A Second Hand Conjecture

The subject of the bloody 1965 Indonesian mass murder of suspected communists is not often openly discussed history even in today’s Indonesia. Given the pervasive silence, estimates vary on the actual number of people killed, but it’s generally accepted as being somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000. Yet so infected with fear is the subject of the massacre (and so influential do many of the men who took part in it remain), that outspoken eyewitnesses are extremely rare, despite the enormous numbers of people involved and widespread knowledge of where each town’s unmarked mass graves can be found.

Some of the worst killings were carried out on a volunteer basis by village men who were members of Islamic and nationalist youth groups, often on extremely flimsy evidence of communist sympathies. Yet due testimony from actual members of these groups who performed the round-ups and committed the killings in the countryside, is virtually nonexistent in the historical record. So it is remarkable and important that some of those men have finally spoken out in old age to the Associated Press. All the men interviewed by the AP however are unrepentant and convinced that they saved their country from an impending communist takeover.

(more…)

1 Comment »

Too often, I have heard people I know laud Cuba’s health care or some other aspect of their nation.

If you are someone who admires Castro’s Cuba – please read this

No Comments »

photo: Isuru Senevi | site

And so ends Mauritania’s brief experiment with constitutional democracy. The AFP has a source in the new ruling junta who says there will be new elections in two months. We shall see.

(more…)

1 Comment »

The impact of this man on the world is not part of the memory of many today. I’ll be breaking out a few of his books this week in his memory. A true Giant has passed away.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of fiction and history written in the 20th century, died late Sunday in Russia, his son Yermolai said early Monday in Moscow. He said the cause was a heart condition. He was 89.

He outlived by nearly 17 years the state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly, he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekov.

Over the next four decades, Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s fame spread throughout the world as he drew upon his experiences of totalitarian duress to write evocative novels like “The First Circle” and “The Cancer Ward” and historical works like “The Gulag Archipelago.”

“Gulag” was a monumental account and analysis of the Soviet labor camp system, a chain of prisons that by Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s calculation some 60 million people had entered during the 20th century. The book led to his expulsion from his native land. George F. Kennan, the American diplomat, described it as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.”

1 Comment »

(photo: Charles Roffey – Charles & Fred)

Someone once said that in Damascus you truly can get a little bit pregnant. It’s a good aphorism, because if you asked the foreign minister of almost any state in the Middle East or the Mediterranean what his government’s policy relationship was with Syria, he would automatically furrow his brow and call it “complicated.” You always seem to be about half-way somewhere with Syria. Lately that appears to be true even for Tzipi Livni. If so for Israel, doubly so for Lebanon.

Surveying it, Jihad Yazigi describes the situation that exists between the two countries as customarily “complicated”, but the dimension of complication he’s seeing is something relatively new. Where before thirty years of Syrian military occupation (and often not very covert political subversion) might be the most obvious locus, Yazigi is today talking about labor and direct investment in Syria by Lebanese:

Syria would probably not be liberalizing its economy and going through a revival of its services sector without the thousands of Lebanese managers that are running Syrian firms. Lebanese managerial know-how is being exported throughout the Arab world and Syria will continue to need it if it wants to further the opening up of its economy.
(The Syria Report)

That’s a very new economic relationship, as historically it is Syrian labor that has traveled to liberal and cosmopolitan Beirut. It is Syrian enterprise that has worked to create a paternalistic relationship between the two countries with one-way investment, generally government directed.

(more…)

No Comments »

Over the weekend I read with fascination William Saletan’s review of the new offering from George Lakoff, “The Political Mind,” and was struck by the remarkable similarities between it and the revolutionary syndicalism espoused during the prior fin de siècle.

In particular, Saletan summarizes Lakoff’s principal idea as the need for progressives to recapture the and reformulate the social myth that drives the political decisions of the masses:

Lakoff blames “neoliberals” and their “Old Enlightenment” mentality for the Democratic Party’s weakness. They think they can win elections by citing facts and offering programs that serve voters’ interests. When they lose, they conclude that they need to move farther to the right, where the voters are.

This is all wrong, Lakoff explains. Neuroscience shows that pure facts are a myth and that self-interest is a conservative idea. In a “New Enlightenment,” progressives will exploit these discoveries. They’ll present frames instead of raw facts. They’ll train the public to think less about self-interest and more about serving others. It’s not the platform that needs to be changed. It’s the voters.

Lakoff’s concept is not new, although his explanation as to why myth-making is important may be. (more…)

5 Comments »

I say it eventually ends in mass murder, but McQ has the latest intermediate step.

