Water is wet, the sky is blue, and...

...Commies are evil.



North Korean slave labor camps house up to 200,000 and are growing.

No one really knows how bad it is, but it’s much worse than I thought possible. Piecing together information from satellite images and eye witness accounts, Amnesty International suspects that the horrific concentration camps in North Korea are growing. Some 200,000 people live as slaves – enduring starvation, torture, and rape while performing hard labor. Many die every year, only to be replaced by fresh bodies. Of those that survive, few will ever be released. Deemed ‘prisoners’, the victims of North Korea’s political pogroms are interned for the smallest criticisms of the regime of Kim Jong-Il, and when they are carried away their extended families are rounded up as well. This is not genocide, it’s not a war crime, it’s an unending consequence of North Korea’s authoritarian government. And it’s been getting worse for the last decade. Amnesty International’s satellite research shows these slave camp expanding, their populations swelling with ‘criminals’ as the general population starves inside its borders and refugees who are caught trying to leave North Korea are executed…or sent to these gulags.

The only thing that Communists are good at is remaking societies into the worst nightmares of Science Fiction.

Remember the victims of Communism and see this movie.

I am listening to Richard Pipes book on Communism on my Ipod.  I've just gone past the horrific tale of Stalin's Terror where 1,000 people a day were summarily executed to meet a quota and millions of innocents were consigned to the hellish conditions of the Gulag.  After that section, Pipes notes that after the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, not a single perpetrator of these - the worst atrocities in human history - was ever tried or exposed, and all of them went on living their lives without ever having to provide an accounting for their inhumanity.

For the first time, I was struck by that fact. Whenever a conservative, nationalist, right wing or any other form of regime that was not Communist falls, we invariably have "Truth Commissions" that collect the fact because, we are told, remembering the atrocity is a basic form of justice for the victims. We also score a few dozen movies from each story, told from the perspective of the victims.

Except for Communists for whom that rule doesn't apply, of course. As Claire Berlinski observed:

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

And who get treated like a bunch of harmless eccentric "liberals in a hurry" by our media.

As a one-man "Truth Commission/Fairness Doctrine," the director of "Gallipoli," "Master and Commander" and "Witness", Richard Weir, is releasing a movie on the Gulag experience which might restore some balance to the historical record in the public mind.  Weir's movie is touted as the first Gulag movie:

For "The Way Back" is a unique and groundbreaking film: It represents Hollywood's first attempt to portray the Soviet Gulag, in meticulously researched detail. I know this to be true because I was a historical consultant to Weir. He asked me for advice because I wrote a book about the Gulag, but he did plenty of research on his own, as his questions reflected. Once, he called to ask whether the guards leading the prisoners off the train would have been wearing the same uniforms as the guards receiving them at the camp (answer: no).


"The Way Back" is based on a book called "The Long Walk" by Slavomir Rawicz, a Gulag survivor who "borrowed" his escape story: Three Poles crossed the Himalayas from Siberia into India in the 1940s; the Polish consulate recorded their arrival; one of them told his story to Rawicz. But the film is "true" in every way that matters. Many of the camp scenes are taken directly from Soviet archives and memoirs. The starving men scrambling for garbage; the tattooed criminals, playing cards for the clothes of other prisoners; the narrow barracks; the logging camp; the vicious Siberian storms. Among the very plausible characters are an American who went to work on the Moscow subway and fell victim to the Great Terror of 1937, a Polish officer arrested after the Soviet Union's 1939 invasion of Poland and a Latvian priest whose church was destroyed by the Bolsheviks.

And:

I haven't found any reviews, so far, that hail this as Hollywood's first Gulag movie, perhaps because hardly anyone noticed that there weren't any before. Weir told me that many in Hollywood were surprised by the story: They'd never heard of Soviet concentration camps, only German ones. "If you need to explain what a film is about," the film is in trouble - and this one almost was. Weir had difficulties getting it distributed and some problems explaining the final scene to his financial backers.


Yet that final scene is exactly what makes this movie "real": Instead of returning home at the end of his harrowing journey, the hero is shown "walking" across time - across the Soviet occupation of Central Europe, across the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968 - finally returning home to Poland only after communism collapses. The absence of an instant happy ending also bothered some of the film's reviewers, even though, in "real life," there were no happy endings for anyone who lived in the eastern half of Europe after the end of the Second World War. People who escaped from the Gulag, survived the war or evaded the Holocaust didn't necessarily live happily ever after. Perhaps that's a truth too difficult to learn from a movie.

It's about time that the public got really acquainted with the legacy of Communism.

Here is the movie trailer.

'Che Guevara; Guerrilla Doofus and Murdering Coward."

Humberto Fontova recollects a Che that defies the media-approved fiction: 

"When you saw the beaming look on Che's face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad," said a former Cuban political prisoner Roberto Martin-Perez, to your humble servant here, "you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara." As commander of the La Cabana execution yard, Che often shattered the skull of the condemned man (or boy) by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. Che's second-story office in Havana’s La Cabana prison had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing-squads at work.


Even as a youth, Ernesto Guevara's writings revealed a serious mental illness. "My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any vencido that falls in my hands!” This passage is from Ernesto Guevara's famous Motorcycle Diaries, though Robert Redford somehow overlooked it while directing his heart-warming movie.

The Spanish word vencido, by the way, translates into "defeated" or "surrendered."And indeed, "the "acrid odor of gunpowder and blood" very, very rarely reached Guevara's nostrils from anything properly describable as combat. It mostly came from the close-range murders of defenseless men (and boys.) Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets from the firing squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro and Che's theft of their humble family farm, all refused blindfolds and all died sneering at their Communist murderers, as did thousands of their valiant countrymen. "Viva Cuba Libre! Viva Cristo Rey! Abajo Comunismo!" "The defiant yells would make the walls of La Cabana prison tremble," wrote eyewitness to the slaughter, Armando Valladares.

