{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Lippincott Talk","title":"Lippincott Talk Episode 23: Where is the real capital of global communism?","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2585,"description":"On Monday, the State Department released a report entitled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.”The report alleges that Cuba is the epicenter of communism today, that Fidel Castro is the father of ideological third worldism, and that Cuba is the “connective tissue” between Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran (and Hamas) against the United States.I find the report hyperbolic. It overstates the real threat of physical invasion and ideological subversion from Cuba. This over-emphasis on foreign threats has a long tradition in American foreign policy, from ironically the Spanish-American War to today.The greatest threats to the American way of life are right here at home. Cuba doesn’t tax a third of American’s wealth every year. Cuba didn’t lock me in my home in 2020 under penalty of law. Cuba didn’t implement the vaccine mandate. Cuba didn’t pass the Civil Rights Act or pour trillions of dollars into far-left American universities. The report misstates the origin of third worldism as well. From the beginning, the communists aimed for planetary revolution by the oppressed. This always had a racial dimension. Ho Chi Minh, for instance, was calling for racial revolution by the “brown” and “yellow” races against their white imperial masters in 1924, decades before the communists took over Cuba. Lenin himself called for decolonization. But that also misses the bigger picture: FDR, as President, made anti-racism and decolonization a cornerstone of WWII policy! The US gave meaningful political, military, and economic aid to Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh during the war. While I respect much of the work that the Trump administration is doing at the State Department—there are many patriots employed there—it is nonetheless true that an accurate accounting of the rise of the global left must place the United States at the center of that project. Had it not been for American aid to the communists in the 1940s there would almost certainly have been no Cold War....","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/2Az57egK2q4TWRUM9aw0pB5le_iPE4qeLVFR32s54ps/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8zN2I2/NGRlNzRiYjlkZWJk/MjU3ZTRmMTllMTA5/Y2FhOS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}