Gustavo Dudamel is reconciled with Venezuela regime

If the Russian invasion of Ukraine has revealed anything about the psychology of collective outrage, it is that moral consensus is almost impossible to achieve until bombs fall from the sky and the easily discernible line of war has been transgressed.

It has also further demonstrated that some brutal dictators are less fashionable and palatable than others. The salsa-soundtracked, Caribbean brand of anti-American “revolutionary” – no matter how atrocious, no matter what human misery he causes – will still make his way to student t-shirts and dormitory posters. Not too many Hitler posters in college dorms these days, but plenty of Castro, despite the misery, deprivation and brutality he exerted over decades. We don’t see too many swastikas daubed on Europe’s statues today, but the spray-painted hammer-and-sickle is ubiquitous, despite the grand-scale horror it symbolises. For some bizarre reason of psychological shift, communist brutality gets a pass, and even elicits a perverse sense of ‘nostalgia-once-removed’ among a significant segment of the university-educated class.

Until you live it.

7.1 million Venezuelans are now exiled. That is almost one quarter of the population. Most walked to Peru, Brazil, Colombia and through treacherous jungle to the US. Venezuelans are now the 2nd most populous asylum seekers on the southern US border, after Mexicans. They rarely make the news (except when Ron DeSantis recently sent an aeroplane of them to Martha’s Vineyard). They are trees falling in the night. Unseen. Unheard. Forgotten.

Why would 7.1 million people want to flee their homeland by such arduous and dangerous means? For the same reason they set float from Cuban beaches on rafts bound for Florida; freedom is compelling. Imagine a scenario, if you can, in which leaving by foot and walking for months without food or water would be preferable to remaining. You can’t, because you – a Slippedisc reader with phone or laptop in hand – are highly unlikely to have experienced anything like it.

Neither have I, but those close to me have. For the 12 years since I have been married to a Venezuelan, I have been exposed to the horror stories of the regime that cynically – yet masterfully – shrouded its crimes in the music of Beethoven, Bruckner and Mahler. The louder the kids played their violins, the more you all ignored the adults pulling the strings.

By design.

Setting aside the internal problems of El Sistema for another day – frankly, that is not my fight – El Sistema is not simply funded by the regime; it IS the regime. It is operated by its own ministry: https://elsistema.org.ve/. It counts among its board individuals who are interwoven in the story of Venezuela’s collapse, while hypocritically pronouncing the “transformational power of music”. It manages to destroy with one hand while appealing to our noblest instincts on the other. This is the purest art of propaganda, almost by definition.

The question, then, is simple: does a public figure like Dudamel have a morally absolute obligation NOT to serve that regime, or is his stated mission of music education sufficient justification to fly in their private jets, break bread and caviar with them, and overtly disseminate the Chavista ideology throughout the world via all the propaganda tools in the arsenal: symbolism, symposia, manipulation of the press, performances at globally significant events such as the UN Security Council etc. etc.

There is no straight answer to that question. We all establish our own moral codes, and we can only follow them as we see fit. Dudamel is no exception.

Or is it so?

When Putin invaded Ukraine, the collective outrage of the classical world succeeded in hounding every last Putin sympathiser out of the US and Europe. Overnight. And rightly so. In one of the most extreme, absolutist acts of global consensus and solidarity ever witnessed, a very clear message exploded across a unified cultural landscape; the noble art of classical music has no business dealing with those who subvert the very core of its values with acts of barbarism.

And yet, Putin and Muduro are allies. They form a unified axis of brutality and human rights abuse, along with Iran, Syria and China. This is not an unknown fact. Indeed, Putin sent two Tu-160 bombers to Venezuela when Juan Guaidó attempted to take his rightful place as interim president in 2018, following the regime’s hijack and reconstitution of the National Assembly. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-russia-airforce/russian-nuclear-capable-bomber-aircraft-fly-to-venezuela-angering-u-s-idUSKBN1OA23L
Latterly, Putin’s cash-for-mineral-resources deal has helped Maduro avoid defaulting on Venezuela’s national debt. Maduro, in turn, openly supports Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Knowing all this, how can we apply one set of expectations to Gergiev and another to Dudamel? Both serve the same, vile axis of ICC-sanctioned dictatorship, even if Dudamel, under extreme pressure from his critics and the board of the LA Phil, suspended his operations in Venezuela for a while – but not until the touring money had dried up anyway under conditions of extreme hyper-inflation and low oil prices. Do we require the outbreak of war so reach a moral consensus?

Is our preferred brand of music really so imbued with assumed godly status that it can justify such morally vacuous and coldly transactional arrangements, without consideration for the millions who do not partake in it? Do we spare no thought for the doctors, the engineers, the lawyers, the thousands of other professional sectors represented by the 7.1 million in exile who must now “start again at your beginnings, And never breathe a word about your loss?”, in Kipling’s words. Is it really acceptable to watch an entire nation sink into the mire of despair as long as we can keep peddling the comforting myth that classical music – uniquely among genres – “transforms society”?

Music alone transforms nothing. It is the moral choices of powerful men that transform our world – the right and the wrong – and our noble music either stands in congruence with those choices or in grating opposition. We need good, powerful men to call time on bad, powerful men, not to legitimise them through complicity. Never forget that Hitler would listen to Parsifal at Bayreuth and send battalions of young men to their deaths in Stalingrad the very same day.

So, Dudamel can do whatever he likes, and most observers will not care or know to dig deep enough to reveal the complex layers of moral dissonance in the whole Dudamel story. Such is the nature of human beings to preserve the fantasy. But I know one Venezuelan, at least, who will never go back to a Caracas concert hall until every last Venezuelan – musician or otherwise – is free from tyranny, until music can be celebrated as a reflection of our true virtues and values, released from two decades of ideological hijack by a cynical, criminal regime.