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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Showing posts with label Fidel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fidel. Show all posts

Friday, May 28, 2021

The Uncancellable Left

In my quest to achieve a hyper-caffeinated version of being “awake” I am gratified to see the great movement forward has managed to cleanse such critical media outlets as Teen Vogue, the New York Times and children’s literature of racists, homophobes, and fascists. However, it seems to me that we have much bigger fish to fry. My awakened soul has called me to alert my comrades with the pitchforks, torches, and cancellation privileges to a number of unacceptably asleep individuals and historical movements that should be purged, cancelled, removed, and obliterated from our accepted discourse and intellectual lives. Out with discussion, pluralism, and context; in with the perfect amount of tolerance for the demands of purity.

Now, I don’t mean to cast aspersions upon my sleepless comrades who have focused rather narrowly on members of the American Founding, Dr. Seuss, Aristotle, and other unmistakably obvious candidates for expulsion from history, but we must face reality. 

A number of intellectual giants of the left must go. 

Karl Marx must be cancelled. This, of course, isn’t a secret to anyone who has actually bothered to read his historical theory, which has large sections focused on racial determinism............The same holds true for Rousseau..........It begins with one of the most widely recognized individuals among fashionably sensible awake people, Che Guevara. While Che’s face adorns countless t-shirts at elite universities and awake political gatherings in the understandable spirit of kinship with peasants wearing colorful clothing throughout South and Central America, he, along with his comrade Fidel Castro, also targeted and imprisoned gay people as well as engaged in racist activities in his lifetime. The Argentine author Guillermina Sutter Schneidner rightly describes him as a “Racist, Homophobe and Mass Murderer”...........Antonio Gramsci, made a fateful and regrettable decision to argue that heterosexual monogamy was essential to achieving Marxist hegemony. ...........Paul Moreno is one of many scholars who has shown quite clearly that the earlier labor movement actively viewed former slaves as nothing but strikebreakers............ 1619 Project has accomplished anything, we must likewise jettison any glorification of organized labor and its racist founding........... Jean Paul Sartre, who regrettably had quite a bit of sexist language and imagery in his writing.............revealed by one of his friends to have paid young Algerian boys to have sex with him in graveyards. ...........To Read More....

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Crimes Against Humanity Are Only For Losers!

[Editor's Note:  This article originally appeared in 2010 entitled, What Constitutes a Crime Against Humanity , and then again in 2013, as Crimes Aginst Humanity Are Only For Losers.  I reposted it for the same reason I'm reposting it now with a few updates.  For some reason a lot of people have been going back in my files and viewing past articles, as a result this has been hit a lot.  In light of what's going on with these fascist actions by the Governors of States in America, including Ohio's Governor DeWine, I think it's worth repeating. 

As you read this ask yourself:  Has anything changed in America with regard to the media, Hollywood or leftist politicians over the last 75 years?  If your conclusion is no, then ask yourself this:  Why are we buying into this latest scare mongering effort to impose Maoism over this nation because of this particular coronavirus?  Outrageous scare mongering by a hysterical mendacious crowd from the media, Hollywood and those in the leftist political arena?  

Let's start reading history books, and stop reading the New York Times.  You'll be amazed at what you don't know, what you will learn, and you will come to realize who these notable people in the news really are.  And that's not a pretty picture.

You may also wish to view my RK]

Rich Kozlovich

An article titled; "Universal jurisdiction raises as many problems as it solves", was published by Hussein Ibish on September 28, 2013. He points out;
“Universal jurisdiction arises out of the post-Second World War environment, the first real applications of it being trials by the victors against Nazi and Japanese officials, among others. They created, in effect, a set of ex post facto crimes that were morally unimpeachable but raised significant legal problems. The magnitude of the evil, however, properly offset such qualms and new international legal norms were established.”
However, he states just before this: 
“It must also contend with even more knotty moral realities – which are usually ignored in the academic and theoretical conversation on the subject – and multiple examples wherein the greater good may well be served by not pursuing even heinous war criminals for various ethically persuasive reasons.”
In short; war crimes are for losers! Stalin butchered tens of millions of his own people. Why wasn't he tried at Nuremburg? Castro killed as many or more per ratio than even Stalin. Why didn't Britain and Spain attempt to try him at the ICC as hard as they attempted to try Pinochet? Some time back I wrote an article titled; "What Constitutes A Crime Against Humanity?" I think it’s worth republishing now. 

