At Heritage c/o Instapundit:
The Christian Science Monitor reports today that “liberals from around the world” are flocking to Caracas “to experience Hugo Chavez’s experiment in socialism.” Liberals here in the United States worried about the carbon credits they’d have to purchase to offset a flight to Venezuela might consider visiting Massachusetts instead.
Heh indeed.
The news isn’t all light humor though. According to the author, Congressman James McGovern (D., Mass.) has been “working with an American go-between, who has been offering the [FARC] rebels help in undermining Colombia’s elected and popular government.”
I guess at least one contemporary Democrat feels he shares a common cause with Marxist “rebels”? How telling.
Update 3/26: More at Gateway Pundit
(hat tip: Ann Althouse, c/o Instapundit)
Thomas Sowell at RealClearPolitics::
Barack Obama’s own account of his life shows that he consciously sought out people on the far left fringe. In college, “I chose my friends carefully,” he said in his first book, “Dreams From My Father.”
These friends included “Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets” — in Obama’s own words — as well as the “more politically active black students.” He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator.
Obama didn’t just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college — members of the left, anti-American counter-culture.
Read the rest — it’s a short piece, and well worth it.
Update:
Christopher Hitchens offers some incisive comments on the topic at Slate:
It’s been more than a month since I began warning Sen. Barack Obama that he would become answerable for his revolting choice of a family priest. But never mind that; the astonishing thing is that it’s at least 11 months since he himself has known precisely the same thing. “If Barack gets past the primary,” said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the New York Times in April of last year, “he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen.” Pause just for a moment, if only to admire the sheer calculating self-confidence of this. Sen. Obama has long known perfectly well, in other words, that he’d one day have to put some daylight between himself and a bigmouth Farrakhan fan. But he felt he needed his South Side Chicago “base” in the meantime. So he coldly decided to double-cross that bridge when he came to it. And now we are all supposed to marvel at the silky success of the maneuver.
You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily.
and later:
Look at the accepted choice of words for the ravings of Jeremiah Wright: controversial, incendiary, inflammatory. These are adjectives that might have been — and were — applied to many eloquent speakers of the early civil rights movement. … But is it “inflammatory” to say that AIDS and drugs are wrecking the black community because the white power structure wishes it? No. Nor is it “controversial.” It is wicked and stupid and false to say such a thing. And it not unimportantly negates everything that Obama says he stands for by way of advocating dignity and responsibility over the sick cults of paranoia and victimhood.
Hitchens does make a number of excellent points. As with Sowell’s article, I suggest reading the whole piece.
At Little Green Footballs, c/o Instapundit:
Barack Obama won’t wear an American flag on his lapel, but on the wall of his Houston campaign office: a Cuban flag with a picture of Communist mass murderer Che Guevara.
(Follow the link for pictures and video.)
Yow. Sure seems like the Obama campaign staff ought make an effort to keep that kind of stuff away from the cameras…
Candidates on the contemporary American left don’t run for office in this country as outright “socialists”, knowing full well that the moniker would render them unelectable in the United States, but incidents like this one (which may say more about certain of Obama’s supporters than Obama himself) do seem to shed light on the shared ideological affinities…
From Yahoo’s syndicated news headlines earlier today: Cameron Diaz apologizes for Maoist bag (photos here):
Cameron Diaz apologized Sunday for carrying a bag with a political slogan that evoked painful memories in Peru.
The voice of Princess Fiona in the animated “Shrek” films visited the Incan city of Machu Picchu in Peru’s Andes on Friday carrying an olive green bag emblazoned with a red star and the words “Serve the People” printed in Chinese, perhaps Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong’s most famous political slogan.
The bags are marketed as fashion accessories in some world capitals, but in Peru the slogan evokes memories of the Maoist Shining Path insurgency that fought the government in the 1980s and early 1990s in a bloody conflict that left nearly 70,000 people dead.
“I sincerely apologize to anyone I may have inadvertently offended. The bag was a purchase I made as a tourist in China and I did not realize the potentially hurtful nature of the slogan printed on it,” Diaz said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press.
