oppression | The Spicy Cauldron

Our governments won’t boycott the Olympics, but we can refuse to watch

The Spicy Cauldron is, along with millions of other websites, banned in China, and this fact, along with my not being resident in that country, means I can safely say without fear for my life that the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is a stupid man if he thinks the world is going to give creedence to his claim that the Dalai Lama masterminded the recent violence in Tibet’s main city, Lhasa. Were I a Chinese citizen, such a boldly-presented public criticism could land me in jail, or worse. How a man who presides over a country that routinely oppresses, censors and punishes dissenters can accuse anyone else of being a liar, well—it simply boggles the mind. The finger should be pointing inwards, not outwards at Tibet’s long-exiled spiritual leader. When the Olympics were awarded to China, did anyone think the country would change?

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Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

tags: censorship, China, Dalai Lama, Olympics, oppression, state control, Tibet, violence

Labour in government: the enemy of the people, peaceful protest, and democracy

After fifty years one of the most famous symbols of protest in British political history, the peaceful demonstration maintained outside the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, has been bludgeoned to death by the Labour government, yet again displaying its contempt for the notion of civil liberties and its twisted determination to do all it can to control what British citizens can and can’t do, think, and say.