Blast From the Past: You Are Not as Rational As You Think

By Jon Ray, Feb 29, 2016 @ Dissecting Leftism

The article, When it comes to politics, you’re not as rational as you think, published by Andy Murdock, UC Newsroom is unusually fair, considering that it comes from a psychologist at UCI (Peter Ditto) and there is much to applaud in it.  Its central idea, that reason is the servant of the emotions, goes all the way back to David Hume, one of the great British empiricist philosophers of the 18th century.

Ditto extends that thinking to say that political attitudes are not rational either and that they are essentially emotionally based.  As I have often pointed out that there is a large hereditary component in political attitudes, I of course agree with that and have often argued that political attitudes can only be explained at the psychological level.

What is conservative or Leftist in political party programs varies from time to time and place to place so searching for any consistency over time in either can seem a complete failure.  At the psychological level, however, I argue, there is plenty of consistency and order in what people believe.  At its simplest, conservatives are cautious and Leftists are angry.

Where I part company with Ditto is his claim that Left and Right are equally emotional and that their beliefs are therefore equally irrational. I would claim that the Left are much more emotional and therefore much more irrational.  We see that in the way Leftists fly into a rage and want to shut you up if ever you present facts that upset their beliefs. Just try to discuss the research on African IQ and you will rapidly find that out. What you find is that Leftists substitute abuse for rational argument.  Conservatives can get abusive too but normally only after they have presented fact-based arguments.  Leftists skip the fact-based argument part and go straight to rage.

Any conservative blogger can tell you that comments and emails they get from Leftists are almost invariably of that sort. Any sort of reasoned submission from Leftists is so uncommon in comments on my blog that the sole reasoned comment I did once receive elicited a whole investigation of it and subsequent post on it from me.  Even then, however, the comment was mostly abusive.  It was just that I could see a reasonable point amid  the abuse.  See here for that episode.

Ditto has done quite a lot of research on his claims and I have read some of it.  You can find links to it here.  The framework for it the one put forward by Jonathan Haidt -- in which Leftists are said to be guided by only two moral principles while conservatives are guided by five.

As I have pointed out on previous occasions, the big problem with Haidt's research -- and the research of those who bob along in his wake -- is that it relies on questionnaires and therefore relies on people describing their thinking honestly.  And the human propensity to lie is so great that that is a rather heroic  assumption.   I did 20 years of questionnaire research from 1970 to 1990 that resulted in over 200 published academic journal articles. And I used all the tricks that psychologists know to catch and correct for dishonest responding.  And I concluded in the end that the whole effort was mostly a waste of time.

The thing that most convinced me that questionnaires are mostly useless came from the fact that my principal research interest was in authoritarianism and attitude to authority.  There can be few things more authoritarian than Communism or wanting to "fundamentally transform" America (Obama's promise), so one would expect Leftists to agree heartily with statements approving of authority and its exercise.  But they do not.  They deny having in their motivations anything like what they actually do in politics.  Their rage-filled motivations are just too dismal for them to admit -- even to themselves, probably.

So in studying the psychology of politics, I now look at what Leftists do and what policies they promote in actual electoral politics.  And I find that all the great tyrannies and political mass murders of the last century have been the work of people who preached some flavour of socialism -- from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to Mao to Fidel Castro. And to this day American  Leftists speak kindly of the brutal Castro, with Obama's recent visit to Cuba  illustrating that for all to see.  So if that consistency of behavior among Leftists is not evidence of underlying rage and hate among them, I would like to see what would constitute better evidence.   

That Leftists claim benevolent intentions is clearly just camouflage.  They want to destroy, not lift up. 

Editor's Note:  I'm adding these new articles from American Thinker as I feel they're an example of how irrational people are.  RK

• Even If Moses Endorsed Donald Trump, Jews Would Not Vote For Him Alexander G. Markovsky Until those American Jews in thrall to socialism break free of that pernicious doctrine, they will continue to vote for their own destruction.....
•  
  GLAAD CEO gets caught spending like BLM bosses as new report alleges she blew cash on 5-star hotels, a Cape Cod vacation, and home renovations August 2, 2024 by Olivia Murray No one loves money like a leftist.....

 

Nixon and Kennedy: The myths and reality

By Patrick J. Buchanan  

Editors Note:  For some reason I'm finding many of the articles I've linked over the last ten years are being hit, even going back to 2008 a year after I first started this blog.  I have no idea why, but they're good pieces. This one is from World Net Daily in 2013, and while initially I just linked it, I really think that piece needs to be promoted far and wide.  So, if Pat, who I've met, or World Net Daily object, I will break this down into a link once again. Meanwhile, here's  the full text.  

Also, all said here about Kennedy is right on, Kennedy was not who the media made him out to be, when in fact they knew the Kennedys to be a disgrace and covered it up.   In fact, this piece isn't long enough to cover how bad he was.  However, Buchannan was in the Nixon administration and make no mistake, considering the long term consequences of Nixon's foreign policies with China and environmental law here in America, Nixon may ultimately have been far worse.  Nixon was a globalist, and let's face it,  Richard Nixon Was Not A Great President. Accept it!  RK

Had there been no Dallas, there would been no Camelot.

There would have been no John F. Kennedy as brilliant statesman cut off in his prime, had it not been for those riveting days from Dealey Plaza to Arlington and the lighting of the Eternal Flame.

Along with the unsleeping labors of an idolatrous press and the propagandists who control America's popular culture, those four days created and sustained the Kennedy Myth.

But, over 50 years, the effect has begun to wear off.

The New York Times reports that in the ranking of presidents, Kennedy has fallen further and faster than any. Ronald Reagan has replaced him as No. 1, and JFK is a fading fourth.

Kennedy is increasingly perceived today as he was 50 years ago, before word came that shots had been fired in Dallas.

That he was popular, inspirational, charismatic, no one denied. But no one would then have called him great or near great. His report card had too many C's, F's and Incompletes.

His great legislative victory had been the passage of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. His tax-cut bill was buried on the Hill.

His triumph had been forcing a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. But we would learn this was done by a secret deal for the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey and a secret pledge not to invade Cuba.

And after the missile crisis, Bobby Kennedy pushed the CIA to eliminate Castro, eliciting a warning from Fidel that two could play this game. Lyndon Johnson said that under the Kennedys, the CIA had been running "a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean."

What caused Nikita Khrushchev to think he could get away with putting rockets in Cuba? His perception that JFK was a weak president.

Kennedy had denied air cover for the Cuban patriots at the Bay of Pigs, resulting in the worst debacle of the Cold War. He was then berated and humiliated by Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit in June 1961.

In August, Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall. Kennedy sat paralyzed.

In September, Khrushchev smashed the three-year-old nuclear test-ban moratorium with a series of explosions featuring, at Novaya Zemlya, a 57-megaton "Tsar Bomba," the largest man-made blast ever.

"Less profile, more courage," the placards read.

In Southeast Asia, JFK had Averell Harriman negotiate a treaty for neutralizing Laos, resulting in Hanoi's virtual annexation of the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos into South Vietnam.

Where Eisenhower had 600 advisers in Vietnam, JFK increased it to 16,000 and gave his blessing to a generals' coup in which our ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem, was assassinated.

Then and there, Vietnam became America's war.

Kennedy had made a famous phone call to Mrs. Martin Luther King during the 1960 campaign when her husband had been arrested. Yet, he kept his administration away from the March on Washington and directed J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap Dr. King to learn of his associations with Communists.

