Chomsky’s Words Will Not Stop The Revolution
by Rick Gunderman
“Speaking to the Observer last week, (MIT professor and noted political analyst Noam) Chomsky has accused the socialist leader (Hugo Chavez) of amassing too much power and of making an ‘assault’ on Venezuela’s democracy.” –The Guardian, UK
Accompanied by a photo of President Chavez riding a horse and pointing skyward, flanked by three llanero-looking individuals, the UK’s Guardian ran an article entitled “Noam Chomsky denounces old friend Hugo Chávez for ‘assault’ on democracy”.
Aside from being an exhaustingly typical example of editoralizing through photographs, the article proceeds to go in depth on how Noam Chomsky’s friendship with Hugo Chavez (“Hugo Chávez has long considered Noam Chomsky one of his best friends in the west”) has been compromised by the imprisonment of Venezuelan judge María Lourdes Afiuni, head of the 31st Control Court of Caracas.
The Guardian’s explanation of why Afiuni was jailed:
“Afiuni earned Chávez’s ire in December 2009 by freeing Eligio Cedeño, a prominent banker facing corruption charges. Cedeño promptly fled the country.”
Not a word more of detail, but conspicuously followed by:
“In a televised broadcast the president, who had taken a close interest in the case, called the judge a criminal and demanded she be jailed for 30 years. “That judge has to pay for what she has done.””
The casual reader could be forgiven for concluding that Afiuni’s detention was totally arbitrary and without cause.
Imagine if, in the Conrad Black case, or the Scooter Libby trial, a judge had not only allowed the accused to slip out of the back of the courthouse so they could escape to Mexico, but had personally summoned the accused for a hearing without notifying the prosecutor, all in order to allow the escape.
The judge would be arrested for assisting a fugitive, at the very least.
This is analogous to what happened in Venezuela. Eligio Cedeño, the prisoner illegally released by then-Judge Afiuni, was a Venezuelan banker arrested in 2007 for allegedly circumventing government currency rules to gain U.S. dollars. To the tune of $27 million USD. Cedeño is now living it up in Miami (no explanation necessary there).
According to Edward Ellis of Correo del Orinoco International (which, unlike the Carr Institute, actually operates in Venezuela):
“While it is true that Cedeño had indeed been held beyond the stipulated time for pre-trial detentions, it is also true that Afiuni’s rogue actions were made in violation of all judicial protocols and legal procedures. In fact, hundreds of trials in Venezuela fall victim to bureaucratic slow downs and judicial delays that prevent the timely delivery of justice in the country.”
And in fact, the judicial system managed to secure Afiuni’s arrest without any intervention from Chavez, although the Guardian would have it framed otherwise. Chavez went on television condemning corruption in the justice system, used Afiuni’s case as an example, and described how she would be punished, i.e. how the legal system works, which a president certainly ought to know. To the Guardian, this is proof of Chavez’s tyrannical ways.
Nor would Chomsky have us believe Venezuela’s judicial system is impartial:
“I’m sceptical that [Afiuni] could receive a fair trial. It’s striking that, as far as I understand, other judges have not come out in support of her … that suggests an atmosphere of intimidation.”
To Noam Chomsky, the lack of judges willing to speak out in favour of a corrupt public official who helped a known criminal escape justice must be a sign of the impending realization of Chavez’s totalitarian agenda. Implicitly, we should have expected this. All socialist countries destroy democracy and succumb to Stalinism sooner or later.
If one continues through the list of international human rights groups joining in the chorus of anti-Chavez voices that makes up the rest of the Guardian’s article, one arrives at the much-lauded Chomsky letter.
Helpfully enough, he sets off the Leninist reader’s radar in the second sentence by referring to the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University as the source of his alarm over Afiuni’s detention. The Canadian reader would be interested to know that the Carr Centre was headed from 2000-2005 by our very own Michael Ignatieff, former Liberal Party leader and open admirer of American imperialism.
Following this vain attempt to establish institutional credibility, Chomsky gets on his high horse and begins shedding crocodile tears for Afiuni’s situation. She has been in prison for a little over a year, and on top of having cancer was a single mother. Indeed, nobody doubts that this is a bad situation to be in. With poor health and young children to care for, one wonders why Afiuni would put herself in the business of assisting fugitives.
Chomsky and the Guardian fail to mention that even among the bureaucratic mess that is the judicial system the Attorney General managed to intervene to have her transferred first to isolation from the general population to ensure her safety (she was sharing a cell block with inmates she had sentenced) then to house arrest so she could receive cancer treatment. Some “cruelty”.
Nor is it evidently worth noting that neither Afiuni nor Cedeño were known to be supporters of the opposition, which compromises the claim that this is a case of political persecution.
Communists should not take lightly the influence that Noam Chomsky has on the petit-bourgeois left. His books are widely available at Chapters and Indigo (why capitalist publishers would print literature with true subversive potential, and why capitalist bookstores would sell them is a rather glaring contradiction), and every university has one political science professor who salivates at the mention of Chomsky’s name. That Chomsky is an arrogant, bourgeois critic-of-everything while having made seemingly few contributions to real activism and revolution is of little relevance – he speaks the truth.
It is this kind of mentality that we as communists must stand against. Not for our own benefit – we already can sniff opportunism from miles away – but because it is poisonous to our allies, the masses, and the entire movement. It is a liberal, petit-bourgeois attitude, no matter the actual class of the individual who holds it.
The mentality can be summed up as “it’s a war of information – we win the revolution through education!”
This is a noble slogan, with a perfect place as a maxim for our media and newsletter staff. Or for a socialist bookstore, or education centre. But it is useless as a slogan that is central, defining or paramount. It can be useful as a very specific slogan for a very specific group or campaign, but only for that.
This, the mentality of the liberal progressives who we often work alongside confines our roles and duties as activists to debates, demonstrations and maybe the occasional leaflet. Without real mobilization of large numbers of people, under the leadership and initiative of the most dedicated activists who can make real demands to the right people to get real victories achieved for the masses (i.e. free education, universal health care including dental and preventive care, changes in government labour policy, unionization of workplaces, etc.), it is a plain fact – nothing gets done.
The organization grows or shrinks, but in any case becomes irrelevant. The policies of government, education and business become more vicious, more reactionary, and more damaging to workers, youth, students, women, visible minorities, recent immigrants, children, First Nations peoples, etc.
That is the practical effect of the Noam Chomsky mentality, of the liberal progressives. Romanticized “political prisoners”, the likes of which they have made disgraced judge María Lourdes Afiuni out to be, seem to pale in comparison.
For we know that the 5.7 million members of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela/Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), and their thousands of comrades in the Communist Party of Venezuela/Partido Comunista de Venezuela (PCV), will not put the brakes on the progress of their revolution just because an MIT professor, high in his ivory tower, shouts at them.
But here at home, where we’re in the embryo stages of getting things going, the liberals in our ranks keep stopping to ask directions from the enemy.
