"Gallowaying" Galloway

I've always found it slightly unfair that Robert Fisk should be singled out as the eponym of the verb meaning "to deconstruct or demolish a specious argument using point-by-point responses" - and no, this doesn't mean that Mr. Fisk is especially skilled in such matters; it means that he is the frequent target of such treatment, for he is an idiot. Unfortunately for him, "fisk" actually sounds like a verb: it has that transitive, transitional sense about it and is pleasantly conjugable (fisks, fisked, fisking, fisker, fiskage, etc.), so he's probably stuck with it. You couldn't really say the same of "Galloway", which is a shame, since George seems to be trying desperately hard to have his own verb coined in the image of "fisk".

Writing in the Guardian (where else?) on Wednesday, which is odd in itself since you wouldn't think a national newspaper, even one so disreputable and degenerate as the Guardian, would willingly give gangway to the ravings of someone who has previously advocated treasonous acts in public, George decides to stick it to all those who don't get their kicks fawning before tinpot tyrants with what he doubtless fondly imagines to be a "robust" defence of the nascent Venezuelan dictatorship led by Hugo Chàvez. "These orchestrated attacks on Chàvez are a travesty," declaims his headline, and right there in the byline, before he's even started the article proper, he's using the "neocons" buzzword, confident that merely by invoking that dread cabal he will be seen to be on the side of the angels.

The chilling Oliver Stone film Salvador got a rare airing on television this week. It was a reminder of a time when, for those on the left, little victories were increasingly dwarfed by big defeats - not least in a Latin America which became synonymous with death squads and juntas.

Admittedly, the death squad is not commonly associated with communism. I suppose when you're chasing the kind of body-count that communism can claim, yer basic death squad seems a little feeble. A purge is probably more likely to get the job done; failing that, a famine. And this explains your general point. It was a reminder of a time when people were so horrified by the results of collectivism that they went too far the other way - or what they thought was the other way, but which turned out to be essentially the same way. The difference between you and me, George, is that you claim to disapprove of one method of curtailing individual freedom - the military junta - while actively endorsing another - communism - merely on the grounds, I can only surmise, of their respective economic outlooks. I abhor them both.

How different things seem now. Yesterday US Vice-President Dick Cheney came uncomfortably close to the reality of Afghan resistance to foreign occupation. On the same day Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez delivered a mightier blow to the neocon dream of US domination, announcing an extension of public ownership of his country's oil fields - the richest outside the Middle East.

It's not "Afghan" resistance, it's the Taliban - another crowd of violent, repressive obscurantists with whom you throw in your lot merely because they hate the Great Satan (c.f. Saddamite Iraq, Cuba, the Soviet Union, whose fall you have described as the biggest catastrophe of your life). It is they who are the foreign occupation, hailing as most of them do from either Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.

I'd also like to know how Chàvez' "extension of public ownership of his country's oilfields" (an agreeable euphemism for theft at the point of a gun) is in any way a "mighty blow" to the "neocon dream" (there's that word again; it's as though you hope it will have some Pavlovian effect on your readers) of US domination, when the US imports barely 10% of its crude oil from Venezuela - and if, as you seem so facilely certain, the US went to war in the Middle East to secure oil supplies, what does it matter if a Venezuelan personality cult arbitrarily decides, in violation of the rule of law on which you are so keen when it suits you, to "nationalise" their oilfields and stop selling oil to the US? How is that a "mighty blow", again?

Much more is at stake than London mayor Ken Livingstone's welcome oil deal with Chávez, which will see London bus fares halved while Venezuela gets expertise from city hall and a bridgehead in the capital of the US's viceroy in Europe.

I eagerly anticipate the halving of London bus fares. This will return them to the price they were in 2003, a fact which betrays the rapacious fare increases Londoners have endured under the villainous Livingstone, while the provision of services, in the absence of competition which, it is almost universally acknowledged, promotes better performance, has remained miserable. Is this the kind of "expertise" Venezuela stands to get in return for its valuable oil? And why isn't Chàvez using this commodity to improve the lot of his citizens (I use the term advisedly) if he's so committed to the mirage of social justice? Why is he flogging it on the cheap to the UK? Surely what he should be doing is getting the best price possible for it - even if that means selling it to the Great Satan. If he were truly committed to improving the lot of his people, that's what he'd do. But he's a posturing megalomaniac, not a man of the people.

Washington's biggest oil supplier is now firmly in the grip of a social revolution. This month I watched with Chávez as thousands of soldiers, French and British tanks, Russian helicopters and brand new Mirage and Sukhoi fighter bombers passed by: the soldiers chanting "patria, socialismo o muerte" - enough to make any US president blanch. Chávez answered the salute with the words: "the Bolivarian revolution is a peaceful revolution but it is not unarmed".

