Caesar in Caracas

My second-to-last whistleblower in slightly more evocative manner with a few improvs, for possible English-speaking readers.

Plato and Albania seem to stride like never-ending threads through this loom, making me speculate of what the wide-headed wrestled might have wanted to say of the political dichotomia of 2012 and of their most flamboyant voices.

This Sunday an election is held, not within the limits of Sweden, but for several reasons it is grateful that the struggle of Simon Bolivar's most important legacy, the Venezuelan presidency, has been observed even in the far North, as far in time from a general election we can reach. I have, quite a few times damned myself over the absence of a head of state appointed through such an election, a fallacy which might have been averted if Bolivar's forerunner, Francisco de Miranda, had remained in Stockholm in 1787 to accomplish a proper revolution here instead. Perhaps it would have been wise to decline such an offer, if not for any other reason with regard for the, from a post-colonial perspective more important struggle for liberation from the Spanish empire. Or perhaps because the choice of liberators tend to make its tracks, or wounds, in a nation's political legacy. When King Gustav III rode through the streets of old Stockholm in 1772 welcomed by the cheer of the throngs, having just unseated the unpopular, quasi-democratic Cap party president von Düben by force, his horse's hooves clattered at pace with Bellman's just composed Kung Gustaf's Skål (a patriotic rant designed to praise the royal coup d'etat) and the clamouring of the masses. Decades marred by partitioning partisan divisions and oligarchy, "parliamentary despotism", the abuses and misery of mercantilism, national submission and defeat and, well, "quarrel", was all to be swept away by the cloud of dust which emerged from the soldiers' boots. This equally quiet and loud march for Enlightenment, Liberation and National renewal was crowned 17 years later by a piece of paper named the Union and Security Act, in all but name restoring complete dictatorship and unfreedom of the press. In hindsight of this, I would likely have put my faith in Miranda in 1787, though the result could have been just as ominious - also for generations yet unborn.

When Nehru fought in silence for a more subtle revolution in British India he authored, by pseudonym, a critical article in 1937, describing his own possible takeover with these words; "In this revoutionary era Caesarism always stands at the door. Is it not possible that Jawahar (Nehru) might see himself as Caesar? ... He must be kept in check. We want no Caesars."

After Caesar's breath had succumbed to his wounds, inflicted by members of the legislature he had disempowered, Simon Bolivar would be the next to bear his title. Bolivar - El Libertador in Bolivia, the new-born country which, "as from Romulus, Rome", would bear its name for its creator. When he first marched through Peru, he was rather crowned, without a crown (in the best Caesarian manner) with the honorific El Dictador - a mistake his successors would correct, substituting the title for the less condemning Presidente. When the constitution of Venezuela was replaced in 1999 by recently elected popular hero, military, coup-maker and cleaningman Chavez, bane of the old corrupted bipartisan system, the name of El Libertador was now included in that of the country, though only the enemies of Chavez were to resurrect the now so infamous title of El Dictador for his self-described heir and successor. Only a week or so past, the prime Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, itself a key to the door of press freedom in the mid-1800s, referred to Presidente Chavez as... "dictator". The supportive voices are weakening within and outside the country, even after renewed strength when El Libertador's self-described successor was nearly ousted in a coup d'etat in the year 2002. For days, he considered exile in Cuba rather than remaining as a subject of an illegal government, but managed - like his preferred idol - burst the net around him, and was instead re-elected with tremendous support in 2006. The failure to transform Venezuela to a "socialist" as well as "bolivarian" republic and remove the poorly kept constitutional preclusions to his revolution in a referendum the following year was his first major setback. After a second attempt in 2009, now with the call for a socialist republic dropped, the constitution was amended with a slim margin. In the wake of this bitter vote, Venezuelans are divided in two major camps on this Sunday the seventh - for, or against, the Bolivarian revolution?

A master surveying a humble pupil?  

Plato scorned democracy, for a number of reasons. It preaches and demands equality in matters only a minority is blessed to understand; it paralyses those capable of acting in favour of good, like denoting doctors and generals to the consent of their patients and privates. It feeds greed, material inequality and atomism and allows sectarianism and self-interest to grow freely in defiance of an organic order where the interests of the nation, the people, the state are housed in the collective cynosure. It also has, Plato suggests, a tendency to birth tyrants just as cruel as any other order's through its natural hunt for an idol promising leadership and order, and might through these exercise just as ruthless torment against its enemies. The latter was confirmed for all eternity when Plato's master Socrates, having survived the courts and unsafe years of tyrants and oligarchies, was executed in a mock trial orchestrated by the resurrectors of democracy. Might Bolivar have become a victim of a Venezuelan democratic revolution, if not in body and life? It is unlikely that the opposite would have been true, had he lived to see such an order and wrestle with its absurdities. Most revolutions are said to bear Saturn's combination of lust and fear for their children, if yet only to such a degree their dignity and identity allows. Most liberators who turn power to the hands of the liberated tend to end their days in the powerless exile of private life, voluntarily or through force. Swedish liberals, much born by the desire for a parliamentary order by universal ballot and who ultimately achieved it (in 1918 for men, in 1919 for women) now live in the emasculated state caused by their long-sought child. Apparently with no regrets.

