Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Chavez e il suo maestro

http://zeek.forward.com/articles/116835/hugo-chavez-advisor-the-anti-semitic-path-of-norberto-ceresole/
“I can’t conceive of a single Jew in this country who would support
Israel’s repressive policies,” Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez announced in
Caracas in early June in an incendiary speech about the Turkish “Free
Gaza” flotilla incident. As he had done numerous times before, Chávez
once again used anti-Israel rhetoric to distract attention from the
internal problems affecting his country: incessant poverty in spite of
Venezuela’s rich oil reservoir, rampant urban violence, and a fractured
electorate in which the concept of civil, peaceful dialogue is quickly
evaporating.
Anti-Semitism is on the rise in the Hispanic world. At its heart is
Chávez’s anti-Zionism, which, of course, isn’t new. Nor is the
Venezuelan president’s ire directly only at the Israeli state. His
anti-Zionism is just one manifestation of his anti-Semitism. Famously,
in a Christmas 2005 declaration, Chávez announced that “The world has
enough for everybody, but some minorities, the descendants of the same
people that crucified Christ, and of those that expelled Bolívar from
here and in their own way crucified him… have taken control of the
riches of the world.” Like his ally Mahmoud Ahmedinejad of Iran, Chávez
portrays Israel as a genocidal state that survives only because a cabal
of wealthy Jews in the United States, through the media, controls the
world’s public opinion.
Before Chávez came to power, Venezuela had a Jewish community of
approximately 20,000, mostly in Caracas, but that number has dwindled
dramatically as a result of Chávez’ rhetoric. Under Chávez’ watch,
anti-Semitic incidents against the Venezuelan Jewish community of
Caracas have increased. One of the most serious of these was an armed
raid in 2004 by security forces against the [Hebráica, the Jewish
social, athletic, and educational center]
(
http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2004/venezuela.htm
). In January
30, 2009, a break-in at the Tiferet Israel synagogue in Caracas was tied
to Chávez’ political supporters, forcing Chávez to defend himself
publicly against accusations of anti-Semitism.
To understand the roots of Chávez’ animosity toward both Israel and the
Jewish people, it is essential to follow the path of one of his close
allies and confidants, Norberto Rafael Ceresole. Creosole’s potent mix
of nationalism, populism, and anti-Semitism has provided the Venezuelan
president with a convenient way to unite the disenfranchised poor under
a common enemy.
Who is Norberto Ceresole?
Norberto Rafael Creosole was a nationalist ideologue and a warmonger—he
described himself as “a sociologist and political scientist who
vindicated the capacity to make war, based on a positive relationship
between the military and society–that spent his life zigzagging through
important right- and left-wing groups in Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, and
Spain. Born in Buenos Aires in 1943, he died there from heart failure in
2003.
Ceresole is best known outside South America as a Holocaust denier.
While his anti-Semitism was clear-cut, his political loyalties aren’t
always easy to sort out, nor is the timeline of his career: he embraced
the far right and the far left, identifying, for example, with
anti-Soviet causes, but also spending time in Moscow, where he taught
and became a member of the Academy of Science.
Ceresole opposed the terminology that came from Marxism, Communism, and
even the postcolonial theories of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said as
ineffective in describing the contradictions at the heart of the
Spanish-speaking world, embracing a racialist and religion-filled
approach that established a tension between oppressors and oppressed
based on ethnic background and theological belief.
Rather than a Cold-War ideologue supporting, depending on the occasion,
the extreme left and the ultra-right, Ceresole may best be defined as a
populist inspired by Juan Domingo Perón, Ceresole’s all-time hero (he
spent time with the deposed Perón in Madrid). One of his central thesis,
if one is to be distilled from his almost three dozen books, is that the
only redeeming institution in Latin America capable of bringing the
region out of its “somnambulist status” is the army.
Ceresole went so far as to say, in his book Subversión, contrasubversión
y disolución del poder: Guerra y sociedad en la argentina contemporánea
(Subversion, Counter-Subversion, and the Dissolution of Power: War and
Society in Contemporary Argentina), that in the proper setting, war is a
positive nation-building effort that might be orchestrated by a
country’s leaders to bring clarity to the collective self.
