Hungary takes another step towards dictatorship

Just last week, Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party adopted a bill that would allow the government to temporarily strip dual citizens — specifically those who are also nationals of non-EU or non-European Economic Area countries — of their Hungarian passports, should they be deemed to have acted “in the interest of foreign powers” and “undermined the sovereignty of Hungary.” 

The ambitions of this bill are clear as day. This is not about national security; it’s about silencing dissent. It’s about targeting civil society, journalists and activists — both within Hungary and the diaspora — who refuse to fall in line with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

I’ve already been the subject of many such attacks. My name and my organization, Action for Democracy, have been fixtures of the Hungarian government’s propaganda machine for years.

The government has commissioned illegal surveillance, covertly recording videos and taking photographs of me and my family in front of our apartment in New York. It has published unfounded allegations in pro-government newspapers. It has launched misogynistic attacks against my wife. And it has instructed the Hungarian intelligence agencies, as well as the Orwellian “Sovereignty Protection Authority” — a body modeled on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s repressive state machinery — to investigate my organization on the grounds of “national security.”

Read the rest here.

Quote of the day...

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” 

 -Widely attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte and just posted by President Donald Trump on his social media account.

Russia: 3 lawyers for Alexei Navalny are jailed

PETUSHKI, Russia (AP) — Three lawyers who once represented the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny were convicted by a court Friday as part of the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent that has reached levels unseen since Soviet times.

Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Alexei Liptser were already in custody and were given sentences ranging from 3 1/2 to five years by a court in the town of Petushki, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Moscow. They were arrested in October 2023 on charges of involvement with extremist groups, as Navalny’s networks were deemed by authorities.

The case was widely seen as a way to increase pressure on the opposition to discourage defense lawyers from taking political cases.

The U.S. State Department condemned the sentences against the lawyers “who were simply doing their jobs to ensure a political prisoner was afforded his right to legal representation, turning defense lawyers into political prisoners themselves,” said spokesman Matthew Miller.

He called it “yet another example of the persecution of defense lawyers by the Kremlin in its effort to undermine human rights, subvert the rule of law, and suppress dissent,” and urged the government to release all political prisoners immediately.

Read the rest here.

Venezuela

Russia's Presidential Election

I wonder who will win. The suspense is killing me.

Putin aims to leave nothing to chance in Russia’s 2024 election

Russian President Vladimir Putin is working to eliminate what little political opposition remains to his rule in Russia ahead of the country’s presidential election in 2024.

Putin, who is seeking a fifth term as president in what is almost an assured victory in the March election, has moved to clear any obstacles in his path. 

Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) last week rejected the presidential candidacy of Yekaterina Duntsova, a former TV journalist, over paperwork errors. Duntsova’s campaign, which is described as pro-peace and pro-democracy, has rejected the commission’s ruling and is appealing the decision through the courts. 

“The CEC’s refusal is directed against the representation of millions of citizens who advocate for a peaceful and democratic future of Russia,” Duntsova’s campaign wrote on Telegram. “With this political decision, we are deprived of the opportunity to have our own representative and express views that differ from the official aggressive discourse...” 

...“I think it’s an insult to the idea of elections and democracy to call what’s happening in Russia an election,” said Bill Browder, a target of the Kremlin for his work supporting Russian anti-corruption activists, in an interview with the U.K.-based Times Radio last week. 

Browder is a key architect of the Magnitsky Act, a federal law that empowered the U.S. to sanction Russian officials involved in significant corruption and human rights abuses, and that has expanded to target bad actors across the globe. 

“What Putin has done in Russia is basically create a dictatorship. Any person who wants to run against him ends up either in exile, in jail or dead,” he said.

Read the rest here.

"Voters don't decide elections. The people who count the votes do." -Joseph Stalin

Putin arrests Alexei Navalny's lawyers

Fascist dictators doing what dictators do.

A reminder that freedom is under attack all over the world, not just in Israel. 

Black Ribbon Day 2022

Never forget.

