Peace in our time in Colombia?

Castro regime mediating conflict it sustained for decades.

Castro backed guerrillas continue to wreak havoc in Colombia 52 years later

News that peace may finally come to Colombia after fifty two years of continuous conflict should be cause for celebration, but there are reasons to be concerned that it may not be achieved. First of all having the negotiations between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) held in Cuba with the Castro regime as mediator is a bit surprising when one considers the surrounding history.

Colombia has been gripped in a protracted violent conflict since 1948 that in 1964, after a brief respite, returned to bloodshed with the Castro regime providing weapons, training, and financial assistance to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The Castro regime continued funding FARC through the 1970s and 1980s. The rise to power of Hugo Chavez in 1999 led to the FARC reportedly being supplied with up to $300 million by Venezuela with the Chavez regime trading arms and oil with the terrorist group.

In the same year a another guerrilla movement would also emerge plunging Colombia into further violence. The National Liberation Army (ELN), after the FARC, is Colombia’s second largest leftist guerrilla group, also formed in 1964 whose founding members were not only inspired by the Communist Revolution in Cuba and Che Guevarra but were also trained in Cuba when they attended "a Cuban scholarship program known as the Brigada Pro Liberación Nacional." ELN sought to overthrow the Colombian government in favor of one following the Castro model in Cuba.

According to Stanford University's Mapping Militant Organizations the April 19 Movement (M-19) guerilla group in Colombia founded in 1974 was also inspired and aided by the Castro regime. M-19 members "attended military training camps in Cuban military academies where they learned both urban and rural forms of guerilla warfare."

On March 1, 1982 the Castro dictatorship was placed on the list of state sponsors of terrorism less than three months after the U.S. State Department confirmed that the Castro regime was using a narcotics ring to funnel both arms and cash to the Colombian M19 terrorist group then battling to overthrow Colombia’s democratic government.

FARC, ELN and M-19 were all designated terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department and would also be granted safe haven in Cuba by the Castro regime for decades. These guerrilla groups in addition to terrorism also became heavily involved in narcotics trafficking to fund their violence.

Peace in our time: Reboot with Juan Manuel Santos as Chamberlain?

The Economist explains the ambivalence by many in Colombia:

For Colombians, the agreement involves “swallowing toads”, in a local metaphor. The FARC claim to have fought a just war against unequal land ownership. In that cause the country suffered bombings, firefights, murders, kidnapping and extortion. Many people find it hard to accept that FARC leaders accused of crimes against humanity will not go to jail provided they confess. [...]

Nobody knows how much money the FARC has invested from its criminal businesses. Many distrust the sincerity of the FARC’s conversion to democracy. And partly because the peace negotiations have taken so long and missed so many deadlines, Colombians have no love for Mr Santos. In a recent poll his approval rating was just 20%, lower than that of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

 Now there appears to be a difference between the guerillas and the Colombian government about where the final peace signing will take place. The Colombian government had announced that it would take place in Colombia and the guerillas are insisting that the signing take place in Cuba. Let us hope that this process full of irregularities manages to achieve a lasting peace and not be remembered as the 1938 Munich Agreement, a betrayal in the service of peace that ended in war. 

Prelude to peace in our time in Colombia or something else?

Month in memory of two Cuban human rights martyrs: Call for articles

Remembering Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero

Christian Liberation announces month in memory of Oswaldo and Harold

July 22, 2016 will mark four years since Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, and Harold Cepero Escalante were killed in Cuba under suspicious circumstances that have led to demands for an international investigation, a report that points to the involvement of state security, and survivor testimony that points to murder. In the meantime family, friends and admirers continue to mourn their passing. The Christian Liberation Movement on the month leading up to the fourth anniversary of their passing is requesting those who knew the two men to write an article or chronicle about them.

Message from the Christian Liberation Movement:

In this month in memory of Oswaldo and Harold we invite those who knew them to send an article or chronicle with anecdotes related to them (between 260-400 words long). 

You can send them to: info@oswaldopaya.org

Original text taken from MCL website in Spanish:

En este mes del recuerdo a Oswaldo y Harold invitamos a quienes les conocieron a enviarnos un articulo o crónica con anécdotas vinculadas a ellos ( entre 260 a 400 palabras)

los pueden enviar a : info@oswaldopaya.org

Human Rights Decade Long Decline: A Reflection and Quest for Solutions

"Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person." - Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948

 Human Rights in Decline: the decade long crisis
2016 marks the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the United Nations Human Rights Council and also coincides with the tenth consecutive year that human rights are in decline world wide. Over the past few days this blog has reflected on what the United Nations bureaucracy could have possibly gotten wrong that has contributed to this worsening situation in which the Council has been described as having turned into Frankenstein's monster.

