Festive Left Friday Blogging Too: Chavecito on Venezuela’s Jews

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Sabina Becker

This should lay to rest any residual bullshit about Chavecito’s so-called antisemitism. Here he is, on Yom Kippur, talking about Venezuela’s Jews and how they fit in to the multi-cultural, multi-religious mix of Venezuela:

The last part is especially lovely. He tells how he was approached by an elderly Jewish man who’d survived Auschwitz and lost his entire family. He came to Venezuela, not Israel, looking for a new homeland. He found it, and feels very much at home.

Shabbat Shalom, Salaam Aleikum, Pax Vobis–as VTV’s Walter Martínez likes to say every Friday night on his news show, Dossier. Everyone belongs in Bolivarian Venezuela. And no one is persecuted.

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12 Responses to Festive Left Friday Blogging Too: Chavecito on Venezuela’s Jews

  1. Christopher Olorago says:
    September 18, 2010 at 7:19 PM

    “There are some − every day there are fewer − ‘small leaders’ [dirigencillos] who don’t lead anyone, they are more isolated every day, and wander around like the wandering Jew.” [http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2004/venezuela.htm]
    “some minorities, the descendants of the people who crucified Christ, [who] seized the riches of the world.” [http://www.miamiherald.com/static/errors/404.html]
    “[t]he world is for all of us, then, but it so happens that a minority, the descendants of the same ones that crucified Christ, the descendants of the same ones that kicked Bolívar out of here and also crucified him in their own way over there in Santa Marta, in Colombia. A minority has taken possession all of the wealth of the world.” [http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2006/jan/05/]
    “Halvorssen says that, “Chavez first ran for president on a reform platform, winning in a landslide. What few understood then was that Chavez planned to revolutionize the country following a plan masterminded by his longtime friend Norberto Ceresole, an Argentinian writer infamous for his books denying the Holocaust and his conspiracy theories about Jewish plans to control the planet.” Holocaust denier Ceresole calls the Jews of Venezuela the greatest threat to Chavismo in his Caudillo, Ejército, Pueblo (Leader, Army, People). Chávez denies receiving advice from Ceresole, who was evicted from Venezuela a few months after Chávez reached power; later, Clarin.com said that Jose Vicente Rangel described Ceresole’s book as disgusting and despicable.” [http://edant.clarin.com/diario/1999/03/04/i-03401d.htm]
    http://bostonreview.net/BR34.4/lomnitz_sanchez.php
    But I’m sure you won’t publish this comment, Sabina. You’re too scared that your precious revolutionary nonsense will be discredited, right?

  2. Sabina Becker says:
    September 18, 2010 at 9:17 PM

    Ha, ha…satisfied now, Oloroso Mentiroso? (That’s “stinking liar” in Spanish. You obviously don’t speak it, do you?)
    Don’t worry, I’m not going to simper and say you’re right, because you’re not. I published this just so the world could see what a fucking dumbass you are. Anyone who cites Thor Halvorssen as a source deserves to be laughed at by the world at large, because he’s certainly not credible in Venezuela (or anywhere else). Your right-wing Israeli sources are also out of the question for credibility; they have an active agenda, which is tarring anyone who disagrees with Israeli apartheid as an antisemite. And get serious–Clarín? Argentina’s #1 fascist rag is a fine one to rail on antisemitism, because 30 years ago, it was full of it and peddling its ass to the junta–and THEY persecuted Jews. And the Miami Whorald? Get the fuck out of town. That paper’s a CIA propaganda front, and a well-known one at that. Can’t you at least choose sources that don’t stink of the cesspit? Of course not, that would destroy your precious fallacy.
    As for those who crucified Christ, if you understood the first thing about history (and you don’t, being a right-wing idiot), you would understand that he meant the fucking Roman Empire. NOT the Jews, who executed by stoning, not crucifixion. Here, have a little light reading, dumbass:
    http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/1563
    http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4769
    http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1581
    It’s even in English, so you should have no problem wrapping your unilingual pea brain around it. Bet you don’t have the guts…so I’ll just give you an excerpt from the last of the three, one that will really leave you red-faced:

    As American Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who questioned the charge, told the Associated Press (1/5/06), “I know of no one who accuses the Jews of fighting against Bolivar.” Bolivar, in fact, fought against the government of King Ferdinand VII of Spain, who reinstituted the anti-Semitic Spanish Inquisition when he took power in 1813. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, a Jewish sympathizer in Curacao provided refuge to Bolivar and his family when he fled from Venezuela.

