Hugo Chavez's Power | New Republic

7/29/2019 Hugo Chavez's Power | New Republic

1/5

13/03/13 2:46 PMThe Source of Huge Chavez's Power | New Republic

Page 1 of 5http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#

The Source of El Comandante's

Power

Hugo Chavez: The Source of HisPowerBY PAUL BERMAN

SIGN IN

OUR LATEST MUST-READS CURRENT ISSUE search...

SUBSCRIBE FOR $ 34.97/YEAR

OTHER STORIES FROM

M A R C H 1 2 , 2 0 1 3

BETHLEHEM SHOALS

The Era of BasketballDiplomacy

JONATHAN COHN

Paul Ryan Has LearnedNothing From His Loss

ELAINE SHOWALTER

Self-Reliance

MARCH 8, 2013HUGO CHAVEZ

Hugo Chvez, the man in the flesh, radiated a freakish degree of energy, as if

he were a nuclear reactor, and the freakish radiation had the effect of

leaving me startled by the news of his death. The reports of his medical

treatments over the past few months had not passed me by. And yet, I had met the

man, and, though the meeting was brief, it had left me convinced that mortalitys laws,

which are said to be universal, must surely have granted Hugo Chvez an exemption.

Cancer issued a decree, even so. It is a lesson to me. But the mans fatal illness does

not gainsay my experience and observations.

What do you think of the Sandinistas? was my question to him. The opportunity to

make this inquiry arose because, early in 2002, Chvez happened to be in New York,

where he delivered an address at New York University. The speech got started an

hour late, and it wended forward at luxurious length, and, as it proceeded, it seemed

to ascend ever higher toward some future fireworks combustion. He invoked an

impending world revolution. Venezuela was going to serve as fulcrum. History was

about to turn on a hinge. Only, the speech came to an end, even without the world

revolution having broken out, and the privileged portions of the audience made their

way to a social reception. And there, via the mysterious swirling motion of wine-

sipping crowds, I found myself, entirely by chance, face to face with the man himself.

My question about Sandinistas was a good one because, in the matter of Latin

American revolutionary projects, the Sandinistas of Nicaragua had served as Chvezs

immediate predecessors. They had come to power in 1979, and they enacted their

Sandinista Peoples Revolution, and, when everything was done and said, their

revolution had proved to be less than a successat least, in my own judgment. A

disaster, actually. But what was his own judgment?

Chvez was a short man, and I am of medium height. He gazed upward at me, and his

upward gaze conveyed the same intensity and power which, a few minutes earlier, he

had directed downward from his podium to the crowded rows of auditorium seats,

except with me as the entire audience this time. His cheeks had the magnificent

armored ualit that ou see in certain eo les ectoral muscles. He lowed. He

THE SOURCE OF EL COMANDANTE'S POWER
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112559/margaret-fuller-new-american-life-megan-marshallhttp://www.newrepublic.com/authors/elaine-showalterhttp://www.newrepublic.com/article/112643/paul-ryan-budget-2013-path-prosperity-looks-lot-last-onehttp://www.newrepublic.com/authors/jonathan-cohnhttp://www.newrepublic.com/article/112647/dennis-rodmans-trip-north-korea-era-basketball-diplomacyhttp://www.newrepublic.com/authors/bethlehem-shoalshttp://www.newrepublic.com/current-issuehttp://www.newrepublic.com/must-readshttp://www.newrepublic.com/latesthttp://www.newrepublic.com/user


2/5



Follow @tnr

The New

Republic

Like 57,488

. .

paused for an instant, perhaps in order to attune his ear to the peculiarities of my

Spanish syntax. And then the prow of his military torso appeared to surge forward

and upward in my direction, and he formulated his answer sharply and analytically,

and onward he plunged.

