Cubans have been out in the streets, protesting decades of oppression and poverty. They've been beaten and arrested for – as The New York Times phrased it – "Shouting 'Freedom' and other anti-government slogans."

That's not wrong if you understand that the protestors are not generally "anti-government." Their opposition is specifically directed toward the socialist dictatorship that denies them basic human rights.

In theory, that should galvanize the United Nations Human Rights Council. In practice, as UN Watch's Hillel Neuer has pointed out, the 47-nation UNHRC "has failed to take a single action: no resolution, no urgent session, no commission of inquiry."

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Antisemitism is back with a vengeance. According to the ADL, acts of assault, vandalism, and harassment against Jews are at the highest level "since ADL's tracking began in 1979."

One example: This month, Khaled Awad, an immigrant from Egypt, was charged with stabbing a rabbi outside a Jewish school in Boston. Witnesses said, "the suspect would stereotype various differences in racial groups and behavior, which included whites, Blacks and that he was especially harsh on Jews." (If that sounds like qualifications for a tenured professorship at an elite university, perhaps that's part of the problem.)

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After the 20^th century's first great war, France, Britain, Italy, Japan, and other major powers founded the League of Nations. Its primary mission: to keep the peace. It failed, of course, and the result was World War II, following which the major powers created a new and, they hoped, improved model: the United Nations.

Keeping the peace was, again, the principal mission, but the U.N.'s contribution to preventing the Cold War from heating up was marginal at best. And wars between lesser powers continued.

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At a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee last week, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this about Critical Race Theory: "I'll obviously have to get much smarter on whatever the theory is, but I do think it's important actually for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read."

Fair enough but that leads to this question: How does one become smarter about CRT? In much of the media, it's being described as nothing more than an "academic concept" or an "analytic tool" for understanding "white rage" and "systemic racism."

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Time and again, we fail to understand Russia and its rulers. Back in 1939, Churchill acknowledged that, famously describing Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma."

Nevertheless, three years later, Roosevelt convinced himself that Stalin "likes me," and that he could therefore "handle that old buzzard." He told an advisor: "I have just a hunch that Stalin doesn't want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace."

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