The American Left’s Love Affair with FARC & Friends

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, January 29, 2021

 

A special court has been convened in Colombia to try eight leaders of the Marxist-Leninist terrorist outfit known as FARC — Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia — on war crimes and crimes against humanity charges. Perhaps justice will be done upon these eight — will it ever be done for their enablers in the United States and elsewhere?

 

FARC is one of the many murderous offshoots of that “real socialism” that our leftist friends always insist “has never been tried.” Like the Taliban, it is part political movement and part drug cartel; like Hamas, it has sought legitimacy by repackaging itself as a political party, now known as Comunes.

 

FARC never enjoyed quite the celebrity status of, say, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the communist militia that enjoyed the support of, among others, Bill de Blasio, who returned from a visit to the war-ravaged country in his late 20s with “a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government,” in the words of the New York Times. (And how are you enjoying it, New York?) The Sandinistas got a Clash triple-album named after them, whereas FARC was always more an enthusiasm of cloistered academic Marxists and left-wing activists with a commitment to worldwide revolutionary movements. They were trained by IRA bomb-makers, and their interests were advanced in the U.S. Congress by elected Democrats, with American activists acting as back-channel go-betweens. Left-wing activists have long agitated for the release of FARC terrorists held in U.S. prisons.

 

If FARC has always had friends in the United States, friends of FARC abroad have had even more friends in the United States. The late Venezuelan socialist dictator, Hugo Chávez, was a longtime sponsor of the Marxist-Leninist-narco-terrorist outfit next door, going so far as to allow them to operate from Venezuelan safe havens. Chávez was the American Left’s second-favorite Latin American dictator, behind Fidel Castro, enjoying the support not only of Hollywood’s champagne radicals but also that of congressional Democrats, including Chaka Fattah and Barney Frank. Those two were not exactly paragons of good judgment: Fattah went down on 23 felony counts comprising racketeering conspiracy, bribery, bank fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering, while Barney Frank at one point had a bisexual prostitution ring being run out of his home but was never charged with any crime.

 

(My main objection to Representative Frank’s taking the gavel as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee was that he had somehow managed to lose money hosting a whorehouse in Washington.)

 

Representative Fattah was an eager dupe for Chávez in the heady days when Venezuela was buoyed by rising oil prices — Boss Hugo sent discounted heating oil to Representative Fattah’s constituents in chilly Philadelphia. He also kidnapped, tortured, and murdered political opponents. But the Left has no enemies to the left.

 

The Left’s love affair with FARC in Colombia and Chávez in Venezuela was an echo of its ongoing romance, now post-mortem, with Fidel Castro. Celebrity progressives such as Danny Glover, Robert Redford, and Oliver Stone made the trip to Havana to sit at the feet of Fidel Castro. Celebrity journalists such as Andrea Mitchell talked up Castro’s achievements in health care even as Cubans were deprived of simple antibiotics and basic medical services. Upon the great tyrant’s death, Barack Obama spoke of “the countless ways in which he altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation,” which is one way to describe the career of a mass-murdering dictator who ran a garrison state so cruel that its subjects set out to sea on tire tubes in hopes of floating off to a better life.

 

And so it goes and has gone: Jane Fonda made her pilgrimage to Hanoi, and, more consequentially, Bernie Sanders, who nearly won the Democratic nomination twice, made his pilgrimage to Moscow and Leningrad, where he spent his time “extolling the virtues of Soviet life and culture,” notwithstanding that Soviet life and culture had included a gigantic gulag state whose outrages included, among many other crimes against humanity, starving 4 million people to death to make a political point. Even Pol Pot had his apologists in the United States, with left-wing radicals such as Noam Chomsky dismissing the Cambodian genocide as exaggerated or wholly invented “propaganda.”

 

The worldwide communist enterprise murdered 100 million people in the 20th century. Eight men will be tried in Colombia. Sales of Che Guevara T-shirts remain brisk.