Comrade, we don’t need a barrel in Nepal

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

The Nepali journalists I noted earlier have posted an open letter to a leader of the Maoists. That’s right, an open letter, open rebuke, and open invitation to a leader of the terrorists who have some reputation for disappearing people they don’t like.

Some of those disappeared do later reappear and still, it was just a few years ago that my friends in Kathmandu, perhaps the safest city in Nepal to say such things, would not question the king or mention the Maoists in voices louder that a whisper. That today these things can be blogged is either real progress for democracy or real personal courage. Likely it’s both. How could they ever really be separate?

So often in developed nations too, leaders and leading organizations take up the standard of doing good for the “little people” but pursue actions and policies that actually refuse to honor and support direct action by those same people. What is happening now in Nepal, all the conversations, private and publicly posted, seems at least as democratic and much more exciting than anything I see happening in the US or the UK.

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