Sobran's --
The Real News of the Month
June 2000
Volume 7, No. 6
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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Features
The Moving Picture
(page 1)
The WASHINGTON POST observes that "Clinton fatigue" is
giving way to "Clinton nostalgia" as Bill's second term draws
to a close. Well, maybe, though let's hope not. But give him
this: Clinton is at least interesting. What we are certainly
in for is *Gore* fatigue. Al Gore's shrill, inane attacks on
George W. Bush are enough to make anyone sympathize with Bush,
who ought to be able to win this election by letting Gore
punch himself out. Gore seems to think he can draw blood by
accusing Bush of favoring too few new federal programs; Bush
seems to think he can defend himself against the charge by
offering more federal programs, thereby risking the generation
of Bush fatigue. What an exciting campaign we're in for!
* * *
In April, an eight-year-old white boy was playing in his
great-grandparents' yard in Alexandria, Virginia, when a
twentyish black male passing by suddenly grabbed him, for no
apparent reason, and stabbed him to death. The killer also
badly wounded the great-grandmother and another woman when
they tried to protect the boy. Then he fled; he is still at
large. The savage interracial crime was reported by the
WASHINGTON POST with no mention of race. The paper later
explained that it has a rule against mentioning race except
when it's "relevant" -- as in "stories about civil rights
issues, the problems or achievements of minority groups,
cultural history, and racial conflict." That is, race is
mentioned when it's in the interests of blacks to mention it.
Obviously, the problems of the white majority -- such as
epidemic black-on-white crime -- don't rate. White-on-black
violence, though rare, is another matter: it's called
"racially motivated" or "hate crime" and gets coast-to-coast
coverage, along with presidential homilies and calls for new
"civil rights" -- that is, anti-white -- legislation.
* * *
By the time Mother Waco's goons snatched Elian Gonzalez,
the media had done a job on the Miami Cubans, making them the
most despised ethnic group since the sneaky Japs. Little
Havana was a "banana republic," rabidly anti-Communist and
(ugh!) Catholic, populated by "landed oligarchs" who still
resented Fidel Castro for dispossessing them. Liberals might
criticize "both sides," but their sneers and jabs were
reserved for the Miami Cubans, not for Fidel. And they
performed all these services for socialism without even
getting checks from the Kremlin!
* * *
But the dumbest sentence I've heard in years was spoken,
not very surprisingly, by the militantly bird-brained Eleanor
Clift: "To be a poor child in Cuba may in many instances be
better than being a poor child in Miami, and I'm not going to
gratuitously condemn their lifestyle." What does
"gratuitously" mean? Since when is living under Communism a
"lifestyle"? I get it: we're not supposed to be "judgmental"
about Fidel. The Cuban people, except for those soreheads in
Miami, love him. Like Lenin, Castro still has his "useful
idiots."
* * *
The Clintonites' solicitude for children always reminds
me of a chilling sentence from Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR.
After describing the sinister institutions of Big Brother's
regime -- the Ministries of Truth, Peace, and so forth -- the
narrator tells us: "But the really frightening one was the
Ministry of Love."
* * *
A veteran lawyer, commenting on David Irving's disastrous
lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, asks a
good question: Why do rightists, knowing how corrupt the
legislative and executive branches are, think the judiciary is
any better? Why turn for justice to an ambitious judge who
knows what he can expect if he rules the wrong way? The forces
who conspired to destroy a single dissident historian wouldn't
stick at destroying a judge too, if necessary. Even his
physical safety couldn't be assured.
* * *
Which reminds me of an old Jewish joke. Two Jews are
sitting in a bagel shop reading the papers. One is reading a
Yiddish journal; the other pores over an anti-Semitic sheet.
"Why are you reading that anti-Semitic dreck?" the first
demands. "I like good news," the second replies. "What do you
mean?" "Your paper is all bad news," the other explains: "'The
Jews are being persecuted! Synagogues are being torched!
Cemeteries are being vandalized!' It's so depressing. My paper
tells success stories: 'The Jews own the banks! The Jews run
the government! The Jews control the media!' Give me good news
any day."
