Mountain Views News          Saturday, March 9, 2013

14

LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN

 Mountain Views News Saturday, March 9, 2013 

GREG Welborn

HOWARD Hays As I See It


HUGO CHAVEZ’S PAINFUL LEGACY


“Many young people turned to drugs and immoral lifestyles; these youth became known 
as hippies. They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and 
deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners. Rock music played an important 
part in the hippie movement and had great influence over the hippies. Many of the rock 
musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship.”

 - excerpt from textbook “America: Land I Love” 

 A whole lot of people, who are seemingly intelligent and informed enough 
to know better, are out in force crying over the passing of Hugo Chavez, a 
man they claim was a great benefactor of the poor despite the reams of data 
showing how this populist thug hurt the very people whose support he so 
cynically manipulated.

 Here are a few choice outtakes for what passes as insightful reporting and 
commentary today:

 Chavez empowered and energized millions of poor people. (NY Times)

 His legacy in his nation, and in the hemisphere, will be a better life for the 
poor and vulnerable. (Rep. Jose Serrano, Dem. Bronx, NY)

 Chavez was the first time in many decades that a leader paid that kind of 
attention to the poor majority in Venezuela. (Washington Post)

 Poor people around the world have lost a champion. (Sean Penn)

 He was a great hero. (Oliver Stone)

 He eliminated 75% of extreme poverty, provided free healthcare and education for all. (Michael 
Moore)

 Sadly, all this praise and worship is a lie. The left has always been more focused on their ideology 
and their intentions than on the reality of their policy prescriptions. As Jean Kirkpatrick used to say, 
being on the left means never having to say you’re sorry – sorry for the damage that you do to the 
people who can least afford the pain your leftist policies cause.

 When Hugo Chavez was elected President in 1998, he took over a country which had staggered 
through 20 some years of economic and political upheaval, riots, corruption and a couple of coups. 
The price of oil was $10 a barrel. With Venezuela being rich in oil reserves and the price of oil 
climbing from that $10 floor to upwards of $100 per barrel today, you wouldn’t have thought things 
could get worse, but you would have been wrong. Hugo Chavez stepped in to a great opportunity. All 
he had to do was improve things a little bit, capitalize on the rising price of oil to lift his country out of 
poverty, and he could have delivered real relief to a population who had suffered so much.

 Instead, he embarked on socialist policies that made things worse. He ruined the Venezuelan 
oil industry. Through nationalization of the various companies that drilled, refined and distributed 
oil, Hugo Chavez reduced oil production by roughly 30%, and much of what was still produced was 
shipped to Cuba at reduced prices to aid his comrade in arms, Fidel Castro. The job losses in the oil 
industry alone were enough to increase the poverty level in his nation. But his economic policies 
also resulted in devastating inflation. Prices are 20 times higher today than they were in 1999. The 
wealthy can always find a way around inflation; it’s the poor that don’t have the options, and can’t leave 
the country, that pay the highest price.

 He used the money he did give to the poor to consolidate his power and intimidate his rivals. He 
amended the constitution to give himself expanded power. He threatened reporters and stripped 
the independent media of their licenses to broadcast or print. Political opponents were limited to 3 
minutes of political advertising per day. Whatever voice the poor might have had through opposition 
leaders or locally elected representatives was stripped from them along with their chances for 
economic success.

 Hugo Chavez so demonized “the rich” and so encouraged retribution against anyone who seemed 
to be richer than their neighbor that he has bequeathed to Venezuela the highest murder rate in the 
world. Adding to the physical danger of living in this country is the fact that food is now scarce, 
lines at the stores long, and drinking water is often polluted by untreated sewage because basic 
infrastructure has been decimated and neglected.

 One of the greatest ironies of all is that the rise in oil prices, which should have lifted this country 
out of poverty, has actually hurt the poor more than any other group. Today, the Venezuelan poor 
spend 80% of their income on necessities like gasoline and food. The rising world-wide price of oil 
has increased the pump price of gasoline, increased the cost of shipping and trucking, which in turn 
has increased the price of food and other necessities. 

 In stark contrast to Hugo Chavez’s socialist policies stand two historically poor countries (China 
and India) which turned from socialism to capitalism. The period from 1980 through 2010 saw both 
these countries gradually dismantle harsh state economic controls and allow private enterprise to 
flourish. The results have been astounding. Over this time period, China’s population increased by 
400 million people, but the number of people in poverty DECREASED by 250 million. In India, 140 
million people left poverty. Capitalism, not socialism, has created a middle class in these countries.

 If we allow the broad brush of history to judge Hugo Chavez, rather than the short-sighted, 
ideological prejudices of the left, no tear would be shed for his passing. In 1950, Venezuela was 
the richest country in its region, and India and China were among the poorest in theirs. By 2013, 
Venezuela has sunk close to the bottom while China and India have climbed to heights that seemed 
almost unimaginable as recently as the early 80s. 

 The truth is that the only proven way to lift people out of poverty and fortify their position in the 
middle class is through free market principles and policies. The surest way to destroy their economic 
well being is through leftist policies. And yet it is the socialist dictator whom Hollywood and the 
media glorify. So we return to Jean Kirkpatrick’s wit: being on the left means never having to say 
you’re sorry.

About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is a freelance writer and has spoken to several civic and 
religious organizations on cultural and moral issues. He lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife 
and 3 children and is active in the community. He can be reached at gregwelborn@earthlink.net.

