Blogging the democratic revolution
A string of high-level surveys of social development over the past year have equated Russia????????s level of achievement with that of the African nation of Niger, a landlocked sub-Saharan state of 14 million roughly half of whose national budget is derived from foreign aid. In October of last year the ???????Corruption Perceptions Index??????? from the German think tank Transparency International surveyed 159 nations and found that only 30 (less than 19%) were less corrupt than Russia. Russia found itself tied for 9th most corrupt nation in the world with Niger and Sierra Leone. Then in June, Foreign Policy????????s ???????Failed States…
Something very little noticed but very important almost slipped under the radar. Perhaps one of the biggest policy detours ever is about to happen in the Middle East. No, Bush is not pulling out of Iraq, and no, Hassan Nasrallah hasn’t played groundhog and come out of hiding. What has happened, in fact, is that the Arab states — which have historically argued for a nuclear-free Middle East (except for Saddam) — are beginning to rethink their loving attachment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Abdul Rahman al Attiyah, said at its most…
Below this is an email from a cousin of mine and his friend who is currently studying and working with an NGO in Thailand. He leans to the left, as you may notice, but provides a great description of what it’s like on the ground level after the military coup. Plus, he knows his stuff. Take a look. ***** by David Ferris & Terri Bennett For those of you who don’t know, I found out last at 11PM that there was a military coup here yesterday. The military’s top general (Songthii) lead tanks into Bangkok, declared a coup, and took…
Hugo Chavez addresses the United Nations General Assembly Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News If Hugo Chavez had wanted to repel the American public, he could not have done a better job than this morning, speaking before the United Nations. Waving a Noam Chomsky book like a late-night K-Tel salesman, he found time to hawk Chomsky tomes, which I am sure was effective – given that people will want to know exactly what he filled his head with after a rant like that. Next, the oily encyclopedia salesman began raving that George Bush was the devil. He yelled about the smell…
In Hungary over the past 48 hours it’s the Nika riots all over again. Sort of. First, political parties in Hungary do not immediately line up into conveniently-intelligible left-wing/right-wing definitions, though some are easily mappable for Americans (the SZDSZ are basically libertarians). See my previous posts here and here for some quick shorthand. What do we know? We know that Prime Minister Gyurcs????ny shot his mouth off at a private meeting of the Socialist Pary (MSZP), which was then leaked to the press, and the entire country fell into political paroxysms. But that’s what happens when the Prime Minister publicly…
Alek Boyd at VCrisis has an interesting item up about his trip to the slums of Caracas. You know, THOSE slums, the pivotal no-man’s-land where no one is safe, but everything hinges on, in December’s coming Venezuelan presidential election. Chavez is a populist and has maintained power on the backs of this poor vote. Alek chats up these Chavista voters over in their icky, scary, horrible red tumbledown cinderblock slums, and has a lot of photos. These conversations are much more interesting firsthand from the Chavistas themselves than filtered through the santized prism of the western Sandalistas, who often claim…
I don’t think many people will be scratching their heads about the coup in Thailand, at least if the entire ordeal is about what we think it is. The events leading up to this make it clear. The impasse of Thai politics in which Prime Minister Shinawatra is accused of corruption yet hugely wins polls anyway, leading to mass protests, has caused one election already to be ruled invalid. Since then not much has happened, but it has created a certain political vacuum in which case both sides are preparing for a repeat of 1992. Perhaps the army really is…
Thai military tanks surrounded the presidential house as Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra made a speech at the United Nations in New York. Source: Reuters, via News.com.au Goodbye, democracy. Thailand’s military has launched a coup to overthrow the government. All the good English language Thai Web sites, like The Bangkok Post and The Nation are down, probably from huge traffic. The U.S. stock market, fearful of what events in Thailand can do to world markets, is falling over this. A well-placed correspondent in Bangkok right now e-mails to me: It’s the army commander, overthrowing Thaksin. Nothing to do with Islamofascists or…
