When Truth Is Castrated: Babalú Confronts the Next Four Years

From Babalú:

It ain't even January yet...

...and it already feels like socialism.

Sorry to be the purveyor of negativity and all, and my apologies to any Obama supporters out there but...

I cant even watch or read the news lately without the hairs on the back of my neck rising. Things are getting ugly and fast. I suppose I could list everything that's on the horizon for us that will bring the ideals and values of this country to their knees, but what would be the point, really? The fringe, along with their naive counterparts, has spoken and elected a socialist to lead this country.

I'd like to be gracious like my fellow contributors here and state - believe - that a President Obama will be my president. And I suppose I could force myself to swallow that purgante and "support" the new President elect. But you know what? I'd be lying, to you and above all else, to myself. Truth is, Obama is everything that I think a President shouldn't be.

So, for the record and so we all know at least where I stand, personally, that guy that will be sworn in as president come January? Yeah, him. He doesn't represent what I believe in in the least and he certainly doesn't represent me.

"Socialist ideology, like so many others, has two main dangers. One stems from confused and incomplete readings of foreign texts, and the other from the arrogance and hidden rage of those who, in order to climb up in the world, pretend to be frantic defenders of the helpless so as to have shoulders on which to stand."
-- Jose Martí

Val Prieto, November 13, 2008

I don't believe that I have ever quoted one of Val Prieto's posts in toto before. I know for a fact that I have never done so in approbation. Val is saying now what I was saying a year ago, and if he can manage to keep only a year behind me, things may turn out better at Babalú than one could have hoped. In truth, Val never joined the McCain feeding frenzy at Babalú, though he did allow the "magnificent cadre" to savage the Republican candidate as falling short of the glory of Newt Gingrich for far longer than they condemned Obama as a Castro clone. Not until the very end did the Babalunians seem to realize that any flavor of Republican was preferable to Socialism à la carte. 50 years ago an earlier generation of Cubans made the same mistake with consequences that are well-known.

The next 4 years at Babalú will be spent hurling anathemas at Obama, which we certainly prefer to granting indulgences to Bush; but, in the end, it will all be for naught, for unless Obama proves to be something altogether different from what his history and associations indicate -- that is, unless he is a complete apostate -- all the words of condemnation in the world will find no echo because the MSM (which will be the state media, effective January 20) will create an alternate "reality" which hails failure as success and the elimination of freedom as self-determination. If you want to know how completely the truth can be marginalized in the world, look to Cuba. You can be sure that our enemies will.

Or witness dauntless Henry at Babalú, who is still engaged in trying to prove statistically for the umpteenth time that Cuban exiles are solidly Republican and that there was no generational shift to the Democratic party in this election. See what I mean? How can anybody believe in such an enormity, and why is the onus on disproving rather than proving it? Because the media created the myth and perpetuates it in the absence of all evidence, indeed, contrary to all evidence. And Henry, who has the truth on his side as surely as Galileo did, is obliged to vindicate it over and over again, obsessed that nobody is paying attention to him, because, in fact, nobody is. The myth has overwhelmed the truth and by force of repetition accumulated a (false) pedigree with far more allure than mere demographics.

I literally spent decades battling the myth of social progress under Castro and I was not the only one. The facts were all on our side but these were discounted in favor of the illusion which glorified Castro at the expense of the Cuban people, who were depicted as a nation of noble savages brought to the light of civilization by the wondrous agency of the Revolution, when, in fact, Cuba only became a Third World nation when Castro declared it as such and then proceeded to make his fantasy a fact. The country that was once the envy of Latin America, which had, alone among Latin American countries, achieved a level of plenary development which not merely rivalled but excelled half of Europe and on many indices surpassed the U.S. itself, has for 50 years been portrayed in the MSM, academia and the popular culture as a cesspool of inequity and class divisions when in fact it was one of the most progressive and fully integrated societies of its day.

A lie that is perpetuated for 50 years does not cease to be a lie, nor does the truth become less true because it is consistently denied. What is lost is the recognition and application of the truth and its lessons. The truth when ignored ceases to be fecund; in fact, it is effectively castrated.

Sadly, the truth is not only assaulted by its enemies but by those who refuse to acknowledge it once it has been officially proscribed. Their motives are often opportunistic but not necessarily so. Many Cubans who know the truth about pre-Castro Cuba have never shared that knowledge with their children, in fact, they have done their utmost to conceal it from them, believing, wrongly, that what is not known cannot be missed and that nothing becomes more substantial when the recollection of something is expunged from the national memory through voluntary or enforced amnesia. Although they may have done so to spare their progeny the pain and disillusion of their own lives, nothing was gained and much was lost by withholding the truth from them. The truth, if naught else, was their birthright, and a life bereft of truth is a masquerade, and, ultimately, a lie -- yet another lie to add to the aggregate. When all the country becomes accomplices in the suppression of the truth, history stops as it has in Cuba and as it will in the United States.