* * *
Old movies often give us glimpses of life in a free
country that no longer exists. The other day I saw an old
Humphrey Bogart movie in which Bogey has a serious auto
accident. In the next scene he's lying on a hospital bed with
his arm in a cast -- and he's smoking a cigarette! Those were
the days. If Cuban hospitals still let patients smoke in bed,
maybe Eleanor Clift has a point.
* * *
Exclusive to the electronic version:
Bush seems to be drawing ahead of Gore in the polls,
especially among white married women. Could we be in for a re-
realignment? In 1994 the Republicans took Congress with large
majorities of white Christian voters, while the Democrats had
to settle for landslides among blacks, Jews, Hispanics, and
homosexuals. Clinton, a brilliant politician, aided by the
bungling of Bob Dole and the Republicans, prevented further
GOP consolidation in 1996 and 1998 but didn't really reverse
the trend. He was reelected with less than 50 per cent of the
popular vote and, in 1998, the Republicans did gain a few
seats; they merely fell short of their scandal-whetted
expectations. He may have been a brilliant fluke. Gore isn't
brilliant and lacks any skill or appeal that might add to his
natural base, so we could be looking at a return to the 1994
pattern this year.
* * *
Up in New York, Hillary Clinton may yet win that Senate
seat, thanks to the unforeseen Giuliani family scandals. The
New York mayor, it transpires, has prostate cancer, a string
of girlfriends, and a wife who isn't too happy with him. Mrs.
Giuliani, an actress who prefers her maiden name of Donna
Hanover, recently announced that she'd be appearing off
Broadway in the feminist hit THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES -- an
inauspicious signal for a candidate who was passing himself
off as a conservative (albeit a pro-abortion and pro-
homosexual conservative). She canceled the performance, but
made further waves by holding a distraught press conference at
which she aired her grievances with Rudy. Taking a leaf from
his opponent's spouse, Rudy is arguing that his private life
has no bearing on his ability to serve the public. (It's, as
it were, the economy, stupid!) If New York wants a senator who
can at least simulate a happy marriage, the seat is Hillary's.
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(page 2)
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THE REAL NEWS OF THE CENTURY
(pages 3-6)
The Real News of the Century
Whenever people praise my courage, I think: "If only they
knew how little I really have!" Much as I venerate martyrs,
I've done nothing to put myself in their company, and I dread
the true test, especially after reading about those heroic
souls who have endured it (as I'll shortly explain).
One reason I write as I do is to avoid living in a
country in which I'd have to be truly brave. Here, at least
for the time being, I can't be jailed and tortured for my
views, and I'd like to keep it that way. I have just enough
courage to risk ostracism by people I would gladly ostracize
myself, even if it costs me some income to incur their
displeasure. We live in an age of hypocrisy that makes the
Victorian Age seem an era of rowdy candor.
The Victorians were notoriously hypocritical about sex;
that is, they spoke of it with excessive delicacy. Some people
think we've gone to the opposite extreme, but this isn't
exactly true: we've merely managed to combine hypocrisy with
vice, prurience, and obscenity. La Rochefoucauld called
hypocrisy the tribute that vice pays to virtue; but among us,
it's become the reverse, a tribute that virtue pays to vice.
We are all forced to pay lip-service to vice now, pretending
it isn't vice.
On the last weekend of April, thousands of homosexuals
gathered in Washington to stage an orgiastic political
demonstration, which was addressed, appropriately enough, by
Bill Clinton and Al Gore in taped messages. (Clinton spoke of
the need for teaching "our children" that we must "respect
each other.") The WASHINGTON POST, forgetting once more that
it's supposed to be a newspaper, covered the event in the
style not of journalism but of promotional literature,
celebrating the "diverse crowd" (diversity, him good) with
lavish upbeat color photos, such as a picture of a homosexual
lad with his parents, all wearing T-shirts attesting their
pride in the gay family member. (The "diverse crowd" included
open pedophiles, but the decorum of fashionable opinion
forbade the Post to mention them.)
At the same time, Clinton made a separate declaration
that an international AIDS epidemic now constitutes a "threat
to national security," whatever that means. It certainly
doesn't mean discouraging promiscuous sodomy or acknowledging
that sodomy is, among other things, a major sanitation
problem.
