What the Pat Robertson affair reveals
By Patrick Martin
27 August 2005
Before the Pat Robertson affair is completely swept under the rug by the
American media and political establishment, the incident is worth more careful
consideration for what it reveals about the state of political life in the
United States. It is, after all, not every day that a prominent American and
one-time presidential candidate openly advocates the assassination of a foreign
head of state.
Robertson issued his call for the murder of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez
on his 700 Club television program Monday. On the same program Wednesday he
tried to pull back from the statement, claiming that in urging the US government
to take out Chavez he was advocating kidnapping rather than killing. After
videotape footage was widely distributed on the Internet of his explicit use of
the word assassination, Robertson issued a grudging retraction, claiming that he
had been speaking in frustration over the policies of a foreign leader who had
found common cause with terrorists.
The American media has largely dismissed Robertsons comment as though it was
a slip of the tongue that, however embarrassing to the individual involved, has
no deeper meaning. The multi-millionaire television host and founder of the
Christian Coalition has been derided as a buffoon, a crackpot, a political loose
cannonanything to obscure the fact that his remarks reflect the views of wide
layers in the US political establishment.
Robertsons statement followed weeks of intensifying verbal warfare between
the nationalist and populist Venezuelan leader and the US government. There were
tit-for-tat diplomatic gestures. The Bush administration claimed that Venezuela
was not assisting in anti-drug efforts aimed at stopping the flow of cocaine
from Colombia. Chavez in turn accused Drug Enforcement Administration agents of
spying on his country and suspended cooperation. The State Department then
threatened to remove Venezuelas certification as an ally in the war on drugs,
which would lead to sanctions against loans from international agencies and
other foreign aid, and it denied entry visas to three Venezuelan military
officers.
From August 15 to 17, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited the South
American countries of Paraguay and Peru, holding talks on the deteriorating
political situation in neighboring Bolivia, where successive US-backed
presidents have been brought down by a peasant-based opposition movement, and
condemning alleged outside interference by Chavez and Fidel Castro. There
certainly is evidence that both Cuba and Venezuela have been involved in the
situation in Bolivia in unhelpful ways, Rumsfeld told the press.
Chavez responded to this heavy-handed intimidation with more bravado, making
his fourth visit to Cuba in the last nine months and appearing side-by-side with
Cuban President Castro on his weekly television show. The grand destroyer of
the world, and the greatest threat, the Venezuelan leader told his audience,
is represented by US imperialism.
The New York Times summed up the situation in an article August 19,
with the headline: Like Old Times: US Warns Latin Americans Against Leftists.
It observed that Rumsfelds visit had the throwback feel of a mission during
the cold war, when American officials saw their main job as bolstering the
hemispheres governments against leftist insurgencies and Communist
infiltration. The Times quoted a senior Defense Department official
traveling with Mr. Rumsfeld who said of Chavez, A guy who seemed like a comic
figure a year ago is turning into a real strategic menace...
The Times did not spell out the obvious corollary of such a
characterization: throughout the cold war, American policy in Latin America was
to foment military coups to overthrow hostile regimes, kill their leaders and
suppress popular opposition. This policy was implemented in Chile, Brazil,
Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Guatemala and other countries.
Such methods are not a historical relic. In 2002, a similar effort was
carried out in Venezuela, with open US support. From the perspective of
Washington, it failed as a result of poor organization and insufficient
ruthlessness: Chavez was detained at a military base rather than murdered, and
the threat of a popular uprising produced a panicky retreat by the coup
organizers, who released Chavez and fled, allowing him to return to power.
Since then, Chavez has prevailed over a general strike organized by the
Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce and Venezuelan union leaders in league with the
AFL-CIO and State Department, and then won a convincing majority in last years
referendum on whether he should be allowed to serve out his term in office,
which ends in 2006. The huge run-up in oil pricesVenezuela is the fourth
largest supplier of the US markethas given Chavez the resources to spend on
social measures popular with the vast majority of his countrys impoverished
workers and peasants.
This is the context in which Robertson vented his spleen at the Venezuelan
president, whose position, in control of a pool of oil of immense economic and
strategic significance to the United States, is seen as a serious obstacle to US
foreign policy. The TV preacher declared that assassinating Chavez made more
sense than another $200 billion war like that which overthrew Saddam Hussein.
