"PROGRESSIVES" IN BED WITH A FASCIST FIDELby Jim Guirard There is no great mystery in why so many self-professed “liberals” are urging the return of little Elian Gonzalez to the not-so-tender clutches of Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Mindless confusion, perhaps, but no real mystery. This ideological blind spot of the lockstep-Left stems from its long-standing perception of Castro as a fellow “progressive,” a "liberator" and a purveyor of “social justice” -- when to any objective observer the Cuban dictator is nothing but a left-wing fascist. When the ultra-Left Congressional Progressive Caucus (which has formal ties to the Socialist Internationale) and the equally-left Congressional Black Caucus join forces with the National Council of Churches in support of Castro’s current cause celebre, it must surely be their ideological confusion and naiveté which are at work. Surely, it cannot be from any honest devotion to human rights and to civil liberties that these self-professed “liberals” are demanding that six-year-old Elian be returned to a communist Cuba -- a) whose constitution quite clearly proclaims state ownership (“father’s rights” be damned!) of the child; b) whose single-party, fascist-left “Revolution” is already gearing up to begin re-making the child in its own image; and c) whose police-state bureaucracy will be doing its “socialism or death” best to drum out of little Elian any expectation of all those human rights and civil liberties that any true “liberal” holds sacred: the fundamental freedoms of speech, press, assembly, association, privacy, property, emigration, religion, artistic expression, political options, judicial due process, habeas corpus -- you name it! Can anyone imagine the left-wing likes of U.S. Representatives Charles Rangel, Jerry Nadler and Maxine Waters clamoring for the return of such a child to Augusto Pinochet’s Chile of the 1970s or to South Africa’s apartheid regime of the early 1980s? Of course not. So why their current tilt toward Castro? It is due primarily to the disinformational language of politics which has long protected all police-state tyrants of the Left from any danger of truth-in-labeling. As the plainly communoid French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre once huffily proclaimed in defense of the Gestapo-left brutalities of Soviet communism: “Il n’y a pas d’ennemies a Gauche!” (There are no enemies, no evil, on the Left.) Of course, there is at least as much evil on the Left as on the Right -- probably more. In fact, if “fascist” is itself the most appropriate codeword for such evil, the label “fascist-Left” should have as much validity as “fascist-Right” has long enjoyed. Indeed, in Castro’s particular case, the “fascist” label fits like a glove. Surprisingly, it represents a return to his own ideological roots. Castro's Fascist Roots According to his former professor and biographer, Dr. Herminio Portel-Vila, the early heroes of the “young intellectual” Fidel in high school and university were none other than Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, the Spanish Falangists -- and Argentina’s Juan Peron, whose heroes were also all of the above. The activist young Castro was so enamored of these Italian and German “national socialists,” he would memorize and recite their most famous speeches verbatim to his schoolmates. And since Mussolini had himself been a self-proclaimed Marxist during his own “young intellectual” years (and then Italy’s leading Socialist), Castro’s affinity for him is not so strange after all. It merely confirms that beneath the semantic masks which have long served to differentiate Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist and Castroite Communism from Mussolini’s Fascism and Hitler’s Nazism, all of these socialist systems are little more than tyrannical mirror images of each other -- no more inherently different than Mafia bosses or mad dogs are from each other. That is why, following World War II, when Castro’s heroes ended up dead and despised, it was an easy transition for the young Cuban brownshirt to take one short step from Hitlerian-right to Lenin-left. No less an expert in Nazism than Adolf Hitler himself acknowledged these synergies between Fascist-right and Fascist-left when he observed during his infamous 1939-41 Friendship Pact with Stalin: “The petit bourgeois Social Democrat and trade union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.... There is much more that unites us than divides us from Bolshevism.... above all the genuine revolutionary spirit.” And yet, throughout the left-leaning media, the universities, the National Council of Churches, and the Congressional Black and Progressive Caucuses we find professed “liberals” who are so brainwashed by the disinformational language of the Left as to be quite shamelessly in bed with a plainly Fascist Fidel. In the years to come, little Elian will surely want to “thank” these people -- as well as the entire Clinton-Rodham-Reno administration and most congressional Democrats -- for delivering him into such a “progressive” environment as awaits him Castro’s Cuba. END Jim Guirard JustCauses@aol.com Mr. Guirard is a Washington, D. C. attorney and governmental affairs consultant. He served for many years as Chief-of-Staff to U.S. Senators Allen Ellender and Russell Long of Louisiana.
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