But the real hypocrisy consists in pretending that there
is nothing amiss in homosexuality. Everyone knows better;
homosexuality is a torment that nobody would wish on a loved
one, and the torment is not simply that "society" still
disapproves of it, or that it's the target of "prejudice,"
"hate," and "homophobia." The forced brazenness of "gay pride"
is part of the hypocrisy. What's to be proud of?
Are we really expected to believe this nonsense? Of
course not. We're expected to *pretend* we do. Otherwise
we're bigots, like the execrable John Rocker. What the
enlightened sportswriters call Rocker's "bigoted outburst" was
really a bit of penetrating, if unauthorized, social
criticism. He was talking about trashy people of all races,
who, if you haven't noticed, teem in our big cities. And in
keeping with "gay pride," they are *defiantly* trashy. That's
why Rocker's infamous list started with kids with purple hair.
The new hypocrisy consists in pretending nothing is wrong
when everything is all wrong. This is now called "tolerance"
and "diversity" -- "our greatest strength," according to
Clinton, the perfect homilist for perverted hypocrisy.
How fitting it was that during the impeachment debate the
porn peddler Larry Flynt should emerge as one of Clinton's
defenders. If Clinton's body were to be fished out of a river
after soaking for a couple of weeks, it would look like Flynt.
Because he deals in raw filth, Flynt poses as an enemy of
hypocrisy. He adopts the view that anyone who espouses
morality is a hypocrite, and he assumes he's immune to the
charge because he has no standards. By his logic, only decent
people can be hypocrites. To uphold principles you may not
always live up to makes you, in his book, a hypocrite (as
Clinton would probably agree). Thus Flynt becomes the moral
superior of Henry Hyde. What's wrong with this picture?
But we aren't absolved of responsibility to the moral law
just because we refuse to acknowledge it. The moral law is
real; we all know it. It isn't a matter of "belief," in the
sense that one may or may not believe in a controversial
doctrine. Morality is an inalienable aspect of human nature.
We all know in our hearts that sexual desire must be
controlled and properly directed, even if we aren't always
clear how; we all recognize degradation when we see it, though
our sense of it may be dulled by bad or vicious habits. No man
in his right mind is indifferent to his daughter's becoming a
prostitute; and even a prostitute has some meager residue of
modesty.
In fact the forms of feminine modesty are so nearly
universal as to seem instinctive. Deviations from them exist
mostly among isolated tribes in hot climates; but of course
degenerate societies as well as individuals may depart from
the norm now and then. The chief proof that sexual morality is
basically universal is that even where men allow themselves to
be promiscuous, they usually hold their women to a stricter
standard. The libidinous sultan expects his harem to be
perfectly chaste. In pagan Greece and Rome, such goddesses as
Diana and Vesta were honored for their virginity. According to
the myth, Diana was so angry when Actaeon came upon her
bathing and saw her naked that she turned him into a stag and
he was torn to pieces by his own hounds.
Natural sexual morality is perversely confirmed by the
universal phenomena, especially in wartime, of obscene sexual
insults, sexual torture, and rape, all of which are felt to be
ultimate degradations of enemies. Moral relativism is a luxury
of peacetime; when hostilities explode, men passionately
intent on doing evil instinctively express their real
convictions in violence against the wives, mothers, and
daughters of their foes.
In other words, it's hypocrisy to pretend we don't know
evil when we see it. And it's only in the area of sex that
contemporary man sustains this pretense. Nobody pretends not
to know whether theft, bribery, and treachery are wrong;
liberals can be extremely moralistic about everything but sex.
They aren't moral relativists when it comes to smoking, owning
guns, or simply preferring to associate with members of one's
own race or sex; on such matters they see no need for
tolerance, and they even demand that the state totally
eradicate practices they disapprove of. They merely single out
sexual conduct as a privileged circle, where normal moral
thinking doesn't apply.
It's likewise hypocritical to pretend that our
differences about abortion are due to differences of "belief."
Abortion advocates have kept shifting their ground over the
years, first agreeing that abortion is an evil but arguing
that legalizing it would control it; then turning agnostic,
and adopting the line that "when life begins" is a "religious"
question; and finally insisting that abortion is a "right,"
which the state should actually promote and subsidize. Even
now they shuttle between saying that we should try to make
abortion "unnecessary" (through sex education and birth
control) and demanding full public approval for it. If they
were, as they insist, "pro-choice," they would be horrified by
forced abortion in China; but they are not, and some of them
even defend the barbaric policy ("You have to understand that
it's a poor, overpopulated country ..."). We are dealing not
with conscientious differences, but with hardened consciences.
