I was one of a group of journalists who visited Savimbi in Jamba early in 1987. It took a good deal of doing. We were told to be at a small private airport on the outskirts of Windhoek, Namibia, at 6 a.m. on a certain day. Not even the control tower could tell us what to expect next, but in due course, an elderly DC-3 without markings, with a white pilot and co-pilot, arrived from somewhere and we climbed aboard. North and east we flew, over the broad expanse of the Kalahari Desert, then very low (about 300 feet, to avoid possible ground-to air missiles) over the Caprivi Strip and into Angola, where we landed on an extremely bumpy grass airstrip in the jungle. Armed men emerged from the undergrowth, piled us into trucks, and took us on a two-hour, deceptively devious ride to Jamba.
      There, in guest huts (every one of them festooned with pictures of Savimbi visiting President Reagan in the Oval Office), we spent the night. And late that evening, assembled 

in a larger building, we heard the roar of an official motorcade announcing the arrival of Jonas Savimbi.
      He was very cordial, reasonably frank and impressively vigorous. He was to need all of that vigor, because after the end of the Cold War the West lost interest in him and he had to finance UNITA with the proceeds of smuggled diamonds. In 1992, his communist foes, now duly sanitized, finally got around to staging an election, which they predictably won. But Savimbi rejected the outcome, and fought on.
      Until Feb. 22 this year, that is, when he was killed in an ambush in a remote rural area of eastern Angola, at the age of 67. There will be few in the West to mourn his passing; he was an embarrassment, a relic of other days. But I will always remember, and honor, Jonas Savimbi. He fought for freedom—not unsuccessfully—when freedom needed him most.
      —The Washington Times, March 1, 2002, p. A 19

Angola’s Jonas Savimbi, legendary guerilla leader of UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), was killed by communist MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) forces in combat last week. Mr. Savimbi’s death follows the assassination of another renowned guerilla leader in Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Masood, two days prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11. These remarkable leaders along with Enrique Bermudez of the Nicaraguan Contras, also assassinated years ago, were direct beneficiaries of the Reagan Doctrine, a critical component of the effort by President Reagan to defeat the Soviet empire by rolling back Soviet-backed regimes in the Third World.
      The Reagan Doctrine was a stunning success. The Red Army was bloodied and forced to quit Afghanistan, and the Sandinistas were replaced by a democratically elected government in Nicaragua. Also, covert U.S. military aid to UNITA allowed the group to expel the 60,000-strong Cuban occupation force in Angola and helped turn the tide of war, forcing a peace settlement. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall relegated these conflicts to the back burner. The first Bush administration, consumed by its own bleak re-election prospects, turned Angola’s first elections over to the United Nations for oversight and in turn, a biased United Nations let the MPLA count the ballots. Internal U.N. documents proved the balloting rife with fraud.
      The run-off election between Eduardo dos Santos and Mr. Savimbi was never held. While negotiating the run-off, under a white flag of truce, the MPLA launched a holocaust against UNITA and other opposition parties, in a mass killing spree Australian reporter Jill Joliffe labeled the "night of the long knives." UNITA diplomats, party officers and activists were slaughtered nationwide, with the body count estimated in the tens of thousands. The prominent, Western-educated Vice President Jeremias Chitunda, well-known and regarded by high-level Reagan officials, was executed trying to escape the capital, Luanda, along with other top diplomats. Chitunda worked successfully to repeal the Clark Amendment in 1985, paving the way for the covert-aid program.
      The new Clinton administration quickly sided with the MPLA and, along with the United Nations, imposed sanctions on UNITA for refusing to submit to fraudulent elections. Today, duly elected UNITA parliamentarians are hostages in Luanda. Abel Chivukuvuku, the charismatic UNITA foreign minister, twice has been the target of 

