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There was a time when, if you said that liberals suffer from Communism envy, they would deny it. Is that still true? Perhaps not, as to the Squad, two members of which were among a delegation that made a more or less secret trip to Cuba:
A delegation of the U.S. Congressional Progressive Caucus traveled to Cuba last week in a trip that has not previously been disclosed by the legislators nor reported in Cuban state media.
The group of about a dozen people was led by Democratic U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal of the state of Washington and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. It included a congressional staffer from the office of California Rep. Barbara Lee’s office, sources with knowledge of the trip told the Miami Herald.
Jayapal and Omar, members of the informal left-wing group of lawmakers known as “the squad,” did not reply to emails and messages seeking comment. Lee’s office also did not reply to a request for comment.
After the Herald published this story, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, comprising more than 100 lawmakers and chaired by Jayapal, confirmed the trip.
Odd. No press releases, no Cuban state media trumpeting the support it is getting from American liberals. So what was up with the visit?
“Representatives Jayapal and Omar traveled to Cuba last week, where they met with people from across Cuban civil society and government officials to discuss human rights and the U.S.-Cuba bilateral relationship,” said a Caucus spokesperson.
Oh. Okay. But the Squad is not in favor of human rights, so it would be interesting to know what the discussion was about:
Jayapal and Omar have been vocal critics of the U.S. embargo against Cuba and have supported bills to normalize relations with the island’s communist government. They were among the 40 Democrats who voted against a symbolic resolution supporting peaceful demonstrators who protested against the Cuban government in July 2021 and “calling for the immediate release of arbitrarily detained Cuban citizens.”
Well, they don’t want arbitrarily detained American citizens released either, so I guess that is consistent. All in all, the story is a valuable reminder that, while the rest of the world has given up on Communism, it still has a certain cachet with American liberals.
Josef Stalin died on this day in 1953. In his sleep; so, like Lenin, Mao and Castro, and unlike Hitler, Mussolini and Ceausescu, he never paid a price for his crimes. The Victims of Communism remember:
Stalin died on this day in 1953.
He left behind a legacy of terror, famine, and mass murder.
Remember the victims. pic.twitter.com/HUBBYUZMwh
— Victims of Communism (@VoCommunism) March 5, 2024
Stalin ranks second only to Mao among history’s worst mass murderers. Those who knew him best understood how evil he was: his wife committed suicide and his daughter defected to America. Stalin’s malignant legacy lives on, as Russia has never fully emerged from his dark shadow. It is unfortunate that he wasn’t strung up like Mussolini or shot like Ceausescu. At this point, all we can do is revile him.
As John noted recently, members of “The Squad” recently snuck off to Cuba, a one-party Communist dictatorship and massive violator of human rights. The woke Democrats seem unaware of films and books that document the repressions of the Stalinist regime. Consider, for example, Improper Conduct, by Cuban cinematographer Nestor Almendros, who in 1979 won an Oscar for Days of Heaven.
Improper Conduct shows how Fidel Castro tossed homosexuals into forced labor camps, which were rather inclusive. As New York Times film critic Vincent Canby noted, “Playwrights, doctors, poets and painters as well as more ordinary folk such as tour guides and hairdressers, spent time in one or more of the country’s forced-labor camps.” Consider also 8-A, a documentary by Cuban exile Orlando Jimenez Leal.
When Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa returned from Africa, Castro spotted a potential rival and staged a show trial for Ochoa and fellow officers. 8-A showcases the actual trial, in which Castro appears, and adds a dramatization of the executions.
In Heroes are Grazing In My Garden, Cuban poet Heberto Padilla exposes the repression of writers and intellectuals, along with the general privations of the people. For example, diabetics sell samples of their urine, so others can get extra rations of milk and meat. In Against All Hope, Armando Valladares documents Castro’s torture of political prisoners. Consider also Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims, which recalls glowing accounts of the Cuban regime by foreigners.
“Fidel sits on the side of a tank rumbling into Havana on New Year’s day,” wrote New Left icon Abbie Hoffman (Steal this Book). “He laughs joyously and pinches a few rumps… Fidel lets the gun drop to the ground, slaps his thigh and stands erect. He is like a mighty penis coming to life, and when he is tall and straight, the crowd immediately is transformed.”
