The Dictatorship in South America

The Encyclopedia Britannica blog doesn't mince words when it comes to Hugo Chavez:

It’s happening again. Another human has succeeded in combining a personal vision of the truly good and just society with the authority to attempt to create it, in the process telling several million other humans precisely how they should live. This time it’s in South America - Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, was granted the power to set aside the country’s constitution and rule by decree for a period of 18 months. The news reports I saw did not comment on whether his powers would include the power to extend his term, but few dictators in history have stepped aside willingly at any time, much less on a date set by mere statute.

The enabling law was passed by the National Assembly, which met in an open plaza in downtown Caracas for the purpose, turning the exercise into a piece of public theater with far too many historical echoes. The president of the Assembly was quoted as declaring “Fatherland, socialism or death!” More echoes. The punctuation and therefore the meaning of her call to arms are open to question. Are there three options or only two? That is, is it Fatherland OR socialism OR death, or is it Fatherland: Socialism OR death? And what is left for those citizens, if any, who find all three distasteful?

Her sloganeering was topped, however, by an explanation from the vice president, who said “Of course, we want to install a dictatorship, the dictatorship of a true democracy.” Anyone who can say that with a straight face belongs in the DSM IV Hall of Fame.

So Venezuela joins North Korea and Zimbabwe as nations where currently the law and the conduct of daily life are shaped by the ignorance and bigotry of a single person. And it takes its place in the long, sad train of Paradises on Earth that so disfigured the 20th century. Exact numbers, even rough numbers, are impossible to obtain, but authoritative guesses put the cost of that century’s experiments in Utopia at upward of a hundred million deaths...

Read it all here.