Moves and Countermoves

Posted on May 2, 2024 by Joel D. Hirst

It’s hard not to notice the difference between the emotional rallies of Maria Corina Machado (MCM), Venezuela’s opposition leader and the dictator Maduro’s forced, loveless, joyless meetings. Size: people always measure size and the Venezuelan opposition have been comparing size for 25 years. “Mine certainly was much bigger than yours,” doctoring pictures, using first photoshop and now AI. But in the age of little iPhone videos it’s also hard not to notice the difference. MCM’s crowds are massive, Maduro’s, almost non-existent. Also, forget the fact that the government pays people to show up for theirs; after MCM’s rallies people are threatened and after the last one in Portuguesa a few people who were too outspoken were arrested, including part of MCM’s campaign team. 

But it’s not really about size. If there are 10 million voters; even a march of 1 million, while impressive, is only 10%. The issue is energy, which is much harder to quantify. But it’s also hard not to notice that these MCM rallies have a twinge of a religious experience about them. People are weeping, they are screaming, they are running.

With Maduro they are sitting in chairs or standing around smoking while his charmless wife speaks through a wad of gum (or did her false teeth fall out?). They are no longer even trying. 

MCM’s strategy seems to be to simply roll over the government. Like a tidal wave when it hits the shore and just pushes inward, overwhelming everything standing in its way. There is precedent for this; if you look at Serbia when the opposition just rolled Milosevic — after twenty years of war and violence and corruption the government just crumbled. It appears to me; the opposition is betting on a great crumbling. 

Can the regime be toppled through the energy of one woman, powered by the delicately mixed potion of hope against despair which has caused such a chemical reaction as we’re seeing on Venezuela’s streets? Maybe. I’m certainly a fan. 

There are moves and countermoves as well. The regime opens a tiny window for a primary, hubristically thinking it will fail. MCM wrests it wide open through the power of her personality and imposes herself on a population hungry for inspiration (and despite a calcified political class cynical and self-dealing who have fought her every way they could). The regime bans her; she chooses an alternative for the ballot while retaining leadership (I have been skeptical, but so far, she’s pulling it off). The opposition tries to fracture, again; she again holds it together through her electric energy and the love of the Venezuelan people for their would-be-liberator. 

There are special politicians. It is said that when Bill Clinton entered a room, he made you feel like you were the only person there. (While, at the same time, it was said of Al Gore that every time he approached it was like the oxygen was sucked out leaving everyone choking.) Moves and counter-moves — the chess game of strategy (for the game to succeed) needs to be accompanied by a monumental personality. Especially in places as difficult as communist Venezuela. Normal politics won’t do; they are fine for the day-to-day humdrum of ordinary elections. But not for liberation movements. 

MCM is the most gifted politician in Venezuela since Hugo Chavez (and one of the most gifted I’ve ever seen). This is why the regime hates her. She has a way of making every single person of her millions of supporters feel special, unique — irreplaceable. As if nothing could be done without you; as if the entire movement hangs on the spider web of your endorsement and support. And she has one special gift that is hard in politics in Latin America; she is known to be incorruptible and uncompromising. In a region exhausted by self-dealing and corruption, somebody clean is also somebody new. In fact, the only thing her detractors can throw at her is that she is a ‘liberty’ extremist: only full freedom from the regime will do. 

Now what happens? The regime still has one tool, tried and true and steady. Violence. They have been using it selectively since Chavez came to power; sometimes more, sometimes less. Torture, assassination, forcing people to flight. Rolling up political prisoners (right now there are more than 400). If the regime is really threatened — if their control over power is in doubt — will they unleash a Bashar Al Assad style war? And will the soldiers — whose mothers have also had trouble finding food, and who are showing up at MCM rallies — follow orders to crack down? Like they did in Nicaragua in 2018 effectively ending any opposition but turning the state into North Korea of the hemisphere? Or will the military, too, crumble and the grunts join the rebellion. That is the question. Counter-moves — an amnesty? People can keep their stolen money as long as they leave forever? These are all strategies, counter-moves, the discussions around which are best done quietly. 

