[Peace-discuss] Always Bad Journalism - Always

[John W.]

At 09:15 AM 3/21/2006, David Green wrote:

>The New York Times: Always vaguely snide and
>condescending, always dismissive of anything on the
>left, which can be reduced to celebrity lifestyle
>choices and camp followers, always absent historical
>memory, e.g., we murdered Allende and destroyed
>Nicaragua. There are "many sides," and the reporter is
>congenitally unable to explore which might be the more
>factual in order to inform the reader.

I, on the other hand, find this particular article reasonably balanced and 
quite informative.  It is NOT didactic.  I appreciate your sharing it with us.

John Wason



>--------------------------
>
>March 21, 2006
>
>Visitors Seek a Taste of Revolution in Venezuela
>
>By JUAN FORERO
>
>CARACAS, Venezuela — The actor Danny Glover has come.
>Harry Belafonte has also been here. So has the antiwar
>activist Cindy Sheehan, the prominent African-American
>writer Cornel West and Bolivia's new president, Evo
>Morales.
>
>But most visitors are like Cameron Durnsford, a
>24-year-old student from Australia who decided to
>study at a new government-financed university in
>Caracas. Mr. Durnsford was, admittedly, put off some
>by the cult of celebrity around President Hugo Chávez,
>which he says "seems a little bit Maoist." But
>Venezuela's revolution, he quickly added, was not to
>be missed.
>
>"You've got a nation and a leader trying to prove an
>alternative to neo-liberalism and the policies that
>have ravaged Latin America for 20 years," he said.
>"That's why people are coming here. There's a sense
>that it's a moment in history."
>
>Mr. Chávez is decidedly unpopular with the Bush
>administration, which he has branded a terrorist
>regime out to get him. That antagonism, coupled with
>Mr. Chávez's huge oil-generated outlays for social
>spending, is drawing a following from all over and
>turning Caracas into the new leftist mecca.
>
>Evoking other cities transformed by revolutionary
>leaders, like Managua, Nicaragua, in 1979, or Havana
>20 years before that, Caracas is attracting students
>and celebrities, academics and activists, grandmothers
>and 1970's-era hippies — a new generation of
>Sandalistas, as some call them.
>
>Some, including many Americans, have come to stay. But
>others come for a new brand of revolutionary tourism
>organized by the government or by private groups.
>
>Venezuela welcomes them all, but rolls out the red
>carpet for high-profile visitors like Mr. Belafonte,
>the 79-year-old singer and activist.
>
>In January, he led an American delegation that
>included Mr. Glover, Mr. West and Dolores Huerta, the
>farm workers' advocate. They met with Mr. Chávez,
>toured a neighborhood and visited government-run
>programs promoted as a way to shift the country's oil
>wealth to the poor.
>
>"We respect you, admire you, and we are expressing our
>full solidarity with the Venezuelan people and your
>revolution," Mr. Belafonte told Mr. Chávez during the
>president's weekly television program. He called
>President Bush, a constant target of Mr. Chávez's
>barbs, "the greatest terrorist in the world." Then he
>shouted, "Viva la revolución!"
>
>Other recent visitors have included the Rev. Jesse
>Jackson; Ollanta Humala, a leading candidate in the
>election for president in Peru on April 9; the
>Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, and the Argentine
>Nobel laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.
>
>For less well-known Americans, the new vacation trail
>no longer goes through the famed beaches of Margarita
>Island. Rather, groups like Global Exchange, based in
>San Francisco, take visitors who pay $1,300 on a
>two-week jaunt through the tumbledown barrios where
>support for Mr. Chávez is strongest.
>
>The tours include visits to literacy classes,
>cooperatives and government-financed media outlets.
>Visitors chat with government ministers, see "The
>Revolution Will Not Be Televised," a documentary
>favorable to Mr. Chávez, and meet with state oil
>company officials, who explain how petrodollars are
>funneled to social programs.
>
>Among the speakers who have met with visitors is Eva
>Golinger, a New York lawyer who is dedicated to
>unearthing what she claims is evidence of Washington's
>support for Venezuelan opposition groups, something
>the Bush administration has denied.
>
>Americans like Pat Morris, 62, from Chestnut Hill,
>Mass., who never had a good impression of the Bush
>administration, are usually left speechless. "I
>thought that our current government was lying and
>greedy, but I had no idea of the long-term investment
>in destabilizing the country," she said, tears in her
