Hugo Chávez Frias
The death has been announced of President Hugo Chávez Frias. Chávez was the most recent of the Central and South American leaders whose left-wing policies and popularity seem to evoke such fear amongst western governments.
By chance, two Irish film-makers, Kim Bartley and Donnacha Ó Briain, were filming a documentary about Chávez and filmed events during a failed right-wing coup in 2002. This was first broadcast on RTÉ as Chávez: Inside the Coup, then in feature-length as The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. There is something evocative in the David and Goliath stand-offs between large corporate interests backed by US foreign and economic policy and the impoverished and embattled, if flawed, Central and South American states.
In that regard, Chávez’s death brought this piece to mind. It was written by Ricardo Garibay (published in various places), from a tape recording by Carlos Ortiz Tejada of the funeral of Pablo Neruda, only days after the right-wing Chilean coup and the death of President Salvadore Allende:
The funeral procession begins at the poet’s house, where the corpse was lying in state attended by his widow and sisters. The wake is held in the middle of a muddy, flooded room that was once his library. Books and documents are floating in the mud along with furniture. The day before, a stream was diverted into the house by the military who smashed everything in sight with their rifle butts and left the house flooded. The coffin has been removed and is being carried by some friends of the poet. Only a few people are present accompanying his widow and sisters and the Mexican Ambassador, Martinez Corbala.
Someone inquires and is told, “Pablo Neruda? “What? “Yes, sir, Pablo Neruda. And quietly the word spreads, and the name opens doors and windows, it begins to appear at half-closed shops, it descends from telephone poles with the workers who worked on them, it stops buses and it empties them, brings out people running from distant streets, people who arrive already crying, still hoping it is not true. The name keeps emerging, like a miracle of anger, in hundreds and hundreds of people – men, women, children almost all poor, almost all people of the shantytowns of Santiago – each of them becoming Pablo Neruda.
We hear a grayish noie of ordinary shoes, we smell the infinite dust, we feel on our eyes the strained breathing of thousands of throats that are ready to explode. Then we hear a sound: shy, half choked, prayed in secret – “Comrade Pablo Neruda? – and we hear an answer of someone who is saying, “Don’t tell that I said it, here now and forever. A voice shouts, “Comrade Pablo Neruda! and there, already in anger, “Here! – already throwing a hat, stepping firmly and facing the military who are approaching and surrounding the crowd.
And here begins something that we imagined ancient and monumental, something from the realm of great literature, something incredible, necessarily fantastic, because it belonged to pure thought and would never appear in the flesh at a street corner. Some kind of giant litany for who knows how many dead. Who knows how many more murdered people this litany is for? A remote voice, shrill voice, howls in a bestial, heartbreaking way, “Comrade Pablo Neruda! And a choir watched by millions of assassins, by millions of informers, sings “Here, with us, now and forever!
There, farther, here, on the right, on the left, at the end of the marching column, a column of three thousand, the Chilean cries rise up, twists of an inexhaustible womb of sadness, twinges of light: “Comrade Pablo Neruda! “Comrade Pablo Neruda! “Comrade Pablo Neruda! “Comrade Salvador Allende! “Here! “Here! “Here, with us, now and forever! “Chilean people, they are stepping on you, they are assassinating you, they are torturing you! “Chilean people, don’t give up, the revolution is awaiting us, we’ll fight until we finish with the henchmen!
Swirls of crying, swearing, threats, wailings, of darkness at noon, of voices choking with anger. Hellish vocabulary, crazy, heavenly words. Three thousand overwhelmingly defeated people are howling.
And suddenly, howling powerfully, a woman begins to sing Neruda’s verses. Her voice grown suddenly alone, “I have been reborn many times, from the depths of defeated stars . . . and all shout, all, they shout from their memories . . reconstructing the threats of eternities that I populated with my hands . .
Share this:
#RIPChavez, Donnacha Ó Briain, Hugo Chavez, Inside the Coup, Kim Bartley, Pablo Neruda, The Revolution will not be televised
I agree Harry. The appeasers and cowards ended up causing 10s of millions their lives and many more folks years of misery and hardship.
