Despite illegal wiretapping, generalized invasion of privacy, concentration camps, and indefinite detention of prisoners, American secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld recently compared Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, to Hitler. There were howls of indignation in the American press whenever Ariel Sharon was accused of genocide for having the Israeli army assist in the mass murders at the Sabra and Shatilla Palestinian refugees camps in Beirut. But no one clamored at the absurdity and unfairness of the characterization of Chavez.  

In their usual slavishness towards the American government's whimsical foreign policy, US newsmen and newspapers are insistently depicting Venezuela as a  dictatorship and Chavez as a tyrant. But who is Chavez? Where does he come from? What has he done? What are his ideas and his plans? You won't find any illumination in the American media. This probably stems from that Americans in general don't really give a fig for Chavez and American officials and the few pundits who seem to care can have a real hootenanny misrepresenting facts or simply telling outright lies.

 In a nutshell, Chavez was once an army officer so indignant about corruption that he tried to overthrow the legally constituted government of Venezuela. He failed and was jailed, but in defeat he struck a defiant pose that Venezuelans admired, apart from sharing his belief about official corruption. Physically Chavez is the typical Venezuelan, with African, Amerindian, and white ancestries. In other times, Americans would have classified him as a "nigger".

 The president he tried to overthrow was subsequently tried and convicted of vague charges that implied the suspicion of corrupt practices. The next president Venezuelans elected was an old man who knew about his country's economy what a cat knows about barking. He freed Chavez, which is nothing to wonder at as it is a Venezuelan tradition to chastise mildly political crimes, even attempted coups. Chavez got himself some advisors who sold him on the absurd idea that a change in the Venezuelan constitution would be an efficient means to eradicate corruption. This was the flag he waived during his first election campaign (1998), but it was his personality, his flawless rapport with the Venezuelan masses, that got him elected with a large majority.

 In office, Chavez was as good as his word and initiated a process along roughly the following lines: he called for a referendum to modify the constitution and it was approved; a constituent assembly was elected for that purpose; the new constitution, which required another referendum and a new election for president, was duly sanctioned; then Chavez ran for president again and was ratified in his office; still another election resulted in a congress in which Chavez counted with a decisive majority.

After a farcical coup, Chavez veers sharply leftward

 Subsequently, there was a surrealist plot in which Chavez was removed from office and the head of the conspirators, although he was no Napoleon but a quite ordinary spokesman for business interests, decreed the ipso facto Napoleonic abolition of all branches government, including the supreme court. Chavez was back in office three days later. But in that eye blink the Bush administration ignoring that, first, Venezuela's is the oldest functioning democracy in Latin America (the oldest in the world if we exclude the USA, India, and western Europe), and second, the many elections in a row (possibly a world record also) that Chavez had won, went and gave its support to the slapstick skit that had overthrown him. It was as if Charlie Chaplin were running the State Department.

 Before his farcical "overthrow", no one could say for sure whether Chavez was a bona fide leftist extremist. After it, Chavez understandably assumed an extremely leftist and anti-American attitude. Encouraged by America's foolishness, Venezuela's middle classes initiated a large movement to have Chavez revoked as per an article in the constitution that Chavez himself has sponsored. Chavez probably regretted the lengths to which his constitution-builders had gone, but apparently he was genuinely afraid that his opponents could best him in a plebiscite and he fought its realization with perhaps unnecessary tenacity, for when the votes were counted he got an even larger majority than he had in his first election (2004). The demoralized opposition did not participate in elections for a new congress, which went the whole nine yards for Chavez.

 Now, let's get back to Rumsfeld. His rationale for comparing Chavez to Hitler was that Hitler had become a dictator through free elections. Now, the German dictator did this in one year (1933-1934) and, if Chavez is indeed as Rumsfeld claims a dictator, he is one after winning over a period of eight years no less than seven elections. This ridiculous comparison raises issues not so much about Chavez as to Rumsfeld himself. One is who is running American foreign policy when it comes to lesser issues such as Venezuela, which is as much a threat to the USA as a sparrow to a 747. Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice has parroted Rumsfeld's squawks, but any fool knows that in influence over Bush she can't hold a candle to the secretary of defense. A recent book started with the not-so-astounding revelation that Bush junior threw the phone on his father, the ex-president and statesman George H. W. Bush, when the elder Bush advised him not to put too much reliance on people like Rumsfeld and vice-president Dick Cheney.

 Another and more important question is whether Rumsfeld might not be, literally, delusional. Hitler, for instance, was eloquent and seemingly rational, but his is perhaps the greatest instance in history of a head of state beset by incurable delusions. During the Cold War, America did have an informal world empire. After the Cold War, it could still lead the world, as Bush the elder did in the First Iraqi or Gulf war. America did not lose its huge world prestige during the Clinton years. But under Bush and Rumsfeld, America went berserk after 9/11. Since then it has not yet eradicated the Taliban, it started the unrealistic and futile Second Iraqi war (in which it is still mired), it can do nothing about North Korea's nuclear program, its roadmap for Israel/Palestine has all the wrong coordinates, and it is now following a course which encourages Iran to arm itself with atomic bombs, about which again it is powerless. All of these failures have been a rude downsizing for America. Yet Rumsfeld, and evidently also his boss, simply do not seem to get it. Though still the mightiest power on earth, America can no longer aspire to be a world empire. The most appropriate historical comparison, then, might be not between Chavez and Hitler but between Rumsfeld and Goering.