Abstract

Editorials

The article focuses on several political issues. "There is no fineness of suppression," Quebec-born novelist Saul Bellow once wrote. "When you suppress one thing, you suppress the adjacent." More than anything one will hear from the Canadian government, Bellow's statement helps explain why two books by anti-pornography feminist Andrea Dworkin, and truckloads of other U.S.-made cultural goods have been detained, banned and even burned by border guards in recent years. This epidemic of censorship shows how "progressive" controls on expression are bound to backfire. Canadian Customs censorship has existed for years, but escalated when a Canadian Supreme Court decision last year adopted anti-pornography feminism. Venezuelans said no to neo-liberalism on December 5. By 30 percent in a four-way race they elected as President Rafael Caldera, a populist who, despite his old roots in the country's political right, won the support of most left parties and campaigned vigorously against government policies of free markets, fiscal conservatism and indiscriminate privatization. Another 21 percent went to former steelworker Andres Velasquez and his Causa R, or Radical Cause, a somewhat mercurial party of the left.