What I do know, this is it. This is Venezuela’s last, best hope to be free. If this effort fails, there begins a dark night of Cuba 2.0. There’s a saying in Venezuela, “No hay mal que dure mil años ni cuerpo que lo resista (no evil last 1000 years, nor a body that can take it)”. Is this Venezuela’s freedom movement? I truly hope so.

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The Democratization of Crappy Stuff

Posted on April 21, 2024 by Joel D. Hirst
The Lexus and the Olive Tree

So, fun fact, Amazon blocked this book review from their site. Then they sent me a nasty email with a ‘warning’ not to do it again. Now, I’m not a polemicist, it’s not really my style. So, I re-read this with the concern that maybe I’d written something inflammatory without meaning to. The reality is I think it’s fine. A review of Tom Friedman’s book a few years on, and where it does (and doesn’t) hold up. It is a criticism of those who have given us their tyranny of crappy stuff; and, frankly, Amazon is responsible for a lot of that. So maybe they were just offended; it is their business model after all.

I have stopped reviewing books on Amazon — I certainly don’t want to offend the gods of Olympus! Perish the thought. You’ll have to come here for my thoughts on things I read. If you want a review of the newest flavor of toothpaste, I’m sure Amazon will allow those through.

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Geography Matters

Posted on April 19, 2024 by Joel D. Hirst

Geography matters. That’s pretty much the whole point of Robert D. Kaplan’s book “The Revenge of Geography”. Not in a deterministic way — there’s still room for human action (agency he calls it); we still define the future. But the future we define is one that will be built upon the geography which we possess. I learned geography matters most recently during my time in Armenia. A euphoric “velvet revolution” truncated by the return of a millennia old problem, the advance of a foreign tribe encroaching on land you believe is yours. Sure, Prime Minister Pashinyan could have acted in a different way — maybe if he had not flaunted Artsakh’s ‘independence’, or if he hadn’t invoked the Treaty of Sevres (thereby laying claim to huge chunks of Turkey as well), he perhaps might have avoided war. Or not. Decisions matter. But facts remain — Armenia is a small landlocked South Caucasus country that has been the victim of genocide, is threatened by foreign enemies, is in a strategically important place for Russia, and is in the way of the renewed pan-Turkic movement.

We ignore our geography at our own peril; and if we make decisions absent an understanding of geography, we are likely to make the wrong decisions. We in the west don’t think about geography enough; we are very ideological. For good and for bad. When we see Putin amassing troops on the border of Ukraine, we don’t think about the importance of Ukraine to the geography of Eurasia and Putin’s re-imagined empire. We see one nation state attacking another, unprovoked. The fact that Putin does not have a warm-water port is not something we consider much, or his desire to plug the hole beneath the Carpathian mountains (from whence invasions come), or the tremendous vulnerability of the wide plains that march into Moscow (that have been exploited by the Finns and the Poles and the Germans and the French, to name only a few). I’m not justifying Putin’s attack; I’m saying if we had understood geography we might have avoided it.

Kaplan is only the 2nd writer I’ve encountered who spends a lot of time on the obscure British geographer Halford Mackinder (the man who invented the idea of geopolitics, which was seen as somewhat of a ‘crank’ philosophy up against the great liberal and illiberal ideologies of the end of the 19th century). The other is Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent modern-day Russian philosopher — they call him “Putin’s Brain” — who invented the modern idea of Eurasianism. Who, in his book “Foundations of Geopolitics” laid out Putin’s master plan and predicted the war in Ukraine. Kaplan said geopolitics matters and would lead us into war if we didn’t pay attention; Dugin then led us into war.

We should have listened to Kaplan.

Our own geography matters too. Kaplan spends the last chapter of his book on Mexico and its relationship to the United States (especially northwest Mexico with Southwest United States). Our country is fusing with Mexico and Central America, whether we like it or not. The income disparities between the two are nine-fold in favor of the United States. This makes the long border a high-conflict zone; but also because in my lifetime there will be as many Spanish speakers in the United States as there are English speakers, it also makes the issue a cross-border issue and a domestic political problem. A problem we ignore at our own peril. Again, we should listen to Kaplan, because what he writes in 2013 is happening — in Russia/Ukraine, and worse (for us) in our own North America.