Recently I had an interesting conversation with one of my customers who turned out to be an atheist. The conversation started out about how Islam is not a religion of peace (and I don’t care what these idiots in politics say) since their religion requires them not to be moderate. They can kill, rape, steal, lie and do whatever else they like in the name of Islam and its ok. That led to a discussion on the Crusades and the Inquisition. Eventually we came to atheists.

Being an atheist she proclaimed that at least they don’t go around killing people. I looked at her with a smile of incredulity and said…I’m sorry…except for the environmentalists atheists have killed more people than anyone in modern history.

Although under no circumstances should it be construed that I am justifying the atrocities of the Crusades and Inquisition; but Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao were atheists and killed far more than all of those combined, and with the exception of Hitler, those they killed were all their own people. Mao deliberately starved thirty six million to death because he needed cash to buy armament. How did he get it? He sold the food these people needed to survive. He said that this may only be the beginning and far more may have to die for him to attain his goals. So much for the “people’s revolution”!

These people committed some of the greatest crimes against humanity every recorded in history, yet Hitler is mostly singled out for that distinction. Why? Not that he didn’t deserve it mind you; but that is the rub isn’t it? Who decides what constitutes a crime against humanity?

Hitler proved that killing 6 million Jews is a crime against humanity because his henchmen were charged, found guilty, and many were executed for carrying out his orders. Joseph Stalin killed fifty million of his own people with the help of (among a host of others) Leonid Brezhnev, who became the leader of the USSR from 1964 till 1982. Neither of which were smeared with the epithet of ‘mass murderer’ or charged with crimes against humanity by any sitting official of any kind anywhere. In point of fact, neither Nixon, Ford or Jimmy Carter seemed to have any problem at all dealing with this mass murderer.

Then we have the modern Stalin apologists who claim that no one killed all those millions of people in Russia, and if millions did die; it wasn't Stalin's fault. But if millions did die, and Stalin did order those deaths; it was because he was trying to save millions more from the maniacs within his government. Accordingly, Stalin and Baria, his chief of the secret police, were in reality the heros, not the villians, and that all the evidence to the contrary constitutes a conspiracy of lies.

Walter Duranty even received a Pulitzer Prize for writing articles that claimed that Stalin wasn't killing anyone; and everyone in journalism working in Russia knew his work was nothing but lies. A Pulitzer Prize that the New York Times refuses to return ; a Pulitzer Prize the Pulitzer Prize committee, in spite of the fact that it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Duranty was a fraud, refuses to revoke.

