American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture
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UPDATE
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Thank you, and my apologies for the inconvenience.
Latin America: As Pakistan’s tightening dictatorship draws global opprobrium, a curious double standard is emerging in Venezuela as democracy gasps its last and celebrities continue to file in. Where’s the decency?
That’s what was seen in the message sent by the latest visitor to Miraflores Palace, supermodel Naomi Campbell, who gushed “amazement” at the “love and encouragement” in the Venezuelan dictatorship as students battled riot police in the streets below.
It wasn’t just an aberration. When the Rev. Jesse Jackson visited Hugo Chavez in August 2005, other street battles occurred beneath the balcony as the reverend praised the dictator.
There is no decency. It’s all about Rev. Jesse’s and Naomi’s and Sean’s and Hugo’s egos.
Glenn Reynolds nails it:
WHY IS THE WORLD MORE CONCERNED with Musharraf’s coup than with Hugo Chavez’s emerging dicatatorship? Because enemies of the United States, like Chavez, get a pass.
Indeed.
If you read yesterday’s Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean you know that President Bush has awarded Cuban political prisoner Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian honor:
Oscar Elias Biscet is a champion in the fight against tyranny and oppression. Despite being persecuted and imprisoned for his beliefs, he continues to advocate for a free Cuba in which the rights of all people are respected.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady explains how Dr. Biscet came about to his path as a dissident:
He is a medical doctor. He got his degree in 1985 and just the next year he started having problems with the government and the way it operates its medical system.
But in 1998 what the did was, he started investigating the use of a drug called rivenal to achieve abortions of advanced pregnancies and he produced a study which showed that the fetuses were actually being born alive and then the umbilical cord was cut and they were allowed to bleed to death or they were being asphyxiated in paper bags, and he produced a study, he presented it to the government, and he also denounced the government for its policies.
He was fired from his job, and things have gone from bad to worse for him in the sense that his conscience just did not allow him to go back.
You can watch Ms O’Grady’s WSJ interview here.
In her article, Ms O’Grady explains,
In 1998, at a Havana hospital, he took the risk of engaging in a clandestine study on the administration of a drug called rivanol to abort advanced pregnancies. The drug was being widely used, particularly on girls as young as 12, who, having been forced to leave their parents and work in rural areas as part of their schooling, found themselves “in trouble.”
Let me call attention to the fact that children are forced to do this: they belong to the state as soon as they turn twelve years old. Many of the girls are raped by adults in charge of the farms. I know a woman who was raped under those circumstances: there was no possibility of prosecuting the man who raped her. Fortunately she did not get pregnant.
Ms O’Grady’s article continues,
The study concluded that rivanol resulted in viable fetuses being born alive. What often happened next horrified Dr. Biscet, who later wrote that, “the umbilical cord was cut and they were allowed to bleed to death or they were wrapped in paper and asphyxiated.”
As a result of his vocal opposition to these abortion practices he lost his job, his family lost their home and Castro’s goons were sent to beat him up.
These are the conditions under which Dr. Biscet is held when in solitary confinement:
I have translated the video:
In the video, Dr. Biscet’s wife, Elsa Morejon, explains (at great risk to herself) that this is a full-scale replica of the dungeon in which Dr. Biscet was imprisoned, “despite the fact that Cuba has signed international agreements and rules on prisoner treatment”.
Ms Morejon points to a piece of paper with her husband’s words on the front wall of the dungeon. Dr. Biscet spent the months of November and December, 2004, including New Year’s Eve, in a dungeon like it. She points to the narrow slot on the door, for delivery of food, and in some dungeons the slots are positioned at different heights. “There are no windows, no lights since for a while he didn’t have a light bulb, no ventilation, in Cuba, a country with very high temperatures”.
Inside the dungeon she points to a pipe for water, a hole for latrine. She shows the actual shoes he owned during that period, and how the leather rotted. She lists the meager possessions a prisoner is allowed: underwear, a towel, a sheet, toothpaste, cup, toothbrush, soap, deodorant, sometimes prisoners are allowed to have their Bible with them. No bed is provided. The prisoner sleeps on the floor, and “sometimes they are brought a filthy mattress at 10PM”.
The food they are given is unfit for human consumption.
Ms Morejon asks, “We ask the world to intercede and ask Cuba to set my husband free. He’s a man who loves God and justice, who believes in non-violence, and shouldn’t be there [in prison], because all he’s asked for is to live in democracy in his own country”.
Notice how both videos point to a total disregard for human life.
Dr. Biscet’s activism started when he saw how newborn children were murdered. Now he is suffering for his decency.
Dr Sanity has posted on the illness of the soul of the island prison’s regime:
The apologists of tyranny are again hard at work trying to redeem the one of the last outposts of communist enslavement. They see a “worker’s paradise”; a “healthcare utopia”, but underneath the civilized veneer of Castro’s Cuba is the same deadening illness of the soul that infected all the other failed communist and socialist “paradises”.
And for that illness, the only cure is Freedom.
(Follow the links at my post for more on the subject.)
Blackfive has an excellent post that you must read:
Counter-InSURGEncy, a primer on our impending victory
The Surge is not our strategy and he is correct that it is not responsible for the tremendous success in Baghdad, the surrounding belts, Al Anbar, Diyala and now even in some of the Shia tribal areas as well. Our strategy is Counter-Insurgency (COIN) and the additional troops, known as the Surge, are simply part of that effort along with every other military member and civilian over there. Read LTC Kilcullen for an elegant primer on COIN in the Small Wars Journal.