Wisdom for effective decision-making comes from understanding the complicated interplay between geography, history and ideology. This only comes through education mixed with a healthy dose of experience, seasoned by curiosity. We can read about war in the South Caucasus, but until you live through one, you won’t really be able to understand the complicated position of Armenians.

Read more. Start with “Revenge of Geography”.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Posted on April 14, 2024 by Joel D. Hirst

We love our dogs because they were never expelled from paradise, like we were. They are our only true lasting final link to perfection and to our role as was imagined by the creator (only people who have owned a dog can understand this). We have become violent, disgusting and boorish; and creation ‘machina animata’ to service our rapacious demand for efficiency in all things.

RIP My Best Friend

Milan Kundera’s opus “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is a little hard to take; parts of it at least. Reflections on life against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, and that ideology’s hope to turn mankind as well into ‘machina animata’ to service the state and its perpetual revolution. There’s more than a little bit of absurdism in this novel, and it is more Nietzsche than Camus. It is said that Nietzsche’s final moment of madness came when he left his hotel in Turin onto the street and found a carriage-driver beating his horse. He threw his arms around the horse’s neck and wept; ostensibly because the animal was now ‘machina animata’ for the motility of man.

The theme of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, at least for me, was one of brokenness. And, more specifically, the brokenness of balance (and how that has made humanity disgusting). Which I think is relevant, because there was no political system more unbalanced than communism (although our current version of progressive utopian ‘liberalism’ comes in a very near second). Kundera’s characters, with perhaps the exception of Tereza, are not sympathetic ones. Bereft of balance, broken away from paradise, all our animal aspects become grotesque. Lust and violence and stupidity. Kundera puts them all on display, and it’s quite ugly indeed.

And then at the end he brings us back to Karenin, the faithful dog that reminds us of what our relationship with our world around us might have looked like before our expulsion from the garden. It is sort of genius, which is why Kundera would have won a Nobel Prize in Literature had not occupation politics gotten in the way. But maybe he was better without his Nobel, anyways.

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Mali’s Descent into Darkness

Posted on April 12, 2024 by Joel D. Hirst

I write this because my Malian friends can’t. They probably can’t event tweet it or FB it. Yesterday the Malian junta banned political reporting and commentary. This, after last week banning political activities by parties or organized civil society. They did this because of a backlash of frustration, as two years into their regime they haven’t been able to solve the problems of Malians.

In the medium term there is no such thing as an enlightened dictatorship. Two years ago, when the military swept into power, people were relieved. They were absolutely sick of the self-dealing of the ‘democratic’ government of IBK and hoped maybe some strong-armed action could sweep away the debates that crippled the country’s political system. Consensus is much harder than decree.

And yup, IBK’s rule was awful. Corruption and Dogon death squads wiping out Fulani villages. In Africa, the trappings and institutions of democratic governance more often than not don’t serve as a check on state capture but instead a tool for state capture.

Let me talk here about my 1000 days in Mali. Because it’s a remarkable place. The seat of ancient kingdoms, based out of Gao and Timbuktu, which made the onetime ruler Mansa Musa the richest man in the history of the world. It is said when he went on Hajj he collapsed the price of gold in Cairo for a decade through his lavish spending. Timbuktu’s library had 400,000 manuscripts when Oxford’s only had 800. It was the center of a Socratic university (called Sankore) where they talked about medicine and math while Europe was still in the dark ages.

But Mali fell on hard times. As always happens — kingdoms rise and fall. When the growing Berber dynasties in Marrakech started paying notice, in the 1500s, and sacked Timbuktu, Mali receded into poverty from which it has never emerged.