Since his death, Kennedy's reputation has been ravaged by revelations of assignations and mistresses from Marilyn Monroe to Mafia molls to White House interns from Miss Porter's School.

All of this was covered up by his courtier journalists who would collaborate in perpetuating the Kennedy myth and collude in destroying their great hate object, Richard Nixon.

Yet, contrast what Nixon did with what JFK failed to do.

Where Kennedy managed to get Gov. George Wallace to admit two black students to the University of Alabama, Nixon desegregated 70 percent of all Southern public schools.

Where the JFK-LBJ administration spent eight years putting 535,000 U.S. troops into a war they could neither end nor win, Nixon withdrew all U.S. troops in four years, brought home the POWs and left every provincial capital in South Vietnamese hands.

Where Kennedy had the Peace Corps, Nixon ended the draft, gave 18-year-olds the right to vote, created an Environmental Protection Agency and a Cancer Institute and an Occupational Health and Safety Administration.

Where Kennedy gave speeches about detente, Nixon negotiated the greatest arms treaties since the Washington Naval Agreement – SALT I and the ABM treaty – ended decades of hostility between the U.S. and the People's Republic of China, rescued Israel in the Yom Kippur War and pulled Egypt out of the Soviet bloc into the U.S. camp.

Creating a new majority that would dominate presidential politics until 1992, Nixon was rewarded with a 49-state landslide in 1972.

Whereupon a press elite that had maintained a conspiracy of silence on Kennedy's misconduct seized on Nixon's failure to deal decisively with misconduct in his campaign to bring him down in the first successful coup d'etat in U.S. political history.

The mythologizing of JFK and demonization of Nixon tell us less about respective accomplishments than the moral character of an establishment, which, though it had lost America by '72, still controlled the culture, media, bureaucracy and Congress.

And as they brought down Nixon with Watergate, they would seek to bring down Reagan with Iran-Contra. But that coup failed.

 

Cultural and Structural Suicide of Western Civilization, Part I

Precipitous, catastrophic civilizational decline. Brought to you by our "elites".  William R Doherty

Rich Kozlovich

Let's start this article with Molly Slag's July 20, 2023 article, America’s Degradation Is No Accident saying:

Do you remember the 1966 film The Sand Pebbles? In the closing scene, sailor Jake Holman (Steve McQueen) is killed by two rifle shots fired by soldiers during the Chinese Nationalist Northern Expedition. The two shots are a few seconds apart. After receiving the shock of the first bullet, the disoriented and moribund Holman mutters, “What happened?” Then, realizing his life is rapidly ebbing away, he shouts to the universe, “What the hell happened?!” With these words comes the crack of the second shot.

What happened is this is the conclusion of almost 150 years of leftist infestation and infiltration of the nation's institutions. The left has been working to destroy any sense of commonality in America forever, and have been instrumental in promoting this insane violence.  As their vile infection spread it grew and we're now reaching the point where America will be just like the Balkans. 

The left has written books for years on the way they will bring America down. Their religion has many branches, and they use them all.Environmentalism, feminism, lawfare, socialism, LGBT + perversion, racism, and many more. Marxism has almost conquered America, but I believe the people are awakening.- Kirk McDonald II

Immigration, both legal and illegal, has filled the nation with anti-American Islamists.  In England it's so bad  ‘Britain will be fully Islamic soon’:

Tate has a point. Britain (and other Western countries) are in free fall, with little or no efforts to preserve its own heritage and history. The core values of the Judeo-Christian ethic have largely been discarded. Biblical values are now deemed to be outdated and “white supremacist,” even though Christianity originated in the Middle East.  In large part due to the subversion of the Christian ethic in the West, particularly under the influence of Islam and wokeism, instability is on the rise. The rule of law, including the freedom of speech, is under attack. In such situations, the most zealous entities generally prevail. Islam and Communist China are now the most dominant forces worldwide. Unless there is a strong Judeo-Christian resurgence in the West, the West is finished. 

A strong Judeo-Christian resurgence in the West?   Really?  And whose going to lead it?  Heresy is now the rule, not the exception in Western "Christian" churches. In German a Lutheran Pastor preaches that ‘God is queer’, in Sweden the "The Church of Sweden declared teen star climate activist Greta Thunberg to be an appointed successor to Jesus Christ in a 2018 tweet that resurfaced in the wake of her speech before the United Nations."   

• Satanic Marxist “Pope” Francis Welcomes ‘Piss Christ’ Artist in Vatican 

In education the teaching of facts and reality are punished with dismissal, as a biology Professor was fired for declaring scientifically proven truth that sex Is determined by chromosomes, and if you dare to call a man who" claims" to be a woman "sir", in Michigan that's a crime of  improper pronoun use and could land you in jail, or even a fine up to $10,000.  Then there's  Rachel Levine, formally known as Richard Levine, who isn't satisfied with just a ‘pride month’.  He wants a ‘summer of pride”.  And yes, he's a he, and this isn't Michigan.

As  Thomas Lifson notes:

From the “Give ‘em an inch” Department. Obsession with cross-dressers and other alphabet people is too important to confine to a mere single month, apparently. First a month, then a season. What’s next? Will we soon be asked to celebrate some people’s sexuality constantly?  Is there no limit to self-obsession?

If States dare to challenge these insanities they're being threatened with loss of Medicare dollars if they don’t provide genital mutilation surgeries, in spite of court rulings this is blatantly illegal. 

• Congrats American Taxpayer, You Just Paid for This Male Soldier to Get His “Facial Feminization” Procedure: Incredibly, the government seems utterly incapable of taking care of the nation’s homeless or vets, but somehow, they can find millions of dollars to indulge mentally ill people and their disturbing whims.

The left demands we all "go green" with "renewable energy", a misnomer to confuse if there ever was one, electric vehicles, all of which has a massive history of failure. The fact is these green misfits almost have a monopoly on being wrong, right along with every other leftist scheme there is.  Electric vehicles are a big flop. ( See my

The nation's agencies and departments  have been totally infected with treason.  Judicial corruption,  commercially bending to the will of the nation's enemies,   Rigged elections, rampant censorship, political persecution, an economic death spiral, and the growing prospect of this century’s first truly global war — "yes, bad things are either here or quickly coming."  Yet the media’s brainwashed minions prattle about “climate change,” “colonialism,” “diversity,” “equity,” Taylor Swift, and other false, foolish, or frivolous blather." Propaganda organized on a scale we've not seen in America,

Things are not good, "things won't work out for the best", and we really need to get this one incontrovertible fact.  Western civilization, including America, is facing an existential crisis. 

 

MSM Ignores Death of Longest Suffering Female Political Prisoner in Modern History of Western Hemisphere

Humberto Fontova Sep 23, 2023 @ Townhall.com

“Many of you witnessed terrible crimes committed in service of a depraved ideology," continued Trump's remarks, announcing his Cuba policy. "You saw the dreams of generations held captive, you saw what communism has done.  You knew faces that disappeared, innocents locked in prisons, and believers persecuted for preaching the word of God.  You watched the Women in White bruised, bloodied, and captured on their way from Mass.  You have heard the chilling cries of loved ones, or the cracks of firing squads piercing through the ocean breeze.  Not a good sound.

“Among the courageous Cuban dissidents with us onstage here today are Cary Roque, who was imprisoned by the Castro regime….She looks awfully good," he added. 

“Mr. President, on behalf of the Cuban people, the people thank you, and we appreciate your love,” Roque responded. 

