Stephen Pollard examines the Left’s adoration of the tyrant in Get those T-shirts ready for Cuba’s monstrous abuser of human rights, also at his blog (emphasis mine):
If it’s bad form to speak ill of the dead, it seems to be even worse form to speak ill of the almost-dead tyrant. When I’ve written before about the monstrous regime of Fidel Castro – one of the longest-standing abusers of human rights on the planet – I’ve been deluged with e-mails and letters accusing me of everything bar incest.
Despite the pictures of him that appeared on Monday, it’s clear that he is on his last legs. And when he does finally pop his clogs, the mourning of left-liberals will be intense.
The mourning hasn’t started, but the adoration is intense: just this week Alexandre Trudeau was calling Castro “something of a superman”, because of the latter’s extraordinary sea-urchin fishing skills. Pollard continues
Such hero worship of so brutal a tyrant would seem beyond rational explanation. As Amnesty International puts it in its 2006 report on Cuba: “There was increasing international concern about Cuba’s failure to improve civil and political rights . . . Restrictions on freedom of expression, association and movement continued to cause great concern. Nearly 70 prisoners of conscience remained in prison.”
Last week, in Sigmund Carl & Alfred‘s guest post, SC&A compared how totalitarian societies, in the Arab world and in Cuba, subjugate their people
In both the Arab world and in the case of Cuba and similar regimes, societies and expressions of dissent of must be subjugated. Regimes that restrict freedom will always be playing ‘catchup’ with free societies.
Societies that are successful do not need to restrict their citizens. Free societies understand that their greatness and ability to progress comes about as the result of each individual free to find his or her own greatness and potential, benefiting society along the way.
Both the Arab world and regimes like Cuba have one thing in common. They are societies that need hate and need fear. They are societies that cannot stand and support themselves on their own merits. Instead, they must rely on ever expanding and convoluted fear mongering. It is impossible for societies to succeed if they only things holding those societies together are fear and hate.
Stephen Pollard finds the reason why the Left worships both:
There is a further, more modern, incongruity: the willingness of elements of the Left to ally with Islamists who exemplify everything they ought, rationally, to be campaigning against. So when Ken Livingstone sings the praises of the Muslim cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Mayor of London is eulogising a man who – quite apart from supporting suicide bombing – argues that it is a husband’s duty “to beat her (his wife) lightly with his hands” when she does not obey him, and who proselytises that a homosexual should be given “the same punishment as any sexual pervert . . . Some say we should burn them, and so on. There is disagreement . . . The important thing is to treat this act as a crime.”
The roots of such bizarre hero worship are complex, but for all its apparent incompatibility with a Left which claims to promote freedom, equality and prosperity, there is a linking thread. Whether it be Robespierre, Stalin, Castro or al-Qaradawi, all their actions stem from the same certainty that the broader Left holds: that the ends it seeks are so incontrovertibly proper that the means are justified for the greater good.
Read both posts, every word of them. As SC&A has said,
Anyone that comes to the defense of tyrannical regimes and their leaders, have themselves made a conscious choice to defend and stand by what is immoral. They themselves consciously adopt an immoral posture.
Meanwhile, at The Scotsman, Scant Castro news keeps expectations low.
Update: Dr. Sanity points the way to the FESTIVAL OF THE ENVIROCOMMIEMUSLIMS
(technorati tags Fidel Castro, Castro, Cuba)