Mao Tse Tung killed even more people yet Richard Nixon along with Henry Kissinger sat around like old buddies with Mao and his partner in mass murder Chou En-lai. Apparently you have to lose a war to be a mass murderer; perhaps that explains why no one in the environmental movement has ever been charged with any crime against humanity. The media and the political element will only stand up for what is right when the agenda fits their needs or view of reality - facts notwithstanding. Thomas Sowell made a worthwhile observation regarding the media and this mass murderer saying"
"The mainstream media never expressed half the outrage about Mao Zedong as they did about Ronald Reagan. Yet, when it came to killing millions of innocent civilians, even Hitler was an amateur compared to Mao."
Then let's not forget Hollywood's favorite atheist and mass murderer, Fidel Castro. "According to the Cuba Archive Project, the Castro regime – with firing squads, forced-labor camps and drownings at sea – has caused an estimated 102,000 Cuban deaths. Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million people in 1960. Put your calculator to it and you’ll see that—per-capita wise--Castro and Che were close on the heels of their heroes and mentors Stain and Mao." These men slaughter men, children and even pregnant women; and yet prominent people today, who should know better, have this to say;
  • Viva Fidel! Viva Che! Castro is the most honest and courageous politician I've ever met." Jesse Jackson
  • Meeting Fidel Castro were the eight most important hours of my life." Steven Spielberg.
  • "Very selfless and moral. One of the world's wisest men." Oliver Stone
  • Cuba's Elvis." Dan Rather
  • “A Dream come true." Supermodel Naomi Campbell
  • "Socialism works. I think Cuba can prove that." Chevy Chase”.
  • "Castro is an extraordinary man. He is warm and understanding and seems extremely humane." Gina Lollobrigida
In 1996 when Castro visited NYC he was called the “The Toast of Manhattan” by Time magazine. Newsweek called him “The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan” discussing the social swirl he had caused. Humberto Fontova wrote an article about this called, Happy Thanksgiving! (From Fidel and Che) about how Fidel is embraced by people that should know better. We are aghast of the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers, yet Fidel Castro and Che had planned something just as heinous, if not more so, in 1962.
“Cuban agents had targeted Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdales, and Manhattan’s Grand Central Station with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set for detonation the following week, on the day after Thanksgiving…. the year’s biggest shopping day, for good measure. Thousands of New Yorkers, probably mostly women and children, were to be incinerated and entombed.”
"Castro and Che planned their Manhattan holocaust just a few weeks after the fuddy-duddy Nikita Khrushchev had foiled their plans for an even bigger one. “Say hello to my little friends!” they dreamt of yelling at the Yankee hyenas in October of 1962, right before the mushroom clouds. “If the missiles had remained,” Che Guevara confided to The London Daily Worker the following month, “we would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York City.”
“Of course I knew the missiles were nuclear-armed,” responded Fidel Castro to Robert McNamara during a meeting in 1992. “That’s precisely why I urged Khrushchev to launch them.”
There's a lot more in this article worth viewing, make sure to read it all, and it makes more clear just what a cowardly murderous maniac both Fidel and Che were.

Was he treated as a murderous maniac? 
[At] “a luncheon at the Council on Foreign Relations. After holding court there for a rapt David Rockefeller, along with Robert McNamara, Dwayne Andreas, and Random House’s Harold Evans, Castro flashed over to Mort Zuckerman’s Fifth Avenue pad, where a throng of Beltway glitterati, including Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Bernard Shaw, and Barbara Walters, all jostled for a photo op, and stood in line for Castro’s autograph. Diane Sawyer was so overcome in the mass-murderer’s presence that she rushed up, broke into a toothy smile, wrapped her arms around Castro, and smooched him warmly on the cheek.”  
“God Bless you, Fidel,” boomed Pastor Calvin Butts of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church while introducing Castro on another New York visit four years later. The People’s Weekly World described Castro’s visit as such: “The audience which included New York Democratic representatives Charles Rangel enthusiastically greeted the Communist leader with a ten minute standing ovation. Chants of ‘FIDEL!-FIDEL! VIVA-FIDEL!’ resounded from the rafters.”  
“Then with Congressperson Maxine Waters looking on in rapture, a beaming Charlie Rangel waddled up to the podium beside the terrorist (and racist) Castro and engulfed him in a mighty bear hug. Castro had to catch his breath, but he smiled and returned the rotund senator’s passionate abrazo.”
In March of 2011 Humberto Fontova wrote and article entitled, "Women’s History Month and Castro’s Female Victims"  wherein he outlines the media's complete contempt for truth, reality and the poor innocents who suffered at his hands.
He states:
"When Barbara Walters sat quivering alongside Fidel Castro in 1977 cooing:“Fidel Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful.”
He goes on to say:
"dozens of Cuban suffragettes suffered in torture chambers within walking distance of the hyperventilating Ms. Walters."
He went on to say:
"I also apologize for singling out Barbara Walters. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell also had praise for the tryant: “Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!”
And what was Casto's reaction to all of this adoration? “You people are the cream of the crop!” beamed the Stalinist/terrorist to the smiling throng he’d come within a hair of nuking in 1962.
“Hear, hear!” chirped the delighted guests, while tinkling their wine glasses in honor of the smirking agent of their near vaporization."
There really isn't any cure for stupid! Then again, perhaps it is just that this doesn't fit the media-political paradigm of the day? But either way.....there really isn't any cure for stupid.

