Thomas Wictor

President Obama has visited Cuba. His trip was a giant waste of time, because there’s no relationship between wealth and freedom. In fact recent history shows that when repressive societies become wealthier, they become less free. This photo is the perfect allegorical comment on President Obama’s visit to Cuba.

The doddering, blood-stained dictator Raul Castro yanks up the limp arm of the feckless, weak American president, while Obama tries to hide his shame with his trademark beaming smile, which looks a bit curdled on his dramatically aged face.

Here’s the president standing in front of a mural of Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

And this is what mass-murderer Guevara thought of black people.

We’re going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing.

He said that in 1959, after he’d helped overthrow the Batista government. At that time he was thirty-one years old. The usual excuse about his other venomously racist statements—that he was a pre-revolutionary whippersnapper—doesn’t apply.

I do give Che credit for becoming the most lifelike corpse I’ve ever seen. He seems a little smug. Maybe he was still in denial and thought that at any second he’d get up off the morgue slab and resume his life of murder, drinking, and womanizing.

Wealth and China

We were told that China’s new-found wealth would inevitably force the codgers of the Communist Party to relax their hold on more than a billion people. Precisely the opposite has happened.

Overall, the report’s big takeaway may be that the Chinese central government is clamping down more and finding ways to try to limit those who may try to limit its power.

Societal breakdown is the result. Pure madness. Stunning videos of human distress are coming out of China. Below you will see blood, so be prepared.

There have been multiple mass murders of children at nursery schools. People run around nude in public and jump off skyscrapers. All of it is caught on camera. Recently I met a man who’d immigrated here from China last year.

“It’s hell on earth,” he told me. “I’d rather sweep streets in the US than be a CEO in China.”

He already ran a successful construction contracting firm in Los Angeles. It’s my experience that voluntary Americans are the best citizens.

Wealth and Vietnam

Opening up Vietnam to capitalism was supposed to make the country more free. Has it?

By most measures, Vietnam’s human rights protections remain woefully inadequate; it scores among the lowest in Southeast Asia in terms of civil liberties, political rights, legal protections, freedom of religion, and freedom of association.

The Vietnamese Communist Party brooks no dissent or challenges to its monopoly of power. Vietnam has one of the most controlled media environments in the world, and is one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists and bloggers.

The government has shut down entire newspapers, such as The Elderly, for their aggressive reporting on government corruption, sacked and arrested editors, leading to pervasive self-censorship. Most recently a well-respected journalist was sacked from the country’s most progressive daily, Thanh Nien, for his satirical comments on Ho Chi Minh.

A leopard doesn’t change its spots. The communist Vietnamese committed astonishing atrocities during the decades that they fought the French, the Americans, and South Vietnam. Why would anyone think that they would suddenly become benign?

On February 1, 1968, South Vietnamese National Police chief General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan summarily executed Viet Cong Nguyễn Văn Lém, alias Captain Bảy Lốp.

Văn Lém commanded a death squad that had been murdering South Vietnamese police officers and their families. This terrorist was captured at a mass grave containing thirty-four people who he’d murdered. Seven were police officers. So General Loan shot Văn Lém to death in front of cameras. General Loan hated those who murdered civilians.

American photographer Eddie Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for his famous photo that shows the moment General Loan fired into Văn Lém’s head. Here’s what Adams said after Loan died in 1998.

I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapons in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths… This picture really messed up his life. He never blamed me. He told me if I hadn’t taken the picture, someone else would have, but I’ve felt bad for him and his family for a long time… I sent flowers when I heard that he had died and wrote, “I’m sorry. There are tears in my eyes.”

The older Adams got, the guiltier he felt.

Here’s something I can tell you about General Loan: He always personally led the assault, the butt of his carbine duct-taped to his right forearm so that he could fire with one hand and direct his men by radio with the other. His courage cost him a leg, which was amputated after the general was cut down by machine-gun fire.

Following their defeat of South Vietnam, the communists began a savage oppression of racial minorities that continues to this day.

Wealth and Canada

On the northern border of the US is a totalitarian regime that is the stuff of nightmares. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) is nearly impossible to comprehend in its implacable moral corruption and destructiveness.

This is what’s called a “star chamber.” If you’re hauled in front of the CHRT, you will be convicted, because they’ll keep changing the rules until they get you. Your “guilt” is a foregone conclusion. It’s how the government keeps people in line.

All you Americans who say you want to immigrate to Canada if Trump wins? Good luck! Learn to keep your cakeholes shut.

Wealth and the United States

Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (VT-I) has this on his Website.

President Sanders wants to criminalize opinion, and at least half the country would support this unambiguous illegality. Yesterday I wrote about grim, busty robot Jacinata Gonzales.

Like Bernie Sanders and Canada, she wants dissent outlawed.

Wealth doesn’t bring freedom. The only way to ensure that individuals retain their rights is to have a small, decentralized national government. However, that requires citizens to be responsible, self-sufficient, educated, informed, tolerant, and rational.

Freedom is too hard for most people. I was born in socialist Venezuela and have lived in socialist Holland, Norway, Britain, and Japan. Here’s what always happens to socialism.