This New Human Conscience

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I gratefully received advice about the danger of personality cults. My enthusiasm for the vision of Hugo Chavez made me forget that I witnessed as a child popular enthusiasm for the good things Mussolini was doing for the people until power went to his head and lead Italy to war. No human is immune to pride and the seduction of success. Chavez is doing good things, but he is a mortal, and I believe he would admit that he is not perfect. Respect for dissent and respect for the Constitution are the first things Hugo Chavez spoke of upon returning to Caracas after being kidnapped during the 2002 coup. The dangerous suppression of the U.S. Constitution by G.W. Bush with the excuse that he is the Commander in Chief in an oil war of aggression stands as a warning to all who love Democracy to keep their eyes open, no matter who is in power.

“Democratic Socialism is love of the people.” These words of Venezuela’s President announced the birth of a different world – a just and peaceful world the youth of the entire planet believes is possible.

Hugo Chavez’ speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations inspired my article, “Hugo Chavez and the Devil’s Recipe,” which first appeared in The Lone-Star Iconoclast of Crawford, Texas, on January 29, 2007, and later in Venezuelanalysis.com on March 15, 2007. That story compared the vision of Mr. Chavez to the worldview of Federico Fellini, the great Italian film director. Both Fellini and Chavez express love and empathy for the people with their work. Fellini, as a cine-magician, helped give birth to a more human culture, and Chavez, as a revolutionary liberator and statesman, is creating a different world that may save the planet from destruction.

“Hugo Chavez and the Devil’s Recipe” attracted so much international attention that people from all over the globe asked: How is it possible to compare a great Italian film author to a visionary South American statesman? The answer: Hugo Chavez shows by his actions that he not only loves the people, but fully understands the needs and aspirations of the world’s youth.

Like Fellini, Chavez does not hate the rich, but knows that they are psychologically deformed by excessive and un-earned opulence and by the guilt that being oppressors of millions festers in their hearts.

The lunacy and cruelty of the global situation is caused, therefore, by the fact that both oppressors and oppressed are dehumanized by the odious reality of fear, greed, and an absurd spiritual myopia that the natural abundance of the Earth is not enough for all to share.

The rich are making themselves sick and dangerously unsafe by inflicting criminal misery on others. The oppressed and poor are sickened by lives turned into miserable destitution and hopelessness from birth to death.

Both ‘haves” and ‘have-nots” are in different ways completely dehumanized and evermore hateful of each other. The unhappiness of the rich and powerful is well known to the psychiatric profession. The poor’s sickness is evident in our crowded prisons and slums. This expanding evil eventually erupts in crime, suicidal terrorism, the reactive police state, and criminal wars of aggression. The obscene plunder by a ravenous and blind few results in universal wage slavery and/or desperate poverty for millions, making this world dangerous and unhappy.

Chavez’s enlightened peaceful revolution is reversing this global lunacy and will even help the rich from becoming further mentally retrograde, like medieval lords. The Bolivarian revolution will help many of these pathetic materialistic souls regain a sense of proportions, become human again, and meet life with renewed hearts. Only a socially responsible democracy and economic justice can bring about this kind of renewal. Such a renewal will protect reformed oppressors from the danger of growing resentment and outrage of the majority as abuses become increasingly transparent to a larger and larger portion of the world population.

Unless change comes fast enough, it will soon become self-evident — even to the simplest minds — that all of us have been fleeced of our universal birthright to share equitably in the bountiful commonwealth of this planet. Some believe that –as the current insurgencies in various parts of the earth evidence — heightened awareness may bring back the revival of the guillotine (to use a stark illustration) as an expeditious instrument for cutting down to size despots, exploiters, oil and gas gougers, highway robbers, and all high ranking thieves in the military industrial complex. That would restore our Republic and bring an end to the Evil Empire as fast as France got rid of its crowned heads and aristo-pigs feeding at the royal trough.

Recently, President Chavez has attracted world attention and become the recipient of increasingly vicious attacks from neo-fascist media whores in direct proportion to his growing fame as a great leader. He is gaining a reputation as the uncompromising and outspoken nemesis of the troglodytes that turned the White House into a fetid Neolithic cave.

“Troglodytes” is a fitting offence that must be clearly understood (Thomas Paine, one of the fathers of our Republic, wrote: “He who dares not offend cannot be honest”), so here are four dictionary definitions of “troglodytes” that prove it to be an the ideal insult for the current White House simians dragging their knuckles on the carpet at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: 1. Pre-historic cave dwellers; 2. Persons of degraded, primitive, or brutal character; 3. Persons unacquainted with affairs of the world; 4. Animals living underground. Hence, President Chavez was perfectly correct to call the troglodyte-in-chief an “ass,” a “coward,” and the very incarnation of evil: “the devil.”

On Monday, December 5, 2005, the following posts appeared on an anonymous blog: Planetofa$$holes, run by political satirists who target traitors, religious fanatics, and other lunatics — like the recently departed Jarry Foulwell (good riddance) — from an underground wine cellar named: In Vino Veritas. Their therapeutic use of insults to retain a sense of reality in our 21st Century bedlam is refreshing.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched. ~Aldous Huxley

On March 2, 2004, in Caracas, Hugo Chavez wisely proclaimed: “George W. Bush is an IDIOT!” With this truthful pronouncement the great President of Venezuela launched a new era of outspoken honesty in international relations, making it easier for decent people everywhere to see what global oppressors and phonies really are and to properly frame them as miserable idiots.

When a head-of-state who loves his people, as Hugo Chavez does, uses the most popular and versatile of all insults: “IDIOT” to describe the perverted liar-in-chief of the most powerful empire on earth, the time for praising the great Latin American President has come.

Hugo Chavez holds in contempt the excessive desire for private wealth, the criminal culture of corruption, and unregulated materialism that grips the vast majority of human beings in hopeless poverty. No one has the right to own in excess, he believes. Opulence in a world so full of poverty is obscene, degenerate, and criminal, no matter how much fat cats protest about having earned their billions legally, even if immorally. Legality is not equivalent to honesty.

Understanding this about Chavez and watching Fellini films like “La Strada,” “Nights of Cabiria,” and “La Dolce Vita,” it becomes easy to see that both Fellini and Chavez are clearly aware of the soulless cruelty and brutal dishonesty of unregulated capitalist-corporate systems that are devouring the earth before our very eyes.

With their great hearts, Fellini and Chavez saw that it is the goodness of simple people — working very hard just to have enough to feed their own families — that keeps the world from collapsing into utter chaos. Both saw the limit of tolerance getting very close and the failure of social compassion.

The vision that makes millions of hearts beat with great hope is Hugo Chavez’s mission for a world without oppression and poverty. Chavez is one of the few statesmen with an understanding of history and realism about the future. Demonic materialists are afraid that he may wake up the sleeping masses to see the nakedness of their blood-soaked oppressors. Their mad hatred of Chavez is like the screeching reaction of a hyena caught by a sudden spotlight in the act of trying to devour a sleeping child. The innocent child represents the TV-hypnotized millions, watching meaningless crap that prevents them from noticing that the hyenas are devouring their country. Chavez understands all this.

His first step toward that different world is the revival of Simon Bolivar’s dream of a united Latin America with democratic, social, and economic justice for its people. The union of a truly democratic Latin America will establish a shining example that can expand social progress on a global scale and spread the ideas of a sustainable way of life based on nurturing, responsibility and equity rather than hoarding and oppression by a few.