Fidel Castro, the dictator and oppressor-in-chief of communist Cuba, has resigned as president. At last!

For some years now, pundits have been speculating whether Fidel Castro really is still alive. A case in point is the Wall Street Journal’s resident funny man, James Taranto. Despite clear indications to the contrary, Taranto speculated in August 2006 that his condition might improve to such an extent that doctors may soon be able to pronounce him dead. The following January, he noted a headline that began, “Castro Reportedly in Grave…”, and bemoaned the fact that the next word was “Condition”. He wished the adjective were a noun.

I share Taranto’s disdain for Castro. Having overthrown the corrupt Fulgencio Batista almost 50 years ago with promises of liberation, he instead murdered hundreds of opponents, jailed thousands more, and established an oppressive, communist tyranny. The pretence of a glorious revolution for freedom and democracy didn’t last long. However, the cult of El Lider Maximo, as he became known, took on heroic proportions. First, the Bay of Pigs betrayal was spun into a glorious victory by Cuba over the evil Americans. Not long afterwards, the legendary stand-off between him, as proxy for Nikita Kruschev, and John F Kennedy cemented Castro’s reputation, and the secret deal that ended the Cuban missile crisis cemented his political survival and longevity.

Surprisingly, Cuban communism survived — but only just — the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, the real Cuba, described by people other than leftist propagandists led by the nose by state minders, remained rather less romantic than the fantasies of useful idiots would have it. Still, Cuba remains an icon of hope for people who love 1950s automobilia, or pine for the glory days of Soviet anti-capitalism. People like Thabo Mbeki, for example. Apparently, we have a lot to learn from Cuba. I’d agree. We can learn how not to run a country, or an economy, for example.

Here’s hoping Cuba rouses itself from its torpor and shakes off the bonds of Castro’s mind-numbing personality cult. Here’s hoping they reject the regency he has installed, in the person of his brother, Raúl Castro. Here’s hoping that when they do, they also renounce the destructive communist idealism of which El Lider Maximo was one of the last hold-outs. Here’s to the fall of Fidel Castro.

Update: Corrected an error, introduced by careless editing, which made the last sentence of the second paragraph refer to the wrong antecedent.

This column was first published in Maverick magazine of 1 November 2007, lightly edited and heavily hyperlinked for your convenience. Maverick is an old-fashioned print-media business publication in South Africa that does old-fashioned things like pay writers, so if you’d consider subscribing you’d be doing me (and the magazine) an old-fashioned favour.

The nice thing about idiots and their fellow travellers is how easy they are to spot. A brilliant example is Canadian superstar, Naomi Klein.

Naomi Klein just wrote a shocking new book. It is bound to make her a fortune.

She gained a good measure of fame at age 30 by writing a sort of little red book for the Battle of Seattle anti-globalisation movement. No Logo was a bold, broad tirade against brands and their owners.

Of course, she could only “take aim” at them (in her rather aggressive term) because she could identify them. They are big-brand organisations in the first place, and their reputations make big targets for the likes of Klein. Hers was no denunciation of Maxi’s Mini Meat Market, Randy’s Rural Rod & Reel, or Sam’s Suburban Suburban Sales. She was bullying the “brand bullies”: Nike and McDonalds, Microsoft and Pepsi, companies whose very brand profile give consumers immense power over them.

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A frequent theme in political rants, both on the libertarian/anarchist right and the socialist/anarchist left, is the notion of the limited liability company. Usually, the concept of limited liability is defined however it best suits the argument, and usually to negative effect. For example, the film The Corporation (2003) was recently screened on SABC 1 in South Africa. As with most bulk-buy trash, it was a late-night broadcast, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open after an hour and a half of distortion, sly inference, slander, oversimplification, quasi-legal mumbo-jumbo, out-of-context quotation, innuendo, and general anti-capitalist drivel. I’m strong, but not strong enough for 145 minutes of Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein all together.

Still, I got the idea: The Corporation, portrayed with sinister madness through a montage of accidents, disasters, lost legal battles, famous frauds, cuts to Hitler and a clever theme of selected crude advertising footage from the 1950s, is evil and dangerous. Worse, you and I are just wide-eyed ingénues too stupid to defend our virtue. For that, we have heroes like Captain Moore, Gnome Chomsky and the Little Gnome. One of the major themes in the film was this notion of (cue dramatic crescendo)… limited liability. It was vaguely interpreted to imply a corporation and the evil people that comprise it — by which they mean everyone above the LOE (line of evility) that you’ll find on every HR (human resources) org chart at about the level of M/CM (middle and compromised management) — gets to deny liability for their actions. In essence, a limited-liability company charter, granted by the evil corporatist government, is a licence to exploit, harm and kill, and exploiting, harming and killing customers and employees is a great way to make money. Or so the illogic goes.

If this kind of thinking is appealing, because you’re either a right-wing anarchist who thinks governments are evil and therefore legal protections granted in corporate law are probably evil too, or you’re a left-wing socialist who thinks corporations are evil and have corrupted government in order to exploit the poor masses, it may be worth reading an excellent essay by Brad Edmonds, over at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, in which he discusses what a limited liability company is and is not, who is and isn’t liable, and on what legal, political and philosophical grounds the concept is based.

