Pompeyo
The violent acts that occurred last week at the Instituto Pedagógico, in which Pompeyo Márquez and the student leader Yon Goicoechea were verbally assaulted – the latter also physically – are of a gravity that many people haven’t fully understood yet. Actually, it’s not just about a simple case of intolerance – which it is, of course –, but also an undeniable symptom of the moral and ideological prostration to which our country has been led by Mr. Hugo Chávez and by Chavismo. That man’s preaching of hate, practiced from the highest political perch, has continued to demolish the ethical values that had traditionally ruled in Venezuelan politics. Eight or ten years ago, not even the fiercest enemies of Pompeyo Márquez would have dared to insult him, to call him a fascist and traitor. Because even when disagreeing with his ideas and with his conduct as a citizen, at that time everyone recognized him as a paradigm of dignity, bravery, honesty, and his long and heroic fight against the dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez, from an absolute and often risky clandestinity, was celebrated.
And the lamentable event is aggravated – if that’s actually possible – by the behavior of Ms. Cilia Flores, who functions as the president of the National Assembly (Oh rivers of Ripley!), when she publicly supported and celebrated those acts of savage violence, in a blatant act of apology for these crimes.
Pompeyo himself remarked how in the middle of the tumult he noticed a sign asking: “Where is Santos Yorme?,” in allusion to the pseudonym he used in the fight against the dictatorship, to which he gave an answer that couldn’t have been more convincing. He said, give or take a few words, the following: “Santos Yorme spent ten years, between 1948 and 1958, fighting clandestine against a brutal military dictatorship. Today, the same Santos Yorme is engaged in the fight against Hugo Chávez’s military, totalitarian and autocratic regime.”
So, it is evident that the catastrophic political, economic and social crisis the Chavista government has continued to aggravate, is magnified by the serious moral crisis, which is so much more harmful and will take us many more years to overcome. It’s not that the political, economic and social crisis is easy to overcome, but with appropriate policies and sufficient economic resources it will be possible in a relatively short period. But the moral crisis, the return to the ethical values cultivated over many decades, and which have now been debased, this degradation will only be eliminated over several generations, and thus it will take many years.
It’s also alarming that the events I’ve commented on occurred at the Instituto Pedagógico, a center specifically designed for the formation of future educators. If those lunatics – fortunately only a few – that everyone saw on TV are going to be tomorrow’s educators, what awaits us in the future of the country’s education, which has already become quite deteriorated?
{ Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, Tal Cual, 2 November 2007 }
Showing posts with label Alexis Márquez Rodríguez. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alexis Márquez Rodríguez. Show all posts
11.05.2007
9.24.2007
La educación socialista / Alexis Márquez Rodríguez
Socialist Education
The most notorious sign of the failure of “actually existing socialism” can be found in education. The aim to build a “new man” resulted everywhere in a fiasco. In the Soviet Union, seventy years of a socialist regime were not enough, nor were the millions of rubles invested, to achieve that so desired “new man.” And not because education there was deficient and of poor quality, since it’s evident that the educational system developed by the Soviet State reached levels that, compared with those of pre-revolutionary Russia, ended up being admired, with reason, as a true miracle. I remember having seen in situ, in the 60s, concrete accomplishments, and not of the kind fabricated to show specific visitors, that provided evidence of the advances gained, not only in the daily practice of schools and universities but also in the field of pedagogical theory. And on those visits, and during numerous international meetings, many of us educators had the chance to meet and talk with Soviet educators and calibrate the solidity of their formation as teachers.
The great Soviet advances in the sciences and technology are also well known, to the point that at one given moment the USSR was at the head of the so called “race for space,” leaving behind the United States for a while. The great achievements of Soviet Medicine were equally acknowledged. And generally, that country’s universities, with the famous Lomonosov in first place, garnered an extremely high prestige throughout the world. And yet, already before the collapse of the USSR people began to perceive the immense corruption among the functionaries of the “Soviet power,” formed within that educational system, a situation that was more widely seen once the Soviet State disappeared. At that point, the failure of the task of forming the “new man,” the desideratum of the “socialist” regime installed in 1917, was evident. The same thing, mutatis mutandis, has happened in all the other countries where “actually existing socialism” was installed. Even in those where high levels in the extension and quality of teaching were reached, the “new man” was nowhere to be seen. And even in countries like Cuba, where a high educational level has undoubtedly been achieved, those gains have been reversed by the reappearance of old social maladies the Revolution had banished, such as prostitution and the corruption of public officials, denounced by governmental leaders themselves. An undeniable sign that the “new man” has not been created there either, after forty years of revolution.
