A new Latin Soviet Union?

By Aussiegirl

The excellent commentator A.M. Mora y Leon published this article yesterday in Publius Pundit about Hugo Chavez's idea of a South American-style Soviet Union. Let's hope the concluding dismissal of this idea as laughable is correct.

Publius Pundit - Blogging the democratic revolution

A NEW LATIN SOVIET UNION?

Cuba’s state-controlled press has just reported that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is proposing a new federation of “autonomous” nations in one big Bolivarian union. It’s a massive show of self-aggrandisement (for who would rule such an entity but Chavez himself?), but also an incredible call to regess to the failed past.

Chavez has dressed it up in the aggrieved language of preserving indigenous identity, something that makes sense from his point of view because he is most likely to entice into this the supporters of leaders like Evo Morales of Bolivia and Ollanta Humala of Peru, who have no knowledge of the Soviet empire. But indigenous-grievance appeal doesn’t disguise the fact that it’s the same concept Lenin had, when he and his commissars introduced to the world the Soviet Union.

The idea then was to gather up the states of the old czarist empire, plus a few small choice stealings from the western frontier and then declare each of them an ‘autonomous republic’ ruled from a centralized ideological center in the Kremlin. (Today, Chavez, an old line Marxist if you study his life carefully - this article in the Atlantic Monthly is useful for that - proposes the exact same structure, recrudesced for Latin American states that have ideologically aligned in some way, however lightly, with him.

Do I think this will go down like a lead balloon?

Yes. [....]

Chavez swears this new plan is not his failed ALBA and therefore everyone should agree with him and join this proposed union. On that I agree with him.

It’s worse. It’s a Latin Soviet Union.

Just watch as nation after nation in Latin America quietly tells Chavez to go to hell.