Spitting on Freedom
While viewing other blogs yesterday, I came across a discussion of Che Guevara. What I found particularly interesting was one of the commenters, a young man, who insisted on defending Che Guevara, alleging that he is no worse than our leaders. He repeated the familiar litany of “crimes” attributed to President Bush by the Left, while doing his best to paper over the murders and other atrocities committed by the Communist strongman.
Normally I would have thrown my hands up in exasperation over this raw example of moral equivalence, such unabashed whitewashing of totalitarianism. But I realized that the young man’s remarks are the logical result of the self-hatred that permeates our popular culture.
His declaration is a manifestation of the same naive sentimentality that drove Jane Fonda on her pilgrimages to Hanoi. We now have multiple generations in the West that have never endured real hardship, and that have no experience with real oppression. Unprecedented levels of freedom have enabled their minds to wander hither and yon, unanchored in history or global political reality. They are thus easy prey for the Orwellian fantasy-world that is propagated by the Left, in which heroes are the people who “stand up” to America. The more these “heroes” abuse and kill, the more their halo shines.
In a similar vein, the New York Times publicizes national defense secrets while it accuses the Administration of muzzling free speech. This blatantly contradictory delusion is the product of a fantasy world that could develop only under cozy conditions of freedom and prosperity.
The receptivity of young people in particular to these messages is possible because they have never tasted arbitrary state behavior. Anyone who has seen it or been close to it knows the difference, and would never succumb to the propaganda.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the noted Somali critic of Islam (now living in the US), has seen more than her share of real persecution. She expressed it eloquently in an interview with Canadian journalist Avi Lewis. After Lewis mocked her for singing the praises of America, she said:
I lived in countries that had no democracy…I don’t find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, so you can spit on freedom, because you don’t know what it is not to have freedom.
Watch the interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali here (courtesy of LGF).
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August 12th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
I found the interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali very informative and inspirational. Thanks for making your readers aware of it.
August 12th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
My pleasure. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is very smart and very courageous. We could use a few more like her.
August 13th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Liberal moonbattery is the price America pays for its success. This ideology could not exist if people didn’t take it for granted that their soft, safe, comfortable lives are protected against a system that is impregnable. When 9/11 proved them wrong, they reacted by blocking it out or turning it into fiction with absurd conspiracy theories. At this point it would take a nuclear strike to get through to them — assuming anything could.
August 13th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
“protected against” is supposed to be “protected by” in the comment above.
August 19th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Another Ayaan quote: “It is easy to hate George Bush, because you know that he won’t come after you and cut your head off.” Another down-to-earth commentary on what decades of prosperity and forgetting God have done to the West- especially, it seems, America.
Che Guevara has always been an icon of superficial, narcissistic rebels in the West; after all, he has a cool Spanish name (which supposedly means “non-white”), wears a cool beret over cool long hair, sports a cool goatee, and despises America (well, he DID, anyway)in the cool Leftist fashion. This is all one needs to be lionized in Western Leftist circles.
“In the old days men became Communists because they were oppressed and hungry; nowadays, in the East they do so because they are ambitious, want to get ahead, and realize that the membership of the Party is essential to achieving that aim. But in the West there are thousands of young fools- there is no other word- who are attracted to Communism for none of the above reasons. They are attracted to Communism because of some romantic notion- visions of Europe as it was in the days of Dickens, which they want to put right with that heady faith that comes from the other side of the Iron Curtain. But men haven’t starved in Europe these 30 years, and if there is injustice, one cannot even begin to compare it with the monstrous injustice which reigns east of the Elbe.”
“The Frolik Defection” by defector from Czech Intelligence Josef Frolik, 1974
Don’t know if that quote is precise, as it comes from memory, but it’s close enough. Tools like Avi Lewis, Harry Reid et al have no idea of the high contempt in which they are held by our enemies. Lenin didn’t refer to them as “useful idiots” out of any respect- like Van remarked, will it ever dawn on them??
August 20th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Thank you, Toa, for that eloquent statement.
August 20th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
My pleasure, friend…just discovered this site; it’s now on “Favorites” along with Moonbattery, Townhall and all the rest.
August 21st, 2007 at 7:02 am
Here’s a great Che quote for next time you face one of his supporters: “The Revolution will do for Blacks exactly what Blacks have done for the Revolution — by which I mean NOTHING!”
So much for the great “anti-racist egalitarian.”
August 23rd, 2007 at 6:02 pm
The human world has become a kind of insane sporting event, at which people threaten one another and carry on in an insane manner, something like the gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome. It is madness. And TV largely creates that madness/insanity and plays to it.
The human world of nowtime is a lunatic asylum, a soap opera of strutting pyschotics. That soap opera actually controls the destiny and experience of the total world of human beings, and that world psychosis is, in its root disposition, totally indifferent to human life, and to the world altogeter. And is indeed rapidly reducung everything to rubble.
“reality” TV and fox “news” rules OK!
September 30th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Ayann Hirsi Ali is smart, courageous and beautiful.