Democracy's Despair

If Gaddafi can treat half of Libya like Saddam Hussein treated Kuwait, if the Saudi king can send his army into a neighboring country to pull a Gaddafi on a people peacefully demonstrating for democracy, if we are requesting Chinese and Russian cooperation for the necessary work for democracy - I mean, we might as well seek Gaddafi's cooperation on human rights then - I am at a loss for words.

For the first time I have begun to have my doubts about Barack Obama. I am not seeing much audacity. I am not seeing much hope.

The fire of democracy is being snuffed out by two mad dogs in the Middle East through brute force.

This is how the Burmese Generals did it a few years back. This is how they did it in Iran in 2009. They decided there was no limit to how much brute force they were willing to unleash upon a peacefully demonstrating people.

I am not feeling too good right now.

The thing to do was to get a NATO mandate to make surgical strikes to take the mad dog out early on when the rebels were looking to march on Tripoli. Instead you have a scenario where Gaddafi is about to bulldoze Benghazi. This is sad.

If Gaddafi and the Saudi king get away with what they are doing, forget the idea of democracy demonstrations in China. It is not happening. The momentum will have been broken. A democracy movement is all about momentum.

North Korea In Sight
Secretary Hillary
John Kerry Has The Solution
No Fly Zone Or Massacre
Saudi Arabi Next
Talk to Jazeera: Saif al-Islam Gaddafi
The Anatomy Of Revolutions For Democracy

North Korea In Sight

Image via WikipediaThe winds of democracy have to blow into North Korea too.

The Anatomy Of Revolutions For Democracy
Nicaragua, Ortega On The Radar
The Fuck With Mugabe
China: 2 PM, Sunday

The Atlantic : North Korea’s Digital Underground: the very archetype of a “closed society.” It ranks dead last—196th out of 196 countries—in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press index. Unlike the citizens of, say, Tunisia or Egypt, to name two countries whose populations recently tapped the power of social media to help upend the existing political order, few North Koreans have access to Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. In fact, except for a tiny elite, the DPRK’s 25 million inhabitants are not connected to the Internet. Televisions are set to receive only government stations. International radio signals are routinely jammed, and electricity is unreliable. Freestanding radios are illegal. But every North Korean household and business is outfitted with a government-controlled radio hardwired to a central station. The speaker comes with a volume control, but no off switch. ........ media insurgents have a two-pronged strategy, integrating Cold War methods (Voice of America–like shortwave broadcasts in; samizdat-like info out) and 21st-century hardware: SD chips, thumb drives, CDs, e-books, miniature recording devices, and cell phones. ....... these new media organizations are helping to create something remarkable: a corps of North Korean citizen-journalists practicing real journalism inside the country. ....... This past December, Open Radio North Korea, a broadcast-news organization, broke the story that a train headed for Pyongyang with gifts from China for Kim Jong Un, the heir apparent, was reportedly sabotaged and derailed, in one of several sporadic and mostly unreported acts of resistance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. ....... in January 2010, a North Korean factory worker was publicly executed by firing squad for phoning news about the price of rice to someone in South Korea ...... Like most of the other independent news organizations, it receives funds from the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as other NGOs and private donors. ...... The footage Ahn brought out was shocking: filthy, barefoot children scavenging for food, picking kernels of corn from cow manure. Glassy-eyed, the children told the interviewer that their parents had died and they were homeless and alone. ...... Once these North Korean defectors made it across the Yalu or Tumen River, they were startled to discover that even the poorest Chinese had higher living standards than they did ....... (A 2009 survey found that 58 percent of North Koreans had regular access to a cassette recorder with radio, and 21 percent watched videos on video-compact-disc players.) The confluence of these developments created a remarkable journalistic opening: just as defectors in unprecedented numbers were bringing more information out of North Korea, the spread of markets and secondhand technology was creating a conduit for getting more information in. ....... Until the late 1990s, all international phone calls were routed through Beijing or Moscow. ..... Cell phones, both legal and illegal, have become a fact of life only during the past five years. ..... NK Reform Radio interviews defectors now living in South Korea. Some are unable to fit into South Korean society ...... The subject that most interests North Koreans is the country’s ruling dynasty: founder Kim Il Sung, his son Kim Jong Il, and his presumed heir, Kim Jong Un. Most of their subjects know little more than the idealized history of the Kims churned out by the state’s propaganda mill. They are shocked to learn that Kim Jong Il was born in Russia, and not on the mythic Mount Paektu; Koreans are quite socially conservative and are aghast that he has fathered several children with women other than his wives. ...... d a clear correlation between the “consumption of foreign media” and “more negative assessments of the regime and its intentions.” ....... One night he heard a South Korean program that contradicted a number of the myths surrounding the Kim family. After a little research, he discovered that the broadcasts were true. Was everything he’d been taught a lie, he wondered? It wasn’t long before he defected. ..... had several e-books, which I got from China. The national security force arrested me for possessing them,” he tells me. The books were pretty innocuous fare, mostly motivational titles like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Related articles

• You: N. Korea tells S. Korea to produce defectors (france24.com)
• Trouble In North Korea ?? (themoderatevoice.com)
• South Korea will make second attempt to send North Koreans home (cnn.com)
• North Korea Blocks Citizens' Return Over Four Staying in South (businessweek.com)
• N. Korea Pressures Would-Be Defectors (online.wsj.com)
• Calls for democracy fly into North Korea (cnn.com)
• North Korea pressures South to repatriate defectors (ctv.ca)
• More surprises likely in North's transition, defector warns (search.japantimes.co.jp)
• North Korea Demands South Return Nationals Wishing to Stay (businessweek.com)
• US and South Korea Choose to Ignore Warnings from Kim Jong Il and Son (blogcritics.org)