“The Castro dictatorship may have taken 16 years of her life in a gulag, but they were never able to take her dignity," wrote Alberto de la Cruz at Babalu Blog. "The indomitable Cary Roque was an inspiration for the Cuban exile community and all women. She passed away in Miami on Wednesday (9/20) at the age of 82, but she leaves behind an incredible legacy of valor and perseverance that we would all do well to follow."

Not only was Caridad Roque a victim of The Left’s premier pin-up boys (Fidel Castro and Che Guevara) but she was also singled out for praise by President Donald Trump. Any more questions about the media black-out of her history, suffering and death? 

On the other hand: 

"She was an early b*llbuster, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. She rattled a lot of cages before women were even allowed into the zoo," said Katie Couric hailing Barbara Walters in Vanity Fair upon her passing on Dec. 30, 2022.

Some women living in the U.S. today (and with long experience in literal cages) strongly differ with Couric. Barbara Walters “interviewed” Fidel Castro in 1977 and again in 2002. But the famous ABC Wicked Witch who interrogated Nixon, Reagan and Bush – when confronted by Fidel Castro – morphed into Ann Margaret in front of Conrad Birdie. No hint of the famous ABC News dominatrix in Washington was evident in the smiley and goo-goo-eyed groupie in Havana. 

Instead this famous “feminist” shamelessly stroked among the most brutal and insatiable male egos in modern history—and within walking distance of where hundreds of his female victims (including Cary Roque) languished in filthy, rat-infested and sweltering torture chambers. 

When feminist icon Barbara Walters sat quivering alongside Fidel Castro in 1977 cooing that “Fidel Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful!” dozens of Cuban (genuine) feminists suffered in nearby torture chambers. From exile today many of them recall the horrors: 

“They started by beating us with twisted coils of wire," recalls former political prisoner Ezperanza Pena from exile today. “I remember Teresita on the ground with all her lower ribs broken. Gladys had both her arms broken. Doris had her face cut up so badly from the beatings that when she tried to drink, water would pour out of her lacerated cheeks.” 

“On Mother’s Day they allowed family visits,” recalls Manuela Calvo from exile today. "But as our mothers and sons and daughters were watching, we were beaten with rubber hoses and high-pressure hoses were turned on us, knocking all of us the ground floor and rolling us around as the guards laughed and our loved-ones screamed helplessly.” 

“When female guards couldn’t handle us male guards were called in for more brutal beatings. I saw teenaged girls beaten savagely, their bones broken, their mouths bleeding,” recalled prisoner Polita Grau. 

Fidel Castro’s regime, so “magnetic” to Barbara Walters, jailed and tortured 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown—not only in Cuba—but in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere. Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s. 

Their prison conditions were described by former political prisoner Maritza Lugo: “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consists of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rat come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.” 

“Only minutes after my arrival at the Hotel Riviera in Havana, I was told to be in his (Fidel Castro’s) office within 15 minutes,” wrote Barbara Walters about her first interview with Fidel Castro in May 1977. “There I found a very courtly, somewhat portly Fidel Castro. He apologized for mak­ing me wait for two years and said that now he wanted to cooperate…On Wednesday, Castro himself came to our hotel to pick us up…Then, driving a Russian-made jeep, he took us to the Bay of Pigs, where we boarded an armed patrol boat. We thus became, according to Castro, the first Americans to cross the Bay of Pigs since the U.S.-supported invasion there in 1961.” 

Barbara Walters’ crossing of the Bay of Pigs was probably more than a historical sight-seeing junket. On the other side and near the mouth of the bay sits Castro’s personal island-resort Cayo Piedra, that houses his luxurious get-away chateau. According to defectors, when younger, Fidel Castro often repaired to this remote but luxurious villa for spearfishing among other recreational pursuits. 

Juan Reynaldo Sanchez, a Lt. Col. in Cuba’s Armed Forces who spent 17 years as Fidel Castro’s bodyguard/valet, had just been promoted to the position when Barbara Walters visited Cuba for her first interview with the Stalinist dictator in May 1977. Sanchez defected to the U.S. in 2008 and explained to this writer how he was part of the Castroite entourage that accompanied Ms Walters and Fidel to the latter’s island chateau. Ms Walters does mention that: 

“We stopped at a little island for a picnic lunch of grilled fish and pineapple. During which Castro swapped fish stories with the ABC crew. It was here that we taped our first but brief and candid interview with him.” 

Argentinian journalist Juan Gasparini in his Spanish language book Mujeres de Dictadores (Women of Dictators) writes that, “It is widely supposed that Fidel Castro had several amorous adventures with the North American reporter Barbara Walters who twice visited Cuba to interview him. It is alleged that she later visited Cuba more discretely for private visits. According to The Hollywood Reporter, "Walters has admitted to developing an attraction to the Cuban leader while boating with him on assignment in 1977, but she denies things got physical."

When Castro’s torturers were transferring his female prisoners from cell to cell while Barbara Walters visited Castro’s Bay of Pigs’ “Love Shack,” the guards were forced to drag many of these Cuban women around like dead animals. They were simply incapable of walking. The constant beatings had incapacitated many of them. The excrement and menstrual fluid caked to their legs and bare feet made it more difficult still. Some of the cells called “Tapiadas,” were barely big enough to stand and walk in and were completely sealed except for a few tiny air holes. The women were confined completely underground in total darkness and suffocating heat for weeks at a time. These were tombs by any other name, except that their occupants were still alive, if barely and if only by ultra-human perseverance. 

In marked contrast to Cary Roque’s horrific ordeal in Castroite prisons, the celebrated Nobel Peace Price winner Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar has served a total of 15 years under house arrest. The late celebrated human rights activist Elena Bonner of the Soviet era served a total of 5 years of internal exile. 

So you’ll please excuse these Cuban ladies (most of them U.S. citizens today) if they regard the “struggles” of Betty Freidan, Gloria Steinem – and yes, the “b*llbusting” by Barbara Walters – as a trifle overblown.

The Bay of Pigs Part II—the Battle’s Over but the Heroism Continues

Humberto Fontova  Apr 22, 2023 @ Townhall.com

Outnumbered over 10 to one by Soviet-led forces and betrayed by their sponsor, these mostly civilian volunteers fought till the last bullet. In three days of relentless close-quarter fighting they made monkeys of the Soviet commanders at the scene and their Cuban lackeys and cannon-fodder, inflicting losses of 20 to one. 

Castro and Che were jittery there for awhile, urging caution in the counterattack. From the lethal fury of the attack and the horrendous casualties their troops and militia were taking, the two Soviet satraps assumed they faced at least 20,000 invading "mercenaries," as they called them. 

Yet it was a band of mostly civilian volunteers they outnumbered laughably. But to hear Castro's echo chamber (the Beltway media and leftist academics), Fidel was the plucky David and the invaders the bumbling Goliath!

(We recently discussed the battle in greater detail here.)

In fact, if JFK wanted some genuine Profiles in Courage he might have looked at the men he betrayed on that heroic beachhead. Some of the most jaw-dropping heroics, however, came after the shooting ended, after they’d spent their last bullets and knew no more were coming from their ally, the most powerful nation on earth, the same one that enforced a "no-fly zone" half a country wide on another continent (Iraq) with half the U.S Air Force for a decade—but refused to provide one three miles across, 90 miles away, for half a day with two planes.

At any rate, the battle was over in three days, but the heroism was not.

Now came almost two years in Castro’s dungeons for the captured Brigada, complete with the physical and psychological torture that always comes with communist incarceration. During almost two years in Castro’s dungeons, the freedom-fighters lived under a daily death sentence. 

