Castro / Trump

As the other thread is locked:
Castro is an icon — for dictators | Focus | The Times & The Sunday Times

 

dont know if your looking for a discussion on it but here goes. two sides to every story.

 

A liberator of his people who then became their enslaver, it would seem.

 

Not much to debate really. Its all pretty self-explanatory. The man was an utter son of a bitch. He replaced one tyranny with another that was even worse. He brutalised and enslaved his people, destroyed their economy and condemned them to life-long poverty. He murdered his political opponents and those who tried to escape his backward regime.
Schoolboy Marxist revolutionaries who hero-worship this ego-maniac dinosaur because he cobbled together some sort of health service with Russian charity is like lauding Hitler for building the autobahns or Mussolini for making the trains run on time. A fantastically pyrrhic achievement.

 

Red Ken had a lot of good words fir him on Vine today. Mind you, he used the phrase 'yeah, but..' a fair amount when replying to Hitchins views. Which were pretty much the same as above. And much more.

Corbyn gave a glowing farewell on twitter too.

Am beginning to think it's s 'hate the west' thing that links the further left together, rather than a 'we're in it together' ideology

 

Come the 'movie', £50 sez Liam Neeson will get to play him.

 

Really? Here are some quotes about Cuba under Batista's regime. Can you guess who said them?

"At the beginning of 1959 United States companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar lands—almost all the cattle ranches—90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions—80 percent of the utilities—practically all the oil industry—and supplied two-thirds of Cuba's imports.
...
"Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in seven years ... and he turned Democratic Cuba into a complete police state—destroying every individual liberty. Yet our aid to his regime, and the ineptness of our policies, enabled Batista to invoke the name of the United States in support of his reign of terror. Administration spokesmen publicly praised Batista—hailed him as a staunch ally and a good friend—at a time when Batista was murdering thousands, destroying the last vestiges of freedom, and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Cuban people, and we failed to press for free elections."*

Cuba before Castro's revolution was ruled by gangsters operating gambling casinos, prostitution, drug dealing, and extortion rackets. All the proceeds were syphoned off abroad, leaving most Cubans dirt-poor. There is no room to debate about these facts.




* It was  John F. Kennedy in 1960.

 

I'm not supporting Batista's regime, nor interested in drawing comparisons. If there are degrees of loathsomeness when it comes to murderous despotic regimes I can see no value in a debate on splitting hairs. They were both arseholes who have improved the world immeasurably by leaving it.
Castro was an evil repressive, paranoid despot who modelled himself on the modern world's most prolific murderer, Stalin. I find it utterly incomprehensible that anyone can defend him or the ruin and misery he brought to his country and its people, nor that bourgeois lefties nostalgic for their bedsit days of student protest can stoop to applaud such a repellent man. I shall be disgusted if any representative of our government attends his funeral.

 

That is rather surprising. Because in your post #6 you drew a comparison between Castro and Batista, and you asserted that Castro was worse (although without suggesting any basis for this).

If you have now changed your mind, I am very glad to hear it.

 

Ooh, pete, you really have turned this "light-touch" form of wind up into an art form, you naughty man

But using serial womaniser and promiscuous lothario JFK was a bit clumsy :Yawn:

 

No emojis either. Just saying