Chávez, Chomsky and Bush

UN Follies

(Editorial Note)

The United Nations General Assembly last month featured some prime speechifying against the UN’s imperialist host. Instead of pounding a Khrushchevian shoe, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez brandished a tome by Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (sales promptly soared), while crossing himself and noting President George Bush’s address the day before: “The devil came here yesterday…. It smells of sulfur still today.”

Bush-bashing is easy—we expect that for most of our readers, already this devil wears nada. For Hugo Chávez and Noam Chomsky, their anti-Bush rhetoric is a cloak for bourgeois nationalism (Chávez) and “kinder, gentler” imperialism (Chomsky)—none of which stops them from being heroes of the reformist left. Chávez has some oil money to spend, including on social programs that relieve some of the misery of the poor in Venezuela, as well as good reason to oppose the U.S.: the Bush administration backed a failed coup against him in 2002. But as we pointed out in “Venezuela: Populist Nationalism vs. Proletarian Revolution” (WV No. 860, 9 December 2005): “Chávez is no socialist. A former army colonel now head of the capitalist state, he is an enemy of the struggle for socialism—i.e., the fight for workers revolution to expropriate the bourgeoisie.”

Chávez’s routine brought down the house, the cheers eclipsing the previous lecture by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—president of the Iranian clericalist state and a Holocaust denier—who complained about “some” who “seek to rule the world relying on weapons and threats while others live in poverty.” Naturally, all this rankled U.S. capitalist politicians, since the main purpose of the United Nations is to provide a fig leaf to cover naked slaughter by the imperialists and their underlings. The counterrevolutionary Korean War of 1950-53 was officially a UN “police action”; UN forces helped set up the 1982 massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon; and UN-sponsored sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq caused the deaths of at least a million and a half Iraqis in the 1990s—sanctions which Noam Chomsky supported.

Occasional outbursts of anti-U.S. sentiment in the toothless General Assembly lend some window-dressing to the UN’s sordid purpose. This year’s podium-thumping resonated all the more loudly given how deep a disaster the imperialist invasion of Iraq has become, not only militarily but for the credibility of the U.S. ruling class as it aims to stamp its domination over the planet.

The Democratic Party rushed to defend the Republican Commander in Chief. Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel blustered, “You don’t come into my country, you don’t come into my congressional district and criticize my president”—never mind that the United Nations is not U.S. territory, and that his district might like some of that discounted oil Venezuela’s CITGO company is offering the poor. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called Chávez “an everyday thug.” A Hartford Courant (2 October) editorial writer shot back, “If he’s a thug, they should ask Exxon/Mobil for a 40 percent discount and see what happens.” Meanwhile, the Bush gang’s typically thuggish response was to grab Venezuela’s foreign minister at the airport for a few hours of intimidation.

As for Noam Chomsky (who’s not actually dead yet, it just feels that way after plowing through his turgid books), his exposure of some of the crimes of U.S. imperialism collapses into the promotion of “pure” democracy through the agency of the UN and “international law.” He, too, is an enemy of the struggle for world working-class revolution, the only way to get rid of the imperialists and all capitalist exploiters once and for all. Chomsky actually bragged in 2003 on Radio Havana that “the United States, to its credit, is a very free country, maybe the freest country in the world” (see “Failed Anarchist on ‘Failed States’,” WV No. 874, 4 August). We expect the bound and hooded prisoners in Guantánamo didn’t quite catch that.