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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.
Earlier this month, The Atlantic published a piece by Gal Beckerman called “The Silence of the Left on Iran.” Its subheading read, “As the Islamic Republic massacres protesters, exiles are dismayed by the lack of sympathy from the American left.”
Right.
In general—but only in general—the Left doesn’t “do” Iran. And the Right doesn’t “do” other countries.
Rare is the individual—to say nothing of a political camp—who “does” human rights in all countries. Selectivity is the rule.
When I was coming of age, the Left was concerned about human rights in three countries, primarily: Chile, ruled by Augusto Pinochet; the Philippines, ruled by Ferdinand Marcos; and South Africa, ruled by the imposers of apartheid.
Those were good countries to be concerned about. But there were lots of other countries in the world: the Soviet Union, with its 15 “republics”; the “Eastern bloc” (Poland, Romania, etc.); China; North Korea; Cuba ...
“My party has a blind spot on Cuba,” Eliot Engel once told me. He was a congressman from New York—a Democrat—from 1989 to 2021. “And the Republican Party has its own blind spots,” he added.
One of them was South Africa, in my judgment—and I’m sure in Engel’s.
There were Cold War considerations, no doubt—not just in South Africa but also in Chile, the Philippines, and elsewhere. But US foreign policy is not genuinely American, some of us think, without at least a touch of concern for the basic rights of all human beings.
Engel was consistent on human rights, throughout his career. So was another Democratic congressman, Tom Lantos (the only Holocaust survivor ever to be elected to Congress). The same is true of Chris Smith, a Republican, who entered Congress in 1981—the same year as Lantos—and is still there today.
Fashion in human rights is a big topic, one fit for a book, not so much for a column. But let me linger on South Africa for a moment.
Apartheid South Africa was an international pariah. That country was banned from the Olympic Games from 1964 to 1992. But you know who participated, all the while? Kim Il-sung’s North Korea. Enver Hoxha’s Albania. And on and on.
In 1980, the Games were held in the Soviet Union.
Twice since then, the Games have been held in China, a police state that is committing genocide against the Uyghur people.
Is the Uyghur issue fashionable? Not fashionable enough.
Twenty-five years ago, I asked Jeane Kirkpatrick something like this: “Why are the heroics of Cuban dissidents ignored in our country? Cuba is, after all, only 90 miles away.” She said this was “both a puzzling and a profoundly painful phenomenon of our times.”
She went on to note the “extreme selectivity of concern over terrible, terrible suffering, the deprivation of all rights.”
The dictator, Fidel Castro, was supported by glittering personalities from all over the world. Gabriel García Márquez, the great Colombian novelist, adored him, and lent his cultural authority to him.
In 1975, García Márquez hailed Castro’s “genius as a reporter.” Castro was always talking to people, you know, giving speeches for hours on end, delivering the news. “Thanks to those spoken reports,” said García Márquez, “the Cuban people are some of the best informed in the world about their own reality.”
As well informed as people in the Soviet Union, China, and other such utopias.
In a steady stream, American celebrities trooped down to Cuba, to sit at the dictator’s feet: Robert Redford, Harry Belafonte, Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, Naomi Campbell, Chevy Chase, Kevin Costner ...
Carole King sang one of her songs, right to Castro: “You’ve Got a Friend.” He sure did, too many of them.
In about 2000, Lincoln Díaz-Balart, the Cuban-American congressman, made a remark to me that remains lodged in my memory: “For the life of me, I just don’t know how Castro can seem cute after 40 years of torturing people.”
Dissidents such as Óscar Elías Biscet and Juan Carlos González Leiva ought to be famous. Biscet is an Afro-Cuban physician and former political prisoner. He has modeled his activism on Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, among others. González Leiva is a lawyer and also a former political prisoner. He is blind.
These men are brave almost beyond belief. Does anyone know who they are? (For interviews I have done with them, go here and here.)
The Ukrainian people at large have provided an example of heroism. In September 2022, I began a piece called “Ukraine and the Right” as follows:
Once upon a time, Ukraine would have been a great cause on the American right. Here is a post-Soviet republic, an escapee from the “prison house of nations.” It is working to find its way as a free, independent, and democratic country. It is invaded by a revanchist Russia, led by a former KGB colonel. Russia seeks to re-subjugate Ukraine through terror. The Kremlin is visiting atrocities on the Ukrainians that it never visited on the Hungarians in 1956 or the Czechoslovakians in 1968.
So, here is a classic case of a free and independent country being invaded and brutalized by an expansionist dictatorship that seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. As of old. Also a case of a national David against an imperial Goliath.
This would have been a natural cause of conservatives (American conservatives, forgetting their European and other counterparts). Is it? Hardly.
Instead, there is excuse after excuse for Vladimir Putin, and considerable admiration. “He is a defender of Christian civilization,” many say. That defames both Christianity and civilization.
Let me try something out on you—see what you think. Today, the peoples of Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran are lucky in one respect, and one respect only: they live in dictatorships opposed by the Trump administration.
Is that still true in the Venezuelan case? The former dictator, Nicolás Maduro, sits in a New York jail—but he has been replaced in Caracas by an equally fervent chavista, Delcy Rodríguez. On January 14, President Trump called her “a terrific person.”
Frankly, Maduro should have flattered Trump—perhaps nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. If I were Miguel Díaz-Canel, the current head of Cuba’s dictatorship, I might offer the Trump family some casinos and hotels in Havana. And why aren’t Iran’s ayatollahs making an oil deal?
You may say I’m guilty of cynicism. It could also be that I’ve made a stark observation of reality.
Human-rights fashion can be puzzling (to borrow a word from Jeane Kirkpatrick). In the 2000s, people all over the world were concerned about genocide in Darfur, a region of western Sudan. But for 20 years there had been genocide in southern Sudan—Elie Wiesel called it a “slow-motion genocide.”
Very few cared, outside some evangelical-Christian groups (and the victims themselves, of course).
You cannot keep your eye on every sparrow. Some people watch “sparrows” in Nicaragua but not in El Salvador. And vice versa. Some watch them in Iran but not Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or Turkey. And vice versa.
I suppose that all the sparrows get watched, by someone. But the lives of these beings are equally valuable.
When I was in college, I had a class or two with Oscar Büdel, an eminent scholar of Italian literature. An interesting background, he had. Born in Germany in 1923, he served in the Luftwaffe and was a POW in Italy.
One day, during his office hours, we were talking about dictatorships—of left-wing and right-wing varieties. He said, “Who cares whether the boot is red or black?” Yes. The face the boot stamps on doesn’t care about its color.
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Be conscious of which sparrows you watch... And who chooses them for you.