For novelist Norman Mailer, Castro was “the first and greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second World War.” For Angela Davis, Communist Party USA candidate for vice-president in 1980 and 1984, “Fidel was their leader, but most of all he was also their brother in the largest sense of the word.” In reality, the white Stalinist plunged the nation into sub-Haiti levels of poverty, and thousands fled on anything that would float.
As Saul Bellow explained, a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. The Squad is either ignorant of the record or, like Angela Davis, fully approves of the Cuba’s Stalinist regime. As Cubans might note, in 2021, Squad members Pramila Jayapal and Ilhan Omar were among 40 Democrats who voted against a resolution supporting peaceful demonstrators protesting against the Cuban government.
Via InstaPundit, I learn that Karl Marx died on this day in 1883. I concur with Glenn Reynolds’ suggestion that March 14 should therefore be a holiday:
Marx performed the difficult feat of being wrong about everything. Most people are right about some things and wrong about others; the law of averages sets in. But if you are an ideologue, like Marx, and if your ideology is stupid, you can be wrong across the board. Marx’s historical analyses were either recycled conventional wisdom or wildly off the mark. He knew nothing about economics, which is why his labor theory of value–the lynchpin of his entire philosophy–is absurd. (Even Marx recognized that; he never finished the key section of Capital, leaving that inglorious task to Engels.) And he pontificated endlessly about workers and the means of production, without even once, as far as is known, setting foot in a factory.
Marx survives in historical memory for two reasons. First, hardly anyone has actually read Capital or his lesser works. Even a person of moderate intelligence could hardly do so without recognizing their foolishness. Second, Marx’s philosophy has served as a pretext for sadists to seize control of governments around the globe. Which is exactly what Marx intended.
Marx was a bad man, equally so in his private and public lives. He should be remembered only as an exemplar of how much damage a single-minded and hate-filled man can do.
The figurehead "president" of the communist state of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, participated in a "virtual reality" Gaza experience this week presented by the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese outlet al-Mayadeen in Havana.
The post Puppet President Declares Every Cuban ‘a Child of Palestine’ After Watching Hamas Propaganda on VR Headset appeared first on Breitbart.
A country’s slide into socialism/communism begins with socialist policies. And every one of these has been proposed in the United States: like an exorbitant minimum wage which is exorbitant and not tied to performance or return on labor, a universal basic income, charging for electricity usage based on income rather than quantity of electricity used, issuing carbon usage credits, allowing the state, not the consumer, to decide how much is enough, imposing a billionaire tax, taxing wealth transfers and inheritance to prevent parents from helping their children, and taxing unrealized capital gains to discourage saving and investing.
Beyond the purely economic, policies that mandate demographic quotas for promotions, hiring, firing, or school acceptance are examples of social engineering that removes the “profit motive,” the reward for hard work, disincentivizing hard work, and resulting in the promotion of those who cannot meet the quality standards.
Washington State has proposed eliminating the bar exam in order to increase diversity among lawyers. Oregon high school students will no longer need to be able to read, write, or do math in order to graduate, for the same reason.
United Airlines announced that it would prioritize diversity in its selection of trainee pilots. And in order to ensure that the younger generation understands only the state agenda, homeschooling will be banned.
Socialism/Communism has never worked, but somehow, people keep voting for it and believing that this time will be different. The truth is that it has caused tens of millions to starve to death while robbing hundreds of millions of their innovation, creativity, and motivation.
The entire society, working different jobs from research scientist to ticket puncher, for an equal number of turnip coupons, is so unnatural that it can only exist in a totalitarian system where people have no choice.
No capitalist nation ever forced people to earn a profit, but communist countries had to use their secret police and state surveillance to force people not to.
No one was ever shot trying to break into East Germany or swimming to Cuba.
Socialism cannot bring prosperity because it destroys the market functions of private property and eliminates the incentives for more productive people to work harder or more inventive people to innovate. Socialists are always worried about wealth inequality, and their solution always involves taking money from the harder-working, more efficient people and giving it to the less productive.
Socialists believe that if they were to forcibly redistribute the wealth, everyone would be better off. The first problem with this logic is that the people who have wealth now would be worse off if someone stole it.
The United States has the highest GDP per capita in the entire American continent, from Canada to Argentina, including the Caribbean. The US average income is about $76,000 per year.
In Haiti, it is $1,748. If the socialists had their way and redistributed the wealth evenly across the roughly 1 billion people in the Americas, the average would be $35,000 per year. So, US citizens would be giving up more than half their income but would still be working the same jobs, for the same number of hours.
