Che Guevara in Black and White

Admirers of cult heroes seldom know the real life story of their hero, and the real life story of the communist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara is not well known by his admirers.

What Communism Really Looks Like

Che has become a symbol for anti-establishment rebellion against the abuse of power. The truth is the real Guevara was a mass-murderer with little to no regard for human life. He was personally responsible for taking countless lives often without sufficient or just reason.

To Guevara death was a necessity for revolution. His orders consisted of five words: “If in doubt, kill him.” Suspicion was all that was needed to end a human life.

In a speech at the Sierra Maestra, Guevara admitted, “We executed many people by firing squad without knowing if they were guilty. At times, the Revolution cannot stop to conduct much investigation; it has the obligation to triumph.”

Guevara interrogated a 17-year-old boy who was a soldier in Batista’s army. The boy begged Guevara not to kill him.

“I haven’t killed anyone. I just arrived here. My mother is a widow, and I am an only child. I joined the Army for the salary, to send it to her monthly. Don’t kill me, don’t kill me,” the boy pleaded.

Guevara responded with, “Why not?” then tied him down next a newly dug grave and shot him in the head.

Those T-shirts bearing Guevara’s likeness should have inscribed above Che’s image: “I wear a Che T-shirt, and I don’t know why.”

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What Lurks over the Horizon? Redux

I wrote “What Lurks over the Horizon?” November 2008 just before the General Election. At that time, several “conservative” outlets were routinely publishing my commentaries, but none of them wanted to publish this piece. Go figure. A few months later I started my own blog, The Millstone Diaries. It was my first blog post, and I posted it for posterity’ sake March 2009. Read it if you dare. Peace.

I.M.Kane

What Lurks over the Horizon?

America stands poised at the edge of a precipice; her next step could send her plummeting headlong to an untimely death. Yet, to even suggest such a possibility opens the door to charges of alarmism or hyperbolic fear-mongering. The chattering classes preach that a dictatorship can’t happen here; America will survive even with one-party rule and a radical socialist in the White House. The radio talk-show host, whose persistent pipes of “Let not your heart be troubled,” has done little to allay my fears for what is likely to happen to my country if the Democrats gain a super majority in Congress and Barack Obama wins the presidency.

It seems that conservative and libertarian pundits and commentators have not connected the dots to see the picture that I see, for they would be sounding the alarm and warning Americans of the radicalism that is about to bring down their nation. Then again, perhaps some have captured the image through their rose-colored glasses but are so attached to their celebrity status that they dare not point it out for fear of being ostracized and labeled a “kook” by their more “sensible” colleagues.

Call me a kook and detest me, but name-calling and rejection will not stop this watchman from warning our fence-sitting Americans of what lurks over the horizon. Facts are stubborn things; they are not opinions subject to debate, and for that reason, two plus two always equal four, not five, contrary to the slogans in Stalin’s Soviet Union or the announcements from the Party of Big Brother in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, who works in the media and creates the Party’s deceptive propaganda, doesn’t know for sure if two plus two equal five, as the Party claims, “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?”

Here we stand a divided country on the brink of entering a nightmare world, unprecedented in American politics, with an undecided electorate who are unsure for whom they will vote in this election. They see Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum, six of one, half-dozen of the other, without a dime’s difference between them. Like Winston Smith, they don’t know if two plus two equal four or two and two make five.

Unlike Smith, our undecideds don’t live in an Orwellian society under a totalitarian government, at least not yet, so why don’t they know a radical socialist when they see one? Perhaps they can’t distinguish a radical socialist from a moderate conservative because they have absorbed so much conflicting information from the media making it impossible to sort out.

Conservative pundits and commentators have made a critical error in judgment by depicting Obama as the most liberal member of the Senate. Obama is anything but liberal; he is a radical socialist ideologue whose worldview and personality traits align him more with the revolutionary demagogues Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez than they do George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. This is why Castro writes in a column that Obama is “the most progressive candidate for the U.S. presidency.”

Add the word progressive to the word Democrat and you get activists demanding a socialist agenda; i.e., massive income redistribution from corporations and the wealthy to low income workers and the poor; massive reductions in military spending; an increase in social welfare spending; universal healthcare; living wage laws; the right of all workers to organize into labor unions and to engage in strikes and collective bargaining; the abolition of significant portions of the Patriot Act; the legalization of gay marriage; strict campaign finance reform laws; a complete pullout from the war in Iraq; a crackdown on free trade and corporate welfare; and the Freedom of Choice Act, which would cancel every state, federal, and local regulation on abortion, abolish all state restrictions on government funding for abortions, and if Obama is elected, use income taxes to fund abortions.