Escaping that sentence would have been easy: simply sign the little paper confessing they were “mercenaries of the Yankee imperialists” or go on camera denouncing the U.S.  Given these freedom-fighters' betrayal, you might think Fidel and Che Guevara had a cakewalk here.

Hah! None of these men signed the document, or uttered a peep against their “ally.” The freedom-fighters stood tall, proud, defiant, even sparring with Castro himself during their televised Stalinist show trials. “We will die with dignity!” snapped their commander Erneido Oliva (a black Cuban, by the way, Ms. Maxine “VIVA FIDEL!”  Waters” and Jesse, “VIVA FIDEL!” Jackson) at the furious Castroites again, and again, and again. To a Castroite, such an attitude not only enrages but also baffles.

Think about it, amigos: even after that betrayal these men (and boys, some as young as 16-17) refused to utter any anti-American slogan for Castro and Che Guevara’s cameras and propaganda mill. The very slogans that half-wit, grandstanding “woke” celebrities and politicians parrot daily for free publicity, these betrayed men refused to utter even while thinking it might save their lives!

The Castroites also staged a classic Soviet-style show-trial attempting to showcase (for all the world to see) the Bay of Pigs prisoners admitting they were “mercenaries in the pay of the Yankee Imperialists.” And initially they thought they’d get the propaganda bonanza they so desperately desired.  

For this big production the prisoners were thoroughly interrogated beforehand (the KGB had been coaching Castro’s secret police for almost two years by then) to see who’d crack, who’d play along. Only these would get in front of the cameras.

Tomas Cruz, Felipe Rivero and a few other Bay of Pigs freedom-fighters gave every impression of having broken down. They whimpered to their Castroite “interrogators” that they’d be willing to go on camera and denounce the U.S. 

“AHA!”  Fidel and Che snickered while rubbing their hands. “Now we got ‘em!” (Rivero and Cruz were also snickering.)

So the day came. The Stalinist stage was set at Havana’s Sports Arena and the communist cameras rolled. Castro and Che Guevara’s lackey vice President Carlos R. Rodriguez were the opening act. He put the microphone to Felipe Rivero.

"Nobody paid us to do a damn thing!" Rivero blurted…..Whoops! The Castroites’ mouths dropped. They gaped nervously. They looked around. A rumble went through the crowd. 

"We came here to fight communism!" Rivero continued. "Men from every class and race in Cuba volunteered to come here and FIGHT you!"

“Holy s**t! What now?!” the Castroites were frantic! The cameras were rolling but started shifting around nervously. Rodriguez’s lips trembled. He wiped his forehead. He stretched his collar. Some heads would (literally!) roll when the Maximum Leader saw this! The cameras didn’t know where to focus.

"And another thing!" Felipe shouted. "We outfought you!” The Castroites were frantic now, they looked from one to another aghast and cleared their throats. They looked like Democrats during the Ollie North hearings. 

Rodriguez finally caught his breath and with a trembling voice started with the usual commie mumbo-jumbo about "the masses" and "the people…bah…blah…”

"Ok, fine!” Rivero rolled his eyes and waved his hand. "You say you have the people with you? Then hold an election! That’ll really tell us, won’t it!"

Complete pandemonium, amigos. Even the diehard commies in the crowd couldn’t restrain themselves. Che Guevara himself had to snicker. A rumble of laughter, a rustle of claps and hoots erupted from all corners. All this was on Cuban national TV, remember. 

And Cuba – that impoverished and squalid little Third World country Castro’s echo chamber (the mainstream media) always tells us about – besides having net immigration from Europe shortly before the glorious liberation, also had more TVs per capita than Canada or Germany. 

The very island almost shook with a collective roar.

Finally the Maximum Leader himself (Fidel Castro) pranced on the stage. Only he could straighten things out. He had it all figured out. He had an ace up his sleeve. So he approached the black parachutist prisoner Tomas Cruz. "We opened the beaches for you blacks," he sneered. (In 1958 Cuba had a private whites-only country club with a private beach.) "So what on earth are you doing with these Yankee mercenaries?"

Tell it to Obama, the Congressional Black Caucus and Black Lives Matter, Fidel. Tell it to Maxine Waters and Jesse Jackson – they’ll swallow your BS and ask for seconds. But Cruz didn’t flinch. He looked Castro straight in the eye. "I didn’t come here to swim," he glowered. "I came here to fight communism. I came here with my brothers of every race to free my homeland from communism.”

Well, amigos, the Castroites decided to hold these "trials" behind closed doors and with the cameras off after that.

A guilt-stricken JFK finally ransomed the Brigade back from Castro's dungeon. The negotiations took almost two years while the men suffered the mental and physical tortures that always accompany Communist incarceration. One source claims that Castro had agreed to terms seven months earlier. But the Kennedy brothers (both President and Attorney General) feared the Bay of Pigs issue in the news for the November '62 congressional races. They feared the issue of how those men came to be prisoners in the first place might skew the races Republican. So the prisoners were conveniently released Christmas Eve of '62. A few died in prison during those intervening seven months. 

Outrageously, thanks to yet another Democrat administration, Castro might have gotten the last laugh with Rivero. In 1967 Felipe Rivero found himself in a U.S. federal prison. His crime? Organizing attacks from the U.S. trying to overthrow Castro! 

You read that right. The same man accused and jailed by Castro for being a U.S. mercenary and lackey, of being bribed by the U.S. to overthrow communism in Cuba was later jailed by the U.S. for trying to overthrow Communism in Cuba!  LBJ had to honor that Kennedy-Khrushchev Missile Crisis swindle to safeguard Castro, you see.

"We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along," snickered Nikita Khrushchev about the Missile Crisis in his diaries, “security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey and Italy. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba." 

The Brigadistas' ordeal was mostly over by late 1962. But when it came to JFK's lies I'll yield to Bachman Turner Overdrive: "You ain't seen nothing yet! B--ba-ba-ba-BY you just AIN'T seen nothing yet!" 

"I promise to deliver this Brigade banner to you in a free Havana!" That was JFK addressing the recently-ransomed Brigade and their families in Miami's Orange Bowl, Dec. 29, 1962. I guess those people hadn't been subject to enough lies, to enough betrayal. They hadn't suffered enough. And the mothers, widows' children—they hadn't been through enough either. In Camelot's eyes, they deserved more shameless lies. 

Kennedy’s secret deal with Khrushchev to safeguard Castro was made barely a month before JFK made his liberation promises in the Orange Bowl. Yet he addressed those men, their families and compatriots with a straight face. 

Small wonder that these Brigadistas, their families, and most of their compatriots always refused to file meekly into the liberal plantation, like obedient little "hispanics," or “latinos,” or ‘Latinxs” with a nice pat on the head by the condescendingly smirking doyens of the Democrat-Media complex. 

The Kennedy Family’s Love Affair With Fidel Castro and Che Guevara

Humberto Fontova Apr 08, 2023

“Cheryl Hines is a successful actress, director, producer, and podcast host, but the Hollywood starlet may be gearing up to add First Lady to her long list of impressive roles,” reports the Daily Mail this week. “The 57-year-old's husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced this week that he's officially challenging President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination for the upcoming 2024 presidential election.”

Which is interesting enough, without the following: “She (Hines) even once had lemonade with Fidel Castro at his house in Cuba. 'We went to Cuba, this was probably 10 years ago, while we were there, my husband wanted to see if we could visit with Mr. Castro'….

"'When we got to the hotel, there was a guy in a white linen suit who said, "El Presidente will see you." 'They came and picked us up in a van, it was a nice van, I was like, "Woah, what's happening?"

