Fidel Castro RIP & The Travels of Trudeau le Petit

Tags

Bay of Pigs, cia, cuba, Fidel Castro, Francophonie, human rights, John F Kennedy, justin trudeau, USA, Women's Rights

Fidel Castro RIP

 

Without any doubt, Fidel Castro will remain one of the 20^th-century’s major historical figures. But there are two stories about Fidel – just as there are two stories about everyone and everything. To some, Fidel will always be the heroic revolutionary who rescued Cuba from a corrupt kleptocracy and instituted an egalitarian society in defiance of Washington and the West. To others, he was a brutal tyrant who crushed all opposition and trampled over human rights. In fact, both stories are true. To the Marxist, however, the “opposition” crushed would be greedy class-traitors, and the human rights trampled over would be those of people seeking to debase the moral climate of society. It is worth remembering that Plato’s vision for his Socratic Republic entailed expelling all the poets and artists as social debasers – even though Socrates himself was sentenced to death for “corrupting the morals of youth”.

It is often indicative of character when people rejoice over the death of a figure beloved of many – and this is what is happening now in the Floridian Cuban community. Many of these people escaped the island, or were expelled by Fidel, either as criminals or class-traitors. It is easy to understand both points of view, but I have been to Cuba a number of times, and am inclined to think that Fidel did far more good than bad. The complaints of emigres are all too often that their purloined wealth was confiscated, either in the form of land returned to the peasants who farmed it, or from confiscated rentier properties, which contribute nothing to national productivity. Few seem to remember the state Cuba was in before Fidel’s revolution. Run by a puppet dictator, it was ostensibly owned by the American Mafia, which had turned it into a private fiefdom of gambling and prostitution. The crime colony island of Spectre in Ian Fleming’s excellent James Bond novels is based on Cuba – Fleming himself lived in nearby Jamaica. Before this period, Cuba had been invaded and plundered by the US as part of a burgeoning would-be tropical empire. The United Fruit Company, active across the Caribbean and Central America, was owned by the Mafia. Like many Third World nations, the island was still in the 17^th-century when the 20^th-century dawned. Fidel Castro seized it by the neck and dragged it forwards, as Mao had done in China, and Stalin had done in Russia. When absolute power corrupts absolutely, what happens? It would seem to be a galloping paranoia, a fear of all critics and criticism – real or imagined. In Fidel’s case, however, it seems to have been more real than imagined. We know for a fact that the CIA were trying to kill him – preposterously at times. Someone was once hired to put a poisonous powder into his shoes that would make his hair and beard fall out – presumably on the premise that such an un-American beard must be the source of his power. Then, of course, there was the disastrous Bay of Pigs attempt at invasion. True, Fidel had allowed the Soviets to place nuclear missiles on the island, but he seems to have realized he was just a pawn in a far larger game, ordering the missiles disarmed and returned to Russia – and thereby averting the Apocalypse. John F. Kennedy’s sensible withdrawal from conflict with Cuba is said by some to be the cause of his assassination – which seems to have been a plot by the Mafia and Cuban exiles.

Few countries are suited to immediate democracy, and Cuba is certainly one of them. This, of course, assumes that democracy is even viable anywhere. Yet, whatever Fidel did, he was adored by the vast majority of Cubans for over fifty years. Most had seen their lives improve dramatically. When I was first there, the Leader would drive himself around Havana in a jeep, cigar clenched in his teeth, and stop to chat with anyone he encountered. He was not a man of the people – he was educated at a private Jesuit school with Pierre Elliot Trudeau – yet he understood the people, and they responded to him with love. At least ten million people will be mourning him tonight. Cuba is definitely a far better place because of him – and the greater good is a Marxist principle.

One of my favourite anecdotes about Fidel is from the memoirs of Kenneth Tynan, the eminent theatre critic and playwright. He was on the island with Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway and others. Cuba’s most famous resident, Hemingway had not left after the revolution, as some seem to think he did. Indeed, understanding the island better than most, he approved of Fidel, who, like most of his close revolutionary comrades, was still very young at the time. This lustrous crew were awaiting an audience with young Fidel, when Truman Capote said, to whoever was listening, “Do you think that boy over there would go get us some tacos if I gave him the money?”