I enjoyed this interview by Eric, over at the Tygrrrr Express, with John Podhoretz, the sometimes controversial but usually eloquent incoming editor of the neoconservative Commentary magazine, the publication his father Norman once edited.

In particular, his quip on uniting Americans is funny: “I, for one, have no interest in uniting with Michael Moore. I have no idea how to reduce the acrimony. People enjoy it more than they admit.” His view on Israel taking action against Iran’s nuclear programme also elicited a chuckle: “After Lebanon, I see no reason to have faith that Ehud Olmert knows how to find the men’s room.”

That’s the title of a new film in which Kevin Leffler, an old schoolmate of Michael Moore’s, turns a camera on Moore himself. The thought of Moore waddling away from ambush interviews, which he abuses so frequently himself, is just priceless.

The film, according to Henry P. Wickham Jr. over at the American Thinker, is “a commendable documentary that shows Michael Moore to be something other than that self-anointed, compassionate advocate for the ‘little guy.’”

Wickham compares the propaganda techniques of Moore with those of the classic propaganda master, Joseph Goebbels, who wrote that arguments must be “crude, clear, and forcible, and appeal to the emotions and instincts, not the intellect”.

Having seen a few of Moore’s films — notably Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911 — and knowing something more about the subject matter than what I saw in those films, I can only concur with this characterisation of his work.

I dislike Moore not because of his hypocrisy or outright lies, however. In fact, I grudgingly admire his ability to make a killing out of the gullibility of his audience, and that this audience has at times even included senior political figures, presidential candidates, and a veritable bevy of Hollywood All-Saints. The reason I dislike Moore is because so many people take him seriously. His hateful lies, partisan distortions and paranoid conspiracy theories infect popular political culture, to the detriment of sane and rational policy choices everywhere.

Michael Moore isn’t brave. He’s a shrewd exploiter of the left-wing lumpenproletariat, which is primed to believe everything he says, and takes even the most obvious misdirections at face value. He uses most — if not all — of the techniques in the famous Skeptical Inquirer essay, How to sell a pseudoscience. (Hat-tip: The Reference Frame, where Luboš Motl aptly applies the pseudoscience essay to the “science” of anthropogenic global warming.)

In short, Moore is a quack, and if he deserves any respect at all it is for his success at parting so many fools and their money.

That said, I can see where Wickham is coming from when he writes:

Shooting Michael Moore is a worthy rebuttal to Michael’s Moore’s pomposity, avarice, and dishonesty. The film helps us understand why Michael Moore, so filled with contempt for much of what is good, is himself so utterly contemptible.

St. Michael Moore got all upset with CNN for daring to question some of the numbers and omissions in SiCKO, his latest “documentary” (his word, not mine) on the US health care system. The film includes, for example, a wonder-filled PR job on the blessings of the Cuban socialised system. I’ve posted before on the inaccuracy of that particular bit of “journalism”. CNN apparently did the same, questioning for example why Moore cherry-picked statistics from different reports (rather than using comparable data) and how it came about that he’s inconsistent about certain data in his film and on his website.

Now Moore is huffy and full of bluster - a scary, Deaniac sight if ever there was one. It’s hilarious, I know, but he actually presumes to lecture CNN on what it means to be a “good journalist”. It appears journalists who just try to uncover and report the facts, are critical of propaganda, or tell both sides of the story just aren’t being “honest”. Not to mention that CNN has always been so nice to him, and now this! The megalomania of the man is staggering. Mind you, he does know how to tap anti-market, anti-war and other populist left-wing tropes in his films to make millions from his gullible audience. And as he blithely admits in his angry rant at CNN, if he stands to make lots of money from someone, he’s going to say what they like to hear. What a journalist!

A good (albeit rather badly written) overview of the substance of the fight can be found here and here. CNN reportedly issued a statement in response to Moore’s tirade, responding point by point. Also see Dr Gupta’s blog post.

Bella Thomas went to Cuba, and returned wondering why so many Western visitors continue to romanticise a place that, for ordinary people, remains synonymous with privation and tyranny. Did they - like Michael Moore - go only where their official guides took them, and speak to locals only in front of the regime’s minders?

Her portrayal in Prospect is pleasantly prolix, but poignant, perceptive and perspicuous.

The king of vulgar, Michael Moore, has released yet another pop hit full of socialist gullibility and leftwing propaganda. The film advocates socialised medicine à la Canada et Comrade Castro as the solution to the free world’s ills. Granted, his proposals would relieve us of a lot of freedom, indeed. Just as his buddy El Lider Maximo did for the happy people who didn’t betray the revolution by sailing to Miami on inner tubes and kitchen tables.

The film’s title is Sicko, which makes the accompanying image even more scary than it would anyway be. I had been planning to see the film, if only to dissect it for the sake of science. With this sicko photograph on the movie poster, however, I’m not sure I can face a darkened movie theatre.