People of Revolution

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Hello Reader,

Got revolution?

I’ve been remembering my youth these last few weeks… this will be my last post on the topic.

YESTERDAY

A week ago I re-read a terrible story by Marina Nemat, a Canadian woman. Marina was tortured in Persia (Iran) for two years, ostensibly in the name of God, but actually by those who had used the revolution to seize power.

 I’ll get back to her, 

but first,

QUOTE:

Revolutions were a tricky thing, and this one would be no different. Hard-line clerics  fanned the flames of the populace’s rage…Young students and professionals who wanted to throw off the censorship and yoke of the shah’s secret police had no idea that they were making an alliance with a group that was no friend of free speech, feminism, and the enlightenment of Persian education. The youth of the country, however, were swept up in the storm of change like an angry uneducated mob. Very few stopped to think what things would be like after the shah was removed. Ashani knew, though. In the end, revolutions were almost always won by whatever group was most willing to slaughter any and all opposition. Nearly three decades, a marriage, and five daughters later it was clear to Ashani that many of those students regretted what they had done. 

UNQUOTE 

(Protect and Defend, a thriller, by Vince Flynn, 2007, page 11 hardcover)

I’m sorry for those students.

TODAY

As recently as last month, September, in the Camden Market in London, I saw that decades-old T-shirt of my youth. The one showing the clean-shaven face of a  handsome young man wearing a beret, with his eyes fixed on something ideal in the distance: the revolutionary Che Guevara. I wonder if everybody today who buys the T-shirt know who he is. A manager at work told me he asked a young man wearing the shirt, “Do you know who it is?” and the lad replied no, but he thought maybe it was a basketball star.

Back in the 1960’s many were thinking of revolution, with some folks wearing cool berets.  I am sorry to spoil anyone’s romantic view of the 1960’s and the various liberation struggles, but I must speak out: Because in an age where today the young male equivalents of Che Guevara are seeking revolution through religious violence, it is important to remember that idealism can serve evil as well as good. Today I refuse to give Muslim clerics and university professors of religious studies any sort of “diplomatic immunity” just because they are professing religion… along with their hatred.

This month, in mid-October, the Epoch Times ran a story on Che (page A9 for Oct. 13-19)

“Although many believe Che was a doctor in his homeland of Argentina, he never did graduate from medical school. In fact, he dropped out to join the fomenting Marxist revolution in Cuba funded by the Soviet Union.”

Che wrote:

“To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. … These are the procedures of the bourgeois detail. This a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the teaching of the Wall!” he wrote in “Motorcycle Diaries.” 

Che also wrote:

 “Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls into my hands. My nostrils dilate while savouring the acrid odour of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!”

No, I won’t buy his handsome T-shirt.

Early this month, in the library display rack, I saw Canadian Marina Nemat’s face on the front cover of her book, After Tehran, where she has post traumatic stress disorder in Canada. As with the Canadian armed forces and first responders, it can take years for problems to be admitted enough to work on them. She’s a lot better now. As for Guevara’s phrase “judicial proof is unnecessary” I am reminded of something: I’m sure there was never any proof before sending thousands, literally thousands, of teenagers to somehow crowd in to the infamous Evin torture prison in Iran.

Here in Canada, Nemat received medical help to deal with her torture, and support from her community. But not everyone was reasonable, supportive and nice. In her book she changed the name of the only person who was cruel. It was a female university professor Marina initially worked with by doing translations and transcriptions. Cruel from her leftist ideology. 

Perhaps for some readers of After Tehran, such as the ones who thought Che’s T-shirt logo was a basketball star, it might seem impossible that a 21st century professor can be so cruel. But not to me, not at all, because I knew such people during my youth. “But wait old man!” someone asks, “Aren’t today’s learned professors all open-minded, in gentle tweed, puffing on their pipes?” I regret to say: No. Some are like learned imams (clerics) in Muslim churches. 

History repeats, for sure, and this grim fact is partly because ordinary people won’t believe that such “ethically challenged” people exist. That’s why some folks thought Che loved the people, was no communist, but merely an “agrarian reformer.” Others believed that a socialist German loved the people, but merely wanted national socialism. Nazism for short.

Maybe it’s because of my harsh youth, but I just can’t get over how even today professors can still be so ignorant. So I am posting clips in TOMORROW from two of my essays, about the infamous “Regina 16,” 16 professors safe in their ivory tower, who will still be there tomorrow, which I posted in 2007. Let’s try to know our history.

TOMORROW

Back in 2007, as Canadians fell in Afghanistan, leaving young children back home, I was angry at the “Regina 16.” I thought professors should know better.

So here’s a footnote from 2007’s April essay Decent Democracy

~… recently (March 24) some Canadian professors in Regina—16 of them— were equally crazy. Obviously these eggheads think not only is our government "separate," like an occupying power, but that the soldiers are separate too. They signed a letter saying the children of soldiers killed in Afghanistan should not be allowed to have university scholarships (heroes program) because the war was "imperialism." 

Clearly they have forgotten the average soldier can't even define "imperialism," while the rest of us regular Canadians are also shaky on that word... Surely it is the responsibility of the professors, as a part of our community, and part of our body politic, to educate the rest of us. But no. Instead they feel separate, off in some alienated ivory tower. Wimps.

To further understand communists, here is an (revised) excerpt from my April 2007 essay about the Regina 16, Socialists reject Soldiers:

QUOTE 

Actually, not “some” but “most” socialists had a strident lack of fellowship for guys like me. I could spot their lack of caring by reading any of their publications supposedly intended for first time readers, for “folks who had just come in off the street.” All I had to do was take a red hi-light pen to every word I didn’t understand. Did the writers really think regular folks would know what a proletariat is? A bourgeoisie? A lackey? A running dog? By the time I’d finished making red marks the page had a very bad case of measles. 

I decided these leftists with their measles may not hate me for being so handsome or so rich, but based on their writing they surely wouldn’t care about me.

Now, in our new century, in which Berlin has always been one city,  the ivory towers remain the last islands of communism on this continent. One of the Regina 16 had a column published in the Calgary Herald. His piece doesn’t quite have the measles, but neither does it communicate. In the first two paragraphs I find: “…illegal imperialist war of invasion and occupation (He means by Canadians)…our troops… are invaders and occupiers…a U.S. puppet-regime…

What scenario is this professor coming from? In his column, in words too distasteful to repeat here, he trolls Canadian history and sees the army as “an arm of the state” employed against the workers during various strikes: “…workers faced machine gun nests and armoured cars.” In other words, to this leftist professor, the rosy cheeked army men are historically not “our boys” but instead belong to Darth Vader. 

UNQUOTE

Although I have a university degree, I still try my best to feel solidarity and empathy with working class boys in uniform. Somehow, those sixteen professors have suffered a failure of empathy. I pity them. When empathy fails, can cruelty be far behind?

Sean Crawford

October

2017

Calgary

Afterthought:

Given that the Argentinian Che Guevara met his end leading guerrillas in the forests of Bolivia—after encouraging the killing of many Bolivians—I want to quote the gentle Han Suyin, the lady I praised in a recent essay:

“Revolution should be neither exported nor imported.”

A cartoon: 

I dimly remember a Doonesbury cartoon. 

Picture two small boys, one black, one white, at the kitchen table with milk and cookies. The black boy would have surely worn a black beret, like the black panthers, and probably his white friend had a beret too. Lacking any revolutionary clenched fist scowls, the boys are clearly enjoying themselves. The caption:

“Even revolutionaries like chocolate chip cookies!”