Showing posts with label Berlin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Berlin. Show all posts

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Totalitarian regimes politicize everything, especially sports. The Democratic resistance has a duty to counter them.

Protesters hold up Abajo Dictadura (Down with Dictatorship) banner

The Castro dictatorship's baseball team was defeated tonight 14-2 by the United States, Cuba's democratic resistance shattered the regime's narrative calling for an end to dictatorship, freedom for political prisoners, and these are both good things. However those complicit with the dictatorship in sport washing its true nature must also be held to account through non-violent means.

Major League Baseball (MLB) has repeatedly made two crucial mistakes, and tonight made a third.

First the professional baseball organization has confused the Castro dictatorship's junta with the Cuban people. Many others have made this mistake.

Major League Baseball doing business with the CCP.

Second to highlight social justice issues in the United States, but ignore them outside the U.S., in places like China and Cuba to go into business with tyrants.

Third, the league compounded their first two errors, by attempting to censor free Cubans attending the World Baseball Classic semi-final tonight in Miami as the teams of the United States, and the Cuban dictatorship face off. 

No more communism!! misery!! dictatorship!!

The bad faith argument that Cuban exiles should not politicize the game ignores that this whole spectacle is a propaganda exercise of the Castro dictatorship. A former Cuban ball player called out the hypocrisy in the March 18, 2023 article by Nora Gámez Torres, "Cuba’s national baseball team’s game in Miami revives old political battles." 

"Edilberto Oropesa, a former Cuban pitcher who played in Major League Baseball from 2001-04, said he doesn’t agree with those who have accepted the Cuban government’s invitation to join the national team. But said he respects their decision." “It’s a free country,” he told the Miami Herald.

He also believes that players on the island do not have much room to dissent if they have decided to stay and live there. “Those who made the Cuba team knew they had to do what they [government officials] say,” Oropesa added.

Last year, Oropesa and other Cuban exiles created the Association of Cuban Professional Baseball Players. They tried to assemble a team of Cubans playing in professional leagues worldwide that could represent the island at the World Baseball Classic.

But the WBC didn’t allow it because its rules grant such rights only to national federations. The former pitcher pushed back against those arguing that politics should not be brought into sports.

"They were the ones that brought in politics since 1959 when they took away professional baseball,” he said, speaking of the Cuban government. “It is something Machiavellian that they are doing for their interests ...   

Totalitarian regimes politicize everything, especially sports to legitimize themselves, and mask their true nature. The Democratic resistance has a duty to counter them. Failing to do so, and allowing the regime narrative to dominate can be dangerous to freedom, and have far reaching and unexpected consequences.

The 1936 Olympics held in Berlin and hosted by the Nazi Germany with the ceremonies formally opened by Adolph Hitler should serve as a cautionary example. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum described the impact of the games as follows:

On August 1, 1936, Hitler opened the XIth Olympiad. Musical fanfares directed by the famous composer Richard Strauss announced the dictator's arrival to the largely German crowd. Hundreds of athletes in opening day regalia marched into the stadium, team by team in alphabetical order. Inaugurating a new Olympic ritual, a lone runner arrived bearing a torch carried by relay from the site of the ancient Games in Olympia, Greece. 
[...] Concerted propaganda efforts continued well after the Olympics with the international release in 1938 of "Olympia," the controversial documentary directed by German film maker and Nazi sympathizer Leni Riefenstahl. She was commissioned by the Nazi regime to produce this film about the 1936 Summer Games. Germany emerged victorious from the XIth Olympiad. German athletes captured the most medals, and German hospitality and organization won the praises of visitors. Most newspaper accounts echoed the New York Times report that the Games put Germans "back in the fold of nations," and even made them "more human again." Some even found reason to hope that this peaceable interlude would endure. 

The 1936 Olympics whitewashed the brutality of the Nazi regime in Germany and led to the acceptance of Hitler's criminal regime. 

The Olympic Committee learned nothing from this shameful episode and in 2008, and 2022 Olympics were held in Beijing that whitewashed the brutality of the genocidal Communist regime in China sport washing the criminal regime. 

Western democracies in the 1930s could have been much tougher with Nazi, Germany and avoided the catastrophe of World War Two (WW2). This is why British Prime Minister and wartime leader Winston Churchill repeatedly called WW2, the unnecessary war.

In the preface to the first volume of his war memoirs, The Second World War, British Prime Minister and wartime leader Winston Churchill said: “One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once ‘The Unnecessary War.’ There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.”

We do not yet know what the full consequences will be for humanizing the genocidal communist regime in China, but history does not give one cause for optimism.