It strikes me as a very sad state of affairs that there is seemingly so little awareness of collectivism’s grim and humbling legacy in the West, to the extent that such accoutrements can be considered hip fashion accessories. (I don’t know what things are like in the rest of the country, but such articles are easily found in San Francisco’s trendiest boutique stores.) No one with a shred of decency would think of heading out the door with a swastika and Nazi party slogan emblazoned on their handbag. Why the difference in sentiment, given especially that the likes of Mao and Stalin made Hitler look like a rank amateur when it came to killing?
Seems like it’s none too soon that we’re finally going to have a memorial in the U.S. to raise awareness of the far too many who perished under totalitarian collectivist regimes over the course of the 20th century (and in some tragically forgotten parts of the world, such as North Korea and ZImbabwe, continue to do so today).
In Salt Lake City where I’m visiting for the weekend, drinking is something of a more rebellious activity than elsewhere, due to the more restrictive state and local liquor laws. To have a drink in a bar, for example, one must pay dues and become a “member”, or else come as the guest of a paid-up member — a regulation whose practical utility in curbing irresponsible drinking I must admit I’m skeptical of.
The amusing upside of this is that it lends the bars that do operate here that certain special “je ne sais quoi” that goes with all things forbidden. And if you’re decorating a den of quasi-forbidden libations in this town, what more perfect icon of fashionable rebelliousness to grace its walls than the omnipresent Che? Such is the fare at the “defiantly hip” Red Door downtown, where I ducked in for a couple of drinks with friends tonight. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought I was back home in left-wing San Francisco.
It continues to bewilder me how people manage to associate this fellow with rebelliousness. Is there any more certain road to capricious, illiberal totalitarian rule than that which Guevarra and his ideological comrades represent?
“Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué”
Indeed.
One more news item before I launch into my series:
Courtesy of Instapundit: Czech Republic President Václav Klaus delivered a remarkable address at a meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in Reykjavik last week. As a U.S. citizen of partly Czech ancestry who holds liberty dear, I can’t help but feel a special affinity for the spirit of his stirring words.
Beginning with an exploration of the appeal that socialist thinking holds for intellectuals, and tracing his theme through to the development of socialism’s contemporary derivative ideologies in Western Europe, Klaus ends up painting a clearer picture of the broad differences in thinking between Western European nations and their post-communist Eastern brethren than I think I have yet seen expressed.
There’s an audio (.mp3) recording in the “Attachments” section following the Brussels Journal article, and a full transcript of Klaus’ speech (which he abbreviated significantly in some places as he went). This is, without a doubt, one of those “read the whole thing” gems — so much so that choosing a brief passage to quote is difficult.
Fifteen years after the collapse of communism I am afraid, more than at the beginning of its softer (or weaker) version, of social-democratism, which has become — under different names, e.g. the welfare state or the soziale Marktwirtschaft — the dominant model of the economic and social system of current Western civilization. It is based on big and patronizing government, on extensive regulating of human behavior, and on large-scale income redistribution.
…
Illiberal ideas are becoming to be formulated, spread and preached under the name of ideologies or “isms”, which have — at least formally and nominally — nothing in common with the old-styled, explicit socialism. These ideas are, however, in many respects similar to it. There is always a limiting (or constraining) of human freedom, there is always ambitious social engineering, there is always an immodest “enforcement of a good” by those who are anointed on others against their will, there is always the crowding out of standard democratic methods by alternative political procedures, and there is always the feeling of superiority of intellectuals and of their ambitions.
I have in mind environmentalism (with its Earth First, not Freedom First principle), radical humanrightism (based — as de Jasay precisely argues — on not distinguishing rights and rightism), ideology of “civic society” (or communitarism), which is nothing less than one version of post-Marxist collectivism which wants privileges for organized groups, and in consequence, a refeudalization of society. I also have in mind multiculturalism, feminism, apolitical technocratism (based on the resentment against politics and politicians), internationalism (and especially its European variant called Europeanism) and a rapidly growing phenomenon I call NGOism.
All of them represent substitute ideologies for socialism. All of them give intellectuals new possibilities, new space for their activities, new niches in the market of ideas.
(Klaus’ inclusion of “feminism” in this last passage is a bit surprising to me. — Is the dominant form of feminism in Europe an illiberal one?)
Interestingly, Virginia Postrel asserts that Klaus has finally come around to seeing it her way, years after repudiating her assertion that socialism in its traditional form is no longer cause for significant concern.