However at the same time the Left's take over of human rights discourse over the past decade to advance its own agenda has benefited it but at the expense of the international human rights consensus. For example, Amnesty International's campaign beginning in 2007 to conflate the right to an abortion with its worldwide campaign to stop violence against women alienated many Catholic supporters, and has been described as anti-Catholic.

Catholic bishops, who had been members of Amnesty International, had to resign over the abortion issue because the human rights group had become an abortion lobby group. Catholics generally have been encouraged to boycott the organization. Independent Catholic News reported:

Cardinal Martino, who served as the Holy See's permanent observer at the United Nations, says that this change of position is part of the "pro-death" agenda in modern culture. The cardinal said that Amnesty International's decision means Catholics and Catholic organizations should no longer financially support the group. "The promotion of abortion opens the door to the slippery slope of evil and death, where human rights are taken away from the most innocent and vulnerable children of God," he said. "I believe that, if in fact Amnesty International persists in this course of action, individuals and Catholic organizations must withdraw their support."

Furthermore Article Three of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right to life, and this is not accidental. This is because this human rights document drafted and signed on December 10, 1948 was not a compromise between liberalism and socialism but lobbied for and drafted by Christian Democrats with the active support of the Catholic Church.

Jacques Maritain

Catholic roots of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Pope John Paul II recalled the Roman Catholic Church's role in 1991 in the Papal Encyclical Centesimus Annus published on the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum:

...[A]fter the Second World War, and in reaction to its horrors, there arose a more lively sense of human rights, which found recognition in a number of International Documents⁵² and, one might say, in the drawing up of a new "right of nations", to which the Holy See has constantly contributed. The focal point of this evolution has been the United Nations Organization.

One of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was Jacques Maritain, a French philosopher who was a profound Catholic and anti-modernist inspired by Christian humanism:

There is but one solution for the history of the world, I mean in a Christian regime, however it may be otherwise. It is that the creature be truly respected in its connection with God and because receiving everything from Him: humanism but theocentric humanism, rooted where man has his roots, integral humanism, humanism of the incarnation.

The formation of the United Nations was an opportunity for Latin Americans to push for international human rights standards. The American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man was the first international human rights instrument signed into existence in Bogota, Colombia on May 2, 1948 eight months prior to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December of 1948 where Latin Americans played a major and crucial role, among them the Cuban delegation. The first draft of the Declaration was fashioned from various models collected by the UN Secretariat among them "a model based on a Cuban-sponsored proposal at the San Francisco conference, a proposed first draft offered by the Chilean delegation, and the earlier Panamanian draft."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is heavily informed and influenced by Catholic social doctrine found in the 1891 Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII. The Catholic Church in its social teaching rejects both liberalism and communism embracing a defense of the dignity of human beings grounded in its own metaphysical vision of personhood.

The holistic approach to human rights that embraces both civil/political and social/economic rights was not found in a compromise between the liberal Anglosphere and the socialist Soviet sphere but was the initiative of Catholic thinkers, states and the Holy See that shaped this important document that was embraced by the major faiths around the world that shared its common truths achieving a unanimous human rights consensus with that document.

Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas

Human rights, as an idea, have a conservative pedigree that stretches back to the Middle Ages and to the Catholic Church. The first time in human history that a universal concept of human rights in which they are applied to all living being on the planet emerged out of a debate concerning the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the 16th century.

The modern language of human rights emerges out of the public debate surrounding the treatment of Native Americans  in the first years of the Spanish conquest and led King Charles V to organize a debate between Bartolomé De Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 in which the humanity of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and their ability to govern themselves was recognized as briefly outlined in the following quote by Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas:

“All the races of the world are men, and of all men and of each individual there is but one definition, and this is that they are rational. All have understanding and will and free choice, as all are made in the image and likeness of God . . . Thus the entire human race is one.” 

Although relatively unknown in the English language Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546), regarded as the founder of the “School of Salamanca,” arrived at the University of Salamanca in 1526, the University had already been founded in 1218. Following the debate between De Las Casas and de Sepúlveda King Charles V would side with neither but followed de Vitoria's council which recognized the humanity of the indigenous people and their right to their own property. The Salamanca School and De Las Casas would leave a profound mark on Latin American thought and human rights discourse. However the claim by some academics remains that only liberals can have a conception of universal human rights.

