"Venezuela's foreign ministry rejected the criticism and said shutting RCTV would guarantee freedom of expression."
Snoopy, it's obvious! People will be absolutely free to express whatever Hugo Chavez wants them to express.
See?
Ah... Oh... Yes, I see the light now!
Yes they are free to express their opinions just not so everyone can see them on TV or on radio. In their homes by themselves will do fine.
My God... it surely must sound even worst en espaņol.
Actually, they are free to express their opinions in their prison cells. It is only outside of prison that they are restricted.
Best of all, to express their opinions to themselves, soto voce, and just keep marching for Hugo's greater glory. Nothing like a good banana republic to take the dullness out of the day.
People will get to agree with Hugo, Snoop. How much more freedom do you need, companero?
There's a certain totalitarian logic in the compaņero's pronouncement. The traditional idea of freedom is negative freedom, defined as absence of constraints (from governments or private individuals) in the realization of your desires and interests. With Kant, however, freedom is redefined as autonomy -- the capacity to act only on moral maxims dictated by your own reason alone, rather than the injunctions of churches, state authorities, or other sources of heteronomy. Kant's insight was based on the premise that, while individuals may be nominally free from outer constraints, they can nevertheless be the slaves of their own inner constitution: irrational passions, prejudices, selfish desires, ignorance, etc. In that sense, he alone is free who acts based on what reson requires.
With Hegel, the idea of freedom as the dictate of autonomy becomes the dictum "freedom is necessity understood." Since necessity, as a modal notion, originates in reason, and is the feature of all (true) moral precepts (e.g., "Thou shall not kill"--necessarily and under any circumstances), for Hegel following the imperatives of moral reason meant grasping the necessity inherent in all moral laws. But to be free was, again, to act according to reason. Hence, freedom is necessity understood.
This slogan was taken over by Marx; and, with a historicist turn, he interprets the idea of rational necessity as a historically necessary process of evolution towards the liberation of the proletariat. That was because the interests of the humanity as a whole must coincide, for him, with the emancipatory interests of the oppressed working class. Hence, in Marx, grasping what reason requires of all of us meant understanding that we have to help proletarians achieve their emancipation -- that is, hand over to them everything we have and let them run things for us. But again, remember the old German Idealist dictum: freedom is following the dictates of reason. And, for a Marxist, reason demands that proletarians get everything and we refrain from doing stuff against them. Ergo, to be free is to let them have it their way; consequently, freedom of expression is the liberty to shut the fuck up.
So, you see, the Venezuelan tovarishch has a point, although perhaps unbeknownst to him.
Ultimately, Kant's idea that true freedom means following reason rather than one's own desires was borrowed from that Frog of Swiss origin, Rousseau: only then are you free when you act for the common good. That's how, once again, the philosophes of the French Elightenment have landed us all in deep shit. I can now better appreciate Gavroche's limerick:
On est laid ā Nanterre
C'est la faute ā Voltaire
Et bęte ā Palaiseau
C'est la faute ā Rousseau
Je ne suis pas notaire
C'est la faute ā Voltaire
Je suis petit oiseau
C'est la faute ā Rousseau
Je suis tombé par terre
C'est la faute ā Voltaire
Le nez dans le ruisseau
C'est la faute
Well, Akaky, I will settle for the freedom to shoot my big mouth off, I am ready to skip the freedom to demostrate (it is freaking cold now in most places anyway), the freedom to smoke inside a building - to be protected from the elements and the freedom to buy intoxicating drinks of my choice for a reasonable price.
As you see, I do not ask for too much.
Ach, Desargues - it was like a breath of fresh air - aside of your French that was quite wasted on me.
Re "freedom is necessity understood" - that good and true Hegelian point was sloppily transformed by good ole Carl M. You see, Hegel was mostly caring about personal freedom, while for the Beard, (who was not that great in philosophy, by the way) it became a good starting point to justify enforcement of any definition of freedom that suits any fashionable reason on the masses.
When the reason in fashion is that of Hugo - why not?
And the curios mix of personal freedom as understood personal necessity with personal freedom sacrificed for common good somehow does not do it for me anymore. Especially when that "common good" is defined by any variety of currently ruling dirty politicos...
Snoops, I wasn't endorsing any of those claims (except for maybe Kant's). I was just putting it out there, for people to know what the enemy thinks like -- well, the brightest among them, anyway; I don't believe there's too much thinking people left in Venezuela these days, or they wouldn't allow that thuggish clown his authoritarian antics.
I realize with dismay that, the more oil reserves a country has, the mor prone to tyranny it is likely to be. Except maybe Norway. But those guys had been sternly disciplined by centuries of Lutheranism before they hit upon their oil bonanza.
Norway is too cold for dictatorship. A good dictatorship involves heat of passion, strong feelings, blood. You cannot have it so far to the North.
Hooray! Venezuela will soon be blessed with the blessings Socialism brings: bread lines, prisons for political prisoners, and all those wonderful Soviet banners glorifying the exalted great leader! Hooray!
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