- Capitalism and Alternatives -

And you call it

In Reply to: nothing like free speech posted by Jason on August 18, 1999 at 00:27:37:

If you think we enjoy free speech right now, your standard of freedom is lower than many people's. Someone once said, 'America has freedom of teh press for anyone who can afford to buy one." By the way, are you actually denying that teh US suppressed democracy (incuding freedom of the press) in Italy, Chile, Guyana, Guatemala, Indonesia, South Korea, Ecuador, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the Congo? These are well-known facts.

The facts are that the mainstream newspapers in this country parrot each other shamelessly. In the wake of Clinton's visit to China,. all teh mainstream papers said essentially the same thing about China's human rights record, about its evolution towards more freedom, teh need for condstructive engagement, etc. No one dared to suggest any alternatives: that China's human rights violations weren't so bad, or conversely that tehy were so bad that teh US shoudl intervene militarily. How free is a press which chooses to say only one thing.

By the way, plenty of communist states including Nicaragua, Kerala, Bengal, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Guyana, the Seychelles and to some extent Yugoslavia have had a free press.

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