In what seems truly a bygone era, Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba on February 16 of 1959. Yes, 58 years ago. And a Castro is still in power in this ghastly real-life Autumn of the Patriarch.

I could say a lot of things about Fidel Castro without getting to anything nice. Like how revealing it is that he would have switched jobs repeatedly while still being the guy you got shot for disobeying. And how typical it is of a regime that for all its yapping about true democracy had no legitimacy that it became dynastic like North Korea. (Mind you his own daughter, from one of his many infidelities, fled the island prison in disguise in 1993 and his own sister opposed him from American exile.) But never mind him.

What I want to do on this dismal anniversary is insult all the leftists who placed such high hopes on him to begin with and then somehow insisted despite everything that he really was a good man and a liberator. Anybody can make a mistake. Even the New York Times in originally hailing him as "the Robin Hood of the Caribbean". But to persist in one, to speak of democracy and human rights and peace in a sanctimonious tone while siding with this seedy brutal villain and denying repeatedly that he was a Communist, or in case he was denying that it mattered if he was one, surely indicates grave defects in judgement.

Especially as it is a habit of the left, from Stalin through Castro to Mugabe and beyond; as Jay Nordlinger memorably put it in National Review back in 1994, "Like an adolescent girl on holiday, the radical Left is always falling in love with some unsuitable foreigner..."

To do it and learn nothing is to double down on nasty folly. Why have so many done it, and not just on the radical left, including our own Prime Minister Justin Trudeau?

For that matter, why are there still Che T-shirts?

"The question is no longer as Dostoevsky put it: 'Can civilized men believe?' Rather: 'Can unbelieving men be civilized?'" Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic

It is hard to believe that, as late as Edward Coke’s time, it was credible in England to assert that the monarchy was originally founded by Brutus of Troy. (Not et tu Brutus. Another guy.) And yet in Japan it was believed well into the 20^th century that their monarchy was founded in the 7th century BC, specifically on February 11 of 660 BC, by Jimmu, a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu. Also of the storm god Susanoo, by the way. I mean, why stop at one?

Now it may well be that the Emperorship was in some way established by a guy named Jimmu or something of the sort in or around 660 B.C. Possibly he set up shop in Yamato on February 11, now celebrated as "National Foundation Day" in Japan. After all, there was a historical figure at the centre of the Arthurian legend, a leader of the Romanized Britons after the legions left, despite later embellishments ranging from the inspiring to the downright silly. And Jimmu too may well have been a real person, or modeled on one.

Brutus of Troy? Not so much. I mean, maybe there was a Trojan called Brutus and maybe he even was descended from Aeneas. But however he got into a 9th century Historia Britonum it was not by ship west from Troy, out through the Pillars of Hercules and then north to glory. Nor was "Britain" named for "Brutus". (Nor, I submit, did Aeneas flee to Italy after the sack of Troy and have a son Ascanius who founded Alba Longa. Nor was Brutus descended from Noah’s son Ham. And so on.)

Perhaps you think it childish of me to make sport of these legends. But I do so in order to draw attention to a crucial difference between the governments, constitutions and political cultures of England and Japan. And I do it while acknowledging that the government of Japan seems in many ways to have enjoyed a more organic and harmonious relationship to its citizens than elsewhere.

The thing is, even if people believed the more fanciful tales about Brutus, and gave them some minor weight in legitimizing monarchy in Britain in principle, nobody ever sought to bolster their claim to kingship, or for sweeping powers for the king, by pointing to Brutus. English kings, going back long before Canute, established their claim to the throne by governing well. And governing tyrannically was never justified by the origins of the monarchy even if people sometimes got away with it for a while. At bottom, Brutus was just a piece of colourful embroidery.

Jimmu was not. Or rather, Amaterasu was not. The Japanese Emperor really did claim divinity, via Amaterasu’s grandson Ninigi, supposedly Jimmu’s great grandfather, and a whole lot of his people believed it. Not all, of course. But those who did not kept their mouths shut or someone shut them permanently for them. And because the Emperor was a living god, to the point that when after defeat in 1945 they actually saw the rather unimpressive figure of Hirohito in his ill-fitting suits (because tailors were not permitted to touch a living god even to measure him) and heard his all-too-human voice they were profoundly shocked.

