Maybe now, we can jail Internet surfers:
Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, who is criticized by media freedom groups, called on Saturday for regulation of the Internet and singled out a website that he said falsely reported the murder of one of his ministers.
“The Internet cannot be something open where anything is said and done. Every country has to apply its own rules and norms,” Chavez said. He cited German Chancellor Angel Merkel as having expressed a similar sentiment recently.
But an incompetent dictator, too:
Homicides in Venezuela have quadrupled during President Hugo Chavez’s 11 years in power, with two people murdered every hour, according to new figures from a non-governmental organization.
The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence (OVV), whose data is widely followed in the absence of official statistics, said the South American nation has one of the highest crime rates on the continent, with 54 homicides per 100,000 citizens in 2009.
That rate is only surpassed in Latin America by El Salvador where 70 in every 100,000 citizens were murdered last year, the OVV said, citing official statistics from that country.
When Raúl Castro became president of Cuba in 2006, he raised hopes, at home and abroad, that he would usher in a new era of reform. His brother, El Comandante Fidel, was struck with some sort of intestinal illness and rendered incapable of governing. So in stepped Raúl with promises to undertake “structural” change in the country. He distributed parcels of idle land to farmers. He encouraged young people, many of whom feel restive about their country’s system, to “fearlessly debate” the country’s problems. He decreed that Cubans could finally buy cell phones and computers, and could stay at tourist hotels that had previously been off-limits to them. When it came to relations with the United States, he said last April, “We are prepared to discuss everything—human rights, freedom of the press, political prisoners—everything, everything, everything.”
Obviously, I have a thing for French blog titles that correspond with appalling stories concerning totalitarian oppression. I could live a thousand years, and never understand why people try to make the Castro brothers out to be nice people, or the Cuban government the salt of the Earth.
Are the people who spent eight years denouncing George W. Bush as the most monstrous of modern day dictators going to say anything about this? I suspect I know the answer, but I would really like for my suspicion to be misplaced.
Credit where it is due: When he is not busy being obsessed with the nature of Trig Palin’s matrilineal line, Andrew Sullivan can pen an interesting blog post.
But it is nice to see that others are speaking out:
As long as I live, I shall never understand why there was ever any controversy about calling Hugo Chavez a dictator:
“If the families of opponents of the Islamic regime in Iran get harassed and imprisoned, that is the fault of the opponents in question for speaking out against the regime, and not a moral failing that we can lay at the feet of the regime. Also, Iranian dissidents are traitors.”
Those who want proof that Iranians are no longer afraid of the regime that has sought to tyrannize them need only examine Iason Athanasiadis’s excellent article to find out that Iran may well have crossed a threshold: