Ivan Osorio quips:

My friend Tom Palmer says that whenever he sees somebody sporting a Che Guevara t-shirt, he likes to ask the wearer, “That’s a great t-shirt; do you have the entire collection?” The wearer usually responds either with a blank stare or by asking Tom what does he mean, to which Tom then responds: “You know, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot…”

Now I can happily say that the disgusting Che is in the right company in at least one type of merchandise. The photo below was taken recently by a friend in vacation in Italy.

Wnat's the photo? Well, as Ivan asks, "Would they also have Castro rum and Stalin vodka?"

(Via Tim Blair, who notes, "Che may finally have liberated someone, but he’s still mixing with the wrong crowd.")

Back in 2003, in a post titled "Mao And The Godfather", we had some thoughts on, and a photo of, the Andy Warhol print of Mao Zedong that hung above the mantelpiece in Francis Ford Coppola's dining room at the height of his power as a film director in the mid-1970s.

A reader of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog quotes from an article by Jed Perl that suggests that Warhol didn't choose Mao as a subject randomly:

Mao is Marilyn, only more so. The terms "icon" and "global icon" are nowadays tossed around with slapdash glee, so it is important to make a basic distinction. It was the moviegoing public that made Marilyn Monroe an icon, because they responded to her beauty, her charm, her wit. The people who hang posters of Marilyn on their walls do so because they like her. It's that simple. But the omnipresence of Mao's image has an altogether different origin. While Leftists in the United States in the late 1960s may have gladly chosen to hang Mao's portrait on their walls, among the billion Chinese who were sure to have his portrait in their homes and in their workplaces, it was understood that they would have endangered their own safety if they did not put his portrait where Mao wanted it to be. There is a world of difference between an icon freely chosen and an icon imposed from above, and the difference has more than a little to do with the difference between a liberal society and an authoritarian society. Warhol's way of blurring this distinction leads straight to the political pornography that characterizes so much of the new Chinese art.

The distinction was not lost on Warhol. According to one of the umpteen books on him that has appeared in recent years, Warhol "often stated that his goal was to obtain the patronage of a dictator, who would then mandate that Warhol's portrait be placed in every governmental office, school, and so on, ensuring the artist unlimited financial opportunities." Was Warhol kidding when he fantasized about being a dictator's court painter? To some degree, of course, he must have been. But then again the fascination of Warhol's work was based on a confusion or conflation of a number of different kinds of power, beginning with the power of celebrity and the power of advertising and the power of art. In the early 1970s he added to that incendiary but still somewhat benign mix another element: the power of communist propaganda. That was the point at which his work turned foul. Warhol's Maos—as well as the Hammer and Sickle still lifes from later in the 1970s and the Lenin portraits of the 1980s—bring his own mercenary spin to a Western love affair with the certitudes of absolutist politics that dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. That was when some members of the European and American intelligentsia decided that the bombastic images of healthy working men and women coming first out of Russia and then out of Nazi Germany offered a relief from the intricacies of modern art. After all, there is nothing less intricate than a painting by Andy Warhol.
The impact that totalitarian imagery can have on free people is an enduring problem. Susan Sontag's essay on the subject, "Fascinating Fascism," was published two years after Warhol began to paint Mao. She could just as well have been thinking of Warhol's Maos, and more generally of the leftist infatuation with the iconography of the Cultural Revolution, when she remarked that the sophisticated public was beginning "to look at Nazi art with knowing and sniggering detachment, as a form of Pop Art." Sontag, who never liked to get too far ahead of her audience, was aware that her readership had still not quite outlived its infatuation with the Maoist look. But she made an important point when she observed that there is a difference between appreciating the peculiar power of a certain kind of totalitarian imagery and going right ahead and succumbing to that power.

As Jonah's reader suggests, expect lots more totalitarian imagery during the coming Olympics in Beijing; in the meantime, we'll always have Che.

As Charles Johnson writes:

If you aren’t familiar with the story of John McCain’s capture and torture by the North Vietnamese, I highly recommend this article at US News, a reprint of McCain’s first-person account originally published in 1973: John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account - US News and World Report.

I was generally familiar with what happened to McCain, but have gained an enormous respect for him after reading this article.

Needless to say, RTWT.

