The reliably pro-Hugo Chavez Pomona College Professor Miguel Tinker Salas attacked corporate media and the TEA party at a SEIU event in Los Angeles with Cynthia McKinney on December 11th. The talk was titled, “Resistance & Liberation in a Time of Economic Crisis.” Salas said,
“Let’s be clear. There is serious discontent in this country. There is serious discontent that is being channeled into right-wing organizations by the media, that is being channeled into efforts like the tea party, or worst, fascist or neo-fascist organizations.”
You can watch it here.
Unfortunately, Miguel Tinker Salas is an avid supporter of the real fascist, Hugo Chavez. His book, Venezuela: Hugo Chavez and the Decline of an ‘Exceptional Democracy’, blames America’s “neo-liberal” policies, not Chavez’s socialist ones, for Venezuela’s woes and has been dismissed as “propaganda.”
Propaganda is exactly what he teaches.
Take just one example, Salas’s 2009 piece for the left-wing, Counter Punch, titled, “The Conservative Counter-Attack in Latin America” which lamented efforts to stop Manuel Zelaya from assuming dictatorial powers in Hondurus.
He writes that,
the right has been rebuilding in Latin America; hosting conferences, sharing experiences, refining their message, working with the media, and building ties with allies in the United States. This is not the lunatic right fringe, but rather the mainstream right with powerful allies in the middle class that used to consider themselves center, but have been frightened by recent left electoral victories and the rise of social movements.
Within this citation is the argument that somehow the networking of the “right” with people in Latin America, the implication is that the right had better leave Latin America alone. Why? Wouldn’t the people of Latin America be well served by having some of the same pluralism that serves America so well? If anything, Latin America, dominated from time to time by leftist or nationalist dictators, could be well served by importing some of the freedom and competitive elections that characterize the U.S. or the West. Sadly, Professor Tinker Salas’s rejection of pluralism is hardly surprising, given the fact that he is a professor at one of the most reliably liberal colleges in America.
Let’s turn to the next paragraph.
It is increasingly becoming obvious that there is no scenario under which elites in Honduras will accept Zelaya back. I do not think that they have a plan “B” on this matter and this speaks to the kind of advice they are getting from forces in the U.S. and the region. If Zelaya comes back, the Supreme Court, the Congress, the military and the church all-loose credibility and it opens the door for the social and political movements in Honduras to push for radical change that conservative forces would find more difficult to resist.
In part, he’s right. The Supreme Court, Congress, the military and the Church have invested a lot in upholding the Constitution of Honduras. The first three have sworn to protect that constitution and they have done that by ousting the wannabe dictator, Zelaya. Calling those institutions “coup leaders” is disingenuous at best.
So too are Tinker Salas’s attempts at branding U.S. involvement with Colombia as “imperialism.” (Why, after all, is it imperialism when Uribe asks the U.S. for help, but it’s not when Chavez funds narco-terrorists in Ecuador, Colombia, and elsewhere in Latin America?) Colombia has every right to ask for U.S. protection, especially given the dramatic economic growth and the hostility that Hugo Chavez has shown Colombia.
At the end Tinker Salas writes about “the fact that conservative forces in Latin America and their allies in the U.S. are mounting a concerted counter offensive that could increase the potential for conflict in the region.”
On the contrary, a more pluralistic Latin American political scene will contain some of the excesses of the Latin American left. The conservatives are simply helping to keep politics more representative and less totalitarian. A more globalized political scene will bode well for liberty and freedom as groups vie for constituents. It will be messy, but all politics is. Efforts to try and silence or expose some giant right-leaning conspiracy against “social movements” robs Latin Americans of political autonomy and the right to self-determination.
But Tinker Salas wants to be the only one who determines what Latin Americans determine about how they ought to arrange their political lives.
Comment count on this article reflects comments made on Breitbart.com and Facebook. Visit Breitbart's Facebook Page.