Ian Buruma, an Anglo-Dutch writer, is one of the most powerful minds among contemporary political journalists. It is a sign of his good standing on the left that the New York Review of Books will still publish him. That observation notwithstanding, he is an independent thinker. He has a piece in the London Times Online on the left's persistent infatuation with anti-Western dictators.
When the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas managed to escape to the US in 1980, after years of persecution by the Cuban government for being openly homosexual and a dissident, he said: “The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.”
One of the most vexing things for artists and intellectuals who live under the compulsion to applaud dictators is the spectacle of colleagues from more open societies applauding of their own free will. It adds a peculiarly nasty insult to injury.
Stalin was applauded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Mao was visited by a constant stream of worshippers from the West, some of whose names can still produce winces of disgust in China. Castro has basked for years in the adulation of such literary stars as Jose Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Even Pol Pot found favour among several well-known journalists and academics.
Last year a number of journalists, writers and showbiz figures, including Harold Pinter, Nadine Gordimer, Harry Belafonte and Tariq Ali, signed a letter claiming that in Cuba “there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959 . . .”
Arenas was arrested in 1973 for “ideological deviation”. He was tortured and locked up in prison cells filled with floodwater and excrement, and threatened with death if he didn’t renounce his own writing. Imagine what it must be like to be treated like this and then read about your fellow writers in the West standing up for your oppressors.
Buruma points out what I have been arguing in posts on this subject: that much of the intellectual leadership of the contemporary left has a fondness for communists dictators, and especially for the "third world" variety. I do not think that this fondness is widely shared by liberals, and certainly not by rank and file Democrats. But it is pervasive among leftist academics (that's not quite redundant) as well as writers, artist, etc.
Some have responded to this criticism of communists chic by wondering what the fuss is about. Communism is largely a thing of the past, no? Why dwell in the past? Buruma has an answer.
None of this is news, and would hardly be worth dredging up if the same thing were not happening once more. Hugo Chavez, the elected strongman of Venezuela, is the latest object of adulation by western “progressives” who return from jaunts in Caracas with stars in their eyes. . . .
As [Tariq] Ali, the ubiquitous applauder of Third World blowhards, put it: “Democracy in Venezuela, under the banner of the Bolivarian revolutionaries, has broken through the corrupt two-party system favoured by the oligarchy and its friends in the West.” But whether the corrupt two-party system will be replaced by a functioning democracy is the question.
Ali was lavish in his praise of Venezuela’s new constitution, which allows people to recall the president before he has completed his term of office. “A triumph of the poor against the rich,” he called it. In 2004 Venezuelans exercised their right to do just that by circulating a petition for a referendum. Chavez survived, but soon the names of the petitioners were made public, and anti-Chavistas were denied passports, public welfare and government contracts.
In 2004 a law was passed that would ban broadcasting stations on the grounds of security and public order. Chavez, as well as his cabinet ministers, appears on television to denounce journalists who dare to criticise the revolution. Most ominous, though, is the way Chavez has expanded the 20-seat supreme court by adding 12 sympathetic judges.
To Buruma's list of cheerleaders I would add Ramsey Clark, Attorney General of the United States under LBJ, who currently serves on Saddam Hussein's defense team. To be fair, it is not quite communism that turns Clark on. It is hostility to the United States in particular, and Western Civilization in general. Any enemy of ours, no matter how murderous or repressive, is a friend of his.
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