Having spent some time in Turkey, talking to various working folk and leftists from all walks of life, I feel fairly confident in saying that the military junta there was not a beneficial force. Whatever strength the military possesses, it brings to bear against all who oppose it or challenge it in some way. The Turkish army may have said it was trying to keep the country secular, but it had no problem training its guns on the secular anti-militarist left while in power.
ETA Well said, RedFury!
Oh for crying out loud. These are men not Super-Villains with armies of mole-men, orcs and flying monkeys at their command. If Bush had tried to stay in office he would have been laughed out of the White House. Failing that he would have been impeached.
Just how do you expect the Honduran Doctor Doom to hold on to office even if the non-binding referendum had come up with the right result?
This is just another Latin American military coup as the traditional elite fight back against anyone who has a political power-base they don’t control and who threatens to stop them getting back to looting as normal.
The point here that is being missed by some is this:
Even if the President was trying to head down the same road that has lead to the barely disguised dictatorship in Venezuela, there are ways to stop that that don’t involve military coups. If the only way you can defend Democracy is to eschew its principles, then it isn’t worth defending.
Still, for those of you (I’m looking at YOU, RedFury) who want to be apologists for what the President of Honduras was doing, if you really think that the purpose of his non-binding poll was innocent, you are smoking something very strong. 
There is a reason he incited the people to storm a military compound and take the balloting equipment (hardly a legal action, I imagine), and there is a reason he wants this poll to happen, and it isn’t so that he can just get a friendly show of hands on some minor issue of no relevance to him. :rolleyes: I recommend that, in defending the President against the illegal action of the military, you don’t try to pretend that the referendum was unimportant, or anything less than the first step towards making him a strongman.
And what, exactly, would the government of the Honduras be compelled to do if Zelaya won this non-binding poll?
I’m sure Zelaya would have come up with something. Why take the poll if he had no plan to use the results to keep himself in power?
Whatever happens Hondurans should be allowed to deal with this with no outside interference whatever, especially from meddling Chavez.
It’s amusing that it’s the Right who have been accused in this thread of never meeting with a dictator it didn’t like given the shameful history of the Left in the past in singing the praises of blood-soaked tyrants like Uncle Joe and Mao. But the Left has a notoriously short memory when it comes to its own family album.
Motes and beams.
Yes! lets preemptively use the constitution as toilet paper to stop him from perhaps maybe do some unspecified “something”…
:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:
And the Right’s shameful support of Hitler, Mao, Franco, Pinochet and all the current barbarians you suck up to like the Saudi’s and the various Bezerkistans. Not forgetting of course, Saddam.
What fragments of the Left was still under the Webb deleusion broke with the Soviet Union by 1956.
I venture there is not anyone under the age of 70 on the Left who ever harboured any illusions about any dictators yet your mob arm them to the teeth and still cheer them on.
motes and entire forest.
Castro’s not a dictator? There’s plenty on the Left who practically idolize the man. And illusions about Mao were alive and well until the old mass-murderer was practically in his grave.
There’s a difference between the way the Right and Left treat their respective tyrants. The Right holds its nose and makes use of them. The Left falls passionately in love, has its heart broken, and tries to erase the chapter from its collective memory.
Not real Left people. The Imaginary Bogey-Left in your imagination maybe.
Besides Castro was a damn sight better than what he replaced. Just as the democratically elected Chavez is. Best of a Bad Lot does not mean idolise.
You get back to us when ‘The Left’ start providing them with the wherewithal for WMD’s (Saddam), arming them to the teeth (practically every other dictator in the world, plus of course the Jihadists in Afghanistan), encouraging and supporting military coups, (practically all South and Central America), setting up death squads (ditto, plus Vietnam) or helping organise the massacre of hundreds of thousands if not millions in Indonesia, none of which in my book hardly qualifies as nose-holding.
And all the other dirty coups and installed murderous dictators like Iran.
And here in this very thread the Right is cheering on a military coup.
