Back to Father Daniel Berrigan, the Vietnam War activist who died recently at age 95. As we noted yesterday, his mainstream-media obits were overwhelmingly glowing. One aspect of his life that they either omitted or downplayed dramatically was the fact that, far from being simply an advocate of peace in Vietnam, he was a man who held America and Americans in contempt and looked upon the North Vietnamese with a special kind of regard.
Berrigan being arrested in 1967
Let’s just examine a few excerpts from Night Flight to Hanoi, his memoir of a 1968 visit to North Vietnam with Communist historian Howard Zinn. Prior to the visit, Berrigan meets with a U.S. State Department officer, whom he accuses, in the book, of “making the worse cause [i.e. the U.S. side in the Vietnam War] appear the better.” Berrigan refers to “the contrast between the facts of Hanoi and the words of Washington.” America, he asserts, is undergoing “the most profound spiritual turmoil in its history” thanks to “a little, broken, unbreakable Asian nation which is working this enormous change in the spiritual constitution of the Western giant.” The conflict between the evil Goliath and the noble David reminds him that “the meek shall inherit the earth or at least that portion of the earth which destiny and their own bloodletting and their own unkillable sense of history and the rightness of cosmic ecology have allotted to them.”
As we noted yesterday, Berrigan and Zinn went to Hanoi to pick up three POWs – American Air Force pilots who’d been shot down over North Vietnam and who were released into Berrigan’s and Zinn’s custody as part of what was apparently a canny PR bid on Hanoi’s part. But Berrigan professed to be riddled with doubts about the situation. What kinds of doubts? He puts it this way:
The cover of a collection of Berrigan’s “essential writings,” published as part of a series of “modern spiritual masters”
Can it be true that in going to face these prisoners of war we are truly leading them from prison? Or are we rather not leading them from a physical prison back to a prison society? And are Zinn and myself of such quality that we can truly free others? And are they of such spiritual capacity as to be enabled to become free men?
Or are we doing something different? Are we bringing children by the hand from one prison into a larger prison yard? What account will they have to tell us of their selves? And if they have grown into free men, what alternative would be truly open to them except to desert, to condemn the war, and to reject once and for all the slavery that hems them in?
Berrigan is unsure, then, whether members of the American military who are being held behind bars in North Vietnam are truly prisoners, in the deepest sense. But he does know “beyond any doubt that Americans are ‘prisoners of war,’ locked in our dungeons of illusion, of fear, of hatred and contempt and joylessness.”
What hateful, joyless people we Americans are! And what a contrast we are to our enemies! Meeting officials at the North Vietnamese Embassy in Peking, Berrigan writes that the “little men,” as he puts it, “could not have been more courteous. Their way is hard and small and gentle.” When he and Zinn fly on to Hanoi and walk around the city, the people there “look at us with a certain curiosity, but we have yet to see on a single face marks of animosity.” He compares the feel of Hanoi favorably with that of New York City, with its “fever and violence and pace.”
But back to the U.S. pilots. The North Vietnamese officials, Berrigan writes, tell him that “they are trying to educate the pilots so that when they return to the United States they will be good citizens, and give up the dark thinking of clichés. They are being released so that they will become good fathers and husbands.” Berrigan makes it clear that he buys the idea that this is, indeed, Hanoi’s intention. To read this passage now is to marvel at Berrigan’s staggering credulity: if the pilots’ captors made any attempt to “educate” them, it’s obvious that what was going on was Chinese Cultural Revolution-style indoctrination, likely accompanied by occasional doses of torture. But it doesn’t occur to Berrigan that he’s being naive; he thinks it’s the North Vietnamese who are naive: in believing that they can improve the pilots through education, he concludes, they’re exhibiting “a strange mixture of naiveté and human confidence,” presumably attributable to the fact that they have “not lost all hope in the decency of the American public.”
Ho Chi Minh
While in North Vietnam, Berrigan and Zinn are shown a documentary about the life of Ho Chi Minh – obviously sheer propaganda. Berrigan, naturally, loves it: the film “conveyed the spirit of his life with the people, with no heavy hand. A life came through, cut to the bone, the life of a peasant, a man with nothing to sell except his capacity for living for others….Quite Gandhian in spirit. Imagine the Pope or Johnson or Kennedy moving among the poor in such a way, allowing spiritual forces to be liberated so that one’s whole life was showed new confidence.”
Mahatma Gandhi
Yes, that’s right: Berrigan likened Ho Chi Minh to Gandhi. While disdaining his fellow Americans, he had nothing but adulation for a bloodthirsty dictator who executed countless political opponents and tortured his own people in unimaginable numbers – all with the backing of one of the few people in modern history who were even more murderous than he was, Mao Zedong.
This, then, is the true legacy of Daniel Berrigan, who is widely considered a modern “spiritual master” and whose death, almost exclusively, occasioned hymns of praise in the mainstream media.
