war within a breath

Stupid, Dishonest or Just Gullible?

08.24.07 - 10:32am

There is a strange article today on the Guardian website in which Angie Bray, the Tory leader on the London Assembly uses a visit by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez last year to launch an attack on the Mayor, Ken Livingstone.

Much of it is just the usual insincere and rather petty knockabout of British politics but part of the article makes a number of serious claims regarding Chavez and the political situation in Venezuela, by which Bray intends to damn Ken by association.

Comment is comment but it reflects badly on the Guardian that the organisation should allow its own site to be used to peddle a series of easily exposed falsehoods.

Bray begins:

“On the day last year when City Hall was overtaken by mysterious men in dark glasses heralding the arrival of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, the Conservative group invited along one of the many dissident groups in the country whose members have had to flee abroad since he took office. Of course, Ken banned them from the building.”

Well this talk of men in dark glasses, with its menacing overtones, is pretty feeble. As we can be quite sure that Angie does not talk in such breathless terms about the bodyguards of any other world leaders, many of whom also wear dark glasses, I can only assume she is simply being intellectually dishonest.

The person that Angie Bray met, interestingly unmentioned by name in the article, was Aleksander Boyd, editor of the website Vcrisis. Mr Boyd was banned from entering the GLA offices because he was judged a possible threat to public safety, given that he openly advocates the violent overthrow of Venezuela’s democratically elected government. Here is a little example of Mr Boyd’s writing:

“I wish I was Genghis Khan, I wish I had eaten my half-brother… Therefore the scum of this earth a.k.a. Hugo Chavez and followers would not be willing to piss me off. Ergo they would be extremely careful of not treading on my rights. Attempts to conquer commanded by me would encounter nothing less than total submission owing to the sheer fear that my presence would cause.”

And another:

“Yesterday I had a conversation with someone about Venezuela and its problems. Given the peculiar characteristics of our crisis, my interlocutor asked “what’s the solution then?” And I replied “when elected politicians treat one as an animal, how on earth can be expected that one behaves as a gentleman? The solution in my view is clear and simple: violence.”

I would be interested to hear Angie Bray’s views on someone who was speaking in such terms about overthrowing the British government.

Anyway, considering the nature of the people Angie Bray is consorting with it is hardly surprising she has some very strange views about Chavez and Venezuela. She continues:

“Have you ever seen the Venezuelan electoral register? It looks innocent enough at first, with columns for your name, address and polling number. But then it suddenly turns slightly menacing: a long line of columns records every ballot you have ever cast. One of the fundamental tenets of democracy, which guarantees freedom from persecution, is the secret ballot. Yet this is unheard of in Chávez’s Venezuela.”

Now this really rang alarm bells. Being openly socialist, and on occasions something of a comical figure, Chavez is routinely portrayed in an overwhelmingly negative light by the British and American media. However, this was the first time I had heard anyone question the secrecy of the ballot. And my scepticism was warranted. Either Angie Bray simply invented this nonsense herself or, more likely, Boyd and his group fed it to her. There is simply no truth in it at all.

The European Union Election Observation Mission, in its December 2006 report on the Venezuelan election, concluded: “The electoral process complied in general with international standards and with national legislation as regards the management of the electoral administration and the electronic voting system.” Specifically on the secrecy of the ballot, the report said: “The electronic voting system established in Venezuela is efficient, secure, and auditable, and the competence of its technical experts is consistent with its advanced technological level. The use of fingerprint readers neither violates the secrecy of the vote, nor is a source of fraud.”

Back to Angie again:

I could use this article to recount the many other abuses of democracy and freedom committed by the Chávez regime, but instead I want to focus on the hypocrisy of Ken Livingstone: cheeky chappy Ken, man of the people, defender of the poor, staunch ally of a tyrant.

Note that while Bush has an administration and Brown has a government, Chavez apparently leads a “regime”. As for the Venezuelan president’s democratic credentials and his being a “tyrant”, well it becomes tiresome to repeat over and over and over again in the face of such smears that Chavez won the presidential election in 1998 with 56% of the vote, a 2000 election with 60% of the vote, was returned to power in a spontaneous popular uprising after a coup against his democratic government in 2002, defeated a recall attempt with 59% of the vote in 2004 and was reelected yet again in 2006 with 63% of the vote.

Leaders such as Brown, Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel can only dream of such support. Let’s not forget that Labour achieved a mighty 35.3% of the vote in 2005 while Bush was awarded the US presidency in 2000 despite actually losing the popular vote to Al Gore, even putting aside the controversy in Florida.

Opponents of Chavez continue to toss such falsehoods around, I suspect banking on the fact that if you repeat an accusation often enough people will start to believe it and those actually committed to the facts will use up energy correcting them. On two occasions the BBC has altered stories on its website after I challenged the organisation over false claims about Hugo Chavez but such claims continue to resurface.

The Guardian grandly titles its editorial blog section “Comment is Free”. I suggest the editor consider whether part of its remit is to propagate outright and easily refuted fabrications.

As for Angie Bray, the only question which remains is whether she is stupid, dishonest or simply unduly gullible. A discomfiting thought considering the position of responsibility she unfortunately occupies.

Thanks to Calvin Tucker, whose research I used in the preparation of this article.

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