Jill Stein on Fidel Castro

From Paste Magazine:

PASTE: While I have you here, I just wanted to get your reaction to Fidel Castro’s death.

STEIN: It feels like the passing of an era of incredible struggle and he certainly represented the struggle against empire right across the water. Throughout the Caribbean, there’s been an incredible struggle — whether you live in Haiti or in Cuba or even much of the rest of South America, there’s been a great struggle for social justice and it’s been very difficult.

Castro was in many ways the face of that movement, which continues to this day.

Interesting to know that sympathy for Communist movements and regimes, which off-and-on tainted liberalism all during the 20^th century, is still around.

Talk on North Korea Tonight on Campus

See the details here.

North Korea is interesting as the worst of the few remaining Communist dictatorships.   An extreme case, in other words, from which much can be learned.

Liberals Have Been Suckers For Leftist Tyrants

From Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe:

On the 60th anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s death last week, the Associated Press reported that admirers of the Soviet dictator, one of history’s bloodiest tyrants, were flocking to the Kremlin to venerate him as a great leader despite his ghastly record of repression. With polls showing a rise in Russians’ admiration and nostalgia for Stalin, observed the Associated Press, “experts and politicians puzzled and despaired over his enduring popularity.”

That some Russians express approval for a despot who has been dead since 1953 is distressing, though perhaps not surprising given the ongoing campaign to burnish Stalin’s image by Russia’s autocratic president, Vladimir Putin. But even more of a reason for puzzlement and despair is the enthusiastic applause for Stalin by influential American liberals when he was at the height of his bloody reign — and the willingness of similar propagandists, naifs, and true believers today to sing the praises of other thugs and dictators.

In the 1930s, as millions were being murdered in Stalin’s terror-famine and Great Purge, Walter Duranty was assuring readers of The New York Times that the Soviet ruler was “giving the Russian people . . . what they really want, namely joint effort, communal effort.” The renowned literary critic Edmund Wilson extolled Stalinist Russia as the “moral light at the top of the world.” Upton Sinclair, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, vigorously defended the integrity of the “confessions” extracted by the secret police from many of Stalin’s victims: It “seems obvious,” Sinclair wrote, that they would not have “confessed to actions which they had not committed.”

The adulation of left-wing dictators and strongmen by Western intellectuals, journalists, and celebrities didn’t begin with Stalin (in 1921 Duranty had hailed Lenin for his “cool, far-sighted, reasoned sense of realities”), and it certainly didn’t end with him. Mona Charen chronicled the phenomenon in her superb 2003 book “Useful Idiots,” which recalls example after jaw-dropping example of American liberals defending, flattering, and excusing the crimes of one Communist ruler and regime after another. Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, the Khmer Rouge, Leonid Brezhnev, Kim Il Sung, the Sandinistas: Over and over the pattern was repeated, from the dawn of the Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Iron Curtain — and beyond.

And the useful idiocy lives on.

When Venezuela’s America-hating caudillo Hugo Chavez died last week, Human Rights Watch summarized his legacy starkly: “a dramatic concentration of power and open disregard for basic human-rights guarantees.” Over his 14-year rule, Chavez succeeded in rewriting the constitution to abolish the Venezuelan Senate and repeal the one-term limit for presidents. He stifled judicial independence, cracked down on freedom of speech, and used his power to “intimidate, censor, and prosecute Venezuelans” who opposed his political agenda. Chavez cemented Venezuela’s alliance with Cuba — “the only country in Latin America that systematically represses virtually all forms of political dissent,” Human Rights Watch noted — and vocally backed dictators elsewhere, including Syria’s Bashar Assad and Libya’s Moammar Khadafy.

None of that troubled the ideologues who raced to praise the dead bully. Chavez “understood democracy and basic human desires for a dignified life,” gushed US Representative José Serrano of New York. Former President Jimmy Carter saluted his “commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.” And former Massachusetts Congressman Joseph Kennedy II, a longtime Chavez booster, eulogized Chavez as a humanitarian who cared about the poor.