assassination in Luanda. True to their Stalinist roots, the MPLA methodically bought or co-opted its political opposition, and whom it could not buy, it killed.
      Regrettably, the new Bush administration perpetuated the Clinton administration’s executive orders against UNITA, which shut down UNITA’s diplomatic offices and unconstitutionally prohibited even U.S. citizens from representing UNITA. The State Department’s Africa Bureau for years has been compromised by American oil companies operating in Angola (who were kept at arm’s length under Reagan and Bush I), which explains the perpetuation of the Clinton Angola policy. Insight magazine described the problem as a "revolving door" syndrome fraught with conflicts of interest—with State Department Africa officials leaving government service for lucrative MPLA lobbying contracts, then lobbying their former co-workers, and in at least one case, returning to Foggy Bottom to work on Angola.
      Mr. Savimbi knew the United States was an unreliable ally and that the State Department and CIA could not be trusted. In the midst of one MPLA offensive, UNITA, desperately short of bullets and other munitions, received shipments of sanitary napkins and boots. But Mr. Savimbi and UNITA fought on with determination, rejecting lives of comfort and safety in exile, and enduring the rigors of combat and the harsh deprivation of life in the bush. UNITA faced impossible odds, with no foreign government left on its side, all corrupted by billions of dollars worth of Angolan crude, and an army of lobbyists paid for by oil proceeds.
      President Bush, last June, along with South Africa’s president, urged direct negotiations between UNITA and the MPLA. Mr. dos Santos and his kleptocratic communist cadres had never been willing to negotiate until facing military overthrow. The murder of Mr. Savimbi was a slap in the face to Mr. Bush, after the call for peace talks. The U.S. response should be to repeal the Clinton executive orders on Angola, to call for an end to the killings, to forge a genuine national reconciliation, to exert political control over State’s Africa Bureau, and to ensure that U.S. foreign policy is not debased by our dependency on foreign oil.
      Mr. Savimbi, responding once to a journalist who asked why we couldn’t assume he would be just another bloody dictator if he won the civil war, said: "Because I know that no one can rule Angola without a government of compromise." That is still to be the country’s fate, even without Mr. Savimbi’s strong leadership.
      The MPLA feared and hated Mr. Savimbi because of his magnetism, his brilliant oratory and the devotion he won from the Angolan people. He stood in sharp contrast to the

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Fidel Castro's Library
by Jeff Jacoby

"There are no banned books in Cuba," Fidel Castro declared in February 1998, "only those which we have no money to buy."
      Of course, books are banned in Cuba; just try to locate one that criticizes Castro. Bookstores and public libraries here carry works exalting Marxism, but you won’t find The Gulag Archipelago or Darkness at Noon on their shelves.
      So when Roman Humberto Colas, a psychologist in Las Tunas, heard Castro’s words, he and his wife Berta Mexidor decided to put them to the test. They designated the 800 or so books in their home as a library and invited friends and neighbors to borrow them for free. And so was born the first of Cuba’s independent libraries—independent of state control, of censorship, and of any ideology save the conviction that it is no crime to read a book.
      The men and women who run these humble libraries risk government retaliation; several have been threatened, interrogated, raided by the police—or worse. Colas and Mexidor were evicted from their home, denounced in the (state-owned) press, and repeatedly arrested. Their books were confiscated. They were fired from their jobs. Their daughter was expelled from school. Government persecution eventually drove them from Cuba, but the seed they planted bore fruit. Today there are more than 100 independent libraries in homes across the country, each one a little island of intellectual freedom.
      In Gisela Delgado’s library in Havana, visitors can borrow Spanish translations of Adam Michnik’s Letters from Prison, Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless, or the speeches of Martin Luther King. On her shelves are everything from art to philosophy, but when I ask which books are the most popular, she doesn’t hesitate: "Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four." It does not come as a surprise that readers in this hemisphere’s only totalitarian outpost hunger for the greatest anti-totalitarian novels ever written.
      The Castro regime boasts of having wiped out illiteracy. That makes it all the more unforgivable that it has turned the lending books into an act of defiance. Dissent in Cuba takes many forms, but there is none that shames the regime more.
      Like most communist countries, Cuba is plagued with shortages of everything from food to electricity, but political dissidents it has in abundance. The government maligns 