 For those in my age group, ask 
yourself: Did this description 
apply to you? Myself, I sported 
“unconventional” clothing, but 
always tried to be polite. I enjoyed rock music – 
but never considered Ravi Shankar or Joan Baez 
to be “rock”.

 As for “Eastern religious cults”, I’m a board 
member of the Pasadena Buddhist Temple – but 
only joined a couple years ago. I don’t know of 
any ex-hippies among the congregation - except 
for maybe my wife, who was into flower-power 
as a teenager in Japan. If I wanted to hook up 
with a girlfriend back then or be allowed in by my 
Mom for a home-cooked meal on the week-end, 
I’d better have taken a bath. 

 Okay – that opening quote is ridiculous. It’s 
taken from an eighth-grade history textbook, 
taught in private schools in Louisiana. It’s a 
“history” financed by taxpayers via that state’s 
“voucher” system – and I swear to that by the 
Power of Satan.

 Last year I wrote a column on voucher-
supported “history”. In Louisiana, for instance, 
there are these gems of indoctrination from 
taxpayer-funded textbooks published by Bob 
Jones University Press:

 On the KKK: “[The Ku Klux] Klan in some 
areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, 
fighting the decline in morality . . . . it achieved a 
certain respectability” - United States History for 
Christian Schools, 3rd edition.

 On slavery: “The majority of slave holders 
treated their slaves well.” - United States History 
for Christian Schools, 2nd edition.

 On dinosaurs: “Dinosaurs and humans were 
definitely on the earth at the same time and may 
have even lived side by side within the past few 
thousand years.” - Life Science, 3rd edition.

 “School choice” means parents have a choice 
whether to have their kids fed this stuff; taxpayers 
have no choice whether to take funds from their 
public schools to pay for it.

 As I went through this “history”, I was reminded 
of the tendency of fundamentalist texts (whether 
Christian or those of “Eastern religious cults”) to 
categorize individuals and movements as “good” 
or “evil”. The exception is with subjects like 
slavery and the KKK, where the hope is merely 
to move up the approval-spectrum from outright 
revulsion to somewhere in the mushy middle. It’s 
like reminding us that Hitler was fond of dogs, 
and Mussolini liked Laurel and Hardy.

 Conversely, there have been attempts to 
convert images of individuals with ambiguous 
characteristics (a description which applies to 
most everybody who ever lived on this planet), 
into epitomes of evil.

 Again, for those in my age group, think back 
to the earliest images you recall seeing of Fidel 
Castro in his fatigues, cap and stogie on TV as 
your Dad watched Huntley and Brinkley. Here 
was a revolutionary who assembled his “July 
26 Forces” in the hills above Havana which, 
under the command of Che Guevara, defeated 
Fulgencio Batista in the Battle of Santa Clara on 
New Years’ Day, 1959. Really cool. Batista was a 
corrupt, thuggish dictator, and everybody knew 
it. The charismatic Castro and Guevara were 
ready-made for fawning reportage.

 But then, Castro blew it. He wouldn’t allow 
the Mafia to reopen their Havana casinos. He 
suggested the daughters of Cuba should be 
getting an education, not serving as maids and 
hookers for East-coast fun-seekers. He argued 
profits from sugar plantations should benefit 
“todos los Cubanos”, not a handful of oligarchs.

 This was too much for the American 
government, so they cut him off - and Castro 
turned to the Soviet Union and became “evil”.

 I recalled Castro as I thought of another Latin 
American leader. Consider this history, according 
to the UK Guardian: In his first decade in power, 
his country’s GDP doubled. Unemployment 
and infant mortality were cut in half. The level 
of “extreme poverty” fell from 23.4% to 8.5% - 
the third lowest in all of Latin America. College 
enrollment doubled, and millions of its citizens 
had access to healthcare for the first time in their 
lives.

 Hugo Chavez was a democratically elected 
leader, and his policies worked. With Castro it 
was sugar, with Chavez it was oil – and his policy 
of nationalization worked for the benefit of all 
Venezuelans. He practiced income redistribution 
and it worked – in contrast to the United States, 
which now has one of the worst levels of income 
inequality in the Western Hemisphere. Chavez 
practiced socialism and it worked – so he had to 
be made a caricature of evil.

 Under the Bush Administration, it wasn’t 
enough that Chavez was ridiculed – he had to 
be removed. Coup leaders, members of the 
Venezuelan oligarchy, held meetings with Bush 
Administration officials. The soon-to-be interim 
leader, Pedro Carmona, traveled to Washington. 
Bush insisted they had nothing to do with 
the coup. And when, after massive popular 
demonstrations restored Chavez to power after 
Carmona had been in office less than 48 hours in 
April 2002, Administration officials claimed they 
hadn’t approved of the coup, anyway. Four years 
later, when Chavez spoke at the United Nations, 
he referred to Bush as “Satan”.

 When Chavez is referred to, if at all, in those 
Bob Jones University history textbooks, it’ll be as 
the one who referred to our president as “Satan”. 
There won’t be any mention of the fact he was 
referring to the one who helped engineer the 
coup to overthrow the democratically-elected 
leader of his country four years before.

 As “hippies”, we learned to question authority. 
We also learned to question the accepted 
“history”, such as the one being offered of 
Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. Peace.