Ceresole saw Latin America as a landscape of missed opportunities. He
believed that elites, whose tentacles are the pseudo-democratic
political parties, falsify the region’s history, trapping people in a
blissful state of forgetfulness. In his work, utopian philosophies like
Marxism are suspect both because they are foreign and because they
simply substitute a set of lies for another. What Latin America needs in
order to awake from its slumber, Ceresole believed, is charismatic
military personalities in touch with authentic nationalist feelings.
During his long career, Ceresole worked tirelessly to shore up the
military and to install charismatic military leaders in three different
countries: his native Argentina, Peru, and Venezuela.
Power, not Principle
Ceresole supported strong men no matter what their ideology. He began
his career on the left, in Argentina, as a Peronista. Peronism was
associated with both a left-wing populism and with right-wing fascist
groups, including an offshoot of the Tacuara Nationalist Movement.
Ceresole had been educated in Europe in the mid-Sixties.
In 1969, Ceresole became an adviser to Juan Velasco Alvarado, Peru’s
left-leaning military dictator whose mandate involved nationalizing
large portions of the nation’s economy, coordinate programs of bilingual
education to empower the Quechua-speaking aboriginal population, and
opposing the United States as an invading presence in local affairs.
During this time, Ceresole became close to the Soviets, negotiating the
acquisition of weapons by Peru from the Russians. His interest in war as
a method of popular coalescence brought him to the USSR, where he joined
the academic environment, teaching subjects such as war in the modern
world. Several of his books were translated into Russian.
After Perón died, in 1974, Ceresole joined an offshoot of the
Trotsky-inspired guerrilla group Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, the
People’s Revolutionary Army, from which the Montoneros, an urban
guerrilla evolved. At that time, Ceresole made contacts with the Cuban
government, although he was already developing an acute anti-Communist
allergy. When sentiment in Argentina began to turn strongly against
Peronism, Ceresole left for Spain. It was in Spain that he became close
to neo-Nazi groups.
Ceresole was also involved with the Carapintadas, a group of displeased
army mutineers led by the ultra-right wing Lieutenant Colonel Aldo Rico.
He met Hugo Chávez in Buenos Aires in 1994, ostensibly through a mutual
liaison with the Carapintadas. Years later, Ceresole described their
initial encounter as enlightening: “When I met Chávez,” he declared, “I
felt a revelation, that is, I saw a character that somehow I had
imagined… I had imagined [him] as a possibility. I had a negative
experience with some Argentine military and when I saw Chávez it was,
frankly, like a blow of fresh air. I immediately understood his
lefty-wing line, which I didn’t like, and therein emerged the fraternal
struggle between Chávez and Ceresole.”
Ceresole went with Chávez to Venezuela. In June of 1995, Ceresole was
expelled from Venezuela by the DISIP, Venezuela’s secret police, on the
grounds that he had been an instigator in Chávez’s 1992 failed coup
against Carlos Andrés Pérez. By 1998, Ceresole was back in Venezuela, as
one of Chávez’ key advisors. He was asked in 1999 by Venezuelan
vice-president Luis Miquilena to leave the country. Though Ceresole did
leave Venezuela, he remained close to Chávez until his death.
Ceresole’s Anti-Semitism
Ceresole was often asked in public if he was an anti-Semite, a fact only
occasionally he bothered to deny. His idol, Perón, had harbored Nazi
refugees in Argentina, which, for Ceresole, is a country that, in
geopolitical parlance, “sits in the periphery of Western Civilization.”
By his own account in his book La falsificación de la realidad: La
Argentina en el espacio geopolítico del terrorismo judío (The
Falsification of Reality: Argentina in the Geopolitical Space of Jewish
Terrorism, 1998), his anti-Semitic stance found its grounding in Buenos
Aires in 1992, with the attack to the Israeli Embassy, and, more
prominently, in 1994, when the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina
[AMIA], the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, was the target of a
terrorist bombing that left dozens of people dead and many more wounded.
The far-reaching effects of that second incident on international
politics have never been fully appreciated. It was the first time the
Americas were used as an extended stage in the Middle Eastern conflict.
