With the long overdue death of Fidel Castro, we finally get a chance to peek inside the minds of liberals and see how they tick. Generally, what we are seeing is well hidden and dressed up to look like what it is not, lipstick on a pig essentially. But when an event of this magnitude occurs, they really can't control themselves.
The latest version seems shocking because it's been a long time since we saw the behavior. It started when Canadian PM Justin Trudeau eulogized Castro thusly:
“It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President.
“Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.
“While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for “el Comandante”.
“I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away. It was also a real honour to meet his three sons and his brother President Raúl Castro during my recent visit to Cuba.
“On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr. Castro. We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader.”
That is what you call instant revisionist history. There is nothing in that press release that is remotely true except that he was larger than life and a good orator. But note the line about education and healthcare. That will be a recurring theme.
It's embarrassing actually but the left always loved Castro for several reasons, which I'll get into in a second.
Let's go back and look at the history of liberals supporting communist dictators. We can start with the overthrow of the Russian Czar and the first really true experiment where communism was instilled on a massive scale. From the beginning liberals trumpeted the successes of Soviet communism. From Lenin through Stalin and finally with Gorbachev, they would do anything they had to do to put a pretty face on the ideology.
The most famous example was NY Times writer Walter Duranty. He was the Times' man in Moscow and he was an unabashed communist. Stalin didn't need to sell propaganda, all he had to do was direct Duranty and a few days later glowing reports would show up in the Times. Meanwhile, Stalin was exiling normal Russians to the gulags in Siberia or allowing millions to starve in Ukraine. Wrote Mark Herring:
After these stories, Duranty got an interview with Lucifer incarnate, Stalin himself. In the interview, Duranty praised Stalin's progressive ideals, his firm control of a wild country, and his brilliant political instincts. Stalin came out of the subsequent story a world figure on the order of Roosevelt or Churchill.
Duranty had accomplished the impossible: he had taken a mere thug whose bloodshed was unparalleled in Europe at the time, and unsurpassed until Mao, and lifted him to the status of world leader, superpower. What Duranty had done for Stalin did not begin to compare with what Stalin did for Duranty. Once the story appeared, Duranty went from well-known reporter to world-class celebrity.
For the record, Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting that the Times to this day has refused to return. He was just the most notable of what Lenin allegedly called the "useful idiots"--westerners who would parrot his talking points and defend communism.
It continued and in 1959 a revolution was going on 90 miles from the shores of the US. A vile despot named Batista was overthrown by young communist revolutionary who enlisted the help of a murderous doctor named Che Guevara. The media fawned over the new Cuban leader and then they started hiding his atrocities. This continued through the early sixties when several ill-fated attempts by the US to take him out eventually led to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Throughout the 1970's, Castro continued his iron grip and Cubans continued to float to the US. Liberal writers wrote loving stories of how cute it is that Cubans all drive 1950's cars and have excellent healthcare and education. They reported on the nightlife in Havana and exulted Castro while ignoring his atrocities and the overall drab existence and utter despair of the people the system was supposed to protect.
Meanwhile, communism was destroying nations and killing millions of people. From Vietnam to Cambodia, from North Korea to South America the hateful ideology brought only death and misery. But the liberal media didn't cover it that way. Not until the real terror of the Cambodian killing fields were exposed were they forced to report the truth and then they blamed the man--Pol Pot--but defended the ideology.
Which brings us to the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.
While the world rejoiced when the Berlin Wall came down and Poland was freed, liberals were upset. They blamed Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II. They said that Soviet Communism didn't prove the failure of the ideology but indeed proved that it was put into practice wrong. It would work if implemented correctly they argued then and still do.
So here we are today, we have liberals and the media (but I'm redundant) already revising the the dictatorship of a murderous thug who raped, killed and destroyed. You will start seeing more and more of these stories eventually leading to t-shirts with an iconic picture of Castro being worn by uneducated college kids.
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