Hey BuzzFeed, Che Guevara Was A Bloodthirsty Terrorist

By David Harsanyi           

Tuesday, August 07, 2018

The terrorist Ernesto “Che” Guevara met his karmic end, executed without a trial in a muddy hut by CIA-trained Bolivian operatives, in 1967.  Since that moment, however, his life has been endlessly romanticized by the Left—a trend that doesn’t seem to be abating.

His life isn’t only idealized by Communists or Cuban tyrants, but by old-fashioned American liberals who have a longstanding practice of whitewashing socialist history. The cult includes authors; retail clothing chains; filmmakers like Robert Redford, who watched his romantic ode to Che with the murderer’s widow in Havana; pop icons who vacation in Communist Cuba; commemorative Irish postage stamp designers; a parade of intellectually stunted zombies walking around your local campuses with idealized portraits of Che their T-shirts; and a number of media outlets, which now include BuzzFeed.

The newest entry into the genre is a Vox-style 9-minute explainer, which is to say a grossly misleading history called “Che Guevara Becomes A Legend After Death.” It’s a biography tantamount to producing documentaries about the lives of Augusto Pinochet or Benito Mussolini without mentioning their vicious suppression of political opposition.

Although the BuzzFeed viewers will learn that Little Ernesto suffered from debilitating asthma, they do not learn that Che took the lead in creating a secret police and gulag in Cuba, where thousands of people guilty of nothing more than thought crimes— including priests, innocent bureaucrats, and anyone with homosexual mannerisms—were sent to spend decades as slave labor.

Scaled for population, the Castro-Guevara police state rivaled any tyranny in history. As Humberto Fontova points out, Cubans “qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period THREE TIMES as long in Che Guevara’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenytzin suffered in Stalin’s Gulag.” It’s worth mentioning that it would have been far worse if tens of thousands of Cubans hadn’t fled Che’s glorious revolution.

We also learn that Che was tasked with running Cuba’s national bank after the revolution—his entire job description innocuously boiled down to “signing new notes” by BuzzFeed documentarians. What we never learn is that in his short stint as lead socialist, nationalizing Cuba’s banks and expelling foreign ones, turned into a massive economic disaster for the Cuban people. Che didn’t merely visit the Soviet Union and China. He went there begging for money. “We want to build socialism,” Che told the world in his 1964 United Nations appearance. And they did.

Viewers of BuzzFeed will also learn that Carlos Puebla wrote a hit song extolling Che’s revolutionary activities (we even get to hear a snippet of “Hasta Siempre Comandante”!) Yet, the editors couldn’t shoehorn in a single mention of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Cubans who were executed on Che’s orders after the rebels seized power. “We don’t need proof to execute a man,” the Argentine once explained. “We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.” Che didn’t even bother giving most his victims—some of them women and children—a Soviet-style show trial for their troubles.

Did you know “Che” is an Argentinian slang that can be roughly be translated to “dude”? I do, because I watched the BuzzFeed’s mini-documentary. What I didn’t learn there was that Che dreamed of creating a revolutionary movement driven by “hate.” Che promised “to march the path of victory” even if it cost “millions” of lives. Put it this way: one of the reasons Che had an icy relationship with the Soviets was that they had abandoned Stalinism. The American socialists abandoned Stalin in 1939. The Soviets did in 1956. Che was still a big fan until his death.

BuzzFeed’s biodoc teaches us that famous Marxists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Neruda wrote hosannas to Che. Sartre, soon to be an apologist for genocidal movements around the world, claimed that Guevara was not only an intellectual, but “also the most complete human being of our age.” Unmentioned by the noted intellectual was that Che was also a warmonger, who not only lamented that Soviets hadn’t been able to place nuclear warheads on an island 300 miles off the coast of the United States — “[i]n the end, Khrushchev struck a compromise,” BuzzFeed explains — but if they had “we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City.”

