Obama’s Authoritarians

Mouthing Sixties-style anti-Western slogans is the way to win the president’s heart.

By Victor Davis Hanson July 16, 2013

There were many paradoxes left after the protests of the 1960s. One of the worst was American elites’ hypocrisy toward authoritarianism abroad.

Most Americans granted that anti-Communist strongmen like Ferdinand Marcos, Augusto Pinochet, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and Anastasio Somoza stifled liberty and freedom. Yet they further agreed that during a lose-lose Cold War, in which our enemies the Soviet Union and Red China had collectively murdered perhaps 80 million of their own people, there were no good choices. Thus they were willing to go along with the American government’s support for right-wing thugs who were enlisted in the war against Communism, although the elites, especially in the academy, regularly castigated them.

Yet left-wing brutes — the Castro brothers, Che Guevara, the Eastern European puppet regimes, an array of monsters in Africa, and, later, the Ortega bunch and Hugo Chávez — were usually given a pass from commensurate scrutiny. The reasoning apparently was twofold. One, bloodthirsty liberationists gained exemption by claiming that their absolutism was in service to “equality” and “the people.” Their supposedly noble ends justified their bloody means.....To Read More.....