"'We got to his house and he was wearing a track suit. We sat down with him, [my husband] and him spoke in Spanish for a while. They talked about assassination attempts, as one does when you're drinking lemonade. He was sweet. It was the best lemonade I've ever had, I don't know what was in it but it was fantastic.'"

As luck would have it, we discussed those (mostly bogus) assassination attempts here just last week.  But naturally, RFK Jr. swallowed Castro’s hoary propaganda hook, line and sinker. To wit:

“Despite its poverty, Cuba has managed some impressive accomplishments. Cuba’s government boasts the highest literacy rates for its population of any nation in the hemisphere" ….blah…blah…blah.

I’ll spare you the rest of RFK Jr’s regurgitations of Castroite propaganda in his article for the Inter Press Service from Jan. 2015, which also predictably denounces one of the crown jewels of post-war U.S. foreign policy: the phenomenally successful “Cuba embargo.”

We’ve discussed this so-called embargo at length here at Townhall, primarily how it’s not a bona-fide embargo by any stretch of the word’s definition, since for over two decades the U.S. has been among Cuba’s top food suppliers. The main provision of this “embargo” is that the relentlessly deadbeat Castro-Crime-Syndicate (mislabeled “Cuba” by the Democrat/Media Complex) pay cash up front for U.S. imports. This has made the U.S. taxpayer among the very few on earth spared fleecing for millions by the Castro-Crime-Syndicate…..speaking of which! 

From just this week:  “A British judge ruled that Cuba’s National Bank can be sued by lenders who are owed 72 million euros.” 

And speaking of the Kennedy family’s historic affection for the mass-murdering, terror-sponsoring Stalinists who have run Cuba; remember when RFK Jr’s mother Ethel Kennedy was discovered to have decorated both her Florida home and the Kennedy family’s estate named Hickory Hill in McLean, Virginia, with pictures of Che Guevara?

And remember how even before the shrieks of “Fake News!” from sophisticated liberals against “deplorables” could commence for spreading something so patently absurd  as a famous American political matriarch decorating her homes with pictures of  an epic America-hater whose lifelong craving was to incinerate the U.S.—even before any of this, Robert Kennedy Jr himself boasted for the public prints that  “My mom loves Che Guevara! Her dog is named Che!”     

According to Pinterest, the Che Guevara picture at Hickory Hill was (is) located in the late Robert F. Kennedy’s very home office!  

This makes the Che Guevara family presence all the more “fascinating,” considering that these Kennedys were America’s twin “commanders-in-chief” during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and during the infamous Bay of Pigs treachery which took place 22 years ago this very week.

More “fascinating” still, the Hickory Hill office picture is the original uncropped version. The famous Che Guevara pic seen on t-shirts and posters was a cropped version of one taken by Alberto Korda in March 1960. Korda’s real name was Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez and he was a KGB agent, as revealed by Soviet-Bloc intelligence defector Ion Pacepa. The cropped picture was spread throughout the world by I. Lavretsky and Giangicomo Fetrinelli, respectively full-time and part-time KGB agents, as also revealed by Pacepa. 

Hence, every person you see sporting that t-shirt or poster is a genuine “Russian colluder!”— though probably unwittingly in about 80 percent of the cases, when they qualify merely as morons. 

Several fascinating questions now arise: Was that Che pic present in RFK’s office in the early 1960s, when he was head of the famous Operation Mongoose, purportedly a Kennedy/CIA plan to assassinate Fidel Castro and overthrow his regime? If so, there’s no indication the Che pic was used as a dartboard, as it sits alongside what are (presumably) revered Kennedy family members. 

Now, if the man (Robert F. Kennedy) tasked with overthrowing the Castro regime kept a cherished picture of Che Guevara in his home office, are there any more questions why Fidel Castro died peacefully in bed at 90?

 

A Kalashnikov Christmas

Tidings of comfort and joy for the persecuted and  oppressed of the world.

By Lloyd Billingsley  December 24, 2022 @ America Greatness 

 

(Editor's  Note: I've not asked for nor have I received permission to publish this in full, but I think it's an important piece that needs as wide a distribution as possible.  If the author or American Greatness object, I will break this down to a link.  RK)

Last year, Dr. Anthony Fauci told people not to invite unvaccinated relatives to holiday parties, and even warned the vaccinated to stay away from events. Americans resisted the white coat supremacist, but they have never faced an outright ban on Christmas like those in the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe. 

As F. A. Voigt explained in Unto Caesar, Marxism-Leninism is a secular religion. In power, it functions as “armed idolatry.” Communist dictators want people to worship them, so they use the power of the state against any moral authority outside of the state. Christianity is a prime target, so banning Christmas was an easy call for Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu. 

Ceaușescu and wife Elena joined Communist youth movements and rose through the ranks. In 1965, Nicolae became general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party and ruled in the best Stalinist tradition. The Securitate, the regime’s secret police, sowed division among the people and built a vast network of informers. Midnight arrests, torture, and assassination were common.

“My grandfather was a priest, a liberal, he was in prison for a lot of his life,” recalled Ionel Boyeru in 2014. The priest managed to survive, but others were not so fortunate.

During a 1977 miners’ strike, Ceaușescu’s Securitate subjected union leaders to five-minute X-rays that caused cancer and killed off the strike leaders. By the end of the 1970s, as this account explains, Romania was one of the most oppressive states in the world, practically on the level of Enver Hoxha’s Albania.

Ceausescu bulldozed churches, monasteries, and entire neighborhoods in Bucharest. Nicolae and Elena lived like royalty as the people lined up for the barest necessities. During the 1980s, as the economy went south, Ceaușescu ramped up arrests and torture.

In the city of Timișoara, the Securitate attacked pastor László Tȍkés for criticizing the regime, and on December 17, 1989, the people organized an anti-government demonstration. Ceaușescu ordered police and Securitate to fire on the crowds, killing nearly 100 protesters. Ceaușescu gave a speech blaming anti-Romanian forces but the crowd only heckled the dictator. The regime then cracked down on the military.

“They made us sign a statement saying we didn’t agree with what was happening, and vowing we would support and protect Ceaușescu,” recalled Boyeru, an officer and elite paratrooper. Mass protests broke out across the country and this time the military sided with the people. Ceaușescu fled in a helicopter but the pilot forced a landing and soldiers took him into custody. Captain Boyeru then volunteered for a special mission.

He stood guard as Nicolae and Elena were tried swiftly for crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. Then, on Christmas Day, Boyeru’s elite unit led the pair toward an outdoor toilet block in a courtyard. Nicolae sang the “Internationale,” while Elena screamed filth at a soldier, who hauled off and smashed her face. The troops then stood the pair against a wall, set their Kalashnikovs on full automatic, and opened fire. The rifle reports came as tidings of comfort and joy.

“Soldiers were crying with happiness,” Boyeru recalled, “people you previously might have thought agreed with the regime entirely were bursting out with excitement. We took out our hidden alcohol, a very bad brandy, and drank.” His grandfather took part in the celebration.

“Don’t worry,” he told Ionel. “I take all your sins upon myself.”

Joyous Romanians openly celebrated Christmas for the first time in decades and the next year the nation held free elections.

The United States has been holding those for a long time, and has never slapped an outright ban on Christmas. On the other hand, since 2020 the nation is experiencing a Gadarene slide into totalitarianism. 

The Biden Junta claims to represent Our Democracy™, just as Stalinist East Germany proclaimed itself the “German Democratic Republic.” The regime divides the people into oppressor and victim classes, based on race. It exploits a pandemic to curtail the rights of the people, and leverages tech companies against free speech.