In Canada's National Post, Robert Fulford asks what to many is a fairly straightforward rhetorical question:

Why aren't the Vietnamese more grateful to Tom Hayden? Recently, he returned for the first time in 36 years to the country that he and his then-wife Jane Fonda tried to save from American domination in the Vietnam war. The trip disappointed him. As he writes in the March 10 issue of The Nation, Vietnam has turned capitalist. Was that what he fought for? Absolutely not. He remains capitalism's enemy, still the same lefty who helped found 1960s student radicalism.

In the San Jose suburb of Milpitas, the large Vietnamese population is so enamored with the current communist regime that they've gone back to flying the flag of the free former South Vietnam. And they're not alone.

Via Small Dead Animals, which notes:

Ah yes, those ungrateful Vietnamese. After Hollywood cleared their path for a worker's paradise they've decided they don't like it much after all and are abandoning it. Oh well, Hollywood still has Cuba and there's always Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to embrace.

And possibly, eventually, not even the former:

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news the official state media try to suppress.

Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly. Alarcón seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Alarcón's reputation in some circles.

Something similar happened in late January when officials tried to impose a tax on the tips and wages of employees of foreign companies.

Workers erupted in jeers and shouts when told about the new tax, a moment caught on a cellphone camera and passed along by memory sticks.

"It passes from flash drive to flash drive," said Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who, like almost everyone else interviewed for this article, asked that his last name not be used for fear of political persecution. "This is going to get out of the government's hands because the technology is moving so rapidly."

This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and Cuba has the benefit of much more modern techology, to boot.

As the Cato Institute, among many others has noted, in the 1980s:

Fax machines and photocopiers, video recorders and personal computers outside the government were no longer exotica but a sprawling, living nervous system that linked the Russian political opposition, the republican independence movements, and the burgeoning private sector. Tied informally together, this equipment constituted a network of considerable scale.

During that period, those same tools had a similar, if sadly less revolutionary impact in China. So the decision to allow possession of computers in Cuba by the new regime after Castro's six year PC blockade could have suprisingly remarkable long term consequences for that currently still-imprisoned Island.

"Castro Rejects Idea of Political Change."

I guess Fidel's the ultimate example of a one-time youthful leftwing revolutionary who's now standing athwart history yelling "stop."

Fidel Castro's friends at AP write, “‘The night before, I slept better than ever,’ Castro reportedly wrote in a newspaper column. ‘My conscience was clear and I promised myself a vacation.’”

John McCain has an excellent tropical suggestion for Castro's travel itinerary.

Update: Related thoughts from Mark Steyn, who writes, "there beats in the liberal breast a strange passion for normalizing dictatorships."

Highlighted on Drudge is what is currently a brief Reuters note:

HAVANA (Reuters) - Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro said on Tuesday that he will not return to lead the country, retiring as head of state 49 years after he seized power in an armed revolution.

"Developing", needless to say.

Update: UPI adds:

HAVANA, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- Fidel Castro, the ailing strongman who led Cuba for 47 years, is stepping down as president and commander in chief, it was reported Tuesday.

Castro, 81, who has been suffering from an undisclosed intestinal ailment, disclosed his resignation in a letter published in the state-run newspaper Granma, CNN reported. In that letter, he said he would not accept being elected to another term as president of the state council or commander in chief when the Parliament meets Sunday.

Since mid-2006, Castro's younger brother, Raul, has been Cuba's acting president, running the government's day-to-day operations.

Fidel Castro ruled the communist island since leading a revolution that toppled Gen. Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

Michelle Malkin has more.

Anne Applebaum explains why actors like Sean Penn and fashion models such as Naomi Campbell get the warm and fuzzies around murderous thugs such as Hugo Chavez:

In fact, for the malcontents of Hollywood, academia, and the catwalks, Chávez is an ideal ally. Just as the sympathetic foreigners whom Lenin called "useful idiots" once supported Russia abroad, their modern equivalents provide the Venezuelan president with legitimacy, attention, and good photographs. He, in turn, helps them overcome the frustration John Reed once felt—the frustration of living in an annoyingly unrevolutionary country where people have to change things by law. For all his brilliance, Reed could not bring socialism to America. For all his wealth, fame, media access, and Hollywood power, Sean Penn cannot oust George W. Bush. But by showing up in the company of Chávez, he can at least get a lot more attention for his opinions.

As she explains, it's the same radical chic urge that drove celebrities, intellectuals, and the original useful idiots of 90 years ago to flock to the then-new Soviet Union.

Yesterday, we linked to a Power Line item regarding Cuban dissident Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, who was awarded the Medal of Freedom from President Bush today, where he described Biscet as "a dangerous man" to the Cuban dictatorship--"He is dangerous in the same way that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi were dangerous."

