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| Home Front: Politix |
| Obama Screws Up Latin American Policy |
| 2009-08-25 |
| The lights are going out in Venezuela. The Chávez-controlled legislature passed an education bill on August 13 that will extinguish the last glimmers of free thought in the country’s classrooms. The law is such a caricature of revolutionary legislation that it almost seems like a joke, like something out of Woody Allen’s Bananas. But it’s not funny for Venezuelans. Schools will now be required to teach “Bolivarian doctrine,” a vague catchall for Chávez’s sloganeering. They will be supervised by “communal councils” (read: commissars from the socialist party) and the central government will decide who can and who cannot enter universities and the teaching profession. Chávez is also saving elections from the “bourgeoisie” by gerrymandering districts before he next offers himself to the voters. When his motorcycle-mounted goons attacked the offices of Globóvision, the only remaining independent TV station, with tear gas and rocks, Chávez piously condemned the attacks. But Globóvision is not long for this world. He is remarkably blunt about his aims. As The Economist reported, the Venezuelan dictator cited the Italian Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci on the importance of seizing control of a nation’s key institutions in order to control the minds of the citizenry. The most important institutions to conquer, Chávez added, were the media, the churches, and the schools. Last year, some of the same Chávez thugs who tear-gassed Globóvision stormed the episcopacy in Caracas after the Catholic Church criticized the president. Chávez condemned that attack as well. The new law stretches government power beyond the schools, permitting the state to suspend media outlets that negatively affect the public’s “mental health.” This comes just three weeks after the government declined to renew the licenses of 34 radio stations. “We haven’t closed any radio stations, we’ve applied the law,” Chávez explained. “We’ve recovered a bunch of stations that were outside the law, that now belong to the people and not the bourgeoisie.” Get it? They’ve been “liberated.” |
| Posted by:ed |
| #1 The wheel turns. |
| Posted by: Bulldog 2009-08-25 12:54 |