Biden’s domestic opposition replaces terrorists and foreign adversaries as the greatest threat to the nation. Should that be doubted, recall Biden’s September 1 speech, backlit in blood red, with Marines at the ready, and the Delaware Democrat oozing hatred like pus.

Should mass protests arise—a distinct possibility—the regime would doubtless deploy military force. This has already taken place at Kent State, Ruby Ridge, and Waco, with deadly consequences. A demented misanthrope has the forces of mass violence at his disposal, and the FBI functions as Biden’s private Gestapo and Securitate.

On Christmas 1989, Romania’s military chose to side with the people. On the other hand, the vile Ceaușescu is the only Communist dictator who got what he deserved. 

Josef Stalin, murderer of more than 20 million people, died of a heart attack on March 5, 1953. According to The Black Book of Communism, Mao Zedong’s genocidal campaigns claimed more than 60 million victims. China’s “Great Helmsman” died peacefully on September 9, 1976, at the age of 82.

At the age of 76, Albania’s Enver Hoxha died of complications from diabetes on April 11, 1985. Erich Honecker, Communist dictator of the “German Democratic Republic” and builder of the Berlin Wall, died of cancer in Chile on May 29, 1994, at the age of 81.

Khmer Rouge dictator Pol Pot, whose campaign of genocide snuffed the lives of some nearly 2 million innocents—about 21 percent of the population—died in his sleep on April 15, 1998. Sado-Stalinist Fidel Castro passed away peacefully on November 25, 2016, at the age of 90.

Totalitarians believe they can get away with murder, but sometimes the people prove victorious.

Make Christmas 2022 a memorial day. Remember the Kalashnikov Christmas of 1989. In 2023 moving forward, the struggle against tyranny will be the struggle of memory against forgetting.

When Mrs. Tom Brady Modeled Che Guevara

Humberto Fontova  Oct 08, 2022 @ Townhall.com

Source: Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File

“Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen's marital woes continue to make headlines as multiple reports claim the NFL star is 'hurt' as the supermodel is the one spearheading their likely divorce,” Reports Yahoo Entertainment this week.

And speaking of people “hurt” by the supermodel’s behavior: ask the thousands of Americans of Cuban heritage whose fathers, grandfathers, brothers, etc. were murdered in cold blood by the terrorist/coward who supermodel Bündchen once cheekily modeled on her bosom and butt.

At the São Paulo fashion show on July 15, 2002, Bündchen catwalked wearing a glamorous bikini consisting entirely of faces of Che Guevara, who rarely bathed and constantly reeked of “boiled liver” and “rotting fish,” according to his early comrades and surviving victims. 

Granted, the future Mrs. Tom Brady probably thought the cool, long-haired image clinging to her bosom and buttocks that day depicted Pink Floyd’s lead guitarist, or perhaps The Door’s lead singer, freshly-bathed and redolent of Guerlain - but still.

Bündchen, once the world’s highest paid model and a champion of “female empowerment,” comes across as a genuinely decent person, devoted mom, and sincere philanthropist. Given her childhood in Brazil, her subsequent social circles and the educational qualities of the mainstream media, expecting her to have a clue about her Bikini icon that day seems unfair if not preposterous. Chris Matthews, after all, admitted that he learned much about the Cuban Revolution from The Godfather II. Time magazine, after all, hailed Che Guevara-- co-founder of a regime that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s, murdered more of them than pre-war Hitler’s, and craved to ignite a nuclear war - as “Hero and Icon of the Century” alongside Mother Teresa.

Indeed, on this issue, being a high school dropout probably helped Mrs. Brady. Given the tenor of “higher” education nowadays, an Ivy League degree in any of the social “sciences” would have probably made her into an even more fervent cheerleader for Che-wear. So I offer the following more as missionary than as heckler:

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s regime jailed and tortured 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes. Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s. Whatever the term “female empowerment” actually means, surely the definition includes the type of fortitude these ladies (mostly girls younger than yourself today upon their arrest) called forth to survive in Cuba’s prisons, forced labor camps and torture chambers. If not, then the term is even more air-headed than it sounds.

Finally free, they now find their torturer and the murderer of some of their loved ones glorified on everything from T-shirts to thong underwear. This in an age where “sensitivity” supposedly rules in every venue of public discourse.

These women’s prison conditions were described by former Cuban political prisoner Maritza Lugo. “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consisted of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rat come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”

 “On Mother’s Day they allowed family visits,” recalls Manuela Calvo from exile today. "But as our mothers and sons and daughters were watching, we were beaten with rubber hoses and high-pressure hoses were turned on us, knocking all of us the ground floor and rolling us around as the guards laughed and our loved-ones screamed helplessly.”

“When female guards couldn’t handle us male guards were called in for more brutal beatings. I saw teen-aged girls beaten savagely, their bones broken, their mouths bleeding,” recalls Polita Grau. 

Many of these heroic ladies live in the U.S. today. But no producer for The View, Lifetime TV, etc.—much less the History Channel, has ever called them. No writer for Cosmo or Glamour or Redbook or Vogue has bothered either.

But you’ve certainly seen their torturer hailed by “feminist” reporters.

Upon the death of Raul Castro’s wife Vilma Espin in 2006 the Washington Post gushed that “she was a champion of women’s rights and greatly improved the status of women in Cuba, a society known for its history of machismo.” Actually, in 1958, Cuba had more female college graduates as a percentage of population than the U.S. 

This Castroite “improvement of status” somehow tripled Cuban women’s pre-revolution suicide rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal on earth. This according to a 1998 study by scholar Maida Donate-Armada that uses some of the Cuban regime’s own figures.

On Christmas Eve of 1961, a Cuban woman named Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. Che’s Soviet-trained secret police had found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits” (Cuban rednecks who took up arms to fight the Stalinist theft of their land to build Soviet–style Kolkhozes.) When the blast from the Castroite firing squad demolished her face and torso, Juana was six months pregnant. 

In 1962, a Cuban Catholic nun named Aida Rosa Perez was overheard saying things about Fidel Castro and Che Guevara similar to those Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg routinely broadcast about George Bush. Sister Rosa Perez was quickly rounded up at Soviet gun-point and sentenced to 12 years at hard labor. Two years into her sentence, while toiling in the sun inside Castro's Gulag and surrounded by leering guards, Sister Rosa collapsed from a heart attack.

The Cuban Archive project has fully documented many firing squad executions of Cuban women by the regime co-founded by Che Guevara. Over 200 women died from various beatings, brutalities and tortures while in prison. 

Thousands of Cuban women have also drowned, died of thirst or have been eaten alive by sharks attempting to “empower” themselves by fleeing the handiwork of your cheekiest fashion statement, Mrs. Tom Brady. This from a nation that prior to Castroism towered over your native Brazil in every socio-economic indicator. 

You’d like to think that in subsequent years Bündchen had learned a bit about her one-time Bikini decoration. Instead in 2016, when Obama’s “opening” made Cuba (still run by the regime that jailed and tortured the most black, female and gay political prisoners in the modern history of the Western hemisphere) the world’s “coolest” “be-seen” locale for celebs—even at this late stage of the game, Gisele Bündchen saw fit to join her hipster colleagues and model a Che beret in Havana.

 

Democrat-Run New Orleans Overtakes Democrat-Run St. Louis as Murder Capital of the US

Humberto Fontova Sep 24, 2022 @ Townhall.com

 

“ST. LOUIS – St. Louis is no longer the nation’s murder capital,” reports Fox2. “As of Sept. 11, New Orleans, Louisiana, had the highest murder rate in the United States, with about 52 homicides per 100,000 residents, according to data from New Orleans’ Metropolitan Crime Commission.”