(And just to dovetail with Scott Johnson's post above, you just know the folks at AFP loved having to type that line.)

Biscet is also the topic of a recent video by The Wall Street Journal featuring columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady:

"Conservatives are down on President Bush, blaming him for everything under the sun, picking at him. Sure, he’s made mistakes. But he also has greatness in him. And this was a great act. In bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Oscar Biscet — an all-but-forgotten and all-but-helpless man in a Cuban dungeon — George Bush has done an incredibly large-hearted and important thing."

I've been getting numerous visitors today searching on "Deborah Santana"; they've been going to my post with a photograph of Carlos Santana and his wife Deborah at the 2006 Oscars, with Carlos in his dinner jacket and uber-reactionary Che T-shirt, and now I know why: they're declaring their marriage splitsville.

For those who are interested, here are the details from the San Jose Mercury of their divorce announcement.

Eric Scheie spots the Columbine killers in the process of becoming cult heroes:

Considering Che a hero while blaming the NRA for kids who go bad?

In a twisted way, there's a certain logic to it.

Sadly, yes (see also Oswald, Lee Harvey and his benighted status in Oliver Stone's JFK.) And if Cho Seung-Hui joins the list, we can trace a key moment in his ascension to this decision by NBC to create his Che/Oswald/Travis Bickle-style anti-hero pose.

Radical chic--it's not just for Park Avenue orchestra conductors anymore!

(Someone should send a case of these T-shirts to BBC HQ.)

The week is far from over, but it's already been filled with deja vu all over again. And again.

Or as to paraphrase those parodies of 1930s-era Time magazine, Backwards ran the flashbacks until reeled the mind...

Want to relive 1945? The Washington Post makes Gerald Ford look like a brilliant Cold War historian.

Or maybe you'd like to revisit 1994? OJ's back in the police blotter once again.

How 'bout 1997? Matt Drudge has the dinosaur media p.o.ed all over again.

Or, why not something as recent as 2004! On National Talk Like A Pirate Day, avast maties, for the return of the Captain Dan the Newsman, swashbuckling his way back into the Blogosphere's hearts with a $70 million lawsuit against his former employer.

Or we can set the Wayback Machine back to the new Ice Age predicted by NASA in 1971; and way, way back--to 1492.

...Where it all will end, knows God!

Update: speaking of "a couple of week links", welcome readers of Jules Crittenden and Don Surber!

Well, it's not that new a podcast--I actually recorded this last December, just as Tech Central Station was transitioning away from podcasting back towards emphasizing traditional print articles. But I didn't want this interview with author Paul Kengor and his book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism to be abandoned entirely, so I'm sharing it here, as a sort of late summer rerun. While there are a few questions near the end of my interview with the author tied to the then-recent mid-term elections, most of the material discussed is pretty timeless stuff: how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War--and spent much of his adult life preparing for the job.

27 minutes, 33 seconds in length, 25.2 MB file size, and no iPod required--virtually any PC with a broadband connection can download and play a podcast. So click here to listen!

At age 88, with the terminal moment approaching with ever-increasing speed, Pete Seeger has second thoughts.

For Seeger, it's too little, and more importantly far, far too late, but at least he's attempting to square his record somewhat by publicly admitting that he was wrong--twice--on the most important moral questions of the 20th century.

Update: "Better late than never, but Jesus, is this late".

Heh. Indeed.

Orrin Judd writes that the Spanish Civil War is "best thought of as the first battle of the Cold War, with the Western Left, not atypically, on the wrong side." He links to a piece by Warren Carroll of the American Spectator, who notes:

WHEN THE HEROICS of the Spanish Civil War come up -- Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Hemingway's fictions or the effusions of various poets -- there is a very large and usually unremarked elephant in the room: Orwell, who actually fought, and Hemingway who wrote about fighting, were on the wrong side.

Read the whole thing.

No good can come of this:

The Russian school manuals are being rewritten in order to fit the Putin doctrine of a strong Russia, unashamed of its past, bluntly distorting facts and bullying the US. Even scarier is the glorification of Stalin.

On the other hand, given the prevailing attitudes of the Russian people, combined with their failing demographics, it's not entirely surprising.

More from the memory hole, as Michael Chapman of CNSNews.com interviews Humberto Fontova, author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him:

Cybercast News Service: What do you consider to be some of Guevara's greatest crimes or offenses that people today should know about?