    Feel stupid yet? Wait, there’s more.
    I’ve also dealt with this tiresome old smear here before. Are you afraid to read this blog THOROUGHLY? I bet you are…but here, I’ll do the searching for you:
    https://hollow-hill.com/sabina/2008/07/the_wall_street_journals_jewis.html
    Afraid. Suuuuuuuure. I’m so afraid to tackle this scary, scary subject that I got there two years ahead of you and debunked it completely before it was OLD news.
    Don’t you feel foolish, sitting there on your ADSL line in the UK, unable to comprehend Spanish and unwilling to dig any deeper? You should. You have much to be ashamed of, starting with your own smug stupidity.
    Now fuck off, you imbecilic wanker.

  4. Sabina Becker says:
    September 19, 2010 at 10:44 AM

    Oh come on. Can’t you do any better than that? How about addressing the rest of my points? Coward.

  5. Christopher Olorago says:
    September 19, 2010 at 11:35 AM

    Well, on the subject of your points, you seem to know a lot about it. Perhaps you are right. However, although I cannot willingly support Chavez or any kind of pseudo-socialist nonsense tyranny, I will agree that you won this one.

  6. Sabina Becker says:
    September 19, 2010 at 11:42 AM

    LOL! That’s a hoot, the only nonsense here is what you’re spouting. Socialism is economic democracy, and Chávez is democratically elected. Moreover, the entire Venezuelan constitution was written collectively, by elected representatives of the people, and he abides by the powers that it grans him. All amendments to it were also put to a general vote. In other words: WHAT FUCKING TYRANNY?

  7. Christopher Olorago says:
    September 19, 2010 at 5:01 PM

    Controls on the freedom of trade of the people, selling of labour on the market and the right to be free from coercion.
    That’s what freedom.

  8. Sabina Becker says:
    September 19, 2010 at 10:17 PM

    You mean the “right” of slavers to be slavers. Sorry, but that “right”, which is just a privilege, was legally ended in the Americas 150 years ago. It’s high time that abolition were enforced.
    Plus, it’s apparent that you don’t know the first thing about worker control of the workplace (as opposed to that owners and managers and shareholders, which is paid slavery). That’s socialism. It’s growing in Venezuela–co-ops and co-management are on the rise down there…
    http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1859
    http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1929
    http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1454

    The idea of co-management has been around for some time. In Germany, for example, co-management was used to co-opt the workers’ movement by giving workers shares and some nominal decision-making power, aimed at convincing them that their interests lay with increased production and profits for the bosses.
    However in Venezuela, co-management is being posed as an alternative to the interests of the bosses, and more fundamentally, to those of capitalism. As Canadian academic Michael Lebowitz, now living in Venezuela, explained at a recent national gathering of workers for the recuperation of factories, “the point of co-management is to put an end to capitalist exploitation and to create the potential for building a truly human society. When workers are no longer driven by the logic of capital to produce profits for capitalists, the whole nature of work can change. Workers can cooperate with each other to do their jobs well; they can apply their knowledge about better ways to produce to improve production both immediately and in the future; and, they can end the division in the workplace between those who think and those who do — all because, in co-management, workers know that their activity is not for the enrichment of capitalists.
    “The development of worker decision-making, the process of combining thinking and doing, offers the possibility of all workers developing their capacities and potential.”

    And that potential is spelled LEADERSHIP. Workers are learning how to run their own industries, no bosses, no shareholders. And that is MUCH more free than selling oneself to an employer.
    If you think there’s “freedom from coercion” under capitalism, you’ve obviously never been employed. Employment is nothing BUT coercion, 9 to 5 (and maybe much longer, if you have a workplace-issued Crackberry.) It’s a dictatorship of the bosses. There is NO democracy in a capitalist workplace. The low man on the totem pole does not get to elect his boss. That’s freedom? Bwahahahahaha…
    But go on believing in your Tooth Fairy capitalist fantasy of freedom, if it comforts you. I’m sure it helps you adjust to your own wage-slave status under dictatorship much better!

  9. Christopher Olorago says:
    September 20, 2010 at 6:09 PM

    Never heard of a “voluntary contract”, Sabina?
    The evil, greedy capitalist bosses do not come to your house in the middle of the night, kidnap you and force you to work. People choose to work – they are not coerced into doing so. Even the most obtuse fool should realise that work is not coercion. Slavery was abolished, thankly, years ago and if you don’t want to work then, y’know what, don’t work.