In other words, you get the issues and causes championed by both the House Progressive Caucus (HPC), which is now the single largest partisan caucus in the United States House of Representatives, and the country’s most radical socialist presidential candidate. HPC, a group made up of the most radical social democrats in Congress, is involved in symbiotic relationship with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is the largest socialist organization in the United States.is the principal affiliate of the Socialist International, which claims to be the successor to Karl Marx’s “First International,” founded in London in 1864.

During his commencement address at Harvard, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.” Eric Hoffer correctly analyzed that socialist movements attract the misfits who are dissatisfied with themselves and their lives, who blame their own condition on outside forces, and think that a change in the world around them will suddenly transform their identities and magically cure their problems. The people caught up in socialist movements are searching for meaning in their lives; therefore, they often hate the present and passionately seek a perfect tomorrow.

Hoffer understood that America had a vigorous and healthy society because of the quality of its common people. Until recently, most Americans have been comfortable in their own skin and satisfied with their own lives, which explains why they have not been mesmerized by socialist movements such as Nazism, fascism, and communism. But now, far too many Americans are mesmerized by Obama’s words and image, not for what he’s accomplished, but for what they hope he will become.

Never before has a politician had such a captivating effect on so many Americans. Such a grandiose claim “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” by the charismatic leader of change about himself and the ruling clique of radical socialists in Congress is reason enough to give pause. Mark Levin says his greatest concern is whether the majority of voters will prove “susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue.”

It’s regrettable when any nation’s people surrender their hearts and minds over to a despot; but when the electorate of the freest people in the greatest nation on earth do it, “[t]his prospect frightens me much more than bombs.” What happened in Germany with Hitler, happened again in Cuba with Castro, and can happen here in the United States with Obama. It was the ordinary people who carried out the leader’s heinous crimes and murders believing in the glorious tomorrow promised them. “Of all tyrannies,” writes C.S. Lewis, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”

The Germans had enormous war debts and a terrible economy, so they believed the charismatic leader who personified hope and went on to elect the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazis) that promised change. The Cubans also supported a young, charismatic leader who promised change, and they openly embraced his idea without asking what kind of change or knowing the price they would have to pay. The upshot for our undecided electorate to ponder is that freedom is not free and “is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

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Universal Health Care Will Destroy America‘s Middle Class

By Jerry A. Kane

Dictator emeritus Fidel Castro has applauded Brother O and his Bread and Circuses administration for advancing universal health care in their takeover of America’s health care system.

“We consider health reform to have been an important battle and a success of his (Obama’s) government. … [T]he government … has approved medical attention for the majority of its citizens, something that Cuba was able to do half a century ago,” Castro wrote in an essay published by Cuba’s mainstream press.

So what does half a century of medical treatment for the majority look like in Cuba? Sicko Michael Moore boasts that Cuban medical treatment is great for everyone, except of course for the average Cuban. For Cuba’s common man “great” means dilapidated hospitals, filthy conditions, neglect, starvation, and 5 percent take-home pay after taxes.

When the Soviet Union stopped supporting Cuba’s economy with $5 billion in annual aid, its health care system hit the skids. The situation has become so bleak that Canadian doctors urge their patients to take “a suitcase full of medical supplies to drop off at a local clinic or hospital” when they vacation on the island. According to a pharmacist from Moron, Cuba, “If you need the most complicated operation, you can get it at a Cuban hospital. But medicines are the problem.”

“We know how difficult life is here, so when we come for a vacation, we always bring a few bottles of antibiotics and Tylenol,” said a Canadian housewife who vacations in Cuba.

“My doctor in Toronto told me that there is nothing available in Cuba, so I came prepared [with tubes of antibiotic cream, aspirin, decongestants and bandages] just in case I needed any of these things for myself. But I am leaving most of what I brought for the maids and the bartender,” added another Canadian vacationer.

Cuba has a three-tiered health care system. The first tier is the “medical tourism” system, designed for tourists who come to Cuba on health tourism packages to obtain treatment at cut-rate prices—a kidney transplant, for example, costs about half as much as one in the U.S.

The Cuban government established the tourist-only hospitals to cater to the thousands of visitors from Latin America and parts of Europe. Tourists pay hard cash for discount prices on botox, liposuction, breast implants, and dental work. Cuban specialists also treat Parkinson’s disease and retinatis pigmentosa, a hereditary disease that causes night blindness.