What if one person is deliberately murdered for philosophical reasons, is that a crime against humanity? We know for sure that it takes somewhere between one death and six million deaths to constitute a crime against humanity and it must fit the media-political pagadigm of the day. What if tens of millions have been killed as a result of policies pursued by the environmental movement and implemented by governmental authorities? Surely that must be considered a crime against humanity? Perhaps this doesn't fit the media-political paradigm of the day?

For those who continue to say there are provisions which allows for DDT use in emergency situations and that DDT wasn’t banned in many areas of Africa; baloney, it is all wall paper.
“Yet African states are still put under pressure to avoid using DDT. This year the EU warned of possible agricultural sanctions against Uganda, Kenya and other countries that defiantly use DDT and vow to continue doing so. An EU official warned the Ugandan authorities that if indoor spraying of DDT meant there was ‘a risk of contamination of the food chain’, then while ‘[it] would not automatically lead to a ban of food products…it will mean that that particular consignment cannot be sent to Europe’ (5). ‘The EU should be saying that DDT is safe and poses no threat to EU consumers’, says Innis. ‘Instead they make either direct or oblique threats about possible trade sanctions. What they’re really saying is, “We’ve benefited from DDT and gotten rid of malaria but you people in Africa cannot do the same”.’
As for those countries that did ban DDT;
“Almost two decades after the country banned the use of DDT, the Government is under pressure to lift the ban as one of the effective ways of controlling the spread of malaria. At the same time, there is pressure on the Government not to lift the ban on the insecticide, which remains banned in many countries in the world. The pressure comes in the wake of the heads of state conference in Abuja, which passed a resolution to put emphasis on and promote the use of indoor residual spraying to help fight the malaria vector.”
The outside pressure is tremendous on these leaders from the green movement.

We now know that by not using DDT millions have died unnecessarily and yet the greenies, the EU, United Nations authorities and the Environmental Protection Agency continue to stand against its use. It would appear to me that someone is guilty of crimes against humanity. The world court is hot to try people for all sorts of things, but why is it that no one with the authority to charge greenies with these crimes has noticed that a crime against humanity has been committed? Perhaps this doesn't fit the media political-paradigm of the day!

Depending on who you read, the number that have died from malaria alone runs between fifty and one hundred million since 1972. That doesn’t count the many other mosquito borne diseases that are transmitted to an unprotected population. Since all of this is a direct result of greenie activities; is this not a crime against humanity? Perhaps this doesn't fit the media-political paradigm of the day!

They stand against a genetically modified food  called Golden Rice, which would prevent five hundred thousand children from going blind each year in Southeast Asia. In Africa they convinced leaders not to let their starving people eat genetically modified corn because it would cause cancer in their people. Untold numbers died. Thousands died and tens of thousands were sickened in South America when they convinced leaders there to eliminate chlorine in the water supplies because they claimed it caused cancer. Since all of this is a direct result of greenie activities; is this not a crime against humanity? Perhaps this doesn't fit the media-political paradigm of the day!

