"Only Totalitarian Governments Speak At Rather Than Listen To Their People

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WARNING: IRONY ALERT CODE LEVEL RED
:yoiks: :yoiks: :smoke: :sarcasm: :smoke: :woohoo: :smoke: :sarcasm: :smoke: :yoiks: :yoiks:

(btw check out the link for the "Faux News" ad)

Like Sean Penn said at a January Town Hall for peace meeting:

"When we said, 'Listen to us' Bush thought that meant surveillance."


“ONLY TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENTS SPEAK AT RATHER THAN LISTEN TO THEIR PEOPLE” read the electronic tickertape message behind the head of Fidel Castro as he gave a speech outside. As reported by BBC TV on Jan. 24, the U.S. government posted the gigantic message on the building behind Castro’s podium.

The linked article indicates that this speech was in reaction to messages beamed by the U.S. earlier this week. “The illuminations so outraged Cuba's president, Fidel Castro, that he called for a mass protest today in front of the mission, which is housed in the Swiss embassy.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/cuba/story/0,,1693435,00.html

'I have a dream' becomes Castro's nightmare in cultural war with US

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Tuesday January 24, 2006
The Guardian

Strollers soaking up the sea spray along Havana's famed Malecón waterfront boulevard absorbed an impromptu lesson on America's civil rights movement this week when the US mission began flashing passages from Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech on a giant screen.

In the latest exchange in the US-Cuban cultural war, the electronic tickertape mounted on the fifth floor of the US Interests Section in Havana began beaming King's quotes in 9ft-high red letters.

The passages were interspersed with sections from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, promising freedom from arbitrary arrest or exile, and inspirational sayings from anti-communist leaders such as Poland's Lech Walesa and the Czech Republic's Vaclav Havel.

The illuminations so outraged Cuba's president, Fidel Castro, that he called for a mass protest today in front of the mission, which is housed in the Swiss embassy. In a three-hour televised speech on Sunday night, Mr Castro described the signs as a provocation intended to break off what limited contact has survived between the two countries, which do not have diplomatic relations. "The US government ... is deliberately trying to force a rupture in the actual diplomatic relations," he said. "The gross provocation ... can have no other purpose."

After the scandals about the abuse of detainees at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib prisons, the US was in no position to deliver a lecture about human rights, he added. "They should put those signs inside, not outside."

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1. You can't make this shit up

[CottonBear]

2. MLK would not be OK with this US embassy propaganda. n/t

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3. Nor his words being delivered by the electronic catapult

:cry: