We got one right - Editor's Note - Brief Article - Editorial

Progressive, The, June, 2002 by Matthew Rothschild

Permit me to crow a second: Was Steven Dudley on the ball, or what? As you may recall, for our April issue, Dudley wrote a piece about the pressures on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (which, on the cover, we called "The Coming Coup in Venezuela"). "The situation does feel as if it could be another Chile 1973," he reported. "The similarities are eerie: A democratically elected left-leaning president in an energy-rich country in Latin America takes the U.S. model head-on; the economy tanks, resistance builds, and a military with an apolitical tradition steps in with the help of the United States."

One month later, the coup-plotters struck.

And, as Molly Ivins notes, wasn't George W. Bush's reverence for democracy on dazzling display?

His Administration cheered the coup(though it studiously avoided that redolent term), all the while misreporting that Chavez had resigned. Once the coup collapsed under the weight of its protruding right wing, the Bush Administration looked awfully silly. And no amount of denials by Secretary of State Colin Powell on Meet the Press could undo the damage to the U.S. reputation in Latin America, which was not good to start with.

It's no secret that Washington has wanted Chavez ousted--not least for his nationalistic oil policies. Michael T. Klare points out in his cover story this month how important oil has become to U.S. foreign policy. Venezuela is the third largest oil supplier to the United States, and Chavez was not playing ball. He was making it harder for U.S. oil companies to invest there, and he was calling on OPEC to start flexing its muscle again. Some things can't be forgiven.

Tariq Ali, an editor of New Left Review, stopped by our office on April 23 while on tour for his latest book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms (Verso), which I highly recommend, by the way. In the prologue, he criticizes our "increasingly parochial culture that celebrates the virtues of ignorance, promotes a cult of stupidity, and extols the present as a process without an alternative."

Later on, he picks up the theme. "The virtual outlawing of history by the dominant culture has reduced the process of democracy to farce," he writes. "The result is a mishmash of cynicism, despair, and escapism. This is precisely an environment designed to nurture irrationalisms of every sort. Over the last fifty years, religious revivalism with a political edge has flourished in many different cultures. Nor is the process finished. A major cause is the fact that all the other exit routes have been sealed off by the mother of all fundamentalism: American imperialism."

As soon as he sat down in our conference room, I asked him whether he was feeling the same despair I wrote about in these pages last month. Jauntily, he said no, and he offered two reasons.

The first was Venezuela. "The mass response to the coup in Venezuela was one of the most heartening events in years," he said, echoing the sentiments of Eduardo Galeano in his column this month. "The masses were playing a big role in history again when many had given up on them."

And the second was the large protest in Washington on April 20. "To have 100,000 people demonstrating in favor of Palestine and against a war on Iraq was very positive," he said.

OK, maybe I was too pessimistic last month.