Chávez died.

Reactions are extremely polarized. A hero and revolutionary for some, a dictator thug for others.

Reactions are also exacerbated. People have posted images of dogs defecating, of him as a pig, mocking his death to cancer as one of personal defeat.

Eric Raymond, an iconic legend of the hacker community, an highly intelligent man, wishes on his Google+ stream that hell would exist particularly for Chávez:

What justifies such hatred? Chávez was no enemy of the United States. He was highly critical of its government, but this is something an open-minded person should respect even if they disagree. From my personal perspective, that makes him a lucid leader of South America. The only one, in passing, who refused to collaborate with Obama's prisoners policy on the continent. In any case, he did not pause any actual and/or direct threat, unlike the United States and their various attempts to destabilize Chávez's country and government.

He is decried as a dictator, but he won elections by large amounts. He won them with all due respect for the highest democratic standards. I have less suspicion on legitimacy than on that of George Bush or our occidental politicians. In France, leaders of the opposition called to run for the highest office during the next election, openly accused each other of frauds during voting. There are countless cases of actual frauds with votes, condemned by the justice.

He is decried as a thug oppressing personal freedoms of his people but how about Guantanamo, the patriot act or the persecution of Bradley Manning?

In Spain, at the time of writing, there is a huge scandal of corruption affecting top members of government, even the king himself.

Chávez is labelled a populist. This is Orwell's English's Politics and the English Language again. Putting a name that people have been conditioned to react emotionally against to disqualify what is initially a virtue. He was popular, he was liked, if not loved, by the bulk of the population. He was charismatic and witty, he was speaking like a human being, not like a showman reading a script .

This is something we have lost in our society where it is perceived as virtuous for the population to despise their leaders, a mark of political freedom from the power, whereas it merely betrays on the contrary the inability of the population to get rid of a completely corrupt political apparatus.

Every French presidents since Pompidou beat the record of unpopularity of their predecessor and achieved this enmity from their people, sooner. Hollande is a jewel of unpopularity: everything in him is unpopular: his look, his manners, the way he speaks are a caricature of the despised, petty, odious ruler. I do not even speak of Spain where the political apathy is total.

If someone cheers up some feelings when addressing the population with his political ideals, he is a populist. What we are told is sane, is to hate, to despise and merely suffer whoever is in charge.

When Chávez offered Obama the book of Galeano book documenting the five centuries of pillaging of south America, the latter, as befits the showman, made a bon mot and said he was expecting the book to have been written by Chávez himself. Oh it is funny indeed, it is an incisive remark.

But Chávez wrote a page of History. Obama merely had History write a page about him: and for the real historian, that about his crimes, his callousness and his Peace Nobel Prize, stained with vomit.