Why the Left Fears Condoleezza Rice
Lowell Ponte
Thursday, Jan. 15, 2004
Condoleezza Rice is a "true illiterate," said a patronizing Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez.
This Marxist thug added that he had asked his comrade Cuban dictator
Fidel Castro to mail Americas National Security Advisor samples of
Cuban books now being used to teach Venezuelan children literacy to
see if she learns to respect the dignity of the people and learns a
bit about us."
Apparently President Chavez is both a racist and a puny macho sexist
to make such stupid remarks. His stunted manhood is threatened by
criticism from this powerful woman.
Condoleezza Rice, who recently called on Chavez to accept the
democratic vote of Venezuelans in a legitimate election to recall him,
is, as many have noted, "the most powerful woman in the world."
Dr. Rice understands collectivist terrorist murderers like Chavez
better than do most Americans, and not only because she is a highly
regarded expert on the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Most of us awakened to the threat of terrorism only on September 11,
2001. Rice as a 9-year-old African-American girl in Birmingham,
Alabama, in September 1963 felt the ground shake from a racists
dynamite bomb going off in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church only
blocks away from the church where her father, John, was pastor.
Among the four black girls murdered in that hate crime that shocked
our nations conscience was Rices 11-year-old friend and schoolmate
Denise McNair. She remembers their funeral and how small their coffins
were.
If youve been through homegrown terrorism, said Dr. Rice, you
recognize there isnt any cause that can be served by it. ... Because
what its meant to do is end the conversation.
Racism is a collectivist idea that denies human dignity by defining
individuals as members of mythical collective racial groups. Socialism
and Marxism are collectivist ideas that deny human dignity by judging
individuals only as members of mythical class groups and by declaring
all human beings to be slaves whose lives and labors belong to the
collectivist state, as in Castros Cuba and increasingly in Chavezs
Venezuela. The indoctrination of this dehumanizing idea, as we shall
see, is what Chavez means by Marxist education.
But first, lets look more closely at the illiterate Dr. Condoleezza
Rice. Leftists such as Hugo Chavez have tried to silence or discredit
this uppity powerful black woman with insults. The Leftist media
inside the U.S. have tried either to ignore her or to diminish her
with the most vicious, loathsome and toxic kinds of racist satire,
mockery, denigration, insults and ridicule.
Jamaican singer-limboist Harry Belafonte, an outspoken supporter of
Fidel Castro and the Democratic Party, called Rice a Jew and a
slave who lived in the house and served the master.
Leftists engage in such verbal terrorism against Bush administration
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State
Colin Powell out of fear, wrote distinguished African-American
journalist and liberal Clarence Page.
The Democratic Party depends on blacks for 18 percent of its votes.
Its survival depends on keeping those voters as a solid, owned bloc of
slaves, chained by dependency and fear, down on the plantation of the
Democratic Party.
A powerful, successful Republican role model such as Condoleezza Rice
could show young blacks an alternative to dependency on Democrats.
What if African-Americans notice that Democrats (the party of the
slave owners, the Klan, Jim Crow and Bull Connor) talk about helping
them but hold them down? And at the same time, the Republicans (party
of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, who freed their ancestors
from Democrat slave owners) have advanced blacks to the highest
echelon of actual power in the Bush administration.
To prevent African-Americans from opening their hypnotized eyes to
this self-evident truth and reconsidering why they vote for a party
that chains and exploits them, Dr. Rice has been targeted for every
kind of insult and attack possible. She must be politically
assassinated.
This is why Leftists have been using character assassination against
Dr. Rice to end the conversation about how little the Democratic
Party has done for blacks ... and about how much the Republican Party
is now doing.
(And the same Marxist tactics are being used against Latino Republican
candidates, one of whom days ago was smeared by a desperate, racist
Democratic National Committee official and Howard Dean operative as a
house Mexican for the Republicans. This is yet more evidence of
Deans implicit racism.)
So, who is Condoleezza Rice, this bright black woman whose mere
presence strikes terror into the hearts of Leftists?
