OPINION:
The USSR. Venezuela. Now Cuba. All were held up as Marxist utopias, as was Hitler’s National Socialist regime and former Socialist Party leader Benito Mussolini’s fascism. But when things go wrong, as they always do, apologists treat us to the same absurd claim: “Real communism has never been tried.” In the words of Sting, “It’s a lie we don’t believe anymore,” except too many supposedly smart people do.
America’s foremost socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), insists the U.S. embargo caused the Cuban people to revolt over COVID-19. Never mind that the embargo doesn’t block medical supplies, or that protestors are waving the Stars & Stripes, not the hammer and sickle. Bernie’s go-to move is blaming America, just as he did when Venezuela and Nicaragua imploded. The last time we saw someone spinning this furiously, Superman was reversing the earth’s rotation to save Lois Lane.
Clay Travis (co-host of my daytime gig, “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show”) recently broke down the problem, citing a Wall Street Journal editorial. “[O]ne of the ways that Cuba funds its government right now is by sending its doctors and nurses overseas,” Travis said, “getting compensated in their real dollar value, taking all of that money themselves, and then paying those doctors and nurses a fraction.”
This mercenary brain drain left everyday Cubans to fend for themselves, a grim fact unlikely to inspire a sequel Michael Moore’s propaganda documentary praising Havana health care, which left Fidel and fellow dictator Hugo Chavez to suffer torturous deaths.
This same corruption of reality sees communist dictators rebranded as “presidents,” until they show their true colors, and then — bam! — they’re “authoritarians.” In any case, the idea that communism is an ideology fresh off the assembly line would shock Lenin, Stalin, the Castros, Hussein, Bashir Assad, Pol Pot, and all the others who’ve proclaimed socialist paradises over the past 100 years, only to see each one end in mass graves, hunger, and repression.
Just last year, Michael Bloomberg absurdly claimed on Firing Line, “Xi Jinping is not a dictator.” When incredulous host Margaret Hoover offered him a mulligan, Bloomberg doubled down. “No, he has a constituency to answer to.” Yeah. The problem is, he answers them with bullets in the back of the head.
Communist Party USA presidential candidate Gus Hall, who disgraced CIA Director John Brennan supported, gushed over the “miracle” of Kim Il-Sung. “The world should see what North Korea has done,” he said, and recommended, ”If you want to take a nice vacation, take it in North Korea.” We can forgive a young people like Otto Warmbier for buying that summer in Pyongyang would be a lark, but there’s no excuse for adults to continue drinking the Kool-Aid — a euphemism for mass suicide brought to us by the infamous socialist messiah, Jim Jones.
“If only the right people were in charge,” is another flavor of this poisoned Perrier. They herald Abraham Lincoln for having read Marx’s “Das Capital,” as if Honest Abe was murdered for advocating the proletariat, and not for saying things like, “No man is good enough to govern another man without that other man’s consent,” which runs entirely counter to communism.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results,” is a quote wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein, but one that endures because it’s so manifestly true. So is Margaret Thatcher’s, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” which would be happening faster than it already is in the socialist states of Europe if the good ol’ capitalist USA didn’t foot the bill for their defense and spend so much of our disposable income on overrated French wine.
Lenin said, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” and so we are as we bankroll regimes like China’s.
Clear-eyed about the evil of communism, Ronald Reagan proclaimed that “freedom and democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history.” But he couldn’t have imagined that there would be so many trash pickers determined to slap a fresh paint on Yugos and insist that with the right driver, they’d blow the doors off Thomas Magnum’s Ferrari.
Cuban cries for freedom should be a reminder to follow Winston Churchill’s urging and “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle” whenever it rears its ugly head. Yes, Virginia, communism has been tried, tried, and tried again; it has failed every single time.
And that’s not a new car smell coming from Das Capital; it’s the stench of rotting flesh.
Viva Cuba Libre.
• Dean Karayanis is a producer for the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton show, former Rush Limbaugh staffer, and host of History Author Show on iHeartRadio.
