>I owe you an apology for my snarky reply about relying on the
>Wikipedia when it conflicted with the US State Dept. website.
Is okay, I mentioned it was from Wikipedia precisely because I wanted it to be corrected if someone else knew better. I should have looked for a more "reliable" source myself but I don't read Spanish. Yet. And I don't like the translation engines. (G)
It's also true that while the law *is* on the books, the Chavez govt has apparently been very lenient in enforcing it. Media outlets do slam him and his administration every day but they are not prosecuted. *And* while Chavez has caught his major opposition party in violation of campaign finance laws, seems there's proof they've been accepting big money from the Bush administration, charges have been filed but the trial keeps getting postponed.
Most of my post was about how little leftist govts are between a rock and a hard place regarding free speech and civil liberties, because I agree with John Thorton: tremendous wealth and power is poised and searching for any way to get a foot in the door to destroy such a govt, and mass media is a wonderful club to be able to wield, absolutely key in molding public perception. Anyone with experience in mass communications knows (and anyone who lives in American society should, so saturated as we are with commercial/cultural propaganda that it's like the air we breathe), the truth *does not* always win the field; it's *repetition* of what you want your audience to accept as truth that does. The art of propaganda can have a huge influence by simply muddying the water, creating doubt and uncertainty. And in a commercial media environment, those who can pay have first crack at calling the tune. Given these facts of life, freedom of the press can be a very damaging thing for a revolutionary govt. Being a libertarian socialist, this statement doesnt make me happy at all, but how can you ignore it?
And another thing, while I got a kick out of his UN speech, IMO Hugo Chavez is no prince, see: embrace of Ahmadinejad. Hmm, could be that Christian religious streak Hugo's got coming out, that makes it easier for him to overlook the fundamentalist oppressiveness of the Iranian govt as personified in this reactionary guy. But, as Juan Cole observed in his interview on Democracy Now! a few days back:
>AMY GOODMAN: Professor Cole, Ahmadinejad's comments have come up again, as he comes to the United States, about denying the Holocaust.
>JUAN COLE: Yes, Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier. He has a thing about Jews and Israel and the Holocaust that comes across very clearly when he talks about it. It's a kind of paranoia or fixation. And, you know, Ahmadinejad is not a really educated man. He's got an engineering degree. He's from what we call the bazaari class. This is people who, from a shopkeeping background or hung around at mosques, and kind of self-educated, and so forth. So he's not a man of the world.
>His predecessor, President Mohammad Khatami, lived in Germany for seven years and has written, using the German sociologist Jurgen Habermas's theories of civil society. Khatami has...reprimanded Ahmadinejad for his bizarre statements about the Holocaust. So this is not, you know, an Iranian government stance or an Iranian stance. This is something that's peculiar to Ahmadinejad.
>And remember, the Iranian president is powerless, virtually. The commander-in-chief of the armed forces is Khamenei, the Supreme Juridprudent. Ahmadinejad can consult on the appointment of cabinet ministers and ambassadors, but there are very few orders that he could give of any significance in the Iranian system. He's kind of like our Secretary of the Interior or something. So what he thinks about things isn't that important.
Full interview, which I found interesting:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/25/1318238
Maria