Mali, specifically the Sahara sands where the Tuareg ride, is also the birthplace of the blues. There are still ethnomusicologists who live permanently in the little villages, studying the evolutionary origins of rock music. Bono called that part of West Africa “The big bang of all the music that we love.” My time there, working on elections and the peace process (which we got signed in 2015 and which the junta just pulled out of), has settled pleasantly into my imagination. A quiet time (Our internet was no good and we only had Malian TV, so mostly ordering DVDs from Amazon and using the pouch, so the constant harassment of social media wasn’t even an option to become addicted to.) I was raising my little boy. He learned to walk there, then to run and jump. He learned to speak — English and Spanish and French. We went often to the little zoo in the center of Bamako to look at the 15 or so animals who were safely protected by the Aga Khan and his foundation (I hope they are still OK). We enjoyed the thundering rainstorms across the Niger; smelled the heavy air, taking shelter from the heat as our eyes were softened by the sandy browns and tans of the Sahara. Bamako is said to be Africa’s biggest village. And I worked hard; because it was a time of transition — away from a previous dictatorship and from a war that had almost arrived in the south. Which is why I can’t imagine a ban on all political activity. Malians love to opine and debate; they are sophisticated in sort of a French way (legacy of the colony); and while certainly conciliatory they don’t hide opinions or ideas. Which made working on a political program in a society that was becoming freer and freer so exciting. We brought in think tanks to organize people; we did book-reading clubs; we funded dozens of community radios and helped improve content; we translated the peace process documents into 13 languages and had village-level discussions of their implications; we organized rallies and marches. Political activity.

All of which is now illegal.

There’s a new totalitarianism that is creeping across the world. Nicaragua is now despotic; Afghanistan is the worst most brutal oxygenless tyranny the world has ever seen, apartheid against an entire gender; Venezuela is a failed drug dictatorship: Eritrea, Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, China, Belarus. They’re all getting worse. Dictatorship spreads like a cold.

Not that we are also not to blame. Our democracy hasn’t provided the answers, and has created tremendous self-dealing, corruption, rent-seeking and disorder which is exploited by those who pretend there is a better way. Our democracy promoters have become too missionary, too technocratic and too universalist in their own way (too often pushing cultural values as a bait-and-switch with real human rights and thereby weakening the entire movement by dividing it from within) — and not recognizing that there are a million-and-one ways to arrive at consent and those must be respected. And that maybe we could even learn something from them. Yes, we too share the blame.

I write this because if I were in Mali right now and wrote this I’d likely be thrown out — because I’d be lucky and have diplomatic immunity. But Malians have no such immunity. So somebody must speak for them, until they themselves can speak again.

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To Talk of Many Things… (Vol. #17 – AI and Literature)

Posted on April 7, 2024 by Joel D. Hirst

The other day I decided to see how easy it would be to translate my Armenia novel “An Excess of Nationalism” into Spanish. There is a huge community of Argentine/Armenians I want to target. I found a new free AI, uploaded the manuscript and in 4 minutes it was spit back out at me fully translated — including formatting and pictures. It was not perfect (maybe 95%), and is currently being proofread; but a $2000 three month translation job just became a $200 one-week proofreading job. Professional translators must be very concerned.

Which got me to thinking about AI and literature. Writers are worried that AI will write all the books going forward; that they will ingest Hemingway and Stephen King and regurgitate a story in short punchy sentences about a fisherman attacked by a clown.

Maybe. I was having a conversation about AI with my brother last week; he brought up the point (which I hadn’t thought about) that as AI trolls global content and synthesizes it, not once but over and over again we will get to a point where AI is writing books taken from other AIs who themselves copied it from other AIs who synthesized it from an original work. In this case, the 95% of my translated novel goes down to 90% and then 85% and 80%. It reminds me of the Michael Keaton movie “Multiplicity” — “You know how when you make a copy of a copy, it’s not as sharp as… well… the original?” while his clone’s clone shaves his tongue in the background.

That.

I’m reading Milan Kundera right now, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” — “Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.” Exactly. Could an AI say this? Great writing comes from the sentient experience of living; reflecting upon what was lived for posterity. For a writer to call out an “avalanche of words” is, I know, a little ironic (and somewhat myopic). It could be argued that the “market” should decide, but for any of you who have spent any time on Twitter or TikTok — that is the market. Can we really expect that crowd to source the next Herman Melville? And remember, Moby Dick only sold about 25 copies a year before Melville died, and was only a best-seller much later.

I wonder if the “…avalanche of words” we’re gonna get from AI (that we’re already getting from Amazon KDP) is maybe a good thing. True literature, good literature, timeless literature cannot be divorced from the writer. Would Kundera’s “Unbearable Lightness of Being”, a love story about a man and two women set against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, mean anything if I didn’t know that Kundera had lived those impossible years. That he was in fact a dissident writer who suffered under the Soviets (and in fact was denied a Nobel Literature Prize due to occupation politics). Would Rose Macaulay’s “Towers of Trebizond” still retain its power if I didn’t know that she had taken a trip to Asia Minor 100 years ago to watch the dying of an empire?