How does one explain, then, that facing such realities the delirious Chavista “revolution” intends to build that “new man” who will definitively install “21st Century Socialism,” a project that, for worse, has been placed in the hands of people who know nothing about socialism nor anything about education?
{ Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, Tal Cual, 21 September 2007 }
The most notorious sign of the failure of “actually existing socialism” can be found in education. The aim to build a “new man” resulted everywhere in a fiasco. In the Soviet Union, seventy years of a socialist regime were not enough, nor were the millions of rubles invested, to achieve that so desired “new man.” And not because education there was deficient and of poor quality, since it’s evident that the educational system developed by the Soviet State reached levels that, compared with those of pre-revolutionary Russia, ended up being admired, with reason, as a true miracle. I remember having seen in situ, in the 60s, concrete accomplishments, and not of the kind fabricated to show specific visitors, that provided evidence of the advances gained, not only in the daily practice of schools and universities but also in the field of pedagogical theory. And on those visits, and during numerous international meetings, many of us educators had the chance to meet and talk with Soviet educators and calibrate the solidity of their formation as teachers.
The great Soviet advances in the sciences and technology are also well known, to the point that at one given moment the USSR was at the head of the so called “race for space,” leaving behind the United States for a while. The great achievements of Soviet Medicine were equally acknowledged. And generally, that country’s universities, with the famous Lomonosov in first place, garnered an extremely high prestige throughout the world. And yet, already before the collapse of the USSR people began to perceive the immense corruption among the functionaries of the “Soviet power,” formed within that educational system, a situation that was more widely seen once the Soviet State disappeared. At that point, the failure of the task of forming the “new man,” the desideratum of the “socialist” regime installed in 1917, was evident. The same thing, mutatis mutandis, has happened in all the other countries where “actually existing socialism” was installed. Even in those where high levels in the extension and quality of teaching were reached, the “new man” was nowhere to be seen. And even in countries like Cuba, where a high educational level has undoubtedly been achieved, those gains have been reversed by the reappearance of old social maladies the Revolution had banished, such as prostitution and the corruption of public officials, denounced by governmental leaders themselves. An undeniable sign that the “new man” has not been created there either, after forty years of revolution.
How does one explain, then, that facing such realities the delirious Chavista “revolution” intends to build that “new man” who will definitively install “21st Century Socialism,” a project that, for worse, has been placed in the hands of people who know nothing about socialism nor anything about education?
{ Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, Tal Cual, 21 September 2007 }
4.22.2006
Una de Teodoro / Alexis Márquez Rodríguez
One About Teodoro
To my friend Eduardo Mendoza Goiticoa
January 1958. The general strike against the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship was being organized, it was supposed to start on the 21st of that month.
With Dr. Antonio Requena, a well-known doctor, at the head, a committee of people from diverse sectors had been organized, in order to coordinate participation in the strike. The support of the businessmen was decisive in assuring that commerce and industry close their doors.
We would meet at Dr. Requena’s house, in a little street in the Country Club neighborhood. Among the representatives of the businessmen were Eduardo Mendoza Goiticoa, Oscar Machado Zuloaga, Alfredo Rodríguez Delfino and a few others.
By chance it was up to me to be the link between the business group and the Junta Patriótica, which was promoting the strike from its clandestine places. The contact was through Fabricio Ojeda, a reporter for El Nacional. My ties with that newspaper made it easier for me, since my presence there raised no suspicions. Of course, I didn’t know that Fabricio was from the Junta Patriótica, nor that he was its president, a position they rotated among themselves.
One day Dr. Requena tells me that an individual is offering the Junta Patriótica three radio stations, designed so as to not be easily found. I give the information to Fabricio. Soon he tells me that tomorrow, at noon I should meet someone on the bridge for the Country Club’s Avenida Principal, to then go see Dr. Requena. I ask him about who I’m going to meet and he tells me: “I can’t tell you. But when you see him you’ll know.”
In effect, on the next day at 12 sharp I’m crossing the bridge in my car, and already emerging from it appears, from I don’t know where, Teodoro Petkoff.
We go to Dr. Requena’s house. After the introduction and rigorous greetings, Requena says to Teodoro: “Tomorrow at 3 in the afternoon, in the atrium of the church of the Las Mercedes neighborhood, you will meet up with Dr. Francisco De Venanzi, who will explain to you about the radio stations.”