“Unlikely,” said Hemingway, “he’s the Minister of Health…”

 

The Travels of Trudeau le Petit

 

He’s swanning around Africa now, bleating about women’s rights, and denying his party fund-raising is dubious. A PM used to be able to avoid these embarrassing questions on foreign trips – but not anymore. Like his bromancee, Obama, he seems to be so thoroughly decent and innocent that one is inclined to believe his protestations. But, with innocence, comes naivety. At the Madagascar Francophonie, countries seem to have issues far more pressing than those Trudeau is blabbing about. Mali, for example. The French want Canadian troops in there and elsewhere to help quell chaos. But le Petit seems more concerned with women’s rights across the continent. Perhaps this is a grave problem to many western industrial women, who only hear about Africa in the media. But, to the Liberians or South Sudanese, the appearance of this bright and bushy white kid preaching modernity must be perplexing. Imagine if he had beamed himself down into 19^th-century England, during the Industrial Revolution, declaring votes for women and a fair minimum wage. Even the Proletariat, whose average age of death was then nineteen, would have thought he was out of his tree. Change comes slowly, and if it comes quickly there is upheaval and mayhem – and then no improvement at all. Karl Marx understood this, and he advocated gradual change from the top down to avoid catastrophe. He believed the revolution, when it came, would happen in England – because he thought it depended upon general education. What happened in Russia would have surprised him, and he wouldn’t have approved of it in any way. It is hard to accept that le Petit is so naïve he thinks western social values can be instantly implemented by nations that are still effectively in the late 18^th-century. They have many other more pressing issues than human rights, so why keep harping on the topic? I hate to think that Trudeau is only doing it to court favour with his dewy-eyed fans back home…

 

Paul William Roberts

The C.I.A.

Tags

Canada, cia, human rights, liberalism, politics, United States of America

For the past 50 years, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has enjoyed a reputation for violence, murder, illegal warfare, political assassination, and large-scale drug trafficking, that has made organized crime look like shop-lifting. Thanks to one of the few consistently decent and honourable politicians in recent American history, Diane Feinstein, we now have the release of a 7000 page report detailing the criminal inhumanity and the psychopathic mendacity of the Agency. As I write, the story unfolds by every minute, so I shall certainly be commenting on it relentlessly, since I have long believed the CIA needs to be dissolved. Right now I have to attend a Liberal Party dinner in Ottawa, to support my friend and the ideal local candidate for MP, David Graham.

Your Right to Human Rights

Tags

democracy, human rights, new-Conservatism, philosophy, politics, privacy

I was listening a lecture by Professor A.C. Anthony Grayling on human rights, at the end of which he was asked, by a member of the audience, an interesting question: in short, what about those vast areas of the planet where his idea of human rights is considered Euro-centric — alien notions which we are attempting to import into, or impose upon, their own unique and cherished traditions? The professor really had no answer to this, beyond citing the idea, in Confucian China, that the community was more important than the individual, whose attempt to rebel from this would be viewed as anti-social. He did mention that the various Islamic judicial traditions held vastly different ideas about the rights of women compared with our own (recent) views, yet merely urged the need for more dialogue between dissenting groups. As I said, he had no answer.

Most of his talk revolved around the struggle to answer Socrates’ question about the nature of a good life, placing inordinate value on the evolution, during the so-called ‘Enlightenment’ (who or what was ‘enlightened?), of various bills and declarations of rights, from that of the French Revolution (freedom is the quintessential right), through those of the American Revolution (some people have rights, others – slaves, aboriginals – do not), with all amendments (if we don’t like your rights we can kill you), to the U.N.’s post-WWII Universal Declaration of Human Rights (meaningless, for the above-cited reasons – it is in no way ‘universal’). The rights we now seek to export, or impose upon, the rest of the world are not even ones we ourselves subscribed to a hundred years ago – or, in the shameful case of America, fifty years ago. When I tell my children that, during my own childhood, Afro-Americans could not vote, nor could they travel in the same buses, or eat in the same restaurants as white people, they don’t believe me. The great Platonic and Ciceronian ideals of democracy – upon which our own are based — are barely recognizable as ‘democratic’. Rights were limited to land-owning males. The poor, women, and slaves were essentially regarded as sub-human. Plato, presumably quoting his guru, Socrates, states that, upon death, a bad man is reborn as a woman; and a bad woman is reborn as a dog. Professor Grayling made much of advances made in European citizens’ rights over the past 400 years, announcing that, now, “we all live like lords” in comparison with the erstwhile lack of freedoms. We can now make individual choices regarding the sort of lives we wish to lead, the kind of things in which we wish to believe, etc. Yet is this really true?

The French revolutionary ‘Committee for Public Safety’ effectively stifled all freedoms in the Revolution’s Bill of Rights with Robespierre’s guillotine, and his banning of religion. America’s Declaration and subsequent Constitution were sheer hypocrisy cloaked in lofty rhetoric. All men were not born free, and did not have ‘certain inalienable rights’—take slavery, or the theft of Indian lands and massacre of their inhabitants. Thomas Jefferson, chief author of these documents, himself owned some 200 slaves while writing the words “all men are born free”. He even ‘fathered children upon’ at least one of them – as the hagiographer delicately puts this rape of a human chattel.

