Elisabeth Young-Bruehl article in The Nation online (17 August 2007, <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070827/young_bruehl>), "Reading Arendt in Caracas,"* is very much in line with The Nation's previous anti-Chavez article: Joaquín Villalobos, " Revolution in Venezuela?" The Nation, 9 July 2007, <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070709/villalobos> (see, also, letters to The Nation regarding this article: <http://www.thenation.com/bletters/20070709/villalobos/2/revdate>). It is surely the case that Chavez and Chavistas are not liberal in the way that Arendt** and her fellow New York intellectuals would have desired and many petit-bourgeois university students in Venezuela and The Nation magazine do today. Good for Venezuela. No authentic social revolution in the interest of the poor majority can be a politically liberal one, least of all in the global South.
* The title of the article is a variation of Azar Nafisi's _Reading Lolita in Tehran_ which has been incisively criticized by Hamid Dabashi: "Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire," Al-Ahram Weekly (No. 797), 1-7 June 2006, <http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm>. Recall, also, that Dabashi, too, was attacked in The Nation recently for his failure to toe the liberal party line: Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, "The Iranian Impasse," 16 July 2007, <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070716/afary/3>.
** Reuven Kaminer says that Arendt's worst writings -- about the faulty concept of "totalitarianism" -- have been lauded while her best ones -- skepticism about Zionism -- have been ignored: <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/kaminer150807.html>. -- Yoshie