More smoke screens, when the monstrosity levels were so high it was not only the Marxists the ones that fought the military thugs in El Salvador.
More ignorance, the reason why the rebellion came to be was because of very naked fraudulent elections (more than 3 in a row) and the systematic assassination of the political leaders of the opposition, the history of El Salvador shows that only an ignorant would not had taken to arms under those conditions, and the recent history of Nicaragua and Chile shows that the socialists do give power when they do lose elections. But it is clear that that needs to be forgotten because many leaders on the right continue to tell you that big lie that justified military coups in Latin America during the 60s-80s.
That’s exactly what I mean. You say that as if there is some ideal form of Republicanism and that those three presidents somehow strayed from the true path. You seem to think they were outliers, aberrations that are unlikely to be repeated. They’re not. The Bushes, père et fils, seem to be on the outs at the moment, but the praise for Reagan still flows freely.
Reagan, Bush, and Bush didn’t damage the Republican brand, they are the Republican brand in my lifetime. If not them, who is?
And if they want another try to prove to me that they can be successful, they’ll need to be a lot more candid about their past failures and what they’ve done to correct them.
And once again, it was the big lie that was used to claim that there were other intentions behind what the president elect in Guatemala did when he opposed United Fruit.
Yes, they have to jettison supply side theory and return to Republicanism as it was before. Cut taxes, but also cut spending. Eisenhower and Coolidge presided over large reductions in government, but only cut taxes to the extent possible. Which in Eisenhower’s case meant continuing to tolerate extremely high tax rates(although the actual tax burden was much lower than it is today).
We know what good Republican government looks like because a) we had it, a long time ago, and b) we have it today at the state level. I’d have 100% confidence in a good Republican governor, and I had that confidence in Mitt Romney. Now if some Republican Senator with little grasp of policy like Ted Cruz runs, then I won’t hold out much hope.
It was so reprehensible that Eisenhower bragged about it publicly. He credited his interventions in Guatamela and Iran as defeats for Communism.
And “opposed United Fruit”? Now you’re being disingenous. They were going to simply steal most of United Fruit’s property. Back in the 1950s, such actions had consequences, and the US wasn’t the only country that considered such things to be tantamount to an act of war.
Robot arm, to further elaborate, I realize the Republicans lost, and they earned their loss. I recognize why they lost, and how they can fix it. Many Democrats here have tried to argue that demographics doom them regardless of what they do unless they can find a way to appeal to them, presumably by becoming Democrat-lite.
My only argument for the past 30 pages has been that this is nonsense, that if they govern well, everything will take care of itself. All political success follows from good governance. No matter what the ideology of the citizenry, people like to live decent lives, and never punish parties that keep things running relatively smoothly.
It was a big misunderstanding. In the 1950s there was a lot of paranoia. United Fruit convinced Ike that Commies were taking over. It wasn’t the first time the US would overreact.
No, fascists appropriate property. It’s defending rule of law in the international sphere. It is illegal to just take foreigners’ property without compensation. And even today, there will be retaliation by the country whose citizens are being victimized. Let Indonesia nationalize Chinese businesses and see what happens.
More ignorance, I guess you are not even aware of the reparations the German companies had and have to give to the former slave laborers that Hitler and buddies obtained for them.
Reparations are not illegal appropriation of property. Neither is appropriation with market value compensation.
Simply nationalizing land owned by foreigners is illegal, and invites just retaliation from the injured country. We don’t do coups anymore over it, but then the world is kindler and gentler than it was in the 1950s. And the 1950s were kindler and gentler than 50 years previous, when nonpayment of debts were met by military force.
That is nice, it also avoids dealing with the point as usual. Once again the point was to show that it is really ignorant to claim that while the fascists did appropriations, it was also for the protection of the companies and corporations, the German owners still kept their business, and that takes us to another feature of fascism,
Indeed, the ruling elites were the German capitalists and rich people, any other elite , like the intellectual one, was prosecuted.
That is nice, it also avoids dealing with the point as usual. Once again the point was to show that it is really ignorant to **forget **that while the fascists did appropriations, it was also **done **for the protection of the companies and corporations, the German owners still kept their business.
The Republicans don’t need to learn from their losses as much as they need to learn from their victories.
We overthrew a government, which was an overreaction to something that hadn’t actually happened yet, and you consider that to be upholding international law? I thought Bush the Younger invented preemptive retaliation, but I guess it goes back further than I thought.
I like that. Yes, learn from the mistakes they made while governing. That’s more important than the tactics of an election. sure, John McCain’s campaign was amateurish compared to Obama’s, but if Bush had been a President with a 60% approval rating I don’t think Obama could have beaten him.
Now I didn’t say it was upholding international law. It was a dirty war, the Cold War, and we responded to covert Communist actions with covert actions of our own. That was how the bulk of the war was fought: they try to undermine and overthrow governments allied to us, we tried to do the same to them. Critics of this policy never say whether they think we should have unilaterally disarmed or whether a real war would have been a preferable option.
I said that it’s a kindler and gentler time now, but mainly the Cold War just ended, so we don’t feel the need to panic and overthrow governments we don’t like anymore.
Another point: The most famous interventions we made, the critics don’t really attack much. When Truman aided the Greek government, this was considered wise and a new doctrine was named after it: containment. Eisenhower was only continuing that policy and it continued up until Reagan: try to overthrow a friendly government, and we’ll send arms to that government. So the critics of that policy tend to focus on the less well known or covert actions, because it’s easier to paint those actions as shady. But I dont’ see any moral difference between what we did in El Salvador and what we did in Greece.
Just like in Iran, the repercussions of those interventions have continued even after the cold war is over. Once again this is ignoring the very point that those interventions were blunders.
Sure, it is no wonder when your sources ignore the Salvadoran Truth commission.
Not intervening in Cuba was a blunder as well, and that’s one we still have to live with. I’d say the consequences of not intervening were just as bad and in many cases worse.
The Marxist rebels were not even a native insurgency, they were astroturf courtesy of the Cuban government. We should not have helped the elected government?
What part of the 3 fraudulent elections and the killing of the opposition did you miss? Once again, it was not just Marxists who took to arms. The repression by the military included the killing of priests, teachers and labor leaders.
Didn’t say they were saints, only that much like the Middle East today, we had to pick the side that we thought was less bad. And history proved that the right-wing juntas were less bad than the Communists. The Commie body count dwarfs anything else in history by several orders of magnitude.
You’re joking, right? In what way was not intervening in Cuba worse, or even equivalent, than the Mossadeq/BP fiasco? Iran is what it is today because of US/GB intervention/aggression.