It seems unlikely that such inconvenient facts (and many more) could be accidentally left out of any honest biography of Che’s life. Instead we learn that Che had a life-long concern for the poor. But few outside his revolutionary buddies were ever made less poor by Che’s revolutions and terrorism. Only less alive.

Outlaw Librarians

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, November 28, 2016

Cuba is a country with outlaw librarians.

A great deal has happened since Fidel Castro launched his first attack on the Cuban government of caudillo Fulgencio Batista in 1953. Castro was arrested after his failed assault on the Moncada Barracks, and Batista pardoned him instead of simply having him shot. He should have known better: He himself came to power through a military coup against an authoritarian president. His misjudged the threat presented by Castro.

Castro would not repeat that mistake. He murdered dissidents — men, women, and children — by the thousands, imprisoned them by the thousands, tortured them by the thousands. His colleague, T-shirt icon Che Guevara, kept the firing squads humming and the torture chambers full while hoping for nuclear war — the world, he said, must have Communism, “even if this costs millions of atomic victims.”

Fidel Castro was a funny kind of Communist. He died either a billionaire or just short of it and made sure his family grew wealthy, too. That’s par for the course with these champions of the people: María Gabriela Chávez, the daughter of Castro’s Venezuelan comrade, is one of the richest women in the world, with a net worth nearly twice that of Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel — a neat trick for someone who has never had anything that you’d really consider a job. Castro could have given the Kardashians a lesson in tackiness: He liked to wear two Rolex watches on the same wrist in a gaudy display of personal wealth.

But perhaps his lack of proper proletarian manners can be explained by the fact that Castro had come to socialism rather late in life. Before he discovered the financial benefits of a Moscow sponsorship, he had been a member of the Partido Ortodoxo, the political organ of the anti-Communist Eduardo Chibás. Partido Ortodoxo was, like the European fascist parties that inspired it, a motley mix of socialists, nationalists, social reactionaries, and militarists, a grand union of the antidemocratic and illiberal political tendencies. It brought together radicals, reformers, and would-be revolutionaries from both the Left and the Right, and to that extent is suited Fidel Castro perfectly: He was, above all else, a political entrepreneur. When the Partido Ortodoxo could bring him close to power, he was a nationalist; when an alliance with the racist Che Guevara was beneficial, he was a racist, and to this day Afro-Cubans are excluded from the most desirable work in much of the Cuban economy; when socialism could keep him in power and make him wealthy, he was a socialist; at the end of his life, he was writing long essays about global warming. The man could read a market.

But about those librarians . . .

Castro never forgot the lesson he taught Batista. Any political threat was potentially a mortal threat. That meant not only that dissidents were tortured and murdered but that any potential source of social instability was treated as though it were treason. Homosexuals were sent to gulags (the Military Units to Aid Production) where they were remanded without trial to forced labor. Later, when HIV made its appearance in Cuba, those infected were imprisoned in sanitaria; incredibly, life for ordinary Cubans grew so miserable and dire that some young Cubans intentionally contracted HIV, because they had heard that sanitarium prisoners were fed three times a day.

If you want to maintain absolute control over a people in that condition, you simply cannot allow the free flow of information. American liberals may be naïve enough to fall for your imaginative fictions of universal health care and literacy (strange that the same progressives who believe that 9/11 was a hoax accept Cuban government statistics without question) but ordinary Cubans are not in the main afflicted by expensive miseducation. Their minds must be carefully pruned.

The answer, of course, is to ban “terrorist” literature. The speeches of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.? Terrorist propaganda. The U.N. Declaration of Universal Human Rights? Terrorist literature. The great civil libertarian Nat Hentoff dedicated a great deal of work to documenting these stories. He was denounced as an outside agitator. “What does Mr. Hentoff know of the real Cuba?” one Castro sycophant asked.

“I know that if I were a Cuban, I’d be in prison,” he answered.