Condi, as friends call her, was born November 14, 1954, in what his
1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would
call probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United
States. During the Civil Rights struggle it came also to be called
Bombingham, with racist explosives killing not only Rices friend
and three other girls but also shattering the home of black civil
rights lawyer Arthur Shores and terrifying the African-American
community.
Rices father went to police headquarters to demand an
investigation, wrote Dale Russakoff in the Washington Post Magazine.
They didnt investigate, Condoleezza Rice has said. They never
investigated.
The police commissioner in Birmingham who would not investigate was
Bull Connor, a Democrat who perfectly embodies everything that
political party has always stood for. When civil rights protesters
arrived, Connor unleashed his dogs and fire hoses on them.
John Rice, writes Russakoff, then did what black fathers all over
Birmingham were doing - what Alma Powell remembers her own father
doing then, when she happened to be home with her babies during her
husbands [Colin Powells] tour in Vietnam: They got out their
shotguns and formed nightly patrols, guarding the streets themselves.
One of the many dirty secrets of the Democratic Party is that its
passion for gun control began, and continues to be, from a desire to
disarm African-Americans and thereby make them powerless and
dependent. Russian expert Michael McFaul, writes Russakoff, remembers
[Condoleezza] Rice telling him she opposed gun control and even gun
registration because Bull Connor could have used it to disarm her
father and others in 1963.
Condi Rice remembers many lessons of how her mother and father stood
up to segregationists, refusing again and again to accept the inferior
place into which the white Democratic bosses of Birmingham tried to
push blacks. She remembers learning from her grandfather that You
have control, youre proud, you have integrity, nobody can take those
things away from you.
Her grandfathers aunts were among the first nursing graduates of
Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington. By hard work he
would put his children through college, and they would marry into
other African-American families with passionate faith in the power of
education.
My family is third-generation college-educated, says Dr. Condoleezza
Rice, winner of the NAACP Image Award. I shouldve gotten to where I
am.
Both her father, the Rev. John W. Rice Jr., then pastor of Westminster
Presbyterian Church and dean of historically black Stillman College,
and mother Angelena, a science and music teacher at a local black high
school, were committed to providing the best education possible for
their daughter. Her name, Condoleezza, comes from the Italian musical
notation con dulce or con dolcezza, meaning to play with
sweetness.
Condi began piano lessons at age 3 and by age 4 was accompanying the
choir at her fathers church. She learned to read music before she, by
age 5, could fluently read English. When the local superintendent of
Negro schools decided that Condi was too young to attend first grade,
Angelena took a year off from work to teach her daughter at home.
Condi was soon mastering figure skating, French, ballet, Latin and a
host of other advanced skills.
Playing Bach and Beethoven even before her feet could reach the
pianos pedals, Condoleezza pursued becoming a concert pianist. At age
13 her family moved to Colorado, where her father became a University
of Denver assistant dean. She enrolled there at age 15, graduating Phi
Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, at age 19 when most other youngsters are
just beginning college.
But by then she recognized that she lacked the skill to become one of
a handful of pianists able to reach the top of that profession and
would probably end up teaching 13-year-olds to murder Beethoven for a
living.
One day she found herself in a classroom fascinated by Josef Korbel,
former Marxist Czech diplomat, as he expounded on the Byzantine nature
of Soviet politics and Stalin. There was so much intrigue, Rice
says. I decided I wanted to study the Soviet Union.
It was like falling in love, she told Essence Magazine. I just
suddenly knew thats what I wanted to do. ... Soviet politics, Soviet
everything.
Korbel, who became Rices mentor and career booster, is the father of
Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Condoleezza went on to earn a master's degree in international
relations at Notre Dame, then a Ph.D. at the University of Denver. The
year she completed her doctorate, 1981, she was offered a teaching job
at Stanford University. She is author or co-author of several
scholarly books, including "Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and
the Czechoslovak Army: 1948-1983," "The Gorbachev Era" and "Germany
Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft."
Her expertise on the Soviet Union soon earned Rice an advisory
position with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1986 and, with the
recommendation of Brent Scowcroft, a place on President George H.W.
Bushs National Security Council in 1989.