No Comments »

Let us remember what May Day has really represented RJ Rummell gives us the toll of The Red Plague:

As you can see, the total mid-estimate is about 110,286,000, an incredible total. It is around 65 percent of all democide over the same period, and is about three times greater than all the international and domestic war deaths, including the two world wars, Vietnam, Korea, and the Iran-Iraq War, to mention the bloodiest. This is the Red Plague driven by ideological fervor. The Black Plague, carried by fleas from rats and not by ideology, killed a quarter of the number the communists murdered.

There is much to dwell on in the table, if your stomach is up to it, and I will only note the most incredible estimates. The Soviet Union appears the greatest megamurderer of all time, apparently killing near 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself is responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these (I know you’ve read the toll as 20,000,000, but it was only for the 1930s and has been mistaken applied to Stalin’s full and bloody reign 1928-1953). Most of the Soviet deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto.

Communist China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the Cultural Revolution, which alone may have seen over 1,000,000 murdered, is the second worst megamurderer (I excluded the great famine of 1959 to about 1961 as nondemocidal – it alone cost about 27,000,000 lives). Then there are the lesser megamurderers, such as North Korea and Tito’s Yugoslavia.

Obviously, the population that is available to kill will make a big difference in the total democide, and thus the annual percentage rate of democide is revealing. By far, the most deadly of all communist countries and, indeed, in this century by far, has been Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and his henchmen likely killed some 2,000,000 Cambodians from April 1975 through December 1978 out of a population of around 7,000,000. This is an annual rate of over 8 percent of the population murdered, or odds of an average Cambodian surviving Pol Pot’s rule of slightly over 2 to 1.

Read the Whole Thing.

See also: Ilya Somin

No Comments »

A Cuban medical office with a sign reading “No prescriptions available.” Photo by: Dr. Darsi Ferrer [via The Real Cuba].

News of Fidel Castro’s retirement has elicited some interesting responses. Chris Bertram’s has to be one of the most arrogant and least informed:

So let’s hear it for universal literacy and decent standards of health care. Let’s hear it for the Cubans who help defeat the South Africans and their allies in Angola and thereby prepared the end of apartheid. Let’s hear it for the middle-aged Cuban construction workers who held off the US forces for a while on Grenada. Let’s hear it for Elian Gonzalez. Let’s hear it for 49 years of defiance in the face of the US blockade. Hasta la victoria siempre!

Bertram is being purposefully provocative with his post, which is what makes it so arrogant, but he’s doing so based on leftist myths, which is why it so misinformed.

The wonderful Cuban health care and education systems are shibboleths of Castro apologists everywhere. For example, film provocateur Michael Moore used the health care myth to agitate for socialized medicine in his propaganda piece entitled Sicko. However, as is the case with propaganda, reality begs to differ:

One of the greatest fallacies about the so called ‘Cuban Revolution’ has to do with healthcare.

Foreigners who visit Cuba, are fed the official line from Castro’s propaganda machine: “All Cubans are now able to receive excellent healthcare, which is also free.” But the truth is very different. Castro has built excellent health facilities for the use of foreigners, who pay with hard currency for those services.

Argentinean soccer star Maradona, for example, has traveled several times to Cuba to receive treatment to combat his drug addiction. But Cubans are not even allowed to visit those facilities. Cubans who require medical attention must go to other hospitals, that lack the most minimum requirements needed to take care of their patients.

In addition, most of these facilities are filthy and patients have to bring their own towels, bed sheets, pillows, or they would have to lay down on dirty bare mattresses stained with blood and other body fluids.

The facilities available to most Cubans are nothing like the ones featured in Sicko, and the “free health care” is not really worth much. [See what real Cuban health care looks like after the jump] (more…)

2 Comments »

The current dust-up over the Cuban-Che flag (flags?) hanging in the Houston campaign office for Barack Obama (opened by supporters, with actual staffers intended to occupy by next week), has spawned some interesting commentary. Captain Ed advised:

Oh, my. Barack Obama may want to call his new Houston office and suggest some decorating ideas…No, that’s not a Texas state flag with a picture of Obama on it. It’s the flag of the Castro-led Cuba regime, with Che Guevara’s face superimposed on the side. A Fox report from Houston captured this image as it showed Obama supporters celebrating his momentum after Super Tuesday.

Does Obama know his Houston supporters honor a terrorist in his campaign office? I’m sure he doesn’t. However, it would behoove him to ensure that the flag gets taken down and that he renounces any affinity for Che and the Fidel Castro regime.

