The Role Of Beautiful Waterfalls

Anne Applebaum has a column up over at Slate that reflects on the role of useful idiots in the world. She starts out with the Russian revolution then moves on to the country that is acting as the modern stand-in, Venezuela.

Ninety years ago this week, a Bolshevik mob stormed the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, arrested the provisional government, and installed a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in its place. Though the Russian revolution is no longer widely celebrated (not even by the Russians, who instead commemorate the expulsion of the Poles from Moscow in 1612), I felt it important to mark the occasion. In honor of the anniversary, I reread Ten Days That Shook the World, the famed account of the revolution written by John Reed, the American journalist and fellow-traveler. Then I reread last week's press reports of the recent encounter between Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president, and Naomi Campbell, the famed British supermodel.

Just as I'd remembered, Reed's book superbly transmits the breathless energy of the autumn of 1917—"Adventure it was, and one of the most marvelous mankind ever embarked upon, sweeping into history at the head of the toiling masses"—as well as his own fascination with, and approval of, the violence he sees around him. After attending a mass funeral, he understands, he writes, why the Russians no longer need religion: "On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer, and for which it was a glory to die." By contrast, he is abashed when he has to explain that in America people try to change things by law—a state of affairs that his new Russian comrades find "incredible."

Campbell is just the latest in a string of jet-setters, Hollywood types and others who are jumping on the Chavez bandwagon. It's a bizarre symbiotic relationship:

But then, that wasn't the point of her visit, just as it wasn't when actor Sean Penn, a self-conscious "radical" and avowed enemy of the American president, spent a whole day with President Chávez. Together, the two of them toured the countryside. "I came here looking for a great country. I found a great country," Penn declared. But of course he found a great country! Penn wanted a country where he would win adulation for his views about U.S. politics, and the Venezuelan president happily provided it.

The Hollywood types feel heroic, Chavez gets photo-ops with the stars. It's just a win-win for them. Of course, the models and the actors and the dilettantes don't have to look too closely at the realities.

The package also would strip the central bank of its autonomy, give Chavez control over international reserves, empower authorities to detain citizens without charge and open the way to censoring the media in so-called political emergencies……

……The referendum package introduces new legal concepts such as "social property" and "collective property," promoting them above individual interests as part of a constitutional goal of creating a socialist economy.

So Campbell can laud Venezuela's beautiful waterfalls without having to address the increasingly thuggish regime. Sean Penn can feel the adoring love of the masses in Venezuela without having to look at the continuing theft of assets. Everyone a winner. Except the people living the nightmare.

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