Yesterday, Estonia held its national parliamentary election. Prime Minister Andrus Ansip’s Reform Party increased its position from 19 to 31 seats in the 101-seat parliament, while their coalition partner in the previous government, the Centre Party, gained one seat to move to 29. The Union of Pro Patria and Res Publica holds 19 seats, the Social Democrats hold 10, and the Greens and the People’s Union of Estonia each hold 6 (the agrarianist People’s Union was the third coalition party in the previous government).

This is a remarkable gain for the liberty-oriented Reform Party, although it does not provide enough seats to form a coalition with only Pro Patria, a party more aligned with Reform than the left-leaning Centre Party is. It was Pro Patria’s Mart Laar who, before the union with Res Publica, implemented numerous market reforms largely influenced by Milton Friedman, and helped transform the former Soviet Republic into a rapidly growing Baltic Tiger. Thus, Ansip could form a coalition with Pro Patria and one other party — none is significantly libertarian — or continue the partnership with the Centre Party alone. It is unlikely that a Reform/Centre coalition would invite any other party.

The election comes at a time when Estonia is nearing entry into the Eurozone and when their relations with Russia are still simmering. Reuters notes in their story: “The tensions were sparked when parliament voted to remove a statue of a Red Army soldier from the center of the capital Tallinn because it was a reminder of 50 years of Soviet rule.”

Also of some interest, this was the first national election anywhere in the world to make use of Internet voting.

In summary, Estonia has made rapid advances since regaining independence, and with this election appears to continue in its desire to lead a path of freedom, at the forefront not just of the Baltics but throughout Europe and beyond. Their example has cleanly illustrated the links between minimal restrictions of individual liberties and an open, prosperous society.

Sokwanele has turned up with some incredible footage of undercover news shot in Zimbabwe and aired the ITV. The video features protestors running down the street as they flea tear gas being launched at them by riot police, along with interviews and a look at how Zimbabweans are forced to live nowadays. One man describes himself as already dead, a sign that there is so little hope for change in Zimbabwe under President Mugabe that the only thing people have left to do is fight.

This is a great video worth watching. What is possibly even more amazing is that it was posted on YouTube, so we all have the ability to see it freely. I would post it here, but I’d much prefer to see you check it out over at Sokwanele. They have some great news and content up these days so make sure to check out the rest of their site.

For at least two years in a row now, women have gathered by the hundreds, if not thousands, on June 12 to demand equal rights from the tyrannical Islamic government. They’re sick of being treated as second class citizens — no, animals — in their own society. Publius reported on these events, the first one in 2005 where demonstrators gathered to protest this gender apartheid. It was one of the first such large demonstrations by women, for women, since the revolution. In 2006, the event unfolded once again, with the women taking confidence from the year before that they could once again raise the issue.

Such a thing would prove to be too humiliating for the authorities, however. The women were rounded up, beaten, and taught a lesson that only strengthened their knowledge that the Iranian constitution, supposedly based on freedom and equal rights, is a load of hypocritical crap.

Unfortunately many of them are on trial for the simple act of protest. So today their fellow women came out to protest the impending convictions, only to prove once again that the Islamic regime in Tehran is relentless in repressing its own women.

March 5, 2007 (RFE/RL) — More than 30 Iranian women have been arrested in Tehran for protesting against government pressure being put on women’s rights activists.

The women had gathered outside a court in Tehran on March 4 to show their support for four women’s rights activists who went on trial that day for organizing a protest last summer against discriminatory laws. Reports say many of the protesters and the activists are now in jail.

The arrests are the culmination of a year of increasing pressure on women’s rights activists, who have been arrested, summoned to court, threatened, and harassed. Their protests have also been disrupted — in some cases violently — and their websites have been blocked.

Some observers believe the arrests are aimed at intimidating activists who were planning to hold a gathering on March 8 to mark International Women’s Day and to protest injustice against women.

The move is also seen as an attempt to silence activists who have been fighting for equal rights.

Many of those who had called for holding a protest in front of the parliament on March 8 are now in jail.

Iranian rights groups report that between 30 and 34 women who were arrested are being held in Tehran’s Evin Prison. Among them are four top women’s movement leaders: Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani, Parvin Ardalan, Sussan Tahmassebi, and Shahla Entesari.

They went on trial on March 4 in connection with a June gathering against laws that they consider discriminatory against women. Charges against them include acting against Iran’s national interests and participating in an illegal gathering.

The four leaders were arrested after they left the court and joined other women who had gathered outside Tehran’s revolutionary court. They were reportedly holding banners that said: “Holding peaceful gatherings is our absolute right.”

Activists say the Iranian Constitution ensures the right to holding a peaceful gathering. Yet police forces disrupted the activists on March 4 and drove the women away in minibuses.

Peyman Aref, a student activist in Tehran, told Radio Farda that police used force against demonstrators.

“They were threatened and they were also beaten up,” Aref said. “The crowd — ÄwhichÅ included more than 50 people — tried to resist by sitting on the ground and not reacting to the beatings. Finally, around 10:00, female police came and the activists were arrested.”

Despite the regime’s best attempts, women’s rights activists are making great headway these days. Women’s groups are pushing some major ground campaigns, including ending the practice of stoning and gathering one million signatures to end the discriminatory laws passed against them. The problem for the regime is that these days such ideas are becoming quite popular. Using force is the only way to silence them, in the regime’s eyes.

But these women don’t fight back. When they are attacked, they sit on the ground and pray for it to stop. Cowardly as it is, the government will then send in female riot police so that it looks more like one big catfight rather than a bunch of crazed maniacs with truncheons bulldozing over someone else’s wife.

It’s absolutely despicable, but nobody is fooled. These women are on the front of the lines fighting for freedom in their country. They’re the ones raising the future generation and they’re the ones taking the beating. It is no wonder that, finally, their cause is beginning to make headway.

Last week, we informed readers about aggressive efforts by and on behalf of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin to punish Internet scribes who dare to criticize the Moscow regime with brutal personal attacks. In other words, demand-side pressure on Kremlin critics. The ultimate expression of this strategy was the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, though for sheer malignant, bloodthirsty sadism nothing can match the killing of strident Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London — a killing which MSNBC reported last week has been confirmed by British authorities to have been a state-sponsored Kremlin whack job (as the Conjecturer blog reminded us recently, there are dozens of relatively unknown victims of this burgeoning holocaust, and shame on us if we let them be anonymous). No sooner had the MSNBC report gone public than, terrifyingly, one of the main sources, Paul Joyal, was shot near his home in Maryland. It’s not known yet whether the incident was a random street crime, but the timing is truly terrifying.

Now, this week, let’s look at the supply side element of the Kremlin’s strategy.

It must be acknowledged that the Kremlin is not one-dimensional, and doesn’t try to solve all its problems with the use of brute force. Just like Marlon Brando in “The Godfather” (award-winning pundit Charles Krauthammer recently said “President” Putin’s “more accurate title would be godfather”), before the Kremlin kills you it will leave the head of a dead horse in your bed, and before it does that it will offer to buy your soul. If you won’t sell, they figure, that’s your problem.

If the killing of Anna Politkovskaya was the ultimate expression of the demand-side strategy, then surely the grandest manifestation of the supply-side approach was when the Kremlin went out and bought itself a German Chancellor, namely Gerhard Schr????der (shown literally at Master Putin’s beck and call in the cartoon above). The cost was a $300,000 annual salary as head of a Russian energy consortium, and ever since then Schr????der has proved a loyal minion of the Kremlin. His response to the Litvinenko killing was this: “Unfortunately, journalists die quite often in other countries, but why doesn’t anybody try to accuse the government Äof wrongdoingÅ in those situations? In Russia , no matter what happens, it’s Putin.” Herr Schr????der apparently has not heard that, according to the Paris-based international organization Reporters without Borders, Russia isn’t just like lots of other countries where this kind of brutality is concerned. Rather, it is among the world’s very most most dangerous countries for the media, along with Iraq and Mexico. At least 20 reporters have been killed in Russia since President Vladimir Putin took office in March 2000, including three last year. The International Federation of Journalists puts the figure at 40.

And just as is the case with the supply-side strategy, there are many grass-roots level events that fly low under our radar. Let’s review a few of them.

The story begins with the Kremlin’s creation of its own satellite TV station for the projection of propaganda across the world in English, a station known as “Russia Today.” Aggressively engaged in an effort to “rebrand” Russia in the West, with the help of gun-for-hire Western PR firms, Russia Today first bought itself a nucleus of Russian journalists and then starting putting out the good word on Russia. Naturally, it doesn’t let pesky little things like facts get in the way of its reporting. For instance, as Radio Free Europe recently reported a particularly flagrant example of neo-Soviet “journalism”:

Following the killings of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former security services officer Aleksandr Litvinenko, the FSB has also been in dire need of an image makeover. And, like the Kremlin and Gazprom, it too has initiated a public-relations campaign, although its effort has a more unorthodox flavor. At the center of its campaign has been an expedition to Antarctica, the declared purpose of which was to reinforce Russia’s claim to that frozen wasteland, undermining the United States’ “monopoly” over the South Pole.

The purpose was twofold. To show that the FSB is at the frontline of Russia’s national interests and revive the Soviet-era “heroic” image of the KGB. In 2003, FSB head Nikolai Patrushev made similar efforts and erected, with a group of FSB officers, a Russian flag at the North Pole, and, in 2004, an elite FSB force led by Patrushev put a Russian flag at the peak of Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe. So on January 3, two FSB MI-8 helicopters flew from Punta Arena in Chile with Patrushev, First Deputy Director and Federal Boarder Guard Service head Vladimir Pronichev, and other assorted FSB officers on board. The expedition landed at the South Pole on January 7, where Patrushev telephoned Putin to extend his best wishes for the Russian Orthodox Christmas. Russian television channels covered the FSB expedition extensively, noting that the trip was wholly supported by private sponsors and that the Russian flag planted at the South Pole symbolizes the restoration of Russia’s superpower status.

