Written: November 25, 2004
Source: www.walterlippmann.com
Translated: Maria Montelibre from http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=8087
Transcription/Markup: Walter Lippmann and David Walters
Public Domain: You can freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the sources above as well as the Marxists Internet Archive.
In 1952, Raúl Gómez García, Jesús Montané and Abel Santamaría, three future Moncadistas, started the underground newspaper “Son los mismos” ("They are all the same.” ) They would cleverly say that everybody in the enemy camp belonged to the same group: the tyranny, the authentic politicians, even those from the Orthodox Party. The two last ones, due to their blindness or lack of loyalty. In the end, all of them are useless for the country. I always wondered who the other ones were. Those opposed to these ones. Ever since then, I use these words when I want to simplify about those who are not with the Man, for whatever reason. They are all the same….
San Jose, Costa Rica, lost many attendees who had been invited to the dance…. Only half of the invited presidents attended the XIV Ibero-American Summit. Just because the Pacific Rim Forum was taking place in Chile. It was supposed to be more important, because the attendee countries were richer. I mean richer, because their economic development was greater.
It looks as if the recently re-elected President of the United States, and suggestive China, were much more eye-catching than the weak American countries, specially in relation to education, which was the main topic of the San Jose Conference.
Although, really, the main topic of the 1995 Bariloche Conference was education. There are millions of 10-year-olds, who, ever since, do not know how to count nor how to write a single letter. Neither San Jose, nor Bariloche, will do anything for education. We will go back to discuss education ten years from now, at that time the children that were born during the Bariloche Summit (if they were able to survive), will in turn have illiterate children. So many broken agreements and such indolence for humanity are really disconcerting. My uncle Abel would say: “They are all the same…”
The news arrived, however, at that time, that Canada, Cuba, Finland and South Korea had received a recognition from UNESCO as a High Performance Group, the highest educational recognition in the world. The experiences of these four countries in the field of education should be a guideline around the world, which in the last analysis is the reason d’etre of the recent Summit. UNESCO’s officials should ask these countries how have they been able to achieve these miracles. I don’t think that there is a more urgent miracle than education. That’s the only way we will be able to avoid being prey to the epidemic of stupidity which has colonized the XXI Century.
The United States and China, in spite of their rapid economic development, are not included in that list, we must ask the reason. Venezuela, on the other hand, in later years has had an unprecedented education campaign, using thousands of new experiences, including those from Cuba. Therefore, the most interesting aspect of the Summit would have been the visit of the President of Venezuela. Venezuela is not part of those four countries, but it will be. It is the country with the highest educational growth in the world.
A couple of days before, some Cuban “dissidents” decided to fix the San Jose celebration. It seems that terrorist Carlos Alberto Montaner and his collaborators did not learn about the UN news on education, and took part in an action supporting Cuban “democracy.” Genius! The truth is found in the relation between the two events: on the one hand Cuba receives a recognition from the UN because of its educational achievements, on the other, the Cuban Revolution is at fault because it does not defend democracy. If two plus two still are four, then we must admit that in Cuba there are many dictators, who make women give birth to live children, and, under terror, they force those children to learn to read, at an age in which most children in the world enjoy human rights such as child prostitution, illiteracy, and death.
In San Jose, Costa Ricans defended the morality of the Americas, and did not allow in Costa Rica the farce which took place in Praga. With hand made signs and tightly closed fists, it ended tens of millions of dollars and prevented the meeting where the farce of helping democracy in Cuba was going to be implemented. On the other hand, the Chilean people put on their best show for the Forum of the Pacific Rim. After all, these summits are useful. They unite our peoples in the streets and invite us to the struggle. That will be the major contribution to these presidents’ meetings.
Fidel could not attend the Ibero American Summit. He was injured just because he was working on education, during the graduation ceremonies of no less than four thousands art teachers. Chavez could not either, because a few hours before, Attorney General Danilo Anderson had been murdered, with a cowardly explosive in his car.
“Danilo was a man who symbolized the Bolivarian process. In the corrupt, classist, Venezuelan justice system, he was one of the few attorneys who applied the law to the pro-coup and criminal individuals in pro of national subversion, who had to face their impunity. (…) Danilo presented a double threat to Washington’s terrorist plans: he was taking one of its main power tools, the corrupt justice system of the Venezuelan high class, and was becoming a symbol of the honest and useful patriot for the majority of the new Bolivarian Fatherland.”
They are not doing anything new. Tens of years trying to oust the Cuban Revolution have not offered the enemy any new variants in their “struggle.” A few months ago they murdered an engineer from PDVSA. We could trace almost a perfect parallel between the methods used in both cases. The assassination attempts against Commander Fidel Castro, the murder of our teachers, the explosions of La Coubre ship and a Cuban plane, etc…. Nothing has changed. And, why? Because they are all the same, they have always been all the same, because they do not even have the scruples to look for another peninsula in the United States besides Florida, nest of cowards, traitors and assassins, who dressed up in tuxedos, encourage a pathetic conference on democracy, and at the same time do not hesitate in assassinating a prosecutor… We already should be used to that.
They are undoubtedly supported by the CIA, and the U.S. Government tolerates them. Three of the criminals who were acquitted by the Ex-President of Panama, are now showing off somewhere else. The ex-President, in turn, certainly needed the moneys from her people to pay for dresses and jewelry. She had the gall to make a public announcement about it. She is shameless. I still cannot understand how in the San Jose summit a resolution against terrorism is launched, if one of those four assassins is surely hiding in a Central American country.
