World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [75]
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Officially, Putin’s shutdown of Berezovsky’s TV-6 station was supported by a court ruling that the station was bankrupt. Nevertheless, even Putin’s supporters concede that his confiscation techniques in both cases—involving intimidation, dozens of armed secret service raids, and mysterious backroom deals—were highly suspect. In the West, Putin’s actions provoked a firestorm of criticism that he was “destroying free speech,” “silencing critics,” and returning to “Soviet-style terror.” In Russia, however, negative reaction has been much more muted while many have openly supported Putin’s moves against the oligarchs. Although Putin himself has never engaged in anti-Semitic rhetoric, he is no doubt aware that significant sectors of the population believe that they “have been impoverished at the hands of rich Jews” and that, as a result, his confiscations of Gusinsky’s and Berezovsky’s media holdings would generate little popular opposition.
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It is important to stress that President Putin himself has not adopted anti-Semitic rhetoric and that he has also targeted non-Jewish businessmen in Russia. The fact remains that the three wealthiest people in Russia today are Jewish oligarchs Khodorkovsky, Abramovich, and Friedman. With Gusinsky and Berezovsky now in exile, hatemongering demagogues waiting in the wings, and draft nationalization bills constantly being debated in the Duma, these oligarchs are increasingly at Putin’s mercy. Meanwhile, the new political party headed by Yeltsin’s former defense minister, Gen. Igor Rodionov, if approved, will have as its explicit policy agenda reclaiming from Russia’s “Zionists” the wealth they “looted” from “the Russian people.”
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Anti-market Backlash in Venezuela
In Venezuela, a small minority of cosmopolitan “whites”—including descendants of the original Spanish colonizers as well as more recent European immigrants—historically dominated both the country’s economy and its politics. As elsewhere in Latin America, this minority is very closely knit. As one Venezuelan jokingly put it, “In Venezuela there are more boards of directors than there are directors.”
But in 1998, the Venezuelan people—respecting their democratic institutions and to the horror of the United States—elected as president the wildly anti-market former army paratrooper Hugo Chavez. Like President Alejandro Toledo in Peru, Chavez swept to his land-
slide victory on a wave of ethnically-tinged populism. Demanding
“a social revolution,” Chavez aroused into impassioned political consciousness Venezuela’s destitute majority, who make up 80 percent of the population, and who, like “the Indian from Barinas”—as Chavez refers to himself—have “thick mouths” and visibly darker skin than most of the nation’s elite. “He is one of us,” wept cheering, growth-stunted washerwomen, maids, and peasants. “We’ve never had another president like that before.”
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According to Moisés Naím, former Venezuelan Minister of Trade and Industry and now editor of Foreign Policy, “What differentiates Hugo Chavez from his political rivals” is “his enthusiastic willingness to tap into collective anger and social resentments that other politicians failed to see, refused to stoke, or more likely, had a vested interest in not exacerbating.” Whereas Peru’s Toledo reached out to his country’s elite, Chavez deliberately fomented class conflict, lacing it with ethnic resentment. Chavez, writes Naím, “broke with the tradition of multiclass political parties and the illusion of social harmony