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Two things: 1) In this piece, Joel Hirst makes a reference to Ayn Rand as though she had something relevant to say about Venezuela, civilization, or for that m
by vonnik 11y ago
Two things:
1) In this piece, Joel Hirst makes a reference to Ayn Rand as though she had something relevant to say about Venezuela, civilization, or for that matter, anything. That alone raises a red flag for me. He's declaring himself on the side of the Objectivists. Who is John Galt? The embodiment of selfishness and much of what is wrong with capitalism.
2) Joel Hirst is a "Fellow in Human Freedom" at the George W. Bush Presidential Center. http://www.bushcenter.org/people/joel-hirst.html http://www.bushcenter.org/people/joel-hirst.html I'm not sure there is a single title in America that denotes greater intellectual fraudulence or moral bankruptcy than that. You can trace a straight line from Kissinger, the Argentine Junta and Reagan's Contras down to George W. Bush and his fellows in human freedom. So Joel is firmly on the side of oppression in Latin America. Remember that when you read his fairly shallow analogy between Venezuela and fallen civilizations.
I do not support Chavez or his politics, but I do recognize that America and US allies have presented very few palatable choices to the peoples of Latin America, and the Joel Hirsts of the world will not save the Amazonian peasants with their visions of John Galt.
- Eliezer 11y agoVenezuela is being run by Atlas Shrugged villains. If there was ever in history an appropriate time to reference Atlas Shrugged, it's there.
- vonnik 11y agoFine. But what I'm saying is that "Atlas Shrugged villains" is not a particularly useful allusion, for a couple reasons. Rand neither invented nor perfected those villains' depiction in literature. Orwell did it better and sooner. Second, any criticism of the populist kleptocracy currently in power in Venezuela needs to take into account the bourgeois kleptocracy that came before it, or it is criminally incomplete. Randians and Bush fellows in human freedom have keen eyes for the former, and are conveniently blind to the latter.
- nikdaheratik 11y agoI think the reference was actually pretty good. And I disagree with most of Objectivism, or whatever you want to call it. The issue with Atlas Shrugged is that the villains were kind of real, it's the "heroes", and their motivations, that were pretty unbelievable. For that matter, the ordinary bystanders were kind of given the short shrift too.
- mc32 11y agoThe problem with LAm was not so much US interventionism -the problem was that LAm was sitting pretty vis a vis most of Europe (aside from the UK/France), at the turn of the last century. They had natural resources and they could have exploited them to their advantage, but they didn't. You had a few "caudilloes" a great peasant population which did not have a tradition of education and generational social climbing (you must remember they were very far flung and rural). When the US went in meddling, it's not like we messed something good in those places, they were going down anyway, due to many varied issues (see Mexico, Venezuela or Peru, proud anti-imperialists) and arguably where we did mess around, like Chile and Argentina, Colombia, Panama things are better off than in the places which languish in Garcia-Marques's feudal time warp. It's almost as though LAm, tied somewhat spiritually to Spain (or the Iberian pen.), followed down Spain's footsteps to relative irrelevance. We did mess up in a few places, due to realpolitiks, but I don't think things would have turned out better without our intervention --I don't see it realized in the places we didn't intervene down there.
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- slantaclaus 11y agoI don't think he's trying to. It's more of a warning for the rest of us