Tourist hospitals are clean, state-of-the-art facilities well-stocked with the latest equipment and imported medicines. 

“Tourists have everything they need. But for Cubans, it’s different. Unless you work with tourists or have a relative in Miami sending you money, you will not be able to get what you need if you are sick in Cuba. As a doctor, I find it disgusting,” said a pediatrician from Moron.

The second health-care system is for the Cuban “nomenklatura,” i.e., the elites of the communist party, which includes bureaucrats, the military, official artists and writers, and other party cronies. Their health care mirrors the first-world system for medical tourists.

Cuba’s third system is the one for the common people, and it is truly wretched. Hospitals and clinics are unsanitary and falling apart. Surgeons lack basic supplies and must reuse latex gloves. Patients must buy their own sutures on the black market and bring their own bed sheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs and toilet paper to the hospital. Basic medicines are scarce.

Local pharmacies are neat and spotless, but they lack even the most common items, such as aspirin and rubbing alcohol. However, they do stock a lot of green boxes of herbal diet teas from Spain. Aspirin and common medications can be purchased at government-run dollar stores, but the prices are too high for most Cubans, whose average wage is about $12 a month.

“I haven’t seen aspirin in a Cuban store here for more than a year. If you have any pills in your purse, I’ll take them. Even if they have passed their expiry date,” said a nurse from Moron.

The equipment used in the third tier system is either antiquated or nonexistent. Although Cuban doctors are well trained, they have nothing to work with. When American doctors travel to Cuba on errands of mercy, they take with them as much equipment and supplies as they can carry.

“The hospital conditions are pretty deplorable. … It’s like operating with knives and spoons,” said Dr. Gary Nishioka, an American plastic surgeon, who had just returned from a trip to Cuba.

Although many of the residents of Moron are fortunate because they work in nearby resorts and often receive foreign medications as tips, conditions have deteriorated so badly for most Cubans that diseases such as tuberculosis, leprosy, typhoid, and dengue fever—eradicated years before—have resurfaced among the population.

To finance Cuba’s universal health care system, the government uses the money from its joint-venture operations in manufacturing, tourism, banking, and mineral exploration with foreign companies. About 30,000 Cubans work in these operations and receive 5 percent of their total wages; the Cuban government “reinvests” the other 95 percent for the good of the entire population.

“There is absolutely nothing free about Cuban health care …. Social services are financed from the sweat of the poor Cuban workers,” said Ismael Sambra, president of the Cuban-Canadian Foundation.

Some of the most courageous, admirable, and persecuted people in Cuba are doctors who have rebelled against the government’s health-care injustices as well as other injustices. Renowned neurosurgeon Hilda Molina spoke out against the government’s decision to turn Cuba’s prestigious International Centre for Neurological Restoration into a tourists-only hospital.

“Cubans should be treated the same as foreigners. Cubans have less rights in their own country than foreigners who visit here,” Molina said.

Molina has been branded a counter-revolutionary and banned from practicing medicine in Cuba. She lives in Havana and survives on an allowance from her family abroad. After 15 years of trying to obtain a visa to visit her family in Argentina, she was finally granted permission last June. The government repeatedly refused her request to travel having designated her brain “a national asset.”

The ill effects of universal health care on the average Cuban has been immense. Everyone but the communist elite now has equally deplorable universal health care. Average citizens in the United Kingdom and Canada are also experiencing the collapse of universal health care in their countries. Yet too many middle-class Americans would rather cling to the lies that Brother O and the progressive Democrats tell them about universal health care, than rely on their own eyes to see what has happened to the middle class in the countries that have tried it.

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What Lurks over the Horizon?

What Lurks over the Horizon?
By Jerry A. Kane

America stands poised at the edge of a precipice; her next step could send her plummeting headlong to an untimely death. Yet, to even suggest such a possibility opens the door to charges of alarmism or hyperbolic fear-mongering. The chattering classes preach that a dictatorship can’t happen here; America will survive even with one-party rule and a radical socialist in the White House. The radio talk-show host, whose persistent pipes of “Let not your heart be troubled,” has done little to allay my fears for what is likely to happen to my country if the Democrats gain a super majority in Congress and Barack Obama wins the presidency.

It seems that conservative and libertarian pundits and commentators have not connected the dots to see the picture that I see, for they would be sounding the alarm and warning Americans of the radicalism that is about to bring down their nation. Then again, perhaps some have captured the image through their rose-colored glasses but are so attached to their celebrity status that they dare not point it out for fear of being ostracized and labeled a “kook” by their more “sensible” colleagues.

