In case you missed it, there was a little unrest down in the commie hellhole of Cuba over the weekend. Some of the good citizens seem to have grown weary of all that glorious communism supposedly does for the people living under it. And some in the American media are befuddled by people demanding freedom from tyranny. These are the same people who believe that they should be the arbiters of what is and is not real news—just in case you were still wondering why things are so screwed up in this country right now. Commies are bad and anyone who finds it difficult to say so has problems, is un-American, and has probably read too much Howard Zinn. They also can’t be trusted as sources for anything. Like information leading up to an election.
The phenomenon of intelligent people saying stupid things about tyrants is a constant of 20th century history and continues unabated into the 21st.
It was Lenin who first identified the genus of Western intellectual known as “the useful idiot,” but it was Stalin who showed how incredibly easy it was to seduce them: a free holiday, dinner, a little flattery and wa-hey- the knickers are off! But then Stalin died, the USSR became much less violent and the useful idiots lost interest.
Searching for a new utopia, many pinned their hopes on revolutionary Cuba, where a bearded mega-bore named Fidel Castro was in the process of transforming a corrupt satellite of America into a corrupt satellite of the USSR, even poorer and less free than before.
Like Papa Joe, Fidel knew how to flatter and soon he had the likes of Picasso, Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag (“the Cuban revolution is astonishingly free of repression”) eating out of his palm. My favorite Castro quote comes from Abbie Hoffman, a justly forgotten 60s radical bed-wetter who compared Castro to… well, read for yourself:
“Fidel sits on the side of a tank rumbling into Havana on New Year’s Day… girls throw flowers at the tank and rush to tug playfully at this black beard. He laughs joyously and pinches a few rumps. .. He is like a mighty penis coming to life, and when he is tall and straight, the crowd immediately is transformed.”
Then there was Castro’s pal, Wee Ernie Guevara, a totalitarian loon who praised Mao, invaded the Congo and died in Bolivia after attempting to inspire revolution among people he knew nothing about. Jean-Paul Sartre declared him “the most complete human being of our age.”
Speaking of Mao, he had his celebrity admirers, too. In 1973, Shirley MacLaine, who was very good in The Apartment with Jack Lemmon, went on a tour of some Potemkin villages in China and wrote a glowing report afterwards. She was especially approving of the absence of advertising billboards, and the general atmosphere of calm which left her feeling “serene.” She never thought that perhaps China was quiet because 60 million people had just been murdered and everyone was very, very scared. Mao was a big hit among 60s students and one of his erstwhile fanboys, Jose Manuel Barroso, who went on to become president of the European Commission.
But Mao and Castro weren’t the only totalitarian despots considered groovy. In the run up to the Iranian revolution, the french philosopher Michel Foucault, paid several visits to Iran and later praised the “political spirituality” of the Ayatollah Khomeini who, given the chance, would have had him executed for his homosexuality. And so on, and so on.
These days, Hollywood morons like landwhale Michael Moore and pinhead Sean Penn still ignore the brutal day to day repressive Castro legacy of the islands population and praises Cuba from time to time. They all seem now preoccupied with promoting the destruction of American culture. But it’s hard to find the pure strain of tyrant admiration, though for a while I was fascinated by a blog entitled Reflections on the Ruhnama, written by “Steve from Wisconsin” who apparently took at face value all the gibberish the deceased Turkmen tyrant Saparmurat Niyazov had scrawled with a colored crayon in his notorious book.
Maybe it has something to do with the loss of religious faith. You know, these leftist elitist no longer believe in paradise, so they project their yearning for redemption onto some exotic remake of America. It pleases certain people of note to adopt counter-intuitive positions, believing it gives them “depth” and “sophistication.” And thus clever people are often the easiest to fool.
And what about today.....Just look around.