Humberto Fontova: He was the chief executioner. He performed for the Cuban revolution what Heinrich Himmler performed for the Nazis. Everything Che Guevara did was directed by Fidel Castro. Early on, when they were in the mountains, Castro realized that Che seemed to relish executing little farm boys. There were executions carried out, carried out in the mountains, of so-called informers. I interviewed many people who witnessed those executions. There was no due process.

Che Guevara wrote a letter to his father in 1957 and to his abandoned wife. In the letter to her, he wrote, "I'm here in Cuba's hills, alive and thirsting for blood." Then, to his father, "I really like killing." The man was a clinical sadist, whereas Fidel Castro you could describe as a psychopath in that the murders did not affect him one way or the other. It was a means to an end - the consolidation of his one-man rule. Che has a famous quote, where he wrote, a revolutionary has to become "a cold killing machine." The thing was, Che Guevara was anything but cold. He was a warm killing machine. He relished the slaughter.

And Hollywood can't stop making movies idolizing him, which helps to place this recent essay by Jonah Goldberg into context.

Video of the day, via Greg Hanke:

And if you haven't seen it yet, don't miss this surreal clip of a prematurely embalmed Stalin "touring" Berlin shortly after WWII.

Update: And speaking of World War II, "Out with the old axis, in with the new axis".

Paco, a frequent contributor to Tim Blair's site, notes that America's leftwing artists need to believe that they live in an oppressive culture, no matter how free from government regulation their speech is:

Pretending that one lives in an oppressive and fearful society, and saying so publicly, creates a sensation of courage and nobility that, in reality, is totally missing from the lives of many of these artsy types. For some reason, it’s not enough for these people to be perceived as interesting, or witty, or brilliant: they have this great need to be perceived as heroic as well.

Meanwhile, Christa Wolf, a communist writer who made her career in East Germany, a society which of course actually did outlaw freedom of speech, is feeling nostalgic:

The trajectory of Wolf’s political evolution has many parallels with that of leftist Western intellectuals, whom historical events compel to abandon their support for communist regimes, but who prove unwilling or unable fully to renounce their earlier convictions. Wolf continued to nurture utopian longings and lingering reverence for Marxist ideals even after the East German regime’s collapse. She responded to the reunification of Germany with a reaffirmation of moral equivalence: if communist systems had turned out to be bad, so were the Western capitalist ones, and there was little to choose from between them. Wolf’s complaints about consumerism expressed these attitudes, as when she writes of a time “when we are supposed to be buried in material objects and become material things ourselves”—a complaint that gives comfort to intellectuals, whose sense of identity is rooted in the role of social critic.

Wolf did not seize the opportunity One Day a Year presented for a thorough, systematic probing of the evolution of her worldview, nor for an understanding of the errors and illusions to which she was susceptible. She seems annoyed by those who “demanded my confession of guilt as an entry into the Western media landscape”—even though she managed to enter it without making such confessions. The sources of her qualified disillusionment with the East German regime remain unclear, as does the extent of her dissatisfaction. What is clear is that for Wolf, not even living most of her life in a highly repressive communist society could extinguish her longing for an ideal, egalitarian, non-commercial society.

And speaking of teaching old dogma new tricks, Amity Shlaes reconsiders our reverence for FDR.

Sidney Pollack, the director of Havana (and numerous, not to mention, better movies) on Fidel Castro:

Castro lost his mind a long time ago. He's a dictator. He started out like a lot of them with probably genuinely good impulses to create a revolution that was fair and then he got in power and look what he did.

Or as fellow Hollywood denizen Peter Mehlman wrote over the weekend:

You could argue that even the world's worst fascist dictators at least meant well. They honestly thought were doing good things for their countries by suppressing blacks/eliminating Jews/eradicating free enterprise/repressing individual thought/killing off rivals/invading neighbors, etc. Only the Saudi royal family is driven by the same motives as Bush, but they were already entrenched. Bush set a new precedent. He came into office with the attitude of "I'm so tired of the public good. What about my good? What about my rich friends' good?"

How can anyone not see it? It's not that their policies have been misguided or haven't played out right. They. Don't. Even. Mean. Well.

Fortunately, the Daily Gut has a running tally, "For those of you keeping score at home, here's a partial list (in no particular order) of leaders who have meant or mean well":

Hitler
Stalin
Lenin
Mao
Big Kim and Li'l Kim
Castro
The Khmer Rouge
Ceausescu
The Taliban
Saddam
Ayatollah Khomeini
Ahmedinejad

I'll take an incompetent leader over one who means well any day!

