Una revolución postmodernista / Leonardo Azparren Jiménez

A Postmodernist Revolution

A while back someone from the regime said that the lieutenant colonel was leading the world's first postmodernist revolution. And it is, because only he who has lost the logic of his own story can enjoy monopoly capitalism based on the mono-production of oil while maintaining a diatribe against the center of global capitalism. Besides, the way in which the regime handles national history makes it postmodern according to Jameson's terms: "The postmodern invites us, then, to surrender to a somber mockery of historicity in general."

The Venezuelan regime made reason insufficient. Death by burning is a mystery because it lacks culprits, time and time again. The regime suffers and seems to enjoy its historical deafness. Just like postmodernity, it takes advantage of the uncertainty it promotes in order to immerse itself within the anachronism of its discourse. It becomes pathetic when it talks about the poor, its own poor.

In this sense the regime honors its own system of capitalist values, namely to obtain its own benefit above all else.

For such reasons, the regime begins to suffer a self-referential pathology, according to which the frenzy with which it defends its singularity ("A peaceful but armed revolution...") absolutely disengages it from the past and places it in a nothingness without a future. With vanity, the revolution pleasures itself with its own self-contemplation. In its own way it believes in the end of history, because the history it intends to inaugurate is not human, but perfect.

In legalistic contingent meanderings the regime found innumerable reasons to deepen its project. It has the honor of having annuled the modern political narrative, which it supplanted with legal appeals regarding the new order of the nation through which it will deepen its totalitarianism. It is able to re-write history, for which purpose it has well-known academic historians at its command.

It realized that it needs a new narrative in order to legitimize the epiphany of the world's new owner, in his epic of reverting capitalism despite the logic of historical processes which are not maleable like political processes.

To have swept away a political narrative that lacked a base and to have invented another, determined and authoritarian, placed the regime in the comfortable position of being the unencumbered referee for coming and going as it pleases.

It is its postmodern irrationality, contrary to history's sense. Without an opposition that will assume the rationality of these new times, the regime feels satisfied. It will have to re-think the notion of progress.




{ Leonardo Azparren Jiménez, TalCual, 12 January 2005 }