Nicaragua, Venezuela and Human Sacrifices on the Left

 

It is surprising to see Jose Mujica, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Ignacio Ramonet, Atilio Boron, and the politicians-consultants of Podemos, disqualifying the people’s repudiation of Maduro and Ortega.

 

By Jose Luis Rocha  (Confidencial)

HAVANA TIMES – During the cold war Latin American gorillas murdered, disappeared and imprisoned -in the name of anti-communism- citizens subjugated under their boots. Now the leaders of the left massacre us in the name of socialism and anti-imperialism because the people must be punished when they are so stupid as not to recognize what benefits them and when they spit the hands of their liberators.

Napoleon, in a letter to one of his lieutenants, was the one who best formulated the idea that progress is achieved through bloodshed: “If the people reject their own happiness, the people are guilty of anarchy and deserve to be punished.”

Maduro and Ortega punish the people who are unfocused and insubordinate. They have plenty of bullets to charge for ingratitude and a lack of class consciousness. They are applauded by writers Atilio Boron and Ignacio Ramonet. They are joined by the politicians-consultants of Podemos in Spain, which take away from the treasury the petrodollars that Chavismo pays them for their advice (note the prostration of Venezuela as a test of its skill and effectiveness).

Jose Mujica places warm cloths over a bloody gash when he says that Ortega must realize that sometimes the time comes to leave power but he doesn’t say a word about the massacres and the hundreds of political prisoners.Scanning towards Venezuela, hr conjure the danger of a military intervention, but neither the vote with the feet of the millions who have migrated nor the evidence of the repudiation of the millions that have demonstrated in the streets manages to extract even a marginal comment.

In the other corner of Latin America, premiering the chair of the eagle, AMLO (Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador) disqualifies the plural and consensual vision (but also dissented) of the OAS, which he labels as interventionist. Then he immediately proposes himself as a mediator. About the dead and the prisoners: silence. AMLO wants to enter the negotiation (or just ask for dialogue?) with great strides to reduce the possibility of tripping over the corpses.

All the characters that I identified by their proper names or acronyms are intellectual and politicians that deserve some respect. Some more, others less, all have shown signs of lucidity in more than one episode of their lives, in their speeches and their texts. That is why I am surprised to see them underestimating, disregarding or even disqualifying the manifestations of repudiation of the regimes of Ortega and Maduro.

In their opinion, these are not genuine revolts, but uprisings skillfully conceived and meticulously executed by imperialism. If the masses participate, it must be because they were deceived.

After all, it was those alienated masses that had boosted Bolsonaro [to the presidency in Brazil]. The masses can be wrong. They tend to be wrong. So, in whom does sovereignty live? In inalienable principles, according to them. Sovereignty for the left is an impersonal entity. The people in the streets are neither sovereign nor self-determined. They are manipulated and dependent. Especially if they demonstrate against your buddies.

These analysts and leftist politicians have made a preferential option for everything that smells to the left. Its position is located at the antipodes of what has been the tradition of the left since its inception. The French Revolution had extreme expressions of what was the division between the left of then. The differences allow us to know who favored granting more social and political rights.

Karl Marx invested much of his time and wit in fighting those he considered as members of a fake left, a pocket into which he put idealists, radical activists, dreamers, the sold-out and co-opted. His fiercest pages were primed on Max Stirner and Bruno Bauer (idealists), Mikhail Bakunin (anarchist), Karl Vogt (agent of Napoleon III), Ferdinand Lassalle (romantic socialist and ultimately submitted to Bismarck) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (unscientific). Most of them were endearing fighting companions with whom Marx broke when they adhered to questionable creeds, repressive regimes or sterile adventures.

Europe has been a persistent scene of conflicts between different factions on the left. It turns out that in Latin America it is enough to proclaim yourself to the left so that its fellow believers        -extend to the strong-men of socialism of the 21st century- a blank check that allows them to massacre their peoples without detriment to their support.

They do not care that the leaders of this left suffer from intellectual dearth and only represent small groups without arguments, accustomed to repeating slogans such as litanies and, in the face of stressful situations, respond to the voice with a blow. They don’t care because they think that, after all, that is the only left that we can reach here. Parodying the old saying, they seem to say: “every country has the left that it deserves.”

All of these analysts and politicians only have eyes for a film where the empire is the star protagonist and the leaders of the left are doing their job to undermine it. The people put up the extras in favor of one side and the other. If a regime is opposed to the empire (even if only rhetorically and in everything else is subject to its logic), there they go with their gold, incense and myrrh to pay tribute, and usually come out with more gold or tinsel than they carried.

That narrative does not correspond to reality. The empire moves its pieces, the peoples move theirs. Sometimes their movements overlap, and their tactical interests coincide partially. The movements of the people, which are varied, contradictory and often erratic, do not annul the imperial interests that are at stake. But the action of the empire does not cancel the strength of the peoples.

The empire reigns, a friend told me with pragmatic realpolitik. The empire is the invariable variable. That is why it is ridiculous that, with their eyes fixed on those interests, some analysts intend to discover as a novel event, as a kind of breaking news or finding that arrived after arduous and penetrating thoughts, that the United States is interested in Venezuelan oil ! A fact that allows them to later disdain that the people are also moving their pieces and that within the great story of the imperial strategy there are hundreds of small stories of surreptitiousness and open resistance, and that not everything that shines with leftists colors is emancipating.