Be that is it may it was not just in Latin America and the United Nations where conservative forces advanced regional human rights structures but also in post World War Two Europe.

Conservative roots of the European Union's Human Rights System

 Dr. Marco Duranti's new book The Conservative Human Rights Revolution:  European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention will be available on December 1, 2016, but the description that is already available points to the key role conservatives, Winston Churchill among them, played in bringing about the EU's human rights system.

"The Conservative Human Rights Revolution radically reinterprets the origins of the European human rights system, arguing that its conservative inventors envisioned the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) not only as an instrument to contain communism and fascism in continental Europe, but to allow them to pursue a controversial political agenda at home and abroad. Just as the Supreme Court of the United States had sought to overturn Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a European Court on Human Rights was meant to constrain the ability of democratically elected governments to implement left-wing policies that conservatives believed violated their basic liberties."

The Modernist rewrite of human rights history

This history is often overlooked with a preference in modern human rights circles given to documents from the Enlightenment associated with the French Revolution which would be associated with the Left. For example "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen," also known as the "Declaration of Human and Civic Rights" adopted on August 26, 1789 which is a product of the French Revolution as is the even more egalitarian document produced in 1793 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from the Constitution of Year I. Article 1 of the 1789 declaration reads:
"Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good." 

Nonetheless, the fruits of these documents did not offer much in the way of protections or safe guards for French citizens who were subjected to the French Revolution's terror. The French Revolution born of enlightenment liberalism, and a rejection of the Ancien Régime and the Catholic Church, gave Europe its first modern genocide of peasants in which men, women, and children of The Vendee were systematically exterminated, and the end result was the rise of the dictator Napoleon Bonaparte and a world war that took three million lives.

Edmund Burke by James Watson © National Portrait Gallery, London

Failure of the Abstract predicted by the first modern conservative

Edmund Burke was one of the few who foresaw as early as 1790 in his book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, published less than a year into the French Revolution, foresaw where the follies of enlightenment liberalism and its abstractions would end in wholesale slaughter, tyranny and war. 

Burke's concept of human dignity as derived from the creator combined with a concept of man's moral equality has deep roots in the Christian tradition which incidentally is where the very language and concept of human rights first emerged in the 1200s in the Catholic Church and was refined by Thomas Aquinas.  Edmund Burke's defense of the marginalized, the colonized, and the conquered was rooted not in abstract enlightenment theory but a Christian moral vision of the universe. According to Burke, in his 1796 Letters on a regicide peace ,man has freedom but it is not absolute:

As to the right of men to act anywhere according to their pleasure, without any moral tie, no such right exists. Men are never in a state of total independence of each other. It is not the condition of our nature: nor is it conceivable how any man can pursue a considerable course of action without its having some effect upon others; or, of course, without producing some degree of responsibility for his conduct.

Enlightenment liberalism constructed abstract models that failed to take into account the full complexity of human nature and its contradictions. The French human rights charter declares men absolutely both free and equal. Edmund Burke and modern conservatives believe that "full equality" outside of the moral and spiritual sphere is unattainable and a dangerous fiction.

First, to permit absolute freedom is to tolerate profound inequalities because people if left to their own devices develop hierarchies. Secondly, to enforce absolute equality requires an all powerful state to repress natural inequalities. The end result is not absolute equality but a small group with great power at its disposal making slaves of the majority. 

This is what happened in the French Revolution and reached its apex with Maximilien Robespierre, in 1794 with his observation that he applied in governance: "The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny." It is a contradiction in the same way that combining absolute freedom and equality as revolutionary goals are in contradiction and doomed to failure. Robespierre was only applying the logic of enlightenment thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau who wrote of "forcing men to be free."

Descendants of Robespierre confronting and infiltrating human rights institutions today

The communist regime in Cuba has played an active role at the United Nations and in the Americas to undermine human rights standards and institutions. Sadly, it has had some successes in undermining international free speech standards and next month may see a long term objective realized with the crippling of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.  The Castro regime's allies in the region: Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have refused to fund the world's oldest human rights system. Bolivia and Ecuador have called for the elimination of the human rights body.

However the Stalinists of old and the new "Socialists of the 21st Century" who divided humanity along class lines have not had as great an impact as the newest generations of the Left that instead of appealing to a common humanity has further fractured and divided people by race, sex, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ability.  The great religions are now to be restricted to the private sphere and any questions that they may raise about the new divisions can be dismissed as "belief-based bigotry."