I really doubt that Obama has any idea either. But this is campaign season, and his refusal to wear a flag pin or put his hand on his heart during the pledge of allegiance opens him up to attack based on this sort of miscue by his supporters. I really don’t care about the flag pin (I don’t wear one either), but the hand-over-the-heart petulance does raise legitimate questions, IMHO.

In any case, the leftosphere is accusing the rightosphere of having apoplectic fits over this, and using “Rovian Swiftboaters,” with their prime target being Captain Ed (my emphasis).

Oh darn those college volunteers with their affinity for hacky-sack & Che Guevara!

It’s going to be another long, reality-deprived year from the GOP Operatives. Apparently, some young volunteer for the Obama campaign had the temerity to set up an office in Texas BEFORE Obama’s actual staffers arrived in Texas. This included someone taking something off their dorm room wall, a Cuban flag with a picture of Che Guevara on it. This sent Captain Ed to the nitro tablets and asthma respirator.

It seems someone hasn’t been on a college campus in thirty-five years. Where youthful affectation with revolucion long ago replaced pictures of “Happiness is a Warm Puppy”. Oh those kids today with their I-Phones, their I-Pods, and their I-deas.

Up next, college-age Hillary Volunteer wears “Bush Sucks” T-Shirt. Ed Morrissey faints.

James Joyner attempts to the split the difference:

[Captan Ed is] right that Che is a terrorist who shouldn’t be honored by decent people. Che worship (or, alternatively, the wearing of Che t-shirts as a statement without the slightest clue of who he was) seems to be a phase that certain left-leaning activists go through in their youth; it generally passes. Driscoll’s characterization of it as “juvenilia” is spot on.

But, surely, Obama doesn’t need to publicly weigh in on the decorating choices of every low level staffer? Let alone “renounce” affinities which he’s never shown?

I sure didn’t take from Captain Ed’s post (or Charles Johnson’s) that he wanted Obama to take a loyalty oath (as Joyner later suggests), and I’m not sure why suggesting that Obama distance himself from such an idiotic display of anti-Americanism is going beyond the pale. Captain Ed was simply encouraging Obama to have his Sister Souljah moment, which seems like pretty good political advice.

But the most irritating thing about the apologia is the persistent inference that this was a youthful transgression. First of all, take a look at the picture and point out to me where this “youth” is. Do you see any college kids in that picture? Are there no adults in charge there? Don’t the women in the picture bear some responsibility here?

Secondly, why should anyone be even remotely complacent about the seemingly accepted fact that “youths” have no compunction about displaying the likeness of a mass murderer in the dorm rooms, on the their chests, and in their volunteer headquarters? Have we just given up on teaching any semblance of what’s right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable? If the flag was instead a revolucion flag from Chile with Pinochet’s hirsute mug gracing it, would the left be as complacent about that? How about Mao or Pol Pot? Is Mugabe OK, or Hugo Chavez? Where exactly does the line get drawn for which statist terrorists may grace the clothing and walls of “youths” before it becomes a fashion faux pas?

Oh, and for the record, here’s a little history on the source of that flag:

I came across a flag which is very usual in demonstantions and events of the youth organization of the portuguese communist party (J.C.P. / P.C.P.). It consists of a cuban flag defaced with the likeness of the mythical communist hero Ernesto “Che” Guevara. A similar flag, all red with black elements and bearing at times the cuban slogan “hasta la victoria siempre” (”towards the victory, always”). I’m not sure if any of these are used by communists anywhere else, namely in Cuba, but it is most likely.
Antonio Martins, 26 December 1999

This non-Cuban “Che flag” is or was, according to Jaume Olle’, used by a ultra left guerrilla group in Guatemala. I used darker colours because flags appear with darker colours. These flags are, of course, unofficial, so the shade here is basicaly a matter of taste, but they are usually used with darker colours than those we have in the Cuban national flag.
Jorge Candeias, 27 December 1999

Getting back to the genesis of this story, I really doubt that this will have much of an effect on Obama’s campaign. Those whom are already against an Obama presidency, aren’t going to be any further swayed by the fact that he has the support of communist sympathizers. By the same token, neither are those on the left with an affinity for Obama (even if they are voting for Hillary) going to be moved, since they seem to have little problem with communist sympathizers being in their midst (to their eternal shame, I might add). And anyone who is part of the undecided middle in this race, probably isn’t even going become aware of this little fiasco, since they likely don’t pay much attention to politics outside what they here on the evening news.

Indeed, the only real eye-opener here is that apparently a number of people think that mythical-Marxist hero worship is nothing more than a college kid fad, and they’re okay with the next generation being that stupid. I guess I’m just not.

8 Comments »

Communist documents promoting North Korea, which were seized from Cuban personnel during the invasion of Grenada in 1983. Not your ordinary tourist brochures. Click to enlarge:

photo: Department of Defense

No Comments »

photo: Tal Bright

Thomas Barnett bemoans the grotesque state of economics education in Europe, which often ranges from the anti-capitalist to the simply fatuous. But consider this item he cites:

Great French HS textbook: “Globalization implies subjugation of the world to the market, which constitutes a true cultural danger.”
(Thomas P.M. Barnett)

Somewhat bemused by this, Barnett asks “why is Europe so antagonistic on capitalism?” Perhaps the better question is why is Europe so antagonistic toward economics, because the item above isn’t really criticism of an economic philosophy. By elevating the primacy of culture over the market, we’re looking at the rejection of the economic premise, which is a concern for the material welfare of mankind. This is what Peter Drucker used to call the dream of “noneconomic man” and in his early work The End of Economic Man, he supplied some explanations for this impulse which might be of enduring relevance to Barnett’s question. (more…)

5 Comments »

What does socialism smell like? At first blush I can’t be much more specific than “pungent and bad.” Luckily the enterprising Catalan Socialist Party has brewed up a concoction as a campaign stunt that promises to answer this confounding quandary:

Election campaigns have witnessed some strange political strategies over the years, but the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC) surely broke new ground today when it launched its very own perfume.

At a press conference today, the PSC answered the question on everybody’s noses since the party announced last week it had created the fragrance: what does socialism smell like?

Apparently, it mixes Mediterranean herbs and fruits such as Bergamot orange and white tea with base notes from the Orient, which come together to produced an aroma of “confidence, equality, progress and efficiency”.

I’ll just note an appalling dearth of blood, rotting food and jack boot polish. But, I’m no perfume expert.

Oddly, it also smells a little like air freshener. One journalist at the press conference said the smell was so strong that he was practically overwhelmed and left feeling faint.

Hmm, maybe the PSC is on to something here. Air freshener is used to hide unpleasant odiferous realities and too much of it can leave one feeling lightheaded. In comparison, socialism has been known to mask certain economic realities with an air of fruitful abundance, and too much socialism has caused millions of people to pass out. Permanently.

The creator, Albert Majós, told Cadena Ser radio station today that it was neither a “perfume nor air-freshener” but the aromatic representation of socialism’s values.

Well, I’m glad he cleared that up.

The vice-president of the PSC, Manuela de Madre, argued that overall “it would be no bad thing if Catalan politics could relax a little using this fragrance” and recommended “the aromatic and relaxing herbs” to the conservative opposition People’s Party (PP).

De Madre said the PSC would be sending a sample to all the political parties in the Catalan parliament.

The fragrance, which comes in little bags to be placed in all good leftwing wardrobes, will go on sale at the PSC headquarters in Barcelona and its other offices, as well as at party meetings.

For his next fragrance, De Madre plans to create “the sweet smell of Irony.”

A spokesman for the PSC said it could also be used in offices to create a pleasant environment of equality and fairness.

I think that one already exists. It’s called Neutra Air.

* The Soviet Era poster above is from here, which provides the following comment:

No Comments »

With the red stars back on the MiGs, criticism of the government illegal and dissident arrests again in fashion, Soviet reversion is all the rage in Russia. Jim Hill revealed a couple of days ago that apparently Disney is in for the show, having dusted off old plans for a Soviet pavilion at Epcot Center from the early 1990s. That project was of course shelved when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but the cycles of Russian history have once again aligned for another ill-advised go at it. This time around of course, the pavilion will advertise the new and “democratic” Russian Federation with the Putin government’s enthusiastic endorsement (and financing?).

Although for me it’s not clear anything would need be changed from the original plan. With its distinctly pre-socialist-modernist architecture, the conceptual designs for the planned 1990s USSR edition looked decidedly more 18th century Tsarist than 20th century Marxist-Leninist anyway. To capture the true spirit of the times, a better and more accurate Soviet pavilion plan would have been a gigantic, grimy, ferro-concrete apartment block with unlighted halls, a pervasive scent of urine and rotting cabbage reeking from the floors, and machine gunners awaiting your attempt at an exit.

But it occurs to me that Disney could save itself the risk of another potential cancellation by making two Russian pavilions (and you would only need two). Call them the Freeze pavilion and the Thaw pavilion. You could begin with the Freeze edition today and when Putin’s authoritarianism inevitably passes out of fashion, it could be temporarily closed and the Thaw exhibit opened. As the well-known and long-running cycles of Russian history attest, these two pavilions would cover the entirety of any future developments in Russia for all time. Just a thought.

No Comments »