It is unfortunate that Major League Baseball would not recognize the Association of Cuban Professional Baseball Players to play in the World Baseball Classic. It would have been wonderful to see what free Cuban baseball players could do in this competition, but they preferred to deal with Fidel Castro's son, Antonio Castro, who is in charge of Cuban baseball.

Antonio Castro, the dictatorship's point man on baseball.

Former Cuban prisoner of conscience Regis Iglesias in an OpEd in Diario Las Américas on September 11, 2022 explained the context that has led to this protest.

..."The MLB institution or the MLB Players Association come up with the idea of ​​allowing some franchises to visit Cuba for "friendly" matches or much worse, to make "agreements" with who enslave not only our athletes, but all our people. I will always protest and condemn those unsupportive positions. MLB cannot be a repressive extension of the Cuban Baseball Federation and the criminal and segregationist regime in Cuba. 

Rob Manfred is not the owner of the farm like the commandos of the island and he cannot pressure the players with simplistic reasoning and opportunism to maintain the status quo with the tyranny or take shameful steps of recognition of it." ... "MLB's agreement with the Cuban Baseball Federation cannot be proudly brandished as it is part of the recognition of an institution, supposedly independent from a free country, to a repressive and segregationist institution from a country subjected to the tyranny of a communist party."

There is a long history of Major League Baseball's problematic relationship with the Castro regime. The Marlins in 2011 hired their manager Ozzie Guillen, who bragged about his love and respect for Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez in a 2012 Time Magazine interview.

"I love Fidel Castro," Blurts Ozzie Guillen, the new manager of the Miami Marlins, in his Jupiter, Fla., spring-training office before an early-March team workout. [...] After a second of reflection, the most unfiltered figure in baseball, if not sports, wants a do-over. "I respect Fidel Castro," says Guillen, a Venezuela native who also says he respects Hugo Chvez. "You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that mother------ is still here."

He was suspended for five games, which was considered a slap on the wrist. He was fired a short time later for the unforgivable sin of having a losing season. Mr. Guillen has not grown wiser in the intervening years, but he does throw Bud Selig under the bus reminding everyone of the time the baseball chief attended a game in 1999 with Fidel Castro in Cuba. Selig himself reminisced about it in 2016 when the old dictator died.

Castro w/ Orioles owner Peter Angelos (l.) MLB's Bud Selig (r.) Cuba 1999

In 2016, Major League Baseball sent a proposal to the U.S. Treasury Department that would have turned Cuban baseball players into foreign workers of the Castro family while playing in the United States.  This is not hyperbole, the point man that Major League Baseball was dealing with Antonio Castro, then vice president of the Castro regime's International Baseball Federation.

 

Freedom for the political prisoners of the July 11th protests.

In 2018, after making their initial proposal, MLB was still trying to go into business with the Castro family.  Cuban baseball players would've been able to play in the Majors, but at a cost. According to Reuters, "MLB teams will pay the Cuban Baseball Federation a release fee for each player to be signed from Cuba." This raised some questions. How big will this release fee be? Will Cuban baseball players have to give up a big chunk of their salaries, like Cuban doctors have had to do?  The proposal was shot down by the Trump Administration.

Cuban baseball fans living in freedom need to boycott, and protest Major League Baseball, and let them know why. 

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Tuesday, February 1, 2022

Berlin 1936 and Beijing 2022: Legitimizing genocidal totalitarian regimes through sports is a profound immorality with bad outcomes

 "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."- George Santayana

 

Legitimizing genocidal totalitarian regimes through sports is a profound immorality with bad outcomes

The 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing were a human rights disaster for China with scenes of Tibetan demonstrators gunned down by Chinese soldiers. 

14 years later, and the world has suffered over 5.6 million deaths due to COVID-19, and the Chinese Communist dictatorship of  Xi Jinping bears responsibility. The Chinese government did not reveal for weeks what it knew about COVID-19, allowing it to spread into a worldwide pandemic. The Frontline Documentary "China's COVID Secrets" is required viewing to understand what happened.

#NoBeijing2022 has listed some of the other outrages committed by the ruling Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.  "The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics is set to happen amid one of the world’s worst crackdowns against freedom, democracy, and human rights."

