Blogging the democratic revolution
You’d think Carlos Santana wouldn’t make a mistake about what’s hip and what’s out, but that’s just what he did at the Academy Awards last month, showing up in a big Che Guevara tee shirt. So old. So out. So out of it. And so damn despicable. Santana learned to play his instruments with Cuba’s…
…and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez behind it. I wrote an analysis for American Thinker this morning. It’s here.
I wrote an essay on the political situation in Mexico for American Thinker this morning and I have never gotten a greater reaction to anything else I have ever written. I am stunned. This morning they put it on RealClearPolitics.com. It’s time to step up coverage of Mexico. Read it here or here. Reuters has…
Timothy Garton-Ash is not a well-known name in the U.S., but when I was a student in England, during the darkest days of Poland’s martial law, he was the person whose lectures I went to, and the one whose answers to my questions provided the most illumination. He hasn’t changed any after all these years…
Revolution is hitting Europe hard. A German CEO, writing in Die Welt, publicly condemned the continent for its long record of cowardice against tyrants and terrorists. It’s a challenge so radical and so against prevailing wisdom that it may have the same impact as Emile Zola’s J’Accuse in forcing Europe to be what it ought…
Blogger Daniel keeps us well-apprised of the everyday aspects of Venezuela’s descent into communism. Today, the grocery stores are demanding ID for even the purchase of bread and water. This is the beginning of rationing. Daniel also gives us a rundown on Venezuela’s state oil company and Hugo Chavez’s mysterious unwillingness to open the books…
An amazing trend is beginning to show up, on all places, at Ivy League campuses. There, young people who were barely old enough to remember the collapse of The Wall in East Germany in 1989, have sensed a new something in the air and are making it their own statement. Attractive young Ivy League students,…
No, it’s not a democracy. No, Hugo Chavez was not fairly elected. Yes, there are arbitrary arrests. Yes, there are political prisoners. Alek Boyd has an ever-lengthening list here.
Jorge Arena has an extraordinary personal account of what Venezuela was in the 1960s, the 1970s after the Arab oil embargo, and the conditions that led up to the rise of Hugo Chavez. It’s readable and lucid and a must read – a truly excellent essay. Read the whole thing here.
There’s no clearer sign a regime is going communist than in the telltale spread of mediocrity. Communists are the great levelers, the equalizers, the exponents of the lowest common denominator as an end in itself. This is why communism in theory is so attractive to tyrants, regardless of their beliefs. If everyone who can make…
Venezuela and the U.S. won their wars for independence against their respective colonial masters at about the same time. Six years ago, Venezuela, very quietly, was our number one overseas oil supplier. You never heard about any of this because – guess what – the U.S. and Venezuela have always been amigos. There’s never been…
I grew up despising Jerzy Urban, the Polish communist party spokesman, whose lies dropped out of his mouth like an loaded dumptruck . It turns out the fat creep isn’t done yet. Today, he weighed with a new pile of hate for the Pope on his passing, still spewing garbage after all these years. Read…
It doesn’t get worse than this.
The broad picture from many news sources is that Zimbabwe’s voters braved long lines and an unbelievably creative menu of efforts to disenfranchise them – from chicanery to fraud to bribes to murder – and held the line. Returns are showing Mugabe claiming victory, as forecast, and the opposition crying fraud. How they deal with…
The Nation magazine has a sugar-coated vision of Hugo Chavez’s Veneuzela, described in an article purportedly written as a “news” story by Christian Parenti, someone who used to spend his time at Young Communist League meetings in San Francisco. Parenti’s trying to make his story appear a respectable reporting job (as Cuban propagandists coincidentally advise)…
Common canard holds that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, whatever his faults, at least is ending poverty through his soup-kitchen programs. Andres Oppenheimer blows the lid off that steaming pot, though, by taking a good look at the Venezuelan government’s own statistics. What he sees appalls him. He writes: Indeed, the latest poverty figures from Venezuela’s…
Back at Columbia, my roomate was a Cuban-American lawyer. She insisted that if you are a lawyer, it is an absolute that you can write. All lawyers know how to write, she added. If law school can teach you one thing, it is the capacity to write well. But now an apologist for Venezuelan dictator…
It’s a little known but important topic – the systematic war on science that is fuelling the coming Venezuelan revolution. It might come as a surprise to many but Venezuela produces some of the finest scientists in the world and they have low tolerance for the political hackery of Chavistadom. They stand up for their…
Alek Boyd is doing an extraordinary job exposing the Venezuelan communist networks that are infiltrating the U.S. through Venezuela’s oil cash. He’s uncovered another $180,000 that’s been spread around like butter today. I am in awe of his extraordinary work, miles ahead of the news and performing a valuable service to any American interested in…
How do democracy struggles, broadly interpreted, and environmental struggles, also in the greater scheme of things, specifically apply to Venezuela? Find out in Gustavo Coronel’s excellent, thoughtful, elegantly written essay here.
Class resentment is a toxic force in Venezuela and Blogger Daniel in Yaracuy has written an excellent descriptive essay of the phenomenon that gives the chavista movement its steam. It’s bitter stuff and keeps many people actively chavista for a long time. It pains me to say it but he incorrectly compares this bitter chavista…
Every revolution is the same quest for the freedom and democracy engraved on every human heart. But each one is unique, too, with different resistance tactics tailored to existing conditions with local ingenuity. In Zimbabwe, people are up against an unusually vile tyrant, one who uses food as a weapon, Robert Mugabe. Since this thug…
Venezuelans are barraged daily with exhortations about the wonderful state of Cuba’s progress. One blogger, Daniel in Yaracuy, notes the Tortugas refugees, and thinks there must be another story. What a sad thing to have to contemplate that from Venezuela, which is rapidly heading down that Cuban path.
How’d I miss this? Here is a terrific Bolivian blog from a Santa Cruz perspective called Blog de Bolivia by Alvaro Piaggio, written with a fierce eye on Bolivia’s democracy struggle, in the context of other democracy struggles around the world today. Santa Cruz, Bolivia is the market-oriented, free-trading, libertarian half of the country, brimming…
Babalu blog has a tremendous scoop on a unreported story of great interest to anyone who’s keeping an eye on Cuba. Fourteen Cuban refugees reached Dry Tortuga in a rickety boat and with it won their right to stay in the U.S. The arduous journey and the determination of the Cubans is chronicled – with…