Castro's scorched-earth human rights record

Armando Valladares provides a scorching indictment, here, of the human rights inferno in Castro's Cuba. And all the while the international left has given its blessing. Is anyone surprised.

In my leftist, or apolitical, days, I visited Cuba 4 times. Three times I went to Cienfuegos, and once to Santiago de Cuba. I was drawn by the old Spanish architecture, the slower pace, the 50's era cars -- the usual elements turistas are fascinated by. Castro's 'gulag' is not visible to tourists. Only once did the cell door swing open, suggesting the routine crimes within.

I'd made the mistake of exchanging US dollars for local pesos, through a middleman on the street. Somehow the authorities heard of it. I found myself a day later sitting in a large room, 20 feet from a police questioner. I admitted I had changed the money, but pled ignorance that this was not allowed for foreigners. Fortunately he decided not to take the matter any further. I recall vividly the air of menace & arbitrary power in that brief interview.

Needless to say, Armando Valladares was not so lucky. A year after Castro's revolution, Valladares refused to have a government placard placed on his desk at the post office. At a press conference, and in recent speeches, Castro had been insisting he was a democrat, and would not impose any form of communism on the Cuban people. Valladares took him at his word. The placard read, "If Fidel is a communist, then put me on the list. He's got the right idea." He refused on the basis that communism in Cuba was not a desirable outcome, in his opinion.

Valladares was arrested the next day. Thirteen days later, in Valladares' own words, "I was tried on charges of threatening the powers of state security, even though there was no evidence against me. The justice system under Castro was a mockery of the rule of law; members of my tribunal were Communist Party apparatchiks who sat with their boots up on tables, smoking cigars and reading comic books. Their very presence was but a formality; the verdicts had already been decided. I was not permitted an attorney."

His troubles were only beginning. For 22 years he was to be an inmate in Castro's vast gulag, a prison system tourists like me never see.

"Once in prison, if the guards felt like punishing us, they would put us in cages, with mesh roofs, and walk along the edge while pouring buckets of urine and excrement all over our bodies. Sometimes, guards would shoot prisoners for target practice. That is how they killed Alfredo Carrion and Diosdado Aquit. Many of the men whom Castro had imprisoned, tortured and killed had been his comrades in overthrowing Batista. But most of them were innocent people eliminated in Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's psychotic quest for what he and Castro called the 'new man'.

"The impunity of Castro's dictatorship was marked by its cruelty. A prisoner in my block, Julio Tan, once refused an order by a prison guard to dig weeds. The guard struck him with his bayonet, another hit him with a hoe, and a gang of guards beat him until he bled to death in just a matter of minutes. My friend Pedro Luis Boitel, a student leader and courageous opponent of Batista, went on a hunger strike in 1972 to protest his treatment. On the 49th day of the strike, Castro personally ordered that Boitel be denied drinking water. Boitel died of thirst, in horrific agony, five days later.

"Terror was Castro's main tool. The tactics used for enemies of the regime included the exploitation of phobias such as reptiles and rats; the use of drugs so as to have prisoners lose all notion of time and place; blindfolding prisoners, hanging them by their feet, and then lowering them into wells they were told are filled with crocodiles; the use of guard dogs that had their teeth removed and which were set upon prisoners with hands tied behind their backs. Usually, these dogs attacked the genitals first. All of this was investigated and extensively documented by a visiting delegation from the United Nations. The evidence can be found in Geneva."

Valladares' harrowing story tells us nothing we didn't already know about Fidel's psychotic island paradise, but it does expose the international left for the hypocrites and cowards they truly are.

I'm ashamed to say I was one such hypocrite and coward. I was one such liberal who just wanted to interact with Cubans, and see Cuba, and to hell with the stories of human rights abuses. I'm still shocked at my own political insensitivity. The abuses simply didn't matter to me, b/c I believed it was all in a good cause. How naive I was, to my great shame.

And so it begins ...

REMEMBER US!
King Leonidas & his 300 Spartans died here this day, so that they might be remembered not only as men, but as free men -- willing to die for an idea.

REMEMBER US!
A new age is upon us, an age unlike anything this world has ever seen. Leonidas knew this, it is why he spoke of victory.

REMEMBER US!
And know that freedom comes not 'free'. Know too, as he knew, that when tyrants rise, as ever they will, they seek to rip away the world it has been given to us to build.

REMEMBER US!
And believe. Believe that to live one day as your own man is worth more than an eternity of days under another man's whim.

REMEMBER US!
And be free, Spartans.

And so it begins ...

The great pushback against Islamic fascism now builds, as free men and women decide, spontaneously, despite being ill-used by the left, that this tyranny, this day, will not steal away our world.

Listen at night when all is quiet. Listen. You can feel it building. The West's defiance will change the world, again.

Forrest Whitaker -- best actor Oscar for 2007

I have always had a very high regard for Forrest Whittaker, the Hollywood actor who won Best Actor this year for his performance as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. I was especially impressed by his acceptance speech.

I will try to recreate it here, from memory.

"Whoa! Okay. Wow. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for this! Thank you for this opportunity. That someone like me, from east Texas, with a dream, could have that dream become real -- what can I say?"

"Anything's possible. Anything can happen!"

"And thank you, God, for making this possible. In this life. Wow! Before going on to the next life. Thank you."

"I really believe that we can take hold of that spark inside each of us and reach out and touch the spark in others. And once that happens, everything changes. Nothing stays the same once that happens. I really believe that. Thank you."

I respect his Christian faith, his belief in an afterlife, his encouragement to other artists not to give up on their dreams, his belief that anything is possible, and his conviction that we can make a profound difference in the lives of others. What a refreshing change from the politicized pap that passes for conviction in Hollywood.