There’s such great blogging going on in Venezuela these days that I almost feel I have been remiss in keeping track of it all. Ahmadinejad of Iran is in Caracas, Chavez is running for reelection, and Venezuela’s economy is falling apart. Here is a brief blog roundup from some of the finest: Daniel, of Venezuela News & Views has a great bloggy mishmash (or since he is in France now, let’s say ragout) of acid comments about Chavismo with several pearls of observation, like this one about current condition of Chavez here: The historian in this blogger has seen too…
Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez are again talking about dependency and how all the ills of the poorer nations are caused by the richer nations; particularly the USA. At the meeting of the so-called Non-Aligned Nations in Cuba, Chavez said, ???????To be radical is not to be insane, it’s to go to our roots. Let’s go to our roots, let’s be truly radical,” Chavez told diplomats and leaders from two-thirds of the world’s countries. He concluded by chanting “Patria o Muerte!” (“Fatherland or Death!”), a favored Castro rallying cry. Well, those roots are dependency theory, blaming the First World for…
Rightwing Swedish babes celebrate their victory over socialism Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News In a wonderful surprise, Sweden’s center-right bloc has defeated the long-ruling socialist coalition, in Sunday’s parliamentary election, 48%-46.2%. A new government is being formed now. The winners are a four-party bloc who’ve been out of power for 25 years. They have just ousted the ruling 3-party socialist coalition which has held power in its current lineup for a decade. Meanwhile, taking in just 35% of the vote, the socialist party itself had its worst showing since 1914! The center-right, led by 41-year-old Fredrik Reinfeldt of the centrist…
The death of great Italian journalist continues to reverberate, oddly intersecting the entry of the pope into the struggle against Islamofascism, and some great essays have been written about her and her legacy. I’ve been really moved by them and present a small roundup of the best of this writing: Victor Davis Hanson has a collection of resonant thoughts in a short informal essay, describing his sorrow at her death and why it has hit us all more deeply in this age of terror and Islamofascism. This is one I read several times. It can be read on Pajamas Media…
Major mainstream television networks in France and Brazil have both taken aim at the odious regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. And I don’t mean something small. They’ve put out huge high-advertising long programs out, firing a unusual cannonade at the dictatorship. This has never happened before. These TV programs document Cuba’s long lines, miserable shortages as a way of life, bureaucracy, commissars, vaunted health care that is nothing but a failure, monstrous communist indoctrination that passes for “education,” secret police surveillance, jailing of dissidents, and complete lack of freedom. It’s realistic programming on Cuba that no one in either…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s foreign advisory team, based at the Miraflores presidential palace, are deep into the task of getting him reelected for the third time, something they may succeed at, given Chavez’s manipulation of the electoral system. Yes, you heard right, foreign as in foreigner. Which sounds pretty disgusting. Shouldn’t one be a citizen of a country before one messes around with its campaigns? Not in Chavismo. That’s why the Chavista campaign team has such an unusual obsession with foreign affairs, something that Miguel at Devil’s Excrement notices. But it’s not all that unusual, in my opinion, it’s simply…
Venezuelan exile Alek Boyd went back to Caracas for a visit after several years living in England, and has asked us to flag his chronicles of his tour there, where he will be covering the campaign of Manuel Rosales. Sounds interesting enough. In his first dispatch, he writes a fair and accurate account of arriving at the airport there, speaking of the monumental Chavista signs, a dictatorship trademark, and the courteous, swift Venezuelan customs officials, something pleasantly surprising. But oh god, Alek’s language! And I don’t mean his command of English, which is fine, but his use of language to…
Oriana Fallaci, freedom fighter Source: Mlle Glass’ photos The great Oriana Fallaci, a clear-eyed journalist and universal freedom fighter for democracy, has died. We all knew she had cancer but this is very sad and affecting news. Her impact on world events cannot be underestimated. The Italian journalist went places no one else would go and saw through everything. No dictator could fool her. She exposed and clarified clowns like Khaddafi and others so that we could see what the real tyrannical enemy was like. At the end of her life, she denounced Islamofascism and extolled the value of civilization,…
While overall the testimony provided by witnesses of Saddam Hussein’s massacres has been damning, the overall “court experience” has been nothing less than a circus. I am not talking about the accusations by human rights groups like Amnesty International which accuse that the trial is well below international standards due to the inherent and legal bias against the defendant. Such things, like the fact that the tribunal does not have to find Saddam guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt,” are true, and were certainly existent in the infamous Nuremberg trials. However, what I am talking about is the fact that there…