Grayling rightly warned that it is under the guise of ‘protecting’ citizens that freedoms are eroded, and the loss of them is seemingly greeted willingly. I say ‘seemingly’ because public opinion is manipulated by a fear-mongering corporate media, owned by the same organizations that essentially are the government. Although it is certainly possible to ferret out the truth behind our daily news on the Internet or in libraries, how many voters have the time or inclination to do so? Many are functionally illiterate – my own son among them – in spite of the best education possible, and parental encouragement. They can read, but they don’t. Most people’s lives are dominated by mind-numbing jobs five days a week, leaving them drained and capable only of watching television. Anyone with ambitions in the corporate world understands, without being told, that he or she will have to work a twelve-hour day, six or even seven days a week. The carrot-and-stick of severance, ‘down-sizing’, or promotion is in constant use. After 40 years of this stressful existence, most are only fit for a brief and troubled retirement (what to do now there is nothing to do, and no ringmaster goading you on?). If, in Socrates’ phrase, “the unexamined life is not worth living”, then such lives are surely wasted ones. With taxes, bills, mortgage payments, fees for every imaginable service that used to be free, and educations not worth their extortionate cost to finance, what time is left for thought?

And this is just the way rulers want it to be. Free thought is a bigger threat than nuclear holocaust. The outrageous invasions of privacy, through cell phone intercepts, or the collection of computer data, are always masked by the terms of terror: pedophiles; identity theft; credit-card fraud; terrorism itself. The removal of freedoms is always consensual now, because it is always for our own protection. Little wonder that Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four is currently being read so avidly. The most frightened populations always have the strongest governments. Keep the fear going. Show the images of horror and devastation afflicting people without adequate protection. If the evil within does not work, then there’s nothing like a good war to unite the nation, making citizens positively keen to throw away their rights, often along with their lives. If you’re doing nothing wrong, why should you worry about cameras watching you on every street, in every store, even in washrooms? Why not have cameras in your house? You would be safer.

Life is risk – fact. Security without freedom is not worth having, since it denies life by pretending to protect it. If you think your rulers really care about your security, you are an idiot. Why would they send you to wars, or force you to work harder than Roman slaves just to survive, if they cared about you? Why are they so keen to keep you in debt from university on?

One percent of the population has the leisure to think, and what they think about is their own power and wealth, not your health and security. Funded thinkers, in labs and universities, increasingly work on either government-approved projects, or else stunningly obscure or pedestrian irrelevancies. Under the guise of human rights and democracy, this one percent seeks to extend their power, and thus increase their wealth, by imposing their very cunning system of theoretical democracy over the entire planet. The author of The End of History – once a neo-conservative scripture extolling democracy as history’s final phase – has even now refuted his own text, detailing its errors. The problem is that much of this planet is not in the 21^st Century. There are places where the calendar reads ten minutes after the Neolithic period. Was Europe ready for so-called democracy a millennium ago? Consensual agreement to neo-slavery has never been easier to obtain than it is now in the West. With bread, the media circuses, and a constant diet of fear, we’ve become cowering imbeciles. Napoleon had to shut down some 100 newspapers to obtain support for his tyranny. Hitler did a bit of that, too; but he also had the state-controlled radio and cinema to aid Nazi propaganda. Thanks to Leo Strauss, the godfather of neo-conservatism – whose escape from Germany was aided by Carl Schmidt, founder of Hitler’s judiciary – fascist ideas, like lying to the public, and ruthlessly persecuting enemies, found favour with many adherents to the ‘Chicago School’, including Iraq war-monger Paul Wolfowitz, and Canada’s current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper (let’s hear the interviewer who dares question him about his devotion to Straussian neo-conservatism!). Today’s tyrants, using Straussian principles, are in every nook and cranny of our lives; they can even exert some control over our minds – and they will strive for even greater control. The Internet may well be the last battlefield, the final barricades from which to fire on those who would strip us of all genuine rights. Already, attempts to block certain websites, or make them unendurably slow to load, are in progress. Such efforts ought to be resisted by every possible means, while we still have the ability and freedom to do it.

As someone recently said, “The Internet is a television that watches you.” Find the open-source software to close its eyes. As someone else remarked, “Republicans care about you before you’re born, yet once you’re alive they don’t give a damn.” Don’t vote against your own interests. Think! Examine your life. Respect the lives and beliefs of others, so long as they do not try to force them upon you. Don’t let very tiny minorities of sick, deranged, or ignorant people – pedophiles and terrorists are a tiny fraction of one percent of the population – scare you into sacrificing the freedoms of the 99.9%. My freedom is also your freedom; your imagined security, however, is my prison.

Paul William Roberts