POPULIST AUTHORITARIANISM IS AN OXYMORON, YOU MORON

It’s inevitable that the hacks would want to draw negative parallels between the departed Hugo Chavez, and President Mahinda Rajapaksa, now that the Western media is having a field day saying that Chavez’s death will give Venezuela a chance to experience ‘democracy’. Translation: Venezuela might revert to being the oil company controlled corrupt oligarchy of proxies run from we all know where…

Hacks will be hacks, but at least spare us the hilarity. One barely English literate specimen writing an op-ed in a new fangled daily, talks about the Venezuelan President as if he was in elbow squeezing terms with that venerated worthy, and proceeds to state that he was ‘insanely popular’ at the time of his death.

However the rest of the tract is in totally pejorative terms, and the reader is told that Chavez practiced a brand of ‘populist authoritarianism.’

Really? Was that brand imported from Mars? If a regime is populist and therefore has the fealty of the good majority of the masses, and if as the writer states, it was an insanely popular dispensation, by what stretch is it branded authoritarian?

A popular regime (that’s insanely popular!) cannot be authoritarian, and that’s by definition. It has the support of the large mass of the people, and for the edification of the absolutely dunderheaded, such a regime does not have to be authoritarian as authoritarianism is the use of dictatorial methods to quell mass dissent, with the accent being on the word ‘mass.’

If anybody says that Chavez was not a saint, political commentator and man on the street alike would of course agree with that.

How could Chavez be a saint when all of the rapacious forces of multinational slash and burn plunder were arraigned against him?

This is much the situation that President Rajapaksa faces today in Sri Lanka. He rid the country of the Tamil Tigers who were loved by the Western bleeding heart liberals even though the organization was banned in most of Europe and in the US.

Simply put, that made him a wildly popular President. But the same forces that wanted the Tamil Tigers to survive, for obvious reasons, now hate his regime and use all of the tricks that are not in the book to affect regime change.

People expect all of those unorthodox tactics to be politely met with a smile and a nod at ‘constitutionalism’ and the Western liberal tenets of good governance!

That’s tantamount to asking an elected regime to step down, ride into the sunset and disappear. When Mahinda Rajapaksa does not oblige, he is accused, moronically and oxymoronically, of being a populist authoritarian of the Chavez mould.

In the first place, when the history is eventually written on Chavez years from now when the current global status quo no longer obtains, they will be saying that he was among the greatest who used all means at his disposal to give back the country - - and her oil wealth in the main -- to the people.

Just because some neo-con hack may have used the term populist authoritarianism in some obscure corner of the internet, it does not mean that this oxymoronic political brand exists, or that we should be told that popularly elected leaders who continue to be ‘wildly popular’ should in this way be diminished and spoken of pejoratively so that perchance, they can all be pigeonholed as ne’er do wells.

The good thing is that this type of rank amateurism has discredited the local regime change savants thoroughly. The propaganda regarding both President Rajapaksa and late President Chavez has been ludicrously self-serving that the mala fides can be smelt a mile away.

Another commentator portrays Chavez as some kind of good natured buffoon who ‘had his heart in his right place’ but gutted the oil industry in his country.

Obviously this ‘leftie’ would rather that the Venezuela’s oil wealth be give to the multinationals on a platter! What do these badly disguised ‘socialists’ think – that running a country is a walk in the park?