He is not a "commie" as you state, on the contrary, he has a far more participatory democracy than we have here.
Chavez for what it's worth is a member of the
Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela which if I see right has the word socilaist in it - um ... maybe he is?
That party has a few ideologies involved, Marxism, Socialism, Nationalism (fascism maybe?) and what is called Bolivarianism.
The last one is really interesting because if you ever read anything by Simon Bolivar, he was a fan of the United States and its form of government but admitted that it will never work in South America but felt was one of the best systems man has ever created. But with that the movement
Bolivarianism seems to be defined close to how Hitler defined National Socialism;
- Economic and political sovereignty
- Economic self-sufficiency
- Instilling in people a national ethic and pride
These seem to be the three common threads between the two ideologies which are not always present in some of the Socialist countries.
I beleive he is practicing his form of Participatory Democracy, which may be akin to Mussolini's form of democracy. The elections take place, there are votes by the common people and so on but there are panels and committees who actually oversee everything and make decisions without any checks or balances.
As far as saying we have less Participatory Democracy than they do, that's not true at all simply because we are not a democracy and if we were we would have had health care days after our messiah proposed it. The differences are too clear and trying to make any comparison of the two systems seems to be trying to justify Chavez's actions. The simplified difference is we still have a system of checks and balances spelled out in the Constitution that actually works, our country hasn't redefined our basic principles and rights of its citizens and we don't have the changes to our government to allow people to become dictators. It is hard to change our basic operating document for a real important reason - Chavez.
I find that Chavez has used the same techniques and the same style as other dictators - Tito comes to mind - you can't call him anything less than a dictator. He may have improved his country but at the same time he is fighting with other countries because of political ideology and nothing more and speaks of the devil and so on, all to get people to be convinced he is the only leader for them.
I can't see what makes anyone want to support him and one day he will have to turn inward to stop the criticism by his opponents with the same methods that were used in his and his neighboring countries.
YOU can be WAY to intense!! It is NOT my fault that Obama, your favorite bud, is a flaming commie!!!