Venezuela is not Washington's biggest oil supplier. Not in terms of crude, and not in terms of petroleum. And I'm sure sitting there with Uncle Hugo as the military parade passed you by was faintly erotic, but please don't try and persuade us in the same paragraph as you so lovingly describe it that this is a "social" revolution. It is clearly nothing of the kind: it is like Russia's, Cuba's, China's and North Korea's before it. It is a military revolution (so much for your dismissal of "juntas" at the top of your article, Geroge) and a death cult, if we take the soldiers' chant seriously. Chàvez' magnificently paradoxical statement is the icing on the cake. An "not unarmed" revolution is not peaceful. It has no intention of being peaceful. It utilises the classic Marxist technique of systematic ambiguity towards violence, claiming peaceful intentions but clearly prepared for bourgeois resistance to the historical inevitability they proclaim - and once entrenched in power, that same threat of violence will prevail. Peace is not the absence of violence; this is particularly so when the only reason for the absence of violence is that the threat of violence was sufficient to win the day.

The music played throughout the event was the hymn of Salvador Allende's 1970s Chilean government, declaring that the people united will never be defeated. But Chávez's socialism is a good deal more red than Allende's - and its enemies seem no less determined than those who bathed Chile in blood in 1973.

Yes, because socialists never bathed anyone or anywhere in blood, did they?

Despite complete control of Venezuela's national assembly - the opposition boycotted the last elections after being defeated in seven electoral tests in a row - Chávez has been given enabling powers for 18 months to ensure he can pilot his reforms through entrenched opposition from the civil service, big business, the previously all-powerful oligarchy, their vast media interests and their friends in Washington.

Despite complete control? The true application of doublethink, personified by the character Syme in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is the ability to be on some level aware of one's use of doublethink yet still use it such that on a conscious level you believe something entirely different from what you know subconsciously to be the truth. It cannot have escaped your notice that there's a glaring contradiction in this sentence, George. If Uncle Hugo has "complete control" of the assembly (the legitimacy of those seven elections notwithstanding), why on Earth does he need these "enabling powers" (another delicate sidestepping of the facts, but I do see how you couldn't possibly have used the word "decree" when you're valiantly trying to pooh-pooh the notion that Uncle Hugo is a dictator, since decree and dictator have more-or-less the same etymological root) to pilot his "reforms" through "entrenched opposition" blah blah blah conspiracytheoryofsocietycakes? Isn't his "complete control" enough to achieve this? Or is complete control not quite complete enough? This arbitrary rule he has acquired is good for one thing only: tyranny.

Among those friends we must include our own prime minister, who only last year declared Venezuela to be in breach of international democratic norms - though when I pressed him in parliament he was unable to list them.

Really? I spent a good while searching Hansard for this. Hansard has only one reference, ever, that you make to Venezuela, and that was in 1998 in connection with mistreatment of two of your constituents. Hansard has no record of your ever having used the phrase "democratic norms". Hansard has no record of your ever having used the word "Chàvez". Looks rather like your penchant for frivolous, fact-free grandstanding got the better of you again, George.

The atmosphere in Caracas is fervid. The vast shanty towns draping the hillside around the cosmopolitan centre bustle with workers' cooperatives, trade union meetings, marches and debates. The $18bn fund for social welfare set up by Chávez is already bearing fruit. Education, food distribution and primary healthcare programmes now cover the majority for the first time. Queues form outside medical centres filled with thousands of Cuban doctors dispensing care to a population whose health was of no value to those who sat atop Venezuela's immense wealth in the past.

You apparently forget, though, that while this all sounds completely unexceptionable and, nudge-nudge, wouldn't you have to be such a total heartless bastard to dispute the righteousness of any of this, the sad fact remains that it is wealth creation, not socialistic conviction, that funds the welfare state. And Uncle Hugo has just driven any sensible entrepreneur running screaming from Venezuela, taking with him all he can carry and, if he has any sense, setting alight to that which he can't - particularly after those ridiculous antics with the supermarkets and the meat wholesalers last week. And the revenue from cheaply-sold oil will only go so far.

Chávez, who regularly pops over to Havana to check on the health of Fidel Castro, is at the centre of a new Latin America which is determined to be nobody's backyard. Reliable US allies are now limited to death squad ridden Colombia, Peru and Mexico - and latterly then only by recourse to rigged elections.

Sure, so Mexico's elections are rigged because you find their outcome unfavourable - but never let any doubt be cast on those seven election victories Uncle Hugo has won! I can't think of a single party, leader or political entity of any kind, anywhere, ever, which has won seven elections on the trot without a significant degree of "assistance" at the ballot box.

But Chávez's international ambitions are not confined to the Americas. He became a hero in the Arab world after withdrawing his ambassador from Tel Aviv in protest at the bombardment of Lebanon by US-armed Israeli forces last summer, and has pledged privately to halt oil exports to the US in the event of aggression against Iran. This all represents a challenge to US power which, if Bush was not sunk in the morass of Iraq, would be at the top of his action list.

