Lindsay Perigo
The Politically Incorrect Show - 10/04/2000
[Music - Die Fledermaus]
Good afternoon, KAYA ORAAAA & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Monday April 10, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd, the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit & excellence against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.
[Music up, music down]
You won't find individual liberty in Cuba. Plato would be proud of Cuba. The Cuban state takes possession of an individual from birth. The Cuban constitution gives the state paramount rights in raising children, & Cuban law requires that parents & teachers raise children with "a communist personality" & bans "influences contrary to communist development." The Cuban state forces all children over the age of eleven to work on its farms for at least a month of every year. When they reach sixteen they are conscripted into the Cuban army. Morally speaking, they remain conscripts of the state all their lives.
You will find many remnants of individual liberty, albeit fast-disappearing, in America - enough to make a vast qualitative difference still between life in the United States & life in Cuba. Desperate souls from places like Cuba have risked - & often lost - life & limb in their efforts to reach America. America used to welcome them. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," exhorts the Statue of Liberty. "The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
Now, it seems, the lamp has been lowered, the torch extinguished. Little Elian Gonzales washed ashore from Cuba five months ago, barely alive, his mother & ten others having drowned in their tempest-tossed quest for freedom. He wants to stay in America. The Cuban government wants to reclaim its property. Says Luis Fernandez, a spokesman for Cuba's unofficial embassy in Washington, unabashedly, "He is a possession of the Cuban government." Unbelievably, the United States government agrees. Attorney-General Janet Reno has declared her support for a court ruling that Elian must be returned to Cuba, ostensibly to his father, from whom his mother had been long divorced, but in reality to the Cuban government. Janet Reno's professed solicitude for fathers & sons rings hollow given her sanction of the Waco massacres by government agents under her jurisdiction. She is not truly concerned to ensure that Elian has a father; she is concerned to ensure that Fidel Castro has another slave.
The unspeakable immorality of forcibly extraditing a young refugee to a life of slavery is one thing; the fact that this heinous act is being perpetrated by the government of what was once "the land of the free & the home of the brave," a government bound by a constitution that prohibits involuntary servitude, is another. If the forced repatriation of Elian Gonzales goes ahead, President Clinton may just as well ceremonially shred the constitution & topple the Statue of Liberty - and officially abandon any pretext that his country is any longer a haven for the poor huddled Elians of this world, yearning to be free. If the golden door is to be slammed shut, if the lamp of liberty is to be smashed, let it be in full view of a darkened world.
Politically Incorrect Show, observing a moment of silence now for the mother of Elian Gonzales, & the freedom that, in the spirit of "Give me liberty or give me death," she so bravely sought.
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