Russian television broadcasts, however, failed to inform viewers that Patrushev was calling from the permanent U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole station, staffed by almost 100 U.S. citizens. Patrushev’s team was bivouacked there waiting for suitable flight weather. And the phone he used to call Putin? That was actually borrowed from a U.S. explorer, according to NTV.

Then Russia Today started branching out. It bought itself a Western “journalist,” one Peter Lavelle, to write a blog on its website. In the first entry on that blog, written January 12th, Lavelle wrote of Russia’s efforts to weaponize its energy resources and terrorize the former Russian slave states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia: “Russia is correct to maintain its position that all its customers pay world prices for energy. If that causes pain for the former republics of the Soviet Union, so be it.” It formed a nexus with a blog published by the nefarious Discovery Institute, whose main reason for existing is to ban the teaching of evolution in schools in favor of intelligent design and which is mired in ethical controversies, and this promptly turned into “The Real Russia Project.” And it established its own blog, Russia Profile, seeking to make insidious connections with the well-known e-mail newsletter published by David Johnson of the Center for Defense Information and the publisher of the Moscow Times newspaper, Independent Media — all of whom are affiliated with the project. Russia Profile’s advisory board includes Konstantin Kosachev, a sitting member of the Russian Duma and a Kremlin henchman, and Yuri Fokine, a Kremlin apparatchik. Shockingly, Russia Profile also lists Leon Aron of the prestigious and conservative American Enterprise Institute as a member of its advisory board, the only member of the group who might be expected to have critical views of the Kremlin. Whether Aron even knows what Russia Profile is doing under his name is anyone’s guess; if he doesn’t, somebody should tell him — if he does, somebody should let him have it.

A few weeks ago, Russia Profile had a banner advertising campaign running on various websites touting a conference it was sponsoring and at which Schr????der and Kremlin insider Igor Shuvalov were to lecture anyone who would listen about how Russia is a “reliable partner” in the energy field. In other words, RP was acting as the direct agent for Kremlin-sponsored PR campaign. So much for “journalism.” RP maintains an “Experts Panel” feature that provides a token Russophobe voice surrounded by a sea of Russophiles and Russian nationalists. In the most recent installment, entitled “Friendless in Moscow: Does Russia Need Allies?” the lead entry is from the lunatic Russophile Eric Kraus, a stockbroker who spends most of his time convincing hapless foreigners that Russia is a great place to plop down their money. It maintains a blog by one Dmitry Babich, which offers such posts as “Whose Double Standards: Far from showing Russia????????s unreliability as an energy supplier, Gazprom????????s recent threats to suspend natural gas exports to Belarus have only exposed the hypocrisy of the West” and one claiming that since Yegor Gaidar stated publicly that the Kremlin didn’t try to kill him, that made it a fact and Gaidar man “worthy of respect.” No mention of the possibility that Gaidar might have caved in to Kremlin threats.

A recent article from the International Herald Tribune points out that the Kremlin is plying the supply-side tactic in the Russian blogosphere as well. The article states: “Some bloggers close to the government admitted that in order to insure that certain news is spun a certain way, or that certain items get leaked, money does change hands. Ivan Zassoursky, a marketing director at SUP-Fabrik and a media expert, says, ‘Can you give someone money to organize a demonstration? Sure you can. So why can’t you give someone money to write something on Äthe Russian blogosphereÅ?”

Russia Today is only in its infancy, yet it already has a handful of Western bloggers in its pocket and a pocketful of cash to buy more. How many Western journalists is it seeking out furtively, with offers of money in return for positive coverage? How many secret threats is it dispatching? Are we watching closely enough to make sure we aren’t taken in by these neo-Soviet snakeoil purveyors?

Time will tell.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. –Benjamin Franklin

High-level talks have resumed between the two Koreas under the old “sunshine” policy, which can only mean that what has happened before in the past is bound to repeat itself very soon. North Korea’s supposedly impending nuclear disarmament is going to bring about all of the usual fringe benefits of duping the West through blackmail and coercion. The United States, for one, has trashed its previously assertive position with the north and is now considering early provision of fuel aid. The south, meanwhile, will eventually be resuming rice and fertilizer aid as soon as the deadline for disarmament passes.

We’ve seen this story before. It’s been on repeat for decades. The modern world cuts off the aid, North Korea begins to collapse, North Korea makes a grand threat, and the modern world caves. See the pattern? There was nothing to say before the Kim Jong-Il won’t decide to restart uranium enrichment in the future, just as there was never any precedent for it in the past. What happens when he decides there isn’t enough rice to feed his military? Fifty bucks says we’ll be repeating this scenario in a few years!

If Benjamin Franklin could see how we’re handling North Korea, he would surely describe our behavior as insane. The rational thing to do would be to find an alternative plan that doesn’t involve propping up the North Korean regime with aid. In fact, regime change by allowing it to quickly collapse on its own would be the best solution. There are tons of worries that people have, like the huge influx of refugees that China would face, but these are all minor compared to the long-term disaster that is Kim Jong-Il. Swiftly dealing with the aftereffects of collapse and stabilizing the country is much more desirable than allowing that tyrant to stay in power.

The only reason why I can imagine we aren’t doing this is because the insanity of doing so is nothing compared to that of Kim Jong-Il. If the United States is continually willing to give in, it must be because, in fact, because we are being blackmailed into allowing him to continue ruling. At least this is the valid excuse I am giving the Bush administration, because I want to believe that this opportunity was given up for a good reason. Otherwise, this is just a game of who can up the ante with the most insanity.

As the Bush administration moves towards disengagement in the Middle East from those regarded as extremist — including Syria, Iran, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias in Iraq, Hamas in Palestine, and Hezbollah in Lebanon — the result has been a vacuum of power left from the absence of traditional diplomatic channels. In the post Cold War era, this meant typically working with, and in the least, involving the United States. But in recent months as American policy becomes more rigid and inflexible, Middle Eastern diplomatic channels have rerouted outside of Washington and back into the Middle East proper. In this capacity, Saudi Arabia has emerged as the new bridge where the forces of moderation can work within the framework of Middle East reality — a reality where extremists unfortunately are popular and united — and work on successful compromises.

The Saud’s have also acted as the defacto go between for Iran and the West as issues continue to flair revolving supposed Iranian involvement in the Iraqi civil war, the pursuit of nuclear technology, and of the funding and support for Shiite proxy groups. Stated by the Washington Post:

Saudi diplomats, including former ambassador to Washington Prince Bandar bin Sultan, are also deeply engaged in talks with Iran. The contacts began with a visit to Saudi Arabia by Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s national security council. Prince Bandar subsequently visited Tehran and, according to a report in the New York Times, King Abdullah received leaders of Hezbollah. Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran back opposite sides in the escalating sectarian conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon, but the talks show that both governments are interested in tamping them down. Though there have been no breakthroughs, the diplomacy seems to have succeeded, at least, in cooling the situation in Lebanon, where a Hezbollah campaign against the Saudi-supported, pro-Western government led to several days of violence last month.

The continuation of this was seen in early February in talks initially balked at by Condoleezza Rice but brokered by the Saud’s between the almost-at-civil-war Hamas and Fatah Palestinian political groups. Instead of direct mediation by the Bush administration, the middle ground is reinvented by the parties involved:

America is holding back from serious involvement while it sees what else Saudi Arabia can do. King Abdullah and his energetic security adviser, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a former long-time Washington ambassador, may try to stick another feather in their caps at next month’s Arab League summit. They want to revive and perhaps refine the Arab League’s 2002 proposal for all Arab states to normalise relations with Israel if Israel withdraws from all the territories it occupied in 1967, both Palestinian and Syrian.

…So was the Fatah-Hamas deal in vain? And why did Condoleezza Rice, the American secretary of state, fly all the way to Jerusalem to see Mr Abbas and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, and on to Jordan to see America’s other Arab allies, to tell them something she could have fitted into an SMS text message?

While it is important that America acts against those committed to reckless ideology, it is increasingly important in the context of prolonged American involvement in Iraq and NATO involvement in Afghanistan that hostility does not boil over to conflict before it has the chance for diplomatic resolution. The ramifications of a sectarian Middle East become more visceral, the role of Saudi Arabia will grow as the leading voice as both a moderate country and the largest Sunni country.

Sources

Saudi Arabia’s Diplomacy, Washington Post.

Banking on the Saudis, Economist.

Decisions Deferred in Mideast Talks, Council on Foreign Relations.

Arab states watch Iraq with dread, BBC News.

A holy but puzzling alliance, Economist.

Originally posted on PBH.

The organized campaign to see Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer, who was jailed this month for insulting Islam and the government, is quite a thing to behold. Between FreeKareem.org, online petitions, blog posts, and articles in huge publications like the Washington Post, rarely has there been such an interest in the blogosphere as a whole on one human rights issue involving one person in a country so far away.

I think it’s great! Bringing attention to these kinds of things is exactly how to get them changed. Otherwise, the Egyptian government will continue to its war campaign against civil society and human rights in its country. If democracy and liberal ideas are ever to take root, they cannot be ripped from the ground and thrown in jail as Kareem has been.

But what about all the others?

