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Topic: Auf Fidelsehen (Read 1003 times) |
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Hermit
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Auf Fidelsehen
« on: 2008-02-19 08:25:05 » |
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Today Fidel Castro resigned, declaring that he would not be running for a further term when the new Parliament convenes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidel_Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (born August 13, 1926) has been Cuba's leader since 1959. He came to power in an armed revolution that overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and was shortly thereafter sworn in as the Prime Minister of Cuba.[1] In 1965 he became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and led the transformation of Cuba into a one-party socialist republic. In 1976 he became president of the Council of State as well as of the Council of Ministers. He also held the supreme military rank of Comandante en Jefe ("Commander in Chief") of the Cuban armed forces. On July 31, 2006, after undergoing intestinal surgery for diverticulitis,[2] he transferred his responsibilities to the First Vice-President, his younger brother Raúl Castro. On February 19, 2008, five days before his current mandate expired, he announced he would not seek nor accept a new term as either president or commander-in-chief.[3][4][5][6][7]
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Auf Fidelsehen
« Reply #1 on: 2008-02-19 09:31:14 » |
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Somehow I just don't quite believe it. I mean I'm sure he SAID he was stepping down, but I wonder if it will actually happen. And if he does, he's way too much of a 500 lb gorilla in the shadows as long as he's still alive and physically present in Cuba. I would think it will be difficult for anyone else to rule and govern with any independence in Cuba as long as Fidel is looking over his/her shoulder.
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:Auf Fidelsehen
« Reply #2 on: 2008-02-22 04:23:45 » |
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[Blunderov] The vainglorious USA never wastes an opportunity to trumpet democracy but it also never fails to subvert those democracies which do happen to arise that are not to its taste. Both the previous century, and now this one too, are strewn with the disgraceful anti-democratic crimes of what must surely be the most criminal and brazenly hypocrital nation that has ever existed on this planet, bar none.
The USA supports all manner of noxious regimes and indeed actually installs them wherever possible whenever it is expedient. "Democracy" in the USA means the combination of the state monopoly of violence with the untrammeled rapacity of big business and has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "we the people". Facism, in a word.
Perhaps Cuba could assign the leadership of one political party to one of Fidel's brothers and the leadership of a second party to another relative. These parties could then take turns to manipulate the "electorate" into changing the guard every four years or so. Voila! Perfect democracy USA style.
There were no USA trade embargoes against the dictator Fulgencio Batista but when the "dictator" Castro overthrew him in a popular revolution the suddenly reawakened moral sensibilities of the USA left it with no choice but to impose them. What a crock of shit.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ed_tubbs_080220_the_truth_about_the_.htm
The Truth about the U.S. and Castro
by Ed Tubbs (Posted by Ed Tubbs) Page 1 of 2 page(s)
http://www.opednews.com
Castro — Let’s set this record straight: the US never objected to him because he was a dictator; brutal or otherwise.
I doubt I’ll never cease being amazed at how, by and large, gullible and uninformed Americans are. With Fidel Castro’s passing from the scene, the tabloids, the mainstream media and the talk shows are all a twitter over the history of our past un-relations with Cuba, ostensibly because Castro was a brutal dictator.
Man! Have I got this waterfront property you’ve just got to see. Let me pose a circumstance to you. Let’s say you’ve been hauled in by the authorities. (I don’t care why.) And wires are connected to sensitive parts of your anatomy, and your captors are “ringing you up.” You’re screaming at the excruciating pain. Do you care, do you give the first damn, what the political orientation is, of those brutal tormentors who are rending your mind to oozing mush?
The history of the United States government reports that it makes all the difference in the world. What has never bothered the United States government is the brutality of the dictatorship, only whether those ringing you up, whether those imprisoning its citizens, whether those engaging mass murder and torture are communist. If they’re not, they didn’t and don’t merely get a pass, so very often they got and get help and assistance.
Indeed, on more than one occasion, the US government put them in power! Indeed, on more than one occasion, the US government effected “with extreme prejudice” the removal of a democratically elected leader, to effect the installation of the most execrable bastard; “He might be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.” Just maybe, do you think? one of the reasons “they hate us,” isn’t because they hate our freedoms, but because of a history of our duplicity, of hypocrisy, of mingling in the internal affairs of governments well beyond our shores? Not the only reason, of course; but just maybe one of the reasons. Ya think?
Example: although some love to point to it as a smoking gun, there does not exist a shred of strong evidence that George Bush’s grandfathers, Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker, collaborated with the Nazi regime, as far into that loathsome government as 1942. What is incontrovertible, however are that the corporate boards they served on — Union Banking Corp, Brown Brothers Harriman, Selesian-American — were kissing-kin close.
What else is beyond question is what, via Mein Kampf, the tome’s author and German leader had in mind. Neither a Jeffersonian or Jacksonian democracy was among the candidates. Brutal to the most inhumane, unimaginable extremes dictatorship was. Until the United States declared war on Germany, a fact that was prompted only as a consequence of Germany’s alliance with Japan, business as usual was, after all, business. And as the mantra waxed, “The business of America is business.”
