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Ah, what better way to spend Saturday night than to read up on the travails of Latin American politics! Venezuela's Chavez is the real star of this trenchant criticism of unthinking, emotional dictatorial leftism that still plagues the region. We are familiar in this blog with how lefty Western intellectuals are sometimes given to lend philosophical credence to Islamist politics and terrorism. Mr. Alvaro Vargas Llosa makes the case for how the same applies with respect to Latin American strongmen and collectivism. His phrase "Latin American Idiot" refers to Chavez and his predecessors who take advantage of the region's hardships and turn it into an anti-American ideology that covers up their own self-aggrandizement at the expense of their countrymen, so that maybe they aren't idiots so much as criminals.
(Source: Alvaro Vargas Llosa, "Return of the Idiot" at Foreign Policy)
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Ah, what better way to spend Saturday night than to read up on the travails of Latin American politics! Venezuela's Chavez is the real star of this trenchant criticism of unthinking, emotional dictatorial leftism that still plagues the region. We are familiar in this blog with how lefty Western intellectuals are sometimes given to lend philosophical credence to Islamist politics and terrorism. Mr. Alvaro Vargas Llosa makes the case for how the same applies with respect to Latin American strongmen and collectivism. His phrase "Latin American Idiot" refers to Chavez and his predecessors who take advantage of the region's hardships and turn it into an anti-American ideology that covers up their own self-aggrandizement at the expense of their countrymen, so that maybe they aren't idiots so much as criminals.
The current revival of the Latin American Idiot has precipitated the return of his counterparts: the patronizing American and European Idiots. Once again, important academics and writers are projecting their idealism, guilty consciences, or grievances against their own societies onto the Latin American scene, lending their names to nefarious populist causes. Nobel Prizewinners, including British playwright Harold Pinter, Portuguese novelist José Saramago, and American economist Joseph Stiglitz; American linguists such as Noam Chomsky and sociologists like James Petras; European journalists like Ignacio Ramonet and some foreign correspondents for outlets such as Le Nouvel Observateur in France, Die Zeit in Germany, and the Washington Post in the United States, are once again propagating absurdities that shape the opinions of millions of readers and sanctify the Latin American Idiot. This intellectual lapse would be quite innocuous if it didn’t have consequences. But, to the extent that it legitimizes the type of government that is actually at the heart of Latin America’s political and economic underdevelopment, it constitutes a form of intellectual treasonAlthough there is some truth to the idea that America has sometimes played harshly with her poorer brown neighbors to the south, the problems of the region are deeper than American greed and indifference, and leaders like Chavez are not the answer, but is more like throwing gas on a fire.
(Source: Alvaro Vargas Llosa, "Return of the Idiot" at Foreign Policy)