He admired the Sandinistas, he said. The Sandinistas had done a great thing. They had

taken up the grandest traditions of their own country, which meant the nationalist

cause of General Augusto Csar Sandino, a Nicaraguan rebel of the 1920s and 30s,

whose name the modern movement had adopted. But the Sandinistas had committed

an error. They had embraced Marxism. This had led to their downfall. I expressed

puzzlement. He explained that, in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas had ended up in conflict

with business. A conflict of this sort was not necessary. Here was the error. The

Sandinistas had also succumbed to the lures of corruption, a grave mistake.

His own movement in Venezuela, he went on, had profited from the Sandinista

experience, the good and the bad. His movement had taken its name and cause from

Simn Bolvar, the greatest of Venezuelas historic rebels. But Venezuelas Bolivarian

revolution, as led by Chvez, was not a Marxist undertaking. A conflict with business

was not required. And yethere he shifted the discussion to his own priority of the

momentVenezuela was caught up in a conflict, even so. It was because of the press,

which was plotting against the revolution. The people of Venezuela were going to

resist. He thought I should look into this.

A young Venezuelan journalist happened to be standing nearby, and the journalist,

on cue, assured me that, in Venezuela, the situation with the press was indeed

terrible, and the journalists were conspiring. Chvez himself wanted me to see for

myself. Wouldnt I visit him in Venezuela? He presented me to still another young man

at his side, his military aide, a rigid sentinel. The sentinel gave me his card. Such was

the conversation. It consisted of one question by me, with follow-ups, which he

answered fully and interestingly, and one speech by him, whose truth he wanted me

to investigate. His eyes studied my face the entire time, as if nothing else in the room

could possibly draw his attention.

I was struck by his commentary on the Sandinistas. The simplicity of his response

seemed to me an example of lucid thinking, or so I told myselflucidity, rather than,

as some people might suppose, the simplicity of a bumpkin of the barracks, or, as

other people might suppose, the faux-simplicity of a cagey deceiver. I had the

impression that Chvez had offered me a miniature display of his ability to sort out the

abstract political categories of national tradition, Marxist doctrine, and non-Marxist

revolution, together with the concrete matter of political corruption.

The schematic nature of the answer reminded me of the Sandinistas themselves. It was

the style of political leaders who are accustomed to think in broad abstractions

leaders whose power descends from their ability to theorize, instead of their ability to

solve practical problems or to glad-hand you to death. Chvezs presentation struck

me as crisper than anything I had ever heard from the Sandinistas, though. Sandinista

rhetoric was always a muddle, sometimes invoking Marxism, sometimes claiming to be

distant from Marxism, as if the true purpose of any given oration or document was to

allow you to project onto Sandinismo any doctrine that suited your tasteliberalism, if
http://www.facebook.com/thenewrepublichttp://www.facebook.com/thenewrepublichttps://twitter.com/intent/follow?original_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newrepublic.com%2Farticle%2F112630%2Fsource-huge-chavezs-power&region=follow_link&screen_name=tnr&tw_p=followbutton&variant=2.0


3/5



,

something more orthodox in the Moscow vein, if old-school communism happened to

be your predilection. But Chvezs answer about Marxism was clear.

Then the months and years went by, and, in the degree to which I paid attention to

his continuing statements and oratory, I began to notice a rhetorical change, which,

after a while, had him speaking about Marxism in an altogether admiring and public

way: Marxism as an inspiration, instead of an error. He offered a few words in favor of

Leon Trotsky. In the history of Marxist revolutions, this was an odditya distinctly

post-Soviet development, given that no one, during the reign of Soviet Communism,

would have dared put in a word for communisms principal heretic. Trotskys gift for

coming up with violent and dismissive phrases evidently appealed to him. And he took

to emphasizing his fidelity to Fidel Castroalways an element in Chvezs political

identity, but increasingly prominent in later years, until his displays of filial loyalty to

Fidel had surpassed anything you could have found among the Sandinistas, back in

the days of Sandinista ultra-radicalism. So Chvez, too, like the Sandinistas, turned out

to be rhetorically flexible. But I am not convinced that political manipulation or

seduction was invariably his goal.

