On the Right

National Review, June 2, 2003 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Castro Kills

Stone

NEW YORK, APRIL 22

Let us pause in order to suppress any smile over the three Cuban hijackers executed by Castro, but go on to smile broadly over the terrible consequences of all of this for Oliver Stone. Here we were, April 2003, and Fidel Castro reaches into corners of his country to round up 75 conspirators against the socialist health of the Castro regime, giving some of them prison sentences as heavy as 28 years. The trials were done in very fast motion, so that there was no opportunity to reflect on what it was that the defendants pleaded. But reports confirmed that no charges were leveled that suggested that any of them had blown up bridges or passed exploding cigars into Castro's dining quarters. What they did, simply, was to write and talk in favor of freedom of speech. When Castro moves, he does so decisively. The civil libertines were arraigned, tried, and sentenced, and background thunder was provided by the rifles executing the three hijackers.

The most decisive counteraction in the West was done by HBO. The movie and television company had been planning a splashy introduction of an extended documentary on Fidel Castro by -- Oliver Stone. It was all packed up, ready to go. In fact, it had been screened in February at a movie festival in Berlin. Castro had given three whole days to Oliver Stone, and that proved to be total immersion -- Stone came away a devout apostle of Castro and Castroism. He spoke of his encounter: "We should look to [Castro] as one of the earth's wisest people, one of the people we should consult." Now, the conversion of Oliver Stone was probably not all that difficult. Stone is attracted to any person, statement, event, book, firework, or parade that stimulates the depreciation of America and its institutions. In his movie depiction of the assassination of President Kennedy, he suggested that the FBI, the CIA, the White House, and the Supreme Court engaged in a right-wing conspiracy vaster than anything ever imagined by Hillary Clinton in order to conceal the story behind the assassination.

At the very least, it was foolishly thought, we would have sterner stuff from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. This organization meets every winter in Geneva. It has had stalwart U.S. ambassadors in the past, including Walter Berns, Allard Lowenstein, and Leonard Garment. They did what they could, back in the Cold War, to breathe a little concern for human rights into the Commission on Human Rights, but a resolution to call Castro to account failed. What was got out of the commission was a wispy recommendation that a representative of the U.N. be invited to Cuba to investigate human rights. The commission voted with full knowledge that the invitation will not be extended and, as usual, everybody will just get used to Cuba under Castro.

There is a fresh threat, however, hovering offstage, and not yet called up. It is to levy economic sanctions against Cuba trade by the European Union. There is also a movement in Congress to forbid the sending by Cuban Americans of U.S. checks to Cuban families. These come to $1 billion of hard cash to that sick economy, and no doubt such a measure would hurt Castro, but such hurt would be disproportionate. The family that fails to get the $100 monthly check from the Cuban-American emigrant is put into true pain and distress. Such deprivations reach Castro as mere trivia, one more price to pay for continuing to harness Cuba to socialism and poverty and idolatry.

The challenge for the United States is to ignore his continued manhandling of freedom and to retaliate against it with the weapon he fears most, which is increased exposure to Western capitalism and Western practices.

All Aboard

Fiasco

NEW YORK, APRIL 25

The fiasco at American Airlines illuminates a great tangle. The airline industry is not wholly subject even to sophisticated ministrations of the free market.

You had first the action of the chief executives of American. One more time, the jeremiad of the Austrian-American intellectual sharpshooter Willi Schlamm comes to mind. He said 50 years ago in private conversation, "The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists." The behavior of the AA executives is a brazen example of his point. Karl Marx and his followers, including some tatterdemalion hangers-on who have dragged their ideology into the 21st century, reasoned from individual cupidity to an indictment of the capitalist system. Marxists were wrong in doing so, because capitalism is a mechanism for coping with cupidity, not for enhancing it.

Capitalism brings on disciplinary measures from competitors who maneuver to success for their enterprises by rendering services to consumers, and such services can't survive any institutionalization of cupidity. If Mr. Gotrocks's appetite for profit extends beyond his ability to manufacture competitive lawn mowers, his greed is contained and lawn-mowers' needs met by the implacable fraternity of unorganized, but supremely efficient, lawn-mower buyers, present and future.