them as malcontents and traitors—"all these people are financed by the United States," sneers Fernando Remirez, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister—but the dissidents I met here uniformly come across as men and women of integrity and courage.
      On my first day in Havana, I visited Oscar Espinosa Chepe, an economist who lost his job at the National Bank of Cuba—and whose wife was fired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—when he began calling publicly for economic reform. Bluff and good-natured, he describes himself as a former true believer who gradually came to realize the truth about Castro.
      "He turned out to be someone who did everything for his own power," Espinosa says. "Life in Cuba is a mixture of Stalinism and ‘caudillismo’"—rule by a caudillo, a Latin dictator—"and there are no parties, no opposition, no elections, no choices."
      Another one-time true believer, Martha Beatriz Roque, was a professor of statistics at the University of Havana who fell out of favor for praising glasnost and perestroika. In 1997, she and three other dissidents released a report criticizing Cuban communism and urging a peaceful transition to democracy. For that offense, they were arrested on charges of spreading "enemy propaganda," and convicted in a one-day show trial that was closed to the public. Roque and two of the others spent nearly three years in prison; the fourth, Vladimiro Roca, is still there.
      Roque has been detained by the police 17 times; her home has been broken into and searched; she assumes her phone is tapped and her visitors spied on. But she doesn’t fear for her safety. Well-known dissidents like her and Espinosa and the others I met—Elizardo Sanchez, Oswaldo Paya, Ricardo Gonzalez—are protected by their international reputations. If something happens to them, say Roque, "people outside Cuba will make a big noise."
      What worries her more is the fate of dissidents who aren’t as well known. Juan Carlos Gonzalez, for example—the blind president of the Cuban Foundation for Human Rights, who was abducted by the security police and battered so badly he needed stitches in his head. Or 70-year-old Juan Basulto Morell, a dissident journalist who was beaten bloody with a club as his assailant yelled, "This is for being a counter-revolutionary."
      In Cuba, as in all dictatorships, it is the dissenters who sustain hope and keep conscience alive. On this tormented island, they are the bravest and the best.
      —The [Colorado Springs] Gazette, March 20, 2002, p. M 6

Probably the most repellent statement ever made by a contemporary American intellectual was that of Susan Sontag when she wrote: "The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballet et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. It is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." (Partisan Review, Winter 1967, p. 57).
      Sontag’s anarcho-racist language is on a par with an equally repellent statement made by a contemporary British intellectual, E.M. Forster. "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." (from Two Cheers for Democracy). Not only repellent but stupid, since in betraying his country he might be betraying his friend into the hands of its enemies. In a fitful absence of mind, Mr. Forster forgot to repudiate the highest honors—Companion of Honour in 1953 and Order of Merit in 1969 that he had happily accepted from the government and land he was prepared to betray.
      And then there is the comment just after September 11 by tenured history Professor Richard Berthold at the University of New Mexico, who told his freshman class that "anyone who can blow up the Pentagon has my vote." Mr. Berthold is still teaching at UNM, but had he uttered a politically incorrect word about Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or the Black Panthers he’d have been fired or, at the very least, suspended. Actually the university has administered a "cruel and unusual punishment"—Mr. Berthold won’t be able to teach freshmen for the immediate future, the university announced Dec. 10, 90 days after the Pentagon and Twin Towers bombing. I was reminded of these "blame America" reflections on noting publication of a book by University of Chicago Professor Mark Lilla "The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics." He poses this question: "What is it about the human mind that made the intellectual defense of tyranny possible in the 20th century?" That question applies to intellectuals like Susan Sontag, an admirer of Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro, who described the September 11 tragedy as no tragedy at all but, to quote her words in the New Yorker, "an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions."