When ballots are cast and counted on Sunday not only Bolivar's yet unknown successor is waiting in the wings; it is likely that the strong but molested remnants of a constitutional democracy which has remained lived fairly well through the ages - by Latin American standards - will accomplish a metamorphosis shortly if the Bolivarian revolution is allowed to continue at its current course. Freedom House's report on the democratic accomplishments (as well as un-accomplishments), available to everyone capable of reading this right here, speaks of an increasingly restrained form of freedom of press, a separation of powers which has been most thoroughly dislocated beneath a skin of formality, of courts stuffed and packed with political appointees (hardly an area where Sweden is anything close to a good example, if yet never worse than our preciously kept parliamentary principles) and a legislature cropped and cut to a house of sheep more austere in its bleating against a formally separate and competing presidency for every day. The second to last time a parliamentary election was held opposition noticed its chances to boycott the quasi-democratic assembly and Chavez' "Movement for the Fifth Republic" ended with 116 out of 167 seats. Since 2010 the partition more sharply follows a proportional example; 5.3 million in favour of the oppositional Mesa de la Unidad Democratica against 5.4 for the all-governing Partido Socialista Unido, or 65 seats against 98. A slight lead is preciously rewarded - in London, in Caracas.

Freedom of the press is by most standards the worst on continental American soil, if yet much ahead of Cuba's - in whose papers I have relished myself (in Spanish as well as the English edition printed for foreigners), though not much for their fastidiously watered-down contents. Unfortunately, there is little division among critics of which way the state's stranglehold of oppositional media is heading. Radio and TV broadcasts have been boycotted and shut down by more or less well-meaning means of coercion and violence, and since the sympathisers of such oppositional voices have grown lately in spite of El Presidente's measures, hundreds standard-bearers of the revolution have been armed and organized into an alternate army within the state. There is every reason to question, with a certain degree of humility, when Freedom House now classifies the Venezuelan democracy with a 5 out of 7 label in both categories; political and civil rights (1 is best, 7 worst, and just ten years ago the former category rested at a sober 3). Sweden, and yes, I have checked it, is measured at a 1, perhaps not so evocative given that Italy, corrupt and violent to the gills in comparison, shares the same brand, the republic which the account of Lars Ohly (former chairman of the Left Party of Sweden) recently denounced in an indigned tweet as just as undemocratic as Venezuela. Or, perhaps, Venezuela was ambiguously upheld to be "just as democratic" as Italy. One should argue of senseless digits; after all, it is the course of politics if you are in the right place to exercise it with impunity, but no mind which is soberly read on the demands of the EU and the European Council regarding constitutional principles and human rights and liberties could ever, ever deny that Italy, one of the founders of the union, could be accepted as a continued member if the political situation resided in such a state that a notoric bolivarian wants to put it. It is shameful, ignorant notion which to the furthest extent denies the danger and lack of dignity - and in that, reports from Reporters without Borders, the United Nations, Amnesty International, and every independent non-governmental organization for human rights worthy of that description - in Venezuela's course in this area in the last years; ironically when the American principle of separation of powers appeared largely safe from demagogic militarymen with a timid love for many and direct re-elections and extensive terms in office, with Cuba and Haiti as major, and for this much renowned exceptions. Freedom of the press has also ran into a brick wall of opposition from the apparatus of government - have I failed to mention that? - with independent TV and radio shut down and instruments for such communication confiscated, sometimes with very high fines as thanks for the silenced broadcasting.

When the bulk of the opposition announced Henri Capriles Radonski as its candidate this spring the self-described bannermen of the people and state-run media outlets did not hesitate long before praise and well-wishes such as a "traitor", "fascist", "pig", "homosexual" as well as "sionist imperialist" or a similar sound of bosh hailed over the 38-year old Jewish-bred lawyer. I can only with a certain precaution find it in my values to support the largely unknown, fairly unexperienced underdog governor who on Sunday may be the end to the possibly loudest and certainly most long-reigning leader of the Western hemisphere. Unless Chavez may choose to adapt to a reborn democratic constitution, following the example of his hero and like Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua - then a young, lively, fast-mouthed revolutionary, now far above the midst of his lifespan, lightly obese and timidly conservative, not least in the notorious question of abortion, which the Sandinistas have elected to resolve in favour of the still influential (for a secular, republican part of the world) Catholic Church. Perhaps it would be preferrable. The fact that either of the two would brusquely disrupt the bolivarification of what was not so long ago the continent's perhaps richest and most well-respected democracy would by many, inside and outside of Venezuela, be hailed as a relief of sublime and irreplacable proportions. An un-Caesarian, un-Bolivarian notion, I admit. Who of us (outside the Bolivarian republic) can today account for leaders and liberators such as Isaias Angarita, Rafael Caldera and Romulo Betancourt? I plead guilty.

Colourful in the midst of grayness - Christopher Hitchens (second from the right) visiting Venezuela in 2008. Do I see the same gaze as in Bolivar's painted eyes? Hear his loud and well-articulated commentaries on Hugo Chavez, and his non-American friends here.

I will close with a few words of a man who might have been one of them, had he lived today to see the accomplishments of the second Libertador;

"Is there a loftier humanism than socialist humanism which, in 35 years, doubles the life expectancy of the entire population of a country?"

Mehmet Shehu, Head of Government of Albania, in 1979
Liquidated by the secret polise DSS in 1981
Posthumously a fascist, traitor, suicide and an agent of the KGB, CIA and the Yugoslavian secret service, UDBA.

Para el pueblo venezolano grandes, en perpetua admiración y esperanza.