The thing about Mehlman's column is it lays out the central tenet of lefty thought: All that matters is that you mean well.

In the 1940s and '50s many lefties (including some if not all of the Hollywood Ten) were apologists for Stalin? Who cares - they were "idealists" who meant well.

Decades of welfare programs actually hurt the already poor and and caused more to join them? Doesn't matter - we meant well.

Ted Kennedy is directly responsible for a young woman's death? Water under the bridge - he means well.

Carter's weakness made the US a laughingstock and emboldened the Iranians to kidnap Americans? Hey, c'mon, the man's practically a saint - he meant well.

Clinton's lack of response to terrorist aggression laid the groundwork for 9/11? That's okay - he meant well.

The UN is a corrupt friend to dictators that does nothing to stop mass slaughter, human rights abuses, and genocide? No biggee - it's a noble ideal and we support it because we mean well.

Pretending there are two sides to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when one side glorifies suicide bombers, rejoices when America is attacked, and can't even keep from fighting and killing amongst themselves? Sure - because we mean well.

Amnesty International equates Gitmo with Soviet-era gulags? Why not - they mean well.

Giving credence to nitwits with double-digit IQs who think the Bush administration had a hand in the 9/11 attacks? Of course - they're just "questioning authority," which makes them patriots who mean well.

Mao obviously meant well, especially when he has Hollywood admirers ranging from the Godfather-era Francis Ford Coppola to Shrek's sweetheart, Cameron Diaz.

One of many amazing passages from Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man. To very slightly paraphrase Michael Herr: simple surfaces, long reverberations:

For years now, Roosevelt had been reading Duranty in the New York Times on Russia. The godlessness troubled him--the purge of the churches. He told Perkins about his meetings with Maxim Litvinov the Soviet envoy. “Well now, Max, you know what I mean by religion. You know what religion gives a man. You know the difference between the religious and the irreligious person.” He went on: Look here, sometime you are going to die, Max, and when you die, you are going to remember your old father and mother—good, pious Jewish people who believed in God and taught you to pray to God.” Roosevelt told Litvinov that religious freedom was important if the the United States was to recognize the Bolsheviks, and he told Perkins he thought he had made an impression on Litvinov.

More from Shlaes, here.

Premiere magazine looks at 20 movies stuck in development hell, and I'd add Total Eclipse, a film I've been waiting to see for seven years. Before it was cancelled, some test footage was shot though; James Lileks has a rare clip of its surprisingly wooden star.

Tim Blair quotes a passage from the New Republic’s Paul Berman regarding the hostility on the left that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has faced, both in Europe and the US:

Something like a campaign against Hirsi Ali could never have taken place a few years ago. A sustained attack on an authentic liberal dissident crying out against injustices in remote parts of the world and even in the back streets of western Europe, a sustained attack that appears nearly to have erased the mention of women’s oppression and the struggle for women’s rights from discussion - no, this could not have happened yesterday, except on the extreme Right.

This is a new event. This is a reactionary turn in the intellectual world.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn--not to mention Castro's many, many critics--might wonder at how new an event it is to be shunned as an apostate by the Western left.

Mark Steyn takes on the blacklist! Or rather, the sentimentality that's built up over the last half century in Hollywood regarding it, which, much like believing that Richard Nixon (let alone the Gipper and George W. Bush) is the antichrist, requires that the blinders be placed as tight as possible over the eyes. Not to mention the brain:

Bernard Gordon died over the weekend. He was one of those Hollywood Communists of the Forties blacklisted in the Fifties, and it defined him till the end. A solid Hollywood screenwriter, Gordon adapted The Day Of The Triffids and was a reliable hand at war movies, among them The Battle Of The Bulge and, of all things, Hellcats Of The Navy, with Ronald Reagan's only film role with Nancy. Gordon's screenplay and the stars' performance aren't always in sync: even as Ron's explaining why he's so tortured with guilt he can never marry her, he and Nancy look like a placidly contented small-town couple heading for a night out at the local Rotary Club. In later years, the screenwriter led the protests against the very belated Oscar awarded to Elia Kazan in 1999. As Gordon wrote of Kazan in The Los Angeles Times, “He helped to support an oppressive regime that did incalculable damage to America and abroad.”

Interesting choice of word: "regime". And what about the regime you supported?