He did have enemies, and the enemies plotted. This part of his message was, in

retrospect, indisputable. I should have taken him more seriously. A mere few months

after his chat with me, his enemies staged a coup against him, which was backed by

the George W. Bush administration and which failed anyway, in illustration of the

Bush administrations talent for botching whatever could be botched and reaping

odium at the same time. I could imagine why, after the coup attempt, Marxism might

have loomed more attractively in Chvezs eyes. Marxism was more assertively anti-

Yankee, by custom and by implication, than anything you could associate with the

name of Simn Bolvar. Marxism allowed him to identify the United States as a more of

an enemyan enemy by definition, instead of merely because of some regrettable

Washington policies.

On the other hand, Chvez also took to emphasizing his Christian inspirations, which

Fidel, as an orthodox communist, would never have done, and which Bolvar, as a

Free Mason, was not fond of doing, either. Christianity was a Sandinista theme,

though. During one of his long-winded Sunday homilies on the television show Al,

Presidente, Chvez announced that a vision had come to him, calling for a new

socialism, in the name of the Lord. Christ was a communist, said Chvezall of

which might suggest that manipulation or seduction was, in fact, his goal. Otherwise,

how to explain the doctrinal mishmash, pro- and anti-Marxist, Christian and Free-

Masonic (by Bolivarian implication), Venezuelan nationalist yet deferential to Cuba,

and always hazily millenarian?

Enrique Krauze wrote a book about Chvez a few years ago calledEl Poder y el Delirio,

or The Power and the Delirium, and Krauze puts his finger on it. The genuine influence

on Chvez, as Krauze lays it out, derived from Thomas Carlyle. Karl Marx was a

dreadful racist and, on racist grounds, despised Simn Bolvar, who was thought to

have a touch of non-European blood. But Carlyle admired BolvarCarlyle, the

celebrator of the heroes of history; Carlyle, the prose-poet, whose name does crop up

in the Venezuelan literature. Krauze in his book stops short of claiming that Chvez

had ever pored over Carlyles writings, but he insists on a Carlylean influence, even


4/5



so, an t s seems to me correct. For w at s erosm, n t e en ? Car y e wou say

that heroism is the ability to bend history, in one fashion or anotherthe power of a

political revolutionary such as Cromwell, for instance, but then again, the power of a

man of words, who bends the language.

Chvez had every intention of bending history. The power to mold world events was

beyond him, though. And so, he demonstrated his heroic qualities by bending the

Spanish language. Marxism, anti-Marxism, Christianity, nationalism, and what-have-you gave him endless supplies of tropes and themes, and his task was merely to string

it all together in sentences of mounting excitement. Orations were his heroic acts.

Other people are the slaves of language, but he was its master. He resembled Fidel and

not the Sandinistas in this respecteven if Fidels voice was or perhaps still is the voice

of a sullen and injured man, nursing his dignity, and Chvez preferred to boom and

declaim.

Orators of this sort, the emperors of language, do not exist in the English language,

except maybe in certain churches where the seventeenth century is still in vogue.

Even Churchill, even Martin Luther King, seem, by comparison, orators of modestrestraint. Nor has any English-language writer, Carlyle apart, captured what this sort

of rhetorical heroism is like. If you want to see a proper description, you have to turn

to Garca Mrquez, the author ofThe Autumn of the Patriarch, which says it all. Garca

Mrquezs dictator lives to be hundreds of years old, though. Honestly that is what I

expected of Hugo Chvez.

The man who stood in front of me commanded the energy of ten

men. He is said to have been, like Fidel, an excellent baseball

pitcher. During his oration in the auditorium, he waved aloft a

bound copy of his proposed new Venezuelan constitution, and he

looked capable of hurling it at the audience at 90 miles per hour.

His brain meanwhile juggled abstractions. His language was a

nuclear leak, gushing upward from a permanent Chernobyl.

During the whole of his conversation with me, not one person

among the many guests tried to join us or to interject a question,

which, at the time, astonished me. What, no interruptions? No signature-collectors,

protesters, Chavista fanatics, academic Latin Americanists? Half of New York City

speaks Spanish, which meant that language could not have been the impediment. I

think the conversation went on uninterrupted because anyone who glanced in

Chvezs direction as he spoke to me would have felt pushed away by the blast of themans energy, the way you might feel if you had opened the door to an overheated

boiler room.

