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| No-one can take this guy serious anymore... |
If President Raúl Castro wants to defend Cuba’s
record on human rights, all he needs to do point to the fact that his
brother has not been deposed from his formal position as First Secretary
of the Communist Party, and carted off to an isolation ward in the Casa
de Dementes, Havana’s psychiatric hospital. Instead he has unstinted
access to the state radio and the newspaper Granma.
In both of these media Castro, now 84, has spouted a steady stream of drivel.
Memorable among these forays intonutdom was his
outburst of conspiracism on the sixth anniversary of the Trade
Center/Pentagon attacks with the whole slab of nonsense read out by a
Cuban television presenter.
Castro claimed that the Pentagon was hit by a
rocket, not a plane, because no traces were found of its passengers.
"Only a projectile could have created the geometrically round orifice
created by the alleged airplane," according to Fidel. "We were deceived
as well as the rest of the planet's inhabitants." All nonsense of
course. There were remains of the passengers on the plane that hit the
Pentagon, in the form of teeth and other bits traced through DNA.
Hundreds of people saw the plane -- people who know the difference
between a plane and a cruise missile. The wreckage of the plane was
hauled out from the site.
It’s logical that maximum leaders like Castro are
conspiracists by disposition. Since they are control freaks, the random
and the accidental are alien to their frame of reference. If it
happened, it happened for a reason. And if a bad thing happened, it was
very probably a conspiracy.
More recently, in early August of this year Castro
touted to his audience in Cuba and across the world his sympathy with
one of the standard mantras of nutdom, which is the belief that the
world is run by the Bilderberg Club.
The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an
article on August 18, spread across three of the eight pages of the
Communist Party newspaper Granma, quoting in extenso
from the Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin’s 'The Secrets of the
Bilderberg Club,' (2006) alleging the Bilderbergers control everything,
which must mean that they pack a lot in to the three-day session the
Club holds each year as its sole public activity. Of course they
probably skype each other a lot too and rot out their brains plotting
and planning on their cell phones.
Followers of the Alex Jones (Radio ) Show, a
sanctuary of conspiracism, no doubt remember Estulin’s claim in 2007
that he had "received information from sources inside the U.S.
intelligence community which suggests that people from the highest
levels of the U.S. government are considering an assassination attempt
against Congressman Ron Paul because they are threatened by his
burgeoning popularity.” The bits of Estulin’s book reverently quoted by
Castro, who called Estulin honest and well informed, retread some of
the doctrines of Lyndon LaRouche, one of the most lurid conspiracists in
political history, (though I do have affectionate memories of
LaRouche’s claim in 1984 in a ad running on the CBS network that
former vice president Walter Mondale, then running against Ronald Reagan
for the Oval Office, was an “agent of influence” of the Soviet
Intelligence services. At the time LaRouchies were in close contact with
the Reagan White House.)
On the evidence of his quotes from Estulin, Castro
is much taken by Estulin’s view that members of the Marxist Frankfurt
School such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who fled to the US
from the Nazis before World War Two, had been recruited by the
Rockefellers to popularize rock music to "control the masses" by
seducing them from the fight for civil rights and social justice.
According to Estulin, reverently quoted by Castro, 'The man charged with
ensuring that the Americans liked the Beatles was Walter Lippmann
himself.'
So Fidel Castro believes that the Beatles were
invented by the Rockefellers, and that Walter Lippmann, the pundit who
drafted President Wilson’s Fourteen Points in 1918, crowned his
literary/political career in 1968 by sending John Lennon the lyrics for
“Revolution”, with its demobilizing message: “You say you want a
revolution /Well, you know /We all want to change the world /… But when
you talk about destruction /Don't you know that you can count me out.”
(In fact I seem to remember that Lennon actually wrote the song as an
answer to my friends Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, who as members of New Left Review
and the Fourth International had suggested to Lennon that the Beatles
pony up some dough to finance the revolutionary cause.)
And now Castro’s latest outing into political
asininity has been to give an interview to Jeffrey Goldberg, of the
Atlantic, allowing the man Castro cordially describes as “a great
journalist” to cite Castro as saying that the Cuban economic model has
been a disaster.
Goldberg is an appalling journalist, whose most
notable achievement was to run an enormous piece in the New Yorker in
the run-up to the attack on Iraq in 2003, which was one of the most
effective exercises in disinformation designed to stoke up the Congress
and public opinion in favor of the war. The piece was billed as
containing disclosures of "Saddam Hussein's possible ties to al Qaeda."
This was at a moment when the FBI and CIA had just
shot down the war party's claim of a meeting between Mohammed Atta and
an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before the 9/11 attacks. Goldberg
saved the day for the Bush crowd. At the core of his rambling,
16,000-word article was an interview in the Kurdish-held Iraqi town of
Sulaimaniya with Mohammed Mansour Shahab, who offered the eager Goldberg
a wealth of detail about his activities as a link between Osama bin
Laden and the Iraqis, shuttling arms and other equipment.
The piece was gratefully seized upon by the
Administration as proof of The Link. The coup de grâce to Goldberg's
credibility came on February 9, 2003 in the London Observer,
administered by Jason Burke, its chief reporter. Burke visited the same
prison in Sulaimaniya, talked to Shahab and established beyond doubt
that Goldberg's great source is a clumsy liar, not even knowing the
physical appearance of Kandahar, whither he had claimed to have
journeyed to deal with bin Laden; and confecting his fantasies in the
hope of a shorter prison sentence. Needless to say, Burke’s demolition
was not picked up in the U.S. press, nor has the New Yorker ever
apologized for Goldberg’s story, certainly as pernicious as anything
offered by Judy Miller in the New York Times.
Since Castro has been sounding tremendous alarums
about a possible attack on Iran, it’s bizarre to find him lofting
Goldberg, a former member of the Israeli Defense Force, to the
journalistic pantheon and taking pains to paint his fellow 9/11
conspiracist, president Ahmadinejad of Iran, as an anti-Semite.
Some on the left see Castro’s deprecating remarks
about the failure of the Cuban economic model as part of a tactical
maneuver to help his brother institute the “reforms” that will see
somewhere between half a million and million Cubans lose their jobs. I
see it as a spectacularly foolish misjudgement by Castro, who told
Goldberg "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore” and later
said he was misinterpreted and that he meant the exact opposite, which
is obvious nonsense.
Then Castro took Goldberg to – of all disgusting
things – a dolphin exhibition. Lock the old fool up I say, free the
dolphins and turn the exhibition into a theme park for all the CIA’s
efforts to kill Castro, including booby-trapping a coral reef. The
ironies of history: the CIA failed, and here’s Castro taking up the
task, methodically assassinating his reputation, week after week.
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
From: CounterPunch
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