Blogging the democratic revolution
Ollanta Humala’s presidential campaign in Peru is bedevilled by charges from peasants from remote mountain areas that he tortured them in 1980s under the nom de guerre of ‘Captain Carlos.’ What a charmer. It’s not enough that he is leftwing and pro-Hugo Chavez, a failed military coupster, and an anti-Semitic racist. He’s also tortured peasants as El Capitan Carlos. Today his own brother confirmed it. El Universal has the story here. I can’t think of any bigger kiss of death to any presidential campaign than being accused of torturing peasants. Not even a Hugo Chavez endorsement. No spin-control is going…
Charles at LGF points out a discrepancy between Google’s .cn and .com versions. At least they’re notifying the poor Chinese what they’re missing! From a Google translation of a google.cn search: According to the local law laws and regulations and the policy, partially searches the result does not demonstrate. I guess Chinese speakers who live outside communist China must prefer to use search engines that don’t work according to “local law laws and regulations and the policy.”
From the cycle: ???????This can happen only in Romania???????? (and I????????m sure in the third world countries, but in theory Romania is not a part of that lot). I have wanted to share with you the story of Ion Dumitru, father of 7 children who has been kept in jail for 866 days, by mistake. He told the police men that he is not guilty, and after being jailed he wrote dozens of letters to the authorities claiming his innocence. His bad luck was the high resemblance with his (evil) brother Gheorghe. Apparently Gheorghe has been convicted in few dossiers,…
I almost forgot that it’s been exactly one year since Human Rights Watch released it’s year 2005 report on global human rights abuses in which its highlight focus, despite everything else going on in the world, was the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Well, fire up the grill and pop open a beer, because their year 2006 report is out and there’s something very unsurprising about it. The introduction by Kenneth Roth, while paying some attention to Russia, China, and Sudan toward the end, spends a good 2/3 of the essay focusing on Guantanamo Bay prison and complicity by Western nations…
Check this out. It’s the launch of a new Middle East human rights initiative to bring together activists from the Middle East and America. They’re doing an essay contest for people under the age of 26 to share ideas about what to do. Check out the website here. It’s being done by a good group of people and I recommend doing so. Click “read more” to see the press release.
Egyptian blogger Abdal Karim Soliman was released from jail after a massive effort pressing for his release. He had been arrested simply for what he wrote on his blog, which was a denunciation of attacks by Muslims on a Coptic nun. It sparked an outrage in the Egyptian blogosphere, prompting a worldwide campaign on his behalf. Bloggers wrote posts to create the buzz, readers wrote letters to the Egyptian embassy, and it took off from there. The Egyptian government finally buckled and released him. It was the end of The Sandmonkey’s post, however, that made me start thinking about this…
There will be a large demonstration in Boston tomorrow in support of the more than 20 million slaves left in the world. It is hosted by iAbolish, an organization bringing together the modern-day abolitionist movement. This is a really good cause to get involved with. I’m posting all the relevant information below. If you want more, just click here! I know I’ll be there! ******** We invite you to attend the 2005 FREEDOM MARCH on Sunday, November 6th in Boston, MA from noon until 2:00 PM . The march offers a unique opportunity for fellow abolitionists to come together in…
Aleksander Boyd has posted a long and extensive report on the state of democracy in Venezuela from its leading democracy advocate, Sumate. The report shows in precise terms the parlous state of Venezuelan democracy and the news is not good. But it is a very important and historic report and Alek read all of it and urges the rest of it to do the same. He writes: Sumate has produced the most comprehensive report about the state of democracy in Venezuela. I highly recommend to read through and analyse the facts presented. By far the best resource for information on…
Stefania in Sardinia reminds us to think of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi who is marking her tenth year of house arrest under the thugs who run Burma. Suu Kyi is the rightful leader of Burma. She also is a brave woman who has stood up to the gross tinpot military thugs in her struggle to bring democracy to her beautiful country. She is a revolutionary democrat who ranks with Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel in the annals of revolution. But her struggle is long and hard and she is still under house arrest by these unsavory, illegitimate rulers who…
This really happened yesterday. Francisco Toro writes: Twenty guys with BIG GUNS storm into your apartment one night. They say they’re from the Prosecutor General’s Office. They’re looking for materials relating to … Tulio Alvarez’s “terrorist activities.” …. They leave, a bit embarrassed. The next day, the prosecutors’ office says it has no idea who the 20 guys were. Read the whole thing here.
