Lawrence Auster
Sunday May 14, 2000

Under this regime, the executive, liberated from the Constitution and from any fear of genuine political opposition, does whatever it feels like doing, from character assassination campaigns against witnesses and prosecutors to missile attacks on foreign aspirin factories to the terror bombing of foreign civilian populations, while the major media, functioning in effect as a state organ, shapes an ignorant and malleable public into agreement with whatever the executive is doing.

Each act of tyranny requires further acts of tyranny, namely the discrediting and dehumanizing of anyone who opposes the executive's will. Such attacks serve two functions: They justify the tyranny by showing that the "enemies of the state" were the ones who provoked it, and they send the unmistakable message to everyone in the society that this is what we're going to do to you if you get in our way.

Dissidents do not need to be crushed physically, as under a fully totalitarian regime, nor do they need to be framed on criminal charges, as has happened to Linda Tripp. It is enough to cast them outside the community of the "good, right-thinking" people.

This is especially easy when the dissident is not a public figure but simply some poor slob whom fate has placed in the path of the left. Since the legions of the politically correct do not regard such a person as a human being like themselves, they don't have to observe even minimal decency toward him.

This may sound extreme, but experience is bearing it out. Just as property owners had no intrinsic value in the eyes of the Bolsheviks, and just as Jews had no intrinsic human value in the eyes of the Nazis, anyone who doesn't dance to the tune of America's dominant left has no intrinsic human value.

These are some of the thoughts triggered by The Washington Post's front-page hit job against Donato Dalrymple four days after machine-gun-toting INS agents grabbed Elian Gonzalez from his arms.

Dalrymple, writes Post reporter Michael Leahy, "seemed the one pure, likable character in this custody tug-of-war." Well, Leahy sure takes care of that little oversight. Writing with a combination of gossip-column salaciousness and a Stalinoid impulse to dehumanize an enemy of the people, Leahy exploits Dalrymple's nave and ingenuous comments to portray him as a shameless publicity hound and a pervert.

I won't go into the details of this unbelievably filthy piece of "journalism," which has been adequately discussed elsewhere. What I want to emphasize here is what the article tells us about the liberals' devotion to the "little people." It turns out that the liberals care about the little people only when they serve the liberals' own political purposes, either as objects for their conspicuous compassion, or as "victims of oppression" with which they can flay the "right."

But as soon as the little people are unfortunate enough to find themselves on the other side of an issue from the left, they become inconveniences to be swept aside. Their very insignificance their relative lack of success in life, their lack of sophistication and media savvy, their quirks, their immaturities, even their very innocence becomes the means the left uses to isolate and humiliate them.

The media's and public's contempt for Elian's Miami relatives and their supporters shows how hollow are this country's liberal ideals. This country, which is so pro-immigration even to the point of allowing its national identity to be erased in the name of open borders suddenly turns against a family of immigrants when they are anti-Communist and standing up to the Clinton government.

This country, which makes such a show of supporting the oppressed against the oppressors, treats the Miami relatives in their modest bungalow home these people who have nothing to stand on but their humanity and their sense of what is right with contempt.

This country, which gobbles up one Hollywood thriller after another in which people who fight against authority for a cause they believe in are regarded as heroes, regards the good Marisleysis as a joke and the heroic Lazaro as a lowlife.

How dead are the souls of the millions of Americans who, far from sympathizing with these good people, agree with those who callously mock and dismiss them.

How dead are their souls that they can't understand that a person who has saved a child's life feels forever a special bond and obligation to the one he saved. How contemptuous are they to a man who did nothing but good, a "fisher of men" who rescued a lost soul from the wide ocean.

Most of all, how lost are they that they cannot see the symbolic evil of what the Clinton government is doing with their support grabbing at gun point from the man who saved him the boy he miraculously saved, seizing him from his surrogate mother, whom he called "Mari," seizing him through the despicable ruse of negotiations, seizing him in the early morning hours of Holy Saturday for fear of acting in broad daylight before the eyes of the people. If the feds had done their deed just 24 hours earlier, in the early morning hours of Good Friday, the parallel with the arrest of Jesus would have been complete.

The more tyrannical and evil a government becomes, the more it must tell lies about its victims so as to justify its tyranny. The providence that placed Elian, at the moment of his arrest, in the arms of the very man who had pulled him from the sea, was such an undeniable symbol of good being victimized by evil that the only way the left could overcome that image was by more evil and lies. Donato must be made to appear like a creep.

Lawrence Auster lives in New York City.