RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.wsj.com/articles/fidels-venezuelan-legacy-1480551271

Fidel Castro’s death has elicited a flood of commentary about his legacy, including predictable tributes to his alleged achievements in health care and education. Readers interested in a more accurate accounting should read current headlines about life and death in Venezuela.

Except for Nicaragua in the 1980s, Venezuela has more wholly adopted Castro’s economic and ideological model than any other Latin American nation. The late Hugo Chávez took his cues from Castro on everything from his fondness for army fatigues to his 10-hour speeches. Chávez also adopted the Castro model of seizing private property, suppressing the independent media, hounding political opponents and making cause with rogues in Damascus and Tehran.

For a while Venezuela escaped some of the inevitable consequences thanks to a flood of petrodollars. That’s over. Inflation is forecast to reach 1,640% next year. Caracas is the world’s most violent city. Hospitals have run out of basic medicines, including antibiotics, leading to skyrocketing infant mortality. There are chronic and severe shortages of electricity, food and water, as well as ordinary consumer goods like diapers or beer. Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s handpicked successor, has put his leading political opponents in jail.

And there’s hunger. An estimated 120,000 Venezuelans flooded into neighboring Colombia to buy food when Mr. Maduro briefly opened the border in July. Desperate Venezuelans are trekking through the Amazon hinterlands to make it to Brazil. And, like Cubans, they are taking to boats, risking their lives to make it to the nearby Dutch colony of Curaçao. Where there’s socialism there are boat people.

For years Caracas supplied Cuba with cheap oil. Havana returned the favor by providing the Chavista regime with much of its security apparatus, including thousands of military advisers and intelligence agents. Few doubted Castro’s skill in holding on to power, and Mr. Maduro and his lieutenants have the same determination.

Not long ago young leftists were hailing the achievements of Chávez’s “revolution,” much as a previous generation celebrated Castro’s. Western credulity about socialism is eternal, which perhaps explains the tearful eulogies for Castro. Those less easily suckered need only look at Venezuela’s desperate boat people to know the truth of Fidel’s legacy.

When Leonard Cohen died in early November, the flags of Montreal, his native city, were lowered to half-mast. Friends and fans exchanged notes of condolence. Leonard was such a mournful singer that he seemed to have readied his admirers for the loss of him, supplying the words and music for their lament. Many—and his Jewish devotees most of all—continue to grieve for the man who danced them to the end of love.http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2016/11/no-apologies-how-to-respond-to-slander-of-israel-and-jews/

Leonard’s eminence was never any mystery to me, a fellow Montrealer and fellow undergraduate (two years behind him) at McGill University. Decades later, when I set out to write a memoir of my college years, I found that I remembered him more distinctly than I remembered myself at that age. Although he was by no means the closest of my friends, not my lover or even the man I most admired among that assemblage of aspiring students, the title of my essay, “My Life without Leonard Cohen,” conveyed the realization that by organizing my memories around his singular presence, I could best reconstruct how our respective paths in life had diverged.

In college Leonard gave the impression of being a little unsure about everything—except his talent. In my essay, which was published in Commentary in 1995, I described how in his senior year and my sophomore year, our shared teacher Louis Dudek launched the McGill Poetry Series with Leonard’s first published book of verse; I helped to raise the money for that project and took part in the discussions surrounding its appearance. The title of the book,Let Us Compare Mythologies, already hinted at his idea of Judaism as but one set of beliefs among many. In a university that then included in its curriculum not a single reference to Judaism or the Jews, we who constituted about a third of the undergraduate population tended to devalue our heritage. “Culture” for us meant Matthew Arnold; “poetry” (at least for students of Dudek) meant T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Although we were never tempted to deny our Jewishness, it seemed bad form to practice it overtly or to mention it in our classes. Cosmopolitan worldliness was our watchword.

Soon after college I rebelled against this self-denigration and determined to introduce Jewish literature into the academy. In 1969 I helped to found the Jewish Studies program at McGill and taught courses in Yiddish literature. Meanwhile, Leonard for his part was launched on an exploration of spiritual experience that eventually took him to the Buddhist monastery on Mount Baldy, California. In his writing and through other forms of experimentation he was intent on finding the combination that was right for him.

My 1995 essay,swaddled in appreciation and love, nonetheless reflected my disappointment over Leonard’s choice. He had written that Canadians were “desperate for a Keats.” I demurred:

Not true in my case. I was desperate for a Cohen. I bet on him as on a racehorse, prayed for him as for an angel. His confidence and his talent were such that I accorded to him my highest hopes, certain that he would become the guardian truth-teller of my generation.

By “Cohen” I had in mind the Jewish high-priestly caste, a fitting association for a poet reaching for greatness. Thou shalt not flirt with other gods is the basis of the Jewish creed. I’d been writing about the two of us in parallel, but at this point in my essay I switched tracks; the man climbing Mount Baldy was not standing with me at the foot of Mount Sinai. He would follow his muse wherever she led him; if I wanted a poet or writer for the Jewish people, I would have to look elsewhere.

