When you watch the likes of Amb.
John Bolton grumpily expounding about the failures of the UN in places like Fox News, it becomes pretty easy to start to believe that the only people against world peace are a bunch of grumpy old greedy white guys with corporate pensions and monocles... it starts to look like it's the same old thing all over again, Honkeys keepin' da' brothers and the brown man down. And there is no doubt some truth to that.. hard to say it doesn't occur, or wasn't the rule of Latin Politics and the Monroe Doctrine, Banana Republics and Tin Pot dictatorships held up by Battleship diplomacy and the now much maligned CIA. The Cold Was was the nadir.. guys like Sandino, Fidel, Che Guevara, Ortega and Maurice Bishop and the like walked around trying to undermine this horrible marriage of Corporate interests and Government oppression and corruption, and it gave justification to the US and it's allies, especially after WW II, to any means considered necessary to subvert these efforts, no matter how initially well intentioned, due to the involvement of Soviet Influences. Their help which might have had idealistic motives and perhaps good intentions (never forget what the road to hell is paved with) for economic equalization and industrialization of these nations, nonetheless also included motives that would have created client states, opened military opportunities that the Soviet exploitation of would have damaged a delicate power balance that kept the world from what all feared was a possible
annihilation at the time, Nuclear War, made quite a real possibility to many Citizens of Europe and the United States after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The results of this fear were disastrous in many nations of the world, with body counts in the hundreds of thousands in places like Guatemala and Colombia, 75,000 in El Salvador, and dust ups all over the 20 or so Latin American countries of the world.
But the Cold War ended in 1990, and in the power vacuum some interesting things happened. The US spent less time suppressing popular movements under the Clinton administration, because there was no fear that it would so destabilize the balance, as the US had hegemony for better or for worse, and there was some recuperation and healthy growth in spots, but back to grumpy Bolton first, and his angry mom with the kids in chaos when dad gets home from work bit.
What happened in general was as the client state system weakened, even though the current situation in Syria has proven that it did not dissolve, even 24 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the countries of the third world started to realize that they had more in common with each other than their former patrons, and they decided that after in some cases 300+ years of colonization, that the UN might be a good place to get some payback. In fact, this has been happening since the UN was created, but it changed form a bit after the end of the Cold War. Even though there was a claim that there were three camps then, there were really just two, since not joining a camp kind of meant joining the other then, but now there could be three, or four, or five or more..
I have been watching the world for a while, learning about it's struggles, and I have learned that when there is no strong attempt towards truth and reconciliation, that the blame game goes on indefinitely, and what started to happen was that whether they were harboring grudges or not, the third world nations started to figure out that even if the White Guys in DC controlled the Security Council, that they controlled the General Assembly by sheer mass of Numbers. There are about 200 nations in the world, more ever few years (Welcome to the Club, South Sudan! Sorry Timor Leste, Mommy still loves you, but she´s got a newborn to look after now.. ), and less than 50 of them are what you would consider developed, and since unlike the Security Council, the General Assembly is a flat out one nation one vote democracy, it can get a little, well, Athenian there...
Now it would be pretty un-PC for me to say that it's like the kids getting control of the Class, that is the old perspective of Colonialism, White Munificence, the White Man's Burden.. sigh.. so hard to be born lucky, and that notion doesn't acknowledge the fact that, despite some of these nations perhaps being true tin pot dictatorships, where the presidents nephew wants to go live in NYC so he becomes Ambassador to the UN, that does happen, but there are plenty of these guys who are pretty smart, and are playing their cards wisely, and that included the search for power to benefit their constituencies, their Nations, and in doing so, it makes sense to take over the UN, and this leads us to the Movement of the Non Aligned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement
Unfortunately, as you can see, this movement kind of dithers along, never quite impassioned anyone, was kind of a hedge against the Cold War, led by Marshall Tito, a legendarily effective coalition builder, but it kind of is an organization that represents an idea, and that idea continues along at the UN, and that idea can make it feel like an Anti US S@&t show, because there are so many countries, and they all need to demonize someone if it is convenient, and it can be quite convenient to demonize, and it can be easy to control the general assembly and construct things in such a way that they become charities of first world money, which also line third world leaders bank accounts quite nicely, while growing their kleptocracies creating more money to steal, and it all can become such a disaster that outside of the Security Council, a WASPy guy like Bolton, blue collar roots notwithstanding when it comes to redistributive zeal, can start to see it as a mismanaged fiasco.
