Leftist Dupes: From the Communist Brotherhood to the Muslim Brotherhood
Of course, it wasn’t merely old men in the Kremlin that impressed the American Left. Our intellectuals, from writers to hippies, were ga-ga like giddy schoolgirls over certain Latin American communists.
For some of these men, the attraction to these caudillos seemed to border on the sexual. After meeting Che Guevara, I. F. Stone, who founded the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee with Corliss Lamont, recorded: “He was the first man I had ever met whom I thought not just handsome but beautiful. With his curly, reddish beard, he looked like a cross between a faun and a Sunday school print of Jesus.” Stone carried on, speaking of Che as “like some early saint, taking refuge in the desert.”
Similar urges were expressed of Che’s partner in crime, Fidel Castro, whose presence transformed ‘60s “yippie” Abbie Hoffman. “Fidel lets the gun drop to the ground, slaps his thigh and stands erect,” marveled Hoffman at the sight of Castro. “He is like a mighty penis coming to life, and when he is tall and straight, the crowd immediately is transformed.”
When the image of a giant penis was not satisfying enough to the Left’s exalted imagery of Fidel, the likes of Norman Mailer invoked the specter of “the ghost of Cortez … riding Zapata’s white horse.”
As usual, outdoing all others in its undo praise of Castro was the Bible of the American Left: the New York Times. Most egregious was a remarkably influential page-one article in the Sunday, February 24, 1957 issue, where reporter Herb Matthews assured Americans that Castro’s “program” “amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic and therefore anti-communist.” Matthews was confident that Castro would bring “social justice” to Cuba. Granted an exclusive interview with a Castro hiding in the Sierra Maestra mountains, Matthews excitedly reported that Castro spoke with “extraordinary eloquence.” “His is a political mind rather than a military one,” reported the Times’ journalist. “He has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution, to hold elections. He has strong ideas on economy, too.”
What unbiased source did Matthews cite for these remarkable claims? Fidel Castro, of course. “Above all,” Castro promised the New York Times, “we are fighting for a democratic Cuba and an end to dictatorship.” Castro assured that he desired a “free, democratic Cuba.”
Yes, yes, but that’s old Cold War stuff—or mostly, at least. These guys are all long gone now, Mailer, Hoffman, Matthews.
Well, how about this post-Cold War assessment of the last remaining true bastion of Stalinism; that is, North Korea and its dictator, Kim Il-Sung, offered by an elected American president, Jimmy Carter?
Carter made a June 1994 trip to this prison state. Carter was totally hoodwinked, filing this incredible account of life in North Korea:
People are busy. They work 48 hours a week…. We found Pyongyang to be a bustling city. The only difference is that during working hours there are very few people on the street. They all have jobs or go to school. And after working hours, they pack the department stores, which Rosalynn visited. I went in one of them. It’s like Wal-Mart in American stores on a Saturday afternoon. They all walk around in there, and they seem in fairly good spirits. Pyongyang at night looks like Times Square. They are really heavily into bright neon lights and pictures and things like that.
In truth, North Korea is a sea of darkness. As a well-known satellite photo attests (click here), the country at night is draped in black, in empty contrast to South Korea. Within one year of Carter’s gushing appraisal, two to three million North Koreans (out of a population of 20 million) starved to death. They weren’t packing Wal-Mart; they were eating grass, bark from trees, and, in some cases, human corpses.
Should I go on? The tragedy of the Left is its consistent gullibility as it moves from one international totalitarian threat to another, from the Cold to the War on Terror—as has been ably demonstrated in these pages by the likes of Jamie Glazov, David Horowitz, and others, whether documenting Jimmy Carter’s statements about Hamas or various other liberals’ encomiums about Middle East Islamists.
And when they’re not praising our enemies, liberals are blasting American leaders who try to confront those enemies.
Who could forget when, on May 10, 2004, Ted Kennedy went to the Senate floor and declared: “President Bush asked: ‘Who would prefer that Saddam’s torture chambers still be open?’ Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management—U.S. management.”
Or, recall the unforgettable words of Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), who compared the thankless work of U.S. military interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay facility to the work of “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings.” This was not a flip comment by a Durbin caught on tape outside a nightclub after a few drinks. Durbin said this on the floor of the U.S. Senate, reading from a text, on June 14, 2005, amid the single worst stretch of killings of American soldiers by terrorists inside Iraq. The terrorists’ goal was to subvert support for America’s mission in Iraq and the War on Terror. Durbin had helped the cause.
Believe me when I say that this is merely a sample of what could be a multi-volume set chronicling the Left’s fatal misjudgment of a long line of dictators and brutal regimes, where jaw-dropping naïveté has led to the replacement of moderately repressive regimes with something far worse, from Nicaragua to Iran.
Could Egypt be next? Could Mubarak give way to the Muslim Brotherhood? I have many thoughts on that complex situation. But I know one thing for certain: Based on a long, long line of fatal deceit, I don’t trust the American Left to get it right.
Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College. His latest book is Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.