Such people are willing to pretend that killing isn't killing;
they shrink from using the word "kill" to describe what
abortion does, though they would presumably acknowledge that
bug sprays kill bugs and weed-killers kill weeds.
Christ himself expected everyone to recognize and
acknowledge the truth. He didn't speak of pluralism and
religious differences; he didn't warn the Apostles that they
might meet philosophers with sophisticated doubts about
whether the evidence of the senses might be trusted. He was
quite emphatic that if men rejected the truth -- *his* truth
-- when it was offered to them, they condemned themselves; and
the Apostles were to shake the dust from their feet and move
on. Forgiveness, yes, even for those who crucified him;
tolerance in the modern sense, no. His truth was so
authoritative, so compelling, that he seemed to assume that
nobody who encountered it, simple peasant or learned
epistemologist, could deny it in good faith. He warned that
rejection and persecution would be the normal lot of
Christians, because the world would hate the light and
willfully refuse to convert, not because it might be
innocently misinformed.
In time, miraculously, much of the world did convert,
thanks to the witness of the martyrs; and a whole Christian
civilization grew up. It was not, and could not be, a tolerant
civilization, by liberal standards; it assumed that Christ had
really revealed the essential truth about the world, and it
regarded those who persisted in rejecting his truth -- such as
the Jews -- as perversely backward, somewhat as modern men
regard flat-earthers. They couldn't understand treating the
truth, revealed by God and available to all, as a matter of
indifference or private opinion, as something that might or
might not be true, or as something about which reasonable men
might sincerely disagree. Not only individual minds but
society itself required orthodoxy. Christians still remembered
the everyday evils of the pagan world, which quietly
disappeared during what liberalism would later call "the Dark
Ages": abortion, infanticide, pederasty, sexual license,
slavery, crucifixion, arbitrary persecution and murder, the
savage amusements of the Coliseum. There was no real doubt --
or pretense of doubt -- that these things were evil. Heresy
and apostasy, if tolerated, might lead to their return. As
indeed they are now doing, and have been doing for some time.
Liberalism has become the hypocrisy of pretending we
don't know good from evil. It even treats Communism -- the
most virulent form of apostasy the world has yet seen -- as a
matter of private belief, and the most impenitent agents of
Stalin as victims of persecution. Only in Christianity does it
see threats to freedom: the freedom of the Communist, the
pornographer, the fornicator, the sodomite, the abortionist,
and, ultimately, its most precious freedom of all -- the
freedom of the modern state, which is to say, the freedom of
enlightened, progressive rulers to remake society without the
inhibitions of Christian morality. For liberalism, God himself
is a tyrant, the *only* tyrant. This explains liberalism's
utter indifference to (and secret approval of) the persecution
of Christianity, the untold story of the twentieth century.
Liberalism would lead to an age far darker than the Dark
Ages -- the age of totalitarian states, with persecution and
thought policing far beyond anything the Roman emperors could
conceive. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and other "progressive"
despots, ruling in the name of Science, would claim absolute
authority over the minds of their subjects. Even in America
education has become the province of the state, and private
education, though tolerated, is heavily handicapped and
regulated.
The proclaimed principles of liberalism contradict those
of the totalitarian state; and classical liberals -- now
called "libertarians" to distinguish them from the prevalent
type of leftist "liberals" who control the Democratic Party --
still want to limit the state to the most basic functions (or
to eliminate it altogether). But as this distinction suggests,
the dynamics of liberalism are very different from its
Jeffersonian rhetoric. In the real world, liberals have often
shown sympathy for Communist regimes, have moved constantly
from a libertarian to a socialist paradigm, and, in contrast
to conservatives, have proved susceptible to Communist
infiltration. Emotionally, liberals are far more hostile to
"right-wing" than to "left-wing" regimes around the world;
they rarely use the label "left-wing" as a term of censure.