  • At least TWO million Uyghur, Kazakh, and Uzbek Muslims are detained in “re-education camps” undergoing systematic torture, rape, and political re-education.
  • 80% of Tibetan children – as young as 4 – are forced away from their parents and housed in China’s colonial boarding schools, cut off from their families they face intense political indoctrination.
  • In Hong Kong, the Chinese government has implemented a draconian National Security Bill that effectively criminalises protest and curtails any remaining human rights.
  • Protests by Southern Mongolians, whose rights, language and culture being eradicated, are put down with force
  • Detention & disappearance of countless Chinese lawyers, feminists & activists
  • Intimidation and geopolitical bullying of Taiwan and aggression and expansion across borders – in the South China Sea and India-Tibet border – present a clear threat to regional and global security.

A second Frontline Documentary from April 2020, "China Undercover" examined the systematic crackdown on Chinese Muslims.

Despite this the International Olympic Committee (IOC) chose China once again to host the Olympics in 2022 in the midst of the historic crimes of the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship.  

As was the case in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics friends of a free China need to increase scrutiny on the Chinese regime and boycott these Olympics. The consequences of  the IOC legitimizing such a regime cannot be overstated. If you are in the Washington DC area on Thursday, February 3rd at 12 noon please join the #NoBeijing2022 Rally at Union Square 3rd Street SW.

The 1936 Olympics held in Berlin and hosted by the Nazi Third Reich with the ceremonies formally opened by Adolph Hitler should serve as a cautionary example. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum described the impact of the games as follows:

On August 1, 1936, Hitler opened the XIth Olympiad. Musical fanfares directed by the famous composer Richard Strauss announced the dictator's arrival to the largely German crowd. Hundreds of athletes in opening day regalia marched into the stadium, team by team in alphabetical order. Inaugurating a new Olympic ritual, a lone runner arrived bearing a torch carried by relay from the site of the ancient Games in Olympia, Greece.
[...] Concerted propaganda efforts continued well after the Olympics with the international release in 1938 of "Olympia," the controversial documentary directed by German film maker and Nazi sympathizer Leni Riefenstahl. She was commissioned by the Nazi regime to produce this film about the 1936 Summer Games. Germany emerged victorious from the XIth Olympiad. German athletes captured the most medals, and German hospitality and organization won the praises of visitors. Most newspaper accounts echoed the New York Times report that the Games put Germans "back in the fold of nations," and even made them "more human again." Some even found reason to hope that this peaceable interlude would endure. 

The 1936 Olympics whitewashed the brutality of the Nazi regime in Germany and led to acceptance of Hitler's criminal regime. The 2008 Olympics whitewashed the brutality of the Communist regime in China further legitimizing that criminal regime.

In 2022,  returning the Olympics to China and making this decision in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the destruction of Hong Kong's democracy, threats against Taiwan, and the Uyghur genocide creates a historic moral hazard.

This is why I will not watch the Olympics, and encourage others to join me in this boycott, instead I will stand with Hong Kong, and Taiwan, share documentaries and films that reveal the facts of the genocidal regime in Beijing, and calls to nonviolent protests against the Chinese Communist dictatorship, and their enablers.

Below is a documentary about the 2019-2020 protests in Hong Kong titled "Do Not Split." Please share it with others.

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Monday, January 21, 2019

Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1964 sermon in East Berlin: East or West – God’s Children

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia 90 years ago on January 15, 1929 but never saw his 40th birthday because he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968.  Dr. King visited Berlin (both East and West) between September 12 - 14, 1964. Below is a sermon held at St. Mary’s Church by Rev. King in East Berlin on September 13, 1964. Source:  http://www.aacvr-germany.org/

Dr. King visits the Berlin Wall. Reference: 306-BN-466-1


East or West – God’s Children
A sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

East Berlin, Marienkirche (Transcript)

September 13, 1964

My dear Christian friends of East Berlin, I want to say what a great privilege and a great pleasure it is for me to come and share this period of worship and fellowship with you this evening.

I come to you not altogether as a stranger, for the name that I happen to have is a name so familiar to you, so familiar to Germany, and so familiar to the world, and I am happy that my parents decided to name me after the great Reformer. I am happy to bring you greetings from your Christian brothers and sisters of West Berlin, where I have just spent a day in that community and certainly one of the most rewarding days of my life.


Certainly, I bring you greetings from your Christian brothers and sisters of the United States. In a real sense we are all one in Christ Jesus, for in Christ there is no East, no West, no North, no South, but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole, wide world.

As you know, there is a great social revolution taking place in the United States of America, and it is the struggle to free some twenty million Negroes from the long night of segregation and discrimination.

We have attempted to conduct our struggle for freedom in the United States on the basis of Christian principles. Therefore, we struggle with non-violence and love as the basic elements of our struggle.
I solicit your continuous support and backing as we continue to go on in our efforts to make brotherhood a reality all over that country and over the world.