Interestingly, back in April 2019, New Orleans’ Democrat Mayor Latoya Cantrell and a retinue of associated New Orleans city officials spent a week in Havana, Cuba, to, in the mayor’s office’s own words, “see firsthand how (Cuba’s) history has produced unique opportunities and challenges in the areas of economic development, trade, health care, education and other quality of life issues."

I realize this sounds like shameless AOC idiocy one-upsmanship. I realize that learning about “quality of life” from a place that saw multiple times as many desperate people die trying to escape it as died trying to escape over the Berlin Wall sounds like shameless click-bait, or even a Saturday Night Live or Monty Python skit. So here’s the proof.

In a way, however, the visit seems appropriate. After all, the rulers of one place drove out practically all productive residents with punitive socialist policies that converted a once charming and prosperous place into a huge slum except for a few tourism enclaves. The other place is named Cuba.

From Stalinist Cuba Democrat Cantrell dutifully performed all the traditional Democrat rituals mandatory for such visits, primarily hailing Cuba’s glorious “healthcare and education!”

“Mayor of New Orleans highlights Cuban achievements,” crowed the totalitarian regime’s KGB-founded media: “According to the Ms Cantrell, the level of the literacy in Cuba is very high, and when she compares this indicator with New Orleans, it is perceptible that there is much to learn from Cuba. She said the same thing happens when analyzing the primary health system, and stated that the U.S. city can take experiences in order to perfect their mother-child program.”

But let’s be fair. Is Cantrell unique in parroting these communist-scripted lies? Haven’t we heard these howlers before and almost ad naseum from liberals? Let’s see:

"Castro has some real accomplishments to point to. Under his rule, the impoverished Caribbean island has created health and education systems that would be the envy of far wealthier nations ... and there is near full literacy on the island."

No, amigos, that’s not Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Cory Booker or Kamala Harris, or even CNN or The New York Times. In fact, it was the London Sunday Times! (owned by Rupert Murdoch!)

If anything proves the devilish proficiency of the Castro regime’s propaganda apparatus the prestigious (for many) Sunday Times editorial from 2006 serves as exhibit A.

For the record: In 1958, that "impoverished Caribbean island" had a higher standard of living than Ireland and Austria, almost double Spain and Japan's per capita income, more doctors and dentists per capita than Britain itself, and lower infant mortality than France and Germany – the 13th-lowest in the world, in fact. Today, Cuba's infant-mortality rate – despite the hemisphere's highest abortion rate, which skews this figure downward and assuming we believe figures from “doctors” persuaded to lie by pistols held to their head -- is somewhere around 30th from the top.

So, relative to the rest of the world, Cuba's health care has worsened horribly under Castroism. And a nation with a formerly massive influx of European immigrants needs machine guns, water cannons and tiger sharks to keep its people from fleeing, while half-starved Haitians a short 60 miles away turn up their noses at any thought of emigrating to Cuba.

In 1958, 80 percent of Cubans were literate, and Cuba spent the most per capita on public education of any nation in Latin America.

During its war of independence near the turn of the 20th century, Cuba was utterly devastated, having lost a quarter of its population. So, Cuba's (capitalist) achievements in national prosperity, health, and education came practically from scratch and in about the same number of years as Castroism’s stint in power.

Can any sane person claim that given that record – and given Cuba's expenditures on public education – illiteracy would not have been eradicated in a few short years?

Better still, Cubans today would not be “literate” in the leftist sense of the term (i.e. rote indoctrinated with Marxist imbecilities) but also educated, allowed to read George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson along with the arresting wisdom and sparkling prose of Che Guevara. A specimen:

"To the extent that we achieve concrete successes on a theoretical plane – or, vice versa, to the extent that we draw theoretical conclusions of a broad character on the basis of our concrete research – we will have made a valuable contribution to Marxism-Leninism, and to the cause of humanity."

I quote "this intellectual, this most complete human being of our time" (Jean-Paul Sartre's description of Che Guevara) exactly. As we see, Cuba's prisons aren't its only torture chambers. With such reading assignments, Cuba's classrooms amply qualify for an inspection by Amnesty International.

Without Castro, Cuba's full literacy would have come about probably as quickly – and without firing squads, mass graves, and a political incarceration rate higher than Stalin's. Most countries in Latin America with lower literacy rates than Cuba had in 1958 have done just that.

"During the 1980s," continued the amazing editorial from the prestigious Times of London, "one could still conceivably argue that Cuba's dictatorship was preferable to its US-backed counterparts in Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua or El Salvador, which went one step farther by murdering thousands of their citizens."

Here one blinks, looks again – and gapes. Forget for a second that none of those regimes abolished private property, free travel, and free speech. None abolished free enterprise and mandated food rations for its subjects. None set up government snitch groups on every city block. Forget that far from being "US-backed counterparts," Pinochet's Chile and Somoza's Nicaragua had economic sanctions slapped on them by U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

Forget the peripheral ignorance; let's look at the central stupidity: You long to believe otherwise, you grope for an extenuation, you hope you misread – but it's inescapable: The editorial staff of one of the world's most prestigious newspapers was unaware that Castro and Che Guevara’s regime killed people.

DeSantis Signs Desperately-Needed ‘Victims of Communism’ Educational Bill

Humberto Fontova May 14, 2022

 

“In a ceremony Monday [May, 9] at Miami’s iconic Freedom Tower, where tens of thousands of Cuban immigrants fleeing Fidel Castro’s revolution were admitted into the US between 1962 and 1974, DeSantis signed into law House Bill 395, designating 7 November as Victims of  Communism Day,” reports The Guardian.

“You can see at a college campus students flying the hammer and sickle from the old Soviet Union flag, you will see students that will have T-shirts with Che Guevara, you will see students that will idolize people like Mao Zedong,” DeSantis said. “To me, this speaks of a tremendous ignorance about what those individuals represented and the evils that communism.”

“Florida is one of a handful of states to adopt the designation,” continues The Guardian.”But is believed to be the first to mandate school instruction on that day….The instruction will begin in the 2023-2024 school year, DeSantis said, and will require teaching about Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro, as well as 'poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence, and suppression of speech' endured under their leaderships.”

Naturally, while reporting the item, the leftist Guardian is snidely pooh-poohing it, as does the Washington Post. “Some opponents argue that although the trauma suffered by victims of communism, particularly in Cuba, are real, DeSantis’s motives are not…He continues to ignite culture wars under the guise of fighting ‘communism’ while embodying the same authoritarian power grabs we are all too familiar with,” one activist tweeted. “Others say the governor should turn his attention to the issues in his state.”

Ah, if only this “tremendous ignorance” of Communist dictators and assassins were confined to grungy college students and their professors. For a shining example of this “tremendous ignorance,” especially regarding the Cuban revolution, let’s turn—not to The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, The Nation, Mother Jones or The New Statesman—but to the Guardian’s stately compatriot The London Times, widely regarded as among the world’s most respectable newspapers. 

"Fidel Castro can look back on some unquestionable achievements," starts a London Times article from back in August 2006, when Castro first got critically ill and many publications were issuing what they thought were epitaphs. "For a start he has defied the world's most powerful nation, just 90 miles from his shores, and lived to tell the tale."

No discourse or screed about Castro – in any language, from any medium, from any point on the political compass – omits this cliché. Let's look at this historical record of "defiance."

