Blogging the democratic revolution
This article will discuss the recently concluded Cairo conference of “national reconciliation” mostly as it was seen through the Arab media. The result is perhaps best summed up by Al-Hayat‘s headline on Nov. 22: “Cairo Conference: A Pass on American Withdrawal and Agreement on the ‘Legitimacy of Resistance’ and Rejection of ‘Terrorism’.” According to the…
– 15,000 people protesting incredible election results in Azerbaijan tried to set up a permanent demonstration, but we quickly beaten down. – Police in Egypt are arresting hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members and preventing people who would vote for them from entering polling stations. Knife and gun fights are ensuing.
The big but unsurprising news out of China is that — golly gee! — the government tried to cover up the huge chemical spill in the Songhua River that has closed down water supplies for nearly four million people in the city of Harbin. The International Herald Tribune reports on the timeline of events and…
This Sunday, Nov. 27, Honduras holds its presidential election. This is an important election because it’s seen by some analysts as the bellwether of how the all-important next 13 months of elections go in Latin America. Will Latam swing further left or move right with these elections? Honduras is expected to give some sort of…
Costa Rica is the one nation that has yet to ratify the CAFTA free trade pact with its Central American neighbors and the U.S. Six other nations have, including Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and – after a bruising domestic battle – the U.S. But Costa Rica has not. The fact that Costa…
Hugo Chavez is meddling in more than just Bolivia. He’s got a northern front and that’s the U.S. Using the good offices of willing dupes like Congressman Bill Delahunt and Congressman Jose Serrano, he’s delivering cheap oil through their offices in return for their support in U.S. Congress. Next time Hugo Chavez invades a small…
Christian Science Monitor has some hagiography on Hugo Chavez’s own house organ, Telesur, insisting that it’s — no, really — full of professional journalists. It cites as proof the Telesur chief, the creepy, rat-like former Chavez shill and spokesman, Andres Izarra, a man who was suddenly forced to leave CNN a few years ago, and…
It looks like the courts in Chile may finally be getting their man once and for all. General Pinochet, who overthrew the Soviet-funded communist government and served as president until he stepped down in 1990, has been charged by the court for abused of human rights during his rule in which more than 3000 people…
The rift between Poland and Belarus continues, with the leading Polish newspapers blacking out their front pages to protest censorship in its less democratic neighbor. Could you imagine the papers here in the U.S. taking such a stand? WARSAW, Poland – Poland’s two leading newspapers blacked out large sections of their front pages Wednesday in…
Pajamas Media hosted another one of its blogjams, where in this case the editorial board members discussed ways that the company could be more “bloggy” and overall revolutionary in its approach to media. Well, after reading the whole thing, I have one big suggestion that I think the editorial board should take into account when…
Garry Kasparov, writing for Newsweek International, calls President Putin out on the misnomer that he is a true ally of the West in the war on terror, and even less so committed to building a democratic society. And he really nails it. The embattled George W. Bush isn’t going to pick a fight with Mr….
The State Duma, in all of its scary Soviet decor, has completed its first reading of a bill that seeks to essentially halt the abilities of NGOs operating in Russia. It will forbid foreign funding, force them to register with the government, and allow the authorities to monitor every last activity that these organizations undertake….
Eduardo Avila of Barrio Flores has this week’s Bolivian blog roundup, in what I suppose I could call ‘The Special Sandalista Edition’ as it is chiefly focused on the writings of foreigners writing about Bolivia, and some of them, who shall be nameless, are knee-deep in Sandalista do-goodery that is utterly unsalable in their home…
Miguel Buitrago has uncovered new polling numbers in Bolivia as the elections close in there in less than a month. He’s got terrific insights and observations about the narrowing lead of Evo Morales in the election, along with some anomalies we might not have expected, like the fact that Morales is doing well in Santa…
During the old days of the Soviet regime, one of the most salient features seen of the public under communism was the telltale sadness in the faces of the people. I remember asking a Soviet diplomat about this during the days of the Cold War and recall his defensive lying – ‘The people are contented,’…
Markets exist to distribute resources most efficiently. Rejection of them inevitably leads to huge, Soviet-style inefficiencies, all the way up to the violation of human nature itself. But in the end, markets, which chase out the inefficient in favor of the efficient, always triumph. Francisco Toro has a fascinating little essay about the economic principle…
Miguel Octavio presents new evidence that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez continues to persecute his political opponents through the use of a blacklist called the ‘Tascon List.’ This blacklist was derived from the public signatures of all the Venezuelans who signed the recall referendum petition against Hugo Chavez, something they legally had a right to do….
Olavo de Carvalho is a brilliant Brazilian intellectual who keeps closely focused on the origins of the far left movements that exist in Latin America and why they are so insidious. Aleksander Boyd at VCrisis spent some time with him, and a terrific, deeply thoughtful exchange of ideas between the two revolutionaries followed. Carvalho attributes…
There is something very eerie about black markets flourishing imperviously in a place like Fidel Castro’s Cuba. It’s one of the world’s most repressed places, with only North Korea more hostile to the perfectly human activity of trade, there demonized as ‘capitalism.’ But such trade markets do flourish in Cuba, on, of all things, the…
It has been ten years since the Dayton Accords ended officially ended the war in Bosnia, which killed over 200,000 people and displaced over a million more. The agreement marked a peaceful separation of nations into a loose, autonomous confederacy of three peoples who had been forced together under Soviet totalitarianism and left to kill…
”We are not a shill for anyone in this,” claimed Steve Schwadron, chief of staff to U.S. Congressman Delahunt who’s just concluded an oil-for-loyalty deal with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, in the first-ever brazen effort to buy political influence through cheap oil to the underclass through the offices of willing U.S. Congressman. The real story…
Instapundit has found a terrific blog called Yannick Laclau from Spain showing that Nicolas Sarkozy of France is getting ‘down in the trenches’ of the blogosphere, which is to say, actually publishing comments on other peoples’ blogs. Yannick, the blogger who discovered this notes that while Dominique de Villepin writes love poetry and Napoleonic history,…
Somewhat more literally, Kenyans had an orange revolution of their own, rejecting a new consolidation of power by President Mwai Kibaki in a fair, democratic process. This represents significant progress in Kenya’s ongoing struggle over its freedom from corruption and pursuit of real democracy; the story I linked to has a good amount of detail….
This article was posted to my blog over the weekend, prior to the second round of voting. As indicated in my Middle East Week in Review post, the second round took place on Sunday amid a major crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. Early indications are that this crackdown has had the result intended by the…
It’s been one year today since the beginning of the Orange Revolution, Ukraine’s democratic movement that has solidified a prompt for change across the entire region. Genuine and copycat attempts have broken out all over, some failing and some reaching realization. This blog was started based on inspiration drawn from the Orange Revolution. With its…