Shot in the Dark

False Equivalence

I was listening to some archival coverage from NPR over the weekend, from May of 1945, about the death of Adolf Hitler.  I was kind of surprised:

“On the one hand, he directly ordered the death of 11 million Jewish, gay, Roma, Sinti and Slavic civilians in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, and launched a war that led to the deaths of between 50 and 70 million people.

On the other hand, he was a committed vegetarian and dedicated to animal rights, and his death by gun suicide highlights attention on the epidemic of gun violence, in which guns killed millions of Europeans.

So the truth is somewhere in between.”

Well, no.  I made the whole thing up.  Well, not the whole thing; Hitler could in fact not bear the though of animals coming to harm.  He was a very forthright vegetarian, and had no tolerance for any sort of cruelty to animals.  But nobody in history has suggested that those facts even nudge the scale in comparison to his crimes against humanity and morality.

That would be just stupid.

I thought about this as I was listening to NPR talking about the death of Fidel Castro.

It was a series of “Journalists” bending over backwards to ensure the world knows that there were two sides to Fidel Castro; the one who “stood up for the little guy” (using funds taken from Russian and Eastern-European “little guys”, but that’s getting too detailed, right?), who was a huge patron of Cuban arts and sports, and public health on the one hand…

…and who may have been a bit of a totalitarian tyrant on the other. The truth, an NPR reporter sonorously reminded us, was “somewhere between the two”.

And it made me wonder – how many people WOULD he have had to murder to push the needle?

A visitor to this planet might wonder who’s being more satirical, NPR or me.

 However, one can forgive NPR for being at least a little less detached from reality than five notable world leaders in their statements about Castro’s expiry.   If you happen to be a citizen Canada, have a word with Prime Minister McDreamy, eh?   Likewise, if you’re from Ireland or the EU, you need to see about changing leaders.  (If you are an Iranian citizen, you don’t have much more choice than the Cubans did; if you are a member of Britian’s Labour Party, you probably don’t know any better.
Fortunately, the WSJ has some moral sense, and has written about the effort to count Castro’s victims (from a conservative 9,000 to an all-too-plausible 90,000).

 

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Mitch Berg

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11 responses to “False Equivalence”

  1. Swiftee Plisken Avatar
    Swiftee Plisken

    Pol Pot wasn’t really such a bad sort, either, once you take the time to get to know him. I think the thing that keeps reprobate leftists from rallying to his memory is his choice in headgear.

    The little coal-stoker cap just doesn’t have the cachet of a beret. Leftists appreciate cachet.

  2. DMA Avatar
    DMA

    He opposed apartheid. Great. What’d he do in for the next 22 years?

  3. Seflores Avatar
    Seflores

    It has been a treat watching our unbiased media (aka the Democrat Party Dominated Media Culture) balancing or at least attempting to balance the Fidel of their lefty youth creating a Socialist paradise with FREE* world class healthcare and a 112% literacy rate* alongside the reality of the Castro brothers rapacious greed, their willingness to use, to borrow from PJ O’Rourke, that light Latin American touch when dealing with political opponents and imprisoning and outright killing political opponents and ‘teh gayz’. I love when they claim on the one hand Fidel liberated the Cuban people from Batista and Yanqui` capitalism only to also claim the Cuban people have suffered from a lack of Yanqui` capitalism.
    Fidel had the one thing the left craves most – the ability to enrich one self from others suffering while silencing and killing any detractors. As noted elsewhere, Fidel broke quite a few eggs, but Cuba never got the omelette.
    *Let’s just agree math isn’t one of their things

  4. Swiftee Plisken Avatar
    Swiftee Plisken

    Speaking of false equivalence, over at the execrable Minnpost, a moribund Eric Black finds a slender ray of sunshine to cling to.
    I wasn’t even going to write for today, but then I read New Yorker Editor David Remnick’s piece, dated today and headed for inky publication soon I’m sure, but available online here, in which Remnick attempts to show us the recent events through the eyes of Barack Obama

    He shares several of his favorite excerpts, all of which will trigger a gag reflex in any real American, but this one stands out:

    Last year, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, he stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, and defined American exceptionalism as embodied by its heroes, its freedom fighters: Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, John Lewis, the “gay Americans whose blood ran in the streets of San Francisco and New York”; its Tuskegee Airmen and Navajo code-talkers, its 9/11 volunteers and G.I.s, and its immigrants — Holocaust survivors, Lost Boys of Sudan, and the “hopeful strivers who cross the Rio Grande.”

    So, to butthurt SJW’s (and Black), rectum rangers fighting for their right to march in assless chaps is the same as highly decorated, black pilots that risked, and lost their lives fighting Nazi’s in WWII. Mexican citizens illegally crossing our border, dancing in the streets in their Big Sombreros and waving the Mexican flag, demanding, not asking, demanding mind you, that we grant them citizenship, are just like the Jews facing mass extermination in gas chambers.

    These people need to be marginalized and scorned in the harshest possible terms, at every opportunity.

  5. Swiftee Plisken Avatar
    Swiftee Plisken

    Your comment is awaiting moderation.

    Cue jeopardy waiting theme…. da da da da da da daaaa,

  6. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    My favorite one about Fidel is where Oliver Stone quoted him as saying that in Cuba, even the prostitutes have college degrees. It takes a liberal (say, Stone) to not figure out that this also means that in Cuba, college graduates have so few job opportunities that they end up prostituting themselves.

    I’ve also read that the “man of the people” was a significant, um, “employer” of attractive female Cuban college graduates, if you catch my drift. Ya gotta wonder what we might have achieved with a few well-placed photos of Fidel on his billion dollar island resort off Havana cavorting with hookers.

  7. Seflores Avatar
    Seflores

    “Ya gotta wonder what we might have achieved with a few well-placed photos of Fidel on his billion dollar island resort off Havana cavorting with hookers.”
    Given the Democrats disaggregation strategy, his cavorting with female Cuban college grads would likely be explained away as Castro being a victim of his own “lusty, hot, Latin blood” and not a ‘victimizer’ as he would be if he were something other than a left-wing dictator.

  8. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    SP,

    OMG. I have got to write bout that one.

    There is literally too much material out there these days.

  9. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    Cue jeopardy waiting theme

    Pretty sure the term “Rectum Ranger” tripped you up.

  10. Chuck Avatar
    Chuck

    The Trudeau mocking tweets are great. A couple of better ones:

    -Today we mourn the death of Jeffrey Dahmer, who opened his home to the LGBTQ community and pushed culinary boundaries.

    -Mr. Stalin’s greatest achievement was his eradication of obesity in the Ukraine through innovative agricultural reforms

  11. Jethrene Avatar
    Jethrene

    Peter Hitchens — the “other Hitchens” writes on Castro’s death: http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/11/fidel-castro-was-a-monster-not-a-rock-star-or-a-liberator-or-a-hero.html
    Peter Hitchens’ Daily Mail blog is well worth reading, but his politics are hard to describe. They don’t fit well into American categories. Peter Hitchens has always been described as Christopher Hitchens conservative, Christian brother, but while Christopher Hitchens welcomed the US invasion of Iraq, Peter Hitchens opposed it as just more imperialistic adventurism by the ruling class.
    Peter Hitchens is a conservative “Little Englander” who doesn’t like America very much.
    His writing style is admirable.

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