September 24, 2009

History of long speeches

I still got the readings to do, so haven't got the chance to watch today's UN session. It's said Chavez's performance today was not bad. He even broached the Kennedy assassination, as His Excellency King of Kings Colonel Qaddafi did yesterday. But he ended with singing. That would be pretty cool! I will try to update as soon as I view the clips.

There is a pretty cool article of long political speeches. The historic long speech in General Assembly belongs to Comrade Fidel Castro in 1960 (considering the speed of Spanish language, that would be even longer), but the longest one in UN is Indian's speech in Security Council about Kashmir in 1957 (dunno about Hindi, but its transcript in UN website is 160 pages long).

It also talked about how a guy was arrested because he stopped first after 11 minutes' applause when they are toasting Comrade Stalin. That's a cool example for game theory, isn't it? How to stop together so nobody gets arrested? haha....

Also, Brezhnev was so old that he would read the same page twice but nobody would notice because it was so long even without it.... or even they did, they couldn't say anything without being executed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8272473.stm
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6 comments:

  1. Claudia PompaSeptember 26, 2009 at 11:18 AM

    Well Fidel Castro is super famous for being able to give speeches that last hours....literally...in PY his speech lasted 4 hs...

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  2. Anthony GaoSeptember 26, 2009 at 1:58 PM

    It's a torture to attend this kind of speech event, isn't it? Since you will be prosecuted if you stop applauding... haha

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  3. Katya StepanetsSeptember 26, 2009 at 3:38 PM

    hahaha! a cool case for the game theory indeed! LOL

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  4. AnonymousSeptember 26, 2009 at 6:19 PM

    I read that article too. It's on BBC website I think.
    Ling

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  5. AnonymousSeptember 27, 2009 at 1:59 PM

    In Gulag Archipelago, Sholzenitsyn relates about Commisar meetings where applause would continue for hours until the first person would pass out from exhaustion...then he/she would propmtly be arrested.
    Why do Communists love long speeches? I think it might be because the long speech covers "everything" and that it leaves one too exhausted to think afterwards...or ask questions...
    -travis

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  6. Anthony GaoSeptember 27, 2009 at 8:28 PM

    Yeah. They deliberately want to confuse us！

    ReplyDelete

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