821–830 of 842 posts
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Executes dissenters
But life inprisonment is okay, right? Asking for a friend (Chelsea Manning). Or is it just a matter of calling dissenters "traitors" and then it's fine? I'm sure Castro ticked that checkbox before the executions.
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Most Cubans live in very poor conditions with no means to improve their lives because of low wages and high cost of living (by Cuban standards, tourists will find it cheap so that should show you how little money they make). Also, government oppression against those who speak up is a great deterrent to changing the current socio/economic situation. You talk about levels of education like a grandiose achievement, it i…
That statement is supported by people I talked to who've been there. It's not like Cuba is North Korea; it's not that hard to see what life there is really like. Also, I do consider their levels of education to be a grandiose achievement, and "to what end?" — well, their levels of healthcare for one. I don't claim their system is perfect or even good, but one can't judge the value of education only on the salaries th…
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> Does the life quality of populace increase or did it decrease on countries that US of A intervened? Yes, I understand that's the question at hand. In the case of Korea, there is a good argument to be made that the entire country would have had the quality of life North Korea has if it were not for the intervention. > by definition ussr did not even have communism Yes, and neither did China, nor Cuba, nor Vietnam, e…
I meant to take into account all results of US interventions from the end of world war 2. Its a net negative result for affected citizens due to underhanded tactics by US. And for US too. Which is why USA is no more a world leader. It would have had plausibility if it didn't constantly try to undermine other democratic countries atleast. But no, every other country is a possible enemy. Spying even the heads of states…
Net negative compared to the counterfactual of perfect interventions or the counterfactual of no interventions?
Again, I think there were lots of cases in which the US screwed up. That's easier to tell in hindsight in some of those cases. On the ground at the time, was it obvious that the Korean War was a good idea and the Vietnam War a bad one? (I think it _did_ become obvious that the Vietnam War was a bad idea quite a bit before the US actually pulled out of it; again, I won't claim that the US didn't make preventable mistakes!)
What I don't have a good handle on is what the world would look like if the US post WWII had adopted the sort of foreign policy it had in 1910 or 1925 and just minded its own business and ignored the rest of the world. And if you're not suggesting it should have done _that_, then I'm not sure what you're suggesting, exactly.
> Which is why USA is no more a world leader.
Is the USA less of a world leader than in the 1920s or 1930s? I don't think so.
Is it less of one than it was in 1946? Maybe, but that was inevitable, for at least two obvious reasons:
1) Its economic influence decreased as its share of world GDP dropped (which it _had_ to; in 1946 a lot of the rest of the world's industrial capacity was in ruins, and let's not get started on the service sector in most of 1946 Europe, Japan, China, USSR). Also, the dependence of other countries on US exports or aid dropped from 1946 to now, generally speaking. This is, of course, a good thing.
2) The rest of the world caught up to the US in some areas in which it had had moral leadership, thus decreasing the moral leadership aspect. As one example, the non-communist European countries which hadn't done so yet finally got around to introducing women's suffrage (Belgium 1948, France 1944, Greece 1952, Italy 1945, Liechtenstein 1984, Portugal 1976, San Marino 1959, Spain 1976, Switzerland 1971 or 1991 depending on how you count).
Which countries would you consider to be more "world leaders" than the US at the moment? Or is your claim that the US is no longer _the_ world leader (as if it ever were)? I would say that's a very good thing.
> Spying even the heads of states of allies
Do you seriously believe that the US is the only country doing that? I would be quite shocked if this were the case.
> Then read it as if you are from ussr.
I _am_ from the USSR (back when there was one). So yes, I have some idea, both from my reading and from talking to people of my parents' and grandparents' generation of what things looked like from that side. A bit from personal experience as well, but that covers a somewhat small slice of post-WWII history of the USSR.
> What I would strongly advocate for is open governance.
Do you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_government or something else? If that's what you mean, then I'm all in favor.
> I wonder if law banning hipocracy is the answer.
I'm not sure whether you mean http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hipocracy or something else. "Hipocracy" is not a word I've seen before you used it just now, and I can find no other references to it. Not sure whether you mean "hypocrisy", but that wouldn't fit in with the rest of the paragraph that follows the above-quoted sentence...
> Here is a very good article that has many ideas I strongly agree with.
