Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says that “the world needs a new moral architecture.” He also has a clear idea of what that morality ought to look like. Speaking at a conference on socialism in May of this year, he said that “every factory must… produce not only briquettes, steel, and aluminum, but also, above all, the new man and woman, the new society, the socialist society.” If Chavez manages to convince enough people that socialists are a new breed of humanity, a breed that has evolved beyond the old ideas of liberal democracy and individualism, then there is no compelling reason to acknowledge the rights of anyone else. Rights in the “new society” are not based on humanity, because the socialists are part of a new humanity. Rights are based on conformity.
Henrique Capriles is not a conformer.
Capriles is the Governor of Miranda, a state in northern Venezuela. He won election on the ticket of the only party to field a presidential candidate against Chavez in 2006. He knows firsthand what happens when democracy falls to socialist ideals: he served jail time in 2004 on trumped up charges of conspiring to overthrow Chavez, and his parents arrived in Venezuela as Jewish refugees seeking to get out from the threat of Nazi tyranny.
Unfortunately, socialism did not die with Nazi Germany. Owing to their allegiance with Iran, President Chavez and his supporters, the chavistas, have made no secret of their intense hatred for Israel. In early 2009, Chavez supporter and political columnist Emilio Silva posted a piece on Aporrea, a pro-government website, calling on his comrades to “publicly challenge every Jew that you find in the street, shopping center or park, shouting slogans in favor of Palestine and against that abortion: Israel.” To the chavistas, Venezuelan Jews are targets because Venezuelan Jews do not conform to the new society’s ideas about Israel. The men and women who dissent in the new society do not enjoy old human rights.
Governor Capriles learned that the hard way last month when mobs of angry Chavez supporters attacked his house in an orchestrated political demonstration by the Mayor of Miranda’s capital city, Alirio Mendoza. The mobs sprayed swastikas and climbed the walls of the home, terrorizing Capriles and his family (pictured above). Speaking that day, Mendoza justified his actions: “We are showing Capriles that… people are opposed to his continuous attacks against the initiatives and socialist projects of president Chávez.”
By the Venezuelan state’s morality, Capriles is outdated. He does not conform to socialism. He refuses to embrace Iran. He opposes political tyranny. In short, he is not a new man.
The moment that rights and even humanity itself are granted only on the basis of conformity is the moment that real morality ends. Chavez’s “new moral architecture” for the world, if adopted, will only end with a socialist swastika for whoever stands in his way.
(Thanks to Tim Mak at New Majority for the article that inspired this one.)
