[Solar-general] Re: Fwd: FSF - Richard Stallman´s Encounter with P resident Chavez

Mie Ene 12 19:45:48 CET 2005

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Fernando Cassia <fcassia en gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 02:05:21 -0300
> Subject: FSF - Richard Stallman´s Encounter with P resident Chavez
> To: Fernando Cassia <fcassia en gmail.com>
> 
> 
> Grande Stallman! El tipo representa 100% mis valores ideas y
> convicciones. Y ratifico lo que alguna vez dije: Chavez tiene huevos,
> que es lo que les falta a muchos politicos en Argentina.
> 
> Richard Stallman´s Encounter with President Chavez
> http://agia.fsf.org/rms-blog/entry-20041206
> 
> 
> Encounter with President Chavez
>  
>  
> by Richard M. Stallman
> 
> I returned to Venezuela after Mexico, for a conference called Artists
> and Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity. On Saturday, our main
> activity was a meeting where President Chavez would speak. I had lunch
> that day with Sergeant-Major Torres, who has converted the Venezuelan
> Army's servers to GNU/Linux, and his wife. Since we've become friends,
> I encouraged him to come back to the hotel and try to get into the
> meeting too, figuring the security would probably ok his entry, and
> they did.
> 
> The first speaker was Sr. Perez Equivel, a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
> He told a fable of a chef who called together various animals to ask
> each one, "What sauce would you like to be cooked with?" The chicken
> responded, "Actually I'd rather not be cooked at all", but the chef
> said, "That's outside the discussion--all you can decide is which
> sauce."
> 
> An invited American speaker then compared the invasions of Afghanistan
> and Iraq to the wars of aggression for which the Nazi leaders were
> convicted. (I supported the invasion of Afghanistan because of the
> totalitarian cruelty of the Taliban, which goes beyond Bush.) He
> described Fallujah as the Guernica of the 21st century, and warned
> that all countries now feel fear of being attacked by the new empire
> of the US. He referred to the celebration of torture, in Guantanamo as
> well as in Abu Ghraib, as a brutal threat against the whole world.
> Regime change imposed by the US, over and over, has led to a regime
> much worse than what preceded it; he cited the Congo, with its 37
> years of tyranny, and the US-organized coup in Haiti this year, and
> accused the US of being behind the attempted coup in Venezuela in
> 2002. (The US recognized the coup leaders' government immediately.)
> But the US is not merely a global scofflaw; Bush intends to be above
> the law, as shown by the US plans to exempt itself from the
> International Criminal Court--feeble as that is.
> 
> His remarks in English were interspersed with Spanish translations
> that were often absurdly and ridiculously incorrect. The interpreter
> seemed to translate most of the concepts that had just been mentioned,
> but often garbled their relationship. Most amazingly, she translated
> Martin Luther King's famous words as "tengo sueño" (I feel sleepy)
> instead of "tengo un sueño" (I have a dream). I can't imagine how a
> native Spanish speaker could make that mistake.
> 
> Then Daniel Ortega, former president of Nicaragua, entered the hall
> and people applauded him.
> 
> A deputy (congressman, more or less) from Argentina then spoke, and
> referred to the problem of the dictatorship of the unidimensional
> corporate media. He proposed setting up a Latin-American alternative
> to CNN which would break its dominance over news. He then referred to
> the bombing of Hiroshima as an act of terror--a somewhat controversial
> idea to an American, but possibly justified.
> 
> Then President Chavez spoke. He covered many topics, and I wished I
> had asked for a simultaneous translation receiver, because I couldn't
> always follow his Spanish.
> 
> Chavez is greatly admired by Venezuelans, who praise him in more
> glowing terms than I would praise anyone (even the people I most
> admire). But Chavez doesn't ask people to praise him--he directs
> people's admiration to Bolivar, San Martin, and various others who
> fought against the colonial rule of Spain. He refers to them often,
> not just to their names but also to their writings and their deeds, in
> a way that Americans used to talk about Washington, but probably with
> greater accuracy. The national anthem, which I think was changed under
> Chavez, praises the "brave people".