Hello Harry and Joe,
One of the reasons I mentioned “Chamberlain and the Lost Peace” by John Charmley was to get a bit of balance into the discussion. And to flag an historian who re-iterates arguments most of the senior soldiers I met in my childhood would have made. The issue is that Churchill inherited a situation where preparation had been made for the war over years of delay. If Britain had taken on Germany in 1934 then the Polish army would have been in a position to hold Hitler’s embryo army down in the east, possibly even defeat it, but in 1938 the situation was very, very different. The fighters that won the Battle of Britain were still only just entering production. My uncle flew Fairy Battles, and only survived the first months of fighting because his squadron did not go to France. So I have some idea just how woeful a show the airforce would have made against advanced German aircraft.
Please, both of you, read Charmley! Joe, there must be some way you can get an interloan, or get a cheap copy sent from here! Churchill is being constantly re-interpreted as the old propaganda myths start to show their weaknesses. Think “Tony Blair.” Think “weapons of mass destruction.”
And Joe, yes, the Nazis should have been contained early, but they weren’t. “The appeasers and cowards ended up causing 10s of millions their lives and many more folks years of misery and hardship.” But Churchill played his own role in this by fighting a war Britain was unprepared for and could never win unaided. Chamberlain was probably right and 1938 would have been an even more suicidal moment to start a war. But even by fighting Germany when he did Churchill effectively destroyed Britain and turned her into a second rate power, and he would not have been even as successful as he was without the groundwork of military preparation carried out under Chamberlain. Honour where honour is due. Please, please read John Charmley, and also his later book on Churchill. It’s a state of the art analysis of the career of the old rogue and intelligently outlines many of these issues.
And please do not trust “history”, simply because a lot of people say it in print, this is simply repetition not proof. Over on the Presbyterian thread I’ve been arguing at length with Nevin, who has been insisting that a much repeated propaganda myth of the late seventeenth century is actually a fact. I’ve attempted to describe in my postings some of the ground rules of historical enquiry. There’s a great quote from Hiram Morgan on the article for the thread “Essentially the more you dig down into a subject, looking at the documents, the original sources, you get further and further away from your own preconceptions your own present mindedness as it were.”
Harry have you read Corelli Barnett’s “Desert Generals”? The reason for the poor showing of the British generals (many of them Ulstermen) was that Churchill had started a war without the means to fight it. They were being asked to fight Rommel with a few outdated tanks and impossible supply lines. They, especially O’Connor, worked wonders! But I would agree with you about Monty, who was known by the people on the spot as a complete idiot. By the time he arrived most of the problems had been solved, but at Alamein Montgomery almost succeeded in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory! And his showing in north Europe, no comment! But remember he was Winnie’s man!
When I was about five I heard a long serving (British Army) soldier say “A lie remains a lie, even when the entire world believes it.” The idea that Hugo Chávez is anything but another demagogue exploiting abstractions to delude his people is reasonably evident to a good number of us under the strident (inter)national socialist praise, but Churchill’s actual record needs a very similar dispassionate examination. Don’t repeat what you’ve been told, go and examine it!
Rory Carr, one of my ancestors made an American marriage one time. Many of the white settlers in the Appalachians during the eighteenth century had intermarried with the Cherokee. Alternate generations “murdered or married” is what I was told growing up.
I have French, Spanish, Cherokee, Separdic Jewish ancestors that I know of as well as being decended from Niall Noígíallach and an ancient lowland Scots family. Perhaps that is why I’m so very allergic to thinking in straight lines! I may even be the only neo-Jacobite on this thread who has read (and understood, I think) Herbert Marcuse, which is why I have the problems I have with both Marx and his enemies!
Yes Seaan I have read Barnett’s Desert Generals and he certainly deflates Monty’s image a bit (however it must be said if Monty’s thrust in May 1940 had been repeated by a few other Allied generals the Nazis could have met another 1914). But seriously how can Churchill get the blame for the dreadful ordinance and equipment that British troops were sent in to fight with in the first half of the war? He was the man screaming for rearmament and increased military spending throughout the 1930s.
I’m all for a bit of revisionism and I will certainly dig out Charmley’s book (can I give a plug for Powells.com, a superb US second hand online bookshop that sells fantastic quality hard to find books at amazing prices, not as slick and shiny as Amazon but excellent service nonetheless?).