It sounds as silly as Brutus of Troy. But this claim, which incidentally could not be made in a Christian society, made genuine self-government impossible. Canute rebuked courtiers for telling him he was such a favourite of God that he could command the waves. Japanese Emperors would have rebuked and possibly executed courtiers for telling him he was not himself a God. And it matters.

It’s no accident that a regime headed by a living god could launch World War II even though it was neither morally justified nor practically sensible. Who’s going to tell a divinity he’s a belligerent nitwit?

Sometimes things are just too easy to ridicule. Like Poland's "Wedding to the Sea" on February 10, 1920. It was so popular there that they had another one in 1945 under the Communists. In fact quite a few. But we should not let Communism, or cynicism, spoil things for us. And in fact the 1920 ceremony, though absurd, is also touching.

The reason it happened, or at least the occasion, was that following World War I Poland had regained access to the Baltic Sea, lost more than a century earlier in 1793 when its neighbours had partitioned it again but not for the last time. Including in the 20^th century when Hitler and Stalin did it in 1939. Poland is in a bad neighbourhood and quite frankly has deserved better of history than it has usually received.

It was partly dismembered in 1772 by Prussia and Russia. They did it again in 1793 at which point Poland lost access to the sea, and then in 1795 they and Austria did it and Poland lost access to Poland, vanishing from the map.

It was briefly sort of resurrected by Napoleon, as the Duchy of Warsaw, after which Russia created a Kingdom of Poland from which it later removed another chunk including Warsaw itself which you’d think was sort of clearly Polish. And after crushing a Polish uprising in 1831 the Russians decided to teach their ungrateful slaves a lesson and recrushed them. Ditto after the 1863 uprising when they tried to replace Polish with Russian.

Things were better in the Austrian bit. But not, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, the Prussian one. Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that after Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary all managed to lose World War I, Poland reappeared thanks to the Treaty of Versailles. Russia attacked again, of all things. But lost.

Back to our wedding.

In October 1919 General Jozef Haller was given the task of peacefully reoccuping formerly German formerly Polish Pomerelia, which has Gdansk in it. As the Germans mostly yielded it peacefully, with a bit of sabotage, the 16th Infantry Division under Haller reached the Baltic Sea. And at Puck, which has nothing to do with hockey or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Haller conjured up a rather touching if theatrical ceremony with a sermon, raising of the Polish Navy flag to a 21 gun salute, and after local fishermen cut a hole in the ice Haller threw in a platinum ring and said "In the name of the Holy Republic of Poland, I, General Jozef Haller, am taking control of this ancient Slavic Baltic Sea shore".

A commemorative post was erected and, predictably, destroyed by the Nazis 19 years later. But a replica now stands in the Port of Puck next to Haller’s bust.

Obviously the great pride and relief Poles took in getting their nation back was short-lived as they got brutally rumbled by their neighbours again and then subjected to hideous Nazi and Stalinist tyranny. And it took some gall for the Stalinists to pose as liberators in 1945 right down to permitting new versions of the ceremony. But there are still reenactments to this day.

OK, so it’s not exactly canonical. But despite the superficial absurdity, when I think of all that Poland has endured, I find it endearing, even moving.

Happy anniversary.

My latest for The Rebel:

February 9 is a nice anniversary for people who like nuclear missiles. Because on this date in 1959 the first ever ICBM became operational, the R-7 Semyorka, at Plesetsk. Yes, you are correct. It was a Soviet weapon. Indeed the reason people panicked over Sputnik, itself a harmless little beeping satellite, wasn’t just that the dang Russkis seemed to be getting ahead in the knowledge economy of the 20^th century so American students would have to hit the math books harder or be outproduced and left in the dust. (Yes, that chestnut is getting a little stale; can you go into a frenzy over "STEM" in schools?) It was that precisely the same technology that could put a satellite into orbit could also take a nuclear warhead up there and then release it onto an inexorable unpowered downward "ballistic" course toward, um, your house.

Now it is true that once both superpowers developed reasonably reliable launch-on-warning rockets it created a balance of terror that kept the peace. Absent nuclear weapons I think it is inconceivable that there would not have been a third conventional war in Europe by the 1980s. And there was a certain wilful embrace of neurosis by intellectuals in the 1950s with the imminence of nuclear annihilation as a bit of an excuse. But that’s about all I have to say of an encouraging nature here.