Writing can be a genuinely revolutionary act, as it so often was in our own revolution. But simply making literature available can be revolutionary — and dangerous. The publishing concern established by Lodewijk Elzevir (which lends its name to the modern publisher Elsevier) in the 16th century published a great deal of what would come to be known as (another gift of Communist-inspired neologism!) samizdat, including some of the later works of Galileo, the distribution of which was forbidden. Some brave man had to smuggle that manuscript out of Florence and into the Netherlands, just as other brave men would smuggle copies of Doctor Zhivago into the Soviet Union and Bibles into North Korea.

There is something wrong with your society if you have outlaw librarians.

But that is a lesson we keep refusing to learn. The United States is not Cuba or North Korea, and it is not going to be. But is it a country in which a significant part of the population, including practically all of the leaders of one of its two major political parties, believes that the government should have the right to ban the showing of films critical of presidential candidates. The Obama administration has gone before the Supreme Court and argued that it should be empowered to ban books in the name of “campaign finance reform.” Harry Reid led every Democrat in the Senate in a vote to repeal the First Amendment, and our so-called liberals cheered. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he wants to change American laws to make it easier to suppress media criticism of political leaders and other public figures.

We are not a country with outlaw librarians or one in which political literature is samizdat. With any luck, one day the same will be true of Cuba. But history is not a ratchet that turns only in the direction of liberty, and there is nothing poisonous in the Cuban water supply that causes Castros or anything magical in the American air that prevents their thriving here. Unlike the people of Cuba, we have every reason to know what is going on in the world, and no excuse to fail to learn from it.

Castro: A Letter from Khrushchev

 By Andrew Stuttaford

Saturday, November 26, 2016

Like many millenarians, Castro welcomed the thought of the purifying fire to come. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, decades into a career in which had waded through blood, remained convinced that communism still offered the promise of a radiant future to come and was a wily and determined opponent of the US. But, unlike Castro, he had lost his taste for the apocalypse.

Here, via PBS, is the text of a letter Khrushchev wrote to Castro not long after the Cuban missile crisis. The most interesting section is this (my emphasis added):

If, by giving in to popular sentiment, we had allowed ourselves to be swept up by the more inflamed sectors of the populace, and if we had refused to reach a reasonable agreement with the government of the USA, war would have probably broken out, resulting in millions of deaths. Those who survived would have blamed the leaders for not having taken the measures that would have avoided this war of extermination…

In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to carry out a nuclear strike against the enemy’s territory. Naturally you understand where that would lead us. It would not be a simple strike, but the start of a thermonuclear world war.

Dear Comrade Fidel Castro, I find your proposal to be wrong, even though I understand your reasons.

We have lived through a very grave moment, a global thermonuclear war could have broken out. Of course the United States would have suffered enormous losses, but the Soviet Union and the whole socialist bloc would have also suffered greatly. It is even difficult to say how things would have ended for the Cuban people. First of all, Cuba would have burned in the fires of war. Without a doubt the Cuban people would have fought courageously but, also without a doubt, the Cuban people would have perished heroically. We struggle against imperialism, not in order to die, but to draw on all of our potential, to lose as little as possible, and later to win more, so as to be a victor and make communism triumph.

Castro, the internationalist, mourned by a pope, presidents and the leadership of an ‘ever closer Europe’, wanted to start a nuclear war.

Castro, the patriot, was willing to consign his own country to the flames. Writing later, Castro’s accomplice, Guevara, put it like this (again, my emphasis added):

Here is the electrifying example of a people prepared to suffer nuclear immolation so that its ashes may serve as a foundation for new societies. When an agreement was reached by which the atomic missiles were removed, without asking our people, we were not relieved or thankful…

Obama, Cuba, and Us

National Review Online
Friday, February 19, 2016

President Obama has announced that he will visit Cuba next month. This is a natural follow-on from his rapprochement with the Castro regime after our midterm elections in 2014.