But now let's add in a Charismatic leader, the aforementioned years of repression in Latin America (Africa, Asia, and well hell, just about everywhere else as well, them Europeans and Americans really did perfect a lot of technology, but the focus of this Blog post will soon become obviously Latin.), the easing of the Monroe Doctrine a bit, an Independence hero with less that perfect democracy credentials, a hell of a lot of Oil Money, and you have Bolivarianism, the new epicenter of the Third World Pity Party, well intention-ed on paper, ego dominated, perhaps a necessary pendulum shift for the victims of the previous 400 years, but nonetheless, a greedy pile on at times of smarmy populist dictatorship, corruption, and control of a newfangled sort for the nations involved, and with some consequences to the Traveler:
I'm Talking about this guy, RIP El Comandante!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUo-pYeVfQ
this was the first time the world really heard from him, a Venezuelan Lt. Col. of humble beginnings who got obsessed with
Simon Bolivar, who is considered the Liberator of South America from Spanish Rule in the early part of the 1800's, kind of their George Washignton, but despite his zeal, decided to try to become viceroy for life,because he felt that 'practicality' was more important than constitutional jibber jabber, and was only balanced by guys like
Santander and others who tried to imitate a more American model of rule of law, similar to the struggles that Benito Juarez fought in Mexico for Constitutional Democracy.
If you don't speak Spanish, Lt. Col. Chavez is admitting his coup attempt failed in that video, asking his fellow conspirators to cease violence in a hastily arranged plea deal that allowed him to live, although he would go to jail, be released two years later, run for president, and the rest is now, well, History.
In the true Bolivarian way, he kept getting himself re-elected, for 15 years until his death. Rights became secondary to the demands of a true populist movement, and even though he won fair elections, or could easily win fair elections even if he did occasionally rig them, he ran a government propaganda machine and shoveled money from the nationalized oil production around Lake Maracaibo (potentially the World largest known reserves.. that's right, more than Saudi Arabia) that made the elections less about a selection of ideas than an outright grade school popularity contest. He did do all sorts of socialist things that can't be argued with after years of kleptocracy and neglect, but he did it all with oil money, not with national sweat, after basically stealing the companies from foreigners, some fat cats, but others legitimate hard working businessmen (met one once, a Vietnam veteran from Louisiana who gave me a ride across the Ahchefalaya Basin once.. he was still a bit pissed), and set up a functional health care system, sold gas at about 25 cents a gallon, and then decided to get involved in other peoples problems, like Bolivar, and like his new mentor Fidel Castro had done with Che Guevara and Cuban expeditionary forces around the world (For the Cubans: Grenada, Angola, Vietnam, Jamaica, Namibia, Laos, Bolivia are just a few I can name off the top of my head where they undoubtedly fought and played a role). The US could less justify suppressing it, they acted like they were parents of teenagers, perhaps feeling a big guilty about the last 200 years in their case, and decided to let democracy, or shall we say self determination of the state as a whole, truly function, let the Teenagers make what might be some bad decisions if they wanted to.
What has developed is a lot like the Pan Arabist movement, of the 70s, that had Nasser's Egypt combining with Syria and Iraq to create a unified Arab state of sorts, or the start of one. It lased briefly from the late 1950s to the early 1960s and the Ba'ath parties of each of these countries were the prime movers of this idea, which was strengthened in large part by demonizing the boogieman of Israel, the go to Straw man of Arab Politics. The US serves as boogieman for the Bolivrians. Like Bolivarianism, it was a funny hybrid of the Local Religion, Catholicism in Bolivarianism, Islam in Pan Arabism, mixed with Socialism. Marxism would have taken on religion as an enemy but in the context of political realism and the greater power struggle and goal for client states that don't have to be as ideologically pure if they play ball, the anti religious views of the true communist like the North Koreans, Chinese, and in the past the Soviets took a back seat, and they provided weapons, training, advice and economic support and trade. The Pan Arabists were therefore sponsored by the then Soviet Block and it's allies, now Russia and it's allies come in and help Bolivarianism in much the same way. It's like the troublemakers or self styled rebels against a perceived or imagined status quo uniting in school, the skater punks, pissed off asian kids, and the latino cafe socialists and gangster types making alliances, and the recent weird fiasco of North Koreans smuggling old Soviet Anti Aircraft System from Cuba through the Panama Canal is kind of exemplary of the kind of outlaws coalescing that occurs when these lines are drawn.
Also in close correspondence with the historical example of Pan Arabism, there was a counter-movement by the monarchies of the Middle East, the Arab Federation, and there appears to be another one growing to counter the Bolivariaons by the more trade oriented countries of Latin America,
The Pacific Alliance, but it's hard not to see it as perhaps a US sponsored counter block, although the countires undoubtedly have their own profit and social welfare motivations for joining, as making a more upwardly mobile nation removed the power of Bolivarianist allied movements within their own countries if they can prove that the rising tide of their more capitalist nations lifts all ships. They are Mexico, Colombia and Chile for three.. MExico is actually the world oldest Socialist country by some measures, and the longer you spend there the more this can be apparent, but like Canada, although it may be more left of center, it knows who butters it's bread, the US, and Mexico has the PRD to contend with for the the newly reelected PRI, centrist by mexican standards although not too centrist for corruption, the PRD being Bolivarian sympathetic for Mexico, and Colombia has their long war with the FARC which makes the remaining persons enfranchised in the political system quite conservative and free market.
Since I stalled out in writing a bit.. and well, Hugo umm, got 'poisoned in a mysterious imperialist plot', I am going to publish this and create a
part 2 with more juicy details and the effects of all this on the traveler.
