The ACLU Sues To Defend Communist Lies
Posted on July 10, 2006
I’ve written on this one before, but Newsmax has an excellent article on it. I urge you to read the entire thing.
In brief, attempted “book bannings’” identical to the one in Miami-Dade, have occurred at a rate of over one a day for the last two and half decades, from sea to shining sea. In most of these incidents the ACLU and the mainstream media have been conspicuously mum.
But just let those insufferable Cuban-Americans try it! Then the ACLU promptly blasts its bugles, its media cronies affect grave frowns, the teachers unions get on their high horse, and cries of “Censorship!” and “Book banning!” flood the airwaves and headlines. “Miami-Dade School Board Bans [italics mine] Cuba Book,” headlined the New York Times on June 15.
Lest anyone forget, school boards are elected by their communities. They have no power to ban or censor anything on the national – or even a regional – stage, screen, or print. That same asinine book potentially “banned” at the urging of Cuban-American parents can be stacked in the windows of a bookstore next door to the school library.
Indeed, dozens of books 20 times as asinine, from Che Guevara’s “Guerrilla War: A Method” (from someone who never fought in a guerrilla war) to Fidel Castro’s own “History Will Absolve Me” (from modern history’s most shameless liar), already blanket the literary landscape and overwhelmingly influence America’s and most of the world’s academic and media depictions of Cuba, hence their almost uniform absurdity.
Heaven knows, Castro gets enough free publicity and soft-soaping from the worldwide media-academia axis as it is. So some Miami-Dade taxpayers have simply balked at subsidizing any more of this malignant idiocy, as millions of taxpayers throughout the U.S. for decades have balked at subsidizing everything from “Heather Has Two Mommies” to “Huckleberry Finn” to ‘Little Black Sambo” to “Harry Potter” – all without major objection from the ACLU and the New York Times – indeed, often with their accolades.
How the Miami parents’ objections amount to a vile and unprecedented lust to “Censor!” and “Ban!” while all the others amount to spreading “tolerance” and “sensitivity” and “upholding community values” might be best explained by George Orwell, who coined the term “Newspeak.”
“Stalin tortured,” wrote Arthur Koestler, “not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.” Ditto for his Cuban understudy, Fidel Castro. For refusing to renounce principles, a man (or woman – Castro is an equal opportunity jailer/murderer) was jailed and tortured for 10, 20, or even 30 years – the longest terms of political incarceration and torture in modern history, almost three times as long as Stalin himself tortured his victims.
Now in a wheelchair from the tortures, this U.S. citizen notices his granddaughter being taught that the regime that tortured him, that murdered his brother and cousin without trial, that stole his life’s savings, that jailed more people than Stalin’s, that trained and harbored terrorists for decades, and that craved to incinerate his adopted country with nuclear blasts – this regime is being depicted in her schoolbooks as wise and kindly.
The depiction is outrageous enough, and the teaching of it to primary-graders is doubly outrageous. But that’s not his objection. He understands perfectly well that his adopted country’s Constitution defends a book espousing idiocies (as did the one in his native country pre-Castro, by the way).
Fine. But should this torture victim (and U.S. citizen) also be forced to subsidize the idiocies? Is his resistance to this subsidizing a dastardly deed while a black father’s yanking of “Huckleberry Finn” from his son’s school library using the identical means a laudable and conscientious deed?
Is the latter an upright “concerned parent” – or even better, an “involved parent” – while the former is a “censor” and bigoted “book banner”?
You’d certainly think so from reading the mainstream media.
The U.S. taxpayers being scolded by the ACLU and the teachers unions for balking at subsidizing Castroite propaganda include, among them, the world’s longest-suffering political prisoners, jailed and tortured by Castro. A former political prisoner, in fact, brought the book to the attention of the school board in the first place and asked for its removal from the public school library (not its “banning”). He urged this not because the book was “insensitive” or “violated community standards,” but simply because it was wrong – because it sought to teach falsehoods.