During the last couple of years, the wealthy and successful British comedian Russell Brand has been amusing himself by posturing as a crusading champion of the downtrodden and a heroic enemy of The System. Last July, Sean McElwee wrotein Salon that “Russell Brand may be the most famous anti-capitalist in the world.” Last year, Brand toured with a stand-up show entitled Messiah Complex, in which, as he told Jimmy Fallon in an interview,he talked “about people like Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Gandhi and Jesus and what made them such splendid fellows.” Che, Brand elaborated, “worked very hard and did some great things for ordinary people.” Fallon, disgracefully, agreed: “Absolutely, yes! You need more people like these people.”
Che Guevara
Yes, more people like Che, who set up Cuba’s first forced-labor camp, ordered over 500 summary executions of ideological opponents, arranged with Khrushchev to bring nuclear missiles to Cuba, and was the person most responsible for the destruction of the formerly thriving Cuban economy.
Last year Brand also came out with a book, Revolution, in which he described himself as “a big fan of Castro and Che Guevara” and called Che “dear, beautiful, morally unimpeachable.” Michael Moynihan’s review of the book for The Daily Beast was aptly headlined “Russell Brand’s Revolution For Morons.” Revolution, Moynihan wrote, is “a meandering and pretentious mélange of student politics, junk history, and goofy mysticism.”
Raul Castro blindfolds a prisoner who is about to be executed
Not long after Moynihan’s review, exiled Cuban writer Humberto Fontova weighed in on Brand’s Che-worship. Refuting the romantic notion of Che as a dedicated revolutionary who cared nothing for creature comforts or the products of capitalism, Fontova quoted a vivid description of Che’s beachfront mansion:
The mansion had a boat dock, a huge swimming pool, seven bathrooms, a sauna, a massage salon and several television sets….One TV had been specially designed in the U.S., and had a screen ten feet wide and was operated by remote control. This was thought to be the only TV of its kind in Latin America. The mansion’s garden had a veritable jungle of imported plants, a pool with a waterfall, ponds filled with exotic tropical fish and several bird houses filled with parrots and other exotic birds. The habitation was something out of A Thousand and One Nights.
Fontova said that he wouldn’t bother debunking “Brand’s idiocies on Cuba” except for one fact: those idiocies, as it happens, “perfectly mirror the ‘enlightened,’ even the mainstream, version of Cuban history, however amazing and asinine it sounds to actual Cubans who lived it or to any person who bothers to investigate the issue beyond what issues from Castro’s agents of influence, on the payroll and off.”
Following a one-minute trial, a corporal in Batista’s army is given last rites before being executed by Castro’s men
Among other things, Brand echoes the familiar line that Castro actually improved conditions in Cuba; on the contrary, writes Fontova, Cuba under Batista had “a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western Hemisphere, the 13th lowest infant-mortality on earth and a huge influx of immigrants.” Nor was the country anything like the wholly owned subsidiary of the U.S. government and/or U.S. corporations that Brand thinks it was (an image promoted for decades by the media, and by movies like Godfather II): “in 1959 U.S. investments in Cuba accounted for only 14 per cent the island’s GNP, and U.S. owned companies employed only 7 per cent of Cuba’s workforce.”
Brand outside his cafe at its opening in March
Part of Brand’s self-branding as a revolutionary on multiple fronts has been his clothing business. He sells his own line of sweatshirts, which, he has claimed, are made in the UK, with all profits going to charity. This now turns out to be untrue. On June 5, the Mail reportedthat the shirts are, in fact, made in Bangladesh by workers earning 25p an hour and working up to eleven hours a day, and that only £1.37 of the purchase price of a £65 sweatshirt goes to charity. And apparently what counts as “charity” in this case is the Trew Era, a “trendy East London cafe” owned by Brand himself that opened in March of this year. His lawyers, responding to the Mail‘s disclosures, describe the cafe as a “community social enterprise project.” Last year, noted the Mail, the website of Brand’s schmatta business “said the money from his merchandise would go to the Russell Brand Foundation”; this statement no longer appears on the site, and British authorities that oversee charitable enterprises have no record of the existence of any such foundation.
A garment factory in Bangladesh
To be sure, it could be argued that Brand is actually doing his Bangladeshi sweatshirt-makers a service – he’s providing them with jobs, however menial and poorly paid, that are better than nothing and that may prove to be a stepping-stone to something better. And, on a larger level, the sweatshops they work in, which also produce apparel for major UK labels, may represent a step toward a stronger economy for Bangladesh. But that’s precisely the kind of argument that Brand has been shooting down for a couple of years now in his fatuous rants against capitalism and globalization.
Russell Brand and Paraic O’Brien at London housing rally
Unsurprisingly, critics of Brand responded to the news of his Bangladesh sweatshop by calling him a hypocrite. And they’re right. If this isn’t hypocrisy, what is? Nor is this the first time he’s faced accusations of hypocrisy. Last December, for example, while taking part in a rally for more affordable housing in London, he “flew into a rage” when Channel 4 reporter Paraic O’Brien suggested that Brand himself “was part of the housing problem because the super-rich buying up property in London were driving up prices for everyone else.” His own £2 million home “in trendy Hoxton, east London,” it emerged, was “owned by a firm based in a tax haven.”