The R-7 is a classic Soviet story in many ways including that its name was always classified so it was code-named SS-6 Sapwood by NATO. (The Soviets always refused to give the names they used for their missiles during strategic arms talks, manifesting a fetish for counterproductive and offensive secrecy that made their general mantra of "trust us" through clenched teeth exceptionally ludicrous.) Apparently they called it by its GRAU index moniker "8K71" when in a formal mood whereas "Semyorka" means "the seven" so R7 Semyorka is a bit of redundant unnecessary repetition of the same thing again. (If you’re wondering, GRAU is the Russian acronym for the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate of the Ministry of Defence, for Glavnoye raketno-artilleriyskoye upravleniye.)

The "Semyorka" was a bit of a beast, weighing 280 metric tons, 112 feet long and burning kerosene plus liquid oxygen. It took 20 hours to prepare for launch, its massive launch system could not be hidden from US spy planes, and it could not stay on alert for more than a day. And it wasn’t very accurate or reliable. In fact it was never deployed operationally although it did get Sputnik up there and led to a family of rockets that got the Soviets into space although never to the moon and in fact failed more often than they succeeded for years.

It didn’t help that the R7s were in Plesetsk, which even Russians might consider to be in the middle of nowhere and with inclement weather unfriendly to construction and machinery. (It’s about 500 miles northeast of Moscow.) But basically the Semyorka was hugely inexpensive, worked really badly and scared other people into making better weapons of their own and regarding the Soviet government as hostile and mindlessly belligerent.

So not a nice anniversary for the rest of us.

"How small," Dr. Johnson rhymed, "of all that human hearts endure,/ That part which laws or kings can cause or cure." It’s a useful reminder, and one somebody ought perhaps to put to music, with a backbeat, in honour of February 7, 1964, when the Beatles arrived in the United States to spearhead the first really successful British invasion since the Seven Years’ War.

It was the eruption onto the main Western stage of an amazing array of musical talent and innovation that showed that Britain was far from exhausted as a cultural force. I do not think it is merely a reflection of my particular advancing age that I call The Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, David Bowie and you can pick many others from the Yardbirds to Herman’s Hermits an exceptional flowering of brilliance. And it is certainly not simply a reflection of my own preferences to say that when these acts showed up in an America whose youth were growing sick of sugary pop songs, it changed the world in ways Elvis Presley alone could not have done.

"The Sixties" had many causes beyond a group of talented Brits giving voice and legitimacy to sometimes juvenile frustration. But rock was the backdrop, and once the Beatles and others had touched down and lit things up, nothing could ever be the same.

I would go further and say the Beatles in particular smoothed the path of social change by being so earnest, so "with it" as one could once say without irony or corn, and yet so decent, blowing the whistle on angry radicalism and somehow placing a kindly, steadying hand on the whole counterculture. "You say you want a revolution? … when you talk about destruction/ Don’t you know that you can count me out".

One can point to laws, kings and wars contributing to the upheaval of the 1960s including obviously Vietnam, the "imperial president" Richard Nixon and the civil rights acts. But politicians jump out to lead parades that are already underway, they don’t create or steer them. It was the ambiance of the period that made the anti-war movement so important, not the other way around. And it was the final, long-overdue change of heart among many Americans including Southerners that finally made formal civil rights a social and political possibility.

There were other contributors to the wildness of that decade including darker forces like the Weathermen and of course pharmaceuticals. And here I think "the pill" mattered more than things like LSD or even marijuana. So the Beatles were far from alone. But they were both surfing on and helping shape a massive social movement that changed what politicians could do or duck.

When you saw the way young people reacted to their arrival in the United States, you knew the world was changing radically and laws and kings would have to scramble to keep up with fast-beating hearts.

A reminder that "Wish I'd said that" needs your help. If you think it's worth my time and effort to produce it, make a monthly pledge so I can keep it going. "the lotus-eaters... call shame silliness and drive it into disgrace and exile; they call self-control cowardice and expel it with abuse..."

Socrates in Plato, The Republic