“The Soviet Union has already created liberties far greater than exist elsewhere in the world,” rhapsodized the ACLU’s founder, Roger Baldwin, about the Soviet Union. “Today I saw fresh, vigorous expressions of free living by workers and peasants all over the land.”
But that was early in the game, you say. Nobody knew how Bolshevism would play out. It was an honest mistake. Come on, cut the guy some slack.
Actually, Baldwin wrote this in 1934. He greatly admired Stalin’s Russia. And not because of blinders or a Potemkin tour. He seemed to recognize the repression – and to excuse it:
“No champion of a socialist society could fail to see that some suppression was necessary to achieve it. It could not all be done by persuasion. When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever. Dictatorship is the obvious means in a world of enemies at home and abroad.”
Small wonder the book “Let’s Go To Cuba” has such sentimental value for the ACLU. It gushes about Stalinist Cuba exactly the way Roger Baldwin gushed about Stalinist Russia. The ACLU seems to recognize who picked up the torch from their founder’s hero.
Cuban-Americans’ proud and unflinching status means the ACLU has a special beef with them. They remain the most vocal and unashamed anti-communists. Enlightened opinion regards them as quaint and musty museum pieces at best; at worst, raving maniacs hell-bent on imposing another McCarthyite dark age.
Because they fought it alone, outnumbered and bare-fisted, on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs and for half a decade in Cuba’s hills, because many spent the longest political-prison terms in modern history for spitting in the face of their torturers, because their life savings and dreams were abolished by armed communists, who tried to ram an insane worldview down their throats – for all of these perfectly valid reasons, Cuban-Americans gag at the ACLU founder’s prescription for a better world.
“Baldwin, sir,” assert Cuban-Americans with their every public act,” you were either a scoundrel, an ignoramus, or a jackass – probably all three.” The ACLU cannot let them get away with that.
Typically, Frank Bolanos, the Cuban-American school board member who urges the “book banning,” understands and appreciates the U.S. Constitution better than most of his native-born journalistic and legal opponents, with all their multifarious and glittering LLD degrees.
“This is not a First Amendment issue,” Bolanos wrote. “Censorship occurs when government refuses to allow people to purchase material, not when it refuses to provide that material at no charge.”
Mr. Bolanos – again, unlike his illustrious and mega-credentialed native-born foes – understands and reveres America’s founding fathers. Thus he quotes Thomas Jefferson: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
Alas, by bringing up Thomas Jefferson in attempting to influence the ACLU and the teachers unions, Mr. Bolanos erred grievously. The ACLU’s founder and guiding light seemed to prefer Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. And the teachers unions probably think Thomas Jefferson was the latest runner-up on “American Idol.”
Humberto Fontova is the author of “Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant,” a Conservative Book Club Main Selection.
Read the whole thing.
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5 Responses to “The ACLU Sues To Defend Communist Lies”
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Syndicate Me
Ah let us defend American from the Islamofascists so we can have the right to ban books! They hate us because we have the freedom to ban books! Oh wait, they have the freedom to ban books too…
And what is it with you guys and communism? When are all you old containment fogies going to die off, or realize that the Soviet Union was never really much of a threat? The main threat of Communism is the main threat of US style Captalism. Big country coming in and beating up on little country and installing puppet government. It really has nothing to do with weather Communism or Capitalism are better economic systems.
This is the same ACLU that sued to force a 5th grade teacher to remove his OWN Bible from his classroom (even though it was for personal use only).
Wow seriously… cold war ended years ago, let the communism thing go.
“Wow seriously… cold war ended years ago, let the communism thing go.”
The cold war ended, Communism didn’t.
There is more than enough history to educate you on what Communism is and does.
Educate yourself or “think” about changing your screen name.
Anyone who thinks opposition to Communism will die off with us “old fogies” is delusional.
I have performed border duty on the East German border several years ago. My wife has had the opportunity to go to East Germany after the wall fell and the East and West were united. To those have not seen East Germany before or after reunification and say that Communism is a think of the past are quite ill advised.