She returned to Stanford in 1991, becoming provost of that great
university in 1993, with oversight of its $1.5 billion budget. She has
also served on the boards of Notre Dame University, the San Francisco
Symphony, the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, San Francisco PBS
affiliate KQED, and
other institutions. She co-founded the Center for a New Generation to
help educate gifted minority students, as she was and is.
When they first talked, she and George W. Bush, both big sports fans
and devout Christians, hit it off immediately. America will find that
she is a wise person, the president-elect said when announcing her as
his pick to become National Security Advisor in December 2000. I
trust her judgment.
Rice is part of a tiny Bush inner circle of brilliant advisers -
including Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State George
Schultz and Pentagon analyst Paul Wolfowitz - nicknamed for their
superior intellects as The Vulcans, in the spirit of Mr. Spock and
other Vulcans in Star Trek.
Now, at age 49, Condi Rice has already become what Business Week
magazine called probably the most influential National Security
Advisor since Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. When she, as one of two
top foreign policy advisers to the president of the United States,
criticizes or challenges Hugo Chavez,
it is no wonder that this nasty little Marxist tyrant shakes with fear
and rage.
Chavez knows perfectly well that Dr. Rice is not illiterate. In fact,
she is an expert on Marxism, the Soviet Union and the kind of tactics
Chavez and his ally Fidel Castro are now using to subvert Venezuela as
well as several other Latin American nations. Her expertise is helping
shape the hard line that President Bush has taken against Fidel Castro
at this weeks summit of Western Hemispheric democracies in Monterrey,
Mexico.
The difference between the Marxist indoctrination of Chavez and Castro
and the kind of education that lifted Condoleezza Rice and her family
is clear. An enlightenment Western education of the kind that informed
Americas Founders is one that respects and empowers individuals.
One of the only three things Thomas Jefferson wanted inscribed on his
tombstone and wished to be remembered for was the founding of the
University of Virginia - and what it represented: universal education
to empower every American with the basic tools of literacy.
Jefferson wanted all to be educated, not to teach conformity but so
that every citizen could read the revolutionary pamphlets of future
Tom Paines. Jefferson understood that revolution is a never-ending
process, that each new generation must rise up and rein in the
tendency of government to take more and more power from the people.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of
civilization, wrote Jefferson, it expects what never was and never
will be.
Dr. Condoleezza Rice is a living symbol of the liberating power of
education, determination and self-respect.
Hugo Chavez is also to some degree educated. He reportedly in 1975
earned master's degrees in military sciences and engineering from the
Venezuelan Academy of Military Sciences. He also studied for a
master's degree in political sciences at the Simon Bolivar University
in Caracas but reportedly never graduated.
Like so many on the political Left, Chavez has the education of a
technocrat and the soul of a machine. His is a mind without beauty,
without love, without any depth of human compassion or comprehension,
without respect for the unique talent of each individual. No wonder
one wife divorced him and a second left. No wonder he has imported
more than 10,000 Cuban operatives and tons of Cuban textbooks to
indoctrinate the children of Venezuela with Marxist racist-like ideas
of class hatred and class war.
To understand the Left, here and in Cuba, ponder the documentary 90
Miles by Juan Carlos Zaldivar, aired on the PBS show POV on July
29, 2003.
In 1980, I was a thirteen-year-old communist living in Cuba,
Zaldivars personal story begins. The Revolution was the biggest
thing in my life. Bigger than religion, or anything else.
This documentary follows his reluctant move with his family to the
United States via the Mariel boatlift and his comparison of Cuba and
the U.S.
As you would expect from the Public Broadcasters of Socialism, this
documentary is not entirely positive toward America. It shows Juans
father bitter, disappointed with his inability to become rich in the
U.S. and defeated by the American dream for which he sacrificed
everything in 1980. It takes viewers back to Cuba and depicts people
there as relatively happy.
And Zaldivar identifies himself as part of a politically correct
minority, gays - while never mentioning Fidel Castros monstrous
history of imprisoning, torturing and killing people simply because
they are
homosexuals.