> 
> He spoke about the recent first graduation of Project Robinson 2, a
> project for teaching literacy and basic school knowledge to adults who
> didn't have a chance to learn before. (This project is named after
> Bolivar's teacher.) He hopes to extend this program to over a million
> people, to help them escape from poverty. He spoke of the kitchens
> established for poor people, including street children, and how they
> have been situated near to Project Robinson 2 so as to lead them to
> get an education also, so they could "be their own liberators". He
> spoke of educational grants of $100 a month that have been given to
> half a million people so they can study. He responded to criticism
> that this money should be spent on building "infrastructure", saying
> that building a sovereign people with dignity is more important than
> constructing buildings or highways. If my memory is right (I'm not
> sure of this), I think he also read a description from an old book of
> some of Bolivar's educational policies.
> 
> Chavez spoke about the 70 clinics in poor neighborhoods that have
> started operating in the past year; the plan is to expand to 1400 of
> them, to cover 95% of the population. I visited one of these clinics,
> in the city of Barinas, while other invitees went to other cities and
> saw clinics operating there. In these clinics, about half the doctors
> are Cuban and half are Venezuelan. Cuba has an excellent medical
> system, aside from the shortage of medicines due to the US embargo,
> and trains many doctors; meanwhile, people told me that many
> Venezuelan doctors didn't want to get their hands dirty with poor
> people. Chavez didn't try to force them, he just hired Cuban doctors.
> 
> Venezuela has many kinds of cooperation with Cuba, which makes sense
> since the US tries to attack them both. However, I am puzzled that
> Chavez, who both speaks highly of democracy and practices it
> scrupulously, also speaks so highly of Cuba. He turns a blind eye to
> the fact that Castro does not hold elections, and has imprisoned a
> number of people for criticizing the government.
> 
> Chavez quoted the results of a survey called Latinobarometro, which
> found that in most countries in Latin America, the number of people
> who believe that democracy is the best form of government has fallen
> since 1996--often fallen by 20% or more. In Venezuela, however, the
> support for democracy increased by 12% over that period. Venezuela has
> among the smallest percentage of people who say they might prefer a
> military government, and likewise for the percentage who say they
> would give up freedom for the sake of order. He drew this conclusion:
> support for democracy is falling in many countries because their
> democracies have failed to deliver what the people want. They have let
> the IMF, the megacorporations, and/or a national oligarchy exercise
> power.
> 
> Early in his speech, Chavez said that he wanted especially to hear our
> criticisms of his policies. He later showed this was not just idle
> talk, because after speaking for perhaps 40 minutes he asked for
> questions from the audience. There were a few hundred of us in the
> auditorium, and quite a number wanted to ask questions or give their
> messages of support, so we were asked to limit ourselves to 3 minutes
> each. Chavez spent over 4 hours listening and responding. After
> listening to a number of questions, and (apparently) taking notes, he
> responded to them one by one.
> 
> Could you imagine any recent president of the US holding such a
> meeting? Bush doesn't even accept unfiltered questions in press
> conferences.
> 
> In one answer, Chavez explained how Venezuela practiced voter
> suppression in the past. For instance, poor people were give only
> provisional identity cards, so they were unable to vote. He explained
> how he had sent trucks with computers and printers to give poor people
> real identity cards so they could vote, and told how a child (who I
> suppose wasn't old enough to vote) was happy that he now had a real
> identity card with a picture of Bolivar on it.
> 
> Given my persistent opposition to national ID cards, I feel somewhat
> less than unalloyed happiness about this solution to the problem,
> although it was a good thing to make sure poor people could finally
> vote.
> 
> Chavez remarked that the term "democracia popular" ought to be
> redundant, because "demo" means "the people"; but democracy has
> degenerated so far in most countries as to make the term meaningful.