It's always comforting when a populist, economically ignorant leader has "ambitions". In fact, if one were to review the history of government ambition of any political stripe, one would, I think, have to conclude that it is invariably bloody.

And I'm not sure what kind of a recommendation the esteem of the Arab world (or more accurately a certain sect of the Arab world) is supposed to be, given that that sect of the Arab world celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers (as, no doubt, you did, secretly); it is essentially the mediaeval, tribalist respect accorded a local strongman after a wanton display of strength. You overlook, magnificently, the fact that Israel was retaliating for an unprovoked act of war constituted by the kidnapping of two of its soldiers; you overlook the fact that Israel was not attacking Lebanon but an unelected, widely unsupported minority terrorist faction operating out of the southern territories of Lebanon, funded and directed by Iran precisely to provoke Israel, and committing the gravest war crimes imaginable by placing military assets in civilian areas to maximise the Lebanese body-count; ... but, of course, you do not overlook the provenance of the ordnance with which Israel exercised its right to defend itself against the sworn enemies by whom it is almost entirely surrounded. Let's take a break for a West Wing moment:

SAM
You mind my asking how the meeting with the Chinese ambassador went?

BARTLET
Well, how do you think it went?

SAM
I think they said if Taiwan tests the Patriots, they'll start their exercises.

BARTLET
That's right, except they didn't call them Patriots. What did they call them?

SAM
US-made Patriots.

BARTLET
Right.

When a show as fluffy and left-wing as The West Wing is making my point for me, you're in a real muddle, George. Back to your drivel:

Not that his supporters are marking time. The mendacious propaganda that Chávez is a dictator and human rights abuser is being spread with increasing urgency by the Atlanticist right and their fellow travellers, such as leftie-turned-neocon Nick Cohen who told his London newspaper audience last week that Livingstone's relationship with Chávez was making him think of voting Tory.

We've already established that you avoided using the word "decree" precisely because you realise that he is, in effect, a dictator. He is unchallenged and unopposed, and his word is law. That's a dictator. He rules by decree. That's a dictator. He's in the process of building up his personality cult and shutting down all means of sedition. That's a dictator. It is equally plain that he is a human rights abuser. The tradition of property rights is among the most fundamental of human rights, and is in fact a guarantor of other rights - if we cannot "own" ourselves, what is the point in claiming other rights? Yet Uncle Hugo is merrily trampling all over property rights. There's a reason they're the first to go when tyranny looms. They're the foundation of a free society. Get rid of them and the rest of your task is that much easier.

I see you're using your favourite swearword again, too. It's not an argument in itself, you know. And the parallels between Marxism and neo-conservatism are rather interesting. Both, for example, turn on the delusion of historical inevitability, part of what Popper called historicism. You should maybe read about it.

Chávez's decision not to renew an expired licence for an opposition television station involved in a coup attempt - there are plenty of others - is being portrayed as the beginning of the death of democracy. It's as if Country Life's diatribes against the fox hunting ban were taken as irrefutable proof of totalitarianism in Britain.

When a leader who has recently awarded himself absolute power, including the right to alter his country's constitution and make himself president for life, starts arbitrarily banning unfavourable TV stations (let's not pretend that the decision "not to renew" the expired licence is in any way conventional behaviour in a free society), he is clearly seeking to consolidate power by removing or silencing as many opposing voices as he can. He is undermining the independence of the press by forcing them to give him more favourable coverage if they want to avoid being nationalised. A free press is essential for those human rights you're so confident aren't being undermined.

And, needless to say, the fox-hunting ban is not on its own proof of totalitarianism in Britain. But you beg the question; the arbitrary criminalisation of perfectly legal activities is a small part of a totalitarian ethos, as the most cursory of glances at the history of Nazi Germany will amply demonstrate. That was, after all, where fox-hunting was first banned.

The so-called "dictator" Chávez is nothing of the kind. He has won election after election, validating his radical course. Still the fear of a coup - such as in 2002 when Chávez was removed and imprisoned for three days before millions descended to the presidential palace to reinstate him - is everywhere. One Englishman abroad who welcomed the 2002 coup as the "overthrow of a demagogue" was the foreign office minister Denis MacShane - a humiliating correction had to be issued following Chávez's restoration. That tale underscores the importance of the links being forged between revolutionary Caracas and anti-war London. Chávez is well aware that the people were defeated in Chile, the fascists allowed to pass in Republican Spain. Just as in Venezuela, the defence against counter-revolution lies with the poor and the working people who are shaping the world they want; so too must all those internationally who want to see this ferment reach its potential rally to Venezuela's side.

Yawn. You've said all this stuff already. Bored now.