By Tom Nichols
Sunday, November 27, 2016
Fidel Castro is dead, and the world is better for it. I
do not mean to say I am celebrating the death of a human being; Castro’s final
disposition awaits a ruling before the Judgment Seat of Christ and is not up to
me. Rather, I mean that nature, after waiting a lot longer than the time
usually allotted to us mortals, has finally removed from this planet a man so
odious and responsible for so much human misery that our common human
experience is better for his absence.
Not that you’d know it from reading President Obama’s
carefully parsed farewell. “We know that this moment,” the president said on
Saturday, “fills Cubans – in Cuba and in the United States – with powerful
emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course
of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation.”
This is the kind of wordsmithing that seeks to replace
words like “evil” with fuzzy notions about being “consequential.” It’s a way of
saying that Castro had a huge effect on many lives, without mentioning what kind. It’s like looking back at Joseph
Stalin’s mass collectivization then talking about “the countless ways in which
Mr. Stalin altered the course of individual lives.” It’s true, especially if by
“altered” the lives of others we mean “ended them brutally.”
“During my presidency,” Obama continued, “we have worked
hard to put the past behind us.” I’ll say.
Good and Bad Ways
to Put the Past Behind Us
Castro’s crimes against his own people are well-documented
by many others, and need not be recounted in detail here. My particular animus
toward Castro is rooted his
eagerness to see the Soviet Union engage in the nuclear destruction of the
United States during the 1962 Cuban crisis. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev
had to remind Castro that the point of putting Soviet missiles in Cuba was to
further Communist interests, not spark Armageddon. “This is insane!” Khrushchev
exploded at the time. “Fidel wants to drag us into the grave with him!”
In later years, Castro tried to underplay his hotheaded
insistence on starting World War III. That tepid backtracking was good enough
for liberals who thought implementing a shoddy socialist state by force was
worth the imprisonment and death of political dissidents and other inconvenient
people (including Christians, gays, and anyone else who crossed Castro). The
whole “nuclear destruction of the United States” was Just One of Those Things
that had to be forgotten.
But will we forget? President Obama seems to think so. “History
will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people
and world around him,” he said in his statement. This, again, is the kind of
thing one says when too timid to render a judgment—or when one fears to speak a
morally defective judgment aloud.
History has already judged Castro. The insane ideas he
espoused, the anti-human global system for which he fought, and the Soviet ally
whose bidding he did for so long, are all gone. I do not expect a liberal
president to engage in triumphalism, but something more than watery rhetorical
oatmeal might have been a better signal to the Cuban people, who are destined
to rejoin the modern world sooner rather than later and who might want to know
whose side we were really on.
Moral Bankruptcy
at Its Worst
“Today,” the president added, “we offer condolences to
Fidel Castro’s family, and our thoughts and prayers are with the Cuban people.”
Our thoughts and prayers? What could that even mean? Our prayers for what? Perhaps that Cubans who are glad
to see their tormentor finally go cold after the luxury of dying in peace are
not accidentally discovered celebrating by the dictatorship Castro’s brother
leads?
Yes, there are Cubans who will be distraught over
Castro’s death. They don’t need our prayers. Rather, they need a reminder that
their regime’s days, one way or another, are numbered, and they should think
about where in President Obama’s revered “History” they’ll find themselves.
Obama’s statement not only shows the bankruptcy of the
administration’s foreign policy, but also of the general inability of American
liberals since at least the 1970s to cope with leftist dictatorships. The
liberal adoration of Castro falls neatly in line with a Democratic Party
foreign policy that for nearly 40 years has been based on the notion of “no
enemies to the Left.”
Anyone who was against Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and
both George Bushes, the reasoning went, had to be getting something right. (The fact that St. Jack of Kennedy inflicted the
Cuban embargo in the first place was usually left politely unsaid, or explained
away as a necessity of the Cold War.) But the idea that Castro stood for
anything besides violence abroad and repression at home now only reflects a
willing suspension of disbelief that requires a huge expenditure of mental
energy to maintain. Youthful leftists might be forgiven their ignorance and
inexperience, but a man Barack Obama’s age—that is to say, my age—should know
better.
What Happens When
You Can’t Stand Up to Evil
I say this, by the way, as one of the few conservatives
who backed the president’s call for normalizing relations with Cuba. As is
always the case with the Obama administration’s foreign policy, however, the
White House took a perfectly sensible idea and implemented it in the worst way
possible, and I have since ended up regretting that support. Instead of
requiring that Cuba take steps away from its totalitarian past, Obama decided
all was forgiven, and joined Raul Castro at a baseball game. Bygones.
This romance with leftist dictators was one of many
reasons prominent Democrats, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, defected to the
Republicans in the 1980s. Fortunately, a more sensible Republican president in
the 1980s would have nothing to do with this kind of moral equivocation.
However, in the two decades after the Cold War—a time I now fear we will later
call “the interwar period”—this unwillingness to criticize leftist
dictatorships has strengthened an inability among Americans in general to think
clearly about foreign policy.
This moral muddle-headedness, particularly among the
young, has severe consequences. Liberals are appalled—as am I—that the new
Trump administration seems hell-bent on correcting Obama’s foreign policy with
an equally ridiculous, and perhaps even more dangerous, policy of “no enemies
to the Right,” which suits Russian President Vladimir Putin just fine.
But years of liberals insisting on moral equivalence for
leftist dictators in fact paved the way for Donald Trump’s utterly
transactional politics. What Trump proposes is, indeed, a morally empty foreign
policy. It makes no judgment about how dictators treat their own people, or
whether they mean us harm.
In other words, it is exactly the kind of vacuous foreign
policy for which American liberalism prepared the ground decades in advance by
sucking up to hideous people like Fidel Castro. If young Americans who in an
earlier time might have worn Che Guevara T-shirts cannot see the danger in
Putinista chic today, there’s plenty of blame to go around. The president’s
whitewashing of Castro on Saturday is one of the prime examples of how we got
to this desolate point.
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