While anti-Jewish sentiment has always been a feature in Argentine
culture (in 1919, a labor dispute, which some historians describe as a
full-fledge pogrom targeting recently-arrived Jewish immigrants from the
Pale of Settlement, took place in the nation’s capital and came to be
known as the Semana Trágica), the reach of the AMIA destruction exceeded
anything before.
The event took place under the watch of President Carlos Saúl Menen, an
Argentine of Lebanese descent. While government forces made every effort
to complicate the search for culprits, the local and international media
immediately exposed visible links by the perpetrators to Iran. Ceresole
became incensed by the connection. Judging that media reports were
building a conspiracy, he began to maintain that a Jewish conclave was
behind such suspicions and, pushing further, that the attacks were
organized by Jewish groups.
After Argentina, under pressure, considered breaking diplomatic
relations with Iran, he published in the periodical Amanecer, May 29,
1998, an “Open Letter to My Iranian Friends,” where he quarreled with
the view that Iranian intelligence was behind the attack, suggested that
the breaking of Argentine-Iranian relations was desired by the Jewish
lobby in the United States, and claimed that “the fight against the
Jewish state should not be limited geographically to the Middle East.”
Ceresole argued that the Jewish lobby in the United States was in
command of el poder norteamericano, a North American power force that
controlled the entire world. He also stated that Zionism had undergone a
metamorphosis “so radical in the last few years that today it is
practically something else: a nationalist-religious messianism. The
classic dichotomy between religious Judaism and secular Zionism is an
equation that longs to the past.”
Embracing a radical Arab cause, he pointed at the Israeli secret
services as the culprits of the AMIA attacks. For Ceresole the “Jewish
problem” today, not only in Argentina in particular but in the world at
large, corresponded, as he argues in La falsificación de la realidad,
“with an internal crisis of the State of Israel.” Argentine Jews, among
whom he had nurtured strong relationships, became in his imagination a
menacing agent. “I suddenly discovered them not as I had known them
until then,” he wrote, “that is, as individuals distinct from one
another, but rather as elements for whom individuation is impossible, a
group united by hatred, and, to use a term that they like, by ire.” He
stated that he received death threats from “the internal
Jewish-fundamentalist connection” and, as a result, was prompted by his
lawyer to leave Argentina.
In quick succession, Ceresole transformed himself into a spokesperson
for anti-Jewish causes. His attention wasn’t focused in the Middle
Eastern conflict per se, although the topic certainly concerned him, as
much as it was on the Jewish influence on the world at large. Ceresole
published a series of volumes where he described the Holocaust as a myth
and painted Israel as a threat. As he started to organize these books,
their content overlapped: some were short essays, others longer
meditations. The first was Terrorismo fundamentalista judío (Jewish
Fundamentalist Terrorism, 1996); the second was El Nacional-Judaísmo
(National-Judaism, 1997); and, by far the most elaborate, a sum of parts
that encompasses everything prior to it, the third installment becameLa
falsificación de la realidad. He wrote other material on what he termed
“Jewish perversion,” including one on Spain and the Jews, but these
three became his carta de identidad.
Their line of argument is labyrinthine. He often contradicts his own
abhorrent views, or else he cannibalizes his own previous oeuvre.
Overall, Ceresole argues that Judaism purports to be a tolerant
religion, but at its core it eliminates any possibility of dialogue. (By
the way, he is quite critical of Edward Said, for instance, whom he
describes as “committing a grave mistake” when considering that
Palestinians might find in Jews a partner for dialogue.) The AMIA attack
is presented as a byproduct of fundamentalist Jewish forces that
infiltrated Israel’s Shin Bet. As a result, he attempts to persuade
readers that the actual 1994 tragedy was un autoatentado, a
self-inflicted wound made by the Argentine Jewish community, especially
the ultra-right within that community, with the help of Israeli
intelligence in order to showcase the fury of “the so-called enemies” of
the Jewish people. Ceresole goes into detail analyzing the car bomb and
the way Israeli intelligence planted evidence in order for Iran to be
accused of plotting the explosion. Intriguingly, he meditates on the
question of what happens when Jews kill Jews, using as an example the
assassination of Yitzhak Rabin just a year later. His interest is when
rabbinical response determines such Jew vs. Jew behavior is acceptable.