They cannot hide, the dirty water has already been served on the table. The tolerance and impunity offered by the recently re-elected President of the United States, accomplice of Anderson’s assassination and other murders which must still be investigated. Because all the purged Cabinet of the Empire has left to do, is to put their white hoods on, upholding their racial superiority. And the cameras will be able to show the Secretary of State with blue eyes. They got the American people used to so many lies, that Ms. Condoleezza Rice could easily obtain a pure Anglo Saxon past.
This fundamentalist and ignorant clique will continue protecting the criminals attempting against the young Venezuelan Revolution. In the end, they are protecting the assassins of Prosecutor Anderson. It is sad, but in this history, anyone who is truly united is the enemy: the pathetic Conference in Prague and in San Jose for democracy in my country, the death of Prosecutor Anderson, and those responsible for the extermination in Faluya…. are all the same. They have the same motivations and obey the same interests.
We must still hear Bush in Santiago de Chile, “scolding” Iran and North Korea because they are not “behaving right.” Terrorism. It is laughable. There are many of us who are still ensnared into the enemy’s verbal trap. Terrorism, axis of evil, struggle for freedom and all that phantasmagoric verbiage of the White House. Without realizing it, we follow them, and we complicate our discourse with so much phraseology.
There is something which could save us, Newton’s Third Law of Motion.
Newton worked in our favor. The Third Law of Motion states, “Every action is followed by an equal and opposite reaction.”
They are all the same, and that implies that we must also be all the same, against them.
Yes, Anderson’s murder is another idiocy of the enemy who is running around, blind, deaf and dumb. The rule is as follows: for every crime they commit, more revolution for us. Yes. Us. Anderson’s murder will promote the radicalization of the revolutionary process in Venezuela.
And Venezuela follows Newton. In the campaign of October 31, when 20 of the 22 states joined the Bolivarian Revolution, Commander Chavez defined the radicalization in the Venezuelan process. Radical is not synonimous with extremist. Extremes never go anywhere. The word radical comes from “root.”
And we mean the root of Venezuela’s problems. The enemy is not only isolated, but it is dressed again in the assassin’s garb. It triggers anger and hate, instead of fear. “God first blinds those he wants to destroy,” the saying goes. In those elections Chavez not only launched the war against large estates and against beaurocracy. Chavez is not only planning against the ills of capitalism, but against the ills a different society may have. Bureaucracy. Corruption and Bureaucracy are two ills which must be stopped when there’s still time.
In a recent “Hello, President” program, Commander Chavez spoke a lot about Che. Fortunately Che is being liberated from that romantic and Quixotic aura put on him in many places. Jose Marti must be liberated of the same thing. Che is indispensable for us, not only as the heroic gerrilla fighter, but also as a founder of Socialism and a socialist thinker, who gave so much to revolutionary theory and praxis.
This month was the 45th anniversary of the first voluntary work promoted in Cuba by Che. On referring to the book “The Road to Fire,” by Orlando Borrego, Chavez talks about the “prolific work by Che” as a leader of the Cuban Revolution, and, more specifically, as Secretary of Industry, about his drive in “analyzing different problems stated in the Handbook of Political Economy by the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union,” written at that time under Stalin’s orders,” about the key issue in the construction of Socialism. He was terribly mystified by the Soviet political economy, about the connections in the development of productive forces, changes in the relations between production and advances of socialist awareness.
Chavez continues, “Socialist economic theory states that the previous development of productive forces is necessary, so that later the relations of socialist productivity can develop (…) but Che says that in underdeveloped countries, Cuba, for example, it was impossible to wait 100 hundred years for the development of productive forces and then change productive relations, Che stated, and I agree with Che, it is possible to raise workers’ awareness, developing an awareness which goes further than Capitalism. We are doing that over here, we cannot wait until industry develops and national productivity gains impetus, that is, for the development of forces behind productivity to the extent that the development will affect productive relations and [generate] a new economic model.”
There are many who still doubt the Venezuelan President, with infantile allegations, or interpret his actions entrenched in textbook paradigms. I said it before, and it is not a metaphor, that the triumph of August 15 has the same importance than November 7 or January 1. We, Communists, could have the same experience than in Cuba. When the Communist Party started taking seriously the movement of July 26 and Fidel Castro, Fidel and the Cuban Revolutionaries were already far ahead in the race.
Fidel said in March, 1956, “The July 26th Movement is the revolutionary organization of the poor, for the poor and by the poor. The July 26th Movement is the hope of redemption for the Cuban working class…” Those who suspected that the July 26th Movement was a proletarian revolutionary organization were just a few. Imperialism, and almost all the “traditional” communist parties did not realize until the end, who Fidel was. We can fall in the same trap with Hugo Chavez.
Hugo Chavez is going after two things: The revolution within the revolution, war to bureaucracy, and the need for the integration of the Americas. We can say it in a different way: permanent revolution and internationalism. Commander Chavez is saying that he is not an ex-rebel, but a rebel. Anyone who has been a true rebel never stops being a rebel. Fidel has just loudly stated that “On facing yesterday’s deadly perils and today’s, which are still worse, Socialism will definitely be the only real hope for peace and the survival of our species.” Always the same rebel… the same communist, different from so many intellectuals who think the word socialism is useless in their discourse.
Because, as Bertolt Brecht said, the good men struggle for a day. “But there are those who struggle their whole lives, and they are indispensable.” Together with them, we will all be able “to change this Earth, once and for all.”