheres and the party of ultraright of El Salvador, Arena.

Also from a La Rouche site article

As LaRouche observed April 9, "We have not yet gotten to the bottom of the Nazi connections behind the late dictator Pinochet from Chile. The Nazi is dead, but Nazism is not. And we see this in the attacks coming from various quarters on President Bachelet, which are obviously coming from the undead fascists of the Nazi tradition of the late dictator Pinochet"

LaRouche added that these are people who may be in cahoots with a filthy character from Caracas, Venezuela, Alejandro Peņa Esclusa. Peņa, a former member of the LaRouche organization, subsequently became an advocate of the Pinochet dictatorship and associated with Pinochet's circles in the 1990s, and is now associated closely with the fascists in Spain and Italy, as well as the U.S. and his own country.

[Guest]

Re: Hugo Chavez, real threat?

Rajiv - I did not spend any time trying to locate the sponsor / author of the documentary. I merely watched the documentary instead, which is what Sapiens requested someone do. The documentary's assertions are entirely factual, to the best of my understanding. Hence you have the curious combination of an acknowledged unsavory "right wing political activist" finding that his most effective propaganda against Chavez is a mere enumeration of the facts recounting Chavez' career, which presents a very interesting insight into the quality of Chavez as an emancipator. That part I surmise you conclude differently, as I've never read you explicitly endorse the fact that Chavez' is truly his own worst enemy as his Curriculum Vitae so easily provides ready material to right wing documentaries (let alone BBC documentaries) "agitating" against his fitness to lead (otherwise known as "rule absolutely" in Chavez-speak).

With regard to employing LaRouche quotes exposing Nazist sympathizers, which has the added dividend of burnishing LaRouche's 'credentials" as a potential source - please be very much on your guard to implicitly concluding that this provides LaRouche with any credentials at all. His admixture of copiously distributed pure paranoid fantasy with generous dollops of imaginatively assembled true facts provides a truly treacherous playground within which to extract data for any conscientious thesis. The fact that you find it permissible, let alone prudent, to draw from any vestigial scrap of Larouche's writing in the service of your arguments is a matter of some notable surprise to me. I may be fundamentally misunderstanding your method, and I of course have very high regard for your keen intelligence and irreproachable personal scruple, but anyone who feels they can "pick and choose" pieces of data from LaRouche without eventually treading on some large ethical land-mines either holds their own powers of discrimination in too high regard (i.e. is far too self confident of their unerring acuity) or is merely being extraordinarily naive.

One of my parents was a political journalist covering among other things terrorism and the Mafia for 45 years from a European perspective. They spent two and a half years exhaustively researching and then writing a book on the assassination of premier Aldo Moro in Italy by the Red Brigades, and the intelligence they gathered was deemed solid enough to have been incorporated as part of the Italian State's findings after five to seven years deliberations on that murder. Among the copious volumes of paranoid tripe which Mr. LaRouche parlayed in the tract quoted by Sapiens on another thread, there was a casual reference (otherwise known as yet another bald and paranoiac LaRouche assertion) that the Moro kidnapping and murder were instigated by a shadowy group loosely bundled with illuminati-like interests, and the Red Brigades were the mere pawns of this event.

Having been intimately apprised of the detailed investigation of that Moro murder at that time, this colorful assertion of LaRouche's immediately jumped off the page as an example of the astonishing degree of neurotically inspired impunity with which LaRouche drags in innumerable references to things he has probably never studied one jot, to lend rich "background color" to better weave his paranoid tapestries. His tactic is to overawe the reader with the sheer volume of historically fantasized assertions which he throws into his screeds. There is so much of this type of detail crammed in there one merely throws one's hands up in exasperation and says he either must have been the world's most prodgious and brilliant scholar or the world's most prodigious and totally un-brilliant fantasist. I get the impression from the way you've referenced him a couple of times that you have a little bit of confusion as to which of these two possibilities is the right judgement call.