May I say that it is indeed an honor to be in this city, which stands as a symbol of the divisions of men on the face of the earth. For here on either side of the wall are God’s children, and no man-made barrier can obliterate that fact. Whether it be East or West, men and women search for meaning, hope for fulfillment, yearn for faith in something beyond themselves, and cry desperately for love and community to support them in this pilgrim journey.

Regardless of the barriers of race, creed, ideology, or nationality, there is an inescapable destiny which binds us together. There is a common humanity which makes us sensitive to the sufferings of one another. And for many of us, there is one Lord, one faith, and one baptism which binds us in a common history, a common calling, and a common hope for the salvation of the world.

Dr. King signs the Golden Book. Reference: 306-BN-466-2
 But here the similarity ends. For in truth our situations are quite different. It is with some reluctance that I attempt to bring you God’s word for your situation. I have not been here long enough to discern God’s plan for you and his calling to you. However, I would like to share with you the way in which the spirit moves in our midst in the freedom struggle in the southern part of United States.

Throughout the New Testament, there runs the theme of reconciliation. Corinthians speaks of a ministry reconciliation which has been given to us in Christ. Ephesians tells us of a plan of God to “unite all things in him, things of heaven, and things on earth.” The Gospels speak directly and in parables about the responsibility which we have for one another regardless of the differences of race and nation. And so it is not difficult for us to go a step further and assume that wherever reconciliation is taking place, wherever men are “breaking down the dividing walls of hostility” which separate them from their brothers, there Christ continues to perform his ministry of reconciliation and to fulfill his promise that “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

It is with great humility that we in the United States in the freedom struggle have taken the liberty to assume that we are serving as agents of God’s reconciliation. This is through no particular virtue of ours, for we are most aware of our unworthiness. And yet, every Negro who has been involved in our movement very soon becomes caught up in a web of destiny which convicts us in the faith that God is working with us and through us in ways that we cannot fully understand. It is the messianism of a moment in history. For we believe that the Negro is called to be the conscience of our nation, and that in being that conscience, we will permit our nation to fulfill its particular role in history under God.
But, under God, every nation has a destiny, and the “people of God” in that nation have a peculiar responsibility to witness to that destiny and work toward its fulfillment.

Perhaps then we can share with one another of the blessings of God, which we have received in our particular situations. Let me begin to tell you some of the things that we have learned about God’s action in our midst.

This period of our freedom struggle began when Mrs. Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to move to the rear of the bus, as was the Southern custom in 1955. In refusing to move, she did not resist, or respond discourteously in any way, she merely said by her presence that “it is wrong for a woman to have to give up her seat to a man merely because his skin is white and her skin is black.”

This was no planned protest. It was one of those spontaneous events of conscience, which the spirit calls for on occasion.

Immediately, the leadership of the Negro community organized to support Mrs. Parks when she was arrested, and called for a one-day boycott of the buses of the entire city. The boycott was so effective, and the response and indignation of the Negro citizens so great, that we continued the protest until the City of Montgomery and the bus company agreed to treat Negro passengers with courtesy and respect.

Several things happened as a result of this local protest, which indicate to us how God’s grace continues to operate amongst us. First, an isolated incident grew into a local movement. Then, this local movement spread to other cities and gave us a South-wide protest which awakened the majority of the Negro population in the United States. Second, a new pattern of social change became a part of the life and history of our nation, for the philosophy and method of Mohandas K. Gandhi joined with the Negro’s Christian tradition and gave us philosophical rationale and practical method by which our faith might be transmitted into mass movement for the liberation of our people from over 400 years of oppression.

But the results were far out of keeping with our expectations. Our only explanation can be that we were gripped by God in his holy kairos; our only response could be that of Martin Luther, “Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God.”

And so our movement began. Not by the plans of men, but by one of the mighty acts of God. Men were merely called to respond in obedience. To suffer if necessary, to face death, and even to die if this be the price of faith. But it was out of the suffering and sacrifice of the poor people of Montgomery, Alabama, that God brought forth a powerful modern missionary action movement.

From this beginning, the students followed with a movement to desegregate lunch counters, which swept across the South and desegregated lunch counters in more than two hundred cities in a year’s time. Here the students learned that it was better to go to jail in dignity than to accept segregation in humiliation. More than 5,000 students served time in prison during the year of 1960, but this gave us the base for massive action across the South.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at St. Mary's Church in East Berlin.
Now we have left the Egypt of slavery. We have journeyed and suffered through the “wilderness” of segregation. For the first time, we stand on the mountain looking into the “promised land” of creative, integrated living. But there are giants in that land, and many of our leaders falter.

