This is What Democracy Could Look Like
April 01, 2013
Viva Chavez!
This is What Democracy Could Look Like
by MURRAY DOBBIN
One of the many things that Hugo Chavez, the charismatic and revolutionary president of Venezuela, contributed to the world was his demonstration for people everywhere the difference between democracy and liberal democracy. Chavez’s hyperbolic style, his tweaking the tail of the Imperial tiger and his willingness to be just as ruthless as his U.S.-backed opponents, gave Western leaders and journalists lots of ammunition to demonize him.
But what really made them all crazy was precisely the fact that he took liberal democracy — the term applied to a political system designed to manage capitalism in the interests of the wealthy and corporations — and turned it into genuine democracy. It highlighted for those struggling for social justice that liberal democracy is an oxymoron — liberalism being the principle that capitalism (inequality) rules and democracy being its opposite: equality. As witnessed by the outrageous levels of inequality now characterizing Canada, you can have one or the other but not both.
Nothing threatens leaders of the Western powers, especially the U.S., like good examples of real democracy and they will do anything to destroy them, demonize them or threaten any other country that dares think about emulating them. No example is too small to destroy, as was witnessed by the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada (population 110,000). The strategy was called “destroy the dream” — which explains, perhaps, why U.S. troops totally destroyed a rural, all-women jam-making co-operative. In the 1980s it wasNicaragua. There they forced the Sandinista government to change its system of electoral democracy from a constituent assembly (made up of elected representatives from all sectors of society) to a multi-party system that the elites could control. The result: the Sandinistas lost.
The U.S. and its imperial junior partners like Canada have always had some excuse, however transparent, to crush good examples in the past. But Chavez shamed them at their own game, winning more democratic elections than any Western leader in the past century. Since coming to power in 1999, he won 15 of 16 elections and referenda, defeating his opponents by a margin of 10-20 percentage points, landslides by our own standards. And he did it through elections that were determined by Western observer groups to be perhaps the most fair on the planet. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, representing one of the most respected observer groups, claimed that Venezuela’s electoral system was “the best in the world.”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/01/this-is-what-democracy-could-look-like/
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