Peacedog wrote:The same bunch of morons refuse to discuss why Venezuela is falling apart: socialism.
Same goons different continents.
Ian C. Kuzushi wrote:Peacedog wrote:The same bunch of morons refuse to discuss why Venezuela is falling apart: socialism.
Same goons different continents.
No, that's not right.
So what's going on in Venezuela?
Michael wrote:In the past two years, there were 3 cases I know of where the Chinese govt arrested Swedish citizens, two of them high profile and one of them kind of common, but in all cases the Swedish govt seemed to be totally unable to do anything to help, and seemed to me not to even be trying much, at least made no public protest.
One was a naturalized Swedish citizen, born in China. He was one of the owners of book store in Hong Kong that was publishing gossip rags about Chinese political leaders and one of five who worked there, who were secretly arrested / renditioned / disappeared. This guy was in his house in Thailand when the Chinese cops grabbed him, whisked him back to China without any word to the Swedes, kept him hidden away for a few weeks, if I remember correctly, and then announced that he had voluntarily agreed to solve a crime....that he had committed 11 years prior, a hit and run with a fatality. How fortuitous! He remains in jail in China today.
Case two was a Swedish citizen working for a small NGO in China that was training human rights lawyers. They nabbed him, locked him away with some sleep deprivation and a room adjoining to where he could hear his Chinese GF moaning and crying at all hours, then forced him to do a high-production-value video confession, where he had to apologize for many things, especially "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people." He did of course confess to being an unwitting agent of Goldstein and consorting with counter-revolutionaries, but it got edited out of the final cut that was aired nation wide. The Swedes did nothing publicly about any of this, but were I'm sure working for his release, which happened after 20-30 days of bright lights.
Third case is just a kid finishing his last year of high school in Beijing and some nothing argument his local and foreign friends had with a coat check girl outside a night club resulted in a passer-by claiming he was shoved. The Swedish kid and a South Korean were taken to jail for 30 days without any court appearance, which is normal in China, you can go away 2-3 years just on the police say so, and after his release, the boy's passport was kept for 11 additional months, keeping him in China while his college scholarship went unclaimed in Sweden. While he was in jail, his parents paid an unknown sum to the bloody nose claimant in an effort to get their son out of jail, but to no avail. After he was out, sans passport, he was encouraged by the police to make a few written confessions and self-criticisms, but luckily there was no struggle session. It was all for naught, didn't help him get his passport, which was finally returned after a total of 12 months when the "investigation" was completed, so he left.
That's the difference between being a citizen of Sweden or the USA, feck yeah.
*Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay: Strongly free market, 90,000 people "disappeared" in a country that had only 2.3 million at the time, mass graves were found near the Chaco River
*Antonio Salazar of Portugal: Totalitarian, people who criticized him simply "dissappeared", highly xenophobic, strongly pro-colonialism
*Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire: Totalitarian, robbed the entire country of Zaire's wealth, directly responsible for the 2nd Congo War by proxy of the USA
*Rafael Trujillo of Dominican Republic: capitalist; tens of thousands of people dissappeared during his regime)
*François "Papa Doc" Duvalier of Haiti: killed tens of thousands of people in his small island country, cult of personality, preferred to be worshipped as a god,
strongly anti-communist, strongly pro-market
*Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam: Catholic dictator, harassed/tortured/executed Buddhists and Buddhist clergy, Buddhists were arrested for practicing their religion in public, suspected communists were tortured and executed, hundreds of thousands were tortured and executed in capitalist purges.
*Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines: thousands murdered, thousands more "dissappeared", close to 120,000 tortured and imprisoned, billions of dollars stolen from the Filipino economy
*Anastazio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua: autocratic ruler, he introduced the term "death squads" into the common vernacular; in 1975, tens of thousands were executed, tens of thousands more "disappeared", hundreds of thousands were tortured and jailed in capitalist purges, elections suspended, mass malnutrition and disease, corruption, etc. etc.
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