A continent where Communism lingers on

The fall of the Berlin Wall restored common sense to Europe, but what about Latin America?

This month was marked by grandiose celebration of the fall of Soviet-designed Communism. It was a happy and inspiring sight. The fall of a tyrannical superpower, coupled with a reminder of the inhuman sufferings and brutalities that its totalitarian philosophy allowed and encouraged, has helped the world to be wiser, and call its political leaders’ bluff when they intend to reinstate a similar chimera.

Not so.

Communism hasn’t died. Indeed, it thrives in many regions of the world – North Korea, Vietnam, China… and, of all places, Latin America. Populist dictatorships of various creeds have popped up all over the continent, from Bolivia to Nicaragua, passing through Ecuador and, of course, the pitiable rising star, Venezuela, not to mention the island of the venerable Fidel Castro. Why? How can this be? As a Latin American, I cannot help asking myself this question at least once a day as I read the regional newspapers and learn about the most outrageous acts of corruption, the grossest public lies, the foulest deceptions, and -- more recently -– the absurd rants of a warmongering fool.

he who promises to deliver everything, to solve all the problems, to change all ideas and institutions, is always lying.

Where did this sudden “red wave” come from? How could it supplant democratic governments and replace them with systematic oppression and absolute inefficiency? How could the sickly and desperate appeal of poverty lead to record levels of underdevelopment, human rights abuse, and outright tyranny?

Well, the first answer is that, in most cases, the socialist governments of Latin America did not supplant “democratic governments” at all. Instead, they sat on the throne of already burgeoning republics of corruption and waste, where anything but civil rights and economic prosperity seemed to be possible. My dear homeland Ecuador, for example, elected and ousted seven presidents in the span of a little over nine years before Rafael Correa (whom, for the purpose of this article, we can accurately call “Hugo Chávez with a PhD”) came to establish his “citizens’ revolution” and the “socialism of the 21st century”. Nine years of the most appalling corruption and the complete disavowal of the nation’s institutional framework.

Poverty, illiteracy, sheer human underdevelopment, have for too long been the justifiable victims of the economic policies of right-wing “technocrats”, while at the same time serving as mere trampolines for left-wing charlatans and demagogues. While it is common for Latin American pundits to exclaim –- with the Gnostic countenance of being “in the know” -– that our continent remains poor because the rich countries, and the US first among them, “want to keep us poor in order to sustain their wealth”.

I would argue that the governments of Latin America have, in many cases, committed the same sin. In order to make their political ambitions minimally credible, they have kept poverty on the forefront of national issues while at the same time doing nothing about it. The fact is that poverty is too valuable a political token to be traded in for anything.

The phenomenon is quite interesting: Progress justifies continued misery, Change serves to perpetuate corruption, Justice is the slogan for lawlessness, Equality gives oppression a respectable name.

This frame of mind, this absurd mental trick by which men are blinded to what is really going on, is what the Berlin Wall represented. It stood for the capacity of the human heart to reach the utmost depths of sin and savagery that lead to the utter incapacity to judge for oneself, to call things, as C.S. Lewis wrote, as they “deserve” to be called.

As French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has said, “in the name of Man, men are forsaken”, and this he calls the definition and center of all rationalism at its core. I am not a philosopher. But if I’m proud of the fall of the Wall (despite the fact that I was three years old and 12,000 kilometers away at the time) it’s because in that signal fact of history I see the defeat of this political rationalism, of the grotesque –- albeit surely well-intended -– premise that a politician’s eye drapes men and peoples in the colors of “Ideals” and deprives them of humanity. Communism, like Nazism, committed this serious blunder, but so have liberalism and all its offshoots. Indeed, it is the theoretical method of all modern thinkers at least since Hobbes – that is, of all the philosophers that consciously kicked God out of the anthropology of politics.

If there is something that I’ve learned from my scant political experience in my home country, it is this: he who promises to deliver everything, to solve all the problems, to change all ideas and institutions, is always lying.

Mind you, he’s not mistaken, he’s lying, because he knows he cannot possibly deliver, and he still bases all his credibility on this Messianic assessment of the situation. Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s president, like Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and, to some extent, Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama, share this trait, that I like to call the “magic wand syndrome”, or if you will, the “the future will be nothing like the past” delusion.

Great ideals always tend to tyrants and oppression because they are false, while at the same time serving as justification for everything, for every law, every decree, every incarceration, every insult, every injustice, every death, every war. Salvation, it would not hurt to remember, is not of this world, and so we should hammer our heads with the fact that no political system or initiative will ever be able to end corruption, poverty, disease, injustice, vice, etc.

Or, in the words of John Adams, America’s second president, “cold will still freeze, and fire will never cease to burn, disease and vice will continue to disorder, and death to terrify mankind”. The best example of this is the very fact that, after the manifest brutality of totalitarianism and the spectacular fall of the Soviet empire, there are still prophets preaching the blessings of communism to deceived and exhausted peoples.

A savvy political leader, or better, a wise statesman, knows that politics is not here to change human nature. He should understand that governments exist, as Alexander Hamilton put it, “because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint”. I would qualify this to say: “without authority”. If one understands that human nature is what it is and won’t be changing anytime soon (at least not by any human means), politics can become the arena of true progress, which is to say, moral advancement.

So, the job is not complete – many more walls remain, waiting to be burst open. Perhaps the most important of them all is the intellectual wall of political rationalism, that teaches us ideals and preaches paradise on Earth, while at the same time marching heroically, banner in hand, eyes on the horizon, over the muffled miseries of the age.

Pedro José Izquierdo is an Ecuadorian PhD student at the University of Navarre (Spain). He is currently a visiting researcher at Columbia Law School in New York.