      It is one of the anomalies of our time that it was highly intelligent people who willingly and actively supported Lenin, Stalin, Hitler or Mao during the 20th century supremacy of these master genocidists. These irrationalist intellectuals—a "chorus for tyranny" Mr. Lilla calls them—all lived in democratic societies, so that their assent was born not out of fear but out of a conscious decision to ignore reason. Mr. Lilla has coined a phrase for these reckless minds: the "philotyrannical intellectual." This "social type," he says, comprised "distinguished professors, gifted poets and influential journalists [who] summoned their talents to convince all who would listen that modern tyrants were liberators." Perhaps they were inspired by Hegel, the 19th century German philosopher, who wrote: "A mighty figure must trample many an innocent flower underfoot and destroy much that lies in its path." Osama bin Laden and his Bombintern would certainly agree with the observation of this Teutonic infidel.
      These "philotyrannical" intellectuals are with us today, as they were back in 1932 when Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, Lincoln Steffens, Malcolm Cowley and Upton Sinclair among others signed a joint letter endorsing the communist presidential candidate because, they wrote, "It is capitalism which is destructive of all culture and communism which desires to save civilization and its cultural heritage from the abyss to which the world crisis is driving it."
      In his recently published study, "Public Intellectuals: a study of decline," Richard Posner, himself a public intellectual as well as a U.S. Court of appeals judge, ascribes to them a "proclivity for taking extreme positions, a taste for universals and abstractions, a desire for moral purity, a lack of worldliness and intellectual arrogance." These attributes, he writes, "work together to induce in many academic public intellectuals, selective empathy, a selective sense of justice, an insensitivity to context, a lack of perspective, a denigration of predecessors as lacking moral insight, an impatience with prudence and sobriety, a lack of realism and excessive self-confidence." (For a devastating analysis of Judge Posner’s book, see Gertrude Himmelfarb in the February issue of Commentary Magazine.)
      The striking consequence about these failures to serve truth is their malignant influence on society. As Lionel Trilling once wrote:
      "This the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking and nowadays the errors of academicism do not stay in the academy; they make their way into the world and what begins as a failure of perception among intellectual specialists finds its fulfillment in policy and action."
      —The Washington Times, January 24, 2002, p. A 19

Although my appearance at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on Tuesday night, was picketed by the members of the "Defend Affirmative Action Party," a thousand students—600 in the hall and 400 in the overflow outside the hall—showed up to hear me speak. About 300 of them were black. (One in fact was the leader of DAAP, Agnes Angebou, who stood up during the question and answer period, oblivious to the fact that she had called for a boycott of the event. She attempted to give an election speech for her candidacy for student body president until I shut her up.) The Black Student Union had evidently decided in a late bout of second thoughts to come in force and be a presence at the proceedings. Another thousand or so people "attended" via the Internet.
      Three vice presidents of the University sat in the balcony. None deigned to introduce themselves to me, or to appear on the platform with me and suggest to their students that spouting hate and calling for pickets of academic speakers might be incompatible with the spirit of learning that an institution like the University of Michigan is supposed to foster. There were also twelve armed police with dogs in attendance who had been assigned to keep things in order and protect me from physical harm. Welcome to the American university campus, circa 2002.
      I talked for a little over an hour. My speeches always begin with a little autobiography since I am the target of a national smear campaign by leftwing hate groups who are ubiquitous on college campuses across the country. Indeed I have encountered only a very few campuses where they are not a visible and intimidating force. At Michigan they regularly steal the newspapers and the newsstands of my conservative hosts, tear down their posters and at times physically attack them. University administrations look the other way – a telling contrast to the way they will leap on the slightest incident that offends the sensitivities of the left. This collusion is essential to the survival of what can only be described as a kind of campus fascism.
      I began, as I always do, by reminding my student audiences that I was fighting for civil rights before they were born, and that I am still doing so. Because of the circumstances of my appearance and the makeup of the audience I altered my subject ("How the Left Undermined America’s Security") and spoke a lot about reparations, about the bankruptcy of the so-called civil rights movement and about the oppression of America’s inner cities by Democrats and progressives who run all the political institutions that govern and affect them. This threw my numerous opponents in the audience so thoroughly off guard that I was able to get through my remarks without incident.

