The Canadian Taxpayers Federation, (a lobby for business not citizens, a private association who appoints its directors does not elect them) is now blogging. Be still my beating heart, another right wing blog.
This one though engages in one of those extreme historical revinisionism, one that should send our pal Warren Kinsella into a paralax of outrage. But will it?
Anyways the CTF blog equates the Holocaust with the Cuban Revolution. Yep. All those Batista Cubans, American mafia types, CIA and ITT folks and hoteliers, the rum runners and pimps, all those nice folks were supposedly executed by Che.
In reality, pre-revolutionary Havana was a brothel and casino for US
playboys, the Mafia and a rich Cuban elite.
Well you wouldn't know it from the CTF article that just over a thousand members of the military and secret police were tried for crimes against the people and executed. Note just over 1000. Armed thugs who oppressed the people. But these twits say this;Che's slaughter of (bound and gagged) Cubans (Che was himself an Argentine) exceeded Heinrich Himmler's prewar slaughter of Germans – to scale, that is. Nazi Germany became the modern standard for political evil even before World War II.
Clever that, pre war slaughter of Germans, no reference to Jews. Oh wait yes he does.
Political executions up to the time might have reached a couple thousand, and most of these were of renegade Nazis themselves during the indiscriminate butchery known as the "Night of the Long Knives." The famous Kristallnacht that horrified civilized opinion worldwide caused a grand total of 71 deaths. This in a nation of 70 million.
And the point is, Castro and Che are nasty. Well lets see how many Cubans died of malnutrition, starvation, police burtality under Batista and other former dictators working for the United Fruit Company? Lets compare apples and apples not rehtorical attempts to; lessen the horror and impact of the Nazi's, or compare Cuban nationalism with Nationalist Socialism in Germany.
Batista was the U.S. government's "man in Havana," even though U.S. officials knew that he was a brutal, antidemocratic, corrupt tyrant in full partnership with Mafia murderers and drug dealers. None of this mattered to Washington policymakers. What mattered was that as "our man in Havana," when Batista received orders from Washington, he obeyed.A Libertarian Visits Cuba, Part 1
No lets look at Latin America and the the US policy of imperialism in the region.
US Imperialism which began in the region with Monroe Doctrine and the colonization of Cuba, Nicarauga and other countries by the Confederate States as slave economies, became the basis of the sugar plantations and fruit production of the post WWII economies in the region.
How many Guatemalans have been murdered since the CIA and United Fruit company engineered the coup there in 1954, prior to the Cuban Revolution. This set the tone for the struggles of national liberation in the region. The revolutionaries knew that death was certain at the hands of the US and CIA and their front regimes.
Unfortunately, the CIA “success” in Iran, which produced the CIA’s ouster of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, bred a CIA “success” in another part of the world, Latin America. One year after the 1953 coup in Iran, the CIA did it again, this time in Guatemala, where U.S. officials feared the communist threat even more than they did in Iran.An Anti-Democracy Foreign Policy: Guatemala
How many Chileans died at the hands of Pinochet whose coup was organized by the US State Department and the CIA.?
How many Argentinians were 'dissapeared' under the US client regime of the Argentinian Generals?
And how many Cubans have been killed by the Cuban exile community and their links to the fascist movements in Latin America and around the world. Many of those same groups being made up of ex Nazi's and notorious Anti-Semites like the World Anti-Bolshevik League.
Many of our leaders seem to view Florida's Cuban conservatives, including the assassins and terrorists among them, as People Who Vote. - Alice Walker, introduction, The Sweet Abys
And how many CIA attempts were there on Castro from the very begining of the revolution. Enough to make anyone paranoid.
Yep what Che and Castro did was unconsionable, but understandable under the circumstances.
Hundreds of suspected Batista-era agents, policemen and soldiers were put on public trial for human rights abuses and war crimes, including murder and torture. Most of those convicted of murder were executed by firing squad, and the rest received long prison sentences. One of the most notorious examples of “revolutionary justice” being the executions of over 70 captured Batista regime soldiers, directed by Raúl Castro after capturing Santiago. Guevara was appointed supreme prosecutor in La Cabaña Fortress. This was part of a large-scale attempt by Fidel Castro to cleanse the security forces of Batista loyalists that could launch a counter-revolution. Many others were dismissed from the army and police, and some high-ranking officials in the ancien régime were exiled as military attachés.
In 1961 after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the new Cuban government also confiscated all property held by religious organizations without compensation including the Roman Catholic Church. Hundreds of members of the clergy, including a bishop, were permanently expelled from the nation, with the new Cuban government being officially atheist.
What the vast right wing conspiracy of the CIA and its fascist allies in the Anti-Bolshevik movement during the cold war did was far closer to the tactics and poltics of Himmler and Hitler than anyting the Che or Castro did.
A revolution implies violence, but a coup implies a regime of violence. The former is caused by the State and its military and the ruling class organizing violence against the people. The latter is the States policy in order to repress the freedom of workers, peasants and the middle class.
Yep a little reading can be a dangerous thing. And in this case the anonymous blogger at the CTF blog read one little right wing article and based his falacious argument on it. Well here is some reading for him to correct the stupidity of his article.
A tip o the blog to Calgary Grit for this.
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