The only political alternative to Mubarak at this point that has any credibility and influence is the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that seems willing to work within a democratic framework minus liberal ideas. Yet since they scored 20% of the seats in Egypt’s parliament during the last election, Mubarak has cracked down on them hard. Hundreds if not thousands of its members have been rounded up and tossed in jail, left to face beatings from inmates and torture from guards, all the while awaiting their fate to be handed down to them from a military tribunal.

Where is the outrage at this? Who is standing up for them?

The hard truth is that nobody is. There are probably many reasons for this, but here are a couple that I’ve thought of when compared to the campaign to free Kareem. They are listed in order of importance, without mentioning limited time and resources:

1. The American blogosphere and Kareem are more ideologically similar especially when compared to the Muslim Brotherhood, so the sympathy leans toward Kareem.
2. There is a high amount of interest in Kareem to a large degree because he is a blogger, so there is a great connection there.

It only makes sense that American liberals will rush to defend their fellow liberals who are under attack from their despotic governments. Kareem’s sentencing is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the Egyptian government. Defending him highlights these issues, bringing them to the table, with the hope that both Kareem will be freed and the Egyptian government will begin to liberalize. However, when members of the Muslim Brotherhood are jailed, never is such a stink made. Simply said, most American bloggers are not going to sympathize with Islamists, so they are either unwilling to publicize such things or just don’t care to do so to such a degree as we do with Kareem. Does a Republican read the New York Times editorial page just for fun? Of course not. Kareem’s own father wants the security forces to treat him extra harshly so that the ideas will be beaten out of him. This is not a guy that’s easy to sympathize with.

Unfortunately, the word “universal” is attached to the phrase “human rights,” and regardless of political orientation, Kareem as well as the Muslim Brotherhood alike should be defended on equal grounds based on equal rights. Otherwise, we only serve to affirm those who believe the United States to be hypocritical in its application of pressure regarding human rights. We have to do it, even if we know they might not do the same for us in the future.

Being a blogger also gives us a reason to fight for Kareem. There are currently many issues revolving around blogging in the United States, and with its inherently cheap freedom of expression under attack in many countries, we want to make sure that everyone has the ability to blog. That Kareem is being prosecuted for what he has written on his blog is particularly heinous and a terrible precedent for what is to come. Yet it is not the only precedent. As Marc Lynch points out, there are plenty of bloggers out there who are members of the Muslim Brotherhood. You can bet that they are being monitored and prosecuted as well for sharing their ideas. What if one of them is put in jail for criticizing the government, as Kareem did, but instead also took on Christianity or Judaism?…

Kudos to FreeKareem.org for the great work they’ve done trying to get him free. It’s not their fault people don’t care about the whole picture. But who is there to defend the rest? That’s why I highly doubt we’d see a reaction from the American blogosphere, which leads me to believe, in the end, it is less about blogger solidarity and more about highly selective application of outrage.

No, its not pornography or terrorist websites. It’s Publius! Check out this new website, GreatFireWallOfChina.org, and type in any website to see if it’s blocked in China.

What can I say? It’s an honor that the Chinese government thinks we’re influential enough that we deserve to be blocked. Cheers!

It’s one thing to use multiple IDs as a mere blogger, and quite another to use such devices in real life explicitly to scam a pedastalled world organization to line one’s silky pockets. But that’s what a top United Nations official has been caught doing, just like some seedy barrio gangster, using multiple id’s in a bid to extend his retirement date and collect fatter pensions from the UN money stream.

The creep’s name is Kadir and he works at the World International Property Office in Switzerland. Being from Sudan, his contribution to invention resides not in industrial innovation but in the multiple birthdays he’s using around the UN to fool its gullible bureaucratic pigeons and thus get rich.

It’s complicated stuff, but that’s the essence of being a white-collar crook, to scam in complicated ways so as to encourage anti-corruption watchdogs to lose interest and thus get away with a cash killing.

Well, journalist Claudia Rosett was onto this thug’s scam, so wasn’t this his unlucky day? She’s exposed at least three of his phony ID’s and birthdates and now the ground is only going to get hotter under him. If he had expected this to happen, one wonders if he would have done it, because so much of what he’s done extends decades and has gone undetected for ages. Color his world upside down now that Claudia’s expose is out.

Check out what she’s got on this pathetic fraudster at this post here.

Source: Anibal Barreto, Correo de Caroni, via Feathers

In the slums of Caracas, Chavista grocery patrons are now being branded on their bellies (food goes into your belly, right?) with indelible ink by store personnel to ensure that they do not buy more chicken than the government arbitrarily allows.

Since at least the beginning of the year, Venezuela’s groceries have been wracked by food shortages due to Chavista price controls and controls on foreign currency. Beef, sugar, pork and coffee have disappeared from store shelves. Meanwhile, at state-controlled Chavista stores, known as Mercal, poor people have been buying up Chavez’s below-market rate foods and selling them at street stalls at their real value according to market demand, something that brings them a profit. Not surprisingly, many Mercal store shelves are empty.

That’s where this belly-branding scheme comes in. Some Chavistas functionaries are angry at the market forces that drives these shortages and have decided to take control. That’s why they’ve decided to force poor people, like cattle, to submit to a sort of ink branding on their bellies, to control just how much chicken they purchase. It probably goes for other products, too.

What it really amounts to is the first steps toward rationing of food, the logical consequences of turning Venezuela’s once-abundant agricultural production (the Venzuelan Agriculture Department is now under the control of Cuban party hacks) into the same disaster Zimbabwe is.

But although this dynamic resembles the exact same failed socialist policies of old, there’s something new and unique about it, this branding policy is spectacularly degrading. Stalin never came up with this. Castro never did either. But the thuggish government of Hugo Chavez has. It’s like marking people as cattle. I’ve never seen anything so disgusting. Chavez is treating the poor he champions …. literally …. like animals.

If you can read Spanish, the original item and photo can be read through the link here or here.

And check out Citizen Feather’s blog’s excellent take on this new repulsive low in Chavista food economics here.

In September of last year, a the Russian human rights organization “Gulag” published a lengthy treatise on efforts of Vladmir Putin’s secret police to seize control of the Internet by using a cadre of “brigadniki” thugs to harrass anyone who dared to express opinions critical of the Kremlin. The lead of the piece, Anna Polyanskaya, was formerly on the staff of Russian Duma deputy Galina Starovoitova, who was murdered in November 1998 for speaking out against the rise of dictatorship in Russia. She belongs in the line of heroic Russian women that includes Anna Politkovskaya and has been previously described on Publius Pundit. The following are some of the text’s most fascinating passages (read the entire text here). It’s worth mentioning that a contributer to the forum of the Russian daily newspaper Yezhedevny Zhurnal recently posted a list of screen names used by some of the “brigadniki” described in the article as servants of the Kremlin who attack Internet critics; one of those screen names is “ENOT” (in Russian “EHOT”) a name that pops up from time to time to attack the posts about Russia on this blog. It’s also worth mentioning that the article confirms that Public Enemy #1 for the “brigadniki” was from the start Politkovskaya, clearly giving the lie Vladimir Putin’s statement that she was viewed by Russians as an insigificance so that the Kremlin would not have bothered to liquidate her.

(more…)

In a ruling more than a decade in the making, whose length is so long that most people will only ever read the summary, the International Court of Justice in the Hague has decided that Serbia can not be held directly responsible for ethnic cleansing and genocide that occurred during the war in Bosnia, but should have used its influence to prevent it. The focus on the ruling also mainly focused on Srebrenica as the major case in which it happened.

February 26, 2007 — The United Nations’ highest court ruled today that Serbia was not directly responsible for genocide or conspiring to commit genocide during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) said Serbia should have made efforts to halt massacres in Bosnia, and said the killing of nearly 8,000 Muslims by Bosnian Serbs in Srebrenica amounted to genocide — the first time the ICJ has called an event genocide.

However, The Hague-based court said that Bosnian Serb forces operated with a degree of independence from Belgrade, and that the Srebrenica killings “cannot be attributable” to Serbia.

Bosnia had accused Yugoslavia of genocide and demanded financial compensation, but the court said Belgrade would not have to pay reparations.

Earlier, Judge Roslyn Higgins said Montenegro is no longer part of the case because Serbia alone had assumed the “legal identity” of the former Yugoslavia.

The ruling comes with Serbia still facing challenges linked to the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.
Closer ties with the European Union have been frozen over Belgrade’s failure to hand over war crimes suspects for trial.

Serbia also faces final talks with the United Nations on the future of Kosovo, with the province heading toward near-statehood despite Serbian opposition.

The ruling is sure to inspire a variety of emotions on both sides. I can see the Bosnian Muslims, whose friends and families were raped and murdered, breathing sighs of pain and grief. On the other hand, there is the everyday Serbian who is breathing a sigh of relief — not just because of national pride, but because this case had focused on the collective guilt of the entire state and not just the Radko Mladiks and Slobodan Milosevics. It was the first time in the history of the world that an entire country had been put on trial by an international court. Whatever the result, it would be unprecedented.

It was not just the Bosnian Muslims that were largely disappointed with the ruling, but most of the Western World as well. The conventional wisdom is that the Balkan wars and the genocide and displacement that occurred were a terrible series of events. Indeed they were. But with Serbia taking the mantle of the former Yugoslavia, the continuance of this creed is that justice must be served for what happened. Unfortunately, this justice is taking shape in the wrong way. Rather than punishing those actually involved in committing genocide, the case had attempted to establish a collective guilt for the entire nation of Serbia.