Thank you for the link. I'll need to take some time to read it and think before I can comment on it intelligently.
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Obama didn't murder thousands? Yet I hear good things about him. FDR? Any US president basically? The people responsible for staging coups abroad to replace democratically elected leaders, install sympathetic dictators and overall fuck up life in a region for 50 years? Yet I hear good things about them too. Why can't the same be applied to Fidel? He committed atrocities and he did good for the country. And indeed muc…
Obama didn't have his fellow-citizens shot by firing squad without a trial merely because they were political opponents, like journalist Yvonne Conde's uncle [1]. Agreed the sanctions were unproductive. More than anything else, US sanctions helped Castro stay in power for half a century. But to blame the sanctions for his atrocities - or to say the good he did outweighed the bad - is to be willfully blind: When Cuban…
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Well, ask people in Honduras or Nicaragua, which are "free" countries, effectively how much better they have it than Cubans. Hint: they don't, because their countries are "democratic" in theory yet they're overrun by gang violence, misery to a level that makes the worst of Cuba a paradise, and have state actors that claim democracy in theory yet will do what they need to keep their power. If anything, the history of…
Strange, all the loops which left wing people jump through, to support murdering dictators... :-( So, why didn't you compare with working democracies there.. instead of with cleptocracies that had coups and civil wars? What is the real problem with doing as normal people and condemn all dictators? Castro had options, he could have gone to Western Europe and asked for help in e.g. the 70s, as part of a democratization…
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I think most replying to this comment are too young to remember that the CIA made several unsuccessful attempts to kill Castro himself, and Muammar Gaddafi. And those where the unsuccessful attempts that we know.
I hadn't quite considered that. I suppose that very well might count, though I was particularly thinking in the domestic sense.
To be fair, earlier in the year the administration promised to implement additional safeguards and oversight for these programmes, but brass tacks a progressive administration killed US citizens in non-war zones because of an executive decision with no due process.
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Droning doesn't kill only terrorists. There's plenty of collateral deaths (what do you think the ratio is, 1:10 intended targets to unintended when explosives are involved in civilian settings?) not to mention the labeling of who is and isn't a terrorist is hardly infallible. Of course those giving the go ahead are so far removed from the consequences that it must become easier and easier to order drone strikes when…
Again, Castro went about killing or jailing all those who opposed him. My original statement was that no US president has done so.
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I'm as anti-communist as they come, but comparing Castro to Hitler is ridiculous. Castro never set up camps for the sole purpose of mass murder. Castro didn't create special army units to machine gun hundreds of thousands of civilians. Castro didn't deliberately starve entire cities of people to death.
You're arguing that some aspects of Hitler's National Socialism don't match Fidel Castro's Marxism-Leninism, while purposely ignoring all similarities, common to any totalitarian and repressive regime. Castro's long list of political executions are well documented. We may agree that Nazi death camps have a scale of their own, but this is no reason to turn a blind eye to the oppressive and persecutory nature of Fidel…
I would encourage the commenters in this thread who see Fidel's legacy as a black-and-white matter of an "evil dictator who did bad things and was wrong about economics" to step back, bear witness to the objective facts about Fidel Castro's life ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidel_Castro ), think sincerely about what could lead a highly intelligent and charismatic person to become or follow Fidel Castro (as many ha…
My family and the family of just about everyone I grew up around had their whole lives destroyed by this evil man. He has executed thousands, has imprisoned thousands more, and has totally ruined a country that was once the most prosperous in Latin America. You may philosophize about the 'complexity' of the life of this evil man, but for people who actually lived under his abuse, who have seen what he has done to the…
Batista was a violent, corrupt dictator. My grandmother lived in Cuba during those days in absolute poverty. It's not wise to talk in absolutes, your family was prosperous but most Cubans were not.
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Consider that despite many natural disadvantages Cuba had higher standard of living, better educated public, better healthcare system, etc. than any of the countries in Latin America which started at similar level but were left under the control of US-backed right wing governments. I’d much rather live in Cuba of the 1960s–1980s than in any of Washington’s pet quasi-fascist police states or in those Latin American st…
> I’d much rather live in Cuba of the 1960s–1980s Yes, while the Soviet Union was sending Cuba billions per year, it was much better there.