Chavez Will Try to Improve U.S. Relations (Fears U.S. will protect people from him, "the tyrant")

Sep. 18, 2005 - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Saturday that he would attempt to improve his relations with Washington, which have been rocky in recent months.

"Sometimes I make mistakes, I tend to respond to any official from the government of Mr. Bush who verbally attacks Venezuela," Chavez said during a speech at a Manhattan church, his last public event in New York before heading to Cuba to meet with his close ally Fidel Castro.

Chavez said the Rev. Jesse Jackson and U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., who sat with him at the church, had advised him "not to be provoked" by representatives of the U.S. government.

He acknowledged that he has occasionally "gone too far with words" when responding to U.S. officials who criticize his government, and he said his criticism of the Bush administration has sometimes been misunderstood as attacks against the American public.

In reference to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, Chavez said it was justifiable for people in an invaded country to defend themselves.

"The true war we ask for is the war against poverty and misery," he said to rousing applause.

Two days earlier, Chavez harshly criticized President Bush in front of a United Nations summit for waging war in Iraq without U.N. consent.

Chavez also criticized U.N. reforms Saturday, saying they would permit powerful countries to invade developing ones whose leaders are considered a threat.

In a speech earlier Saturday that was broadcast on state-run television in Venezuela, Chavez said the document adopted at a U.N. summit Friday was developed without consensus and was "invalid and illegal."

He singled out a section of the document creating a Peacebuilding Commission that outlines a "responsibility to protect." He called it suspicious, saying "tomorrow or sometime in the future, someone in Washington will say that the Venezuelan people need to be protected from the tyrant Chavez, who is a threat."

Chavez, a self-declared revolutionary, has often clashed with the U.S. government and has accused Washington of seeking to oust him a claim U.S. officials have denied, though they have expressed concern about Chavez's ties with Castro and what opponents call his authoritarian tendencies.

The disagreements between the two sides drew more attention last month when religious broadcaster Pat Robertson suggested the United States "take him out" because Chavez poses a danger to the region. Chavez responded that Robertson clearly "expressed the wish of the elite that govern the United States." Robertson later apologized, and the State Department said his remark had been inappropriate.

***.....Naturally, today's leftists are smart enough to distance themselves from Soviet Communism. But the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev was already a critic of Stalin forty years ago. Did his concessions make him less of a Communist? Or more?

On the other hand, conservative misunderstanding of the left is only in part a product of the left's own deceits. It also reflects conservatives' inability to understand the religious nature of the progressive faith and the power of its redemptive idea. For instance, I'm often asked by conservatives about the continuing role and influence of the Communist Party, since they observe quite correctly the pervasive presence of so many familiar totalitarian ideas in our academic and political culture. Though still around and sometimes influential in the left, the Communist Party has been a minor player for nearly fifty years. How can there be a communist left (small "c" of course) without a Communist Party?

The short answer is that it was not the Communist Party that made the left, but the (small 'c') communist Idea. It is the idea, as old as the Tower of Babel, that humanity can build a highway to Heaven. It is the idea of returning to an Earthly Paradise, a garden of social harmony and justice. It is the idea that inspires Jewish radicals and liberals of a tikkun olam, a healing of the cosmic order. It is the Enlightenment illusion of the perfectibility of man. And it is the siren song of the serpent in Eden: "Eat of this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you shall be as God."

The intoxicating vision of a social redemption achieved by Them-this is what creates the left, and makes the believers so self-righteous.

And it did so long before Karl Marx. It is the vision of this redemption that continues to inspire and animate them despite the still-fresh ruins of their Communist dreams.

It is this same idea that is found in the Social Gospel which impressed the youthful Hillary Clinton at the United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. She later encountered the same idea in the New Left at Yale and in the Venceremos Brigade in Communist Cuba, and in the writings of the New Leftist who introduced her to the "politics of meaning" even after she had become America's First Lady. It is the idea that drives her comrades in the Children's Defense Fund, the National Organization for Women, the Al Sharpton House of Justice and the other progressive causes which for that reason still look to her as a political leader.

For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal-"social justice"-is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself. ...***

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