Unprecedented though any ruling would be, that potential end would have been ridiculous. The collective wisdom at that point, and the desired outcome derived from that wisdom, is therefore completely wrong. The issue is therefore worth re-examining. To start, here is a post by contributor Russel Mitchell who, nearly a year ago, challenged these assumptions and paved a new way for these events to be looked at.

Bosnia has brought up Serbia on war crimes. Yes, the entire nation. This has never been done before, and there????????s a good reason for that: the Allies didn????????t hang the entire population of Germany for war crimes after World War II, the entire Serbian nation didn????????t somehow wake up one morning and think ???????let????????s go murder all the Bosnian Muslims.???????

Now, for those of you who are rightly beginning to protest, don????????t get me wrong. I know folks who were in Sarajevo. I can remember to this day handling the piece of shrapnel that the Bosnian I was introduced to kept to commemorate the piece of metal, one half of which cut his hair and sat in his pocket, the other half of which tore his best friend????????s head off. At no point do I wish to even pretend that what Milosevic engineered does not fully justify putting him and his at the end of a short rope, just as was done to the men who ran the Nazi concentration camps. But just as it would be ridiculous to hold every Croat guilty for the expulsion of Serbs from the Krajina, mass judgment in this case is an abrogation of, rather than a support for, final justice.

The trial is giving rise to self-righteous screeds like this, which sacrifice history on an altar of sanctimony. History is more complicated than an editorial-page sound-bite, and the Serbs also suffered terribly at the hands of Milosevic as he rallied the Chetniks???????? long memories of earlier horror as a distraction from what he was doing to the populace at large. The Bosnian government????????s attempt to create collective guilt papers over certain inconvenient facts, like Milosevic????????s little habit of putting Chetnik units directly behind the lines in order to keep Serbian line units from simply deserting en masse out of a war with which they wanted nothing to do in the first place.

I don????????t know where Ratko Mladic???????? is. Neither does the average Serb, and the Serbian government appears to take its responsibility regarding the fugitive seriously. That some Chetniks are in denial over the whole process, or even actively aiding and abetting this monster even today, does not justify making a mockery of history by putting forth collective judgment. Collectivism makes a mockery of justice. If everybody owns the land, nobody owns it. The same thing applies to atrocities. The individuals who took part in the mass killings and rape rooms need to be brought to full, merciless justice. Otherwise, individual accountability suffers, and it becomes easy enough to once again subordinate one????????s guilty conscience under the murderous goals of an evil regime.

The 20th Century should have unequivocally taught us this lesson.

If history cannot be surmised in an editorial page, then it certainly can’t be captured in a headline. A quick browse of Google News shows that most stories are titles “Serbia clear of genocide, or ” “Serbia failed to prevent genocide.” The details are lost in the overarching simplicity of the headlines, the articles, and the desire to try an entire nation.

History is much more complicated than that, and most people are more decent than they are made to be. Most working Serbs did not support the genocide. Even most Serbian soldiers did not agree with it, having been forced into such acts on the pain of death or themselves and their families. It also cannot be forgotten that in 2000 the Serbian people rose up against Slobodan Milosevic. and he died rotting in prison afterward. The fact is that it is impossible to try an entire nation or genocide when most of its people are not guilty of it, even indirectly, and even helped overthrow their dictator when they could.

While I can certainly understand why Bosnian Muslims are upset at the ruling, this feeling is based on a gross oversimplification of the case. Everyday Serbians are no more guilty for the genocide than the Americans or Germans or whoever are for not stepping in to prevent it on time.

Two days ago, I reported on my blog the news of the decision of current Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi to resign. Here’s the text I had written:

The Left lost at the Senate over a vote on the Italian Afghanistan mission. Now it????????s up to the President of the Republic to accept the resignation (he????????ll most probably do so) and decide whether to schedule new elections (I don????????t think he????????ll do so, as he is from a party of the current gov????????t). If elections are scheduled, they might be held in a few months. And, according to all polls, the Right would win easily. I don????????t believe the right will change things (governments in Italy are known for breaking promises), but at least Italy would be again part of the Coalition of the Willing in the War on Terror and a faithful ally of the US and Israel, instead of Hezbollah and Hamas. This, even though many Italians have strong prejudices against America and Israel and tend to be sympathetic to the Palestinians. I will keep you up-to-date.

The President of the Republic has yet to decide whether to accept Prodi’s resignation or ask him to form a new government. Today, the parties members of the ruling coalition have somehow “agreed” to a five-point deal which would allow the Left to continue staying in power. The opposition, of course, is demanding new elections to be held this coming spring.

All analysts agree that this government is unstable by nature. On the one side we have a more moderate part of the governing coalition that is on the center-left. On the other, there is the radical Left: two communist parties (one Stalinist and the other Trotskyst, but both pro-Castro/Chavez) and a Green Party. These three are joined in pressuring the coalition to strenghten even more the centralized Italian economy, keeping the old and disastrous pension system intact and, worse still, to withraw the Italian troops from Afghanistan and end the participation to the War on Terror. Prodi and the Center-Left insist Italy will stay in Afghanistan, even though “more as a civilian force than a military one” and only because “the mission has been approved by the U.N.”.

Having said that, the differences between the moderate and extreme Left are enough to make the government collapse anytime. Even if Prodi agrees to a second-term, many doubt he will be able to keep the government intact until 2011.

It’s a shared feeling that new elections might be held within a year. Currently, all polls say that, if elections were held today, the Left would loose big time.

Overall, I don’t trust the Italian political system. But I think that, for stability’s stake and for cleansing Italy’s image in the international arena, it’s better for the current government to step aside.

I will keep you up-to-date.

UPDATE: As predicted, the President of the Republic (member of one of the ruling coalition’s parties) has asked Prodi to form a new government. And Prodi accepted. So, he remains as Prime Minister. But, there is a but: now he faces a confidence vote in both the Senate and the Lower House. He has a thin majority in the latter, meaning that most likely he would get the confidence vote. The Senate, on the contrary, is decisive. Senate will determine whether he can continue to govern.

Whatever, I very much doubt his government will last until the end of the term, scheduled for 2011. Stay tuned for updates if there will be.

Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club posts about a subject close to home — about a document called the Melo Report released yesterday in the Philippines. It’s the result of a fact-finding investigation conducted by former Supreme Court Justice Jose Melo into extrajudicial killings committed by both the military and communist rebels. The result is interesting, but my historical standards, not too surprising. By and large, the communists have killed far more people than their right-wing adversaries.

There is evidence that the military “allowed, tolerated and even encouraged” political assassinations, and that retired Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan was among those who justified the killings, according to the report of a special commission.

The report ???????? made public only yesterday ???????? of the fact-finding commission headed by former Supreme Court Justice Jose Melo, also stated that those killed by the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People????????s Army (CPP-NPA) far outnumber the victims of summary executions carried out by “a small military group.”

It urged President Arroyo to take the lead to stop the killings.

“The Armed Forces is not a state within a state,” it said. “If extrajudicial executions are to be stopped … it must start with the President.”

The Melo Commission said it is not “ignorant or unmindful of the crimes committed” by the communist rebels or the benefits of having “a decent military to defend our freedom and way of life.”

But it also urged the military not to stoop to the level of communist rebels “with their lawless, treacherous methodologies” but to respect the rule of law in running after enemies of the state.

“To be sure, those slain by rebels and insurgents far outnumber the killings attributed by the leftist (groups) to the government. Many of our sons, husbands, and fathers have been slain or injured in encounters with the NPA, or have been assassinated by dreaded hitmen and mowed down in other acts of terrorism of the CPP-NPA,” the 86-page report said.

The conclusion of the report is not at all surprising. Historically, communist governments have resulted in more deaths than have military governments. Their left-wing insurgent counterparts, even without absolute power, are more willing to kill their own people.

The respected political scientist of democracy and democide, Rudy Rummel, has documented these trends extensively. According to his research, the number of deaths attributed to the killing of internal persons by their own governments far outweighs those caused by the great wars of the 20th century. While acknowledging the other great human losses of this time, communism by and far outweighs the rest, reaching a total death toll of over 100,000,000 people. In the following excerpt, he explains how this came to be:

How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of an absolutist ideology with the absolute power. Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government–the Communist Party–was thus above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were as though lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world.

Constructing this utopia was seen as though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And thus this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths. The irony of this is that communism in practice, even after decades of total control, did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made their living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the greatest famines have occurred within the Soviet Union (about 5,000,000 dead during 1921-23 and 7,000,000 from 1932-3) and communist China (about 27,000,000 dead from 1959-61). In total almost 55,000,000 people died in various communist famines and associated diseases, a little over 10,000,000 of them from democidal famine. This is as though the total population of Turkey, Iran, or Thailand had been completely wiped out. And that something like 35,000,000 people fled communist countries as refugees, as though the countries of Argentina or Columbia had been totally emptied of all their people, was an unparalleled vote against the utopian pretensions of Marxism-Leninism.

But communists could not be wrong. After all, their knowledge was scientific, based on historical materialism, an understanding of the dialectical process in nature and human society, and a materialist (and thus realistic) view of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has been and why, and he and his interpreters proved that it was destined for a communist end. No one could prevent this, but only stand in the way and delay it at the cost of more human misery. Those who disagreed with this world view and even with some of the proper interpretations of Marx and Lenin were, without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that. . . . In other words, communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusade against nonbelievers.

What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state’s instrument of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and, of course, the family. The result is what we see in Table 1.

