Links & notes. posted by Richard Seymour

Via Alphonse , a nice article on Venezuela and the presumptuousness of even its left-wing defenders in America.

If you ask me, Chavez is one of the smartest leaders to emerge from the Left in some time. He has handled the situation he is in impeccably, warding off violent threats, a coup attempt, a viciously hostile media - all the while making small, but substantial reforms in aid of the rural poor and the workers. And while there are grounds for criticising Chavez, (his dealings with Castro are misguided), there is no excuse for Beautiful Soul puritanism. Come to think of it, if I was a socialist leader (in a real and not titular sense), and Castro had saved me from a coup attempt while offering free doctors and so on, I don't know that I would turn it down. That said, Fidel Castro is reported to have said at a press meeting between the two: "You know I could harm my reputation by associating with you."

Meanwhile, K-Punk has an interesting post on how the Tories might revive themselves. Like Tim Yeo today and John Gray a couple of years ago, he argues that a) the Tories would have to successfully re-hegemonise the centre-ground rather than just "the aged and the ageing privet hedge nazis of the shires" and b) this would involve successfully inventing a genuinely post-Thatcherite solution, rather than warming up and consolidating the monstrous achievements of Thatcherism itself, as the Blair regime has done. I profoundly disagree with K-Punk's assessment of Labour's downfall in the 1980s (punk radicalism clotted with media cliche about the big bad unions, dammit), but the article is onto something.

Meanwhile, I would have thought that the obvious way to synthesise the centre-right with the privet hedge Nazis would be to emphasise crime and domestic security. Crime is a beautiful issue for the right because although it is a valid issue for many people in itself, it is also a code-word for racists - ie: "I don't like going into that area, you might get mugged". "The people there are funny, they're really threatening, know what I mean?" It is also suffused with a certain middle-class resentment at the working class, and it taps into the fantasies of the budding Tony Martins out there: an Englishman's home being his castle and all that. And, of course, there is the culture of cruely , the specific enjoyment people take in seeing tough punishments meted out to the weak and innocent: hence, ASBOs for the suicidal and mentally ill. (Meaders was first to note the Tory-Lib Dem realignment).

Finally, also via Alphonse, Jean Bertrand Aristide on Democracy Now . The question of US power in Haiti was sedulously avoided in the film The Agronomist, an otherwise remarkable account of a Haitian underground radio station. That's no surprise, since precisely that question is avoided by practically every other media form or outlet now that it has manifested itself to depose Aristide, install a government of sweat-shop merchants and former death squad leaders, and oversee the brutal suppression of dissent.

Also: see the excellent blog detrimental postulation for some pre- and post-graduate political ruminations.