Verbally devoted to religious freedom, they are alarmed by
anything they see as an encroachment of religion in American
public life -- the posting of the Ten Commandments in a public
building -- but silently indifferent to the persecution of
religion by any state they regard as "progressive." They see
racial discrimination anywhere as a "human rights issue," but
religious discrimination, even to the point of savage attacks
on believers, never shows up on their moral radar screens.
This is why conservatives speak of liberal hypocrisy and
double standards. But the real problem is not that liberals
apply their standards inconsistently, but that they don't
acknowledge their real standards. Behind every double standard
lurks an unadmitted single standard. Deep down, liberalism
shares Communism's hatred of Christianity.
A large part of the story that liberal journalism and
liberal history have left untold has now been thoroughly
recounted in a 430-page book by my dear friend Robert Royal,
THE CATHOLIC MARTYRS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: A COMPREHENSIVE
WORLD HISTORY, published by the Crossroad Publishing Company
in New York.
The book begins with a meditation on the meaning of
martyrdom. Repeatedly and emphatically, Christ told his
disciples to prepare for it as the inevitable price of
following him. Yet most Christians believe that the age of
persecution belonged to the early centuries of Christianity,
and since the conversion of Constantine they have come to take
for granted their security as the majority religion of the
West. Yet the return of terrible persecutions in the twentieth
century confirms Christ's prediction.
Christians are well aware of the gruesome general record
of atheistic Communism, which, in ruthless cruelty and numbers
killed, far surpass the persecutions of the Roman Empire; but
Royal's account of it adds remarkable detail and stories of
heroic personalities unknown to most Westerners. Among these
are two Ukrainian Catholic churchmen, Archbishop Andrew Graf
Sheptytski and his successor, Joseph Slipyi, who defiantly
endured Soviet rigors. Sheptytski was arrested, beaten nearly
to death, and, during his hospitalization in 1944, poisoned by
a Soviet doctor; Slipyi survived decades in the Gulag and
finally went to Rome, where he worked to organize support for
the Church in his native country. When he died at age 92 in
1984, Pope John Paul II said: "He passed through the tortures
and sufferings of the Cross, similar to those of Christ at
Golgotha.... May his memory last forever!" Despite Communist
rhetoric of "class struggle" and "working classes," the
Soviets hated Christians far more than capitalists.
Most Americans think of Mexico as a Catholic country;
they are on the whole remarkably ignorant of the Mexican
government's long and bloody war on the Church, beginning in
1914 and finally repealing its anti-Catholic legislation only
within the last decade. The most famous of the thousands of
Mexican martyrs was the priest Miguel Pro. The dictator
Plutarco Calles ordered Padre Pro's execution by firing squad
in 1927 and, far from wishing to conceal the deed, invited the
world press to cover it, in the expectation that the world
would see the priest begging for mercy. Instead, Padre Pro
extended his arms in a Christ-like pose and cried: "Viva
Cristo Rey!" ("Long live Christ the King!") The resulting
pictures, which Calles desperately tried to suppress, were
reproduced countless times and inspired thousands of other
Mexicans to accept martyrdom. Tens of thousands defied
Calles's orders by attending Padre Pro's funeral; the police
could do nothing. But the day after his death, U.S. Ambassador
Dwight Morrow and the humorist Will Rogers joined Calles on
his presidential train for a triumphant tour of Mexico. The
government banned the Church outright and killed hundreds of
thousands of Catholics. Yet the Church, though the hierarchy
discouraged armed resistance by lay Catholics, could not be
exterminated.
Spain was another story. There the Catholic side won,
after a terrible civil war (1936-69). As the liberal press and
historians tell the story, it was the overthrow of the liberal
democratic Republic by the fascist forces of Francisco Franco,
who restored the Catholic monarchy while retaining dictatorial
power. But (apart from the fact that Franco was no fascist)
the standard account omits nearly everything that led up to
the war: the Republic's attempt to strangle the Church by
legislation, while tolerating widespread harassment violence
against the Church and the clergy. The government cut off
public funding of the Church, banned religious education, and
announced its right (and therefore its intent) to limit
religious festivals and to expel religious orders. Communists,
active in the government, didn't conceal their aims: "We are
determined to do in Spain what was done in Russia," one
socialist leader proclaimed. The sincerity of these avowals
was duly attested by the leftists' many tortures, rapes, and
murders of nuns, priests, and ordinary believers throughout
Spain, which became common years before the civil war began.