But communism does not stand alone in such mass murder. We do have the example of Nazi Germany, which may have itself murdered some 20,000,000 Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Yugoslaves, Frenchmen, and other nationalities. Then there is the Nationalist government of China under Chiang Kai-shek, which murdered near 10,000,000 Chinese from 1928 to 1949, and the Japanese militarists who murdered almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Indochinese, Koreans, Filipinos, and others during world War II. And then we have the 1,000,000 or more Bengalis and Hindus killed in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 by the Pakistan military. Nor should we forget the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and German citizens from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, particularly by the Polish government as it seized the German Eastern Territories, killing perhaps over 1,000,000 of them. Nor should we ignore the 1,000,000 plus deaths in Mexico from 1900 to 1920, many of these poor Indians and peasants being killed by forced labor on barbaric haciendas. And one could go on and on to detail various kinds of noncommunist democide.

But what connects them all is this. As a government’s power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all the corners of culture and society, and as it is less democratic, then the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. There is more than a correlation here. As totalitarian power increases, democide multiplies until it curves sharply upward when totalitarianism is near absolute. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal desires, to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. In this case power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite have it, other causes and conditions can operated to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing an elite feels is warranted.

Finally, at the extreme of totalitarian power we have the greatest extreme of democide. Communist governments have almost without exception wielded the most absolute power and their greatest killing (such as during Stalin’s reign or the height of Mao’s power) has taken place when they have been in their own history most totalitarian. As most communist governments underwent increasing liberalization and a loosening of centralized power in the 1960s through the 1980s, the pace of killing dropped off sharply.

By contrast, military governments are rarely in absolute control. One could argue that they have the monopoly on force, but they generally do not have a monopoly on action like communist governments do. Military governments rarely institutionalize themselves throughout all aspects of society like communist ones do, meaning that there must be significant precedent by society itself for the coup. Cracks in this support usually lead to its downfall. That’s why military governments kill more politically precisely rather than indiscriminately.

Unfortunately for the apologists of communist governments, there is no solid evidence to show that military governments are worse than their own breed of despotism. In fact, military governments usually favor pro-growth economic policies, so once the transition is made to democracy, there is already a free market in place that provides for the greater prosperity o the people. Communist countries, on the other hand, have to make the tumultuous transition to both a market economy as well as democracy. The result is likely relapse and greater internal conflict.

These facts are usually ignored when there is an ideological struggle involved. As Richard notes, human rights organizations should play it fair. The Filipino military should get the blame it deserves while the communist insurgents should get what it deserves as well. They should acknowledge that human rights violations and extrajudicial killings are far worse on the communist side without pardoning the military. In a perfect world, such fairness of judgment would be the right thing to do.

Yet it is unlikely. Leftist activists for decades have rebuked military governments while apologizing for the communist ideology — if not the system. Changing the rules of the game at this point would be an admission of fault that cannot be allowed. This means that despite the horrendous actions committed by military regimes, people who understand the gross horrors of communism are forced to the other side in order to defend the indefensible. Just as I did above, military governments have to be defended to a degree in order to counter the arguments of leftist apologists, forcing myself and others to be a something of a rightist apologist. The Left still speaks today of the military overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically-elected communist government in Chile, saying that he never got a chance. But what they don’t say is that inflation had eroded the working man’s savings, food was scarce, and that a majority of the people supported the overthrow. They say that this new government was evil because 3000 people were killed and many were tortured, but that forces me to apologize for Pinochet by pointing out the obvious: that perhaps 100 or 1000 times that many would have died under Allende’s tyranny.

It is this very predicament that has precipitated the continued discrediting of the international Left, but in that wake there is an empty void created by the polarization. Even in an age where the desirability of liberal democracy is paramount, in this void is the impossibility of either side being able to play it fair with the crimes of the past. What happened, happened, and whether on the left or right, those who committed crimes against humanity should be condemned roundly by anyone who cares about human rights. It is the ideological tug-o-war that excuses certain means in order to achieve certain ends. As long as the recognition of human rights is divided ideologically, the totalitarians of the world have and will continue to conquer. Their power rests on the excuses made for them.

Cradle-robbing dictator Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe cuts into a huge birthday cake. Courtesy AFP.

Mugabe turned 83 on Wednesday — one year closer to his sweet, sweet death (unless he’s a robot like Castro). It promises to be a time of celebration for a few dozen millionaires. This Saturday is the big event! It’s a party worth over $50,000 dollars, enough to pay for the drugs of a few hundred AIDS victims for a year or even tons of grain to feed his people.

Meanwhile, the rest of Zimbabwe isn’t doing so well. Inflation is up 1600% in the last year, though that may have gone up since I last checked half an hour ago. Fuel, water, food, and electricity barely exist there. Stores are no longer selling because government price controls are forcing them to do it at a loss. How does bark stew and mud pie sound to you? Not so good, but for Mugabe, there’s plenty of cake to go around. My bet is that most Zimbabweans haven’t seen that much food in a long time.

Yet Mugabe doesn’t want anyone else to have any fun. In fact, after the opposition Movement for Democratic Change held an unannounced rally that took the police completely off guard, the government decided to squash a legally sanctioned rally by firing live ammunition and rounding up hundreds of supporters. Then? No parties for the MDC this month, or the next, or the next. All political rallies or gathering have been expressly banned. Instead, business owners are being harassed to make “donations” to the party fund while civil servants are getting their wages docked.

Unfortunately, it does not appear as if the party is going to be crashed by the international community. The only ones who can do that are the people of Zimbabwe, and while some analysts are seeing greater desperation and dissent both among the people and even officials, as long as Mugabe has the security forces it may never happen. Maybe someone should push him in the pool and see if he short-circuits?…

If there’s one thing we seasoned Russia-watchers who have spent considerable time “in country” really really cannot stand (no matter whether we be Russophobe or Russophile, we can always reach perfect agreement on this), it’s when someone who hasn’t spent real time at ground zero starts pontificating his “insights” about the place, especially about what the people who live there think and feel and why they act the way they do.

For instance, the author of the blog Scraps of Moscow recently wrote the following about New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s first column based on a recent trip to Moscow in an e-mail to a fellow blogger:

What this column really says:

I went to Moscow and talked to one Russian pundit and one Russian politician. I also talked to one American expert who is crazy enough to actually live there. She told me a story about a time she went out to the provinces and talked to actual Russians. Did I mention that they’re starved for stores with Western consumer goods? Oh, yeah, and the place is a crazy quilt of a lot of phenomena I don’t really understand, so I’ll gloss over them and throw in some BS about Europe and a spoonful of corruption. But my trip wasn’t a total loss. I did grow a third hand - must be that Chernobyl thing.

With his beady eyes and twitchy mustache, Friedman resembles nothing so much as giant humanized rat (so let’s call him Ratboy for short, shall we?), and his rhetoric doesn’t discourage this view one bit. He’s so much more objectionable than the rest of the Times stable of crazed left-wing extremist ideologues due to the fact that he’s so much more dishonest; at least wackos like Paul Krugman make no pretense of doing anything other than engaging in rabid partisan propaganda and spewing blind hatred at the right. Friedman, by contrast, acts like he thinks people might believe he’s the second coming of Gandhi (or even Humbert Humphrey), dispensing some sort of Holy Bipartisan Truth from Mt. Gray Lady like an oracle of omniscient do-good-ity.

Incidentally, it’s impossible to link to Friedman’s column, because it’s locked behind a pay-per-view vault called “Times Select” along with all the other columns that appear on the op-ed page from the Times’ stable of lunatics. Why? Because, desperately strapped for cash as it sees readership and revenues plummet and layoffs soar, the Times has decided to manipulate the frenzied cult of weirdos, tiny but monied, who follow the Times pundits with ultra-religious fervor by forcing them to pay to see their heroes in print. In other words, the Gray Lady is putting it on the street for some quick cash. And there is a side benefit because, conveniently, since we can’t link to the column it’s that much harder to organize opposition to correct its disinformation.

Friedman’s second missive from Russia made his first bit of drivel seem sagacious beyond all words by comparison. Headlined “Putin Pushes Back” and appearing on Valentine’s Day, the column sought to blame America (and, if at all possible, Republicans) for the rise of dictatorship in Russia. It claims that “we helped to create a mood in Russia hospitable to a conservative cold warrior like Mr. Putin by forcing NATO on a liberal democrat like Mr. Yeltsin.” For sure, this is one of the most breathtakingly dishonest sentences ever printed in the English language. Only the the New York Times could pack so much disinformation into such a small, grammatically correct space. Three quick questions serve to show how malevolent this sentence really is.

First: What you mean “we” kimosabe? In bizarre fashion Friedman attempts to claim that America’s relations with the Yeltsin government had something to do with George H. W. Bush (whom he refers to respectfully as “Bush I”) and hence the Republicans as well as Bill Clinton and the Democrats. In fact, it was Clinton alone who was responsible for America’s policy towards Yeltsin. Clinton became president in January 1993. Yeltsin was not even elected President of the Russian Republic until June 12, 1991, and at that time Gorbachev still led the USSR. The coup against Gorbachev did not occur until August and Yeltsin did not have consolidated power until early 1992. Within months thereafter, “Bush I” had been voted out of office. If Friedman thinks “Bush I” undertook some wildly provocative action towards Russia in those few lame-duck months, he must have got hold of that unusually powerful New York Times special weed we’ve all heard so much about. Clinton left office in January 2001. Yeltsin stepped aside in favor of acting president Vladimir Putin on New Year’s Eve, 1999. The Republicans had nothing to do with Yeltsin. Mr. Friedman really ought to spend a bit more time with his ratlike nose in a book. Preferably a history book. His attempt to drag Republicans into this issue is nothing short of an outrage.

