Venezuela

On a news digest I receive at work that features any and every story each week involving the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, I noticed a headline a few days ago that made me wince. Not with the usual feeling of righteous dismay, I add. But with something more akin to shame.

The source in this case was in no way reputable, but far from this lessening my embarrassment, it sharpened it. There's something particularly nausea-inducing about being criticized in a way that you half-way recognize as true by someone otherwise distinctly lacking in the moral upper-hand. You have a right to be awful, you think. You have a right to attack me, hate me, malign me. I'd expect that. But you surely don't have a right to be right, while doing so.

The Cassandra of my doom in this case was a Fox News personality, Rachel Campos-Duffy, who has followed what is now, it seems, the conventional career path to success in right-wing public life: that is, reality TV. She is married to one Sean Duffy -- who is somehow, horribly, astonishingly, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (that "incredible pigsty," as Fitzgerald once called it -- an assessment that seems all the fairer in light of Matt Gaetz's behavior this week) -- and Rachel and Sean both met on The Real World, the show through which they first, as Wikipedia diplomatically puts it, "entered public life." If you didn't tune in to MTV in the late nineties long enough to see them there, you might have caught them two years ago -- as I did -- on stage at the Republican National Convention.

Anyways, the wince-inducing headline in question reads: "'It Doesn't Fit Their Narrative': Campos-Duffy Blasts Dems, Hollywood's Silence on Venezuela."

On the face of it, of course, that headline is nonsense. "Dems" have hardly been "silent" on Venezuela. The Florida Democratic party is currently bending over backwards to outdo Trump in denouncing the Maduro regime and advancing the dubious claims to executive power of Juan Guaidó (who only wants to be president for a little while, we are assured, until he can graciously hand it over to an elected successor, Cincinnatus-like) -- all with an eye on the substantial voting block of the Venezuelan diaspora.

So too, when one examines the statements made by Democrats who are accused of being "soft" on the Venezuelan government, like poor Bernie Sanders, it turns out what this really means is that they are skeptical of Guaidó (as they should be), not that they have failed to point out and condemn Maduro's many atrocities.

What "Hollywood" has to do with it one way or the other is simply lost on me.

Ah, the right... the poor right. No wonder they are scrambling for a moral high ground. They have had to go so very long without one. They used to have the rich vein of Communist atrocities to mine, but most of those regimes are dead and gone -- or profoundly transformed -- and their successor authoritarian states are all increasingly in bed with Trump. Recall how our current Republican president two weeks ago said he was apparently trying to encourage the People's Republic of China to execute even more of its prisoners, and no one thought that was the least bit odd?

That's not quite all that is going on here though...

Buried beneath the outrage and scurrility of the Fox headline, there is something approaching a valid point. There is the fact, that is to say, that the humanitarian community (myself included) has paid less attention to the Venezuelan refugee crisis than to other cases of mass exodus and asylum-seeking unfolding in Latin America, despite the fact that it is quite possibly the largest refugee crisis in the region's history. Even if people haven't been open apologists for it, the fact remains that it has drawn fewer resources, headlines, capital, interest. Why?

Well, the Venezuelan exodus is less visible on our border than the Central American refugee crisis, for one thing, since "caravans" from the latter have been so much for egregiously demagogued by the far-right, for instance. That is to say, the population driven out by Maduro's policies has been less singled out in Trump's brutal anti-refugee rhetoric, so it draws less of a humanitarian response in reaction. And the U.S. government is not aligned in Venezuela's case with the ruling regime (the way it is in Honduras), so there are fewer levers for U.S. advocates to push to hold that regime accountable and stem the underlying human rights violations forcing people to leave, such as police and military violence, etc.

Is there not, though, a bit more to it than that? Is there not a certain left-wing squishiness and squeamishness happening here, at least in some circles? -- a certain distaste, an aesthetic dislike, at the thought of full-throatedly condemning a "socialist" regime, or of devoting equivalent amounts of time and attention to defending its victims?

Maybe not. Maybe that's putting it a bit too harshly. But is there, perhaps, at the very least a sense that a refugee crisis created by a left-wing government is fundamentally less interesting, morally and intellectually, than one created by a U.S.-backed right-wing government, and therefore it tends to fall by the wayside?

Here is where I recognize an uncomfortable element of truth to the critique. At least I fear it might apply to my own case.

Example: I confess that I didn't know until I looked it up just now that more than 70,000 Venezuelan asylum seekers have already applied for refuge in the United States. This is far beyond any scale I had realized. Why did I allow myself to miss this?

Of course, all of this doesn't mean for an instant that one should abide the attempt being made by many establishment Democrats and the American right to muddy the distinction between opposing Guaidó and favoring Maduro. This is the confusion that Wasserman-Schultz and others have tried to sow in criticizing Sanders on this issue, and it is an old trick for stigmatizing legitimate disagreements with U.S. policy and U.S. geopolitical alignments. In real life, you don't actually have to choose between Guaidó and Maduro. You can distrust the motives of both.

And you should.

Guaidó and the Trump administration policy that is backing him bear many of the hallmarks of the familiar U.S.-sponsored right-wing golpista approach in Latin America (that of the "Trujillo flies," as Neruda called them). There was that disturbing McClatchy report earlier this month about what appears to be an arms shipment from the U.S. intended for the Venezuelan opposition. Today found Guaidó rubbing shoulders with Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro -- the region's latest addition to the rogue's gallery of quasi-fascist neoliberal demagogues (Bolsonaro's specialty being to advocate the extrajudicial killing of "criminals" -- a theory that Maduro's regime has also put into practice). Finally, the man overseeing the whole operation on the U.S. side is none other than Elliott Abrams -- he of the Iran-Contra affair, the El Mozote cover-up, the Guatemalan genocide, and the other U.S.-sponsored war crimes of the 1980s.