Would my Armenia novel be any good at all, if it was not about a lost writer I discovered (Gurgen Mahari), a refugee from genocide, who became a communist, who was exiled to Siberia by Stalin, who married his Lithuanian love and returned to Yerevan only to die of a broken heart amid bonfires of his finest work? And if the story itself didn’t ooze, didn’t drip with my own impressions of living where Mahari lived and walking where he walked? Probably the Twitteratti don’t care, but those looking for a real experience — a more intense significance — would probably notice. And it is for them we write anyways.

“Write what you know,” and “write who you are” are the advice given new writers. AI knows nothing, and is nothing. There is no connection to the human experiment. I wonder if AI produced literature will be the spark and fodder for a great fire, burning away the underbrush of overproduction leaving lasting only the mighty trees to stand alone un-impeded by unworthy competition. Or, better said, will people return to stories written by writers who connect them back to the “années folles” of 1920s Paris (which is where all writers want to live), to the dying days of an ancient empire, to the struggle for freedom in South Africa or so many other of humanity’s epic moments? We can only hope that after the “avalanche of words” greater appreciation will emerge for work that resonates with life.

That is, after all, what real literature is about.

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Was It A Morning Like This?

Posted on March 31, 2024 by Joel D. Hirst

There is one place that is central to our human story: Jerusalem. In about 2000 BC, Abram (to become Abraham) was instructed by God to leave Ur (south-east Iraq today) and go to the promised land, the holy land. He stopped by Haran (just south of Edessa which would be the epicenter of the Church of the East for 800 years) to pick up his family (and because you can’t just walk from Ur to Jerusalem through the desert, you follow the fertile crescent) and went to his new home. Why his family was in Haran we don’t know; was he a day laborer in Ur? Was he an itinerant merchant? We don’t know much about Abram; what he looked like, what language he spoke (although we assume it was some sort of proto-Hebrew), what religion he had been. Before the Jews, there was no Judaism. How did they talk to God, those 500 years between Noah and Abram?

And why Jerusalem? Why did God send now-Abraham to Jerusalem? There are more beautiful places along the way. Lebanon is forested and lovely; southern Turkey has extraordinary beaches; Syria has some alpine meadows filled with dainty flowers in the spring where rivers flow and breezes cool. Why not one of those spots for the center of the world? Jerusalem is a little dusty and hot, and nowhere near any water. But on to Jerusalem he went.

I had a conversation with a new friend last week, about the Jews and Jerusalem (he is Jewish). “Do you think the Jewish people were indigenous to Israel?” He asked me. “Indigenous, or aboriginal?” I responded. “What’s the difference?” — “Indigenous people inhabit a land from the earliest times; aboriginals were always there, way back into the deep mists of the past.”

But I know what he was really asking. “Does this land really belong to us?”

We know when the Jews arrived in Jerusalem; sometime around 2000 BC, with Abraham and his family. So what did they find when they got there? And this is the most remarkable part of this story that often gets overlooked. They didn’t fight for Jerusalem when they arrived; they found that it was being held for them, by Melchizedek the “King of Salem”. Salem of course being the early name for Jerusalem; and Melchizedek, we believe, was a pre-incarnate Jesus. “Without Father and Mother,” Hebrews says — the king to whom Abraham paid homage.

Jerusalem was held for the Jews from the days of the flood by Jesus himself. That is extraordinary!

There is a legend that says that the heart of Adam is buried under the rocks of Golgotha. When Jesus was murdered, the rocks split, allowing his blood to flow onto the old heart thereby closing the loop on original sin. Which is why Melchizedek/Jesus needed to hold the place for Abraham the patriarch against the Canaanites or the Philistines or the Egyptians. He needed the place; there is something about Jerusalem (Incidentally I went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem last August, before the return of war. Read about that here.)

Just like there is a place at the center of it all, there is also one time that is the fulcrum, Passover morning, Easter morning — that Easter morning. We don’t know when Jesus was born; we don’t know the time of his first steps or his first word. Of his first miracle. But we know when he was killed, because it was a day that was important to the Jews; an ancient holiday celebrating their salvation from slavery in Egypt. A time when the Jews went from a monotheistic paganism to nationhood (Remember before Moses, they had no written word and, more importantly, no law. They were just another Semitic tribe — that one monotheistic — though obviously chosen. I often wonder how the Jews of Egypt worshipped, how they talked about their God. But I digress.) It’s important that Jesus was killed on Passover; everything comes around again, everything is circular. Just like Melchizedek held a city for the Jews, probably for hundreds of years until they were ready; Moses foreshadowed the coming of the Messiah through an act of sacrifice and violence that gave them their freedom — same as Jesus’s death. He was sacrificed for the Jews first.

“There is something balanced about the salvation story,” my new agnostic Jewish friend admitted. “Elegant,” I responded. The Gospel story is a puzzle, timeless and vast, where all the pieces must fit together and you can’t miss even one, or the story doesn’t make sense. Our world of Scientism doesn’t want to allow for this; the new prophets of the new religion want to insist that there is nothing outside the realm of their understanding. Which is why I find it tremendously satisfying that, as soon as we were able to move past Newtonian physics (classical mechanics) — of how objects interact in our world — and onward to general and special relativity, the certainties all vanished. In quantum mechanics, effect can come before cause. In quantum entanglement distance has no bearing on whether or not one thing can move another. Time is relative to gravity; perception of time is likely only related to entropy.

If the big bang is true, and holding to the balanced nature of our universe (positive and negative), there needs to be an inverse explosion that created a parallel universe that is moving backwards in time. And if this is the case, is the time and place where these two universes meet on a hill called Golgotha two thousand years ago? Is that why all the rocks broke apart? And did his death and then un-death in some way tie things together, balance things out? Is there something happening in that other universe that required him to first live and then die and then live again and onwards towards Melchizedek and Adam? (Incidentally this also solves the ‘predestination’ issue, which has befuddled us all. But I digress again.) And maybe this is why things need to be perfect on both ends…

We are not just smart monkey’s on a rare earth, that at least I’m certain of. The universe as we learn of it is too interconnected; it harmonizes and sings; it is a tapestry not a bunch of matter hurling through space. And the metaphysical, whatever it is that holds strong force together or that acts through entanglement to connect the unconnected also brings us all together. Just like the story of Jesus was not random; but was planned from the beginning, he held the city of Jerusalem for himself — thousands of years before his death and un-death. Did he walk Golgotha, knowing what was going to happen there? And if he did, did he also think of a time deep in the future when he would rebuild a temple and set up a kingdom, again, after thousands of years of suffering and war and displacement?

Just might be.

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What ISIS Is And What They Want

Posted on March 24, 2024 by Joel D. Hirst
Where the Islamic State Came From, What It Wanted, And Why It Failed

Given the horrific ISIS attacks in Moscow (and my heart goes out to the victims and their families), I wanted to re-up this piece I wrote for posterity on where ISIS came from.

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The Gods Will Have Blood

Posted on March 24, 2024 by Joel D. Hirst

Utopianism is extremely dangerous when it is comingled with envy and greed. And revolutions are easily captured. These are the two simple lessons I learned from Anatole France’s masterpiece “The Gods Will Have Blood”. The book is an easy read, though not un-beautiful; and the storyline is straightforward as it follows the revolution itself. A young man, idealistic — a painter — joins the revolution. He imagines a world of joy and without want; an easier world; a parenthesis utopia that can extend. We all sympathize, because we are all utopians. The yearning for utopia is a ghost in the machine of our sentience put there, probably by God himself, to point us in the direction of perfection.

I say ghost in the machine because it is tremendously glitchy and caused hundreds of millions of deaths in the 20th century alone. Conservatives and progressives differ a little bit on our utopianism. For conservatives it is a utopianism of the past; we look at the shires and dales of our youth, we read the great literature and watch the classical movies that withstood the harsh fires of time and imagine a better world before the chaos of now. Nostalgia is memory with the pain removed, which is why our utopianism of the past is golden and perfect. We see its protectors as the institutions, ideas and memories of our forefathers — culture, which Patrick Deneen called “democracy of the dead”, of how our grandparents can still weigh in despite the fact that they can no longer vote. It is also why our utopianism is safer; nobody can change the past, so people don’t really try.