I knew of the hunger strike of two Cuban ’75’ dissidents in Fidel Castro’s prisons but had very little information about Castro’s actual GULag at Guantanamo, and the conditions of which that led to the drastic hunger strike. Today, Wall Street Journal‘s Mary Anastasia O’Grady has done a great public service by publicizing this terrifying communist dungeon that stands alongside what she calls, in comparison, the ‘tropical resort’ of the U.S. Guantanamo terrorist prison that has been subject to such international reproach. On the human rights violations that are occurring at Castro’s Guantanamo, the media and international left are utterly…
It seems that some other countries are worried about American imperialist hegemony with regards to the internet. So, morally speaking, other countries should be able to have joint control over it to make sure that nothing bad happens. It sounds all so wonderful. Well, until you look at who wants it, and when you realize that they just might get it. The issue of who should control the net had proved an extremely divisive issue, and for 11 days the world’s governments traded blows. For the vast majority of people who use the internet, the only real concern is getting…
This past Sunday, 60 Minutes ran an “interview” with Elian Gonzalez, who is now 11 years old. Elian, you recall, was the 6-year old boy who was picked up at sea by two fisherman and taken ashore, where an international custody battle between Fidel Castro and the Miami exile community ensued, leaving bitter and unforgotten feelings among the freedom-loving Cubans now in the U.S. The 60-Minutes interview had a staged appearance, with CBS itself admitting it got “help” from Fidel Castro’s own camera-man, making the film communist-approved propaganda to shed the most favorable possible light on the Castro regime. The…
Source: Babalu The photographs will break your heart. Ten people from Cuba, where Hurricane Dennis hit this year, riding the worst piece of rusted junk you can see, inventively powered by a tractor motor and some strange orange sail, rode through HURRICANE RITA and its storm-tossed seas for a week in the Florida Strait determined by hope to reach life and freedom on U.S. shores. Just as they were within sight of U.S. land, a Coast Guard cutter tried to ram their boat and sink them. The poor Cuban refugees were desperately resisting the Coast Guard (see the photos here),…
They’re so darn dumb. How does anyone get that dumb? Rule Number One: You DO NOT do drugs in Asia. Rule Number Two: You DO NOT transport drugs in Asia. Rule Number Three: You DO NOT associate with anyone who does drugs in Asia. Rule Number Four: You read the signs at airports, the ones in great big red letters that say ‘Drug Dealing Will Be Punished By Death’ and drop your drugs in that convenient trash receptacle right under that sign before you go see Mister Asian Customs Man. Rule Number Five: You do not violate any of this,…
Qando.net blog has a point-by-point comparison of the land confiscations going on simultaneously in both Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Other than his hint that Hugo Chavez, unlike Robert Mugabe, is actually a reasonable man who doesn’t quite realize what he is doing, it is a very valuable list of comparisons whose facts speak for themselves. Read it here.
What does 6,000 extrajudicial killings by police sound like? Oh, but you remind yourself that Argentina’s and Chile’s dirty wars have long been over, as dictators like Pinochet are brought to justice. Well, there is one part of South America where these dirty wars have not stopped – in fact, they have started. Venezuela, one of the few countries in South America with no history of a dirty war is resurging as the dirty war capital of the Americas, a horrific title as the bodies and mass graves turn up, a title that one had hoped had long passed for…
I’m in quite a bit of a mood for Russia at the moment after finishing Kremlin Rising. The book went into detail about Putin’s life and how he has consolidated power to the Kremlin since being elected, but it both started and ended with the massacre at Beslan School No 1. The authors themselves were WaPo correspondents and in Beslan during the hostage crisis, and they go into great detail about the actions of both the Chechen terrorists and the outright corruption of the Russian security forces, of which the latter is quite extensive and relatively untold since it isn’t…
Our friend Jim GatewayPundit has a good Zimbabwe news and blogger roundup, including a link to a new film about dictator Robert Mugabe’s ‘clear out the trash’ campaign that has left hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans in the informal sector homeless and suffering. See it here.
Back in the 1980s, Nicaragua’s Sandinistas engaged in a communist campaign of mass murder against the innocent Miskito Indians on Nicaragua’s north Atlantic coast. The Miskito were peaceful people who lived in a strategic spot coveted by Cuban troops who were making inroads into Nicaragua as the region slid into civil war. Cuban troops wanted a supply route to foment unrest in Honduras and El Salvador, where the war to end communism was much hotter. The Sandinistas razed villages, burned crops and killed lifestock. Then they force-marched the Miskito on a long trek through the jungle to ‘re-education camps.’ There,…
…against humanity. The vicious Marxist dictator slave-marched thousands of Miskito Indians on a death march to ‘re-education camps’ that killed hundreds in the sweltering Atlantic jungle. He did it to force communism on them and to prevent them from joining the resistance. Now, with the glorious CAFTA passed, Nicaragua’s government has grown stronger and the human rights organizations are growing bolder. This is a great day for democracy, a mass murderer is getting called to account. This goes to show that the justice moves around the Americas are real, and do not just apply to thugs on the right. They…
I wanted to highlight this because it’s really very dramatic given how much the international eye has refocused on Serbian war crimes. The wife of one of the leaders indicted for genocide spoke out on regional television stations appealing for his surrender. I can’t even imagine how hard that must be. 29 July 2005 (RFE/RL) — The wife of war crimes indictee and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic appealed to her husband in a broadcast carried by several regional television stations yesterday to surrender to the Hague-based war crimes tribunal. Bosnian and international media said the appeal came as…
Tulio Alavarez, the respected Venezuelan attorney who conclusively proved that there was fraud in Hugo Chavez’s recall referendum, was set upon by Hugo Chavez’s thugs as payback for his democracy work. The goons stopped him as he was preparing to get on an airplane. They tried to call his car stolen. They tried to plant weapons on him. Alvarez was released but he attributed it only to the swift response of the Venezuelan bloggers, who rapidly publicized the travesty. Now, Chavista goons are pretending nothing happened. These thugs, along with their fellow thugs in Havana, have clearly begun an assault…
It’s time for another hard hitting report by Amnesty International, and this time the Iraqi “insurgents” have found themselves in their, er, verbal crosshairs. They’re still recovering from the whole “Guantanamo = Gulag” controversy, so this is the perfect time to wise up and release a real report on real human rights abuses. It’s the perfect way to both get their credibility back and do the work they were started to do. The press release starts off really well too; with a real bang, if you’ll excuse the pun. Armed groups opposed to the US-led multinational force and Iraq’s government…