I notice that on the day of Hugo Chavez's state funeral, Anglo-American journalists are still being highly disrespectful, with snarky comments about who attended the service, with smug references to their human rights and foreign policy records.
As with many democrats, I am not comfortable with the concept of charismatic personality cults either, such as the one Chavez built, even though, ironically, we do it with our own (highly cherished) royal family. The right-wingers, who often befriend authoritarian regimes sympathetic to their goals, had a tendency to knock the Chavez government in Venezuela though. Why was this?
The reason is that right-wing politics, which has sadly become as much populist discourse in the UK as it has been in the USA for decades, is against the redistributive policies that were championed by Chavez.
This is sad for one significant reason. After the Second World War, the British public actually voted for democratic socialist politics. Labour was elected, and the NHS, an education system, the welfare state and social housing were built, albeit under the much quieter and thoughtful leadership of Clement Attlee. I am convinced that nowadays, such policies, along with a major nationalisation programme, would lead to spiteful vilification in the press along the lines of that subjected to Chavez.
Hugo Chavez may have few friends in the neo-liberal West, but he has now passed away. He deserves a little more than the same obituary that was given to Kim Jong-il, Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, with only the names and a few local details altered.
His status was sufficient enough for our own Conservative Foreign Secretary, William Hague, who is by no means a socialist revolutionary, to pay his respects to Chavez and his family. It was also remarkable that despite the constant criticisms in the UK media, the British public nonetheless still had enough independence of thought to ensure that "RIP Hugo Chavez" was a statement popular enough to briefly trend on the Twitter website.
RIP Hugo Chavez indeed.
