From the China Information Website
Victims of Communism -
Cuba
"
from The Australian 30/11/2016 The Truth About Castro
The Left’s latest descent into cluelessness, sanctimony and hypocrisy unfolded like a tedious but impeccably timed bit of synchronised swimming. After Donald Trump’s win, some on the Left remonstrated about a “post-truth” era where impertinent readers and voters ignore the mainstream media.
Then when Cuban leader Fidel Castro died, many on the Left soliloquised about a romantic era of revolutionary leadership, neatly proving that post-truth labels better suit their own factually compromised postures.
Last week CNN’s Christiane Amanpour beamed about this new phrase finding a home in the Oxford English Dictionary as the word of 2016. “Post-truth” explained the rise of Trump, she said, as the candidate did a savvy end run around the mainstream media, a very American football term where a footballer runs with the ball outflanking the defensive line. How dare Trump and his supporters outmanoeuvre the defensive line of media pundits rooting for Hillary Clinton.Rather than coining phrases, the media would do better lifting its game after its shoddy failure to explore the reasons for Trump’s rise. Alas, the second-rate reporting of Castro only confirms why Amanpour and her media confreres should expect more people doing plenty more end runs around her kind of media.
With the Left’s post-truth accusations in mind, look at how our taxes are being spent at the national broadcaster following Castro’s death. On Sunday, the ABC News website carried one piece by Mark Beeson asking “How will the Cuban leader be remembered?” The University of Western Australia professor mentioned unresolved debates and a dirt-poor Third World country creating a medical and education system. “Not bad for a country that has laboured under American sanctions,” he wrote. Alas, he didn’t mention the thousands of dissidents murdered by Castro’s authoritarian communist regime.
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation estimates 73,000 were killed since Castro came to power in 1959. The professor didn’t mention the thousands more political prisoners thrown into jails for dissenting views, or the extrajudicial executions, or the homosexuals and priests sent to re-education camps. Or the flight of hundreds of thousands of Cubans to America to escape Castro’s repressive communist regime, which stifles freedom of expression and association. Or that Cuban migration is one-way, away from Cuba.
On ABC’s Sunday Insiders program, the couch pundits joked over failed CIA assassination attempts against Castro but said nothing about Castro’s 50-year persecution of dissidents. Then again, the ABC is hardly home to divergent views either. Early Monday morning, ABC News Radio ran a continual news stream about the death of a “revolutionary leader” with nothing to say about the evils of that leader.
Barely a month ago, the ABC was keen to air Amnesty International’s latest report into the island of Nauru. But Aunty’s go-to-group and its latest report into another island, Cuba, was not mentioned when Castro died.
Instead, on Monday morning, Fran Kelly on Radio National talked to an AP journalist and then wanted to keep talking about failed assassination attempts against Castro.
She asked former CIA operative Brian Latell “was Fidel Castro’s survival the CIA’s biggest failure?” Not content with Latell’s observation about the myths surrounding assassination attempts, Kelly persisted with exploding cigars and mollusc bombs: “Sounds like a Get Smart movie,” she quipped. Though Latell suggested they talk “about something more serious”, Kelly didn’t show much interest in executions and the regime’s total control over dissidents. Had Kelly used the ABC’s premier news and current affairs radio platform to speak with someone from Amnesty International about its latest annual report into Cuba, her audience could have learned the totalitarian state established by Castro continues today with brutal restrictions on freedoms of expression, association and movement.
Listeners would have been informed about the thousands of reported cases of harassment of government critics and arbitrary arrests and detentions.
Alternatively, had Kelly interviewed someone from Human Rights Watch, another ABC favourite in any other circumstances, the radio host might have explored HRW’s statement following Castro’s death that “Castro built a repressive system that punished virtually all forms of dissent, a dark legacy that lives on even after his death”. We might have been informed by the taxpayerfunded broadcaster that Castro’s repression was “codified by law and enforced by security forces, groups of civilian sympathisers tied to the state and a judiciary that lacked independence”. We could have learned that “many of the abusive tactics developed during (Castro’s) time in power — including surveillance, beatings, arbitrary detention, and public acts of repudiation — are still used by the Cuban government”. Kelly might have delved into the 2009 HRW report after Castro handed power to his brother Raul, New Castro, Same Cuba: Political Prisoners in the Post-Fidel Era.
The next time a taxpayer-funded snob at the ABC talks about the dumbing down of commercial news, remember that listeners looking to learn about Castro from the ABC’s premier news and current affairs radio timeslot on Monday were treated to Kelly’s fondness for assassination myths and Get Smart.
In the Left’s own post-truth world, inconvenient facts that challenge their penchant for socialism are simply ignored. This, despite legislative duties under the ABC Act that require the national broadcaster to gather and present “news and information (that) is accurate and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism”. Taxpayers demand more than the ABC’s perverted balance sheet of human rights that romanticises a murderous communist dictator as a “revolutionary leader” but harangues a democratically elected Australian prime minister for the offshore processing of asylum-seekers.
Indeed, Castro’s death has laid bare the moral bankruptcy of the broader Left. You don’t have to watch Hollywood’s latest instalment of dystopian fiction. Just read the dystopian eulogising of Castro by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who said he was saddened by the death of Cuba’s longest serving president. Serving the longest is a cinch when you control the military and the judiciary and there are no elections. Trudeau embarrassed himself further, describing Castro as “a revolutionary leader and orator (who) made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island”. Yes, and under Mussolini the trains ran on time and Stalin granted divorce rights to women. Or the President of Ireland: “Castro will be remembered as a giant among global leaders whose view was not only one of freedom for his people but for all the oppressed and excluded peoples on the planet.” Is the chap from Limerick kidding? At least President Barack Obama only passed on condolences.
Next time post-truth pontificators remonstrate about voters doing an end run around their kind of media, remember it was Trump who, in a statement on Sunday, pointed out that Castro oppressed his people for more than five decades. “Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights,” he said.
Alas, there’s nothing very original about the Left’s “post-truth” postulations. A decade ago, Merriam-Webster dictionary chose “truthiness” as its word of the year. It means the same, making a decision on a gut feeling rather than on facts. Back then, the Left described those they disagreed with as suffering from “truthiness”. Now the Left uses “post-truth” to denigrate those who dare to differ with the mainstream media. Different catchwords that keep catching out the deluded Left.