Teodoro responds: “Alright, I’ll be there. But I don’t know Dr. De Venanzi. I’ve never seen him and I don’t know how to recognize him.” To which Requena replied: “No one else will be there at that time. But if anyone else is there, you pay attention, and when you see a man with an idiot’s face, that’s Dr. De Venanzi.”
We all laughed, of course. I took Teodoro back to the place where we met and each one went his own way.
The handover of the radio stations was successfully accomplished, and the transistors were very important in calling together the general strike, which ended on January 23 when the dictator fled.
Thirty years later I was at El Nacional one day, with other people, in the Brujoteca as Oscar Guaramato called the cubicle of the legendary Arístides Bastidas, already in a wheelchair and a victim of all the plagues of Egypt, and I don’t know how the topic came up. I narrated the episode, and when I was finished Arístides said to me: “You were in on that too? I was the one who received the radio stations and handed them over to the Junta Patriótica.” Neither of us knew we had both participated in that episode. A living testimony of a well-done political job, impeccable and thus successful, the product of a mysticism and discipline that, unfortunately, were lost forever after the 1960s.
{ Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, TalCual, 21 April 2006 }
To my friend Eduardo Mendoza Goiticoa
January 1958. The general strike against the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship was being organized, it was supposed to start on the 21st of that month.
With Dr. Antonio Requena, a well-known doctor, at the head, a committee of people from diverse sectors had been organized, in order to coordinate participation in the strike. The support of the businessmen was decisive in assuring that commerce and industry close their doors.
We would meet at Dr. Requena’s house, in a little street in the Country Club neighborhood. Among the representatives of the businessmen were Eduardo Mendoza Goiticoa, Oscar Machado Zuloaga, Alfredo Rodríguez Delfino and a few others.
By chance it was up to me to be the link between the business group and the Junta Patriótica, which was promoting the strike from its clandestine places. The contact was through Fabricio Ojeda, a reporter for El Nacional. My ties with that newspaper made it easier for me, since my presence there raised no suspicions. Of course, I didn’t know that Fabricio was from the Junta Patriótica, nor that he was its president, a position they rotated among themselves.
One day Dr. Requena tells me that an individual is offering the Junta Patriótica three radio stations, designed so as to not be easily found. I give the information to Fabricio. Soon he tells me that tomorrow, at noon I should meet someone on the bridge for the Country Club’s Avenida Principal, to then go see Dr. Requena. I ask him about who I’m going to meet and he tells me: “I can’t tell you. But when you see him you’ll know.”
In effect, on the next day at 12 sharp I’m crossing the bridge in my car, and already emerging from it appears, from I don’t know where, Teodoro Petkoff.
We go to Dr. Requena’s house. After the introduction and rigorous greetings, Requena says to Teodoro: “Tomorrow at 3 in the afternoon, in the atrium of the church of the Las Mercedes neighborhood, you will meet up with Dr. Francisco De Venanzi, who will explain to you about the radio stations.”
Teodoro responds: “Alright, I’ll be there. But I don’t know Dr. De Venanzi. I’ve never seen him and I don’t know how to recognize him.” To which Requena replied: “No one else will be there at that time. But if anyone else is there, you pay attention, and when you see a man with an idiot’s face, that’s Dr. De Venanzi.”
We all laughed, of course. I took Teodoro back to the place where we met and each one went his own way.
The handover of the radio stations was successfully accomplished, and the transistors were very important in calling together the general strike, which ended on January 23 when the dictator fled.
Thirty years later I was at El Nacional one day, with other people, in the Brujoteca as Oscar Guaramato called the cubicle of the legendary Arístides Bastidas, already in a wheelchair and a victim of all the plagues of Egypt, and I don’t know how the topic came up. I narrated the episode, and when I was finished Arístides said to me: “You were in on that too? I was the one who received the radio stations and handed them over to the Junta Patriótica.” Neither of us knew we had both participated in that episode. A living testimony of a well-done political job, impeccable and thus successful, the product of a mysticism and discipline that, unfortunately, were lost forever after the 1960s.
{ Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, TalCual, 21 April 2006 }
6.25.2005
De nuevo la revolución / Alexis Márquez Rodríguez
Revolution Once Again
If in 1998 the Venezuelan situation required truly revolutionary changes, it needs them even more now, since that situation bordering on the catastrophic has been aggravated considerably today. There is not a single vice, a single lack or a single act of corruption that has not been enormously multiplied over the last six years. With the aggravating circumstance that, while governmental bad practices were sometimes enacted in the open, but often with the appearance of legality—which didn't make them any less harmful—, along with being increased to the maximum, today they are enacted with the most unbelieveable nerve and without the least bit of camouflage.
