Fidel Castro died last week. Good riddance. While I’m normally loath to speak ill of the dead, there are justifiable exceptions. Castro, who killed tens of thousands of his people and kept millions in abject poverty while amassing a billion dollar personal fortune, is one of them. A monster is dead. Good.

Not everyone agrees with me. Leftists high and low took to Twitter and other venues to voice their support and admiration. The first and normal reaction is to denounce and dismiss these fools and their perverse and persistent allegiance to an ideology that has killed hundreds of millions and left billions impoverished.

The persistence, however, tells us otherwise. Denounce, we should. To dismiss, however, is to allow the festering miasma that is collectivism continue to wreak its havoc, and not just in hellholes like Cuba and Venezuela. The mindset that elevates monsters like Castro, and Che Guevara and other leftist icons, is seductive and toxic, especially to young minds, and it behooves us to expose its reality.

Castro’s defenders trumpet Cuba’s purportedly enviable health care system, her literacy rate, and that “basic human needs” like food, housing, education and so forth are provided by the state. In this they romanticize the collectivist dreams of a society free from want, free from the rapacity of the greedy and selfish, and managed for the benefit of all citizens. These are elements of “social justice,” where the inequities of free markets, laissez-faire, and a less-involved government are countervailed by benevolent management by the Best-and-Brightest.

The stark reality is that, even if we accept the literacy rate (reported by who? A totalitarian government? Our own government bends statistics all the time to make itself look better) and the wonders of Cuban health care (doctors have to moonlight as taxi drivers to get by, and you have to bring your own linens to the hospital), these collectivist wonders come at an incredible cost.

Extreme poverty is only the beginning. What we take for granted as human rights are a farce in Cuba. Political dissidents are jailed, with the aid of kangaroo courts. You have free speech only insofar as it favors socialism. Or, to paraphrase the late comedian Bill Hicks, you are free to say as they tell you. The press is also tightly controlled. Your freedom to move about, to associate and assemble, rights that are so presumptive in America that we rarely even think about them, are restricted.

Defenders of Castro who pretend he didn’t do bad things are few. However, there are many more who rebuff criticism of his wrongdoings with a bevy of deflections or moral equivalences. Some argue that America has committed plenty of atrocities (a “glass houses” argument that falsely presumes Castro’s critics are not critics of bad acts by the American government). Others argue that the Pinochet regime was far worse, and that some eggs had to be broken. Still others amplify the good and diminish the bad, and often blame America’s embargo for Cuba’s poverty. This is both blindly geocentric and utterly ignores the blatant lesson presented by Venezuela.

All these defenses are manifestations of a deep collectivist mindset that hates materialism, consumerism, capitalism and the idea that people might be free to act in ways they don’t like. They suggest that leftists would rather people live in abject poverty and without individual liberties if the demands of social justice are satisfied. In other words, “poor, unfree and equal” is better than “not-poor, free and not-equal.” America’s poor are better off than Cuba’s poor, but because there are rich in America, the free enterprise system is considered more evil than the horrors of communism.

Thus, because their idealized vision of collectivism is better than the reality of the freer society they live in, they defend Castro and say nice things about him in death.

Then there are the knee-jerk contrarians. We all know someone like this – someone who, if a non-liberal says “up,” they automatically say “down.” They will argue that there is nuance, that nothing is black-and-white, but they would rather chew hot gravel than agree with their political opponents on anything. They pretend they’re rational deep thinkers, but they’re driven primarily by tribal hatred and zero-sum partisanship. So, if I say “Castro was a monster, end of story,” they feel compelled to denounce me for being simplistic.

I am increasingly convinced that much of what drives the social justice movement is knee-jerk contrarianism. If someone not on the team believes X, they must argue for not-X. It’s the only way I can rationalize, as one example, the Left’s improbable defense of Islam, a religion that embraces tenets completely contrary to the social justice movement’s ideals. It’s as likely an explanation as any for the persistent defense of communism and socialism in the face of mountains of damning evidence. This contrarianism spawns pretzel logic, defenses of the indefensible, endless straw men, a whole lot of anger, and an increasing inhumanity among those who consider themselves more “human.”

Castro’s death reminds us that there are people in our society that would rather everyone be equal in poverty and oppression than unequal in prosperity and individual liberty. They’d rather stifle our rights and our economy than permit both to flourish if they produce inequitable (in their minds) outcomes. Better that everybody loses than that most win. It is hard to imagine a more callous and hateful mentality towards our fellows than this.

• About the Author

About Peter Venetoklis

I am twice-retired, a former rocket engineer and a former small business owner. At the very least, it makes for interesting party conversation. I'm also a life-long libertarian, I engage in an expanse of entertainments, and I squabble for sport.

Nowadays, I spend a good bit of my time arguing politics and editing this website.

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