Second: What you mean “liberal democrat” kimosabe? People who actually know something about Russia can only gape slack-jawed at the notion that Yeltsin was a “liberal democrat.” Hasn’t Friedman heard about Yeltsin’s March 1993 assumption (just after Clinton took office) of “special powers” over the nation (not unlike the recent actions of dictator Hugo Chavez in Venezuela) which was immediately followed by impeachment proceedings, or his subsequent disbanding (in September) of the legislature, which was followed in short order by his military attack upon the legislature when it declined to be disbanded? Surely, he must have heard the rumors about how Yeltsin stacked the deck against his Communist rival when he was re-elected president in a landslide despite having single-digit public approval ratings (under his rule, the value of Russia’s currency plummeted and inflation skyrocketed, and then there was that nasty little matter of bombing his own parliament into submission). At the very least, he must have some awareness of the fact that the only reason a proud KGB spy currently rules Russia is that Yeltsin decreed it.

Third: What you mean “mood in Russia” kimosabe? Vladimir Putin didn’t become president because of the “mood in Russia.” He became president because Boris Yeltsin plucked him out of obscurity and summarily ordered the Russian people to vote for him and then, despite professing to hate Yeltsin, they did so in lemming-like manner, with a goodly amount of electoral corruption in Putin’s favor thrown in for good measure. “President” Putin then crushed all opposition political parties and independent media, and basically was re-elected unopposed. Is Ratboy really suggesting that “liberal democrat” Yeltsin decided to turn the reins of power over to a proud KGB spy because he felt that was the best way to protect the country from the imperialist designs of NATO? One’s mind boggles. Perhaps Ratboy is simply operating at an intellectual level too lofty for the ordinary human to comprehend. More likely, though, he’s expressing haughty contempt for Russians in the guise of respect. Basically, he’s saying that Russia is a nation of psychopaths who can’t grasp reality and who may launch themselves helter-skelter into oblivion based on one wrong word from the “true” humans in the West. Therefore, we have to treat them like they were wild dogs, and try not to get them excited. Now that’s a Russophobe! He doesn’t seem the realize the fundamentally crazy character of his suggestion: If Russia really is a nation of wild dogs, then sooner or later those wild dogs will go berzerk. There’s nothing we can do about that except gird our loins, yet he doesn’t advise us to do so.

It’s genuinely incredible that a sentence like this could even dream of seeing the light of day in the nation’s “paper of record.” Friedman should be fired for writing it, but what will actually happen, however, is that probably he’ll get promoted to Editor-in-Chief. Don’t forget that during the Cold War the Times told us that Russians were soulful democrats just waiting to escape their abusive regime and the provocation of narrow-minded Americans/Republicans, that all they needed was a chance to show their stuff. They got that chance. They elected a proud KGB spy. Here come the excuses and disinformation.

But there’s more, much more, reason to oust Friedman. Needless to say, the rest of his “analysis” is also somewhat questionable. Nowhere in the piece, for instance, do we find the slightest attempt to suggest that maybe, just maybe, the people of Russia may perhaps be subject to criticism for choosing to elect a proud KGB spy by an overwhelming margin (or, heaven forbid, that the Times may have misled us regarding their propensity to do so in the past — it’s the president’s fault, of course, not the Times!). At least Friedman will, from time to time, say a word or two about possible blameworthiness of Arabs who murder children in Israel (though, granted, primarily for propaganda purposes). But as for Russians? Not a peep.

He claims that “we need to be getting Russia’s help” but he doesn’t give one single example of Russia ever “helping” us to do anything (other than to build a military-industrial complex and lose sleep over nuclear apocalypse). In fact, he doesn’t suggest one single thing Russia even could do to help us if we agree to stop “forcing” NATO upon it. (By this latter remark, he seems to be suggesting that the United States shouldn’t form strategic military alliances against Russia unless Russia first says it’s OK. Amazing what a few days in Moscow will do, isn’t it?) Is Russia going to cut the price of gas at the pump if we agree to drop the idea of putting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO? Is it going to catch and hand over Osama bin Laden? Is it going to give back the oil and gas fields it has stolen from Western investors and let Mikhail Khodorkhovsky out of prison? Ratboy isn’t saying. Maybe by “help” me means not give active assistance to terrorists who are trying to kill us. If so, he’s suggesting we bribe them not to kill us.

By far the most bizarre claim in the article is Friedman’s repeated suggestion that Russia is mad not because NATO membership was expanded, but because we didn’t offer NATO membership to Russia itself. Mind you, not even Friedman is wacko enough to suggest that Russia would have accepted this invitation. So what in blazes is he talking about? Apparently, he feels it’s just nice to be asked, and that Russia got offended by this lack of courtesy and hence decided to rebuild the Soviet state. Isn’t that an awful tragedy?

Friedman refers to “Vladmir Ryzhkov, one of the last liberal Duma members who is ready to openly criticize the Putin government.” He says Ryzhkov agrees with him. Yet, he doesn’t mention one single direct criticism of Putin that Ryzhkov has ever made, nor does he say what difference it would make if Ryzhkov did so. Is Ryzhkov “ready” not only to “openly criticize” but to risk his neck and seek to divest Putin of power? Ratboy isn’t saying. Ryzhkov appeared on the PBS Newshour broadcast in December 2006 to talk about the Litvinenko killing. Here’s his remarks in full:

There are not any conditions for honest and free elections in Russia today. That means that next parliamentary elections and the next presidential elections will be totally manipulated. And it will be very simple: Putin will nominate his successor as a candidate, and this successor will have huge, enormous resources for to be re-elected. Any critic of regime in Russia is now in the risk. Political murder in Russia today is normal instrument of political life and political struggle. And this is the main dangerous thing. And I think that, if you take a list of victims, all of them are liberals, liberal critics of regime, so that means that violence mostly oriented against liberal flank of Russian politics. You know, people feel that no one could feel himself safety, so all of us feel that life is nothing.

Whoa there, Vladimir, take it easy! Try to be a bit diplomatic, can’t you? Ryzhkov doesn’t even try to directly blame Putin for the Litvinenko killing, doesn’t mention by name any other recent political killing, and makes no attempt to blame Putin personally for electoral corruption. The idea that this man can offer us a better Russia in exchange for us backing off the NATO throttle is, putting it mildly, insane. If Friedman is Ratboy, Ryzhkov is Mouseboy. We hear the echoes of the cowardly Grigori Yavlinksy, supposed reformer and actually wallflower.

And then to round things out Friedman just starts lying (unless of course he simply didn’t check out his “sources” enough to actually know who they are): His other named “source” in the article was one Aleksei Pushkov, whom Friedman identifies as having “a foreign policy news show on Russian TV.” Forgetting to mention that Russian TV the slave of the Kremlin, Friedman characterizes Puhskov as some sort of pro-West liberal scholar and tells us that Pushkov, too, feels we need to stop pressing the NATO issue “because you are losing Russia.” To put it mildly, Pushkov is lying (and playing Ratboy for the fool he is) when he says he is interested in helping make Russia democratic and friendly to the West — and Friedman is helping him lie. Here’s what he wrote in the Russian paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta in 1998, in an article titled “The Shadow Goes East” (referring to NATO): “Encouraged by the USA, which walks on air propelled by the feeling of power, NATO can make mistakes. In other words, it can blunder, as the USA had blundered in Vietnam, Nicaragua and Iran. And other countries will have to pay for this blunder, and pay dearly.” No wonder the Times likes him so much as a source. Radio Liberty refers to Pushkov as “Kremlin-connected TV-Tsentr political analyst.” Too bad Ratboy didn’t feel the need to tell us about that. So much for the vaunted standards of journalism at the Gray Lady.

What Ratboy can’t seem to understand is that nobody in Russia is writing columns in major newspapers asking what Russia may have done to make the USA think it was necessary to expand NATO or how Russians can help avoid a second outbreak of cold war. Instead, they’re favoring Vladimir Putin with stratospheric approval ratings as he destroys local government and the media and sells weapons to arch American foes like Iran, Venezuela and Hezbollah. So basically, what Ratboy is doing is selling our side down the river, gambling that Russia won’t take advantage but will instead have its heart melted by our bravery and humanity. That makes him dangerous to American national security, no two ways about it.

Ratboy is quite correct, though, that America bares some blame for the rise of the neo-Soviet Union in Russia. But not because we were too confrontational. We’re to blame because we were not nearly confrontational enough, just as we were to blame for the rise of Hitler and Stalin, for the same reason. Because what we see in Russia today is not the result of our provocation, it’s the result of the latent, deep-seated hatred of the West that prevails in Russia today as it always has done, a hatred that include contempt for Western institutions like democracy. What we saw after the fall of the Berlin Wall was simply weakness, not friendship or change. Russians didn’t have the strength to attack us, so they didn’t. But now they do, so it happens. They were just waiting for the opportunity. And why should we think differently? Why should we patronizingly assume they didn’t “really believe” in Soviet animosity, that they would abandon their creed just because we had defeated them? Would we have abandoned our affection for democracy if they had defeated us? Come to think of it, it’s just possible that Ratboy, for one, would have done exactly that.

Why did we fail to understand this? Could it be because Ratboy and his ilk misled us? Will we ever learn? Not as long as we keep eating Ratboy’s toxic jellybeans.

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.

I have to say that I am quite disappointed by the free world’s total focus on the Iranian nuclear issue (a pressing one, of course) while ignoring what goes on in Iran. It happens that, while all eyes are on whether the Mullahs are arming the Iraq-based terrorists (and they are, despite claims of the opposite by the Bush-haters) and their nuclear plans, ancient archeological sites dating back to the pre-Islamic invasion era are about to be flooded.