Civil and political rights and social and economic rights may all be in decline but repressive regimes can pay lip service to the above six areas and improve their ranking while still denying all humans within their territory their civil, political, social and economic rights.

Ireland's Pro-Life stance criticized by the UNHRC in contradiction with the UDHR

The UN Human Rights Committee in March of 2016 criticized Ireland's pro-life laws, but at the same contradicted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its pro-life clause under Article 3. Both Catholicism (1.27 billion) and Islam (1.6 billion) which make up 2.87 billion believers hold strong bioethical considerations about abortion that are also shared with Orthodox Judaism. Post-Christian societies in Western Countries have legalized abortion with varying levels of restrictions with the United States having some of the most extreme pro-abortion laws when compared to Western Europe.

British Section of Amnesty International and its objectives in 1962

Restoring the dynamic tension to the human rights conversation

In 1961 Amnesty International was founded by Peter Benenson and consisted of a board of trustees that included all the major British political parties: Labour, Conservative, Liberal and religions: Roman Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, Jewish and Humanist.  

If human rights are to regain their relevance and end its worldwide decline then all parties (and this includes religions) must be invited to the table and not censored beforehand because it does not serve a particular political agenda. Furthermore the right to life, enshrined in both Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in Article 1 of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man should apply to all, at all stages of life. Competing rights claims need to be weighed and measured carefully, but recognizing the transcendent importance of the person. 

Finally, human rights defenders instead of focusing on what divides us by race, sex, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and religion should seek to recognize our common humanity with a focus on the dignity of the person.

Conservatives need to embrace their human rights legacy and reject attempts by intellectual adversaries who claim that there is only a "liberal conception of human rights." There is a conservative tradition of human rights that stretches back centuries and has a far better record of success than their liberal enlightenment and revolutionary counterparts.

Human Rights Council marked 10 yrs, held a panel w/all former Presidents last week

How Fidel Castro white washed Communist crimes and plotted its expansion

How Communism came back after its reverses in 1989 - 1991 

Castro tyrants at the Cuban Communist Party Congress in 2016

Fidel Castro on April 19, 2016 at the Cuban Communist Party Congress lamented the passing of the Soviet Union and advocated another revolution just like it.

"Lenin's work violated after 70 years of Revolution. What a history lesson! It can be affirmed that it should not take another 70 years before another event like the Russian Revolution occurs, in order that humanity have another example of a magnificent social revolution that marked a huge step in the struggle against colonialism and its inseparable companion, imperialism."

However, Fidel Castro has done much more than merely wish for the return of Soviet-style communism. The great 20th century poet T.S. Eliot understood that "there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause." This was also understood by the remaining communist powers and parties in the world after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. 

Fidel Castro and Lula Da Silva

 In 1990 following a request made by Fidel Castro to Lula Da Silva the Sao Paulo Forum was established with the goal to rebuild the Communist movement or as they put it: “To reconquer in Latin America all that we lost in East Europe.” This set the course for the rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela that has been a game changer both regionally and internationally. Food riots are now breaking out in what was once the richest government in South America.

The hunger, the suffering, and deaths of thousands of Venezuelans should be laid at the feet of Fidel Castro who prepared and backed Hugo Chavez with the assistance of the Cuban military and intelligence services that are keeping Nicolas Maduro in power today. However the communists with their agents of influence in the media will blame capitalism, the United States, imperialism, global warming, and anything else that distracts from pointing the finger at them.

Killing fields in Cambodia

Meanwhile the United States Secretary of State John Kerry said in  August of 2015 that "the United States and Cuba are talking about ways to solve the Venezuelan crisis" and is not alone in this belief within the American foreign policy establishment.

Not recognizing this historic context is a a foreign policy recipe for disaster. 

2017 will mark 100 years since the first communist regime took power in Russia ushering in a century of bloodshed that included a brief alliance with Nazi Germany that plunged the planet into World War Two. The overall death count of victims of communism is 100 million dead and counting.

Reynaldo Benito Antonio Bignone Ramayón with Fidel Castro Ruz

Like the Soviet Union, the Castro regime in Cuba crossed ideological lines to advance strategic interests. In the 1960s Fidel Castro invited in former Nazis to train the regime's intelligence services and purchased weapons from German right wing extremists. In the 1970s and early 1980s the Cuban dictatorship had a solid working alliance with the Argentine military dictatorship at a time when the military junta was disappearing 30,000 leftists in Argentina. This is in the news again now because of newly declassified documents that have emerged confirming the sordid relationship.

Meanwhile tourists continue to visit totalitarian regimes as they have over the past century and returning with happy talk completely divorced from the reality on the ground.

