WHY DO LIBERALS WORSHIP EVIL?
[This Monday’s TTP Archive was originally published on December 2, 2016. A little over three weeks before (November 8), Donald Trump stunned the world being elected President, and now the Babylon Bee couldn’t help celebrating both that and Castro croaking on November 25. For me, it was an opportunity to discuss why those on the Left so often have a compulsion to worship the worst of humanity rather than the finest.]
It was the summer of 1992. Our youngest son, Jackson, had been born in May, and I was staying put, not traveling anywhere to remain at home to help Rebel take care of him.
A friend of mine named Ray Kline called. Ray was a legendary intel guy in Washington, having been the Deputy Director of the CIA under John Kennedy, and later Director of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon).
It was Ray Kline who, in the fall of 1962, drove down the George Washington Parkway from Langley CIA headquarters to the White House, entered the Oval Office, and placed the satellite photos of the Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba on Kennedy’s desk to personally explain them to the President of the United States.
That’s how the Cuban Missile Crisis began.
Ray was calling to tell me about a 30th anniversary conference of the veterans of the Crisis he had just come back from. The conference was in Havana, Cuba.
“You went to Cuba, Ray?” I asked, amazed. “Jack, the Soviet Union has vanished off the map [December 1991] and a lot of Castro’s people are nervous” he replied. “They are trying to convince him to make his peace with the US. They even asked me if I knew of a conservative organization that would send a delegation to Havana and talk to them.”
Ray paused for effect. “I suggested you and your Freedom Research Foundation.”
“You’ve got to be kidding, Ray,” was all I could say.
“Jack, Cuban intel knows all about how you instigated the Reagan Doctrine, which is why they no longer have their Soviet patron. Who better than you to go and see if they are for real?”
I told him I would think about it. I decided to go and told Rebel, my reason: “I want to look Fidel Castro in the eye and tell him that someday the Cuban people will urinate on his grave.”
She decided to go with me – in order to prevent me from doing any such thing.
Thus it was in October of 1992, with my Mom looking after little Jackson, that Rebel, our oldest son Brandon (just turned 8), a group of donors to the Freedom Research Foundation, and I went to Cuba.
Most countries run by a dictator are ubiquitously festooned with pictures of their Dear Leader — like Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe or North Korea with the Kims.
So the very first thing I noticed in Cuba is that Castro was invisible: No pictures, statues, huge posters or other depictions of him anywhere. There were only billboards and signs with the Slogan of the Revolution: Socialismo o Muerte – Socialism or Death.
Not once did I see the rebellious defacement the sign was begging for: the “o” scratched out and replaced with “es” – Socialism is Death.
Walking down a street in Havana, Rebel and I came upon a middle-aged man engaged in make-shift repairs on his bicycle. Fluent in Spanish, Rebel struck up a conversation with him. I noticed the bike was made in China and had a label in English: “Forever.”
When Rebel asked him about his bike, he said it was no good. Trying to make our talk light-hearted, I said, “Tell him the bike is called Forever.” Rebel translated his reply: “Nothing is forever.”
I couldn’t help myself. Instantly I said, “Like Fidel Castro.”
When the man heard Rebel say this in Spanish, he was not startled nor fearful. Instead his eyes went blank, glazed over with utter incomprehension. He simply could not conceive of a Cuba without Castro.
The Castros rule through a secret police and informer network who are everywhere and look like everyone else – the “government in the crowd.” But at this moment, there was no one nearby who could overhear our conversation. And there didn’t need to be.
Castro rule and constant presence have been internalized by Cubans. Their lives have been controlled for so many years, he has turned them into a nation of obedient robots.
You could see it in this man’s eyes, in the eyes of the Cuban people in general. The lights are on, but nobody is home. They have checked out.
Last Friday (11/25) at age 90, Fidel Castro finally croaked. Cuban-Americans danced in the streets of Miami. Liberals mourned. A mystery that has puzzled me for almost 60 years rose again to confront me.
When I was 14 years old in 1958, my father was able to take my family to Moscow on a filming assignment. Our Intourist guide was named Valya. She took us to Red Square where I was entranced by the fabulous St. Basil’s Cathedral built 400 years ago by Russia’s first Czar, Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584), and named after an eccentric Russian saint known as Basil the Blessed (1468-1552).
Then we went to Lenin’s Tomb.
On the Kremlin side of Red Square, it housed the waxy embalmed corpse of the Soviet Union’s founder, Vladimir Lenin, who died in 1924 – and that of Joseph Stalin as well, who had died just a few years ago in 1953. (Stalin’s corpse was removed from Lenin’s tomb on the order of Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, and buried some 300 feet away under the Kremlin wall.)