I want you to just spend a few minutes to read my article published by the American Thinker on this topic and to sign this important petition.

I’ll keep you up-to-date.

Meanwhile, below are some pictures showing Iranians protesting the announced flooding, in front of the Ministry of Energy and Iran????????s Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organization.

Speaking before an annual conference on international security in Munich recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin said this of the concept of “unilateralism” in an attempt to complain about the allegedly hegemonic position of the U.S. in the world today:

It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.

He was talking without listening to himself, the signal hallmark of the old Soviet state that soon collapsed and disappeared. As the Boston Globe wrote:

Even the most ardent European critic of Bush’s unipolar delusion could not ignore Putin’s hypocrisy. The Putin who decried the use of force in Munich is the Kremlin boss behind Russia’s brutal, war in Chechnya. His castigation of interference in the internal affairs of other states came from a leader backing secessionist movements in two provinces of Georgia and one in Moldova. His critique of unilateral bullying was delivered by the president who shut off gas supplies to Ukraine last winter and to Belarus this winter. Then there is the irony of Putin complaining about “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making.” There could hardly be a more apt description of the power system Putin has built in Russia. His inner circle of KGB veterans controls the energy and banking conglomerates, the major media, the provincial governors, the judiciary, and the Russian legislature. If there is anybody in the modern world who understands what it means to rule a unipolar system, it is Putin.

In other words, Putin is hoist with his own petard. He smugly believes he has proven how evil and hypocritical the United States is, rallying the nations of the world to join with Russia in opposing it, and in so doing he has actually proven how hopelessly bankrupt his own government really is.

This is the “emperor’s new clothes” phenomenon that has always plagued Russia. Russia’s rulers quite literally live in a tower (it’s red rather than ivory) completely cut off from reality. Simply put, there’s nobody to tell Putin how far afield he’s wandered, so he just walks around naked all the time. This is what happens when you obliterate the media and opposition political parties.

And it was only the beginning of Putin’s amazing flameout. Because not only was he condemning his own form of government, he was attacking the world’s most powerful nation for no good reason, provoking it into a cold war posture and galvanizing American allies just as the old men of the Kremlin used to do in Soviet times. In fact, the only thing missing from the Munich spectacle was a shoe being waived.

You see, not only did Putin apparently forget that he himself rules over Russia in a totally unilateral manner, he also forgot the context in which his remarks were being made. It’s a context of (a) massive military buildup and (b) horrifying incidents of political murder and (c) worldwide fear of Russian efforts to weaponize its energy resources. Putin has just announced a nearly 25% increase in Russian military spending including massive arms sales to American enemies like China, Iran, and Venezuela, and he has presided over a litany of killings of Kremlin critics ranging from Anna Politkovskaya to Alexander Litvinenko (in between are more than a dozen journalists including many names Westerners hardly even know, like Yuri Shchekochikhin). He’d kicked Western oil companies out of Russia’s major oil and gas fields, and gone so far as to arrest and jail major oil company executives (in fact, he just recently announced a whole new round of charges against Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky, essentially trying him for the same crime twice).

Instead of trying to put out the fires of Western concern over these issues, Putin arrogantly chose to pour gasoline on them, just as was done in Soviet times. Apparently, then as now, Russia’s rulers are simply unable to contain their hatred of the West, no matter how much it may be in their best interests to do so. The result? Google News now has over 1,500 international news articles reporting on Putin’s declaration of Cold War II with the United States. Estonia’s president condemned Putin’s remarks, using them as an opportunity “to urge the EU to rethink relations with ‘a country that considers democracy on its borders as a threat, or despotism inside its borders as a source of stability.’” Sweden’s Foreign Minister stated: “We should take him at his word. This was the real Russia of now, and possibly in four or five years time it could go further in this direction. We have to have a dialogue with Russia but we must be hard-nosed and realistic. We must stand up for our values.” Czech Republic’s Foreign Minister sarcastically thanked Putin, saying he had vindicated NATO’s decision to take in members from the former Soviet east over the past decade. Ron Asmus, executive director of the Transatlantic Centre think tank in Brussels, stated “This Munich conference is normally about the Americans and Europeans bitching at each other. It will be interesting to see whether Putin actually managed to bring us together.”

Worst of all, Putin’s good friend George Bush was alienated. The White House responded to Putin’s crazed, egomaniacal tirade as follows: “His accusations are wrong. We are surprised and disappointed with President Putin’s comments.” New Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had already said a few days earlier, while testifying before the House Armed Services Committee: We need the full range of military capabilities. We don’t know what’s going to develop in places like Russia and China, in North Korea, in Iran and elsewhere.” Russia filed a formal diplomatic protest over this statement. Then Gates went to Munich and heard Putin escalate his rhetoric even further. What do you think the Bush administration now sees when it looks into Putin’s eyes?

So Putin has infuriated the entire world, except the clan of crazed Russian nationalists within Russia who agree with him. But he already enjoyed 70% job approval, does he really feel he needs to bump it up to 71%? Meanwhile, Russia continues to lose as many as 1 million people from its population ever year. It’s citizens continue to commit suicide at a truly alarming rate, and they continue to work for an average hourly wage of $2.50. In other words, Putin will now have contend with exactly the same burden of an arms race and an imploding social structure that destroyed the USSR. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, since after all he’s nothing more than a proud KGB spy who obviously longs for the good old days.

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.

Sharia is the new sexy! Rather than bikinis, burkas are back in style. Fashion designer Louise Golden unveils a brilliant, untried fashion that is sure to provoke a flurry of sales and the unwanted attention of men everywhere. Let me introduce to you the 2007/2008 winter sharia collection!

All courtesy of the Associated Press.

Whether or not these outfits are really meant to be sharia ninja gear is up in the air, but Drudge says it is in his initial post. Unfortunately for the designer, if it is, she messed up pretty badly and I doubt these would sell at all. I’m pretty sure those shades of gray and that touch of orange are simply out of line!

Throughout most of the Cold War, prevailing wisdom in foreign policy suggested that international relations between governments and the study of comparative politics should remain separate. The leaders of the United States spent most of their time meeting with, negotiating with, and occasionally threatening leaders from the Soviet Union. Whether or not people were being sent off to the gulag or purposely starved made no difference. Those people had no power, whereas the Politburo did.

This went on largely until the Helsinki Accords were signed in 1975, effectively tying America’s foreign policy to the Soviets’ treatment of its own citizens. Ronald Reagan turned this into one of his favorite past times. Foreign policy became a 3-D chess game, with America playing the Soviets, and the Soviets playing their people. Therefore both international relations and comparative politics were irreversibly connected — if America advanced, so did the oppressed Soviet people, and vice versa. Likewise, if the Soviet leadership advanced, it meant America had a potentially weaker influence on how they treated their own citizens.

Such philosophies come in cycles. At once the Wilsonian rhetoric of freedom and democracy will be the choice of the day, and when executed poorly, realpolitik (where the second game of chess is ignored completely) is called upon. Inevitably there will be problems with this as well, and the pendulum will swing back in democracy’s favor.

Until recently, democracy was high on the list of America’s priorities, especially for the Middle East. Advancements in women’s rights, opposition representation, and elections have made great strides in just a few years from Lebanon to Kuwait to even Saudi Arabia. Yet with a deteriorating situation in Iraq — which is the central part of the freedom agenda — the case against democracy is weighing heavy both at home and abroad. Exporting it, for now, is an idea that is doubted.

Yet just at a time when America????????s foreign policy is turning the corner toward realpolitik once again, the Shia Islamic regime in Iran is aggressively pursuing a policy of exporting its own revolution.

Iran understands the connection (and often disconnect) between internal politics and the leadership of countries. The mainly Sunni Arab regimes of the Middle East have taken it upon themselves for decades and centuries to oppress the Shia minorities in their territories. They are deprived of basic human rights ???????? even more so than others ???????? and in general are poor and prevented from making anything of themselves. They are also a sizable population, especially concentrated densely in certain areas, making them a ripe target for Iranian infiltration ???????? just as it has in Iraq and Lebanon.

The dynamics of this Shia revolution are much like those of Hugo Chavez????????s Bolivarian Revolution. It incorporates the resentment of an oppressed majority against the ruling classes. In the latter case, it is the indigenous Andean people of South America where there has been a noted trend that the greater the oppressed population, the greater chance of and mandate for this revolution. These Bolivarian leaders ???????? like Evo Morales of Bolivia, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua ???????? all hail from countries with majority indigenous populations.

The Shia community, however, is a vast minority in the Islamic world, comprising only 15% of the total population. But they also comprise a majority in many densely populated areas. Over 60% of the population of Bahrain is Shia. Furthermore, Yemen, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar have large minorities of Shia, concentrated heavily in the respective capitals. Even Saudi Arabia has a large Shia minority that actually makes up a majority of the population in the eastern province of Al-Hasa as well as the western provinces of Jizan, Najran, Asir, Al-Bahah, and Abha. Significantly, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Oman all have sizable Persian minority populations as well. They are usually used as migrant workers; afforded zero human and political rights and ripe for radicalization.