Once we reached the top of the mountain, we could look out into two directions. As we look back into the wilderness, we see our brethren who have borne the burdens of slavery and segregation much too long. Many have not had the opportunity to get an education, which will prepare them for the “promised land.” Many are hungry and physically undernourished as a result of the journey. Many bear on their souls the scars of bitterness and hatred, seared there by the crowded slum conditions, police brutality, and the exploitation they experienced on the rural Southern plantations. Still others lack self-confidence and courage to compete in this new land, and they wallow in corroding despair.

On the other side of the mountain, we see the giants. But God has brought us along this far, and we sing a song in our movement, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.” And when we have been afraid in the past, we have sung this song and kept on marching. And so, we will not turn back. We will learn to confront these demons just as we have those in the past, and we shall overcome.

We have found ourselves literally “thrown to the lions” in the arena of life. No longer is there any question of what St. Paul meant by principalities and powers. We are just beginning to learn the rules of this new order. We are often abused, but we are learning to work together to fulfill our dreams through the political structures of our society.

“God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who has brought us thus far on the way; Thou who hast by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray.”*

This is our prayer. For it is only by the might and power of God that we have been able to proceed. We have been as a “valley of dry bones,” and the spirit of the lord breathed into us the strength and breath of life, and the dry bones of my people put on flesh and courage and faith and began marching on to freedom land.

This is a faith which has kept us going. This is a faith which has enabled us to face death. This is a faith which has given us a way when there seemed to be no way. This is a faith that let us face our daily crucifixions, in the knowledge that God’s world is changed through resurrection, and there can be no resurrection without crucifixion. This is the faith I commend to you Christians here in Berlin. A living, active, massive faith that affirms the victory of Jesus Christ over the world, whether it be an Eastern world or a Western world.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of the nations into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to suffer together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

With this faith, we will speed up the day when the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of our Lord and his Christ and he shall reign forever and ever.

Hallelujah, Hallelujah.


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Sunday, August 26, 2018

#VigiliaMundial #WorldVigil united for the victims of repression in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." - Edmund Burke


On Sunday, August 26, 2018 at 6:00pm at St. Michael Archangel Catholic Church in Miami, Florida people of goodwill gathered together for victims of repression in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba as part of a world vigil united for the victims of repression. Hopefully this will be the beginning of new tradition to be observed annually where friends of freedom gather and network in order to collaborate in the struggle for liberty in the hemisphere.

Miami, USA

The enemies of liberty have been gathering regularly for decades at the São Paulo Forum, and its most recent addition was held in Havana back in mid July 2018. The members of the Forum backed Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista Party despite their mass slaughter of civilians.  

 For far too long democrats in this hemisphere have failed to join together in solidarity against those suffering under tyranny and others have fallen, one by one, failing to arouse sympathy or solidarity in far too many remaining in freedom. This is a recipe for disaster.

Berlin, Germany
However this past Sunday across the world people of goodwill gathered around the world for victims of repression in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba. This was a good start.Let us pray that it is repeated in years to come.
Geneva, Switzerland and Oslo, Norway
If we do not join together to resist tyranny, support the rule of law, liberty, and the freedom of all prisoners of conscience then the list of countries succumbing to tyranny will continue to grow until freedom is extinguished in this hemisphere.

Maracay, Venezuela
Therefore it is imperative for people of goodwill to join together in networks of freedom to counter totalitarian networks that seek to enslave free peoples. Free peoples must remain vigilant and not succumb to the complacency of living in freedom, only to lose it. 
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Buenos Aires, Argentina 🇦🇷 contó con la participación de testimonios de miembros de la Red que han padecido las dictaduras. Unidos hoy en la #VigiliaMundial #UnidosPorLasVictimas y por la causa de la libertad y la democracia. pic.twitter.com/pGGiA5SNJA
Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas on December 17, 2002 addressing the European Parliament observed that  “the cause of human rights is a single cause, just as the people of the world are a single people. The talk today is of globalization, but we must state that unless there is global solidarity, not only human rights but also the right to remain human will be jeopardized.” The world is witnessing his prophetic vision in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Cuba. The distancing away from human rights has had dire consequences in these countries.

Santa Cruz, Bolivia
Witnessing these democrats and human rights defenders gathering together all over the world does give one hope for the future, but it must go beyond a symbolic act, to sustained concrete coordination and action.

Santiago, Chile
These vigils took place in many other places around the world, but there is not sufficient space to cover all of them.
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