This is why it is so important to remember the crimes of communism and reject attempts to rewrite the historical record by white washing these atrocities.

Extra-judicially executed by the Castro regime on July 13, 1994

In the case of Cuba one must not forget the mass executions at the start of the regime. However the brutal massacres of Cubans continued such as the July 13, 1994 "13 de Marzo" tugboat sinking and the February 24, 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shoot down. The tugboat sinking involved the killing of 37 Cuban refugees, among the dead were 23 youths. The shoot down involved two planes blown to bits over international airspace by Cuban MiGs killing three American citizens and a Cuban resident who were engaged in the search and rescue of Cuban rafters.

Between June of 2009 and December 17, 2014 high profile Cuban dissidents were killed under suspicious circumstances in Cuba, but the drive to normalize relations meant that there were no consequences for the dictatorship and the killings continued generating a body count. Beginning with Orlando Zapata Tamayo on February 23, 2010 and peaking with the suspicious deaths of Ladies in White founder,  Laura Inés Pollán Toledo on October 14, 2011 and Christian Liberation Movement leaders, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and Harold Cepero Escalante on July 22, 2012.

Anti-communists of the world need to unite and figure out how to save humanity from another century of communist barbarism. 

Victims of Communism: 100 Million Killed and Counting

"To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” - Elie Wiesel, Night

Wreath laying ceremony at Victims of Communism Monument in Washington DC

Great crimes against humanity must not be forgotten and new generations must learn what happened in order that they not be repeated. Communism in the 20th century claimed over 100 million lives and unfortunately the body count continues to rise in the 21st Century. Although communism imploded in Eastern Europe in 1989 the number of people living under it in the world today is one in five and that is a greater percentage than lived under communism before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the opening up of the archives there and elsewhere it was revealed that the crimes of communism had caused the deaths of 100 million human beings and counting where it is still being applied around the world. One cannot forget that beyond the body count there was also spiritual wreckage generated from regimes that required friends and family members to spy on each other and betray each other for the sake of the totalitarian state.

Last week on June 9th and June 10th the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation for the ninth year gathered victims of communism from around the world to remember all the past victims and the ongoing crimes of communism in Washington DC. On June 9th there were two panel discussions one that focused on witness accounts of communism in Cuba and another on educating Americans about the history of communist regimes.

The panel on Cuba provided an overview of the past six decades of repression and death by the Castro regime, the current situation in Cuba under the Obama administration's new Cuba policy, and the first hand testimony of one of its victims, Sirley Ávila León, now in the United States receiving medical care for her injuries.

On June 10th there was a Roll Call of Nations Wreath Laying Ceremony at the Victims of Communism Memorial located on (Corner of Massachusetts Ave and New Jersey Ave NW, Washington, DC). 20 embassies participated in the wreath laying ceremony along with 30 non-governmental organizations who with flowers came together to pray and pay their respects for the 100 million plus victims of communism and those who still live under the totalitarian darkness.

Former prisoner of conscience Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet addressed the gathering at the memorial and spoke of the communist terror that still exists in Cuba today. The presentation of the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom was realized there and the 2016 laureate, Paul A. Goble, gave an important talk on the ten reasons why we must remain anti-communists.

President Obama in Cuba photographed with mass murderer in the background

It is of great importance to remember the horrific crimes of communism such as what these regimes did to children;  the genocides they carried out in Africa, Asia, and Europe.  Attention needs to be paid to the communist ideas that resulted in so much horror and loss of life. For example, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who President Obama felt comfortable being photographed with the Argentine communist revolutionary's image in the background, despite Guevara's calls to mass murder in Havana, Cuba on April 16, 1967:

"Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy."

The failure to address the legacy of communism and its continuing threat with seriousness is without a doubt a contributing factor to the decade long decline in human rights in the world. Furthermore failing to remember the international consensus achieved in 1948 when all the countries in the world signed on to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and engaging in relativism, as President Obama did in Cuba earlier this year, reopens a debate on the universality of rights that had been settled.

Forgetting the role played by international business in strengthening totalitarian regimes has resulted in the practice being repeated in China, Vietnam and Cuba prolonging the lives of those communist regimes to the detriment of their respective peoples. Not to mention the seizure of investor assets, the arbitrary detention of investors, and the theft of trade secrets.

This is why in 2017, the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution that brought the first communist regime into power and the tenth anniversary of the Victims of Communism Monument's dedication on June 12, 2007 needs to be truthfully remembered.