Blogging the democratic revolution
Boz has a fascinating collection of polls from around the Americas in several countries signalling the political temperatures in assorted hot spots like Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru and others, all put together in a clean roundup of news. Don’t miss the weird Argentine soccer poll at the bottom. Well worth a click here.
The U.S. needs to get its act together on certain things. Like this, that Glenn Reynolds has noticed here.
Francisco Toro has an interesting item about the growth of the ‘ni-ni’s in Venezuela’s political system. These are the people who are neither for Chavez nor for the opposition to Chavez. They are sort of fence-sitters, or, as Francisco suggests, the political center. As a group, they are growing, and new parties like Venezuela de Primero (he has a link) are trying to cater to them. With an election approaching on Dec. 4, this trend will be well worth watching. Read it here.
Yesterday’s The Messenger (an english-language Georgian daily) covers the formation of a new political party out of smaller opposition groups, primarily the Conservatives and the Republicans. This new party shares in the heritage of the Rose Revolution, although it now finds enough room for disagreement with the ruling National Movement: Several leading members of both the Conservative and Republican parties originally were members of the pro-government party but broke away over the last 20 months, disenchanted by the policies of the government. “I can say for sure that we are a revolutionary opposition, in that we supported the Rose Revolution.…
When your country becomes a totalitarian regime, you often preserve your identity through exile. This is largely because all institutions have been shattered in your country and there is virtually no possibility of democratic resistance to tyranny. Every institution is politicized in a communist regime. It’s shocking to think about this matter of exile in a historic context – all through this ages, exile on a vast scale is relatively rare – but under communism it’s a perfectly accepted reality. Of 13 million Cubans worldwide, 2 million are in exile. And this, under conditions of extreme totalitarian control. If emigration…
One of the rarest things on the blogosphere is a non-Sandalista, non-foreigner-financed, non-foreigner opinioned, non-angry-Latin-intelligentsia Colombia blog that’s by a Colombian about marvelous Colombia. I have had yet to find one – until now. Unfortunately, you bring up Colombia – even to a Latino audience in the states – and the first thought they have about Colombia is about drugs. It happened to me during a Spanish presentation I was giving. I discussed the strong Colombian banking system and was horrified when the first question from the audience was ‘is it full of drug money?’ And these people weren’t only…
The day of solidarity with Belarus on Oct. 16 that I talk about was an outstanding success, even moreso than I thought it would be. Over 100,000 people lit candles in their windows all around Belarus on Sunday in a form of protest yet unseen in this country, where protestors are roundly beaten and arrested. More than 100,000 citizens of Belarus have taken part in the Day of Solidarity on October 16. The action has been supported in many Belarusian towns and in many countries of the world. In this connection representatives of the civil society of Belarus proposed continuing…
Miguel Octavio has some utterly repulsive photos of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe in the throes of love. Look at those two embrace! What’s hard to believe is that Mugabe, one of the world’s foremost creators of famine and hunger today, was so much as allowed in at this United Nations conference in Rome. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had assured earlier that these kinds of obscenities at the UN – which do hurt its credibility – will stop. Well, they are not stopping. They are going on at full blast. Investor’s Business Daily has an excellent news…
Jailed Abimael Guzman, the Pol-Pot-ian Marxist terrorist leader of Peru’s Shining Path, which terrorized Peru for 20 years, gave Peru corrosive, confidence-killing hyperinflation, and murdered no less than 35,000 to 70,000 people, mostly from among the poorest of Peru … was a bigtime writer of fuzzy love poetry. The story is here. You know how repulsive that news is. Saddam the human shredder was into writing romance novels, this freak was into sentimental poetry. Somehow, it makes the monsters even creepier. What’s disgusting is that there are still certain kinds of people on the international left who defend him or…
Transparency International’s famous corruption perceptions index for 70 countries of the world was released this morning. Notice those nice Estonia and Barbados ratings! Notice those hideous Burma and Belarus ratings! The press release and the list of rankings is here. UPDATE: Veneuzela’s Aleksander Boyd has some additional commentary here.
Val Prieto at Babalu blog has an excellent news roundup – called ‘a link ajiaco‘ in ‘Cuban,’ with all the significant news and events happening in and around Cuba in the blogosphere. He’s done it up bien. Read it here.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa has a great discussion about Argentine-Cuban poseur revolutionary Che Guevara on NPR. Hispanicon has the link to the audiotape, and it can all be found here.
Venezuela’s bloggers have found a call from the BBC World Services to submit questions to Venezuela’s dictator Hugo Chavez online. This event probably is part of a coordinated propaganda effort from the Western hemisphere’s communist tyrants to reach out to the outside world through the Internet. Fidel Castro did almost the very same thing last week, albeit under greater conditions of state control. For Castro and Chavez, the idea is get online with the rest of us and appear hip or perhaps human, via the easily controlled medium of the Internet. It’s not like live TV where a tyrant could…
…in Hungary, where the memories of bleak, gray communism and the tanks and massacres of 1956 are not entirely forgotten. I wrote up the whole unexpected turn of events, with the rightful blog links on Babalu here.
