Mark Steyn exppands on a point made earlier by Jonah Goldberg
....being a radical means never having to say you’re sorry.:
But there beats in the liberal breast a strange passion for normalizing dictatorships.
"Saying he is no longer healthy enough to hold office, Cuban leader Fidel Castro has announced he will not seek re-election after 49 years in power" — the Miami Herald.
Hmm. Castro didn't really have to "seek" re-election, did he? He's a — what's the word? Oh, yeah — "dictator." If he "seeks" re-election, he's pretty much guaranteed to find it — assuming for the purposes of argument you can be "re-elected" if you've never been freely or fairly elected in the first place. In its own "news report," the satirical website The Nose on Your Face got closer to reality:
"Fidel Castro announced today that he would not seek a new term as Cuba's president, citing concerns that at 81, it may be difficult for him to serve the full, constitutionally-mandated 49-year term."
...
When a free man enjoying the blessings of a free society promotes an equivalence between real democracy and a sham, he's colluding in the great lie being perpetrated by the prison state. A generation ago, to their shame, almost every Western politician did it — Trudeau, Mitterrand, Carter, Helmut Schmidt. Today, the political class is more circumspect, but the broader culture, almost instinctively, drapes thugs in the accessories of legitimacy. Just before he was overthrown, Saddam Hussein "sought" "re-election," and on the big day CNN covered it like a down-to-the-wire gubernatorial or senate race — full of shots of Iraqis going to the polls as if it was in reality what it was merely pretending to be: an election.
In his previous submission to the people seven years earlier, Saddam got 99.89 per cent of the vote. And, given that the 0.11 per cent foolish enough to write in Ralph Nader were no doubt subsequently shoved into the industrial shredder, it seemed a safe bet that the old butcher would do even better this time round. Nonetheless, throughout the day, CNN kept up the Election Special excitement to the point where you half-expected a Gallup exit poll showing Saddam plummeting to 99.82 per cent, or Frank Luntz live with a focus group of Tikrit soccer moms who want more spending on health care and less on anthrax. Saddam "sought" re-election and happily found it, and, after the removal of his regime, survived in his spider-hole long enough to enjoy an increasing number of approving pieces in the Western press bemoaning the way the blundering neo-cons and their incompetent stooges among Iraq's democratic parties had destroyed a smoothly functioning dictatorship. From the London Spectator: "Things Were Better Under Saddam." Once Cuba begins the inevitably messy birth pangs of democracy, expect similar Castro nostalgia to the nth degree: Havana not as quaint as it used to be, full of ghastly American banks and fast-food outlets.
Pondering Western enthusiasm for Castro and Co., you wonder whether the free world's urge to normalize tyranny is entirely confined to its exotic overseas exemplars. If you believe in big problems that demand "big government" solutions, democracy just gets in the way. Take Mayer Hillman, senior fellow at the Policy Studies Institute in London and big-shot eco-panjandrum. "When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it," he said recently. "This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not." David Suzuki, Canadian eco-messiah, is cool with that: he recently called for politicians who disagree with him on "climate change" to be thrown in jail. It would be nice to think that Mr. Suzuki's totalitarian tendencies would render him beyond the pale, unacceptable in polite society, exposed as a buffoon who wants brute force to compel what his lazy arguments cannot. But come Christmas season he'll still be getting the A-list invites and schmoozing with celebs.
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