Look around the globe and look around this nation an see what’s happening. Dictators and tyrants are doing everything they can to stay in power flaunting the will of the people by denying election; by cheating in elections and by using force to suppress independence and freedoms.

“Americans like to think we believe in democracy and in challenging authoritarianism. But, based on what’s happening here and in Eastern Europe, do we still care?”

“On Thursday, Belarusian authorities began releasing prisoners from the jails. These were people who had been arrested during the days of protest following Sunday’s presidential election, which European officials said ‘was neither free nor fair’” and in which Aleksander Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus for 26 years, claimed to win over 80 precent of the vote. After the country broke out in protest, Lukahsenko dismissed the people in the streets as foreign-funded ‘puppets’ and police rounded up some 6,000 protestors. Their families and lawyers had no way to get in touch or to learn what was happening to their loved ones. All signs, however, pointed to the utterly terrifying. Agonized screams could be heard outside prison walls, and those protestors who were being let out, had usually been leaving in the back of ambulances.

“But on Thursday, a clearer picture began to emerge of what had transpired inside the jails. After hundreds of protestors and journalists were released, they described being severely beaten and humiliated, handcuffed and packed in jail cells and forced to lie face down on the concrete, ‘like a living carpet,’ in pools of their own blood.”

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