Venezuela is now a leftwing dictatorship

Not that there was much doubt about where things were heading, but it's pretty much official now. The so called Supreme Court (stacked with leftists loyal to Dear Leader Maduro) has declared the national legislature "illegitimate" and announced that it will now make all laws for the country or it will pass the legislative power to another entity. Three guesses who that would be. Things have gotten so bad that even Venezuela's neighbors are openly calling Maduro a dictator amidst talk of expelling the country from the Organization of American States.

The Scale of Turkey’s Purge Is Nearly Unprecedented

Only rarely in modern history has a leader detained and fired as many perceived adversaries as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has since a failed coup attempt last month. Here is how Mr. Erdogan’s vast purge would look if Americans were targeted at a similar scale.

Almost 9,000 police officers fired

Like firing every police officer
in Philadelphia, Dallas,
Detroit, Boston and Baltimore.

The Interior Ministry fired the police officers, some of whom government officials said had supported the coup attempt. Turkish officials have acknowledged that the number of people targeted in the purge is probably much greater than the number of conspirators.

21,000 private school teachers suspended

Like revoking the licenses of every
third teacher in private elementary and
high schools across the United States.

In addition to the teachers suspended, the government intends to close more than 1,000 private schools it linked to Fethullah Gulen, a cleric who the government said was the mastermind of the coup attempt. (Mr. Gulen has denied this, and his level of involvement remains unclear.) Followers of Mr. Gulen have sought to gain power within Turkey by infiltrating state institutions, often successfully.

Education officials said they planned to convert the schools into public schools and hire 40,000 new teachers.

10,012 soldiers detained

Like taking nearly every fourth
officer in the U.S. Army into custody.

The military, which has long been a unifying force for the country, is now deeply divided, diminished and discredited. A rebel faction of the military initiated the coup attempt.

Since then, nearly half of the top generals and admirals have been jailed or dismissed and more than 5,000 army officials have been sent to pretrial detention.

Read the rest here.

Venezuela’s Maduro resorts to state-sponsored looting

LIKE A slow-motion car crash, the unraveling of Venezuela’s economy and political system is a fascinating, as well as sickening, spectacle. Last month we noted the attempt of Nicolás Maduro, the would-be caudillo who succeeded Hugo Chávez as president, to distract public attention from world-beating inflation, shortages, power outages and crime by expelling several U.S. diplomats who he claimed were engaged in nefarious sabotage. Now, with prices still rising as fast as his popularity is dropping, Mr. Maduro has adopted a drastic tactic: state-sponsored looting.

This month, Mr. Maduro, a former bus driver whose ignorance of economics is shockingly obvious, ordered the national guard to invade electronics stores and drastically lower the prices of goods. Mobs soon besieged the outlets, carrying away televisions and other appliances, sometimes without paying; even some of the soldiers helped themselves. More than 100 shop owners and other small businessmen were rounded up and jailed.

Read the rest here.

A leftist paradise on the rise.

Raul Castro announces retirement in 2018

HAVANA - Cuban leader Raul Castro announced on Sunday he would step down from power after his second term as president ends in 2018, and the new parliament named a 52-year-old rising star to become his first vice president and most visible successor.

Castro, 81, made the announcement in a nationally broadcast speech shortly after the Cuban National Assembly elected him to a second five-year term in the opening session of the new parliament.

"This will be my last term," Castro said.

Read the rest here.

Egypt's Islamist President Seizes Dictatorial Powers

CAIRO – Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi declared extensive political powers for himself Thursday, taking broad and sweeping control of his country a day after he won international praise for fostering a cease-fire in Gaza.

Under the terms of Thursday’s decree, Morsi said that all of the decisions he has made since he took office — and until a new constitution is adopted — were final and not subject to appeal or review. He declared the retrial of high officials accused of the deaths of protesters during the country’s 2011 revolution, a measure that appeared targeted at former leader Hosni Mubarak. And he dismissed Egypt’s Mubarak-era prosecutor general, immediately swearing in a new one.

Read the rest here.