It is tempting to assume that numbers don????????t necessarily make reality, and that this is all the delusion of a single writer. Yet that is not the case. Iran????????s imperial ambitions are real and well-known even outside of Iraq. The Middle East Newsline reported on February 8, 2007, that Shia rebels in Yemen had received large sums of money and heavy weaponry, including rocket-propelled grenade launchers and anti-tank missiles, from Iran. It reported earlier on February 6 that the Bahraini authorities had to move in on Shia protestors as unrest begins to deepen in the country, leading officials to believe that a future insurgency is possible. To prove that this is not just a recent phenomenon even, the Iran Democracy Monitor reported last October that local news stations have noted increasing government monitoring of Shia groups, citing ???????non-Al Qaeda sleeping cells??????? being provided financing and indoctrination by Iran. It is also spearheading a campaign to convert Syria????????s poor to Shia Islam.

Just like the Bolivarian Revolution, the Shia Revolution led by Iran is taking charge ???????? and fast. Iran????????s coffers flush with petrodollars and bunkers full of military hardware are finding their way across the Middle East, sowing the promise confrontation.

It is perhaps ironic that just as Iran begins its own policy of ideological exportation that the United States is ending its own. While some may see this as a de-escalation of conflict between the two, in fact it is a terrible travesty. Democracy and liberal reforms may be the only way that the Arab governments can deflect mounting domestic pressure and prevent further infiltration of Iranian influence. The Shia have real grievances ???????? and the only way to redirect this anger effectively is to establish a means by which these issues can be addressed. Democracy, not radical Islam, is the answer.

Do you recognize the gentleman in the foreground?

Unless you are an avid follower of Russian politics, you may not. He’s Sergei Mironov, a high-ranking figure in the Kremlin’s power structure. He’s the leader of the “Russia of Justice” political party (a sham entity subservient to the Kremlin) and the Chairman of the Federation Council, equivalent to being the majority leader of the U.S. Senate. If, that is, George Bush personally selected all the members.

Even if you are not an aficionado of Russian politics, you likely do recognize the gentleman in the background, with the red square around his head and torso. Maybe he’s a bit too small to really tell. Here he is closer up:

Yes, that’s right, it’s Alexander Litvinenko, with pair of nasty holes his face from being used as target practice, as reported a few days ago by a Polish newspaper called Dziennik. Then the AP picked up the story and fleshed it out. Here it is:

A private facility that trains security personnel used pictures of poisoned Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko’s face for target practice during a competition for special forces, the center’s chief said on Tuesday. In video circulating the Internet, trainees dressed in camouflage maneuver between slats in a wall, leap through an obstacle course, then tumble to a semi-sitting position with outstretched arms aiming their weapons at a black-and-white target showing Alexander Litvinenko’s face. Several black holes appear on the target near the ex-spy’s nose before the video goes black. Click here to watch video of trainees firing at the Litvinenko target.
Sergei Lysuk, Vityaz Center’s chief, said the video is from 2002 and shows military recruits. He said he was unaware the target depicted Litvinenko, who died of radiation poisoning after eating at a sushi restaurant. The former spy was an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and from his deathbed accused the leader of pulling the strings in a plot to kill him. “The fact that it was Litvinenko, we only found out later from the press,” Lysyuk said. “We did not shoot at Litvinenko; we shot at a target.”

Use of the target at the center, which held a competition for Russian special forces, became known this week after Russian media published photographs of Sergei Mironov, head of the Russian parliament’s upper house, visiting the center in early November Äsix days after Litvinenko was poisonedÅ. His visit, to present awards in a competition for Interior Ministry special forces, came about a week after Litvinenko fell ill; one photo shows the Litvinenko target in the background behind Mironov.

Lysyuk insisted his company does not normally hold such contests and was granting a favor to former Interior Ministry colleagues, whose own training ground was being repaired. Litvinenko, once an agent in the Federal Security Service, the Soviet KGB’s main successor, fled to Britain and was granted asylum after accusing his superiors of ordering him to kill Boris Berezovsky, a Russian tycoon and one-time Kremlin insider who also has been granted British citizenship.

Dmitry Peskov, a senior Kremlin spokesman, said using a person’s face as a shooting range “was ethically incorrect,” but stressed it was that company’s responsibility and insisted government troops were not involved in the exercises. “There is no talk of such shooting ranges being used by Russian special forces or by the Vityaz unit,” Peskov told AP in a telephone interview. “This ÄcompanyÅ has no relation to the elite Vityaz troops.”

Talk about killing two birds with one stone! At one stroke, we see obliterated absurd Russophile canard that Litvinenko was “nobody” to the Kremlin AND the true nature of the government officials who support “President” Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin scrambled to deny that the shooters were actual FSB agents and screeched about a russophobic foreign conspiracy, but it can’t deny that Russia’s highest-ranking legislative officer was standing there next to those targets days after Litvinenko was poisoned and didn’t say a word of protest. And it’s undisputed that the security forces use the center. Kommersant reported: “Mr. Lyusyuk also acknowledged that bodyguards and private security forces are not the only visitors to the center: real Vityaz troops (the 1st special-task regiment of the 1st independent division of the Moscow region troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs ???????? the so-called “Maroon Berets”) are also known to stop by.” It’s obvious that a figure of Mironov’s stature wasn’t there to watch the activities of mere private security guard trainees at an obscure private center.

The Kremlin is stonewalling the Litvinenko investigation, refusing to extradite those that Scotland Yard may find evidence to indict, and it certainly hasn’t issued a condemnation of Mironov’s conduct. Instead, it’s issued statements about Western conspiracies against Russia, rationalizing and defending his conduct. Welcome to the neo-Soviet Union.

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.

Fausta has an impressive piece at Pajamas Media on how and why Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was able to rise to absolute power as a dictator of Venezuela, which he announced on Jan. 9 and consolidated on Feb. 4.

If you’re new to Venezuela, or if you just want to read something summed up perfectly, make sure to have a look at Fausta’s flawlessly written piece, one of her very best and that is saying a lot. Read the whole thing here.

Ziva at Babalu blog has found a Miami Herald exclusive, buried deep, about young Cuban conscripts who just blew away their senior commissar officers in Cuba. It’s a stunning development. Read it here.

There are several interesting implications:

1. There may be more to come. People are less afraid to rebel these days and challenge communist authority.

2. A power void is being sensed. Obviously, Castro’s demise is creating less and less sense of direction, and people in leadership positions don’t know what to do, because they don’t know whether Castro will get well or not. If they make decisions on their own, and then Castro gets well, they could get into trouble if Castro doesn’t like those decisions. Therefore, they have every incentive toward inaction until they are sure the Havana Vampire is dead for good.

3. People are not afraid to fight. The Cuban conscripts used violence, something that surely would have brought consequences on themselves. People don’t do that unless they are steeped in some sort of culture that says that’s ok. What the heck are Cuban citizens talking about these days as Castro lingers between death and life. The U.S. is preparing for a boatlift as well when Castro’s death is announced because they expect a lot of people fleeing … violence. Castro’s end could result in a bloody power struggle.

4. There will be more of these, as word spreads.

5. But even if there is a civil war, it does mean there are people out there with the gumption and willingness to fight for their lives, one thing in a hopeless tyranny like Castro’s that can bring about freedom. There may be an American Revolutionary War ahead of Cuba, if the good guys win.

6. The Castroites are going to do everything they can to suppress this news to the rest of us, it’s very damaging in itself to them and their tyranny.

After years of braying about ‘food security’ - Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has accomplished the opposite of that: widespread empty shelves for basic food stocks like meat and sugar, throughout Venezuelan grocery stores, duplicating Soviet-style food shortages. The next step will be rationing.

As of now, only chicken feet can be bought, according to this AP report. The brutal dictator is repeating the failures of Castrodom in Cuba, as he completely politicizes the economic realm. Chavez is also yelling about ’speculators’ when the fact is, these food shortages are the natural result of Chavista control over the economy.

This goes down to the basis economic element that is communism’s Achilles Heel - its insistence on determining prices. Communist commissars set prices with little knowledge of what really makes an economy work. They just announce them by fiat, and force the whole market to distort to their diktat. That’s why Soviet factories cranked out the world’s shoddiest merchandise, and Chinese factories produce the world’s worst water pollution on China’s rivers. It’s why Ukrainian factories were experts at producing 10,000 pairs of left shoes, and why Latvians learned to stand in line once for a ticket to stand in line, got a ticket, stood in line to get a loaf of bread, then stood in line to pay for that bread, all of it taking a full day’s work. This is communism, in all its aspects, in action. But the root cause of it the same as it is of these new meat shortages in Caracas: the urge to set a price - against the will of the market, which prices in spontaneously what an object is really worth.

Today, the food shortages are there, affecting nearly a third of the food supply. It started with cattle ranches and sugar, but extended to chocolate, coffee and oil. Whole sectors of the Venezuelan economy are being run into the ground. As a result, Venezuelans are finding themselves with nothing. They have oil earnings to import food, but why should they be importing food when they should be maintaining their oil facilities or giving their shareholders a dividend? No, they will have to spend it on food and after they spend it on food, they will be beggars before they collapse, same as the monstrous regime of Fidel Castro.

Guess who’s going to have to clean this all up in the end?

Read Miguel’s translation of a fine VenEconomia piece here.

UPDATE: Here’s an excellent a short analysis as any I’ve seen on what the motivation is behind these food shortages is. Read it here.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came out with strong and unambiguous language for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, warning that he was trashing democracy and destroying his country. She went after him with a sledgehammer.

Naturally, the Venezuelan thug will response with those weird kissing noises or perverse and undignified gibberings about his own sex fantasies, but that doesn’t reduce the power of the condemnation emanating from Washington.

Rice warns that Chavez is a dictator, says he is wrecking Venezuela politically and economically and notes he is a menace to the entire region. You can read the whole thing here.

Well said, Condi!