Evidencias y creencias / Francisco Vera Izquierdo

Evidences and Beliefs

It is evident how each person who holds a position of power needs to maintain himself there with an influential layer of people who will obey and not judge.

In fact, such contingency is neither frequent nor easy, and this is why so many political positions end up crumbling.

The opportunists always appear at the birth of each success and the prudent caudillo knows how to use this to his advantage.

It can be presumed that, outside of armies, blind obedience of this sort can be extremely difficult to find. Thus the case of the life-long dictator, in the style of Fidel Castro, Juan Vicente Gómez or Francisco Franco, is infrequent.

I personally think the proceso will begin to provoke what Machado called: "This second innocence which results in not believing anything." Here it wouldn't be "in not believing" but instead in not knowing. And once integral stupidity is accomplished, to proceed then to fill minds with a single, predetermined idea. As has been the desideratum of Marxists in Power.

Chavismo is obtaining the first stage of the process. What remains will be sought.

In his speeches, the Vice President achieves a difficult goal, whose invention was attributed to Pemán, and which consists of saying nothing and saying it seriously. The presidential allocutions deserve to awaken thanks from all Venezuelans, for their ability to discredit two unpleasant things: oratory and revolution. And the birth of a new wave—which would discredit counterrevolution—is not within the foreseeable horizon.

Fashion has much more of an impact than one might suppose. The German defeat of 1945 replaced the fashion for fascism with communism. In Venezuela, the jailed students in 1928 found as their jailmate the doctor Carlos León, a very intelligent man and a communist who educated them.

Due to the Russian revolution, the communist empire seemed as though it was going to impose itself globally, and Don Miguel de Unamuno wrote that those countries traditionally under submission would accept the new empire; but that when it reached others, with independent histories, they would create autonomous communisms. This was the case with the Peruvian APRA.

Once the anti-Fidelista organizations disappeared due to their own superfluousness, Fidelismo itself disappeared, and anyone today with a minimum of education sees in the Cuban case a traditional Latin American dictatorship, with a little flag of leftism. What happens is that Fidel Castro is intellectually and personally worth much more than his enemies. In fact, each time I read the publications of anti-Fidelismo, I feel my own tremble. That's why I never read the Spanish-language press in the United States.




{ Francisco Vera Izquierdo, El Nacional, 30 May 2005 }