National Post (National Edition)
Democracy needs champions, not apologists. It’s time the Liberals grow a spine.
It has been so delightfully amusing, taking in all the mockery and wickedness that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau brought upon himself by having keened so plaintively last weekend upon hearing the news of the death of that gruesome old Cuban caudillo Fidel Castro. We’ve all had a good laugh. We should also strive to be fair.
First, as wildly ill-advised as they were, nothing in Trudeau’s dolorous condolences would have been out of place had they been uttered at any gathering of fashionable society in Canada. Secondly, the Castros and the Trudeaus have been chummy for decades, so the dabbing of a hankie at the corner of one’s eye is considered practically de rigueur in these circumstances. Thirdly, Trudeau has quite sensibly declined his invitation to attend Castro’s state funeral next Sunday. Full marks for that.
The thing you’ll want to to take far more seriously, however, can be discerned in the jumbled cascade of whimpering inanity, equivocation and excuse-making that continues to accumulate like a pile of baby blankets around Trudeau, and around the blessed memory of El Commandante himself. It is playing out like a laboratory replication of the way a particularly corrosive form of intellectual and moral slovenliness is eating away at the very foundations of liberal democracy, allowing strongman populism to arise in its place.
There was a hint of it in the first instance, in Trudeau’s encomium, not so much the reiteration of the standard propaganda (“Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation .... ”) as in the subordinate clause, “While a controversial figure .... ” It’s in the fatal equivocation that begins so innocently with an “on the one hand, but on the other hand” invocation. That’s the thing to keep your eye on.
The descent into cacophony proceeds, thus: “Well, what about that time Stephen Harper offered his condolences to the king of Saudi Arabia?” “Sure, but what about Guantanamo?” “Well, what about Cuba’s great health-care system and its wonderfully high literacy rates?” “Sure Fidel may have been authoritarian but what about how he pulled Cuba out of poverty?” That sort of thing. It’s been deafening. There’s a term for it.
By the late 1940s, the Soviets had become adept at a cheap subject-changing trick that came to be called “whataboutism,” a propaganda dodge employed to defend against and deflect antiCommunist arguments that relied upon, say, the death by starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants overseen by Joseph Stalin. Soviet dissidents developed a descriptive term for it all their own: U nich negrov linchuyut (“Over there they lynch Negroes”).
The feint got stale after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989, but immediately after the atrocities of Sept. 11, a toxic form of “whataboutism” entrenched itself as the most commonplace rhetorical style of the liberal-left, and it was to remain embedded in leftish “discourse” in all the turmoils that followed. If you wanted to situate the precise time and place this began, you could do worse than put it at Oct. 18 of that disorienting year, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at a lecture delivered by the famous left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky.
Over the course of an hour and 15 minutes, Chomsky’s address on the subject of the events of 9/11 (as to who was directly responsible: “It doesn’t really matter much.”) was a full-to-bursting catalogue of whataboutism. What about how beastly the United States has been to the indigenous Hawaiians? What about all the Filipinos killed by Americans? What about the conquest of the northern half of Mexico? What about the ghastly friendships the United States has cultivated over the years in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua? What about the poor Palestinians? What about all the seedy allies the United States is taking on in its socalled war on terror? Who are we to talk? We can set aside the lowbrow propaganda that has been making the rounds about Castro, and about Cuba’s literacy rates and its health system, and about Castro’s feats in pulling Cuba up by its bootstraps. That’s the easy part.
The Cuban government claims that the country’s literacy rates are above 99 per cent. This may be true. But there would be nothing exceptional about it, according to UNESCO’s global surveys. The same literacy-rate levels are claimed by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
As for Cuba’s universal health-care system, never mind the scarcity of basic medicines or all the Cuban doctors who drive cabs or serve drinks to tourists just to pay their bills. Even if the propaganda claims were true, Cuba would still be but one of 58 countries with socialized medicine, including Botswana, Burkina Faso, Bhutan, Belarus, the Bahamas — that’s just the countries that start with “B.”
Well, what about how Castro pulled Cuba out of poverty to become one the richest countries in all of Latin America? Inconveniently, that’s not quite true. Before Castro, Cuba was one of the richest of the 47 Caribbean and Latin American countries, with a gross domestic product that tied with Guatemala’s for sixth place. A halfcentury after the 1959 revolution, Cuba was the thirdpoorest country in Latin America. But let’s be fair: let’s go by the Human Development Index yardsticks instead. The first HDI ranking in 1990, before the full effect of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the loss of its billions of dollars worth of subsidies took effect, Cuba’s place in the pack was the same as where it was when Castro showed up, if not slightly worse: in seventh place.
Oh yeah? Well what about the fact that these are obviously slanders you’ve been fed by some neoliberal thinktank to be circulated by the notoriously pro-capitalist National Post? Sorry, but all that economic data comes from Solidarity, “an independent socialist organization dedicated to forming a broad regrouping of the U.S. left.”
Well what about the crippling American embargo you never mentioned? What about that? Sorry, but here’s Solidarity: “Cuba and the United States have been economically isolated from each other but, despite the strenuous efforts of the U.S. government, Cuba has not been isolated from most of the rest of the globe. The main causes of Cuba’s poverty must surely be domestic.”
Here’s the biggest problem with whataboutism. It’s not just about the Castro cult, which is so deeply embedded in the flightier sections of what has lately been described, not particularly helpfully, as “the liberal elites.”
It cripples liberal democrats. It renders liberal democrats incapable of serious self-reflection and self-criticism. It equivocates between democracy and despotism. It has wounded liberal democracy deeply, and it has allowed, just for starters, the rise of Donald Trump in the United States, and of demagogues and dangerous right-wing populists right across Europe.
To be fair to Trudeau one last time, his sunny-ways brand of politics appears to be keeping the global trend of cynicism and strongmanworship at bay in Canada. His blubbering on the corpse of a caudillo did not help the cause, but at least liberal democracy is Trudeau’s cause. To be fair to Canada’s New Democrats and Conservatives, too, they have largely inoculated themselves against lumpen radicals of the right and the left.
But Trudeau’s Liberals better find some spine, and soon. Without a fire in the belly, liberalism stands for nothing, and falls for anything.