Blogging the democratic revolution
Finally the answer comes to the question we’ve all been waiting for: The opposition will not protest. HARARE, Zimbabwe, April 3 — Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai on Sunday ruled out calling for mass demonstrations to protest what he said were fraudulent results from last week’s parliamentary elections. Instead, he said, his party would redouble efforts to recruit new members from beyond its urban strongholds. Tsvangirai said widespread discrepancies in announced vote totals made clear that the party of President Robert Mugabe, which controlled the nation’s electoral mechanisms, rigged the outcomes in the rural areas where they claimed most of…
I was just reading A.M. Mora y Leon’s post right below this one and a website I remember from a long time ago clicked into my head: cafepress.com. They let you create clothing and apparel using your own images. I figure if Che tees are for the old and unhip, then democracy gear must be the new thing. Therefore, I present to you PubliusPundit.com Democracy Gear. If you go to that link, you will be able to buy an assortment of men’s and women’s t-shirts and bumper stickers with the words “Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!” on them. Take a look at…
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, some of them sons and daughters of Cuban exiles, and others just interested in Cuba, are coming out and challenging the prevailing Che tee shirt logic of ignorance and stupidity. At Princeton, there was a big spontaneous demonstration against communism in Cuba. Other kids are…
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 decisions is stupid, tyranny is easy. That’s why political loyalty substitutes for objective merit as totalitarian power consolidates. The net result is Blotting Paper Bureaucrats, first described by Vladimir Voinovich in 1982. Solzenitsyn, with his physicist’s low boiling point for stupidity, also wrote of the…
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 a history of anti-American sentiment there. Until Hugo Chavez showed up. Swapping Venezuela’s longtime friendship with the U.S. for that of mendicant Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, bloggers have noticed a dramatic rise of anti-U.S. ravings from Chavez minions in Venezuela. This occurs on the same…
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 here.
I just got done reading David McDuff’s eleventh installment of Dragons and Democracy. Always a good read!
Freedom House does an annual list of the world’s most oppressive regimes. To some of us, it doesn’t come as a surprise that six of the 18 nations on the list are members of the UN Commission on Human Rights. Significantly, six of the eighteen most repressive governments–those of China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe–are members of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), representing nearly 11 percent of the 53-member body. “Repressive governments enjoying CHR membership work in concert and have successfully subverted the Commission’s mandate,” said Freedom House Executive Director Jennifer Windsor. “Rather than serving as the…
Yesterday I wrote that Mugabe will not face any consequences if the opposition rebels and he decides to crack down — something he would inevitably do if that happens. While western election observers were kept out amid certain criticism of the election, as we have seen a lot from America and the European Union despite this, those monitoring the elections were all from regional countries: Libya, Zambia, South Africa, etc. Being that South Africa is a democratic nation and a major regional power, one would assume that they would exert some pressure over Mugabe. Not so. In fact, they are…
Two articles published recently in the London-based Arabic daily al-Hayat suggest that Arab governments may be making a decisive change in their dealings toward the Palestinians. One was a March 30 article, The Amir of Qatar: ‘The Palestinians Have Proven that Reform and Peace Can Go Together’. The article, citing remarks of the Amir of Qatar Shaikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani at the “Fifth Doha Conference for Democracy and Free Trade,” wrote: ‘The search for reform and the search for peace in the region can go together without conflict or contradiction,’ remarking that ‘our Palestinian brothers have proven this by…
The hours are counting down to the final decision of the opposition in Zimbabwe, one of the “last Outposts of Tyranny” on this earth. Word on the street is that if the order is given, they will protest. Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, said the party would not pursue legal challenges for the seats it believes were stolen. Instead, he said, “the people of Zimbabwe must defend their vote,” stronger language than he used after 2000 and 2002 elections, which were characterized by massive fraud. But he denied he was calling for people to take…
One of the most admirable men of the last century is passing his last breaths before softly slipping to a more enviable place. Pope John Paul II has been to myself and countless others the spiritual revolutionary that gutted the Soviet Union in its Godless, empty soul. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for the unmatched contribution he made toward securing us a freer world than the one he was born to. Thomas Jefferson once said, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” making Pope John Paul II one of His most humble servants. With the Pope’s passing…
Even though this protest was about a week ago, and there are already plenty of photos, Belarus Today has come out with a gallery of photos from the protest that are unique to its own website. And… A babe finally!