There are those who arrogantly and smugly scoff at the very idea that anything the green movement does can be considered a crime; and if this was sixty, fifty, forty or even thirty years ago society would have agreed with them. Very few actually knew what was really going on and no one listened. We simply didn't know any better because the media kept the truth from society. But we now have the internet, and that has allowed the evidence of time and science to be made known. We now know that the positions they had taken were not only wrong but evil. Evil because the environmental stands that they have taken have been tested by time; and people are still dying and suffering needlessly because of them, and they know it. Why has no one been charged with crimes aginst humanity? Perhaps this doesn't fit the media-political paradigm of the day!

They know it! At the heart of the environmental movement they believe that humanity is the planet's greatest disease and must be eliminated. Prince Phillip once said that he would like to be reincarnated as a virus for that purpose. Apparently being detached from reality is a requirement to be a Royal and a greenie. For someone to be aware that they are taking a position that they know will kill untold numbers has to be criminal. Yet they continue to insist on standing their ground on all of their their misanthropic postions.  How can this not be crimes against humanity? Perhaps this doesn't fit the media -political paradigm of the day!

If you don’t want to call these events crimes against humanity, could we at least agree that this certainly represents depraved indifference? That is a crime also, and yet these are the people deciding what pesticides (if any) should be allowed, if genetically modified foods can be grown and sold, if chlorine and fluoride should be allowed in our water supplies, whether we can use fertilizers and herbicides on our fields, what foods we should eat, whether hydroelectric dams can be built and whether oil should be or will be drilled and where.

Does anyone feel any more confident now? Perhaps we can just get a copy of the New York Times to find out how we should feel.  Or you could choose to read a history book instead, and find out what you should think!

Sunday, December 10, 2017

100 Years of Communism, 100 Million Deaths, and the Morally Bankrupt Death Cult of Che Guevara

December 9, 2017 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty
 
It’s time for the final installment of my series commemorating the evil impact of 100 years of communism.
Today we’re going to wrap up the series with a look at Che Guevera and contemplate how a mass-murdering racist and homophobe became a cultural icon.

