Venezuelan president's death reminds us, unfortunately, that many still cling to the monochrome liferaft of good and bad
Share 111
inShare2
Email 
Hugo Chávez strikes me as a familiar type of Latin American caudillo whose career would probably end in tears – his own or other people’s. Photograph: Gustavo Amador/EPA
On days like today when Hugo Chavéz is being adored and reviled in equal measure following his death from cancer I'm fascinated by society's deeply felt need for heroes and villains, the overwhelming urge to set aside inconvenient facts which mar the hero's life or put the villain's record in a more impressive light.
It will be the same when Margaret Thatcher, another charismatic and divisive figure, goes to join the majority. Both sides will be outraged that I mention Lady T in the same breath as Commandante Chávez. How dare he! But that reaction reinforces my point. People with a need for heroes – their black and white world view also needs villains – will have no truck with that sort of comparison.
Are our own times worse than others in this regard? Probably not, except that the widespread rejection of religious faith – plenty of scope for heroic saints to admire there – western secular society seems to search for other heroes. Did I say western? Europeans in their millions may have revered both Hitler and Stalin. But even more Chinese made a lethal cult of Mao Tse Tung well within living memory.
Maoist cult groups in Europe threatened death to writers who questioned his towering achievements. Even today the nervous crony capitalists elite in Beijing dare not do what Khrushchev did to Stalin in his secret speech a mere three years after his predecessor's death. Cromwell, Napoleon, Richard III, they all retain their active fan clubs and hate clubs centuries after they died. Some leaders have that knack.
Myself, I usually refrained from writing about Chávez, who struck me as a familiar type of Latin American caudillo whose career would probably end in tears – his own or other people's. I did so because a lot of people I like regarded him as a serious progressive who was trying to raise up the poor of oil-rich Venezuela and do so at the expense of the corrupted oligarchy that had run the place for a long time with the connivance of the United States.
The overall US record in South and Central America has been pretty baleful since it took over paternal stewardship of the subcontinent from the Spanish and Brits (Portuguese Brazil was always a special case), though the past few decades have been more successful and assertive, not least in modernising Brazil, which has avoided what we'll call Chávez's flair. Even Franklin D Roosevelt – who comes as close as I can muster to a 20th-century political hero of mine – once said of some ratbag (was it Batista of Nicaragua?) "he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch". Not nice.
Like the dynastic Castro brothers, Chávez was part of the Latino self-assertion, for all his faults and excesses, economic, political and constitutional. It's pretty obvious that millions of poor people loved him and benefited from his rule, whatever sour-puss US analysts are saying on radio and TV today. Fair enough, so I gave the president-for-life the benefit of the doubt which was often difficult, as today's obituaries underline.
He did a lot of outrageous things at home, not all of them necessary to sustain his popular rule, his economic policies, based on the oil boom, would have run out of money sooner or later, and he chose some very unsavoury pen pals abroad. Check out this – and this balanced warts-and-all analysis from Rory Carroll, the Guardian's former Caracas correspondent and Chávez biographer. Here's Rory's thoughtful film.
It won't be good enough for the worshipping end of the trade, especially liberal and leftwing romantics who live far from Venezuela. Check the posts on the Guardian's coverage. This morning, ex-mayor of London Ken Livingstone traded blows on air with a US hardliner, both blinkered in their own ways. Honest, frank, likeable, you didn't feel at all deferential in his presence, the former mayor confided.
Livingstone said Tony Blair met Muammar Gaddafi too, so that made it OK, that Chávez was more popular than George W Bush – probably true, but a low benchmark – and that US and British ministers rig our supreme courts too by picking the judges. Hmmm. I can find no easy confirmation of Livingstone's claim that the US flew three assassins into Venezuela during the failed 2002 coup but that when Chávez's jailers realised they'd kill them too they saved him. Hmmm again.
Chávez bounced back in impressive style in 2002 as he had after his own botched coup in 1992, and after misleading voters over his own health – people with cancer are entitled to do that, but should his entourage have joined the conspiracy of silence? - got re-elected in November. What happens next is likely to be messy, let's hope it isn't. At least Barack Obama isn't Bush.
Quiet, fairly democratic states don't need heroes quite as much as those suffering deep turmoil or oppression. For most people, I suspect, ritual hatred of politicians is pretty skin deep. Even Maggie worship is fading and Churchill has little of no cult following left at all. In Italy the shine is coming off Beppe Grillo already – and he's only been a political kingmaker for a week.
That's as it should be. Happy the country without heroes. I like to think of the 1940s as offering two perfect, rival models of leadership – Churchill and Attlee. Sensible people would have voted for the charismatic Churchill as warlord in May 1940, the Labour party certainly did, though his own side was tepid and did not cheer his first entry into the Commons as PM.
But in July 1945 sensible people voted to chuck him out and quite right too. They elected his Labour deputy in the coalition, Clem Attlee, taciturn and uncharismatic, but a man who mastered a turbulent cabinet determined to rebuild war-ravished and bankrupt Britain. In her memoirs Thatcher gracefully conceded Attlee was "all substance and no show" (unlike most politicians today, she added meanly) while Attlee said of Churchill that he was "50% genius, 50% bloody fool".
Clem gets my endorsement, but he wouldn't want it. He wouldn't want a fuss. No demos, no placards please.