As Mugabe’s Zimbabwe spirals further into turmoil — inflation over 1000% and 80% of the population underfed, underemployed, and living in poverty — you might think that such conditions would spur action in people to act against the government. They have tried, and they have tried again, but every single time they fail. This time a national strike was called involving some of the country’s largest labor unions, but at the last minute many withdrew as the government dispatched paramilitary units to arrest opposition leaders. Police arrested trade union leaders and blocked streets and the main square in the Zimbabwe…
A recent seemingly trivial news item has demonstrated how many people misunderstand racism and how explosive the topic is in our politically correct world. For the first portion of the 13th edition of CBS’ hit series “Survivor,” the contestants competing for the $1 million prize while stranded on the Cook Islands in the South Pacific will be divided into four teams: Blacks, Asians, Hispanics and Whites. A group of New York City officials have criticized the new format, saying it promotes divisiveness (they do think we all are the same!). They have asked CBS to reconsider its plans. The bizarre…
In my view the strongest force of all . . . was that unmistakable sense of unanimity among the peoples of the world that war must somehow be averted. The peoples of the British Empire were at one with those of Germany, of France and of Italy, and their anxiety, their intense desire for peace, pervaded the whole atmosphere of the conference, and I believe that that, and not threats, made possible the concessions that were made. I know the House will want to hear what I am sure it does not doubt, that throughout these discussions the Dominions, the…
While the United States pays tribute and mourns the September 11 terrorist attacks on its homeland, it must be remembered that there are people in this world who are even now actively plotting acts more deadly and terrible than anything before. They want to see America brought to its knees and are doing everything they can to see this happen. The not-so coincidence of Khatami’s speaking tour on this symbolic day as well as video releases by Al Qaeda are things that are to be expected. However, something that is not being widely reported on is the opening of the…
The mainstream media decided to ignore the big anti-Khatami rally that took place in front of the Washington National Cathedral while Khatami was delivering his taqiyya on September 7. Worst, the few media that reported it, have falsified the truth by telling that the protestors were only “50”, while in reality they were about 1,000, Iranians and non-Iranians alike. Read the report here. I have also found it very hard to find photos of the rally. Mainstream media, however, were quick to post pictures of the pro-illegal immigration rally as well as Khatami’s speech. Hence, I ask you to post,…
When I heard about the protests planned against Khatami’s speech at Harvard, I knew just the guy to contact. I emailed Jesse Sage over at HAMSA and he filled me in on all the information. Khatami was to speak at 4:00 p.m. so the protests would start around three. We arrived in Harvard Square outside of the Kennedy School of Government just before then, and people were already gathering by the dozens. It wasn’t just the people I knew from HAMSA and the Iran Freedom Concert Coalition, either. There were many, from pro-Israel Jews to Americans concerned about our security…
Source: AFP, via Getty Images Bolivia is on fire. The fiery democratic revolutionary babes of Santa Cruz are no more. Anti-communist protest turns violent in eastern Bolivia Friday Source: AFP, via Getty Images Now, it’s angry citizens of The Media Luna – four provinces, led by Santa Cruz, fighting to the last man against the brutal expansionary communism of Evo Morales’ Bolivia. This is going well beyond peaceful demonstrations to the first stages of insurgency and maybe war. Revolutionary war. They are fighting tyranny. They’re fighting with axes, fists, and cudgels, in an action that began with a general strike…
Things appear to be going from the frying pan to the fire in Russia. As if the recent news of Russia????????s internal human rights strife was not bad enough, now horrifying anti-democratic events appear to be unfolding in the former Soviet slave state of Georgia. The Moscow News reports that Georgian police uncovered an attempt to destabilize and unseat the government of elected President Mikhail Saakashvili. It reports: Nearly 30 people were arrested in Georgia on suspicion of plotting a coup against the government, officials said. They say those detained are supporters of Igor Giorgadze ???????? the fugitive former head…