I feel badly for the people of Egypt. But it is of course not the concern of the United States.

Dictatorship By Executive Order (updated)

EXECUTIVE ORDERS ISSUED…
Teddy Roosevelt 3
Others to FDR NONE
FDR 11 in 16 years
Truman 5 in 7 years
Ike 2 in 8 years
Kennedy 4 in 3 years
LBJ 4 in 5 years
Nixon 1 in 6 years
Ford 3 in 2 years
Carter 3 in 4 years
Reagan 5 in 8 years
Bush 3 in 4 years
Clinton 15 in 8 years
George W. Bush 62 in 8 years
Obama 923 in 3½ years!

Read the rest here.

That is insane. And read what some of those orders do...

Update: The credibility of the linked post has been seriously challenged. See the first two comments.

Hugo Chavez Facing Electoral Revolt

On Feb. 12, Henrique Capriles Radonski, a 39-year-old Venezuelan state governor, won a primary election to become the opposition’s candidate against Hugo Chavez in October’s presidential election. He won 1.8 million of an astonishing 3 million votes — double the turnout predicted by most analysts.

The next day, Capriles, a devout Catholic, was greeted by a commentary on the government-run Web site of Venezuelan National Radio titled “The Enemy Is Zionism.” Capriles, it explained, is the descendant of Jews. (In fact, his grandmother was a Holocaust survivor who emigrated from Poland to Venezuela.)

“In order to understand the interests embodied” by Capriles, the commentary declared, “it’s important to know what is Zionism, the Israeli ideology that he sneakily represents. . . . It is, without doubt, an ideology of terror, of the most putrefied sentiments of humanity; its supposedly patriotic impetus is based in greed.” And so on.

“Zionism,” it concludes, “is owner of the majority of the financial institutions of the planet, controls almost 80 percent of the world economy and virtually all of the communications industry, in addition to maintaining decision-making positions within the U.S. Department of State and European powers.”

Thus began the latest — and what will surely be the ugliest — political campaign by Chavez, a ruler who has served as a friend in need to Moammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — and who now is facing his own homegrown democratic uprising. But Venezuela’s spring differs from those of Libya, Syria or Iran: Instead of pouring into the streets, Venezuelans — fed up with the chaos and violence of Chavez’s 13 years in power — are marching to the polls and trying to restore the country’s crippled and compromised institutions.

The opposition Capriles now heads has learned lessons that might benefit some of the revolutionaries of the Middle East. It tried and failed to oust Chavez with mass demonstrations and strikes; it foolishly boycotted elections it believed would be unfair; it indulged in endless internal quarrels. The result was the entrenchment of a strongman who has thoroughly wrecked what was once Latin America’s richest country and who now presides over the highest inflation and murder rates in the Western Hemisphere, shortages of basic goods and power, and a drug-trafficking industry whose kingpins include the defense minister.

Read the rest here.

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez tightens his grip on power

...In March, intelligence agents arrested Oswaldo Álvarez Paz, a former presidential candidate, charging him with conspiracy after he said in televised remarks that Venezuela had become a haven for drug trafficking; he also supported a Spanish indictment asserting that officials here had helped Basque separatists train on Venezuelan soil.

Only days later, agents arrested Guillermo Zuloaga, the owner of the opposition television network Globovisión, after he criticized the government’s efforts to shut down media outlets that challenged the president. After an outcry by rights groups, Mr. Zuloaga was released on the condition that he could not travel outside the country.

Next, agents arrested Wilmer Azuaje, an opposition lawmaker, on charges of insulting and striking a police official during a heated discussion. Mr. Azuaje had in the past revealed corruption claims against Mr. Chávez’s siblings. Like Mr. Zuloaga, Mr. Azuaje was released, but the Supreme Court forbade him to discuss his arrest with the media.

The arrests have taken aim at some of Mr. Chávez’s most prominent critics ahead of legislative elections in September that put control of the National Assembly in play, and they illustrate Mr. Chávez’s attempts to tighten control over institutions like the judiciary.

Read the rest here.