During the war, nuns were shot in the streets; priests were
killed for refusing to break the seal of the confessional, and
one was castrated before his murder. Yet few of the clergy
renounced the Faith even in the face of death. (Royal notes
that among the famous foreign sympathizers on the Republican
side, Ernest Hemingway was much more candid about anti-
Catholic atrocities than George Orwell.)
Royal's chapters on the fate of Catholics under Nazi rule
should dispel the libelous myth of any sort of affinity
between Catholicism and Nazism; Nazi hostility to the Church,
combined with Catholic resistance, produced plenty of martyrs.
But nowhere was persecution more dreadful, more
ferocious, degrading, and downright satanic, than in Communist
Romania. The torturers compounded physical suffering with
obscene desecrations of the Host and parodies of the
sacraments, "baptizing" their victims by pushing their faces
into unflushed toilets.
Albania was not far behind: a Jesuit survivor recorded a
litany of physical tortures so sickening that one marvels at
the mere fact that the regime found men willing and able to
inflict them without passing out:
Most of [the Catholics in the prison camps]
were beaten on their bare feet with wooden
clubs; the fleshy part of the legs and
buttocks were cut open, rock salt inserted
beneath the skin, and then sewn up again;
their feet, placed in boiling water until
the flesh fell off, were then rubbed with
salt; their Achilles' tendons were pierced
with hot wires. Some were hung by their arms
for three days without food; put in ice and
icy water until nearly frozen; had electrical
wires placed in their ears, nose, mouth,
genitals, and anus; burning pine needles
placed under fingernails; forced to eat a
kilo of salt and having water withheld for
twenty-four hours; boiled eggs put in their
armpits; teeth pulled without anaesthetic;
tied behind vans and dragged; left in
solitary confinement without food or water
until almost dead; forced to drink their own
urine and eat their own excrement; put in
pits of excrement up to their necks; put on
a bed of nails and covered with heavy
material; put in nail-studded cages which
were then rotated rapidly....
As the brave Romanian Bishop Iuliu Hirtea put it before
his death in the 1970s: "It is not we who keep silence here.
It is not we who are the Church of Silence, but the members of
the Church in the free world who are the real Church of
Silence, for they do not speak on our behalf." Of course we
American Catholics had so many more urgent things to worry
about: the Pope's refusal to let us use contraceptives or to
allow women to be ordained as priests.
Much more remains to be said about the tremendous story
of the modern world's war on Christendom. But Robert Royal, to
his eternal credit, has made it possible to say it.
Boxed Copy
RATHER NOT SAY: Somehow the major media neglected to mention
that the "housewife" who organized the Million Mom March for
gun control, advertised as a "grassroots" movement, was
actually an employee of CBS News (she works for Dan Rather)
and a friend of Hillary Clinton. It just goes to show that we
need more investigative reporting on journalism. (page 8)
OUR FRIEND THE STATE: The state is a monopoly of the means of
destruction. And those who are skilled in the *acquisition*
of coercive power -- an amoral pursuit -- are forever trying
to persuade us that they are wise and benevolent in the
*exercise* of it. The masters of force always pretend to be
philanthropists. (page 10)
Sir John Gielgud (1904-2000): It was John Gielgud's fate to be
overshadowed as a Shakespearean actor by the flamboyant
Laurence Olivier. Gielgud's refined, quavering style seemed a
nineteenth-century anachronism; yet he was generally
considered the greatest Hamlet and Richard II of his time.
Nobody was so great for so long: only a few years ago he
recorded a Lear that displayed his voice and intelligence
amazingly undiminished in his 90s. (page 11)
Reprinted Columns (pages 7-12)
* The Critics of Christ (April 11, 200)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000411.shtml
* The "Dangerous" David Irving (April 18, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000418.shtml
* Subsidized Consensus (April 20, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000420.shtml
* The Weirdest Sister (April 25, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000425.shtml
* Why Fear Castro? (April 27, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000427.shtml
* Changing the Story (May 2, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000502.shtml
All articles are written by Joe Sobran
Copyright (c) 2000. All rights reserved.
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of Joe Sobran's columns and newsletter. For more
information contact fran@griffnews.com or call
800-493-9989.
[ENDS]