Of Devils and Democracy
Let’s face it: Americans are becoming an increasingly thin-skinned people. Fueled by the self-pity, anxiety, and insecurity of recent historical events–including the attacks on the world trade center and the disastrous outcome of our recent misadventures in Iraq–Americans are apparently less capable then ever of understanding or empathizing with their critics. We bristle at the slightest condemnation of our government, our culture, or our international policy, while failing to realize that this lack of self-reflection and understanding is precisely at the heart of our problems.
The American public’s bumbling and inane response to the recent UN speeches by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinijad are two telling examples of this knee-jerk jingoism. Regardless of what you might think about the two leaders–Amahdinijad is certainly no angel–their respective speeches at the United Nations marked the beginning of the end of America’s unquestioned global authority, and as such represented a potentially transformative shift in global democracy from a world dominated by U.S. interests, to one more broadly representative of the needs of all nations. Ironically, it seems, it might be from the global south, from the mestizos and indigenes of Venezuela and Mexico that global democracy will find its greatest supporters and not, despite all of our president’s empty rhetoric, from the United States.
Although the popular media and politicians, both conservative and liberal, raced to be the first to condemn and ridicule Chavez’s speech for its over the top characterization of President Bush as the devil, few of them seemed capable of understanding what Chavez was really saying or the real significance of the event. Charles Rangel’s idiotic response: “an attack on Bush is an attack on all Americans,” made him the darling of the conservative New York Post, garnering him a spot on the front page, and even John Stewart, once an irreproachable defender of the freedom to satirize America and the American media, joined the mob of angry voices, suggesting that Chavez’s “insane” theatrics detract from real criticisms of the president: “calling Bush the devil is just stupid!” But Stewart is wrong. Chavez’s speech and his outrageous characterization of President Bush as the devil, was anything but stupid. Quite the opposite, Chavez’s theatrics were a calculated performance, designed to draw attention, not to himself, but to the hypocrisy of the U.S. Chavez could have offered a more moderate, less outrageous critique of President Bush and American foreign policy, as other members of the UN did that week, but it would have been widely ignored. As such Chavez’s speech was a refined mixture of substance and flash. Designed to create a media stir and draw attention to the problems of a U.S. dominated United Nations and the failure of American policy to lead the world, Chavez’s speech could not have been more successful. But Chavez did more than merely call the president the devil.
Chavez’s speech, full of references to Noam Chomsky and Alfred Hitchcock, displayed a familiar and sympathetic acquaintance with the intellectual American left, perhaps his greatest ally in containing and curtailing American power. It’s no coincidence that before calling the president a devil, Chavez recommended uber-liberal Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival–now #18 on Amazon’s best seller list–saying “the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house.” Similarly, Chavez’s call to move the UN to Caracas may have been hyperbole designed to get attention, but there is in fact a good argument to be made for this. The United States, through its abuses of power in the Security Council has done everything that it can to destroy the legitimate sovereignty of the United Nations for decades now. Chavez’s suggestion gets to the heart of that hypocrisy.
Likewise, Ahmadinijad’s speech, taken on its own, was remarkably sensible–especially for a man primarily defined as a holocaust denier. Much longer, more substantive and less theatrical than Chavez’s speech, Ahmadinijad’s offered specific critiques of U.S. and U.N policy, describing the obvious inequities between first and third world nations, between those with a seat on the security Council and those ignored voices in the general assembly:
“Some are fast expanding their domination, accumulating greater wealth and usurping all the resources, while others endure the resulting poverty, suffering and misery.
“Some occupy the homeland of others, thousands of kilometers away from their borders, interfere in their affairs and control their oil and other resources and strategic routes, while others are bombarded daily in their own homes.”
Ahmadinijad, like Chavez, also offered a critique of the Security Council, arguing:
“Justice and democracy dictate that the role of the General Assembly, as the highest organ of the United Nations, must be respected. The General Assembly can then, through appropriate mechanisms, take on the task of reforming the Organization and particularly rescue the Security Council from its current state.”
Despite all of this, the Christian Science Monitor, not normally a conservative paper, described Chavez and Ahmadinijad’s speeches as “the rantings of demagogues,” without discussing any of the substance of those speeches. Ahmadinijad may be a demagogue, and his real intentions may be questionable, but what he said was as relevant as it was startlingly true. If we cannot learn to listen and to listen closely to the voices of those who disagree with us, if we cannot learn to see ourselves and the world from the subaltern perspectives of those we are supposedly seeking to help, than we will be dooming ourselves to a world of real enemies rather than mere critics.
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