I read desultorily through the long "treatise " of LaRouche's which Sapiens posted in "Rant & Rave", and it was only on the few instances I actually knew something about, such as events and personages he referenced in Italy in the second half of the 20th Century when I actually was a direct observer, where I saw first-hand the LaRouche method at work. A blizzard of bald assertions, assembled in such "largesse" and quantity that most people merely surrender from the task of confirming any of it and the mind abdicates into conspiracism, which is exactly where LaRouche wants to take you.

I note this much only: Your own caliber of contributions here is always very high, leaving me predisposed to often give you the benefit of the doubt. I am in fact one of your biggest fans here. Your characterization of the above documentary is (as usual) accurate, it is indeed then a "Right Wing" source. What it is not however (surprisingly!), is "propaganda", because the actual content of this documentary is indeed quite factual. However I have a faint suspicion that you would regard several of it's assertions as "not factual" but rather merely to be attempts at "character assassination" of Chavez. I won't go there as I have no desire to change your viewpoints on Chavez' merits as an emancipator, nor enter into any political polemic, and I'm sure you don't either. I do however have to advise you, that insofar as you and Sapiens have a predilection for quoting LaRouche, you do more damage to your overall stature than if you had dropped a dirty neutron bomb on your entire, scrupulously and assiduously constructed good reputation. That is the extent to which I despise this man's (copious) "research". Quote him at your own peril.

LaRouche is worse than merely a cesspool. He is a "disinformationist", a man whose allegiances to any discernible principles across the decades have been as slippery as an eel's. This parent of mine who was a very good investigative journalist for 45 years, told me they'd come repeatedly across LaRouche's writings over the decades while covering international crime syndicates, and that LaRouche's toxic brew of systematic disinformation left them genuinely wondering at times whether this man had ever been employed by any agencies precisely for that obfuscatory function. Quite apart from what this relative advised me about him, even way back in the 1970's, and 1980's, the fact that you seem to have no particular compunction about quoting him on occasion is something I find more than a bit stunning Rajiv. That Sapiens should quote him I find frankly unsurprising. That you should feel no compunction to quote him calls into question the entirety of your otherwise outstanding demonstrated intelligence and finely tuned sense of scruple in so many other directions. I can't quite believe you find he passes any smell test.

As far as I'm concerned, the documentary above about Chavez could have been written by the devil himself. If it's contents is factual a scrupulous reader acknowledges it to be so, based on a whole host of other freely available data evidencing Chavez's progress in systematically dismantling all vestiges of opposition and bi-party rule in Venezuela (legislature, toothless opposition in congress, castrated free press, free public petroleum entity to serve as his personal cash cow, etc). To pick and choose what one chooses to believe about Chavez depending on the ideological credentials of the documentary's author, regardless of the essential factuality of the report is an ideologically biased method of inquiry which I don't share with you. Of course I assume that, and I may be entirely wrong and you see it the way I do. The authors here could be paramilitary right wing death squads. If I can watch the documentary and find all the information is scrupulously factual, it passes my personal smell test.

LaRouche is another matter entirely as a source. He is beyond the merely ideological, ranging far into the most colorfully toxic / psychotic. At least that is my most considered view.

Respectfully.

[ P.S. - Apologies for yet another "long post"! ]

[oddlots]

Re: Hugo Chavez, real threat?

Haven't taken the time to watch documentary... so maybe this is annoying... but just thought I'd post a couple of blogs that I find helpful sorting out Labyrinth of Lat Am politics:

First is an analyst based in Lima who posts some thoughtful stuff about Lat Am economics and who constantly points up how bad the North American press is at actually getting the facts right about Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela... all of it.

http://www.incakolanews.blogspot.com/

Takes - to my view - a constructive view towards the socialist bent in Latin America as a predictable reaction to largely unsuccessful Neo-liberal policies.

He highlighted this blog which, if nothing else, is a very funny running commentary on the distorted view of Chavez served up in the MSM.

http://www.borev.net/

I follow Ecuador's politics closely for investment reasons and, if that's anything to judge by, the chances of anyone understanding what's going on in Venezuela while relying on the MSM seems about nil.

Don't have time to find it but I believe BoRev took on the accusation that Chavez had shut down the Opposition press.