To my surprise, soon after the essay’s appearance I received a note from Leonard, whom I’d not seen in years. It was unmistakably distressed. “I don’t know about ‘flower-childrens’ brigades,” he wrote, referring to my description of the audiences he was attracting,

Instead of blaming Obama, the Germans have the effrontery to blame Trump. And What unified Europe is this loon talking about? The Slavic nations, Hungary, France, Holland, Italy are looking away towards the American model….while German cities are becoming Allahstans…..rsk

Trump Election Means Europe Must Now Lead West -http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/trump-election-means-europe-must-now-lead-west-a-1120929.html

Even history sometimes leans toward pathos. In January 2017, when Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, the American Age will celebrate its 100th birthday — and its funeral.
The West was constituted in its modern form in January 1917. World War I was raging in Europe at the time and in Washington, D.C., President Woodrow Wilson told his country that it was time for Americans to take responsibility for “peace and justice.” In April he said: “The world must be made safe for democracy.” He declared war on Germany and sent soldiers to Europe to secure victory for the Western democracies — and the United States assumed the leadership of the Western world. It was an early phase of political globalization.

One hundred years later: Trump.

Trump, who wants nothing to do with globalization; Trump, who preaches American nationalism, isolation, partial withdrawal from world trade and zero responsibility for a global problem like climate change. And all of this after a perverse election campaign marked by resentment, racism and incitement.

Human dignity is the centerpiece of the Western project. Following the revolutions in France and the United States in the late 18th century, states began guaranteeing human rights for the first time. Human rights have a normative character, as Heinrich August Winkler argued in his monumental work “History of the West.” And a racist cannot embody this normative project. Trump has no sense of dignity — neither for himself nor others. He does not qualify as the leader of the Western world, because he is both unwilling and incapable of assuming that role.

We now face emptiness — the fear of the void. What will happen to the West, to Europe, to Germany without the United States as its leading power? Germany is a child of the West, particularly of the United States, brought to life with American generosity, long spoon-fed and now in a deep state of shock. The American president was always simultaneously our president, at least a little, and Barack Obama was a worthy president of the West. Now, though, we must come to terms with a lack of Western leadership.

It is the seventh day after Donald Trump’s triumph, an election upset that set off a political earthquake around the world, and time for a visit with those far away from Washington who think like him. Members of France’s Front National (FN) are meeting at the five-star Hotel Napoléon in Paris, not far from the Champs-Élysées.

The topics of discussion this evening include disadvantaged youth in the outer districts of the capital, known as the banlieues, and radical Islamists who are recruiting new members there. The mood is explosive in the banlieues, warns the speaker, a resolute blonde woman, who goes on to say it is a ticking time bomb that could go off at any moment. “I am the only one who can defuse this bomb,” she adds.

Her words are met with cheers and applause. Marine Le Pen has struck the right note, once again. Here, in the stuffy conference room at the Hotel Napoléon, people want to hear what they have long believed: That Islam constitutes a threat and that France’s very future is on the line. Marine, the daughter of Front National co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been the head of her party for almost six years.

‘We Want To Destroy this EU’

The Frenchwoman will soon enter the presidential election campaign under the slogan “Marine 2017.” Within a few years, she has managed to garner the support of like-minded individuals, and not just in her native France. Le Pen also chairs the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group in the European Parliament. ENF brings together elected representatives from nine countries, people who share an unmistakable common goal. “We want to destroy this EU,” says Le Pen.

Less than two weeks after the election of the new US president, Europe’s anti-establishment parties are feeling the wind in their sails. “A Trump victory was considered unthinkable,” says Le Pen, who sent the billionaire her euphoric congratulatory message on Twitter on the night of the election. “Our life has changed,” Nigel Farage of Britain’s UK Independence Party (UKIP) says over a gin & tonic in the lounge of European Parliament in Brussels. In Vienna, Heinz-Christian Strache of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) proudly reports that he has already reached out to Trump advisers in Washington. And in Dresden, Frauke Petry of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany party is planning to announce her candidacy in the 2017 Bundestag election, which is likely to see AfD land seats in federal parliament for the first time.

Populist leaders, who see themselves as the only true representatives of the people, have long known and respected each other. But the days of backroom deals are now over. Le Pen is flirting with her fellow European populists on the open stage: here a kiss of the hand for Marine in Vienna, there a chuckle and a joke with Geert Wilders in The Hague and even a little dance with Matteo Salvini, leader of the separatist Lega Nord in Italy.

The consequences of Mutti Merkel’s treasonous madness will be felt for years in Germany:

A German intelligence officer has reportedly been arrested over a suspected Islamist plot to bomb the agency’s headquarters in Cologne.

The 51-year-old official was said to have made a “partial confession” to the plot, according to Der Spiegel.

The suspect attempted to pass on “sensitive information about the BfV (Germany’s domestic security agency), which could lead to a threat to the office”, an official told the newspaper.

Well, this is just great. It’s clear that the occupying forces of Islam mean to make quick work of the Federal Republic of Germany, sucking its welfare coffers dry, molesting its women, taunting its capon males to do anything about it. Germany must die in the name of multiculturalism, diversity and tolerance, which is precisely why the international Left constantly pushes those “ideals.”

When you recall that Merkel grew up in the former DDR, raised to loathe and despise the West from childhood, her political goals become clear. But with resistance beaten out of the former Huns-turned-honies, it’s highly unlikely Germany can recover from this monumental act of treason.