The world refused to believe reports coming out of Russia in the early 1930s of Joseph Stalin's forced collectivization of peasants that cost millions of lives. Nor did it credit accounts later in the decade which revealed that millions of other Soviet citizens, including "Old Bolsheviks" and second-generation communists, had been condemned to slave-labor camps. In those days, the Soviet Union was considered to be a "progressive" society, hence, by definition incapable of committing barbaric acts.
The world found difficulty believing that Hitler, evil though he was, could commit an enormity like the holocaust until World War II was almost over. We knew, of course, after November 1938 when Der Fuhrer launched his Kristalnacht pogroms throughout Germany, that he was guided by genocidal impulses. But our most sophisticated wartime leaders could not accept, at first, reports of the Reich's wanton murder of six million Jews and additional millions who belonged to various other nationalities.
Man's inhumanity to man is so . . . inhuman, that we often stand before it in openmouthed disbelief. Today, terrorist killings take place with such frequency around the globe that we are rendered numb with incredulity and horror. We realize that they are a grim reality, as all-too-graphic portrayals on television drive home to us. In one week alone, four car bombings killed scores of innocent bystanders in Beirut, while in far-off Bogota terrorists machine gunned a supreme court justice close to the spot where they had killed the minister of justice two years before.
And what about the equally insane horrors committed by the rulers of states? By the Muammar Qaddafis and Idi Amins? We think of them as psychopaths. What, then, are we to think when leaders of "progressive" states are bracketed together with such so-called madmen? Is it credible that a ruler whose image is that of a humanitarian-someone who is said to be creating a utopia-should turn out to be in fact a cruel despot and a bloodthirsty killer?
Fidel Castro presents to the world just such a case. For a quarter of a century "Fidel," as he is affectionately called, mesmerized Western society into believing that he had freed the Cuban people from oppression and ignorance, and that he was the champion of oppressed peoples everywhere; particularly in the Third World. To the Left, he was a kind of St. George of humanism, as he once called his doctrine, who would not lay down his arms until he had slain the dragon of imperialism wherever it reared its head. American and European leftists and liberals supported him when, in the name of liberation, he organized guerrilla movements to overthrow governments in Latin America and sent armies to help others take power in places as remote as Africa. If what he had finally admitted he stood for was communism, not humanism, so be it. American liberals were certain that he was only posing, or at worst committing a kind of hyperbole pardonable in a tropical leader. They tolerated in Castro political extremism that they abhorred in others. They even countenanced a certain machismo in the rough way he dealt with his enemies. Since they were after all the enemies of a society trying to create the "New Man" they merited harsh treatment.
American liberals raised no effective protest against the infamous paredon Castro introduced in the first days of the Cuban Revolution-a harbinger, as it turned out, of the future Cuban gulag. The date, we
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