This gesture is also one that is incredibly problematic, for it reproduces the historic and unequal colonial dynamic of centre and margin, just with a progressive political face. As the West has used the developing world "other" for centuries to define itself, as what it is not, so again this system exists in the Che Complex: while we, for whatever reasons, cannot effectively battle the forces of capitalism and corruption in the metropole, our brown brothers and sisters in the outré-mer can...
>... ...The current fetish of Hugo Chavez in the developed world
strikes me as an aspect of the same phenomenon. I always think that a
good test of politics is to measure it upon yourself: a self-test. For
instance, what would American leftists feel if they found themselves
at odds with a presidential administration, and exercised their
democratic right to request a recall election. Then, after much
hemming and hawing and protesting and pressure on the part of the
government, the election took place, favourable to the administration
but with dubious and unverifiable results (confirmed by international
observers with their eyes more on the unstable price of oil than
democratic irreugularities; in other words, brought to you by the same
people who confirmed an Ohio win for Bush). And subsequent to
"winning" the election, the administration then obtained a list of
those voters who had signed the petition for recall, and distributed
the list publicly, and began to bar these voters from civil services
(such as the right to a passport or the ability to obtain foreign
currency), discriminate against them in government and university
employment, and began calling these voters by name on television and
in the press traitors, oligarchs, coup plotters, squalid ones, and
prosecuting them for treason in courts packed with judges selected for
their loyal politics to the regime. Would that be OK?
Well, that is exactly what has happened in Venezuela. The veil of the Che Complex excuses these "excesses" from censure by Western leftists. "Venezuela is different!" we hear. How is Venezuela, or any developing world nation that different? People in Venezuela and other developing world countries aren't from Mars, after all. "They have critical poverty!" we are told. Well, there is a lot of critical poverty in the USA. "There is an extreme difference between the have and the have-nots, and an oligarchy that controls business and the press!" people say. How would one describe the USA any differently?
The depressing truth is that Chavez represents the flip side of the criminal administration we currently have here in the USA in its rapaciousness and ideological excesses, and the love affair the global Left has for him is symptomatic of its intellectual exhaustion more than anything else. Didn't we get enough of this with Fidel? We need to wake from our Che Complex dreams, and dedicate ourselves to forthrightly and deliberately fixing our own world (as opposed to transferring our utopian fantasies onto others in a colonial modality), and rebuilding effective leftist strategies, effecting change here as well as there (for after all, Chavez does not emerge sui generis, he represents a true crisis in Venezuelan society, as Bush represents a true crisis in American democracy). What we need is more thinking, and less compulsory and knee-jerk hero-worship. For in the words of Tina Turner, we don't need another hero.