One can acknowledge all of this while in no way diminishing the fact that Maduro is a dictator who likely stole the last election, is brutally repressing his own people, and has led his country into an economic and humanitarian catastrophe -- albeit one that Obama-era U.S. sanctions gravely exacerbated -- that has placed countless lives at risk and forced a mass exodus of more than three million people.

Along similar lines, one can oppose both Maduro's government and the additional U.S. sanctions that were announced this month against it, which will drain billions more dollars out of the already crippled Venezuelan economy, exposing more families to malnutrition, food insecurity, and worse. If history is any guide, this approach will only entrench the regime while ordinary civilians will pay the incalculable humanitarian price -- as we remember from Saddam's Iraq, where U.S. sanctions in the 1990s were responsible for the deaths of more than half a million children.

And yet I know people on the left who are profoundly uncomfortable with acknowledging both sides of the truth at once. They'd rather not focus on the aspects of the story in which Maduro's regime is the villain.

The situation is in many senses akin to the "boat people" crisis that followed the end of U.S. involvement in various wars in Southeast Asia. Then as now, the Left had in many cases confused their opposition to U.S. policy with an unwillingness to criticize its adversaries -- they mistook their own opposition, that is, to the quasi-genocidal U.S. bombing campaigns, military presence, and authoritarian government in Saigon, for support and admiration for the communist government in Hanoi. They were therefore uncomfortable with taking a fully humanitarian attitude to a massive refugee crisis generated by the repressive policies of the triumphant North Vietnamese regime. As Vo Van Ai lays out in a captivating article from 2014, the French Communist Party at the time went out of their way even to criticize and belittle humanitarian advocacy on behalf of Vietnamese refugees.

It was therefore no small thing when left-wing luminary Sartre was willing to join forces with longtime ideological opponent Raymond Aron to support the boat people, speaking at a press conference of the "imperative [...] to save fellow human beings in danger."

Which is the sort of thing that one would hope wouldn't need saying. But one gets the sense that if you were a left-wing intellectual in France in the '70s, you didn't know whether refugees fleeing a Communist government were fellow human beings or not, until Sartre told you. So thank God he did.

The lack of attention from some segments of the Left to the Venezuelan refugee crisis stems from a similar lack of moral nerve. Do we really have to talk about it, we think? Can't we just go back to focusing on all the terrible things that are caused more directly by U.S. foreign policy? Aren't those more important?

It's hard to say this to more than three million people fleeing from their homes. They didn't get to choose whether they got to be displaced by a nefarious U.S.-backed regime or a nefarious "Bolivarian" one. They just had to survive, like any of us. We don't get to decide whether the moral demands of our time "fit our narrative" enough to pay attention. What Adrienne Rich called the "dark birds of history" come for us whether we are prepared for them or not. The moving finger writes.

If there is no grave problem with Maduro's regime, after all, why are there so many refugees? Why has Venezuela generated the largest forced displacement in Latin American history? Maybe, as some neoconservative historians seem to think about the origins of the Palestinian refugee crisis, they are all just leaving in order to make the government look bad. Which would be quite a sacrifice, for the sake of a P.R. stunt.

Or maybe, all these refugees are exaggerating the horrors they have fled, not out of malice, but out of confusion. This was the pseudo-psychology proposed by Chomsky at first, when the early stories started coming out of Cambodia about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge: "[R]efugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces," he and his co-author wrote at the time, "They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocuters wish to hear." (This is the same thing one hears from people trying to discredit former members and critics of the Church of Scientology.)

If Chomsky's assessment of refugee psychology is right, though, why are they frightened? What did they flee? Why would they put themselves at "the mercy of alien forces" and subject themselves to their terrors, if what they had been forced to leave at home was not a genuine horror? If they're making it up, why are they refugees at all? As Brecht wrote: So many reports... So many questions...

Of course, the hypocrisy cuts both ways. If the right wishes to be other than "silent" on Venezuela, if they are sincere in their supposed concern for the humanitarian crisis generated by Maduro's policies, there is an obvious way to help the victims of those policies -- namely, by passing Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans currently in the United States. Republicans can't make any "Tu quoque" argument that the Left too has its anti-humanitarian moments, if they aren't willing to support the particular refugee population displaced by the humanitarian crisis in this case.

What's more, granting TPS is bound to have a positive effect -- issuing directly and immediately in protections for a refugee population. Unlike backing an unknown opposition that may only cause more chaos in a country already facing economic and political collapse -- or considering the still more abhorrent option that has been floated in some circles of military intervention -- here's a strategy that we know will save lives, and it can be done right now.

Such a partial solution has already been proposed in bipartisan legislation in Congress, but Trump could accomplish the same tomorrow with a stroke of his pen. Thus far, he has manifestly failed to do so, or to offer any hint he would consider it. Big surprise. Before the right accuses Democrats of being "silent on Venezuela," they ought to ask why their president is silent on the fate of thousands of refugees who have fled the Venezuelan catastrophe, whom it is entirely in his power to protect.

Here is where the next step is inarguable. No one in the United States, whether left or right, neither Sartre nor Aron, has an excuse for not favoring it. TPS is needed now.