A Cuban man imprisoned after a YouTube incident was transferred to a psychiatric ward on 17 September. Juan Carlos González was sentenced to two years in prison after a video of him drunkenly interrupting a documentary crew to talk about the lack of food in Cuba was posted on YouTube in April. Despite apologising on YouTube the next day Gonzalez was arrested and jailed for “public dangerousness”. (Guardian) Read more.
Why has the Left become so suspicious of civil liberties? Why has the Right hijacked the issue and turned it to its advantage? A dozen years of New Labour rule have left this sorry legacy. A party that should have intervened for social justice and greater equality instead allowed the markets to let rip. Having raised the white flag to the bankers, ministers instead sought to exert their power elsewhere, at the level of the citizen, seeking ever more ingenious ways of watching us, listening to us and telling us how to lead our lives. I am no Freudian psychoanalyst, but I can find no better example of displacement theory in modern politics.
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This is a guest post by Candice Holdsworth
As part of the 17 September launch of Index on Censorship’s latest edition, I attended an event at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon entitled: “Time for a Revolution”. The event and the new edition of the magazine both marked the 20-year anniversary of the transformations in eastern Europe in 1989, with a panel discussion following the performance of two rarely-performed plays from that era.
The two plays in question were Václav Havel’s ‘Mistake’ and Samuel Beckett’s ‘Catastrophe.’ Beckett had in 1982 dedicated ‘Catastrophe’ to the then-imprisoned Havel, whom the Czech authorities had sentenced to four and half years in prison for ‘subversive activities.’ Havel had been greatly moved by this gesture of solidarity; upon his release one year later, he dedicated ‘Mistake’ to Beckett. These two plays are rarely performed. But they retain their brevity and pathos today, even though decades removed from the historical and political context in which they were originally conceived.
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Burma’s military government marked the 21st anniversary of the 1988 coup by releasing some of its 2,200 political prisoners, says Burmese artist and former political prisoner Htein Lin
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