The Red Side of Brown - A look at Jerry Brown's very radical friends

The Weekly Standard ^ | 10/27/2006 | Kevan Blanche

[calcowgirl]

Kevan Blanche is a California attorney and campaign finance consultant.

JERRY BROWN has been an unabashed and stalwart devotee of left-wing politics throughout his career, but in recent years he has led many to believe that he has joined the political mainstream. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and as mayor of Oakland, Brown has once again reaffirmed his longtime sympathies for leftist causes, while consistently working to undermine U.S. foreign policy with regard to Cuba's communist regime.

In the February 28, 2002 issue of the Nation, reporter Marc Cooper wrote of his encounter with the mayor and of an item in his possession; a memento of Brown's apparent affinity for the Latin American communist movement:

As I get into Mayor Jerry Brown's city-owned black Town Car, he scrambles to move a folded red and black flag on the front seat out of my way. "You know what this is?" he asks as he puts it in the back seat. "It looks like an original flag from Castro's July 26 movement," I answer. "You got it," says the Mayor. "It was given to me by Ché Guevara's widow one night after I spent eight hours talking to Castro. I'm taking it home from my office to keep it in a safe place."

Upon hearing this statement, many Americans might pause to question the apparent friendly relationship with the communist dictator and his allies. What is a person repeatedly elected to serve the American people doing spending hours speaking to Fidel Castro? Why would the widow of Latin America's most notorious guerilla leader bequeath such a memento to him? And why would any liberty-loving person want to have, in their own home, a symbol of such a violent and repressive movement?

Lest we forget, behind that ubiquitous image now plastered on so many t-shirts and stickers, Ernesto "Ché" Guevara was a ruthless militant who is personally responsible for the torture and murder of hundreds (and possibly thousands) of Cubans. It was Ché who helped institute Cuba's gulags and was himself the commander of the notorious La Cabaña prison, where political prisoners and dissidents were imprisoned, tortured and murdered. It was Ché who brought before the firing squads the enemies of Cuba's new dictator and is said to have personally engaged in summary executions. According to the New Republic,

In April 1967, speaking from experience, [Ché] summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his "Message to the Tricontinental": "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine."

One wonders how Brown, a man opposed to lawful capital punishment, could treasure an emblem of anarchical slaughter. One wonders how Brown, a man of Jesuit training, could possibly identify with a man whose revolutionary zeal lead him to declare, "if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm."

Likewise one can only be shocked by Brown's continued fawning over Fidel Castro. To take just a single example, consider the heart-wrenching testimony of human rights activist and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Armando Valladares--a devout Catholic who spent 22 years in Castro's gulags in part for refusing to place a pro-communist placard on his office desk:

All the time I was in jail, I never gave up my freedom. My freedom is not the space where you can walk around. There are lots of people in Cuba who have space to walk, and they are not free. For me, it meant 8,000 days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement and solitude, 8,000 days of struggling to prove that I was a human being, 8,000 days of proving that my spirit could triumph over exhaustion and pain, 8,000 days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to instill in me with each bayonet thrust, fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart, 8,000 days of struggling so that I would not become like them.

UNDER JERRY BROWN'S LEADERSHIP, Oakland has adopted as one of its sister cities, the town of Santiago de Cuba, from where Castro launched his original July 26 movement, which ultimately led to his dictatorship.

In July of 2000, Mayor Brown led a delegation from Oakland to Cuba. The avowed purpose of the visit was the formal recognition of the sister cities relationship, but as the San Francisco Chronicle noted, "these trips are political junkets designed to recast Cuba in the eyes of the American people and pressure federal legislators to remove the barriers thrown up when Cuba became a communist state in 1959."

But perhaps the most underappreciated angle of this trip was Brown's choice of travel agency. After having his initial application for travel to the Treasury Department rejected, Brown sought out the help of a travel company called Cubalinda.com. A firm specializing in finding ways for travelers to get around government travel restrictions, Cubalinda.com is owned by Philip Agee.

Students of the Cold War may recall that Agee as a former CIA agent turned ideological rogue who dedicated himself to the exposure of covert CIA agents and the sabotage of their operations. One of Agee's books Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe contained what the Contemporary Authors guide described as " . . . nearly 400 pages providing names, addresses, telephone numbers, biographical information and professional activities of approximately eight hundred CIA and National Security Agency secret agents in Western Europe."

As editor of the magazine, Counterspy, Agee routinely published the names of CIA agents. After resigning from the CIA in 1969, Agee lived in Europe during the 1970s but was deported from the United Kingdom for maintaining contacts that were deemed harmful to the security of the country. He was subsequently expelled from France, asked to leave the Netherlands, and rebuffed by both Italy and Switzerland. His U.S. passport was revoked in 1979.

Agee eventually settled in Cuba, where he continues to work to undermine CIA activities as well as U.S. policy. In Agee's own words, the CIA is "nothing more than the secret police of American capitalism, plugging up leaks in the political dam . . . so that shareholders of U.S. companies operating in poor countries can continue enjoying the rip-off," it is a view that dovetails nicely with Jerry Brown's own assertion that the "The CIA . . . is now at the disposal of these oligarchic structures run by the 1%."

TO UNDERSCORE his approval of, and enthusiasm, for the communist regime, Mayor Brown hurried to be in Cuba for the 47th anniversary of Castro's revolution. On July 27, one day following what the USCSCA website called, "the July 26th celebration of the gunshots that touched off the revolutionary war led by Fidel Castro," Brown stood with the city's mayor and read aloud a declaration offering Oakland's friendship and solidarity. The opening lines of Brown's declaration were remarkably consistent with communist orthodoxy: "[d]ismayed by growing injustice, mindless armaments, assaults on nature and the flood of useful things which make people ever more useless . . . "

Brown's dance with Castro continued two days later when he attended a major speech delivered by the dictator in the main square of the city of Santa Clara. During the hour-long speech, delivered beneath a towering statue of Ché Guevara, Castro blasted U.S. policy and reiterated his belief that the Cuban revolution could never be defeated. Later in his visit, Brown dined with Castro and selected others, including one of Castro's favorite political props, Elián Gonzáles.

AT PRESENT Jerry Brown is seeking the public trust once again. Having left Oakland mired in criminality, Brown comes before California's voters seeking the office of attorney general. There is perhaps no one in American political life with such a twisted and inexplicable view of justice, or less qualification to lead a department committed to its advancement.

[EagleUSA]

Just throw Brown back to the dogs of Berkeley. That is where he belongs.

[pissant]

That's Savage's new boy.

[Paleo Conservative]

Is Savage a left wing plant whose goal is to discredit conservatives?

[pissant]

I don't think so. He planted himself. He's just psychotic and confused most of the time.

[brivette]

Kind of stinks, don't ya think?

[ansel12]

Thanks for the post, those of us that remember Jerry Brown have been shocked at how little the current generation know about him.

Governor Brown is a true far leftist that has demonstrated that in his time in California government, but the media has left that off the pages in recent years, letting him create a new image. That combined with Michael Savage's promotion has helped deceive actual right wingers into supporting an actual radical leftist.

[fhlh]

Isn't the "Savage Wiener" considered one of Brown's "radical" friends?????

[RoadTest]

The mystery deepens as to why Michael Savage contributed money to Brown's campaign for state attorney general.

[onedoug]

No mystery here.