Jay Nordlinger looks at the legacy of Guevera in a column for National Review.
Danilo Maldonado Machado, a.k.a. El Sexto, the Cuban street artist and human-rights activist, who is in and out of prison. I interviewed him at the Oslo Freedom Forum. …At the end of our interview, I asked him a standard question: “What do you wish people could know?” And you know what he said? You know what were the first words out of his mouth? “Che Guevara was a murderer.  He wasn’t a hero.” …“Maldonado says he can excuse Cubans who wear Che shirts: They have been propagandized all their lives. He has a much harder time excusing men and women from free societies.”
Writing for the Washington Examiner, Tom Rogan has a good summary of Guevera’s monstrous life.
Che Guevara was definitely evil, almost certainly a moron, and possibly also a psychopath. …Acting as Castro’s Treasury Secretary, Guevara ignored the failures and associated moral hardships his collectivist policies imposed. …Guevara may have been a psychopath. …for ideological zealots like Guevara, purifying the Earth of non-believers is an act of the highest moral order. In Guevara’s blood lust, we see his mental union with the propaganda offerings of ISIS… Guevara was also intellectually defective to the point of being a moron. …Guevara’s fervent obstinance planted the roots of far-left delusion that prevail today. It doesn’t matter that every population that tries out capitalism…does better than under communism. …He might have murdered hundreds of political prisoners…the true metaphor of Guevara’s cigar smoking face is not one of moral courage, insurgent glory, and resolute intellect, but of a useful idiot for totalitarian propaganda.
Even the establishment understands that there’s something wrong about Che idolatry, as illustrated by this Economist column.
In death Che, with his flowing hair and beret, has become one of the world’s favourite revolutionary icons. His fans span the globe. …The ascetic, asthmatic Argentine doctor first fought alongside Fidel Castro in the mountains of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. After the Cuban revolution had imposed communism on the island, Guevara left to try to “liberate” first Congo and then Bolivia. Those who idolise Che do so because they see him as an idealist who laid down his life for a cause. An aura of Christian sacrifice surrounds him. …In Guevara’s view, equality was to be achieved by levelling down. As minister of industries in Cuba, he wanted to expropriate every farm and shop. …the cost of miserable wages, the denial of opportunity and the brutal suppression of dissent. In Venezuela’s pastiche of the Cuban revolution, installed by the late Hugo Chávez, another Che fan, the masses have been impoverished while insiders have become fabulously and corruptly rich. …Not only does democracy offer the best hope of progress for the masses, it also protects the left against its own mistakes. It is long past time to bury Che and find a better icon.
Let’s go back in time and look at excerpts from a 2004 Slate column.
The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. …Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s “labor camp” system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che’s imagination. … “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …”— and so on. …The present-day cult of Che—the T-shirts, the bars, the posters—has succeeded in obscuring this dreadful reality. …Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version… I wonder if people who stand up to cheer a hagiography of Che Guevara…will ever give a damn about the oppressed people of Cuba—will ever lift a finger on behalf of the Cuban liberals and dissidents.
And here’s a grim body count from the Cuba Archive.
Ernesto Guevara, better known as “Che,” is the ultimate poster boy of “revolutionary chic,” a quintessential icon of mass culture. …the flesh and blood “Che” exhibited a deep contempt for the sanctity of human life. He knew from his communist self-education that terror would be a necessary component of revolutionary order. …from day one of the new revolutionary government, January 1, 1959, he and the Castro brothers set out to take control in Cuba by sheer terror through mass killings. …From January 1 to 3, 1959, Che executed, or left orders to execute, 25 people in Santa Clara. On January 3, Fidel Castro appointed him commander of La Cabaña prison in Havana and supreme judge of the revolutionary tribunals. In the few months Che was in charge of La Cabaña (from January 4 to November 26, 1959), 73 people are believed to have been executed without basic legal guarantees; the vast majority was killed immediately after kangaroo summary trials that often lasted minutes and presented no evidence of the alleged crimes of the accused. …Che spoke frankly to the international community about the revolutionary government’s killings in Cuba. At the United Nations in New York on December 11, 1964, he made his famous statement: “”Fusilamientos” (executions by firing squad), yes, we have executed, we execute, and will continue executing while necessary.”
Here’s some more background on Guevara from Politifact, including his murder of fellow Cubans and his racist attitude.
Ernesto “Ché” Guevara was a Latin American guerrilla leader and Marxist revolutionary, and a major figure in the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro in the late 1950s. Although hailed in some circles as a legendary icon of rebellion, the Argentine-born doctor is also reviled by many Cubans for ruthlessly ordering the execution of more than 150 prisoners in Cuba without a fair trial. …But was he a racist? …The most compelling evidence was from The Motorcycle Diaries, a book based on diaries he kept while traveling through Latin America in the early 1950s. ” …their different ways of approaching life separate them completely: The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.”
This story, by the way, attempts to exonerate Guevara even though it acknowledges his racist pedigree.
Guevara’s words in The Motorcycle Diaries were highly critical of the blacks he came across in that Caracas neighborhood, and he placed them beneath Europeans. The experts we consulted said the remarks are real and would not have been unusual coming from a 24-year-old from Argentina at the time. …We rate this claim Mostly False.
So he was racist, but it’s “Mostly False” to say he was racist because he was a product of his times.
Does anyone think Politifact would say that slaveowners in the 1840s weren’t really racist because they were products of their times? Likewise, who thinks defenders of the Jim Crow laws in the 1960s would get a free pass since they were products of their times?

For some bizarre reason, leftists (and lots of vacuous college kids and brainless celebrities) want to excuse – or even justify – Guevara’s unsavory life.