If you received the same wage, no matter what, you would stop doing overtime, stop coming up with new ideas, and pretty much stop working at all. In the Soviet Union, there was a joke: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
Almost every communist country began by abolishing money and nationalizing production of everything, including food. Within a very short time, these countries faced famines.
With no profit incentive, there was no motivation for farmers to grow food. Additionally, with no money prices, there was no rational way to calculate the cost of planting versus the money earned from selling the produce or to calculate how many resources should be allocated to producing food versus producing some other product.
Nearly six million people in the USSR starved to death in the Soviet Famine (1931-1934). Roughly half of these were Ukrainians, living in the “breadbasket of Europe.”
During the Khmer Rouge period (1975-1979) in Cambodia, between one half and a third of the population died of starvation and overwork, although nearly 100% of the population was sent out to the fields to farm. Venezuelans are facing hunger, while Cubans are facing shortages of everything.
The winner of the socialist starvation death toll competition is Mao Zedong, whose Great Famine (1958-1962) killed 30 million Chinese.
India was resource-rich and had the largest workforce, but socialist policies led to India becoming synonymous with extreme poverty. The USSR was the most resource-rich country on the planet and had one of the largest workforces, but had an economy about 5% the size of the U.S. China similarly had a huge workforce, and it was not until 2007 that the average Chinese citizen was earning more than the average American was earning in the year 1900.
Vietnam also experienced a mini-famine caused by communism, but they quickly realized that by privatizing farming, they were able to increase rice production.
It was privatization that also ended the Chinese famine, and Deng Xiaoping allowing private sector entrepreneurs to earn profits that lifted 800 million Chinese out of poverty.
No former communist country has ever reverted to communism. And China and Vietnam, the world’s largest remaining communist countries, dramatically increased the welfare of their people by allowing market economics, profit, and private ownership.
But both China and Vietnam remain dramatically poorer than the US because of their refusal to completely let go of communism/socialism.
Given all the evidence against it, how can American socialists believe that this time will be different?
The post Socialist Policies: Steps Toward a System That Has Always Failed appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Red_Guards_Austin
Red Guards Cell, Austin, Texas. By Reddebrek, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104103414
The new Netflix sci-fi series "3 Body Problem" is provoking intense online debate over its opening sequence depicting a struggle session during China's Cultural Revolution in which a physics professor is violently beaten by Mao's Red Guard.
The post Netflix’s ‘3 Body Problem’ Showrunner: China’s Cultural Revolution’s Similarities to Cancel Culture Are ‘Hard to Ignore’ appeared first on Breitbart.
The Chinese state propaganda newspaper Global Times quoted film critics complaining that the Netflix adaptation of the Chinese science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem used "people of different skin colors."
The post ‘Political Correctness’: Chinese Media Complain Netflix Cast Non-Chinese Actors in ‘3 Body Problem’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Nicaragua authorized the establishment of a Russian-built and operated "Instruction Center" for the "reengineering" of the Nicaraguan police.
The post Nicaragua Agrees to Host Russian ‘Police Academy,’ Fueling Espionage Fears appeared first on Breitbart.
Chinese author Liu Cixin’s monumental science fiction book The Three Body Problem, which has now been adapted into a Netflix series under the punchier title "3 Body Problem," has a little something to annoy just about everyone - from climate change activists to skeptics, Chinese Communists to anti-communists, nationalists to open-borders fanatics. It is a big story with big ideas, and like most great works of fiction, not even the author can fully control how its events are interpreted.
The post Hayward: ‘Three Body Problem’ Has Something to Annoy Everyone, From Communists to Climate Cultists appeared first on Breitbart.
The communist regime in Nicaragua announced the conviction of 11 pastors associated with the Evangelical Mountain Gateway ministry and humanitarian organization, this week on dubious and unspecified charges of "money laundering," sentencing the accused to between 12 and 15 years in prison.
The post Communist Nicaragua Sentences Christian Pastors to 12-15 Years in Prison on Holy Week appeared first on Breitbart.
The Argentine Navy intercepted and boarded an illegal Chinese fishing vessel caught 12 miles inside the nation's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), local media reported Wednesday.
The post Argentina Intercepts Invading Illegal Chinese Fishing Vessel appeared first on Breitbart.
Cuba reportedly banned Christians from celebrating traditional Catholic Holy Week processions across several regions of the country.