      I did manage to talk briefly about the left’s role in undermining America’s security by pointing out that the reparations campaign is really a campaign of the hate America left whose intention is to paint America as a slave-owning, segregationist and racist nation and thus to alienate black Americans from their own country, while making other Americans ashamed to defend it. In the midst of a war that is taking place on American soil and that may soon involve biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, the rest of us can no longer afford to take such a complacent and tolerant attitude towards this kind of internal ideological attack.
      During the question and answer period at Michigan the discussion got somewhat heated as one would expect. Issues came up – like affirmative action or whether American business investments "destroyed the economies" of African countries – which showed the success of the Marxist indoctrination process at this once great university. Ideas that the 20th century has shown to have dangerous consequences and which are tantamount to flat-earthism are obviously flourishing in a university environment which provides no competition from conservative viewpoints.
      During the Q&A, my most frequent responses were those starting with, "Look, I can’t remedy four years of mis-education in one hour, but …" And then I would attempt to provide a verbal reading list of conservative authors they had never heard of like Thomas Sowell and Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, who have provided the irrefutable evidence that blacks could have succeeded – and did — without affirmative action. The rank ignorance of questioners who argued that "the Constitution said blacks were only 3/5ths of a human being," fueled the righteous rage of the Black Student Union members in attendance and for a moment I thought it was time to end the evening. But the boiling point wasn’t reached and the evening ended if not amicably then at least without a total breakdown. Two cheers for what remains of the learning environment. The hundreds of students who were either neutral, curious, or conservative enjoyed the evening immensely and some of them undoubtedly took away new thoughts.
      In my discussions with my conservative hosts before the speech I learned, among other things, that the Black Studies Department had previously paid $10,000 to Randall Robinson – the pro-Castro, America-hating, race-baiting proponent of reparations to come to Michigan to speak, but had refused to invite me (or pay me a dime), even though reparations would appear to lie within the field of black studies and I am the author of the only book on the other side of the issue. The immense subsidies to destructive leftwing ideologues like Robinson and the lack of resources to bring conservative views to the campus only add to the already colossal intellectual imbalance and the ongoing perversion of the academic process.
      I also learned that out of a faculty of perhaps 2,000 

professors, there is not a single professor available to sponsor the conservative students’ newspaper (The Michigan Review) and club. This does not mean there are no conservatives on the faculty at Michigan, a taxpayer-funded school in a state with a Republican governor; my hosts actually thought there might be as many as six, albeit four in the engineering department. What it does mean is that conservatives are such an endangered species on the Michigan faculty that they are afraid to let anyone know that they are conservative lest their lives be made miserable by leftists who masquerade as liberals. (I was told by one conservative professor at a previous school I had spoken at, that because he had "made the mistake" of letting his views be known he had not been given a raise in 15 years, and by another — a scientist — that he was punished in petty (or not so petty) ways as, for example, by denying him lab space he needed for his work.
      It is things like this that leave me with an aura of sadness even when an evening at a university goes as well as this one did. It is as though when I leave the campus I am leaving students behind an Iron Curtain where they will have no adult to stand up for them or educate them in histories and ideas that would make them proud of their country, that would help the blacks among them to march towards a positive future, or that would give them a reasonable understanding of the world around them. The students I leave behind have no access to professors, books, or ideas 

associated with the conservative viewpoint – which is to say a viewpoint that celebrates the progressive aspects of this country and progressive role it has played as a "beacon of freedom and opportunity to the rest of the world." What they have instead are the prejudices, rancors and delusions of a discredited past.
      —Front Page Magazine, March 21, 2002

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colorless and untelegenic Communist Party bureaucrats in Luanda. Isolating Mr. Savimbi through Western sanctions, which deprived UNITA of free speech and contacts in the Free World, was their ultimate coup. But Mr. Savimbi, as a martyr, becomes an ever more powerful force. His death reminds us that the Cold War never ended, and that we neglect our international friends and commitments at our peril. The United States forgot Afghanistan and was rudely awakened to the consequences of that neglect on September 11. Foremost, Mr. Savimbi’s murder should prompt a revived Reagan Doctrine, dedicated to aiding with diplomatic and military support those who share our democratic principles and are willing to fight with us in future conflicts—particularly in what portends to be a difficult and protracted war against terrorism.
      The Washington Times, February 28, 2002, p. A 21