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Don't mention the V-word: Uganda bans Monologues
The Observer ^ | February 20, 2005 | Jeevan Vasagar

Posted on 02/19/2005 5:19:53 PM PST by MadIvan

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To: Clintonfatigued
The proper way to oppose crud like this is to refuse to pay money to watch it

And they'll bring it into the schools if no-one wants to pay for it.

21 posted on 02/19/2005 7:42:39 PM PST by GeronL (The Old Media is at war with the New Media...... We are all Matt Drudges now.)
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To: MadIvan

Good for them!


22 posted on 02/19/2005 7:43:55 PM PST by kstewskis (you have to have a mind to lose it...)
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To: Clintonfatigued; Ukiapah Heep; cyborg; zbigreddogz; MadIvan; GeronL
Thing is, in Uganda the government stepped in and took official action against the play.

I do not support, nor was I advocating, government censorship. I was merely commenting on the Ugandan people's appropriate (and un-PC) condemnation of this liberal pornographic trash.

There was a time in the United States when no one would have been subjected to such garbage, and not because of any law, regulation or even consumer boycott. It would never have seen the light of day because it would have been socially shunned and condemned by our overall society.

And before people start telling me "If you don't want to see it, don't go to watch it," let me say a few things:

1. The local community "college" here in Leftist-occupied Marin County decided it was not only appropriate to host a "performance" of the Vagina Monologues, but they posted a huge banner advertising the event near a major traffic thoroughfare. I can just hear little Suzy or Johnny asking, "Mommy, what does THAT mean?"

2. It's only a matter of time before this, or something like it, is part of your child's public school curriculum. At the rate things are going, we'll soon see fourth graders performing the Vagina Monologues for their annual school play.

3. At what point do we, as a society, step up and declare what is morally right and wrong? Not through burdensome government censorship, but through self-control and widespread social standards of acceptable human behavior. We once had that, and we had a lot less problems, both socially and governmentally.

4. When people willfully give up their responsibility to control their own actions, then ultimately, the state will step in (for the "good of the masses") and take over that part of people's lives. That is why our government, once rooted in freedom and liberty, is passing mountains of laws regulating every possible behavior and action. You can't act like animals or anarchists for very long before the people demand that the government take control.

23 posted on 02/19/2005 7:50:49 PM PST by SpyGuy (Liberalism is slow societal suicide. And screw political correctness: Islam is the Religion of Death)
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To: SpyGuy

Agreed.


24 posted on 02/19/2005 7:52:59 PM PST by cyborg (http://mentalmumblings.blogspot.com/)
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To: NYC GOP Chick

I'd pay to see that!


25 posted on 02/19/2005 9:09:00 PM PST by lavrenti (Think of who is pithy, yet so attractive to women.)
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To: SpyGuy

Uganda has turned around AIDS by promoting fidelity in marriage and chastity before.


26 posted on 02/19/2005 10:57:16 PM PST by little jeremiah
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To: SpyGuy
Umm, no offense, but I've known what a Vagina was...umm, since probably before I could talk. I don't see how having the words 'Vagina Monologues: (Date+time+place) is all that horrible.

Now, having a sign that said, 'Red Hot An** Gang*****' or something, that I could understand being offended by that, but why are you offended by the mere mention of gentiles? I don't get it.


I think #2 is a false argument. You could use that argument on ANY adult oriented material, yet I think some of it isn't only bad, but beneficial. Should all topics of sexuality be drummed out of our dialog as a society?

#3 might be right, I don't know enough about the Vagina Monologues to answer, but there have been lots of great books and poems about sex by respected authors from before time began that I'm increasingly afraid some of my fellow right-leaning folks might have dismissed as 'trash' in times past.

#4 is right in theory, in the sense that yes, inevitably, societies that do not exhibit self-control will eventually have it imposed upon them, but it frightens me that you would bring that up over some silly poems about girls masturbating or something. I certainly think that sort of discussion isn't even close to the point of societal collapse, and it kinda frightens me that some people would think so. That sort of violent overreaction is the kind of thing that gets us in trouble, politically, if folks realize how over-the-top it is, and even worse, as a nation if for some reason people don't. Anyhow, I've read a poem or two from these performances at one point or another, and I remember thinking it was in poor taste, and not terribly good, but I don't get the violent reaction here. It seems pretty silly.
27 posted on 02/20/2005 10:48:58 AM PST by zbigreddogz
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To: MadIvan
'They cut a sketch. They also cut another in which a 16-year-old girl is seduced by an older woman.

Even though that is a crime, their description is still innocuous. Actually, the 24 year old seducer first gets the girl intoxicated with vodka. According to one report I've read, the 16 year old later describes the experience as a liberation.

Imagine the uproar if some (horribly misguided) conservative wrote a play where a conservative male grad student “cures” a 16 year old lesbian girl by getting her drunk and having his way with her, and then when she sleeps it off, she says, “Oh thank you, you saved me from being a lesbian all my life, you reminded me why only hetero sex is natural and good.”

I think they'd hear the screaming all the way over in uganda.

28 posted on 02/21/2005 1:01:44 PM PST by Mr. Silverback (Chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin' out over the line)
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To: nothingnew

Dude...too...much...information...


29 posted on 02/21/2005 1:02:37 PM PST by Mr. Silverback (Chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin' out over the line)
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To: MadIvan
...has been branded 'indecent and tasteless' by a Ugandan government minister, while church groups have described it as pornographic and 'anti-male'.

Sounds about right to me...

30 posted on 02/21/2005 1:03:49 PM PST by Barney59 (Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!)
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To: MadIvan
has been branded 'indecent and tasteless' by a Ugandan government minister, while church groups have described it as pornographic and 'anti-male'.