You may have all noticed that I haven’t posted a nice, long entry on Iraq since the referendum. Well, that’s because I’ve been holding my breath. I don’t want to get too ahead of myself, so there will be something much much bigger when some more indicative preliminary figures come in. One thing is for sure though. The January election and the October referendum were incredibly different emotional experiences for Americans who supported the war. Back then, we had no idea what would happen. It was one fell swoop of an emotional event, and when we saw Iraqis waving around…
Today is the anniversary of the day when President Lukashenko held an illegal referendum to secure his limitless rule in Belarus. With parliamentary elections scheduled within the year, it is more important than ever for the people of Belarus to stand with each other and to know that others stand with them. This is why students from around the world walked for democracy on October 15. Knowing that you have support in your actions against a force as seemingly unstoppable as a dictatorial government will help you have the moral fortitude to stand up against what is blatantly wrong and…
Students for Global Democracy has more of the photos from the worldwide Walk For Democracy In Belarus. Here is the press release, accompanied by a sampling of the pictures. Remember, here are the pictures from our own walk in Boston. ******* October 17, 2005 – Ann Arbor, MI; Bloomington, IN; Istanbul, Turkey; London, Canada; London, United Kingdom; Santa Cruz, CA; Boston, MA; Washington, DC????????For hundreds of Students around the world, October 15th was not just another Saturday: it was a day to commemorate the courage of democracy advocates in the Eastern European nation of Belarus. Held in the iron grip…
In less time than it takes for a new baby to reach U.S. voting age, the nation of Estonia has transformed itself from a cold, gray, stagnant outpost of the Soviet Empire to one of the world’s most impressive dynamic democracies. Its banks are pristine, its one of the most wired countries in the world, it is famous for its absence of corruption, as well as its flat tax, its sound stable money, its property rights, its free trade (unilaterally done with no miserable CAFTA battle, as Alvaro Vargas Llosa noted.) The only shortage out there for Estonia is enough…
This doesn’t look very good. Baku, 17 October 2005 (RFE/RL) — Azeri opposition leader Rasul Quliyev has been stopped by Ukrainian police in the Crimean capital of Simferopol en route to Baku, where he was returning after nearly 10 years in exile, RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service reported. Former parliamentary speaker and Democratic Party of Azerbaijan Chairman Quliyev planned to return to Baku today to participate in the country’s legislative elections next month. He has lived in exile in the United States since 1996. When Quliyev’s charter plane stopped in the Ukrainian city of Simferopol en route to Baku, the Ukrainian authorities…
John Hinderaker at Power Line asks whether the information to date demonstrates that large numbers of Sunnis did, in fact, vote for the new Iraqi constitution. RTWT. UPDATE: On the other hand, in the alternate reality-based community, the Sunnis are being subjugated — because, I suppose, the position held by the majority of Sunnis didn’t carry the referendum. Or something like that.
It was cold and rainy. People were tired and hung over from Friday night festivities. Some cancelled at the last minute and some just kept sleeping. However, despite all that, we still came through and marched out with our signs, deteriorating and wet as they were. There were about a dozen of us total, a mix of students from Bentley College and Brandeis University. We stood out in major intersections shouting slogans like “Free Belarus!” Some people asked us what we were protesting and we told them about it. Others slowed down and honked. It was cool. Here are the…
I have just published the last in a three-part series the global implications of the attacks in London of July 7, 2005. This last post, After London – The Infrastructure of Terrorism in Pakistan, is the one most relevant to democracy issues because it deals with both the socio-political and the military networks of militant Islamist movements in that country. The post has links back to the first two posts in the series, as well as other posts related to the London bombings. Also note that I have a cool new look for my banner. I’m planning on having multiple…
Well, we can already count one victory: the Iraqis, mired in a Vietquagmire and facing constant (real) terrorism, can be trusted to vote on their constitution in 2005 — just a couple of years removed from living under one of the world’s brutal tyrants — which says a lot about Iraq’s present status and how the world views their status. Meanwhile, how’s that going in Europe? Surely we can’t talk about failure in Iraq, when Iraqis are more trusted with their democracy than Europeans are with theirs, and have achieved more actual democratic progress in a far more hostile environment.…
Iraqis voted today on whether to accept the constitution, which Publius has covered extensively. Terrorism was minimal, with only three relatively unsuccessful attacks wounding two police officers and one civilian — which, out of 6,000 polling stations, is a highly ineffective 0.05% success rate. It does indeed look as though the Iraqi and coalition security forces are able to maintain the peace while locking down infrastructure; I expect that as the Iraqi forces continue to ramp up in the coming months, they’ll rapidly outpace the terrorists and develop the capacity to hold the peace without restricting Iraqis’ rights. But, then,…
I’m preparing for the Walk for Democracy in Belarus all day today. Posters, people, all that. Should be pretty cool, and we’ll have pictures and video up for viewing. If you’d like to get involved, just go to the link. I hope to see you all there!