Commemorating the good old days?

I'm glad Dave Price put up a post to commemorate the defeat of Communism, and I'm glad Glenn Reynolds remembered it too

Matt Welch asks an excellent question: The defeat of communism 20 years ago was the most liberating moment in history. So why don't we talk about it more? And here's an excerpt from his analysis:

Twenty years later, the anniversary of that historic border crossing was noted in exactly four American newspapers, according to the Nexis database, and all four mentions were in reprints of a single syndicated column. August anniversaries receiving more media play in the U.S. included the 400th anniversary of Galileo building his telescope, the 150th anniversary of the first oil well, and the 25th anniversary of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. A Google News search of "anniversary" and "freedom" on August 23, 2009, turned up scores of Woodstock references before the first mention of Hungary.

Get used to it, if you haven't already. November 1989 was the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history, yet two decades later the country that led the Cold War coalition against communism seems less interested than ever in commemorating, let alone processing the lessons from, the collapse of its longtime foe. At a time that fairly cries out for historical perspective about the follies of central planning, Americans are ignoring the fundamental conflict of the postwar world, and instead leapfrogging back to what Steve Forbes describes in this issue as the "Jurassic Park statism" of the 1930s (see " 'The Last Gasp of the Dinosaurs,' " page 42). There have been more Hollywood hagiographies of the revolutionary communist Che Guevara in the last five years than there have been studio pictures in the last two decades about the revolutionary anti-communists who dramatically toppled totalitarians from Tallin to Prague (see Tim Cavanaugh's "Hollywood Comrades," page 62). And what little general-nonfiction interest there is in the superpower struggle, as Michael C. Moynihan details on page 48 ("The Cold War Never Ended"), remains stuck in the same Reagan vs. Gorby frame that made the 1980s so intellectually shallow the first time around.

Disgusting as it is to contemplate, I think there are many people who still yearn for the good old days.

Not of the fall, but of Communism.

One of the last titans of Communism is Fidel Castro, who did not fall, even though his regime had largely been underwritten and financed by the Soviet Union. Castro found himself in trouble after the Soviet collapse, and in the 1990s he did what he had always done when he needed moral support.

He came to the United States. Here is the murderous tyrant himself, speaking to a fawning leftist audience in New York, in 1995:

Yeah, I know it's boring to watch -- to the point of utter, tear-your-hair-out tediousness. That's what they want to do to their enemies -- bore them to death in the hope that they'll go away and let them win. The name of the game is attrition by tedium.

And I don't like to subject the readers of this blog to such a video unnecessarily, but there's one particular detail in it that I think is worth remembering.

Take a good, close look at the guy standing on the stage behind Castro and to the left. [If you must skip through the speech, you can see him clearly at 3:59 and later.] It's Charles Rangel, the corrupt, ACORN-swilling, tax-exempt, scandal-ridden Congressman for life.

Does anyone think it's a coincidence that he'd be so unabashedly pro-Castro?

Anyway, there he is, kissing Fidel's ass and helping him out, right at the peak of that tough "special period" after the fall of Communism, and I thought it was worth sharing on the anniversary of Communism's fall.

Communism fell, if not completely. Castro is still there, and so is Rangel.

Some things never change.

posted by Eric on 10.13.09 at 09:34 PM





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Comments

Amusingly, even Cuba is moving towards capitalism during this recesssion... unlike us.

http://minx.cc/?post=293624

Dave Price   ·  October 14, 2009 01:17 PM

Beautiful post. Thanks.

SteveBrooklineMA   ·  October 15, 2009 08:50 AM

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