In order to begin implementing these profound measures, Chávez counted on an almost complete consensus in 1999, since the political parties, the business community, the media, the middle class, the workers in general and the poor were unanimously convinced of the necessity of these changes and they were ready to collaborate. Of course, once the task was undertaken, and seeing as it was inevitable that some of the measures would affect powerful interests, that consensus would diminish. But in such a situation an intelligent and effective governmental politics could have avoided the pitfalls and neutralized opposing factors. What Chávez and his government most lacked was intelligence, and instead of gaining more adherents they began to alienate the support, not only of the large capitalists, which was inevitable, but also of the middle class and of important and diverse sectors of society.
That is why what Chávez has insisted on calling revolution, first Bolivarian, then pretty and now even neo-socialist, has been a fiasco, in which no one believes anymore. How can a regime where the most universal and unbelievable corruption rules be revolutionary; where the head of the Government is the first to violate the Constitution and the laws, without even bothering with technicalities and pseudo-legal tricks, but instead in the most shameless manner and with total impunity; where the separation of powers is mocked, and the great majority of functionaries of those powers, without exception, act submissively as mere executors of the boss's wishes; where human rights are mocked and even those that remain, such as freedom of speech, are kept within a regime of threats and pressures; where poverty has grown to obscene numbers; and finally, where the head of the Government uses filthy, arrogant, defiant and crude language on a daily basis, which not only discredits him nationally and internationally, but also deepens the abyss separating him from a good portion of the population, including that sector which is not originally anti-Chavista?
It is this attitude of the President and his followers, more than the content of his incoherent and epileptic politics, which undermines his supposedly revolutionary character, and it irremediably damages the few positive measures that have been implemented. Because, for example, who can deny that the so-called missions, beyond whatever attributes they might have, have been an opportunity for so many thieves to enrich themselves quickly and shamelessly with the country's money? By defining itself as revolutionary, what the current regime has done is prostitute the concept of revolution.
{ Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, TalCual, 17 June 2005 }
If in 1998 the Venezuelan situation required truly revolutionary changes, it needs them even more now, since that situation bordering on the catastrophic has been aggravated considerably today. There is not a single vice, a single lack or a single act of corruption that has not been enormously multiplied over the last six years. With the aggravating circumstance that, while governmental bad practices were sometimes enacted in the open, but often with the appearance of legality—which didn't make them any less harmful—, along with being increased to the maximum, today they are enacted with the most unbelieveable nerve and without the least bit of camouflage.
In order to begin implementing these profound measures, Chávez counted on an almost complete consensus in 1999, since the political parties, the business community, the media, the middle class, the workers in general and the poor were unanimously convinced of the necessity of these changes and they were ready to collaborate. Of course, once the task was undertaken, and seeing as it was inevitable that some of the measures would affect powerful interests, that consensus would diminish. But in such a situation an intelligent and effective governmental politics could have avoided the pitfalls and neutralized opposing factors. What Chávez and his government most lacked was intelligence, and instead of gaining more adherents they began to alienate the support, not only of the large capitalists, which was inevitable, but also of the middle class and of important and diverse sectors of society.
That is why what Chávez has insisted on calling revolution, first Bolivarian, then pretty and now even neo-socialist, has been a fiasco, in which no one believes anymore. How can a regime where the most universal and unbelievable corruption rules be revolutionary; where the head of the Government is the first to violate the Constitution and the laws, without even bothering with technicalities and pseudo-legal tricks, but instead in the most shameless manner and with total impunity; where the separation of powers is mocked, and the great majority of functionaries of those powers, without exception, act submissively as mere executors of the boss's wishes; where human rights are mocked and even those that remain, such as freedom of speech, are kept within a regime of threats and pressures; where poverty has grown to obscene numbers; and finally, where the head of the Government uses filthy, arrogant, defiant and crude language on a daily basis, which not only discredits him nationally and internationally, but also deepens the abyss separating him from a good portion of the population, including that sector which is not originally anti-Chavista?
It is this attitude of the President and his followers, more than the content of his incoherent and epileptic politics, which undermines his supposedly revolutionary character, and it irremediably damages the few positive measures that have been implemented. Because, for example, who can deny that the so-called missions, beyond whatever attributes they might have, have been an opportunity for so many thieves to enrich themselves quickly and shamelessly with the country's money? By defining itself as revolutionary, what the current regime has done is prostitute the concept of revolution.
{ Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, TalCual, 17 June 2005 }
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