The cry of "Viva Cristo Rey" recalls the cries of Catholics killed by the secularist Mexican government during the Cristero Rebellion of the 1920s, and suggests the religious element of the Cuban Revolution.

Compare the courage of Carlos Machado with Che's ignominous ending:

His pathetic whimpering while dropping his fully-loaded weapons as two Bolivian soldiers approached him on Oct. 8 1967 ("Don't shoot!" I'm Che!" I'm worth more to you alive than dead!") proves that this cowardly, murdering swine was unfit to carry his victims' slop buckets.

Only Communists would think that it makes sense to actually implement bad science fiction plot ideas.

It was Robert Heinlein, I believe, who wrote that the essence of science fiction is to take some idea or trend and play it out to its logical, if absurd, conclusion.  For Heinlein, the essence of science fiction was to ponder the question, "if this goes on..."

Normal people may wonder what would happen "if this goes on,"  but when they ponder the conclusion, they usually draw back in a human horror of the inhuman implications.

Not so with science fiction authors and Communists.

Only Communists would think that a "one child policy" implemented by forced sterilizations and abortions, inevitably leading to a massive selective abortion of females and thirty five million womenless men who have nothing better to do than revolt against the government that caused their predicament is a good idea.  Only Communists would think that it is even possible to create an alternate society of intergenerational slave labor/political concentration camps.

In the same vein, only Communists would think of this bit of science fiction outlined in this Wintery Knight post:

Doctors in southern China are working around the clock to fulfil a government goal to sterilise — by force if necessary — almost 10,000 men and women who have violated birth control policies. Family planning authorities are so determined to stop couples from producing more children than the regulations allow that they are detaining the relatives of those who resist. About 1,300 people are being held in cramped conditions in towns across Puning county, in Guangdong Province, as officials try to put pressure on couples who have illegal children to come forward for sterilisation.

And:

In a news conference on Capitol Hill, several speakers, including attorney David Matas of B’nai Brith Canada and Ethan Gutmann of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said their investigations have unearthed a grisly trade in which an estimated 9,000 members of Falun Gong have been executed for their corneas, lungs, livers, kidneys and skins.


They likened the practice to the Nazi treatment of Jewish prisoners in World War II concentration camps, which included using them for sadistic medical experiments and taking the gold fillings from the teeth of corpses. The newest wrinkle, they said, is that organs from other religious prisoners — specifically dissidents from China’s Christian, Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist communities — are also being harvested to satisfy an insatiable global demand.

The common thread might be the Communist belief that human beings are just sophisticated animals, and, therefore, there is no ontological barrier against using human beings like animals.

It is said that truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to be plausible, which seems accurate until some utopian humanist gets involved.

Secret History

Humberto Fontava corrects the historical record behind the movie "Che."

For example, according to Fontava, Che and Fidel fought only one guerrilla war, and it was one that they brutally suppressed:

Now, on to Cuba’s genuine guerrilla war, fought from 1960-66 and–this cannot be repeated often enough– AGAINST the Fidel/Che regime. Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And Cuba’s Kulaks had guns, a few at first anyway. Had these rebels gotten a fraction of the aid the Afghan Mujahedeen got, the Viet Cong got – indeed that George Washington’s rebels got from the French – had these Cuban rebels gotten any help, my kids would speak Spanish and Miami’s jukeboxes today would carry Tanya Tucker rather than Gloria Estefan.


Be it known: Che Guevara had a very bloody (and typically cowardly) hand in one of the major anti-insurgency wars on this continent. Eighty percent of these anti-communist guerrillas were executed on the spot upon capture, a Che specialty. For my book I interviewed several of the lucky former rebels who managed to escape the slaughter. “We fought with the fury of cornered beasts,” I titled the chapter, using the phrase one used to describe their desperate freedom fight against the Soviet occupation of Cuba through their proxies Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

And:

Mass murder was the order in Cuba’s countryside. It was the only way to decimate so many rebels. These country folk went after the Reds with a ferocity that saw Fidel and Che running to their Soviet sugar daddies and tugging their pants in panic. That commie bit about how “a guerrilla swims in the sea which is the people, etc.” fit Cuba’s anti-Fidel and Che rebellion to a T. So in a relocation and concentration campaign that shamed anything the Brits did to the Boers, the gallant Communists ripped hundreds of thousands of Cubans from their ancestral homes and herded them into concentration camps on the opposite side of Cuba. I interview several of these “relocated” families too.


One of these Cuban redneck wives refused to be relocated. After her husband, sons, and a few nephews were murdered by the Gallant Che and his minions, she grabbed a tommy gun herself, rammed in a clip and took to the hills. She became a rebel herself. Cubans know her as La Niña Del Escambray.

For a year she ran rings around the Communist armies sweeping the hills in her pursuit. Finally she ran out of ammo and supplies and the reds rounded her up. Amazingly, she wasn’t executed (Che must have taken that day off.) For years La Niña suffered horribly in Castro’s dungeons, but she lives in Miami today. Seems to me her tragic story makes ideal fodder for Oprah, for all those women’s magazines, for all those butch professorettes of “Women’s Studies,” for a Susan Sarandon or Sandra Bullock role.

Think about it: here’s that favored theme for Hollywood producers – “the feisty woman.” Well, they don’t come much feistier than Zoila Aguila, her real name. Had she been fighting, say, Somoza or Pinochet, you can bet your last penny Hollywood and New York would be ALL OVER her story. Instead she fought the Left’s most picturesque poster boys. So, naturally, nobody’s heard of her.