COIN is completely different than the nation-building and national institution-building that we had been doing since toppling Saddam and up until the beginning of this year. We had hunkered down on the FOBs heading out on patrols and then back inside the wire. Now we cleared areas and then stayed and lived side by side with the Iraqis, and once they saw that we were staying they “awakened” and determined that al Qaeda brought death and destruction and the Americans brought electricity and water, not to mention security.
Yesterday Michelle Malkin was noticing the news in The Australian
There have certainly been several days in the past month when no US or British soldiers were killed.
During a five-day stretch between October 19 and 23, there were no deaths among coalition forces.
Take a look at the weapons caches turned in by the Iraqis in the past year.
In The First Ten Months Of 2007, Coalition And Iraqi Security Forces Have Found And Cleared 5,364 Caches”
“That Is Twice The Volume Of Material Found And Cleared In All Of 2006.
The Democrats are tripping over themselves not to acknowledge that the COIN is working. To the contrary; Yesterday they were saying that the real reason behind the falling casualty rates in Iraq was that Muqtada al-Sadr had declared a six-month ceasefire.
Today they’re saying that If violence is decreasing in Iraq, it may be because insurgents “are running out of people to kill,”
For more on the real story on Iraq, please listen to these two podcasts where Matt Sanchez and Michael Fumento talk about Iraq.
They’ve been there.
Matt’s writing about the media’s Iraq con job. Go read it. The WaPo‘s shedding a dark light on the news.
James Tarranto talks about the death count in Iraq.
A. J. Strata has more metrics on success in Iraq.
Enlighten NJ has them, and a roundup, too!
Welcome! This week’s posts on Latin America and the Caribbean are:
On Latin America in general:
Wealth and Nations, via Dr Sanity
SOS: Truth Telling Deeply Needed for Latin America (link now corrected)
ARGENTINA:
Via Eneas of the Hispanic American Center for Economic Research, Corruption in Argentinian election – 28-October-2007
Via Siggy, Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina: Jewish community welcomes new president, who has taken a strong position against terrorism and the Dirty War.
BOLIVIA:
Learning English through avatars
CUBA
Poster relates Che’s dark side
“The Victims of Che Guevera” poster, produced by the Young America’s Foundation, centers on a collage that uses tiny photos of those killed by Cuba’s communist regime to compose the face of the Marxist guerrilla, who has become a popular T-shirt icon.
Via Larwyn, WaPo Writer Waxes Poetic for Castro Regime Control Mechanism
Son: [Oscar Elias] Biscet is “an inspiration”; The unyielding ones
ECUADOR
The Vatican Denounces Chavez-Correa anti-Freedom Constitutional Epidemic
HAITI
Again… UN Troops Involved In Another Child Sex Scandal
MEXICO
Chucha Libre
NICARAGUA
Nica news for Nov 2
VENEZUELA
Venezuela’s Constitutional Reform continues the item-by-item review
The New York Times Does PDVSA: The Perils of Petrocracy
EXPOSING THE CHAVEZ NIGHTMARE IN LATIN AMERICA
Troops Attack Venezuelan Protesters – Again
Venezuela Congress OKs ending Chavez term limits; Via Larwyn, Venezuela Circling the Drain
OTHERS LINKING THE CARNIVAL:
A colombo-americana’s perspective
Babalu
Dr. Sanity
ECrisis
Heading to Retirement
The Washington Times
At City Journal, Britain’s Anti-Semitic Turn:
But a subtler reason exists for Britain’s embrace of the new anti-Semitism. After the Second World War, the radical Left set out to destroy the fundamentals of Western morality, but its campaign played out very differently in America and Britain. In America, it resulted in the culture wars, with conservatives, many churches, and sensible liberals launching a vigorous counterattack in defense of Western moral values—and, as it happened, Israel.
Exhausted by two world wars, shattered by the loss of empire, and hollowed out by the failure of the Church of England or a substantial body of intellectuals and elites to hold the line, Britain was uniquely vulnerable to the predations of the Left. The institutions that underpinned truth and morality – the traditional family and an education system that transmitted the national culture – collapsed. Britain’s monolithic intelligentsia soon embraced postmodernism, multiculturalism, victim culture, and a morally inverted hegemony of ideas in which the values of marginalized or transgressive groups replaced the values of the purportedly racist, oppressive West.
Further, people across the political spectrum became increasingly unable to make moral distinctions based on behavior. This erasing of the line between right and wrong produced a tendency to equate, and then invert, the roles of terrorists and of their victims, and to regard self-defense as aggression and the original violence as understandable and even justified. That attitude is, of course, inherently antagonistic to Israel, which was founded on the determination never to allow another genocide of Jews, to defend itself when attacked, and to destroy those who would destroy it. But for the Left, powerlessness is virtue; better for Jews to die than to kill, because only as dead victims can they be moral.
And this general endorsement of surrender feeds straight into a subterranean but potent resentment simmering in Europe. For over 60 years, a major tendency in European thought has sought to distance itself from moral responsibility for the Holocaust. The only way to do so, however, was somehow to blame the Jews for their own destruction; and that monstrous reasoning was inconceivable while the dominant narrative was of Jews as victims.
Now, however, the Palestinians have handed Europe a rival narrative. The misrepresentation of Israeli self-defense as belligerence, suggesting that Jews are not victims but aggressors, implicitly provides Europeans with the means to blame the destruction of European Jewry on its own misdeeds. As one influential left-wing editor said to me: “The Holocaust meant that for decades the Jews were untouchable. It’s such a relief that Israel means we don’t have to worry about that any more.”
Read it all, and don’t miss Melanie Phillips.com
My latest article is up at the Star Ledger’s NJ Voices
Special thanks to DynamoBuzz for his kind words.