In April of the next year, Obama said, “After the midterm elections, my advisers asked me, ‘Mr. President, do you have a bucket list?’ And I said, ‘Well, I have something that rhymes with “bucket list.”’” Exactly.

An opening to the Castro dictatorship was neither urgent nor necessary nor in the American interest. Obama simply wanted to do it. It was on his list. The dictatorship had been dreaming about this kind of rapprochement for well over half a century. So had the American Left.

Previous administrations had offered linkage: favors from Washington in exchange for liberalization in Cuba. Obama had next to no interest in linkage. He offered his favor to the Castros essentially for free.

Since the Obama opening, they have cracked down all the harder on democrats and dissidents. Oscar Biscet, the Cuban democracy leader, said, “I feel as though I have been abandoned on the battlefield.” Berta Soler, another democracy leader — the leader of the Ladies in White — said, “The European Union, the U.S.A., Pope Francis — they have turned their backs on us.” She also said that Obama had given “a green light to the Cuban government to crush civil society.”

It is the contention of Obama and others that U.S. policy over all these decades has not “worked.” By “worked,” they mean “toppled the regime.” Okay. But what Cuban democrats tend to say is, “At least the Americans haven’t helped the regime. That sets them apart from the Russians, the Western Europeans, the Canadians, and others. God bless them for it.”

Many of our citizens look forward to touring in Cuba. May they have a good time, sipping their mojitos on the beach and exploring what is sometimes euphemistically called “nightlife.” But remember, tourist dollars — or euros or whatever they are — are poured right into the regime, giving the Castros the oxygen they need to keep going.

That the Castros will direct much of that windfall to the persecution of their opponents seems to be of little concern to the administration. In recent months, David Thorne, a senior adviser to the current secretary of state, John Kerry, spoke of our new relationship with Cuba: “As in other parts of the world, we are really trying to also say, Let’s find out how we can work together and not always say that human rights are the first things that we have to fix before anything else.”

With that in mind, a big question about the president’s upcoming trip is whether he will meet with the dictator emeritus, Fidel. Fidel Castro is a hero to leftists all over the world. A rock star. Meeting with him, for the Left, is like meeting with Elvis. Che Guevara would be possibly better, but he is no longer available.

Arguably, Obama has an opportunity to do good in Cuba. He can insist on meeting with democrats and dissidents. He can insist on spotlighting political prisoners, if not outright visiting them. Last September, Pope Francis snubbed the democracy movement. The movement was terribly demoralized. Obama probably can’t get away with a total snub. But will he do more than the minimum? More than pay lip service?

Between Democrats and Republicans, there are many and sharp differences, including on Communism. Consider that a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders, honeymooned in the Soviet Union. And that the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, honeymooned in Cuba.

Among the Republican candidates for president are two Cuban Americans, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. The latter has made an interesting proposal: to rename the street in front of the Castros’ new embassy in Washington, D.C., after Oswaldo Paya — who was a Cuban democracy leader killed in 2012, almost certainly by the regime. We hope someone who can distinguish between Cuba’s oppressed and its oppressors occupies the White House next.

Until then, there is little recourse. This is what Barack Obama does. This is who he is. In this last couple of years, he is crossing off the items on his rhymes-with-bucket list. On to Tehran.

Mrs. Clinton Is Professor Click

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, January 07, 2016

A group of state legislators in Missouri has, after a great deal of nagging by your favorite roving correspondent and many others, come around and made a public statement that Professor Melissa Click of the University of Missouri should be fired.

Professor Click, you’ll recall, is the petty commissar who assaulted a student journalist (who has since filed a police complaint) who was covering one of the daft, diaper-filling protests on the Mizzou campus. The protest was happening on a corner of the campus that not only is a public space but a public space recognized as such in Missouri state law, with access to it guaranteed. Professor Click attempts to intimidate the student, physically blocks him, and then swats at his face before calling for “some muscle” to forcibly remove him. So far, neither the university nor the campus police department, which are manifestly run by miscreants and moral cowards, has seen fit to do anything about the case.

