The AP reports that Radio Caracas Television, Venezuela’s most popular channel, will be forced off the air at midnight tomorrow because Hugo Chavez’s government has decided not to renew its broadcasting license. Miguel Angel Rodriguez was a talk-show host on Radio Caracas TV until his final segment on Friday, where he vowed, “There is no goodbye. It’s ’see you later.’” Rodriguez had been an active critic of Chavez on the air, and no doubt ol’ Hugo saw the media as a threat to his establishment and changed the laws to suit his own political agenda. Both sides plan street protests over the shutdown during the weekend.
The problem with being either too far to the left or too far to the right is that you end up in essentially the same place – a land of silence. When in college a couple of years ago, I found myself arguing with a real, dyed-in-the-wool Communist about the importance of civil liberties. He shared many social and political ideals with me, yet I argued with him more often and more passionately than I did with pro-war conservatives. He believed ( and probably still does) that freedom of speech is overrated; the first thing he would do if he was in power would be to drag all of the right-wing crazies out into the streets and have them shot. He was only half-joking. His justification for doing so was that allowing the right win a pulpit from which to preach hatred was a threat to the security of the country, and that when you know you’re right, there’s no point in allowing others to create constant turmoil in the political spectrum. I have heard the same type of arguments before; this time only the players and causes were different. My friend’s arguments were decidedly more eloquent than what I have just stated; this is merely my interpretation of his words.
I pointed out that one who is certain s/he is right should embrace criticism, not quash it, and that people have a funny habit of changing their minds, especially when one martyrs the leaders of a cause through persecution. or worse. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. He said the extreme right was no different than he; if Bush and Cheney had anything to do with it, they would probably have locked many of us anti-war activists up long ago. “The reason you are still free,” he said, “is because you are not a significant threat to their power.” It was an astute, if fallible, analysis of majority rule.
[As it turns out, the protests of eleven million people on February 15th, 2003 did not discourage Bush from going to war because, as we now know, Bush and Cheney live in a bubble floating towards the South Pole, last seen heading southeast somewhere over Texas. However, they did convince the rest of the world that if the earth were to take a vote on Iraq, our soldiers never would have left Fort Dix. Despite the unlikelihood of an incumbent 'president's loss in a second-term election, we were enough of a threat that members of the Republican National Committee rented out a comfy ex-bus terminal on Pier 57 to accommodate us during the 2004 Convention sans habeas corpus. The public did not start a revolution upon Bush's re-'election,' either, as I had predicted to my friend. But I digress.]
Only the weak and insecure must fear the birth of conflicting ideas. The more desperate one becomes, the more one tends to suppress one’s opponents by any means necessary, including the hammer of the iron fist. Putin is just as dangerous to the cause of human rights as most neo-cons; he has a nation of citizens who still remember Lenin instead of Stalin, and he has no pesky historical Bill of Rights to stand in the way of his internecine methods of culling his critics from the flocks.
That’s why I’m so pissed off at Danny Glover for actively supporting the Venezuelan president’s cause. Chavez and Bush are two sides of the same coin. All the socialist medicine in the world cannot make up for the loss of basic human freedoms. Bush may be an evil moron, but he is not nearly as adept or as capable at silencing his political foes as others are.
Yet.
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