A huge line of Russians, hundreds of people, waited their turn to enter and see the corpses encased in glass displays.
Valya took us to the front of the line, as we were “foreign guests.” Everyone from the guards to the people in line to Valya were so reverential, as if this were a holy, sacred place. There was complete silence as we entered the tomb with a number of Russians and proceeded past the two bodies under glass, nobody making the slightest sound. It was impossibly creepy.
It was also hard for me not to laugh. All over Moscow we had seen huge statues of Lenin and Stalin, making them look like giants towering above the rest of us mere pygmies. Yet I had learned in the research I’d done back home that they were not much taller than midgets – Lenin was five-foot-one, while Stalin was under five-four[i].
What really got to me was all the pretending that these two monsters were moral giants. What would the world think of Germans flocking to the tomb of Hitler, with Hitler’s body on display under glass and worshipped?
I was only 14, yet I knew that these men had murdered millions, that they were among the most evil men who had ever lived, that they were moral equivalents of Hitler. The reverential silence, the worship of evil, displayed by these Russians all around me as we slowly shuffled past their corpses was terrifying and mysterious. Suddenly, I didn’t want to laugh.
When we came out again onto Red Square, I felt overwhelmed by a question: Why would people worship evil?
Why would they worship monsters as heroes, monsters who took away their freedom, who slaughtered and starved them, put them in concentration camps, caused them to live a life of fear?
The question puzzles me to this day. I saw one answer in the eyes of Cubans in Havana: helplessness.
When people feel helpless, they submit. An old aphorism explains this exactly: “When you have a man by the balls, his heart and mind will follow.”
But… why do Russians today, 25 years after the extinction of the Soviet Union, continue to line up in droves every day to pay Zombie Reverence to the monster in Lenin’s Tomb?
Why do they continue to worship evil when they are under no compulsion to do so?
Even more puzzling is affluent and free liberals in America worshipping evil.
It’s no puzzle seeing many of the world’s fascist scumbags show up to pay homage to their dead hero in Havana. But why does the BBC or USA Today headline them as “World Leaders”?
Why would NBC’s Andrea Mitchell be in tears over her “revered” Castro’s death, or ABC’s Jim Avila compare him to George Washington? Why did so much of the US media have a love affair with Castro for more than a half-century?
Not all liberals worship evil. In Richard Cohen’s On The Left column yesterday (11/29), he condemned Obama’s citing “the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation.” Cohen’s acid retort:
“If individual lives were altered by torture, imprisonment, execution or mere harassment then I suppose the president is on to something and once again using language creatively. But this is thin gruel for Castro’s victims, some of whom might have expected the president of the United States to acknowledge their suffering. Alas, they got nothing.”
In the Washington Post (11/26), Dr. Carlos Eire, Riggs Professor of History at Yale University denounced the “Kafkaesque moral disequilibrium” affecting so many of his academic colleagues regarding Castro, listing 13 of his horrors that should be etched onto his tombstone.
They are the exceptions that “proves” (meaning “tests”) the rule of liberals rooting for America’s enemies. That’s virtually a defining characteristic of liberals – to be so embarrassed over America’s success in world history that they are on the side of anyone anti-American no matter how evil.
The good news is that very soon we will no longer have a liberal embarrassed-to-be-American president, and instead have a president who will make liberals everywhere, from the media to academia to Hollywood, irrelevant.
Within hours of the announcement of Castro’s death, President-elect Donald Trump issued this statement:
“Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades. Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.
“While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve.
“Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty. I join the many Cuban Americans who supported me so greatly in the presidential campaign, including the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association that endorsed me, with the hope of one day soon seeing a free Cuba.”
This is exactly how a real American President would describe the death of an evil monster. At last, we have a president of whom we can be proud of once again.
Which is why we no longer have to mind if liberals worship evil. We no longer have to mind because they no longer matter.
Ps: No, we didn’t get to meet Fidel, who sacked his underlings for inviting us. Rebel was relieved.
[i] Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who adopted the made-up pseudonym of Lenin, was five-one according to British Marxist historian of the Soviet Union, Eric Hobsbawn. Iosef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, who adopted the pseudonym of Stalin (meaning ‘steel’ in Russian), measured according to police records in 1902 at age 23 “2 archin 4½ vershoks.” An archin is 28 inches, a vershok 1¾ inches, which makes Stalin less than five-four.