Please continue to inform everyone that communism’s crimes are acceptable because someone else once committed a crime. It reflects very well on you.
Would you personally be manning the machine-guns in the communist revolution, or would you expect others to do the dirty work for you? I know that everyone who, thanks to Western capitalism, has the luxury of posting on a message board at 2 PM on a weekday thinks they will be the dictator and not the slave or the genocide victim in Bolshevik America, so I’ll indulge that fantasy and just give you those two options.
Yep, I’m a stinker, through and through. A no-goodnik of the first water, no question. So, that in mind, you are totally justified in evading my questions.
Does that mean that if someone else asks them, you will answer? Or is the fact of asking such questions proof enough for you of malign intent? Was a time, in my living memory, when simply asking such questions was proof of disloyalty.
And “Bolshevik America”? What is this, performance art? Pull the other leg, it’s got bells, pull the middle one, I’ll give you a nickel.
Those mass graves are irrelevant in the context of critiquing Communism. They are the fault of the people who ordered them, not a political ideology that changes depending on who’s in charge. If Communism actually had a line somewhere that said “And on Tuesdays, we kill people and put them in mass graves”, then it would be a valid point
Well, if people are just going to whip out “I’m not advocating communism” or “mass graves are irrelevant” when challenged about the shortcomings of communism, then there’s no point in having a discussion about communism in general. We return to the subject here, which is that the reason Cuba severely hampers the ability to leave now and totally forbade it before is because Cuba is a shitty place to live and anyone given the option would rather live in the U.S. or one of several dozen other Western countries.
Mass graves are irrelevant not as a defense of Communism, but because its actually irrelevant. I wouldn’t tar democracy because some place calls itself the “Democratic Republic of X”, I would say those people are terrible rulers.
Very rarely have “Democratic Republic of X’s” had Western intellectuals and fellow travellers defending them. I mean mass graves are relevent to communism. Every communist state that produced mass graves had contemporary supporters in the literati and in Universities. Relatively few “Democratic Republics” had the same support in such circles. It really is asking a lot for communism not to be associated with Stalinism and Maoism when a generation or two of intellectuals did exactly that; associate these regimes with communism.
It really is a lot more than a state giving itself a certain label or name. It’s almost a century of far left intellectual thought you are trying to make disappear.
I would consider Russia under Stalin and China under Mao to be more of a dictatorship, unless you thought those guys were kicked out of power by a party apparatus sick of their shit. I did enjoy your pointless attack on the left though; predictable but still a little surprising that you worked it in there
See Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant. Really, you’d think that would be Hitler – what tyrant has featured in more movies than Hitler? Can’t recall a single one where Fidel even gets a line of dialogue.
(Yeah, I came in on a whim and vanity surfed. Sue me.)
I’ll start out by recommending a book titled “Cuba since the Revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment” by Samuel Farber. It’s a very thorough left-wing analysis of the concrete shortcomings of the Castro dictatorship by an avowed Marxist who grew up there and has kept up with developments there since leaving. It’s a must-read for both sides of the aisle.
One of the things he brings up in passing is that the current incarnation of the Communist Party of Cuba was founded in October 1965, nearly six years after Castro seized power and several years after his control over much of the Cuban infrastructure - such as the newspapers and the mass media in general - had been firmly established.
Furthermore, from looking at how the party functions (Farber goes into some detail on this in his book) it can reasonably be surmised that the creation of the current CCP was a top-down scheme tightly controlled by both Fidel and Raúl Castro rather than a genuine rank-and-file effort from below by the Cuban workers themselves. That’s not even mildly progressive socialism.
Cuba has much to be criticized for; a tight lid on emigration is just one item on a long list. Whatever Castro’s reasons for doing so, however, the blame for that cannot be ascribed to communism - because, fundamentally, what’s going on over there ain’t.