* * *

That’s what all those Hollywood and Broadway Communists did. They were the polite front of an ideology that led to mass murder, and they expected Kazan to honour their gentleman’s agreement. In those polite house parties Gregory Peck goes to [in Gentleman's Agreement], it’s rather boorish and tedious to become too exercised about anti-semitism. And likewise, at gatherings in the arts, it’s boorish and tedious to become too exercised about Communism – no matter how many faraway, foreign, unglamorous people it kills. Elia Kazan was on the right side of history. His enemies line up with the apologists for thugs and tyrants. Whose reputation would you bet on in the long run?

Read the whole thing.

Every other year it seems, Hollywood makes a movie about the horrors of the blacklist. And every other year it seems, the rest of us ask this question.

Now that Garrison Keillor and Joan Baez have each had second thoughts, maybe they can help spearhead their production!

Claudia Rosett describes the hellish North Korean famine:

When the Soviet system imploded in 1991, there was great concern that in the immediate aftermath the populations of post-communist nations, suddenly cut loose from Big Brother, might starve. They didn't. Although life was hard, people used their newfound freedoms to cope. But in one of the Soviet-engendered communist states where the totalitarian regime survived — North Korea — the result was famine.

Perhaps because no TV cameras were allowed in, and far too little information was allowed out, the North Korean famine of the 1990s remains one of the most muffled horrors of modern times. By now, however, there have been enough studies, reports, and tales from defectors to confirm that the deprivation in North Korea was catastrophic: One million or more people died, and food shortages continue to this day.

Ted Turner and the editors at the L.A. Times should read Claudia's article--naturally, the odds that they actually will are virtually zero.

Or, Springtime For Mao Tse-Tung: James Lileks checks in with a report from Beijing, about as off-off-off-off-Broadway as theater can get.

Update: Speaking of China, over at TCS Daily, Nick Schulz has some (much less satiric) thoughts on its role in the global economy--"The Lego-fication of Heavy Industry".

Jay Nordlinger wirtes, "If you have not seen The Lives of Others, I urge you to do so at the first opportunity":

This is the movie about the Stasi, the East German secret police. Since the dawn of film, there have been about two anti-Communist movies. And that’s because the people who make movies are — um, let’s just say not anti-Communist. At any rate, if you’re going to make one of the precious few anti-Communist movies, it had better be good. And this one is great.

I couldn’t help being amused at the information given at the beginning of the movie. We are told that the year is 1984, long before Gorbachev, when life in the Soviet bloc is dark, hopeless, and grim.

Well, I myself came of political age about this time, and East Germany was always portrayed to me as a quite benign state. Even an admirable one! You see, we in the West had “political rights,” such as those to speech and assembly; and those in the East had “economic rights,” such as those to food and shelter. And East Germany was something of a model: socialist but not Stalinist. Why, in Erich Honecker Land, a form of justice had been realized!

Do you remember, you old television-watchers, how Bob Novak used to tease Al Hunt about loving East Germany?

In any case, we’re all anti-Communists now, which is to be welcomed. Although some of us are lagging behind on Cuba, aren’t we?

You read (honest) materials about East Germany, you read (honest) materials about Cuba — very, very similar. The Germans shot would-be escapees on a wall; the Cubans shoot would-be escapees in the water. Once the Cuban people are allowed to see The Lives of Others, they will effortlessly recognize everything.

Nordlinger's thoughts on the universality of The Lives Of Others (and surely the 1984 time period of the movie is no accident) reminded me of something that Theodore Dalrymple recently wrote about George Orwell. The bulk of the article is now behind The New Criterion's pay-to-read firewall, but fortunately, this excerpt was quoted elsewhere:

Insofar as it is possible for an intellectual in a liberal democracy to be brave, Orwell was brave.

Perhaps the most genuine and moving encomia to him I ever heard were in Romania in the dark days just before the downfall of Ceausescu. Nineteen Eighty-Four circulated clandestinely, and several Romanians told me that they found it astonishing how an Englishman, who had never so much as set foot in a communist country, seemed to understand their own experience from the inside, as it were, and sometimes better than they understood it themselves, so that the meaning of their own experience became clearer to them as a result of reading him. And this they found immensely consoling, the very opposite of Primo Levi’s terrible nightmare that after he was released from Auschwitz no one would listen to him or believe him because what he had to say was so utterly at variance with all previous human experience. Orwell’s book reassured the Romanians to whom I spoke that, the Iron Curtain notwithstanding, they were not alone, and also that the political conditions under which they were living were highly abnormal and therefore, however apparently durable, historically temporary. Dismal and pessimistic as the book may have seemed to a reader in the west, it was read with immense joy in the east. Few authors have ever been loved and venerated as Orwell was loved and venerated by the people to whom I spoke in Romania.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that there are a few samizdat copies of 1984 floating around Fidel's island gulag; I wonder what his imprisoned citizens think of it.