There was an inadvertent truth embedded in this comparison. Robertson was
effectively confirming that the war in Iraq, too, was about oil.
The media commentary on Robertson has been largely aimed at covering up the
seriousness of the affair. The right-wing Cincinnati Post observed,
Privately, most people might admit, Robertsons plan to cap Chavez has a
certain forbidden appeal... But most newspaper editorials have either ridiculed
or bemoaned his remarks, while claiming that his sentiments did not reflect
those of the US government.
The Washington Post set the tone in an editorial Thursday which
expressed vexation that Chavez would be able to use the death threat to validate
his claims that the US government seeks to destroy his government. Mr. Chavez,
who, like Mr. Robertson, is infatuated with the absurd, fancies that the United
States is out to kill him, the newspaper said. The Venezuelan president seems
to enjoy portraying himself as a target of US assassinsa charge that he makes
without evidence and that has been strongly denied by the Bush
administration.
In its invocation of the absurd, the Post conveniently ignores the
well-established fact that US administrations, including that of John F.
Kennedy, developed and approved of schemes to assassinate Castro. Revelations of
US assassination plots became a sufficient political embarrassment in the 1970s
to oblige President Gerald Ford to issue an executive order banning such
practices.
The fact, moreover, that Chavez has faced a series of CIA-financed
destabilization campaignsand only narrowly survived a US-backed coup three
years agoapparently does not constitute evidence in the eyes of the
Post, a newspaper which served as one of the principal mouthpieces for
the Bush administrations fabrications about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction.
An even more cynical note was sounded by the Los Angeles Times, in an
August 24 editorial that began, A paranoid is never happier than when he
discovers that he really does have enemies. So Pat Robertsons call for the
assassination of Hugo Chavez may be just the moment of vindication the
Venezuelan president has been waiting for.
People in the United States know Robertson is a crackpot of questionable
sense or even sanity, the newspaper added. But South Americans may see things
differently, causing considerable damage to the United States already poor
reputation in the region.
Those poor deluded South Americans! They apparently are prone to believe,
after a century of US-backed coups and military interventions, that Yankee
imperialism is the biggest menace to their national independence and democratic
rights.
The Los Angeles newspaper does not seriously examine the implications of its
own characterization of Robertson. This is, after all, a man who has played a
major role for a quarter century in the Christian fundamentalist right, which
exercises immense sway in official Washington. As recently as the 2000 campaign,
Robertson played a critical role in the selection of the Republican presidential
nominee, throwing his support to Bush against Senator John McCain in the crucial
South Carolina primary.
If Robertson is semi-deranged, the same can be said about fundamentalist
spokesmen like James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Tony Perkins of the
Family Research Council, or Republican politicians like Tom DeLay or, for that
matter, Bush himself. It is a reality of American political life that ideologies
which would once have been considered part of the fascistic lunatic fringe are
now treated with respect and deference in the media and official Washington.
Support for political assassination does not put Robertson out of this
far-right mainstream. We should recall that after the murders this spring of
two judges and a judges family, at least one Republican senator, John Cornyn of
Texas, expressed understanding of the political frustrations directed against
the judiciary, while DeLay declared (echoing Robertson) that federal judges were
a greater danger than terrorists, and had to be held accountable.
It was during the media furor over Robertsons comments that Christian
fundamentalist Eric Rudolph was sentenced to life in prison for the 1996 bombing
of Olympic Park in Atlanta, in which one woman was killed and a hundred people
wounded, as well as bombings of a gay night club and an abortion clinic.
Rudolph, like Robertson, is a representative of the culture of life so praised
by Bush.
American imperialism is in a blind alley, facing an insoluble social crisis.
It has embarked on a course of military aggression, using its residual military
superiority in an attempt to offset a weakened economic position. The wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq are only the prelude to even bloodier adventures. In that
context, the ravings of a Pat Robertson give a more realistic view of the actual
state of mind in Washington than all of the official bloviating from the White
House and State Department about democracy and freedom.
See Also:
Christian
Coalition leader Pat Robertson calls for assassination of Venezuelan
president
[24 August 2005]
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/robe-a27.shtml