Clearly, the AMIA incident is the ignition in Ceresole’s machination of
hatred. The sediment of that hatred is buried in mud. He reasons that
while Argentina is traditionally seen as a European country—e.g.,
Caucasian—the white population is, in essence, a minority. He then
claims that the Jews, using the Bible, colonized Argentina in such
fashion that other ethnic groups, demographically larger, were
marginalized. A similar strategy took place in the colonization of the
United States and Israel, enabling Jews and their allies to usurp a
white minority. Other races, including other Jewish racial populations
originating in Spain, were thus pushed aside. The outcome of this Jewish
supremacy is the kidnapping of world history and the creation of the
Holocaust narrative, what he calls “the Myth,” with Elie Wiesel as its
foundational father.
Ceresole defined the Holocaust as “a destabilizing creation” and the
Achilles’ tendon between Western Civilization and the state of Israel.
He calls it “the greatest lie ever told by humans since the Old
Testament.” He praises the German scholar Ernst Nolte, a controversial
scholar of Hitler’s rise, but subscribes mainly to the ideas of three
prominent French Holocaust deniers, whom Ceresole depicted as pals:
Roger Garaudy (who wrote the prologue to El National-Judaism), Paul
Rassinnier, and Robert Faurisson (an appendix to La falsificación de la
realidad features Spanish translations of a couple of Faurisson’s
revisionist essays on Auschwitz).
Ceresole and Chávez
The impression that Ceresole’s ideas had on Hugo Chávez is evident in
the way the Venezuelan leader has turned them into content in his public
speeches. Chávez embraced Ceresole’s vision of the army as an agent of
populist change, although, as a means to perpetuate his legacy, he
rejected the idea of eliminating the political party. He specifically
endorsed Ceresole’s views on the United States and Israel as agents of a
global conspiracy in which Jews endorsed torture while seeking to
control history.
Ceresole, in turn, saw in the Venezuelan president an antidote to what
in his eyes were “facile party” clowns without the authentic will to
subvert the political status quo in Latin America. In a 2000 interview,
he said that Chávez was eager to comprehend the role of a
technologically-advanced army in the implementation of an equitable
society and he and Ceresole discussed these ideas frequently. He
explained how he told Chávez that all dissidence needed to be abolished
in Venezuela in order to prevent a civil war. And he stated that Jews
were foreign agents intended on perpetuating a false myth of the past.
In June of 1995, Ceresole was expelled from Venezuela by the DISIP,
Venezuela’s secret police, on the grounds that he had been an instigator
in Chávez’s 1992 failed coup against Carlos Andrés Pérez and that he had
links with Arab terrorists. Ceresole claimed that the expulsion was
actually the work of the Israeli Mosad because DISIP and Mosad were
partners. In any case, being expelled from Venezuela did nothing to
lessen Ceresole’s links to Chávez. By the time Chávez came to power
through a general election in Venezuela in December 1999, Ceresole had
reemerged as his consultant. It is at that point that Ceresole’s
anti-Jewish views became tangible in Venezuela.
Two weeks after Chávez’ election, Pynchas Brener, the rabbi of Unión
Israelita, published a piece in El Naciona titled “The King is Naked,”
in which he linked Chávez’s demagoguery to Adolf Hitler and Joseph
Stalin, and expressed hope that things would change sooner rather than
later. Ceresole saw Brener’s critique not only as an affront to the
emerging leader, whom he believed had redeeming powers to reorganize the
infrastructure of Venezuelan society, but also as proof that, as in
Argentina, Venezuelan Jews were traitors with whom it was impossible to
establish a dialogue. He responded to Brener’s letter by depicting the
rabbi as “a prophet of Zionist hatred” and maintaining that Brener’s
opinion wasn’t his alone but represented the Venezuelan Jewish community
in its entirety. In his eyes, they were a Zionist envoy in Chávez’s land.
