Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who now rules by decree
Source: AP, via Yahoo! News

So how’d you like one man making all your decisions for you? He’d pick your legislator, or dump him, as he pleased. He’d decide your food security – what you would eat. He’d decide whether you get housing or whether you’d own what you thought was your own house, you’d not make any such decisions as yourself. He’d decide how much of your money you could keep or he could take, just like that. Anything he said, would go. He’d be the law of the land. Not only no more representative democracy, no participatory democracy either, just one-man democracy. All power would be concentrated in his person and all decisions. You, on the other hand, would just sit there and allow him to take care of you. Like an infant. Except that you wouldn’t be an infant. You’d be in a cage. And this dictator would be your everything, everything you needed to survive. If he decided to let you survive.

Today was a grim day in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez dissolved congress and threw out the constitution. Now, he rules by decree, using the same means and exact same word as Hitler himself used to seize power: ‘The Enabling Act.’ This parallels how Hitler seized Germany’s weak democracy and turned it into a dictatorship. Donald Rumsfeld was scarily right when he compared – to much derision – Chavez to Hitler. Today, that comparison is quite real.

All this dictatorship power has been seized despite there being no crisis in Venezuela, no wartime action, no seige from without. Chavez has seized all power for his own aggrandizement and glory, in an amassing of absolute power Ceaucescu would envy. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and now we will see how deep the rot will go.

Democracy is gone tonight in Venezuela. The only thing missing is the burning Reichstag. The Thug of Caracas has ascended supreme. The next thing we watch for is the U.S. and OAS response. Will the world’s democracies stand idly by as a thug penetrates their midst and claims to be a familiar? Will the west stand idly by?

Miguel at Devil’s Excrement has a powerful analysis of what’s happening here.

Guillermo at VenePoetics has an excellent translation of a Tal Cual newspaper essay on the failure of socialism and the implications of it for Venezuela, in this post here.

UPDATE: Boz at Bloggings by Boz has a good analysis called ‘An elected dictatorship’ in this post here.

It’s like Gilligan’s Island – in the trappings of Gilligan’s dictator nightmare. But in Venezuela, the nightmare and the dictator are real.
Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News