Maybe, says Ace, who posts some thoughts on San Francisco State, which recently investigated College Republicans for flag desecration and blasphemy, two things which otherwise never occur on campus...

Update: Meanwhile, Jeff Goldstein explores conflicting on-campus identity politics.

England's Daily Mail reports, "Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims".

David Irving should be feeling awfully smug about this.

Update: More thoughts on the topic from American history teacher Betsy Newmark.

More: Follow the Insta-links for some additional related thoughts. And here's a reminder from seven years ago that England's recent societal meltdowm wasn't exactly unexpected.

Found via Maggie's Farm (where it's cocktail hour!), The View From 1776 has a great post on how Hollywood went Red in the 1930. Here's but a sample:

Collins later repented his years in the CPUSA. He unburdened himself in Confessions of a Red Screenwriter, published in the October 6, 1952, issue of New Leader. He wrote:

A Communist is always prepared. He, or rather his party, has an answer for everything. When I joined the party, I was handed ready-made: friends, a cause, a faith and a viewpoint on all phenomena. I also had a one-shot solution to all the world’s ills and inequities....Suppose our Comrade keeps up with all the twists and turns of party policy, what is his reward? Why, peace of mind, of course. Since he has an answer for everything, he has a great sensof personal security; the world is safe; everything is explained – his history and the future; and everything is also simplified – into black and white....

The party member, on the other hand, has to make only one effort. He must be “flexible.” “Flexible” means that you cheer for Earl Browder [former CPUSA head] on his birthday and the next day you despise him as a “betrayer of the working class”...

All of which is a reminder of what a huge "Nyah!" Lillian Hellman's infamous quote that "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions" was to the HCUAA. And of something that Dennis Prager wrote in 2004:

As a famous Soviet dissident joke put it: "In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it's the past which is always changing."

And of course, such "flexibility" is an ever-present part of today's society and its media.

And I think that "flexibility" is one of the reasons why Glenn Reynolds is correct when he writes:

It occurs to me that the media sectors that are doing badly -- movies, music, newspapers, TV women's shows -- seem to be the most highly politicized, while the sectors that are doing well, like games, aren't.

The non-politicized sectors are under much less pressure to cut their conscience to fit this year's fashions.

Ed Morrissey writes that a 1971 letter by Albert Speer ties him to the Holocaust. As Ed notes, that isn't all that surprising: Speer had to know, as Germany's concentration camp system supplied much of the slave labor that Speer, as armaments minister, worked to death to keep pumping out weapons and munitions (and here's but one nightmarish example) in the last years of Nazi Germany:

Historians always looked at Speer's claims of innocence about the Holocaust with some suspicion. William Shirer, whose Rise and Fall of the Third Reich remains the seminal work on Nazi Germany, wondered in his history how Speer could have remained ignorant of the death-camp system. Speer drew his workers from the same system, and demanded more and more as the war progressed. Any ignorance on their provenance or their fate had to either be willful or faked.

They also questioned his sentencing, even at the time of the Nuremberg trials. The men who supplied the forced labor to Speer had their necks stretched, while Speer essentially walked away from the ruins of Nazi Germany. Why? Speer made a calculated decision to defy Hermann Goering and admit all of the horrors of the Third Reich, expressing remorse and sorrow all along the way. Goering had rallied the rest of the defendants to assume a defiant tone, defending the Nazis and blaming the atrocities on everyone else. The tribunal allowed itself to be impressed by Speer's no-nonsense admissions of the obvious and rewarded him with his life.

Now it appears that Speer was more calculating even than most thought. The letter makes clear that Speer knew exactly what the Nazis would do to the Jews, and cared so little that he helped them work prisoners to death. Essentially, Speer lived a lie for the last half of his life, aided and abetted by a credulous West that for some reason wanted to believe his strange protestations of innocence.

Of course, Speer would hardly be the last polished representative of a totalitarian regime with the blood of innocents on his hands that "a credulous West" was all too willing to forgive.

Speer owes almost a half century of additional life to that polished, seemingly cultured persona. But millions of innocent victims in Germany's concentration camps died needlessly due to his organizational genius, which bought Nazi Germany time it wouldn't have had otherwise.