Call me a kook and detest me, but name-calling and rejection will not stop this watchman from warning our fence-sitting Americans of what lurks over the horizon. Facts are stubborn things; they are not opinions subject to debate, and for that reason, two plus two always equal four, not five, contrary to the slogans in Stalin’s Soviet Union or the announcements from the Party of Big Brother in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, who works in the media and creates the Party’s deceptive propaganda, doesn’t know for sure if two plus two equal five, as the Party claims, “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?”

Here we stand a divided country on the brink of entering a nightmare world, unprecedented in American politics, with an undecided electorate who are unsure for whom they will vote in this election. They see Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum, six of one, half-dozen of the other, without a dime’s difference between them. Like Winston Smith, they don’t know if two plus two equal four or two and two make five.

Unlike Smith, our undecideds don’t live in an Orwellian society under a totalitarian government, at least not yet, so why don’t they know a radical socialist when they see one? Perhaps they can’t distinguish a radical socialist from a moderate conservative because they have absorbed so much conflicting information from the media making it impossible to sort out.

Conservative pundits and commentators have made a critical error in judgment by depicting Obama as the most liberal member of the Senate. Obama is anything but liberal; he is a radical socialist ideologue whose worldview and personality traits align him more with the revolutionary demagogues Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez than they do George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. This is why Castro writes in a column that Obama is “the most progressive candidate for the U.S. presidency.”

Add the word progressive to the word Democrat and you get activists demanding a socialist agenda; i.e., massive income redistribution from corporations and the wealthy to low income workers and the poor; massive reductions in military spending; an increase in social welfare spending; universal healthcare; living wage laws; the right of all workers to organize into labor unions and to engage in strikes and collective bargaining; the abolition of significant portions of the Patriot Act; the legalization of gay marriage; strict campaign finance reform laws; a complete pullout from the war in Iraq; a crackdown on free trade and corporate welfare; and the Freedom of Choice Act, which would cancel every state, federal, and local regulation on abortion, abolish all state restrictions on government funding for abortions, and if Obama is elected, use income taxes to fund abortions.

In other words, you get the issues and causes championed by both the House Progressive Caucus (HPC), which is now the single largest partisan caucus in the United States House of Representatives, and the country’s most radical socialist presidential candidate. HPC, a group made up of the most radical social democrats in Congress, is involved in symbiotic relationship with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is the largest socialist organization in the United States.is the principal affiliate of the Socialist International, which claims to be the successor to Karl Marx’s “First International,” founded in London in 1864.

During his commencement address at Harvard, Solzhenitsyn said, “socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.” Eric Hoffer correctly analyzed that socialist movements attract the misfits who are dissatisfied with themselves and their lives, who blame their own condition on outside forces, and think that a change in the world around them will suddenly transform their identities and magically cure their problems. The people caught up in socialist movements are searching for meaning in their lives; therefore, they often hate the present and passionately seek a perfect tomorrow.

Hoffer understood that America had a vigorous and healthy society because of the quality of its common people. Until recently, most Americans have been comfortable in their own skin and satisfied with their own lives, which explains why they have not been mesmerized by socialist movements such as Nazism, fascism, and communism. But now, far too many Americans are mesmerized by Obama’s words and image, not for what he’s accomplished, but for what they hope he will become.

Never before has a politician had such a captivating effect on so many Americans. Such a grandiose claim “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” by the charismatic leader of change about himself and the ruling clique of radical socialists in Congress is reason enough to give pause. Mark Levin says his greatest concern is whether the majority of voters will prove “susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue.”

It’s regrettable when any nation’s people surrender their hearts and minds over to a despot; but when the electorate of the freest people in the greatest nation on earth do it, “[t]his prospect frightens me much more than bombs.” What happened in Germany with Hitler, happened again in Cuba with Castro, and can happen here in the United States with Obama. It was the ordinary people who carried out the leader’s heinous crimes and murders believing in the glorious tomorrow promised them. “Of all tyrannies,” writes C.S. Lewis, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”

The Germans had enormous war debts and a terrible economy, so they believed the charismatic leader who personified hope and went on to elect the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazis) that promised change. The Cubans also supported a young, charismatic leader who promised change, and they openly embraced his idea without asking what kind of change or knowing the price they would have to pay. The upshot for our undecided electorate to ponder is that freedom is not free and “is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Read Full Post »