There is no better example of what I say than the dual nature of the armed counterrevolution in the Nicaragua of the 1980s. The counterrevolution was a peasant movement that arose because of the wrong policies, the urban option and the repression of the FSLN. The technical and financial support of the government of the United States gave them fuel to sustain themselves, last and have a greater military and economic impact.

But even with 150 Elliot Abrams and 200 Oliver Norths, the Reagan administration would not have been able to mount such a movement. The primary component was a discontented peasantry, which not only nurtured the ranks of the counterrevolution army, but also provided the basic elements that all guerrillas must have: a sympathetic population to provide where to hide, rest and ambush. The narrative of good and bad – white and black, or red communists and imperialist blacks – is disturbed by this version that opens to varied interpretations of political actors.

Much of the left – just as old historians concentrated on episodes in the lives of emperors, princes and princesses – also exclude ordinary people from history, small people, the “vulgar, local and dense,” said Ruben Darío.

There are only two players on its two-color board: the empire and the coalition that opposes it. They forget or relegate to the drawer of small-time events the clamor of the murdered, widows, mothers, children and political prisoners. “If they were not manipulated, they would complain less”, maybe they think. They also leave out that the left -especially if it is an oil rich like the Venezuelan or dependent like Nicaraguan- obtains its resources from the bloody imperial market. Or in what market do they think that Venezuelan oil is inserted?

There are loose ends that I cannot digest in this indifference or will to deny the suffering of the Nicaraguan and Venezuelan peoples. I can leave aside the fact that the left that supports Ortega considers nothing more than a minor peculiarity that in Nicaragua the Vice-President is the President’s wife, a rarity that will not be found in any other country in the western hemisphere.

I can overlook that some analysts are blind, indifferent or celebrate the unbridled accumulation of capital that the Latin American left (Venezuelan, Nicaraguan and others) has mounted on Venezuelan oil. I suppose that their brothers and sisters will think that it is better that this wealth goes to fatten the pockets of leaders of the left instead of falling into the coffers of the traditional domestic oligarchies and transnational corporations.

However, I have no framework to explain the large number of leftist analysts willing to turn a blind eye to the fact that under the Ortega regime, mining expanded like never before. Gold exports have grown at a rapid pace from 99,400 troy ounces and 55.3 million dollars in 2006 to 236,900 troy ounces and 357 million dollars in 2016, just the period of the government of Commander Ortega.

In that same period, silver exports went from 94,200 to 681,700 troy ounces. Due to the creation law of the Nicaraguan Mining Company (ENIMINAS) of 2017, the territory granted to mining went from 12 thousand to 26 thousand square kilometers. All these are official figures, available on the website of the Central Bank of Nicaragua.

And there is more, much more evidence of the present sacrifice and the future costs of twenty-first century socialism that so many intellectuals and politicians celebrate, while they shake the cocktail shaker to prepare a Bond Martini, with the relieving viewpoint of watching the bulls from the benches.

Because that is what is happening: the indifference of many before two peoples [Venezuelans and Nicaraguans] who resist with their nails from being sacrificed at the altar of the noble causes of the left, now contaminated by the leaders who proclaim them outwardly, and are no more than an excuse to line their pockets.

The theologian and economist Franz Hinkelammert wrote some time ago about these human sacrifices. Western society, he explains, “always speaks of a man so infinitely worthy that, in his pursuit and in his freedom, this man has to be destroyed. That man knows Christ, that he saves his soul, that he has freedom or democracy, that he constructs communism, are such ends in the name of which the simplest rights of concrete man have been erased. From the perspective of these pretended values, these rights seem simply mediocre ends, materialistic goals in conflict with the high ideas of society. Obviously, it is not about giving up any of these purposes. What it is about is to root them in the simple and immediate, which is the right of all men to be able to live. ”

Before the left that brandishes the sacrificial knife, the multitudes that oppose Ortega and Maduro are unworthy because they reject the socialism of the 21st century and prefer employment, toilet paper, beans and that piece of land that was going to be swallowed by the interoceanic canal.

On that basis some politicians and analysts have taken the level of distortion of the debate to the point where the dilemmas seem to be: ideas or people, principles or human beings. And this is a falsification of what is really at stake, but it serves as a symptom that there are two competing values ??systems: those that bet on the lives of specific women and men, and those that immolate these on altars of the great ideals.

Maybe being left today means being a feminist and an ecologist. But this should not be exclusively left. The struggles against the patriarchy, the looting of the logging mafias and the big corporations that pollute the environment and minds should be present on the agendas of all responsible politicians.

Norberto Bobbio found a minimum common denominator of what it means to be left: the distribution of resources according to needs to reduce social inequalities and reduce natural inequalities. But the task of distributing has at least two prerequisites: to have resources to allocate and that the potential beneficiaries are not prisoners or dead. How does the left, indifferent or prone to favor human sacrifice, manage this scenario?