Yet again.
The Left, at best in your wild imagination, wave placards.
Your side actively kill people.
The history of Communism and “People’s Revolutions” show that the left kills folks too.
Both sides have histor that is soaked in blood. Let us not for one moment think that one side or another is angelic.
What grandpa did was bad, but forgetting what uncle sam did in my lifetime is bad too. It also has to be mentioned that not all the left movements in Latin America depended on Leninism or Maoism.
It is Latin America we are dealing with.
In Ecuador in 2000 the coup was made by the **left **of Ecuador. The army just followed the current.
Whatever took place in Ecuador was watched by the other American nations, for a few seconds I have to say that I was happy to see the people rising to get rid of a bad ruler.
But that was for a few seconds, I was mature enough to recognize that I was dumping democratic ideals if I was going to support a coup.
So I approved the efforts to remove the coup plotters from power, in Ecuador it was enough to tell the plotters that aid was going to stop if they continued.
A compromise was made, the deposed president selected his replacement, the plotters were free to organize to put a presidential candidate in the next elections.
So, even if popular, a coup needs to be rejected. It was evil for the left and the military to take power that way in Ecuador, and it is evil for the right and military to do so in Honduras.
Right, but it reckless to ignore that times are different, democracy needs to be respected, left or right ideologies need to be pushed aside.
Hah!, the butcher of El Salvador, D’Aubuisson, got a statue made of him by his right wing party. They still continue to idolize him.
Guys like Jessy Helms loved that fighter **of **freedom.
Aside from the fact that you have completely misread everyone’s arguments, you are utterly, completely, and irredeemably wrong.
Hitler was a man of the Left, as was Mussolini. All were generally irrelevant or disliked by American conservatives and genuine liberals. The Progressives loved them all, as well as Communists the world over. They eventually left the Republican party, though they retain considerable influence in the Democrats. Castro, as well as Che, are still beloved by large portions of the left.
Second, the idea that Castro was better than Batista is an outrageous peice of nonsensical bullshit. Batista was a dictator, but not totalitarian. We, in fact, supported Castro in his early days, but he turned directly to Totalitarianism in order to hold power forever. I won’t bother to argue the point here, but the statistcis do not lie, and Castro does not bend.
Second, you confuse practical support built on a “least-bad” principle with approval, as well as confusing “conservative” with “classical liberal”.
Therefore, give that you appear to know nothing on the subject of American political history, you have nothing of value to say now.
:rolleyes:
You fail history forever.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=11170652&postcount=21
Bring it. There’s at least half a dozen lefties here on the Board, you should have no problem finding examples for Show and Tell. If, as you say, this is a defining characteristic, then you must have lots of examples, right at your fingertips, perhaps even examples of tyrants who haven’t been dead for half a century. (I mean, Stalin? You’re kidding, right?)
If you can do it, bring it. If you can’t, and I suspect you can’t, then may we offer you a fresh cup of Starbuck’s STFU in the humongo grandissimo size?
I agree that neither right nor left is on the side of the angels.
But I repeat, the right doesn’t romanticize the tyrants it deals with. It knows exactly what they are but if the calculation is that their tenure will prove beneficial to the United States then the right will not summarily eject them if they believe
a) the other side will prove equally authoritarian
b) the other side will work actively against the interests of the US when in power
A politician should always put the interests of his or her own country first. The right may sometimes miscalculate those interests, but it never forgets them. The left, with its historical internationalism, sometimes seems to.
And that is relevant to the situation in Honduras because…?
It isn’t, really - just another ad sinistram to derail the thread.
Still waiting for those examples. Could we move this along a bit? I’m getting on in years, and the doctors say I may only have thirty or forty years left.
Not even all of them, just the top ten or twenty examples of SDMB lefties gushing romantically about brutal tyrants. Really, how hard can that be, if its as universal as you claim?
Unless, of course, it isn’t. Unless you’re simply vomiting up a talking point with no connection to any actual lefties.