For a while, the soul of Chavismo oscillated between two poles that can
be identified with Ceresole and José Vicente Rangel. Rangel was a
journalist and another important intellectual influence on Chávez, who
served in various positions in his government, including those of
foreign minister, defense minister, and vice president before he was
replaced in 2007. Rangel promoted the idea of a democratic revolution,
arguing in favor of a controlled dialogue among political factions.
Ceresole represented the opposite pole. He believed that political
parties eventually betray the popular needs and that, as a result,
political parties need to be abolished.
He advocated caudillismo, a system of government with a long-standing
tradition in Latin America that sees redemption in a centralized
dictatorial figure—in Venezuela’s case, Hugo Chávez. According to
Ceresole, Chávez as a political leader didn’t need any party as his
intermediary; rather, the Venezuelan president could best establish a
direct connection to his people through the army. For Ceresole, the
charismatic leader represents the people through the army; all other
political apparatus is a virus, an illness, to be expelled.
Here is the link between Ceresole’s politics and his anti-Semitism. As
Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez argued in a piece in the Boston
Review, “in the Chavista corporealization of politics, any alternative
becomes alien and monstrous, and must be expelled from the body of the
nation and annihilated.” Just as Chávez becomes the personification of
popular will, Jews become the arching metaphor for the illness of the
state, the excess of party and ideology that must be expelled for the
state to function properly.
In 1999, Ceresole released a book, Caudillo, Ejército, Pueblo: La
Venezuela del Comandante Chávez (Caudillo, Army, People: Venezuela under
Comandante Chávez), emphasizing Chávez’s promise as a panacea to the
country’s ills. With this book, he won the heart of Chavismo. The
title’s triptych quickly became the unofficial motto of the Chavista
revolution. Ceresole cemented his position as Chávez’ favorite by
accusing Rangel, in his letter to Brener, of being “a Jew by option,”
that is, another enemy of the Venezuelan people. Because Rangel believed
in political parties, he became a “Jew,” that is, the personification of
all that must be expelled for a healthy state.
Ceresole’s Influence
The relationship between Chávez and Ceresole, always a point of pride
for both, remained steady until, according to lore, the Venezuela leader
threw him out of his house for being “an anarchist.” Certainly, within
the Chavista movement, Ceresole was perceived as an extremist, and among
moderates in the movement his anti-Semitism was worrisome. Nevertheless,
Chávez continued to praise his confidant in various forums, including in
his weekly show Aló Presidente, where on May 2006 he described Ceresole
as a “great friend” and an “intellectual deserving great respect.”
Indisputably, Ceresole’s ideological influence is felt beyond the
Chavistas. It is also resonant outside the places he was active in, Peru
and Venezuela. Inspired by Chávez’s message, other regional leaders,
from Bolivia’s current Evo Morales to Honduras’ deposed Manuel Zelaya,
have embraced anti-Israel policies, and, under Ceresole’s ideological
scope, anti-Semitic views.
Naturally, Jewish communities in Latin America, given their small size
and precarious security apparatus, feel under threat. Within those
communities there is ample dissent toward the policies of the Israeli
military. But that dissent is eclipsed in an atmosphere such as the one
generated by Chávez that reduces Jews, Israel, and the United States,
into a unified foe eager to destabilize the hemisphere first and then
the globe. Graffiti on the walls of the synagogue in Caracas’ Mariperéz
neighborhood constantly joints the swastika and Star of David,
graphically shrieking “Jews out.” The distinction between anti-Semitism
and anti-Zionism is deliberately murky. Chavistas resist any suggestion
that dissent among Venezuelan Jews with the politics of the Israeli
government is part of the democratic debate.
While the roots of anti-Semitism in the Hispanic world go back to the
Inquisition during the colonial period, between the age of independence
in the nineteenth century and World War II the region experienced only
mild manifestations of Jewish hatred. At no time in the recent history
has that hatred been as rampant as it is today. And Norberto Ceresole,
though dead, is one of its instigators.

 evaporating.
per colpa sua, ovviamente. Che ci sia della gente che istiga ogni
giorno al suo omicidio dalle tv non rileva...