However our unseemly addiction to foreign dictatorships precedes the 40s, since then it has been virtually constant and terribly vile; like prostitution, pimps and the mob bosses who reign over all, collecting their cut, with neither the pimps nor mob lords giving one damn about the prostitutes — their age, their physical and/or emotional conditions, the morality of it, right or wrong . . . nada a single damn. The only concerns have been: How much money can we make off it, and for how long?
Without much asking whether the inhabitants wanted it, we subdivided Columbia into two countries, Columbia and Panama because we wanted a canal. With but a single exception (saved for last because of relevance), follows is a list, in alphabetical order of the countries, of the brutal dictatorships the United States supported and/or installed. (Where noted as “Democratically elected replaced by . . .” the “replacement” was via or accompanied by direct CIA intervention.)
Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina.Hugo Banzer in Bolivia.Humberto Branco in Brazil.Democratically elected Salvador Allende was replaced with Augusto Pinochet in Chile.Chiang Kai-Shek in China.Rafael Trujillo in The Dominican Republic.Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez to Alfredo Cristiani in El Salvador.Bavadra to General Rabuka in Fiji.Democrtically elected Andreas Papandreou was replaced by George Papadopoulos in Greece.Democratically elected Jacob Arbenz was replaced by Rios Mont, then by Vinicio Cerezo in Guatemala.François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier in Haiti.Suazo Cordova in Honduras.Suharto in Indonesia.Saddam Hussein in Iraq.Democratically elected Mossadegh was replaced by Shah Pahlavi in Iran.Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua.Mohammed Zia Ul-Haq in Pakistan.Manuel Noriega in Panama.Ferdinand Marco in the Philippines.Ian Smith in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).The House of Saud in Saudi Arabia.Park Chung Hee in South Korea.Turgut Ozal in Turkey.Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam.Democratically elected Patrice Lumumba was replaced by Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire.
And now the most relevant, since the current talk is all about Cuba: The ties between US gambling and agricultural interests (most especially United Fruit), as well as the illegal associations with United States’ crime syndicates, and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles, John Foster’s brother and head of the CIA, and Fulgencio Batista, the pre-Castro dictator were verily incestuous. Young girls were used as sex slaves for visiting Yankees and other businessmen.
Those who worked in the sugar plantations, not only had no protections whatsoever, complaints were met with horrendous beatings. Suspicions of union interest or activity were met with torture and sudden disappearances. Similarly, any form of protest or the expression of an opinion that might be construed as hostile to Batista or his corporate backers resulted in fates not unlike those of suspected union organizers.
It is no stretch to conclude that it was the Eisenhower administration’s look-the-other-way, solid backing of Batista that directly facilitated Fidel Castro’s overthrow of the hated regime, and to Cuba’s diametrically opposite swing to a Communist dictatorship. It is an exquisite example of the unintended consequences of a foreign policy that utterly betrays the ideals upon which this country was founded!
Thus, all the nails-raking-a-blackboard, hate-speech of Cuba because it has been a “brutal dictatorship,” all the ultra-grating screeching hype that has been a running chord through successive American administrations is disingenuous at best, and a catalog of intentional lies, fulminated to deceive the American public at worst. And everyone who has permitted him- or herself to be taken in by the orated rationale has proven him- or herself to be an utter fool, one informed or uninformed, over what was actually going on, and why it was going on!
Not one administration objected that much to Fidel Castro’s brutality or the fact he was a dictator. What they objected to were two truths. The first is that he nationalized US corporate interests; nightclubs and gambling, and the agriculture — most particularly United Fruit. The other was that he had the audacity to flash us the bird, he would not play the game, the rules of which we had written and established and regarded as sacrosanct. In Republican-oriented corporate boardrooms across America it was a chorus of “How dare that bearded little sonofabitch? Doesn’t he realize who the hell he is, or who we are?”
That’s what it was 100% about.
An afterthought: I can hear the retorts, loud and cacophonous, now: the United States has an “admirable” history of not pursuing aggrandizement of territory, the lands of others.
But you see, occupying foreign lands would bring with it the commensurate burden of governance and all that entails. Much better to reap the spoils provided by a government friendly to our business interests: voila, no ongoing burden, other than ensuring the tinhorn dictators never forget by whose beneficence they retain their hold on power.
And is it mere coincidence that in almost every instance it has been the national leaders of the Republican Party, governmental and business, under whose aegis the skullduggery was promulgated and effected? However I feel Representative Ron Paul is rather naïve on a number of issues, on this one I agree wholeheartedly: the idea that we would be best served by concentrating on our own limited national interests, and staying the hell out of the affairs of others. I’m still looking for a clear case of how messing where we shouldn’t a been a messin’ has inured to our long-term benefit.
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Blunderov
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Re:Auf Fidelsehen
« Reply #3 on: 2008-02-23 07:24:31 » |
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Quote from: Blunderov on 2008-02-22 04:23:45
...There were no USA trade embargoes against the dictator Fulgencio Batista... |
[Blunderov] Correction. I was mistaken. Washington had in fact imposed an arms embargo on the Batista regime. This may well have contributed to the success of the Castro revolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Revolution
"A growing problem for the Batista forces was an arms embargo imposed on the Cuban government by the United States government on March 14, 1958. The Cuban air force rapidly lost its power as planes could not be repaired without spare parts from the U.S."
My apologies to all for the previous incorrect statement.
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