{"id":96707,"date":"2017-08-14T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2017-08-14T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=96707"},"modified":"2017-08-09T12:29:02","modified_gmt":"2017-08-09T11:29:02","slug":"why-its-hard-to-understand-whats-happening-in-venezuela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/08\/why-its-hard-to-understand-whats-happening-in-venezuela\/","title":{"rendered":"Why It\u2019s Hard to Understand What\u2019s Happening in Venezuela"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

8 Aug 2017 – <\/em>We hear about violence in Venezuela but not about politically motivated deaths in Mexico, Colombia and Honduras. Rigoberta Mench\u00fa, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her 10-year campaign against military terror in Guatemala, asked \u201cEn nombre de qu\u00e9 l\u00f3gica\u201d does it make sense to single out Cuba and ignore what is happening elsewhere? So it goes with Venezuela.<\/p>\n

It should be familiar logic. Einstein said that \u201cmere thinking\u201d doesn\u2019t produce great science. He knew something Marx knew, namely, that facts always depend upon a particular perspective. It means that situations sometimes need to be changed, fundamentally, to see the facts, or some of them.<\/p>\n

It is why Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed declared, in his famous \u2018Our America\u201d, that a bigger hurdle for Latin America, than the power of the North, was a false view of being educated. It doesn\u2019t happen just by possessing information. Some information doesn\u2019t figure, without work. This point matters.<\/p>\n

Knowledge is not power. If we don\u2019t know what knowledge explains, or might, it\u2019s useless. In the last 30 years, the world has produced more information than in the preceding 5,000.<\/a>[i]<\/a> Daily murders of journalists in Mexico are reported. There is no lack of information.<\/p>\n

In Victor Hugo\u2019s Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em>, Inspector Javert relentlessly pursues ex-convict Jean Valjean. It\u2019s not from malice. It\u2019s how Javert understands justice, to which he is absolutely committed. When Valjean has a chance for revenge, he sets Javert free. Javert doesn\u2019t know what to do with an act of mercy when revenge, by ordinary reasoning, is expected.<\/p>\n

Hugo writes that \u201cJavert saw two roads ahead of him, both equally straight, but he saw two of them, and this terrified him, for he had never in his life known more than one straight line\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Right in Venezuela calls for immediate elections, expecting social and economic chaos to influence results. Yet after the failure of the first republic, Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar, liberal though he was, said elections would sell Venezuela back to slavery. In his Cartagena Manifesto (1812), he argued that popular elections in such conditions would favour the ignorant and ambitious. He was not a dictator.<\/p>\n

He knew the independence struggle was shackled by social structures.<\/a>[ii]<\/a> It required authority needed for institutional change. Similarly, Peruvian Jos\u00e9 Carlos Mari\u00e1tequi, known, like Bol\u00edvar, to admire European ideas, was skeptical about \u201cdeliberation and votes\u201d as definitive of democracy. <\/a>[iii]<\/a> Elections don\u2019t easily express the will of the people when some people don\u2019t count.<\/p>\n

Victor Hugo had a lot in common with Mart\u00ed, leader of Cuba\u2019s last independence war against Spain.<\/a>[iv]<\/a> Valjean, the convict, was \u201cno longer the like of the living, so to speak\u201d. And for Valjean, it is \u201cbetter to suffer, to bleed\u00a0 \u2026 [than to] never look openly, to squint\u201d. It\u2019s about seeing what is there. Valjean refuses to \u201cnever look openly\u201d.<\/p>\n

Bol\u00edvar, Mari\u00e1tegui and Mart\u00ed knew that to \u201clook openly\u201d is first and foremost a struggle against imperialism. To talk about justice and elections without acknowledging the \u201cmarch of humanity\u201d is to never look openly. We want truth not dreams, Mart\u00ed wrote. It is an obvious claim for those \u201cno longer the like of the living\u201d. But truth is hard. It\u2019s not \u201cmere thinking\u201d, or collecting facts.<\/p>\n

Hugo was a liberal. But he was \u201cmore tolerant of human frailty than our own Anglo-American liberalism\u201d.<\/a>[v]<\/a> Lamentably, the latter dominates, including much of the left, especially in Academia. They may want to be \u201cirreproachable\u201d, as did Javert.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t want to see that the \u201crules could be brought up short by a deed\u201d. Ana Bel\u00e9n Montes is one who could see this.<\/a>[vi]<\/a> The deed, in her case, was the Cuban Revolution. She\u2019s in jail in the US. She saved lives but they were of people Madeleine Albright says are \u201cworth the price \u2026\u00a0 if it furthers U.S. foreign policy objectives.\u201d\u00a0(Please sign petition here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Hugo, like Mart\u00ed, warned of false ideals. Against the grain of current obsessions with happiness, he writes \u201cit\u2019s a terrible thing to be happy. How we content ourselves with it. How easily, having attained the false aim of life, we forget the real aim, duty\u201d. Happiness is uninteresting, compared with truth.<\/p>\n

Ana Bel\u00e9n Montes didn\u2019t forget the real aim. She did what she did, she says, because the Cuban Revolution must exist.<\/p>\n

The Bolivarian Revolution must also exist. It should be criticized, true, but not from the \u201cthe blind iron horse of the straight and narrow\u201d that finally debilitated Javert. It has to do with truth. The familiar logic denounced by Mench\u00fa (and Bol\u00edvar, Mari\u00e1tegui, Mart\u00ed and others) needs to be named, persistently.<\/p>\n

NOTES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>[i]<\/a> Pascual Serrano, \u201cEl compromiso de los intelectuales en el siglo XXI\u201d Cubadebate <\/em>11 julio 2017<\/p>\n

<\/a>[ii]<\/a> John Lynch, Simon Bol\u00edvar A Life <\/em>(2006) 63-68.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[iii]<\/a> .\u201dPeru\u2019s principal problem\u201d, Jos\u00e9 Carlos Mari\u00e1tegui: An anthology<\/em> (Monthly Review Press) 142<\/p>\n

<\/a>[iv]<\/a> Carmen Su\u00e1rez Le\u00f3n, Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed y Victor Hugo, en el fiel de las modernindades<\/em> (Havana: Centro de investigaci\u00f3n y desarrollo de la cultura cubana, 1996)<\/p>\n

<\/a>[v]<\/a> Allan Gopnik, \u201cIntroduction\u201d Les Mis\u00e9rables <\/em>(2008)<\/p>\n

<\/a>[vi]<\/a> E.g. http:\/\/www.prolibertad.org\/ana-belen-montes For more information, write to the cnc@canadiannetworkoncuba.ca or cincoheroes@listas.cujae.edu.cu<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

Susan Babbitt<\/em> is author of <\/em>Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014).<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 counterpunch.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

8 Aug 2017 – We hear about violence in Venezuela but not about politically motivated deaths in Mexico, Colombia and Honduras. Einstein said that \u201cmere thinking\u201d doesn\u2019t produce great science. He knew something Marx knew, namely, that facts always depend upon a particular perspective. Knowledge is not power. If we don\u2019t know what knowledge explains, or might, it\u2019s useless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96707\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}