"Fidel I love you. We both have the same initials. We are both powerful men. And we both use our power for good."--Francis Ford Coppola.

Actually, they both use their power to substantially increase their own personal net worths. Except Coppola makes his by putting guns in his actors' hands, not in your back.

And of course, Coppola is far from the only person in Hollywood who loves Fidel.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

The New York Times praises Forest Whitaker for his portrayal of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland for revealing "some of Amin’s positive qualities".

Has Idi taken his first step on the inevitable path towards icongraphic T-shirt superstardom?

And it wouldn't be the first time that the Times itself has met a bloodthirsty dictator and/or third world revolutionary and presented his positive, nuanced qualities as well.

The One Free Korea blog links to a news report that states that "On December 20th, a mass group of 120 prisoners from the camp in Hwasung escaped"; the camp is "half the size of the state of Rhode Island", and holds 10,000 prisoners. One Free Korea adds:

In the history of North Korea, there has only been one known incident like this one — the mass uprising at Onsong, Camp Number 12, in 1987, when 5,000 people were killed. The punishment for escape is death, and former guards claim that they were offered generous bounties for killing escaping prisoners.

Apparently 21 have been recaptured and face near-certain death sentences; others have made it to China:

The significance of this, if true, is proof of the existence of an organized underground inside North Korea. As you will see below, Hwasong is a very long walk from China. Without help from an underground, these people would have had nowhere to go; they would all have been recaptured or killed almost immediately. If around 100 prisoners were still at large weeks after the fact, or made it at least as far as China, someone must have helped, hidden, and fed them.

I certainly hope they make it to ultimate safety.

Despite Ted Turner's fantasies to the contrary, North Korea is a nightmarish hellhole of a nation. As Christopher Hitchens wrote last year, "George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint".

Richard Miniter asks, "aren’t you tired of the whole 'you’re-a-fascist' line?"

The Fascists and the Nazis are only on the right if you yourself are communist—and therefore, they are barely to the right of you on the political spectrum. To the rest of us, Fascists, Nazis and communists are different sub-species of the same murderous monster, a blood-drenched beast that believes in the power of the state and seeks to dismember or murder every individual and every group in society that refuses to bend to its will.

Those of us who believe in free speech and, its economic equivalent, free trade, limited government, tolerance, the equal freedom of the artist and the entrepreneur, the separation of church and state, and so on, are the enemies of fascists and, their ill-clothed counterparts, communists. Indeed, capitalism is the opposite of fascism, which favors government control of the every economic decision. Calling us (liberals and conservatives) “fascists” simply reveals the Left’s nostaglia for truly evil enemies (like Nazis) and its current reluctance to engage in a battle of ideas.

Spot-on--don't miss the rest.

Pamela of Atlas Shrugs spots the perfect gift for the hip, young wannabe terrorist whose Che or hammer and sickle T-shirt is looking particularly ratty--for sale at the Las Vegas Urban Outfitters.

Meanwhile, Mary Katharine Ham has some very much related gift suggestions.

Mark Steyn appeared on Hugh Hewitt's show this afternoon:

I think one of the horrible and contemptible aspects of our generation is that we're posers. You know, after 1945, everybody said never again. It's chiseled on the markers in front of concentration camps all over Europe. Never again. Never again. And we thought those words meant something. And in fact, the never again event turns up all the time. It turns up in Rwanda. It turns up in Darfur. it turns up when we sit by and listen to people like Ahmadinejad pledging to wipe Israel off the face of the map. And we think that that is just like a kind of rhetorical ploy in the opening of negotiations. We don't understand that he does mean it, that he wants a world, and certainly a Middle East, but preferably a world, without Jews. And I think we are morals posers, and these are perhaps the most hollow words of our time, those words, never again.

HH: And as is, I think, increasingly hollow, the support that we had for the Cedar Revolution, as Hezbollah becomes more and more belligerent, and less and less inclined to do anything other than bring down the government of Lebanon.

MS: Yes, and I think there is a...Hezbollah is really a kind of model for the future, that you will have these institutions that prey on weak states, and take over sections of weak states, and yet have all the advantages of not being a state entity with the responsibility that imposes. One of the most disgusting things about this settlement of the Israeli-Hezbollah war, as it was, is that you had the U.N., and you have European nations, and other nations effectively treating Hezbollah as a quasi-state entity. And who's fault is that? I mean, the U.N. gave the PLO, a terrorist organization, a seat at the United Nations. In a sense, we have made this rod for our own back.