I’ve been reading this article with the above title. It’s pretty long and informative, but I think this quote sums it up, “They haven’t ever seen a good election and wouldn’t know one if it hit them in the face.” Truer words have never been spoken!
It doesn’t get worse than this.
So far this is the fourth bomb to strike within the last three weeks, just as Syria will finish pulling out its troops by next week. BEIRUT, Lebanon — A bomb damaged a shopping center in a Christian area northeast of Beirut Friday, the fourth attack against an anti-Syrian target in two weeks. The blast lightly injured seven people, one of them an American, police said. The explosion in the resort town of Broummana, 10 miles northeast of the Lebanese capital, started a fire and shattered glass in several buildings, blew out store shutters and smashed several cars. Firefighters workers…
Well the results are in and they’ve been plenty doctored. Here’s the overview, with the opposition promising something unspecified to happen. Harare ???????? President Robert Mugabe’s ruling party has secured a majority in parliament, according to results announced Friday in an election the opposition says was marred by fraud. Thursday’s vote was seen as a test of the legitimacy of Mr. Mugabe’s increasingly autocratic regime after 25 years in power. Mr. Mugabe, one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders, is the last on the continent who has ruled his country since independence from the colonial powers. Mr. Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic…
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 this fraud is the coming question. I have this news roundup organized beginning with a backgrounder or The Stage for action; the the Timeline of events; the Foreign Response; and the observed irregularities: Intimidation, Disenfranchisement and Electoral Fraud. Here is a summary of the news…
…Only after the police tear gassed the protestors. Kampala – Ugandan police used water cannons and tear gas to break up an opposition demonstration on Thursday, engaging in running battles with marchers protesting efforts to extend the president’s tenure. Riot police dispersed the protesters, who were denouncing plans to amend the constitution so that President Yoweri Museveni can run for a third term in office. Police spokesperson Asuman Mugenyi said the demonstration had not been authorised. “They knew that we had stopped it, but they continued inciting people to come and participate in violence and in an illegal assembly,” he…
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) but it’s pretty clear he’s ignoring the biggest parts of the story in his bid to plug Hugo Chavez. Essayist Gustavo Coronel, a Venezuelan who knows the deal, gives a good factual, statistics-heavy rebuttal to this blatant propaganda effort to defend the indefensible. Read the…
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 official National Institute of Statistics — buried in a mountain of figures deep in the bowels of its Internet site, www.ine.gov.ve — contain the most damning condemnation of the Ch????vez government I have seen anywhere. The figures, on Page 5 of the Institute’s Social Report,…
I’m going to start this off by putting this article in the reverse way that it was written. International human rights organizations and such other groups as the European Union, which on Wednesday called the election “phony,” say the outcome is unlikely to reflect the will of most Zimbabweans. Mugabe controls every daily newspaper, all broadcasting, thousands of patronage jobs, the electoral commission, the courts that would judge accusations of rigging and the dwindling food reserves for a populace on the brink of starvation. Most international election observers have been kept away. And Mugabe increased the budget of his secret…
There’s been a lot of talk with regards to the Iran soccer riots, and it looks like North Korea’s loss to them has triggered riots in the homeland, a rare public display of unrest! Angry North Korean soccer fans interrupted their national team’s World Cup qualifying match against Iran on Wednesday, throwing bottles and chairs at the referee and visiting team. The unrest erupted when North Korean defender Nam Song-chol was sent off for shoving Syrian referee Mohamed Kousa during a 2-to-0 home loss match, which was seen on international satellite television. The violence spilled over outside the Kim Il-Sung…