Congratulations, Forrest!

9/11 remembered

The 9/11 victim list available here, is still staggering, 5 1/2 years later. To see the ordinary faces, of those victims on American Airlines Flight 11, with 11 crew and 92 passengers, that crashed into the WTC North Tower; on American Airlines 175, with 9 crew and 56 passengers, that crashed into WTC South Tower; on American Airlines 77, with 6 crew and 64 passengers, that crashed into the Pentagon; and United Airlines 93, with 7 crew and 45 passengers, which, though headed for the Capitol buildings, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, because ordinary Americans had the opportunity to fight back.

It is horrific to see the pictures of ordinary people, doing ordinary jobs, going about their ordinary business, as we do in normal, free, peaceful societies. And then to realize they were murdered, viciously and without the slightest regard for the fact that they were innocent civilians.

And then to realize that the leftist media, leftist academia, leftist Hollywood, are ashamed (how dare they!) and feel that America brought this on herself. That belief is the most monstrous thing of all. It truly makes my blood boil, to know that the dead are being so brazenly dishonored. It makes any thinking person sick.

The Anchoress has it right

I started this blog a month ago & fully expected to be blogging daily, yet that isn't how it turned out. In the past I found I was writing letters to the editor of multiple newspapers on a very regular basis. I was motivated by my chagrin at the media's routinely selective reference to facts, its interpretive distortions, implausible extrapolations, misanalysis of causes, ideological bias, and more. I often wrote such letters twice or more times per week.

Yet now I find I've fallen silent. I truly find my passion is waning. Political discourse in the West seems now to be all about pessimism, defeat, guilt, blame. We in the West have lost our focus, and incredibly to me, few of us any longer believe we're in a war with a supremely vicious enemy. We pretend all is well. All that's necessary is to correct the many horrendous mistakes of the conservatives in power. We blame conservatives for the message we don't want to hear.

I feel very much as the Anchoress appears to feel.

"No, I still don’t feel like writing," she wrote recently on her superb blog. "Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s hormonal. I read the news, the blogs and the op-eds and it all feels like hyperventilation and apoplexy to me."

"I keep thinking of that old phrase, 'diabolical disorientation,' and that’s what the news, the politics and the blogosphere feels like to me, right now. When you’re a kid, you spin and spin, because the disorientation is thrilling and new. Over the past 15 years we’ve watched whole governments spin and spin and now the press does it incessantly…and we’re all disoriented."

'Diabolical disorientation.' Tell me about it! So, for now, I'll just continue posting when I feel the desire, if at all.

should old acquaintance be forgot ...

HAPPY NEW YEAR! to all bloggers, readers, & surfers. Here's wishing ya'all a prosperous & productive 2007 ...

The West: Fragile or Invincible?

Conventional wisdom maintains that America and the West are not under attack. The terrorist incidents are either dismissed as passing epiphenomena, or presumed to be the regrettably violent expression of a legitimate sense of Islamic grievance against the West.

The Islamists themselves keep adding to the list of alleged/imagined grievances, which the Left obligingly picks up and uses to attack those governments that do contribute to the world's defense against terror.

This defense is primarily being waged by the Anglosphere, the English-speaking world: the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada, and India. The conservative governments in these countries are under relentless attack by the Left.

A majority of polemicists have taken the position that the West in general, and America in particular, is fragile in the face of a protean enemy: Islamic fascism. The Left is not in this fight. Indeed they do all they can to undermine our defense, in effect to assist the enemy. The Left has, in word and deed, joined the enemy. The sooner we acknowledge this truth the better.

So it is true that in the short and medium term the West will be increasingly fragile in meeting these two enemies: Islamic fascism and the international Left.

Orson Scott Card, in his article "How Our Civilization Can Fall", brilliantly argues a parallel between ancient Rome's Pax Romana and a modern Pax Americana, that the military of each provided the defensive bulwark behind which a trans-border trading system developed. Globalization is a system of global trade that America's military has made possible. Card explores how in the Roman world the system broke down as the Roman military's protection was gradually compromised.

The international Left compromises America's military from inside the West. The projection of American military power is constrained so routinely now, in a myriad ways, it's hard to see America ever launching another elective, pre-emptive military mission after the media circus of defeatism and negativity over Iraq of the past 3 years. The American military's protection of the global trading system has already been seriously compromised. Card's point is well-taken.

Gerard Vanderleun, in "Toying With Genocide", takes the opposite view. He maintains that the Islamists will be defeated, but only in the long term, when the West finally grows tired of the endless homicide bombings, hijackings, kidnappings and beheadings. A serious co-ordinated response will begin when that weariness sets in. In those early stages it will still be a war waged with the West's modern conceit of self-restraint.

Victory will only occur when the gloves come off, likely after a series of devastating terrorist attacks on Western and American targets. In that context, as many European cities continue their transformation into Mogadishu, Vanderleun sees Europe reverting to form. It will use those techniques of localized genocide "it perfected in the last century. Europe is very, very good at police states, purges, death camps, massacres and Gulags." The U.S. he sees deploying a 'remote genocide': nuclear strikes on population centers in the Moslem world. Not only can the West survive "another 9/11, it can survive another hundred 9/11's."

In the short and medium term the West will continue to be fragile, by choice. Inevitably, however, if the Islamists' terror attacks continue, a horrific reckoning will befall the Islamist forces and their Moslem hosts. It is an outcome the West would do almost anything to avoid.

The international Left will almost certainly continue its campaign of subversion, though it's hard to see how their credibility will be maintained once the endgame starts.

We have the Left to thank for this delay in the West's struggle for cultural self-defense.