Speaker’s Corner revisited

In 1872, the British Parliament decreed Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park of London as a place reserved for free expression, and initially it attracted all those extremists who, although qualifying as nuts, still had the right to vent their opinions. Lately, we have all witnessed how the original Speaker’s Corner speakers moved into Speaker’s Studios and now radicalism, anarchy, or fundamentalism is voiced on prime-time television. All of us others considered as boring in-betweens, have now to settle gratefully for slots in after-midnight cable television, or Speaker’s Corner, (or FT when they published us).

Sir Cass Sunstein discusses the fundamental issue of “How the rise of the Daily Me threatens democracy” January 11, and he should be commended for it since indeed the most dangerous weapon for mass-self destruction in any society is divisiveness; as a columnist in Venezuela I should know; there I write in green but my readers can only read me in yellow or in blue.

The current sheer overload of information forces many to use a very simple though also very dangerous initial classification system that uses some basic common denominators. The one of these most recently used is of course Bush, and which has otherwise clear-minded people thinking: “Hugo Chavez speaks against Bush? Then he must be good!”

How do you fight it? The only way I know is by always pointing out the many shameful similarities of the extremes and trying to make life in the middle seem interesting, fun and chic. But, it still takes guts to swim in the middle of the river and not crawl up on an extreme safe shore!

European blindness

Sir, you must excuse me using Philip Stephens’ (November 3) “A bitter crop from our failure to tend to global warming” for a somewhat different discussion but when he says that “Europeans . . . are beyond rational calculation: bad for George W. Bush by definition must be good for everyone else” that must be exactly the reason for which many Europeans have not distanced themselves completely from a Hugo Chavez, who has positioned himself as a big time Bush foe, and have been turning a blind eye on issues such like that in a notoriously divided country the Congress of Venezuela has 167 members in favor of Chavez, and none, zero, zilch, of those who differ with him. I said a “somewhat different discussion” because in fact, with respect to global warming, they have also wanted to ignore that petrol is sold domestically in Venezuela for about three euro cents per liter and thereby producing runaway consumption and the transfer of about 10% of it GDP from the poor to those who have cars. Indeed, how hatred can make you blind!

Philip Stephens George Bush Hugo Chavez