However to make it out that Chamberlain was a farsighted strategic genius, stringing Hitler along until the British Army was ready (the British Army wasn’t ready until 1944, if even then) while Churchill was the fool who would have brought Britain to the brink of defeat in 1938 (as opposed to the brink of defeat in 1940 with no France, Czechoslovakia or Poland to help out?) takes quite a stretch.
Hitler could have been stopped at the Rhineland or at the Czech border, Chamberlain and Baldwin chose to let him get fatter and then chose to fight him disastrously over Poland when it was too late. That seems so obviously a historical truism that I can’t accept it is some sort of myth.
Churchill put it well in March 1939
“If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.”
You can dismiss him as an old bibulous imperialist windbag but I have to say he seems to have been phenomenally cleaer sighted than Chamberlain and for that matter most of the British top brass.
@ Kevsterino .
‘it was the Native Americans who gave us tobacco. They knew what they were doing.’
And in return they got the ‘firewater’ And at a later date were presented with ‘casino gambling emporiums’
I doubt the American Indians were aware of the carcinogenic add ons of tobacco .Neither was Buchanan Dukes .
Ironically it was the South American Indians who were to have the greatest impact on European history .They did after all give us the ‘potato ‘ without which it is unlikeiy that Ireland’s population would ever have reached 8.5 million in the mid 19th century and the subsequent mass emigration which followed ?
As we seem to be enmeshed in the pros and cons of Churchill , Chavez and WW2 and Russians in all the above it might be of interest to some to reflect on how the humble potato was the deciding factor in the survival of the early Prussian State as it fought several wars against Austrians , Russians and French . Back in the day it was customary for invading armies to purloin grain supplies and use them as a weapon to force submission of enemies . The canny Frederick the Great had several years earlier imported the ‘potato ‘ and encouraged it’s proliferation among the Prussian peasantry .The Austrians & Russians could never figure out how Frederick could keep supplying his soldiers with full stomachs to keep them on the march .
In retro with no Prussian State there would have been no German Empire etc etc and subsequent history would have been ‘different . Hitler would have ended up a homeless hobo and Stalin might have remained a priest ?
Harry, I have far, far too much respect for you (and relish for your comments) to brawl with you over an old rogue such as Churchill.
But I’ll just have to say that I’m not suggesting that “Chamberlain was a farsighted strategic genius,” nor is Charmley! The real issue here is that Churchill’s rhetoric dragged Britain into a war they could never, ever win, and would have dragged them into an even worse situation in 1938. Eden, at Stressa, had decided (out of his patrician distain for what he called “wops”) to alienate Mussolini, who had been courting France and Britain and was, surprisingly, Hitler’s main enemy in Europe after the death of Józef Piłsudski (check out Hitler’s first attempt to annex Austria). So, with Mussolini now forced into Hitler’s fetid arms it is highly unlikely that the Austrian corporal would have been stopped by any Franco/British display far from “the Czech border.” While Churchill may have been “the man screaming for rearmament and increased military spending throughout the 1930s.” the simple fact is that this actually happened far too late, and simply running into a war without the goods was an act of lunatic hubris. In the long run, Britain was lucky to have got away with simply loosing control of their dominions to the United States (yes I know, not overtly…) and without an actual German invasion.
As Ogden Nash says (about something completely different) “His Cause was right and his arm was strong, but he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong.” Even if old Winnie was clear sighted about the need to defeat Hitler, in the event his testosterone inspired tactics would simply have offered Hitler Europe on a plate, and while perhaps “it is better to perish than live as slaves” if I was an Englishman in 1939 I would have been wanting to choose the moment I would have perished for myself rather than at the vainglorious behest of someone else’s self intoxication (in both forms, alas, up to six bottles a day I hear!). Certainly, rather than being cowards, the British top Brass were simply doing their proper job of working out how to not actually loose a war, rather than hoping for the United States or the USSR to come and win it for them.
But even the depleted British army could have acted with France, Italy and Poland to stomp on Hitler and prevent the Rhineland remilitarization. After that debacle any action was going to be potentially suicidal.