Perhaps it was British columnist Nick Cohen, writing in October 2013, who served up the definitive verdict on Russell Brand:
He writes as if he is a precocious prepubescent rather than an adolescent: a child, born after the millennium, who can behave as if we never lived through the 20th century. He does not know what happened when men, burning with zealous outrage, created states with total control of “consciousness and the entire social, political and economic system” – and does not want to know either.
America’s new opening to Cuba should not blind us to the cruel history of the Castro era. We should not forget the human-rights heroes who have suffered in Castro’s prisons and spoken out internationally about his tyranny. Nor should we forget those prominent figures in the West who have betrayed the cause of freedom by befriending, defending, and brown-nosing Castro over the decades.
Take, for example, Gabriel García Márquez. During his lifetime, he was probably the most honored and most famous author in the Spanish-speaking world. He deserved immense respect for his writings: his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is a beautiful piece of work, a true masterpiece. After his death in April 2014, however, he was celebrated by left-wing media around the world not only as a literary genius but as a great humanitarian, a sort of world-class hero of the human spirit. Recently, on the Oscar telecast, he was included in the “In Memoriam” segment alongside the likes of actors Mickey Rooney and Eli Wallach, presumably on the basis of his handful of obscure Spanish-language screenplays.
Only a few dissident voices dared breathe the ugly truth.
Armando Valladares, who described his years as a prisoner of conscience under Castro in the book Against All Hope, wrote after García Márquez’s death that the Colombian novelist had “put his pen at the service of Fidel Castro’s tyranny, supporting torture, the concentration camps, and the murdering by firing squad of whoever dared to oppose the Communist regime. García Márquez used to say that the only country in the Americas that respected human rights was Cuba.”
García Márquez, recalled Valladares, “lived in a ‘House of Protocol’ with Blanquita, his teenage lover….The Nobel winner had a white Mercedes Benz, another gift from his friend Fidel Castro, and privileges in exchange for defending Castro’s dictatorship, all while he rent his robes denouncing Pinochet.”
Valladares’s gravest revelation was that García Márquez was “an informer for Castro’s political police” – in other words, a snitch, a fink, a double-crosser. Valladares cited the case of Cuban dissident Ricardo Bofill, who, during a visit by García Márquez to Havana, entrusted him with “documents relating to several Cuban artists.” Shortly thereafter, Bofill was arrested – and “displayed on the table right next to Castro’s secret-policeman…were the very documents which Bofill had given García Márquez.”
Bofill, whom Cuban emigré Humberto Fontova describes as “a peaceful human-rights activist inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.,” ended up spending “12 years in Castro’s prisons—thanks to Gabriel García Márquez.” In 1968, two major Spanish newspapers, ABC and Diario 16, reported on this betrayal, and stated flatly that García Márquez had informed on several Cuban writers and artists, whose trust in him – as a colleague who they assumed would agitate for their human rights – landed them in prison.
“Some of his friends and defenders have said that García Márquez interceded for my freedom,” wrote Valladares. “This is absolutely untrue — a complete falsehood. I have enough moral honesty (which he did not) to have accepted the story if it had been true. This version was a maneuver of his buddies to capitalize on the international sympathy that produced my release; they used this sympathy on his behalf. What he did was use the Nobel Prize ceremony to repeat accusations of Castro against me, which prompted a strong critical letter from the French PEN Club, into which I had been adopted as an honorary member.”
Fontova noted that Castro provided García Márquez with “a (stolen) mansion…where he frolicked with adolescent girls” and with “a (stolen) Mercedes” in which he tooled around the crumbling city of Havana. Fontova also cited Before Night Falls, the autobiography of gay Cuban writer Reynaldo Arenas, who “was jailed and tortured by Castro’s police for his rebellious writings and gay lifestyle” before finally escaping to the U.S. in 1980. Two years later, Arenas described García Márquez as an “unscrupulous propagandist for totalitarianism.”
Then there’s Cuban author and emigré Roberto Luque Escalona, a sometime Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, who said of García Márquez that
Only a five star-scoundrel would put his literary fame in the service of a cause as vile and malignant as the Castro tyranny. Simple frivolity cannot possibly justify an embrace so long and strong as the one Garcia-Marquez gave someone who devastated a nation, murdered thousands, jailed and tortured tens of thousands dispersed an entire nation and debased the rest.
A fellow Latin American novelist who is not only a gifted artist but a morally admirable human being, the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, has described García Márquez as Castro’s “courtesan.” But in fact he was only one of several international cultural figures who were, or are, “courtesans” in Castro’s harem. We’ll look at a few more of them next time.
What hateful, joyless people we Americans are! And what a contrast we are to our enemies! Meeting officials at the North Vietnamese Embassy in Peking, Berrigan writes that the “little men,” as he puts it, “could not have been more courteous. Their way is hard and small and gentle.” When he and Zinn fly on to Hanoi and walk around the city, the people there “look at us with a certain curiosity, but we have yet to see on a single face marks of animosity.” He compares the feel of Hanoi favorably with that of New York City, with its “fever and violence and pace.”
