I found this tweet in Alan MacLeod's Twitter feed, and while I'm trying to be fair, I can't see any excuse for it. By juxtaposing two images and an older tweet from another source, it aims for plausible deniability, but I think it misses the mark.
At first blush it's bluntly racist: the claims of the Wall Street Journal commentator (behind a paywall, sorry) can be evaluated by his name and ancestry. Ditto for the person referenced in "Jane's" tweet below the images, though I confess her mockery of her target's name is mildly witty. Remember when an American right-winger could say that you could tell that Obama is a terrorist because of his name, and we all jeered? Remember American right-wingers' giggling that FDR's real name was Rosenfeld, nudge nudge wink wink? But that was different.
Some of the commenters showed that Barents-Von Hohenhagen is a thoroughgoing right-winger, but he could be that while possessing black hair, olive skin, brown eyes, and a name like Guaidó or Bolsonaro or Fujimori. What counts is his stance and his arguments, which appear to be standard corporate-media alarmism. It also appears that he and his family have longstanding ties to right-wing circles in Germany. I believe the local library carries the Journal, I might take a look at the piece when the library re-opens after its holiday break.
The same goes for Blanca von Buren Green, the other blond whom Jane mocked. It's true that the great majority of Venezuelans are poor, usually brown people, and that many of the right-wing Venezuelan opposition are blond and blue-eyed. But as the example of Juan Guaidó shows, many of them aren't. What counts is their politics, which are determined by history, not by their "race." So yeah, at second blush, this stuff is bluntly racist.
It's the accompanying photo of Chilean President-elect Gabriel Boric that threw me a bit off-balance. I wondered if "Ewan" meant to contrast his dark, even swarthy appearance with Barents-Von Hohenhagen's name, as a badge of Chilean authenticity. I remembered reading that he's Croatian by ancestry, and I was right. According to his Wikipedia entry, his forebears arrived in Chile in the late 1800s, but they and he retain ties to relatives in Croatia to this day. He's leftish enough to give the far right conniptions (no great accomplishment), but he's no Chavez or Morales. But y'know, he looks like he could be Chilean, as indeed he is. I doubt that Ewan or Jane or their granfalloon would defend him if he couldn't pass as non-white, at least to their eyes. I can't say for sure, though, because the matter didn't turn up in the comments.
What Boric will actually do as President will have to be seen. Maybe if he disappoints foreign leftists like Jane and Ewan, they'll start dragging up his Croatian ancestry to explain it. They knew all along he wasn't really Third World.
What generally is overlooked in discourse at this low level is that colonialism in the Americas didn't begin with the US. It began with Spain and to a lesser extent Portugal. It's entertaining when Spanish-speaking creoles complain that they're colonized by the Yankees, but it must never be forgotten that they are colonizers themselves. (They're like colonial North American slaveholders who complained that the British Crown was enslaving them!) The rise of indigenous movements in Latin America, exemplified by Chavez, Morales, and Castillo among others, are a reminder of this, and I'm a bit mystified by how often the US left forgets it. But then, we have a rather limited range of attention; I'm not sure I'll ever get over how US progressives ignored the South Korean candlelight marches of a dozen years ago, even though that movement should have been on their radar. The massive grassroots movement that led to the fall of then-President Park Geun-hye in 2017 got somewhat more attention here, but the US left still seemed not to recognize its significance.
I'm most concerned right now with the left's racialization of these issues. People who freely deplore Trumpian deplorables still make inadvertently hilarious assumptions about religion and culture -- that the Bible was written by "white guys," for example; that there's something funny about a white female Zen master in the US; that a toxic-masculine Afro-Caribbean god is a model that white Christians should learn from; or that Muslims aren't white. The specifics of the racism differ, but the errors that drive it stay the same.