>eyes after hearing Ms. Golinger speak.
>
>Reva Batterman, 27, a graduate student, said she had
>wanted to come to Venezuela to show its people that
>"we're not all just Bush supporters or imperialists."
>
>"I wish the people in the U.S. would try to understand
>Hugo Chávez," she said.
>
>Not everyone is as enamored. Julio Borges, an
>opposition politician, said that while Mr. Chávez
>certainly had showered aid on the poor, he was also a
>strongman out to crush dissent.
>
>Instead of lionizing him, Mr. Borges said, visitors
>should be aware of government ineptitude and growing
>abuses, like attacks on the press, charges the
>government denies.
>
>"We always tell people who come with this romantic
>idea of Venezuela that despite the changes here, the
>people who carry out the transformation are the armed
>forces, that Venezuelan democracy is basically a
>militarized one," he said. "You have to have a
>profound concern about that. We want to take off the
>democratic veil the government uses."
>
>Referring to American visitors, an American diplomat
>in Caracas, who could not speak on the record because
>of embassy rules, echoed the concerns, saying, "Come
>down here and get your consciousness raised,
>absolutely." He added, "My only request of them is
>that they try to get the other side of the story."
>
>Emily Kurland, a 26-year-old social worker originally
>from Chicago, said that was exactly what she and the
>others here were getting.
>
>"They're frustrated with Bush, frustrated with not
>being listened to, frustrated with Iraq," said Ms.
>Kurland, speaking in the Caracas house she shares with
>several foreigners. "They don't trust Fox News. They
>don't trust the mainstream news. They want to see with
>their own eyes what's happening here."
>
>She came to Venezuela thinking she would stay just
>long enough to get a taste for Mr. Chávez's grandly
>titled "Bolivarian revolution." A year later, she
>said, she has no plans to leave anytime soon.
>
>She has taught English in government-financed classes
>for the poor and talks about volunteering at a
>state-run microcredit bank for women. She spends most
>of her time, though, leading tours for Americans who
>flock here for a look at how Mr. Chávez is changing
>his country.
>
>There is a precedent, of course: Fidel Castro's
>revolution, which in its early years placed emphasis
>on "people to people" contacts that enhanced support
>among vocal members of the American body politic,
>while neutralizing opponents.
>
>Activists, intellectuals and leftists have gravitated
>to other governments, from Allende's Socialist Chile
>in the early 1970's to Sandinista-run Nicaragua in the
>1980's, which also declared ambitions to overturn the
>old order in their countries.
>
>"Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Chile at one point
>became the mecca for many leftists around the world,"
>said Fernando Coronil, a University of Michigan
>professor and the author of "The Magical State," a
>book about Venezuela. "That has been capitalized upon
>by the governments of these places, in eliciting
>foreign support but also as a way of focusing on
>certain elements of foreign policy that have wide
>appeal, and not focusing on internal problems."
>
>Some of the people who have visited Venezuela or have
>moved here acknowledge having some doubts. Chesa
>Boudin, 25, a New Yorker who has worked as a volunteer
>here, notes that some on the left glorify Mr. Chávez
>simply because he has positioned himself as the
>anti-Bush leader in Latin America.
>
>But Mr. Boudin, one of the authors of a book favorable
>to Venezuela's government, said many people who had
>been dismayed by the advance of globalization saw the
>possibility of a better world in Venezuela.
>
>"The fact that we have a country that's trying to
>create an alternative model is bold and ambitious and
>unique, and that's why people are wondering, 'Is this
>possible?' " said Mr. Boudin, whose parents, Katherine
>Boudin and David Gilbert, were members of the 1970's
>radical group the Weathermen. "The intellectual in me
>is curious."
>
>Perhaps nothing so illustrates the intertwining of Mr.
>Chávez's rhetoric about serving the poor and the
>government's policies as the three-year-old Bolivarian
>University, which offers free tuition to its mostly
>poor student body.
>
>Jerome Le Guinio, 23, from France, came a year ago and
>works in the university's administration. He lives in
>Catia, a poor neighborhood where support for Mr.
>Chávez is solid. "The idea is to find an alternative,"
>he said, "and if you don't find it in Venezuela, you
>won't find it anywhere else."
>
>Jens Gould contributed reporting for this article.