WHO IS WORSE, CHAVEZ OR MUBARAK?
I saw a reporter asking a Congressman why the United States has tolerated Mubarak in Egypt but not Chavez in Venezuela. The Congressman insisted that the behavior of Chavez was despicable but seemed unable to go beyond that.
THE SAD FACT: both Chavez and Mubarak are/were terrible dictators.
I believe Christians should be thrilled that with Mubarak gone the people of Egypt will experience more freedom. We pray the Islamic fundamentalists will not get control of the Egyptian government. For the 14 million plus Egyptians (18.5% of the population) who live on $2 or less per day, we hope the new government relies on capitalistic economic ideas because the impoverished rise out of poverty dramatically faster in market based economies.
But is Mubarak, the standard despicable dictator as bad as Chavez?
A dictator mercilessly sucks wealth out of his people and lives like a king while much of his citizenry barely keeps alive. Both Mubarak and Chavez are guilty. In Venezuela, despite being the 5th largest oil producing country in the world, over ten percent of the people live on $2 a day or less. That is about 3 million people. Christians who care about the poor should be appalled.
I contend that dictators of the left, of the ultra-socialist and Marxist type, are indeed even worse than the bad dictators like Mubarak whose primary objects are first to stay in power and second to squeeze as much money out of the people as possible.
In the forward to the book The Absence of Tyranny by Lloyd Billingsley, Richard John Neuhaus opined that leftist dictators are even worse for three reasons.
FIRST: Dictators on the left are part of a worldwide pursuit of a utopian ideal which destroys freedom wherever it goes. These dictators, whether Stalin, Castro, Chavez, or others aggressively pursue the spread of their horrific ideal to other countries around the world. Wherever this ideal goes, people suffer and lose freedom. Dictators like Mubarak do not try to spread their domination, they simply try to stay in power.
SECOND: Dictators like Mubarak are satisfied, once they have sucked the wealth out of a people, to leave the society of the people alone. Not the leftists. They rip the social fabric to shreds in an effort to build their utopia. They tell families how many children they should have. If the state would benefit from the taking of children out of a home, it happens. When leftist Daniel Ortega decided the state needed the homeland of the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua he moved them away from land where their ancestors had lived for many generations. For the leftist dictators the state comes first and the social well being of the people is ignored.
THIRD: Neuhaus calls leftists the “friends of unfreedom.” Wherever socialist/Marxist ideas take root, people lose their freedom. Leftist dictators co-operate with loss of freedom whether it is political, academic, religious or otherwise.
END NOTE: The Shah of Iran was a dictator, but internal unrest was forcing him to yield some powers and give some freedoms. This was not enough for the Jimmy Carter administration. They forced him from power before the time was right and the Islamic fundamentalist government came in. Iran would not be the horrible problem it is today if Carter had not made one of the worst foreign policy decisions in the past century. To the credit of the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations, they did not force Mubarak out of power. They let the people of Egypt develop their own response to the dictator.
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