It is all of these things, and more. For instance it celebrates the lesbian molestation of a young girl by an older woman. It is truly despicable.

31 posted on 02/21/2005 1:09:05 PM PST by montag813
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To: montag813

I have a soft spot in my heart for present-day Uganda - first President Musaveni told Clinton off when Clinton tried to apologise for the slave trade, then their correct AIDS policies, and now this.

Oh and one of Uganda's big enemies is Zimbabwe.

Regards, Ivan


32 posted on 02/21/2005 1:12:52 PM PST by MadIvan (One blog to bring them all...and in the Darkness bind them: http://www.theringwraith.com/)
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To: MadIvan

This from Saturday's Daily Telegraph. By the way Uganda's AIDS statistics have been widey discredited by the Lancet. At best figures are down because so many people have actually died. At worst they have been positively massaged by Museveni's notoriously corrupt government.

The woman running most of the AIDS programmes is Museveni's wife Janet -- and she is believed to have pocketed most of the donor money given to fight the disease.




Regime of tyranny and torture back to haunt Uganda
By Adrian Blomfield in Kampala
(Filed: 19/03/2005)

Suspected dissidents disappear after midnight visits to their homes; chilling screams can again be heard from Idi Amin's infamous torture chambers, reopened after a quarter of a century of disuse. From the few that escape come tales of punishment beatings and even mass executions.

Welcome to President Yoweri Museveni's Uganda. One of Britain's favourite African states in recent years has, almost unnoticed in the West, become a sinister land where a corrupt regime uses its secret police to rule through fear.



President Yoweri Museveni

The reasons for this transition are not hard to fathom. Mr Museveni has ruled Uganda since 1986, when his rebels marched triumphantly into the capital Kampala. Many of his countrymen believe he now wants to recast himself as that most African of leaders: a president for life.

Signalling his intent to jettison the vestigial trappings of democracy his government still professes, Mr Museveni has set out to remove a constitutional provision that prevents him from standing in elections next year.

Not all Ugandans are keen on the idea, but the government has ways of making them change their mind.

Last year, Yasin, a taxi driver who occasionally chauffeured a senior opposition official around the countryside, was woken by a loud rapping at his door a few hours before dawn. The men who had come to arrest him were not policemen, but members of the widely feared Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI).

Yasin knew that the CMI, a shadowy spy agency directly answerable to the president, had no powers to arrest anybody. But he also knew better than to question his captors.

He was taken to Makindye barracks, where some of the worst atrocities of Amin's infamous State Research Bureau, which used to force inmates to beat each other to death with sledgehammers, took place in the 1970s.

"Every day for a week, they would hang me upside down and beat me with clubs," Yasin said. "They wanted to know names of people working for the opposition. I kept saying I didn't know any, but they wouldn't believe me." On his third day, Yasin watched as a fellow inmate, an elderly man accused of recruiting for the main opposition alliance, the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), was killed using a method known as "Liverpool". The victim's head was placed in a bag that was repeatedly filled with water. To breathe, he had to drink it all, but the more he drank, the more bloated his belly became until his innards ruptured and he died in a pool of his own urine.

The official existence of political parties was only allowed last year, under considerable western pressure. Until then Mr Museveni operated what he called a no-party system, in which every Ugandan belonged to an entity known as The Movement, which was headed by the president.

In theory, the philosophy was supposed to rid Uganda of the ethnic and political divisions that helped cause the civil wars and dictatorships that characterised much of the country's history since independence from Britain in 1962. In practice it has allowed Mr Museveni to exert total control over most of his people.

The leader of the FDC, Kizza Besigye, in exile in South Africa, has instructed his campaigners to dole out copies of Animal Farm during party rallies.

But most people are too frightened to attend. Secret police infiltrate the rallies, noting down those who attend. It is usually supporters and low ranking FDC members who are taken to Makindye.

As a means of spreading fear, it is an extremely effective method.

Philip and his wife Juliet were picked up in January, accused of renting out their hall south of the capital for an opposition meeting.

Like many fellow suspects, they were accused of supporting the People's Redemption Army (PRA), a shadowy rebel outfit the government links to the FDC. The Foreign Office Minister, Chris Mullin, says that it is likely the PRA does not exist.

"Every night I was hung upside down over a pit of snakes while my wife was raped by army officers," said Philip, who was held in Room 21 of Mbale Police Station, another Amin torture chamber. "One time we had to move five dead bodies into a truck. Another time I was made to dig my own grave." Like Yasin, Philip and Juliet were released. Their captors told them to report what had happened to fellow villagers, but threatened them with death if they told anyone else.

Certainly things are not as bad as they were under Amin, who killed half-a-million people in eight years of bloodshed. Mr Museveni remains popular in many quarters for bringing stability to the country.

The president was long seen as an African role model in the West for his willingness to introduce economic reforms demanded by the World Bank.

But many donors are now disgusted both by the repression and by the corruption in Mr Museveni's cabinet, many of whom are relatives of the president. "Museveni hoodwinked many donors for a long time and people wanted to see the glass as half full," a diplomat said. "We are now learning our lesson." But that lesson may have come too late. A gang of young thugs, known as the Kalangala Action Plan (KAP), is allegedly preparing to disrupt the elections. Styled on the youth wing of President Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party in Zimbabwe, the KAP was an effective tool of intimidation during flawed 2001 elections won by Mr Museveni.

With an even greater risk of defeat if elections are free and fair, diplomats fear that the KAP could be responsible for serious violence and compound Uganda's human rights reputation still further


33 posted on 03/19/2005 10:38:52 AM PST by propertius
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