Progressives are utopians of the future. They see serenity and peace beyond the next horizon, but to experience it better some leveling must be done. You have to get rid of those “institutions, ideas and memories” — of that culture — because it is a restraint, a dam that is keeping the perfect river of utopia from flowing forward. While getting rid of the dead and their democracy is not without stress (culture fights back), and is often bloody, it is nevertheless something that must be done. The problem is that progressive utopianism is also old now, hundreds of years in fact — from the very revolution Anatole France wrote about, or maybe before. So most of the recipes have been tried (and all have failed). The Soviets sent millions to the gulag and starved millions more (in the Holodomor but not only then). The Khmer Rouge decided that they should just kill everyone with education, and they tried, in the first genocide of the mind. The Cubans wanted to make an “Island of happiness,” as Hugo Chavez once said, “And in that direction Venezuela will go.” Cuba made an island prison; and Venezuela a failed state and the largest new émigré diaspora in hemispheric history. But none of this dampens the progressive utopians attempts to try some new leveling exercise in search for their elusive prize; and damn the dead bodies.

The problem also is progressive utopianism is easily captured by the wicked. It’s like the famous quote by Thomas More in “Man For All Seasons,” in an exchange with William Roper, where Roper when asked if he would violate the law in his hunt for the devil says, “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!” to which Sir Thomas More responded “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” Progressive utopianism in its iconoclasm doesn’t allow for any restraining institutions, first of the ideologues who must move quickly and brutally in their leveling efforts and then against the criminals who so effortlessly seize power and use the lawlessness to their own gain and advantage.

“The Gods Must Have Blood” is about how a young man, Gamelin, joins the revolution out of a sense of hope and idealism. He’s offered his first job, as a judge in the revolutionary courts meant to ferret out the royalists or the resisters who are holding the revolution back. How Gamelin presses on even as he loses his soul in the blood and the violence of the French Revolution. It is a book about extremism, where it comes from and what it looks like and how it can happen to the best of us, but especially those who are sensitive to human suffering. And it is a lesson that we all need to remember, desperate as we are to change things. That progressive utopianism needs a healthy dose of democracy of the dead if it is not to become wicked and violent; and that institutions matter, though we are annoyed by them and they slow us down in our attempts to make a better world.

And that maybe, just maybe, this is on purpose.

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Auxilio, Venezuela’s Cry For Help

Posted on March 21, 2024 by Joel D. Hirst

“Auxilio!” Dignora screamed into the silence on a warm Caracas afternoon. “Help!” her cry muffled by the might of the agents who were shoving her into the back of a car. There was no-one to help her; the men who should have helped, security services under the pay of the government — we would call them ‘law enforcement’ except in Venezuela they enforce no laws except those of their jungle despot Nick Maduro — those men were the perpetrators of the crime.

Dignora’s cry continues to reverberate, to resonate, though her own voice has gone silent, for now; locked away in the calabozos of the regime, the political prisons filled with the political prisoners who dared defy the tyrant. “Auxilio”, the cry of a whole country whose state turned violently and wickedly against them; so long ago now that most people don’t remember what the real role of government should be. Can’t imagine anything except abuse from those whose entire job should be to serve. Sneers and jeers and mockery the only thing they get from people who steal the money; who rape and pillage and loot. Literally.

Maduro’s despotism is being defied by Maria Corina Machado; Venezuela’s last best hope for freedom, a final narrow beam of light, tenuous and weak it would seem but it still somehow lighting the darkness. If she can hold on. And she needs our protection, all of us who love freedom, who know that the cry of “Auxilio” unanswered might as easily have been our own, if we were unlucky enough to be born under the dampening pall of tyranny.

She gave a fiery speech, last night, after the arrests. “The international community must do more than wish us well” she said. Defiant and brave as always, like the time she stood up and confronted the fabled Hugo Chavez and called him a thief. Which is why they hate her; her spirit — which is why she’s our last best hope for freedom in Venezuela.

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