The post Cuba Bans Holy Week Processions, Fearing More Anti-Communist Protests appeared first on Breitbart.
A group of political leaders led by the "moderate" Palestinian party Fatah and representing a variety of Arab nations visited occupied East Turkistan, the Chinese state propaganda outlet Global Times revealed on Thursday, applauding China's "creative governance measures" in the region.
The post Arab Parties Led by Palestinian Fatah Back China’s ‘Creative’ Governing in Uyghur Genocide Region appeared first on Breitbart.
The governments of South Korea and Japan confirmed on Tuesday that communist North Korea fired a projectile believed to be carrying a "hypersonic warhead" and potentially capable of striking the American island of Guam.
The post North Korea Tests Missile Believed Capable of Hitting Japan, Guam appeared first on Breitbart.
The Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) terrorist organization announced this weekend the creation of a unit within the group to carry out criminal activities across four Colombian regions.
The post Colombia’s FARC Terrorists Boast of Youth Recruitment Boom — 8 Years After ‘Peace Deal’ appeared first on Breitbart.
President Joe Biden held a phone call on Tuesday with China's genocidal dictator Xi Jinping in which the American leftist leader reportedly emphasized his distaste for a "new Cold War" or "conflict" with the Chinese Communist Party and assured Xi he would not pursue economic "decoupling."
The post Biden Assures Xi Jinping He Opposes ‘Decoupling,’ Wants ‘China to Succeed’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping on Tuesday, paving the way for a meeting between the top Communist Party leader and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and arriving in between expected visits from American officials Janet Yellen and Antony Blinken.
The post Russia Sends Top Diplomat to China Between Yellen, Blinken Visits appeared first on Breitbart.
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping hosted former President of Taiwan Ma Ying-jeou, declaring that Taiwan is not a separate entity from China.
The post ‘No Force Can Separate Us’: Xi Jinping Lays Claim to Taiwan in Meeting with Ex-President appeared first on Breitbart.
A court in Ho Chi Minh City rushed on Thursday to sentence real estate tycoon Truong My Lan, one of the richest women in the world, to death for her part in a $12.5 billion fraud case.
The post Female Vietnamese Real Estate Tycoon Sentenced to Death in $12 Billion Fraud Case appeared first on Breitbart.
Experts, including two former diplomats representing America at the United Nations, warned Congress in a hearing on Wednesday that China is amassing power within the U.N. structure to "blunt criticism, shut out and stigmatize Taiwan, plug its Belt and Road Initiative, and dilute norms that might be used to hold it accountable."
The post Experts to Congress: China Is Hijacking Key U.N. Agencies to Advance Communist Agenda appeared first on Breitbart.
The bloodiest man in the history of "the most deadly idea ever conceived in the history of the world," communist mass murderer Mao Zedong, "embraced evil in all respects" – and successor Xi Jinping is faithfully following in his footsteps, acclaimed scholar Steven W. Mosher affirms in his new book, The Devil and Communist China: From Mao Down to Xi.
The post Exclusive – China Expert Steven Mosher: Xi Jinping a ‘Son of Mao’s Spirit’ Leading a War Against the Free World that China Is Winning appeared first on Breitbart.
Chinese cheap goods e-marketplace Temu "encouraged" suppliers to use Chinese cotton in their products despite the vast majority of that cotton being produced in occupied East Turkistan, the technology news site The Information alleged in a report published on Thursday, apparently disregarding the risk of using materials tainted by slave labor.
The post Report: Temu Encouraged Suppliers to Use Chinese Cotton, Ignoring Slavery Risk appeared first on Breitbart.
President Joe Biden held a summit with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio.
The post Japan, Philippines Push Biden to Challenge Chinese Colonialism in South China Sea appeared first on Breitbart.
The communist government of China demanded Israel "exercise calm and restraint" on Sunday following an unprecedented attack featuring over 300 drones and missiles on the Israeli homeland on Iran.
The post China: Iran’s 300 Missile and Drone Barrage on Israel ‘Restrained,’ Israel Should Not Respond appeared first on Breitbart.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held calls with the top diplomats of Iran and Saudi Arabia on Tuesday in which he expressed support for Iran's unprecedented bombing on Israel on Saturday and the Muslim world's opposition to Israel generally.
The post Chinese Foreign Minister Calls Iran ‘Good-Neighborly and Friendly’ After Israel Barrage appeared first on Breitbart.
Vaunce News 