There’s little I can say about Sean Penn’s fluff “interview” with Hugo Chávez and Raúl Castro that Marc Cooper hasn’t said.
Some have suggested that I tend to overstate the influence of actor-activists like Penn. If anything, I’ve understated it. Penn’s “journalism” is now being published on the cover of The Nation, right at the moment when audiences are swooning over his film portrayal of the late Harvey Milk. The damage he’s doing to the very idea of the left as a principled force for human rights is considerable.
One would never know from Penn’s article that Chávez has summarily ejected Human Rights Watch officials from his country; has proclaimed Belarus under Alexander Lukashenko “a model social state”; has pledged solidarity with Robert Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Vladimir Putin. Do not even get me started about Castro, whose decades-long erasure of civil liberties is treated by Penn only in the most evasive, relativizing way. All societies are “imperfect,” he counsels. I can’t imagine a moral stand more limp and spineless.
Because Chávez and Castro are demonized by Fox News and other right-wing forces, Penn has concluded they must in fact be stand-up guys. What an infantile and dishonest view of world politics. What a catastrophe for the left, which has been down this road before.
Odd that Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Brinkley accompanied Penn on this trip; I eagerly await their sides of the story.
A minor point: I would expect Penn to have no idea what the Monroe Doctrine is; perhaps he’s misremembering Brinkley’s remarks, which are clearly about the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine was not imperialist, but rather anti-imperialist, stating that Europe should have limited influence in the New World. It was Theodore Roosevelt who tweaked the doctrine to justify U.S. intervention in Latin America.
[Update: This post excerpted at Harry’s Place.]
Comments are closed.