  10. Sabina Becker says:
    September 20, 2010 at 9:17 PM

    Yes, of COURSE of heard of “voluntary contracts”. The term is actually a bad joke. Employers constantly violate their end of them, in the name of profit. Any concessions you get one year will be taken away the next. You get stiffed on promised pay raises, you don’t get put on the full-time payroll–there are all kinds of perfectly legal ways they can and will cheat you. After all, they bought the politicians who made those ways available to them. Of course they expect their money’s worth! Your choices, such as they are, are to either quit and lose all income and benefits, or go on sucking it up. That’s about as “voluntary” as these “contracts” get. Unless you have a strong union that can launch a class-action lawsuit against the violator (increasingly rare nowadays, after three decades of union-busting governments), have come into a sudden large inheritance, or are willing to find a lawyer who can work pro bono (and those hardly exist anymore, since they too are chasing after the bigger bucks), that’s where your “voluntary” part ends. The system is stacked against those who can’t pay a lawyer to fight on their behalf. Not exactly a great freedom, is it?
    And as a matter of fact, work IS coerced in our society. Hardly anyone is born provided with all the necessities, let alone those zillions of luxuries that we’re being taught to want by an endless barrage of advertising all around us. That means an overwhelming majority are forced to WORK. Unless you can prove that you are too disabled to do it, which entails jumping through a remarkable number of increasingly narrow hoops, you’re even expected to work for welfare benefits, at least in my province–which pay less than a minimum wage job, and THAT isn’t enough to live on either. A more perfect setup for the low-wage slavers is hard to imagine; who wants to hire people at a decent living wage when there are all these unemployed on welfare, being made to work for their embarrassing pittance? If you want to be able to afford a roach-infested hole in a wall, you have to work for it–or go homeless, which nobody sane EVER chooses to do. (Who voluntarily chooses humiliation? Only those rich enough to pay a dominatrix. That’s not most people.)
    You have two basic choices here nowadays if you have no birth class advantage, no luck in the job market, no insider connections, and no lawyers: run yourself ragged at two or more poorly paid jobs, or put up with the indignities of an ever more shredded social safety net–and risk being arrested if you fail to comply with its increasingly byzantine legal conditions. Which is very easy to do when you’re trying to scrape by. I know several people who’ve been there, and only gotten out by the grace of government-funded re-training programs–i.e., SOCIALISM. Those are constantly in danger of being taken away, since our feds are currently VERY right-wing. “Les Miserables” is only a few strokes of the legislators’ pens away.
    And if the corporations these friends work for decide they can get it done cheaper by using Chinese slaves, and there’s no law to stop them–and there isn’t–they will, and they won’t hesitate to pocket the profits and pass nothing along to the peons. Guess who’ll be left in the lurch yet again. And they’ll be made to feel that they are to blame, for expecting to make a decent living in this “difficult” economy of record profits and capital gains! Ever seen the suicide rates for out-of-work people lately? They’re through the fucking roof. Foxconn workers in China, indebted farmers in India who were tricked into buying Monsanto, hell, even the French are killing themselves now that there’s all this “freedom” brought on by rampant privatization and competition. That’s what all this lovely unfettered capitalism is bringing–tons of crap everywhere. If you want to know the truth about where the economy is going, look at the bottom of the pyramid, not the top. The bottom looks awful here, it looks awful in Britain, in all parts of Europe, and in the US and Mexico. It looks hideous in India and China. But it looks better than it used to in Venezuela, go figure!
    “Don’t work”, you say? I can tell by your blithe attitude that you live a remarkably sheltered life. Even if you fall, you’ll undoubtedly fall into a fat wad of cash. Must be nice. Better pray that your good luck holds out, because when your fortunes reverse, I know at least one person who won’t feel the least bit sorry for you.

  11. Christopher Olorago says:
    September 21, 2010 at 3:09 PM

    A lack of choice is not coercion Sabina, so the rest of your argument falls flat afterwards.
    I’d agree with you that it is wrong for employers to violate contracts – after all, what are contracts even for if they are going to be violated?

  12. Sabina Becker says:
    September 21, 2010 at 3:50 PM

    Bullshit–a lack of choice is indeed coercion, especially if the lack of choices is by design (and it is.) You seem to have a very narrow and simpleminded definition of the word. It’s not just gun-to-the-head, you know. I think you really just don’t know how to address my points, because they are all correct and it’s YOUR argument that’s fallen flat. (Not that it was ever upright to begin with.)
    As for what contracts are for–it’s to give the whole farce a gloss of legitimacy. And to leave the guy on the shit end of the stick with no legal recourse. It’s the greatest sucker scheme of all time.
    And on that note, this discussion ends. My blog, my rules.

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