When Rolling Stone published its breathless account of what turned out to be an entirely fictitious rape on the campus of the University of Virginia, some critics (ahem) were denounced as monsters for asking such straightforward questions as “Why wasn’t a violent gang rape, purportedly committed on a bed of broken glass, followed up by a police report, which surely, given the details, would have produced physical evidence supporting prosecution and conviction?” In the Missouri case, there was not only a police report but video of the incident, shot by the victim of the crime himself. One can only imagine what would have happened if there were a similar video of, say, a white, portly Mizzou football coach physically laying hands on a young black woman going about her legally protected and legitimate business on the campus.

But, so far, not one thing of any consequence has happened to Professor Click.

It is worth keeping her in mind as one considers the curious case of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ongoing e-mail problem. It has been amusing to watch the evolution of her lies on the issue: She was going to turn over all the evidence, until she unilaterally destroyed (crime) and withheld (probably a crime) a great deal of it. She insisted that the communication that passed through her off-site toilet (her secret e-mail server was located in the bathroom of a loft apartment in Denver, because that does not seem sketchy at all) was not classified, until it was shown that some of it was; she then said that what she personally sent or received was not secret or sensitive, until it was shown that it was; she then said that none of it was marked as such, until . . .

Strike three.

If you are a Democrat, the safest place in the world to be is under the authority of other Democrats. Lois Lerner, the criminal who used the Internal Revenue Service as a political weapon on behalf of the Democratic party, was never going to be charged, or even disciplined, by her overseers in the IRS or at the Department of Justice. After pulling one of the worst Gestapo stunts in modern American history, she’s receiving a nice, comfortable pension, and those who enabled her crimes were given fat bonuses. There was no way that Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch was going to charge Lerner — what do you imagine the odds are that they’ll discover their integrity in the matter of Hillary Rodham Clinton, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee? Unless President Barack Obama should decide to take this opportunity to rid his party of the Clintons forever (a slim but non-zero possibility), nothing is going to happen.

The Obama administration can traffic guns to Mexican drug cartels, poison rivers, assassinate American citizens, more or less make up health-care law as it goes, lie about critical foreign-policy questions, and criminally mishandle sensitive information, and all of that amounts to – nothing. For it to amount to anything, you’d need a Justice Department, an FBI, and federal judges with self-respect sufficient to outweigh their institutional political cowardice. And that we do not have.

A couple of militia nuts squat in a vacant visitor center at an obscure park in Oregon and the Left, with one voice, bays for blood. Black Lives Matter rioters torch Baltimore and Ferguson, assault police and innocent bystanders, and attempt to burn human beings alive with Molotov cocktails, and — nothing.

This is a recurring motif in U.S. history. Thousands of Americans over the course of a generation participated in a criminal conspiracy that resulted in, among other things, the murder of some 100 million people, and the bad guy in that story is . . . Senator Joe McCarthy, who tried to stop them. In the 1930s, as the Soviets were intentionally starving millions of people to death, our so-called progressives were busy denying that any such thing was taking place. In the 1960s, our so-called progressives were posing with murderous tyrants in Vietnam and making excuses for Pol Pot’s genocide. The same people still celebrate Che Guevara, a murdering racist and Jew-hater. When the Sandinistas brought the Soviet murder campaign to the Americans, Bill de Blasio and his ilk cheered the Sandinistas. When Hugo Chávez installed himself as an autocrat in Venezuela, all the usual progressives cheered him, too, not just Hollywood jackasses like Sean Penn but elected Democrats such as Chaka Fattah. There never has been, and probably never will be, a reckoning for the American Left’s role in the Communist massacres and repression of the 20th century.

Against all that, what’s a few thousand sensitive e-mails from a Democratic presidential candidate who has accepted millions of dollars in “charitable” donations and speaking fees from Beijing and Moscow? What’s one piddly assault on one piddly student journalist?