Posts Tagged ‘Sozialismus’

Die Ausgabe der El Nacional vom 18. August 2010. Die venezuelanische Tageszeitung entschloss sich dazu nach einer richterlichen Verfügung, die für die nächsten vier Wochen das Abbilden von “gewaltätigen, blutigen [und] grotesken” Bildern sowie Informationen über Morde und Tode, welche das Wohlbefinden von Kindern und Erwachsenen gefährden könnten, verbot. An jenen Stellen, wo sich ein blutiges Bild befinden sollte, wurde lediglich das Wort “Zensiert” in roten Großbuchstaben gedruckt.

So Zirkumflex in dem sehr guten Blogbeitrag ‘Wie Chávez seine Macht zu sichern versucht’. Die New York Times hat gestern einen längeren Artikel über die rasant ansteigenden Mordraten in Venezuela veröffentlicht; seit Chávez Machtantritt 1999 hat sich die Mordrate in Venezueal mehr als verdreifacht, insgesamt sind seitdem 118.541 (!) Menschen umgebracht worden.

Venezuela hat ungefähr 26 Millionen Einwohner, damit verfügt das Land in etwa über die Einwohnerzahl des Irak, die New York Times stellt die Mordrate der beiden Länder in Relation:

In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed above 16,000.

Im südamerikanischen Mordratenvergleich ist der Sozialismus des 21. Jahrhunderts ebenfalls unangefochtener Spitzenreiter, die venezuelanische Hauptstadt Caracas schlägt in Sachen Mord selbst die kolumbianische Hauptstadt Bogotá und die brasilianische Slummetropole São Paulo:

Caracas itself is almost unrivaled among large cities in the Americas for its homicide rate, which currently stands at around 200 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to Roberto Briceño-León, the sociologist at the Central University of Venezuela who directs the violence observatory.

That compares with recent measures of 22.7 per 100,000 people in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, and 14 per 100,000 in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city.

Mehr erschreckende Zahlen und Hintergründe in der New York Times: Venezuela, More Deadly Than Iraq, Wonders Why

Was liegt also für die Linkspartei näher, als sich anlässlich des 60. Jahrestages der Allgemeinen Erklärung der Menschenrechte auf einer Konferenz ihrer Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung dem Thema “Menschenrechte und Sozialismus“ zu widmen.

(Christoph Seils – Alle böse außer Oskar)

Ich bin gerade über ein Protokoll eines Symposiums unter dem Titel “SOCIALISM: What Happened? What Now?” gestolpert. Von Jeane Kirkpatrick finden sich dort diese autobiographischen Absätze:

I’d like to tell you bit more about my own career as a socialist.[...]
After that, I moved on to New York, where I studied socialism in a different fashion. My principal advisor and professor at Columbia was Franz Neumann, who was a brilliant professor and writer, and who had been himself a member not only of the German Social Democratic Party but a member of the ISPD, Independent Social Democratic Party, which was the left social democratic party. He had been active in the politics of Weimar as long as he thought he could still escape Germany and survive. He had thought very deeply about it. He taught and wrote about both the Second Empire, about the Weimar Republic, and about the German socialist movement.

We studied all manner of socialists, including those mentioned here. We studied not only Marx and Engles but also Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg and a whole array. Edward Bernstein I found particularly interesting. I was already a revisionist at that early stage. I was especially fascinated by their doctrines of war and of peace. [...]

As I read the utopian socialists, the scientific socialists, the German Social Democrats and revolutionary socialists— whatever I could in either English or French— I came to the conclusion that almost all of them, including my grandfather, were engaged in an effort to change human nature. The more I thought about it, the more I thought this was not likely to be a successful effort. So I turned my attention more and more to political philosophy and less and less to socialist activism of any kind. [...]

It’s useful to distinguish between radical socialism and social democracy. The differences between them have been absolutely critical. It’s important to distinguish between the Weimar Republic, which was not a perfect republic but had many good qualities, and the Soviet Union, which was clearly not a good republic.

But I always remained very interested in the people who could not be satisfied by developing something clearly do-able, and who sought instead to transform human nature.