"We put Castro in power," flatly stated former U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Earl T. Smith during congressional testimony in 1960. He was referring to the U.S. State Department and CIA's role in aiding the Castro rebels, also to the U.S. arms embargo on Batista, also to the official U.S. order that Batista vacate Cuba. Ambassador Smith knew something about these events because he had personally delivered the messages to Batista.

Castro's "defiance" of the U.S. at the time is also evident from CIA disclosures: "Me and my staff were all Fidelistas," boasted Robert Reynolds, the CIA's Caribbean Desk "specialist on the Cuban Revolution" from 1957 to 1960.

"During the 1980s," continues the Times editorial, "one could still conceivably argue that Cuba's dictatorship was preferable to its US-backed counterparts in Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua or El Salvador, which went one step farther (italics mine) by murdering thousands of their citizens."

Here one blinks, looks again – and gapes. “Went one step farther,” got it, amigos? Forget for a second that none of those regimes abolished private property, free travel, free speech. None abolished free enterprise and mandated food rations for its subjects. None set up government snitch groups on every city block. Forget that far from being "US-backed counterparts," Pinochet's Chile and Somoza's Nicaragua had economic sanctions slapped on them by Jimmy Carter. Forget the peripheral ignorance; let's look at the central stupidity.

You long to believe otherwise, you grope for an extenuation, you hope you misread – but it's inescapable: The editorial staff of perhaps the world's most prestigious newspaper was unaware that Castro's regime killed people.

Yet Castro's murder tally is (and was) not difficult to dig up. No need to consult the ravings of some "crackpot" scandal sheet in Miami. Simply open "The Black Book of Communism," written by French scholars and published in English by Harvard University Press, neither an outpost of the vast right-wing conspiracy nor of Miami maniacs. Here you'll find a tally of 17,000 Castroite murders by firing squad. "The facts and figures are irrefutable. No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism," wrote the New York Times (no less!) about "The Black Book of Communism."

"[The Black Book of Communism's] cumulative impact is overwhelming," said a review in a prestigious newspaper named the London Times! So, according to a scholarly work that received gushy reviews in the London Times itself, Castro's regime almost quintupled the alleged murder rate of Pinochet's (3,000.) And this refers only to Communist Cuba's firing-squad murders.

The Cuba Archive project, headed by scholars Maria Werlau and the late Armando Lago, once put the death toll from Castro's regime, including deaths at sea and the desperate anti-Communist insurgency of the early '60s, at close to 90,000. This project was lauded by everyone from the Miami Herald (again, no right-wing outpost) to the Wall Street Journal. The mind reels at the London Times' ignorance until you note that such ignorance is practically universal on matters Cuban.

Trump-Bashing Pope Francis Refuses to Bash Putin for Ukraine War

  Humberto Fontova May 07, 2022

“ROME?—Pope Francis said that the “barking of NATO at the door of Russia” might have led to the invasion of Ukraine and that he didn't know whether other countries should supply Ukraine with more arms” reports the Wall Street Journal. “Since February, Pope Francis has deplored the suffering of Ukrainians and denounced the invasion but refrained from explicitly naming Russia as the aggressor…In Ukraine, it was other states that created the conflict,” Pope Francis said in the interview.

No such “objectivity” seemed to influence the Castro-hailing Pope Francis when expounding on former President Trump’s attempts to defend U.S. doors from something that goes quite beyond “barking.” 

"Pope Francis has criticized the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the Mexican border…Speaking to Reuters, the Pope said he supported recent statements by U.S. Catholic bishops who called the separation of children from their parents 'contrary to our Catholic values' and 'immoral.'" (Reuters, June 20, 2018.)

Pope Francis also bashed U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump: 

"A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian." (Pope Francis after holding a showy mass in Ciudad Juarez for the Mexicans who died trying to cross the U.S. border, Feb. 18, 2016.)

But upon one of his many fond visits to Stalinist Cuba Pope Francis held an even showier mass in the company of Castro and with Che Guevara as the backdrop. Never mind that about 20 times as many Cubans have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba as died trying to escape East “Tear Down this Wall!” Germany. Never mind any of that. 

What makes this death tally in the Florida straits more horrible (and the Pope’s hypocrisy more revolting) is that prior to Castro and Che Guevara’s destruction of Cuban society, the prosperous island nation took in more immigrants per-capita (mostly European) than the U.S.

You’d never guess this from the Fake News media, Hollywood or your professors, but in 1953 more Cubans vacationed in the U.S. (and voluntarily returned to Cuba) than Americans in Cuba. Yes, for pre-Castro Cubans the U.S. was a “tourist playground.”

“What?” you say. But you’ve always heard that it was the other way around? That Cuba was a tourist playground for Americans? Indeed it was—but the tourist traffic went both ways, as befit a nation described by a 1957 UNESCO report thusly: "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class. So check it out here--and please click links for thorough documentation.

But I referred to Pope Francis as “Castro-hailing,” right? Well: 

“During their meeting (in Sept. 2015) the Pope thanked comrade Fidel Castro for his contributions to world peace in a world saturated with hate and aggression." (Cuba’s Communist party paper, Sept 21st 2015.)

“It is the communists,” Pope Francis told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica six years ago, “that think like Christians. Christ has spoken of a society where the poor, the weak and the excluded are those who make the decisions.” Castro’s captive (literally!) press was quick to spread this bit of gratifying news. 

“The defiant yells (“Viva Cristo Rey!”—“Viva Cuba Libre!”-“Abajo Comunismo!”) from the bound and staked martyrs “would make the walls of La Cabana prison tremble!” wrote eyewitness to the slaughter, Armando Valladares, who suffered 22 torture-filled years in Castro’s prisons and was later appointed by Ronald Reagan as U.S. ambassador to U.N Human Rights Commission. 

Given their valiant defiance even during their last seconds alive, by mid 1961 the mere binding and blindfolding of Castro and Che’s young Catholic murder victims wasn’t enough. The fine folks who hosted Pope Francis’ in Cuba in Sept. 2015 then began ordering that the Catholic youths also be gagged. The shaken firing-squads demanded it. The yells were badly unnerving the trigger-pullers, you see.

So now, as the fine folks who hosted Pope Francis’ in Cuba yanked the young Catholic heroes from the cells, bent their arms back, and bound their hands, two more Communist guards came into play. One grabbed the struggling victim’s hair and jerked his head back, trying to steady him. The other taped his mouth shut.

Raul Castro (who hosted the Pope at the Sept. 2015 Havana Mass) and Che Guevara (whose visage formed the backdrop for the Mass) were the most notorious executioners during the early years of the Cuban Revolution. The orders, of course, all issued from Fidel Castro, who Pope Francis went out of his way to visit and smilingly hob-nob with after the Mass, profusely thanking him for his efforts towards “world peace,” (I am NOT making this up!)

“I am not Christ or a philanthropist,” wrote Che Guevara in a letter to his mother. “I am all the contrary of a Christ--In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm.” 

As mentioned: an enormous image of Che Guevara formed the backdrop to Pope Francis’ Mass in Havana on Sept., 20, 2015. 

It’s perfectly fitting that a Pope who often expresses affection for a KGB-created and sponsored regime (the Castro brothers and Che Guevara had a KGB handler, Nikolai Leonov, since 1957) should refrain from openly disparaging a KGB Lieut. Col. (Vladimir Putin.) And as you might guess Cuba’s KGB-founded and mentored media (the same one that routinely denounces your humble servant here as a “TRAITOR! and SCOUNDREL!”) is whole–hog with Putin on his typically murderous Ukraine invasion.