But in this documentary we find that in Communist Cuba instead of
going to school, my class would join demonstrations that publicly
humiliated the people who were deserting [leaving]. They were called
acts of hate. Wed build bond fires [sic]. ... And wed make dummies
out of uniforms that people left behind. We would stuff them with
their pillows and then we would burn them. ... One afternoon, I saw a
mob of my school friends chasing a student and her mother. The mother
was caught sneaking her daughter out of
school to take her out of the country.
In addition to such lynch-mob acts of hate, Zaldivar says: In Cuba
we had to wear uniforms to school. In Miami, we could wear whatever we
wanted. I didnt like that. It created this atmosphere that there was
nobody to answer to. ...
I remembered how safe one feels in a crowd, he says of the Orwellian
groupthink in Cuba.
During the first two years [in Miami], I was very outspoken, says
Zaldivar. I was still spouting out communist slogans.
His father explains to him how Fidel and the Marxists too control over
who got what in Cuba. You had to apply and they gave you a house,
the father says. When they came to check me out, they saw pictures of
saints on the walls. So they never gave me a house.
His father had supported Castros revolution, and continued to be a
block leader for it prior to deciding to leave for the United States.
He was a man insufficiently loyal to either system, viewers are left
to conclude, and fell between the two stools.
This columnist has also seen Castros educational system firsthand,
albeit briefly. As a journalist in Cuba to do a piece for the Los
Angeles Times, I visited a Potemkin Village school shown off to
foreign visitors. Oddly, the pride of this school was its adjoining
factory, into which young students were marched to work half of each
day, burning their hands with acid as they manufactured batteries.
If such a thing happened in the U.S., it would be denounced as brutal
exploitation of child labor. Visiting Leftists to Fidels
factory-school, of course, make no such criticisms of Cuba whatsoever.
And, needless to say, we were not shown how those who fail to conform
and succeed as Communists in Cubas schools are required to live out
their short lives in the hot sun cutting sugarcane for 10 Cuban pesos
a month - much the way slaves lived in Cuba centuries ago.
This school had a black principal - the only instance in Cuba where I
saw a black person in a position of power. As Cuban-American author
Humberto Fontova (whose current best-seller is "The Hellpig Hunt")
explained to me, Leftist Hollywood movies about Cuba typically depict
Castros revolutionaries overthrowing a blond, blue-eyed dictator
Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar. Batista, however, in real life was a
dark-skinned mulatto of black ancestry from a poor farming family.
It is Castro who embodies the white Spaniard colonial ruling class and
whose father was a crime boss in Cuba ... just as Fidel is a crime
boss today. And under Batista, Cuba had the third-highest standard of
living in the Western Hemisphere, while today this Marxist prison
colony is near or at the bottom. This, notes Fontova, is typical of
the lies Americas Leftist media use to brainwash Americans.
This is also typical of the lies in Cuban textbooks now being used by
Hugo Chavez to enslave the children of Venezuela - and of the
Left-slanted faculties that former Marxist intellectual David Horowitz
has been fighting to diversify at the University of Denver and other
institutions of higher learning.
Call it Red-ucation in the enslaving spirit of Karl Marx, not
education in the empowering spirit of Thomas Jefferson and Condoleezza
Rice.
Heres one lesson to remember: A major 1986 textbook dealing with
Marxist education lists 15 significant nations that were then
Communist. Today, 18 years later, more than half of those nations are
no longer Communist. Guess who is winning the global battle for hearts
and minds.
A second lesson: As Condoleezza Rice so admirably teaches by example,
we must never permit the collectivist thugs, here or abroad, to stifle
or end the conversation.
Mr. Ponte hosts a national radio talk show Saturdays 6-9 p.m. Eastern
Time (3-6 p.m. Pacific Time) and Sundays 9 p.m.-midnight Eastern Time
(6-9 p.m. Pacific Time) on the Liberty Broadcasting network (formerly
TalkAmerica). Internet Audio worldwide is at LibertyBroadcasting.com.
The shows live call-in number is (888) 822-8255. A professional
speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Readers Digest.
--
Left-wing liberals are EVERYTHING they accuse the right of being. They
are mean, vicious, hateful, greedy, cold-hearted, closed-minded,
selfish, intolerant, bigoted and racist.