Indeed, notwithstanding a record of cruelty and hate, Che Guevara has a big contingent of fanboys.
Such as the government of Ireland.
An Post have issued a one euro stamp featuring the face of Che Guevara, a leading figure in the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. The stamp, which features a famous image of Guevara by Dublin artist Jim Fitzpatrick, commemorates the 50th anniversary of the revolutionary’s death on October 9, 1967. …Designed by Red&Grey, the stamp is based on Mr Fitzpatrick’s artwork, which appears on t-shirts, posters, badges and clothing worldwide and is now rated among the world’s top 10 most iconic images.
I’m assuming Ireland’s vacuous president somehow played a role in the decision to honor Guevera.
In any event, I can’t wait to see the new stamps for Hitler, Mao, and Stalin that the Irish postal service doubtlessly is preparing.

The United Nations also is part of the Che death cult.
With an impeccable instinct for venerating murderous thugs, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has now added to its Memory of the World Register the writings of Cuba’s Ernesto “Che” Guevara. That means that the documents generated by Che during his bloody career will now be treated as historical treasures, protected and cared for with the help of UNESCO. What’s next? The teachings of Stalin and Pol Pot? …Che’s works were nominated for UNESCO’s special attentions by Cuba and Bolivia, and to be added to the UNESCO Register the nomination had to be endorsed by UNESCO’s director-general, Irina Bokova. You might suppose that as a former Bulgarian government functionary, from the days when Bulgaria orbited the Soviet Union, Bokova would be aware of the horrors behind Che’s radical “cool.” But Bokova appears to suffer from a longstanding infatuation with Cuba’s repressive regime. …one might wish for a UN cultural organization endowed with at least some hint of a moral compass.
Let’s look at a couple of videos.

We’ll start with Johan Norberg’s succinct summary of Guevara.


Reason has a video about the Che fetish, with a special focus on Hollywood’s moral bankruptcy.



Let’s close on an uplifting note.

Some people are waking up on the issue, as noted in a report from the Economist.
Che Guevara was born in Rosario, then Argentina’s second-largest city… A red banner marks the posh apartment block where he was born. A four-metre-high (13-foot) bronze statue stands in Che Guevara Square. The city council finances CELChe, a centre devoted to the study of his life, and celebrates “Che week” around his birthday in June. …Not everyone in Rosario thinks the bereted revolutionary…deserves such reverence. Fundación Bases, a liberal think-tank based in the city, has launched a petition to persuade the city council to remove the monuments. The martyr was himself a killer, says Franco Martín López, the institute’s director. Guevara was second-in-command to Fidel Castro, whose Cuban revolution killed more than 10,000 people. …Under the motto “a murderer doesn’t deserve state tributes”, Mr López’s foundation has produced videos to educate Argentines, and rosarinos in particular. One shows a clip of Guevara promising to “continue the firing squads for as long as necessary” in a speech to the UN General Assembly in 1964. In another, a narrator reads out the accusatory suicide note of Reinaldo Arenas, a gay novelist who died in 1990 after suffering decades of persecution by Cuba’s government. …Norberto Galiotti, the cigar-smoking secretary of Rosario’s Communist Party, …suspects liberals are envious of Che’s posthumous charisma. “You don’t see many kids walking around with Margaret Thatcher T-shirts,” he observes.
I rarely agree with communists, but it is sad that kids are more likely to idolize Guevara than a great leader like Margaret Thatcher.

By the way, my disdain for Che and the Cuban dictatorship does not mean I support a trade embargo by the United States.

Such a policy may have been appropriate when the Soviet Union still existed and was using Cuba as a proxy regime. But that’s no longer the case.

Yes, the current regime in Cuba is still deplorable. It impoverishes and oppresses its own people. But that description applies to a lot of nations that have normal economic relations with the United States. If we allow trade and travel with China, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia, the same should be true for Cuba.

The bottom line is that we can have economic relations with unsavory nations. Even with nations that produce evil people like Che Guevara.

P.S. Returning to the topic of Che Guevara fanboys, don’t forget the cynical actions of Mercedes-Benz. But at least the company apologized.

P.P.S. If you want to understand the economic impact of communism, consider the astounding fact that Cuba and Hong Kong had similar living standards in the late 1950s.