> 
> Another answer that he gave, when asked about the persistent US
> intervention in Colombia, is that in the past decade or two some had
> claimed imperialism had become benevolent, like a protecting father;
> but that after examples like Colombia and Iraq, this theory had become
> incredible.
> 
> He was asked what he thought about the "war on terrorism", and said
> that it is "more terrorism". "The only way to end terrorism is with
> justice." I applauded that (as I did some other things). He condemned
> the world's armament spending, above all in the US, for the waste of
> not using this money to reduce poverty.
> 
> When it was my turn at the microphone, I raised the issue of the new
> law to regulate the broadcast media. This law has been cited by the
> opposition as a form of tyranny. I obtained a copy of the text a
> couple of weeks ago, and found no tyranny, but a number of rules that
> were stated rather broadly, and whose natural interpretations could
> prohibit broadcasting things from Harry Potter to various somewhat
> dangerous sports to my own opinions about unauthorized copying. (The
> term "apología al delito" seems to include that.) The law had been in
> discussion for over a year, but in an agonizing coincidence, just
> after I had written down comments on the text and started to circulate
> them, the law was voted on. If only the timing had been a little
> different, I might have been able to help make it better.
> 
> I explained how what I say in my speeches appeared to be prohibited by
> this law, and said that I was asking, not in the spirit of opposition
> but in a spirit of friendly criticism, to make sure this law would not
> restrict the expression of opinions on radio and TV.
> 
> Chavez responded at length to my question, as he did to many
> questions. Unfortunately, I couldn't follow all of his response
> clearly.
> 
> Chavez explained certain distinctions, about who would be legally
> responsible for certain kinds of broadcasts, using the example of an
> interview with a person who said he wanted to kill the president, and
> whether the interviewer actively contributed to expressing that
> sentiment. This example is not unrealistic in Venezuela; he told how
> the TV stations had, for a period of weeks, constantly called on the
> public to attack Chavez (but the public didn't). The opposition now is
> no longer so directly violent, but still harsh by US standards. In the
> airport, as I left Caracas, I looked at an opposition newspaper; it
> condemned the government for how it has honored the recently slain
> prosecutor, who was prosecuting participants in the attempted coup.
> You would never see a major US daily newspaper criticize Bush policies
> so harshly.
> 
> However, choosing that example missed the point somewhat, since
> calling for violence is not the same kind of case as the one I raised.
> Perhaps in my question I should have explicitly distinguished
> expressing opinions from fomenting violence. I felt I had had just one
> chance, and I had fumbled it just a little, and wasted the chance. I
> felt like a failure.
> 
> About 20 minutes later, as the meeting ended, I asked Sergeant Torres
> and others to explain to me the parts of Chavez' answer that I had not
> entirely heard or understood. They told me he said that the
> constitution, which overrides any law, guarantees the right to express
> opinions, and also that the requirements in this law will not be
> enforced by judges but rather by a "media responsibility committee"
> made up of representatives of the media, civil society, and
> government, which would apply all the requirements in a less strict
> way. People also said that the word "apología" is understood in
> Venezuelan law to mean something beyond merely expressing an opinion;
> only a direct call to commit a crime would qualify as "apología al
> delito".
> 
> As a result of that, I feel my concern has been mostly resolved, but
> I'd still feel more comfortable if the law said this more explicitly.
> So I still feel a burning sense of futility from having come to the
> issue just barely too late.
> 
> On Sunday evening I participated in a dinner which was concerned with
> the plans to start Canal Sur, as they call the planned alternative to
> CNN. Many suggested making it a "revolutionary TV" station, and
> following the best progressive ideas in all ways--for instance, one
> suggestion was to try to represent not just Latin America but all
> downtrodden parts of the world.
> 
> I suggested, rather, that they follow the model of Al Jazeera, which
> doesn't call itself revolutionary and doesn't try to be progressive in
> all ways, but has succeeded in showing millions what Bush doesn't want
> them to see.
> Created by johns 
> Last modified 2004-12-16 11:24 AM 
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