Have a crack at Charmley, and see if he offers you anything that might get you to rethink Churchill. No pressure, though, I respect the sincerity of your defence, and I know a lot of people I really like who seem to respect the old dilettante.
And I wonder when Roy will be getting back to us with those USSR production figures? I hope he has not forgotten….
There was a school of thought amongst the WW2 appeasers -many of them in the British Army top brass and aristocracy who seriously believed that Hitler was good for Germany and with his anti communist credentials would also help to shore up western defences against the red menace .
France in the 1930’s was politically more divided than the USA today but without the USA’s economic strength . That the French could have marched into Germany in 1936 and defeated Hitler before he became too strong is one of those what could have beens of history . But France itself had memories of the slaughter of WW1 and would not have wanted a repeat performance . Also there were still memories of the ‘insanity ‘ of the French declaration of War on Prussia in 1870 when a much smaller French Army was forced into war by the ‘mob’ with the cry of ‘To Berlin ‘ only to find Paris under siege in a few weeks and were finally forced into a humiliating defeat .
Looking back is easy .Despite their strength in armed forces in 1936 France was ripe for revolution from the left the communists and the right with their home grown fascists .
Divided they fell .
There was of course a hope amongst many British politicians /top brass and indeed the French and Americans that Hitler would’nt last more than a couple of years .There had been so many assassination attempts on Hitler that it was a standing joke as who would be the lucky one . On one occassion he left a political platform a couple of minutes earlier than anticipated .As he was driven away the bomb exploded under the platform killing a dozen people . And that was before 1939 iirc .
And then there was that Irish Bavarian policeman who rescued Hitler and a companion from being kicked to death by a communist mob in Munich in 1928.
Whoever is responsible for the ‘universe ‘ wanted Hitler to live or so it would seem
Two excellent postings Greenflag! Thank you. Yes everything has consequences. But the Generals I’m speaking about above, if my family stories are true, actually wanted to beat Hitler, and their assessment of Britain’s honest chances of success was exactly nil. They were realists, not appeasers in the old blanket sense of the term in the story that has come down to us.
Such generals looked to belligerent continentals such as Józef Piłsudski and Benito Mussolini to provide the muscle against Hitler, as their own governments conspicuously would not. This was realism, rather than alignment with the systems these men represented, but even so, neither man could begin to compete in political unpleasantness with Stalin, whom Britain finally fought alongside.
Three!
@ SeanUiNeill
‘ the Generals I’m speaking about above, if my family stories are true, actually wanted to beat Hitler, and their assessment of Britain’s honest chances of success was exactly nil. They were realists,’
Britain’s main defence was always the navy . The British Army could never match in numbers what the Germans and/or French/Russians could put in the field . Thus it was always British policy to keep the ‘continent ‘ divided and to prevent any one power be they France (under Napoleon) or Germany (under Kaiser or Fuhrer) or Russia (under Tsar or Stalin ) from achieving hegemony over the continent .
To an extent that policy remains the same today vis a vis the Eurozone and European integration . Ireland was always of course tucked way out of sight and hearing from mainland Europe since the Second Conquest (Circ 1558) so that it could not prove to be a base for a flank attack on England and later Great Britain. Scotland was also up to the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie considered a possible back door entrance for a French attack .
Regardless of Churchill’s personal peccadillos I remain convinced that with any other politician in Downing Street at the time the outcome of WW2 would have been somewhat different .How Churchill managed to become PM is another story of which that not too many English or Irish people are aware . The background challenge and plotting to have Churchill replace Chamberlain was organised by Brendan Bracken a scion of a Tipperary family and whose family were founder members of the GAA and involved in the early IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood ).
Bracken was appointed Minister for Information by Churchill and hired George Orwell to work for the BBC propaganda service .Later Orwell is said to have based his ‘Big Brother’ in the Ministry of Truth in 1984 on Brendan Bracken’s ‘persona ‘ .
SeaanUiNeill,
My “How ?” was meant as a greeting, Amerindian style, not a presumptious demand for genealogical details.
You sure you’re Cherokee ?
Rory, Yes. People like me are very careful with their “genealogical details.” We look for proof before we accept anything. I’m still awaiting the USSR production figures&