All this was preceded by Dennis Rodman’s return to the headlines, as the former basketball star traveled to North Korea, where the planet’s most ghastly regime presides over a Stalinist hellhole in which hundreds of thousands of people are imprisoned in slave-labor camps. But Rodman, whose trip was financed by Vice Media, an American documentary production company, wasn’t there to see a human-rights nightmare. He came to watch some basketball, to hang out with the country’s new dictator, Kim Jong Un, and — in a country where starvation is a leading cause of death — to eat a 10-course meal that participants described as “an epic feast.”

All in all, the trip’s organizer said, “they had a grand old time.” So much so, apparently, that before a crowd of thousands, Rodman assured Kim: “You have a friend for life.”

Indeed. It’s a shameful thing, but dictators like Kim always do.

Philip Agee: Cold War Traitor Has Fans in the University Ministry

From a post on (of all places) the Internet JFK assassination newsgroup:

Wednesday, Sept 19, 12 noon - 1pm, Marquette Univ. Alumni Memorial Union, Ballroom A, 15th & Wells Street, Milwaukee; Soup with Substance screening of the film, “One Man’s Story: Philip Agee, Cuba and the CIA”, and Agee’s update, with discussion sponsored by Campus Ministry at Marquette University.

This collaboration between Cuban and Irish co-directors Roberto Ruiz and Bernie Dwyer, respectively, focuses on a dark side of United States foreign policy. Filmed in Havana with excellent archive material of numerous US covert and direct involvements in Latin America, “One Man’s Story” allows Agee, a former CIA agent, to tell his part of his captivating story.

Agee is famous for his international best selling book, “Inside the Company,” which exposed his own assignments and a history CIA covert operations to undermine and even terrorize progressive and democratic movements for social justice, particularly in Latin America where he served for 12 years until his resignation in 1968. This DVD focuses particularly on the CIA’s targeting of Cuba and Che Guevara.

Agee will not be present. Apparently, he refuses to come to the US while President Bush is in office.

When an Agee supporter says “progressive and democratic movements for social justice,” that means “Communist movements.”

The event is also listed here.

Agee, quite simply, was a traitor.

In 1975, he published Inside the Company: CIA Diary in which he identified 250 CIA officers and agents.

Agee was not simply a freelance critic of the CIA.

Of those [CIA defectors], the worst is arguably Philip Agee, who left the CIA and published the seditious Covert Action Information Bulletin, with the help of both the KGB and the Cuban DGI, a magazine dedicated to promoting “a worldwide campaign to destabilize the CIA through exposure of its operations and personnel.” Agee told Swiss journalist Peter Studer, “The CIA is plainly on the wrong side, that is, the capitalistic side. I approve KGB activities, communist activities in general. Between the overdone activities that the CIA initiates and the more modest activities of the KGB, there is absolutely no comparison.” Today Agee runs a website from his home in Havana, Cubalinda.com, and is a dedicated communist.

He, in fact, received help from the KGB and from Cuban intelligence in his attempts to undermine the CIA.

The evidence that Agee was supported by the KGB, by the way, comes from something called the Mitrokin Archive -- a treasure trove of KGB documents that KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin brought to the West. The documents were the basis of the book The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB.

So what we have here is the University Ministry still fighting the Cold War.

And even more absurdly, they are fighing it on the losing side!

Campus Speaker: Abuse of Psychiatry Under Communism

An e-mail sent to faculty:

Dr. Witold Simon

Psychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology in Warsaw, Poland, and Senior Fulbright Fellow at Brigham Young University presents:

The Abuse of Psychiatry in Central and East Europe Under Communist Rule
Wednesday, June 20, 2007

9:30 a.m.

Using illustrations from daily life, Dr. Simon will describe how the Soviet penal code abused psychiatric practices and the characterization of mental illness. He will also discuss the aftermath for victims of psychiatric abuse and contemporary approaches and treatment.

Alumni Memorial Union, Room 163

1442 W. Wisconsin Avenue

Marquette University Campus

Free and open to the public

Continental breakfast will be provided