One day I attended a talk by Henry Kissinger at the Asia Society in New York, where

the societys director, Orville Schell, asked Kissinger to describe his meetings with Mao

Zedong. Kissinger responded with ponderous gravity, as if freshly recalling to himself

every detail of his encounters, that Mao in the flesh conveyed a sense of enormous

power, something unusual. I was impressed by the comment, given that, during the

last half century and more, Kissinger has probably met most of the worlds most

powerful people. He meant, I believe, that Mao was someone of a different order

entirelynot a man like President Nixon or like the leaders of the Soviet Union, mere

politicians all, but someone freakishly powerful in his own person. Kissinger seemed


5/5



SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

SHOW ALL 5 COMMENTS

POLITICS

BOOKS

FILM

ECONOMY

TECHNOLOGY

WORLD

OUR LATEST

MUST READS

CURRENT ISSUE

TRB

JARGONIST

ONE MAN FOCUS GROUP

SUBSCRIBER SERVICES

ABOUT THE NEW REPUBLIC

ADVERTISE

JOBS AND INTERNSHIPS

CONTACT US

PRIVACY POLICY

GET THE NEW REPUBLIC FOR$34.97/YEAR

SUBSCRIBE NOW

MASTHEAD

FOLLOW @TNR ON TWITTER

LIKE THE NEW REPUBLIC ON F ACEBOOK

COPYRIGHT 2013 THE NEW REPUBLIC ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

never to have gotten over it. And, as he went on, I thought that, yes, here was Hugo

Chvez, as wella man without Maos achievements, to be sure, who stood at the helm

of a country that cannot compared with China in size and potential (except in its

possession of oil reserves), but a man, even so, unlike other men.

In Carlyles definition, a hero is someone in touch with the divine. This need not imply

anything good. Carlyle himself, a great writer, was a monstrous thinkeran intellectual

precursor of fascism. But the precursor of fascism succeeded, in his book on heroes

and heroism, in identifying a human or more-than-human type.

share this article onfacebookortwitter

READ THESE NEXT:

The Shah of Venezuela

Congressman Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts:

Pompous, Pretentious, Ineffective. Going The Way Of

Martha Coakley. Or Worse.

Obama a Socialist? Guilty by Association, Says

Romney Ad
http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/109577/obama-socialist-guilty-association-says-romney-adhttp://www.newrepublic.com/blog/the-spine/congressman-william-delahunt-massachusetts-pompous-pretentious-ineffective-going-the-http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books/the-shah-venezuelahttps://www.facebook.com/thenewrepublichttp://www.twitter.com/tnrhttp://www.newrepublic.com/page/mastheadhttp://www.newrepublic.com/signuphttp://www.newrepublic.com/page/privacy-policyhttp://www.newrepublic.com/page/contact-ushttp://www.newrepublic.com/page/jobs-and-internshipshttp://www.newrepublic.com/page/advertise-new-republichttp://www.newrepublic.com/page/about-new-republichttp://www.newrepublic.com/page/subscriber-serviceshttp://www.newrepublic.com/tags/one-man-focus-grouphttp://www.newrepublic.com/tags/jargonisthttp://www.newrepublic.com/tags/trbhttp://www.newrepublic.com/current-issuehttp://www.newrepublic.com/must-readshttp://www.newrepublic.com/latesthttp://www.newrepublic.com/tags/worldhttp://www.newrepublic.com/tags/technologyhttp://www.newrepublic.com/tags/economyhttp://www.newrepublic.com/tags/filmhttp://www.newrepublic.com/tags/bookshttp://www.newrepublic.com/tags/politicshttp://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#primary-formhttp://www.newrepublic.com/article/112630/source-huge-chavezs-power#primary-form

Hugo Chavez's Power | New Republic

Documents

Transcript of Hugo Chavez's Power | New Republic