Reading Arendt in Caracas

The Nation magazine shows its true class colors again.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl article in The Nation online (17 August 2007), "Reading Arendt in Caracas,"¹ is very much in line with The Nation's previous anti-Chavez article: Joaquín Villalobos, "Revolution in Venezuela?" The Nation, 9 July 2007 (see, also, letters to The Nation regarding this article). It is surely the case that Hugo Chavez and Chavistas are not liberal in the way that Hannah Arendt² and her fellow New York intellectuals would have desired and many petit-bourgeois university students in Venezuela and The Nation do today. Good for Venezuela. No authentic social revolution in the interest of the poor majority can be a politically liberal one, least of all in the global South.

1 The title of the article is a variation of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran which has been incisively criticized by Hamid Dabashi: "Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire," Al-Ahram Weekly (No. 797), 1-7 June 2006. Recall, also, that Dabashi, too, was attacked in The Nation recently for his failure to toe the liberal party line: Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, "The Iranian Impasse," 16 July 2007.
2 Reuven Kaminer, an Israeli leftist, says that Arendt's worst writings -- about the faulty concept of "totalitarianism" -- have been lauded while her best ones -- especially about her skepticism about Zionism -- have been ignored: "On the Concept 'Totalitarianism' and Its Role in Current Political Discourse," MRZine, 15 August 2007.