Monday, May 28, 2007

Heil Chavez!

Chavez pulls a Stalin:

Chavez closes opposition TV station; thousands protest

...

President Hugo Chavez announced in January that the government would not renew the broadcast license for the station, long an outlet for opposition parties.

Chavez has accused the station of supporting the failed 2002 coup against him and violating broadcast laws.

He called the station's soap operas "pure poison" that promote capitalism, according to AP.

RCTV, which has been broadcasting for 53 years, is slated to be off the air at midnight. It will be replaced by a state-run station.


"To refuse to grant a new license for the most popular and oldest television channel in the country because the government disagrees with the editorial or political views of this channel, which are obviously critical to Chavez, is a case of censorship," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

"We have arrived at totalitarianism," said Marcel Granier, president of Empresas 1BC, which owns RCTV."


You might think the world would learn. If I were in Venezuela right now I would be doing my best to catch the next flight away from that 'worker's paradise.'

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

From
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8700

One last story about a third Talmud scholar, the late Rabbi Eliezer Silver, Chief Rabbi of Cincinnati from the 1930s through the 1960s. He was much more famous than the other two; the city of Cincinnati made a Memorial Day in his honor. In the '50s, when Peron's government in Argentina was tottering, Silver was reading the news with a penetrating eye. One day he read an item that convinced him that Peron would fall. He called his young assistant, Jacob Lustig (still residing in Cincinnati), to take him to the Western Union office. There, he telegrammed to Rabbi Bloom, Chief Rabbi of Argentina, the following text designed to confound government censors: "And the way the Ark traveled was that Moses said, 'Arise...' (Numbers 10:35)"

Late that night, the phone rang in Silver's house. It was Rabbi Bloom calling from the post office in Buenos Aires (the only way to make international calls at that time), acknowledging that he received the telegram and asking when he should leave. "Why are you still there?" Silver shouted. "Leave immediately in the middle of the night." The Blooms grabbed a few possessions and paid a fisherman to row them across to Uruguay. By the next morning, the military had deposed Peron and arrested all major religious leaders as collaborators.

Lost said...

Just surprised this didn't happen earlier.

Anonymous said...

there goes south america