Did you know that Pinochet privatized the public pension system in a way analogous to that proposed by Bush? Apparently torture isn't all Bush has in common with Pinochet.
FL, your first Yglesias link is wonky.
You know Rightists would be all over Castro if he traded the fatigues for a proper dress uniform.
Instapundit: "The other contrast is that you can find apologists for Castro in pretty much every newsroom and university campus in America. Pinochet, not so much."
He writes this (without offering a shred of evidence) from the campus of the University of Tennessee, after linking an apologia in the Washington Post.
...how many [state-sanctioned deaths] would Allende have inaugurated?
The authoritarian right loves possible-worlds theory.
The first Yglesias link is working for me. Just in case:
http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2006/12/the_low_price_of_power/
You know, maybe I just don't hang out in the right circles, but I've literally never heard any one of my colleagues offer Castro apologetics. The idea that he's a Hero of the Left seems genuinely crazy to me. (Closest I've heard: "Castro sends a lot of Cuban-trained doctors to humanitarian crises" in a context where that clearly didn't endorse Castro.)
Snarkout, I was about to complain about that.
Does anyone worth taking seriously make a serious defense of Operation Condor?
"Castro sends a lot of Cuban-trained doctors to humanitarian crises" in a context where that clearly didn't endorse Castro.
I think there are people who read that as a full-throated endorsement of Castro. I got into an argument over at ObWi once; Sebastian (I think) had linked to a bunch of pictures in the big hospital in Havana showing peeling paint and loose wiring, and concluding from that that the whole "Cuban health care system has something to be said for it" thing was socialist propaganda.
What I really don't understand is how right-wing American pundits can countenance a man who--to mention just one among many other crimes--sponsored a terrorist act on U.S. soil. There's a marker at the spot--I used to come across it now and then as I walked around D.C. They might want to visit it and reconsider.
I remember when I was a lad, my parents' liberal friends seemed to be pretty supportive of Castro, in a "shame about the violations of civil liberty, but he improved literac quite a bit" kind of way. Heck, my wife probably falls into this camp herself.
10 -- Pinochet had a Chilean opponent murdered in Washington, D.C.
6: me too.
I've seen apologetics for him in blog comments threads occasionally. There was that lame movie about Che Guevera, but Che is a different case because he died young and attractive and people don't so much bother with what he advocated since he had less opportunity to bring it to pass.
I don't remember meeting fans of the Castro government in real life.
there are people who read that as a full-throated endorsement
I think we agree that this is a stupid reading. My sense is that "Castro apologetics" requires more than the claim that not every single facet of Castro and his regime are completely evil.
"Hero" may be too strong, but he's an important figure to the left, to whom some sentiment attaches. There was an interview with a journalist who had interviewed him, as had her father before her, on Democracy Now last week, that brought this out. I'm a bit anti-anti-Castro myself.
(I do realize, by the way, that I run in unrepresentative circles.)
I'm a bit anti-anti-Castro myself.
Yeah, my feelings about Castro are colored by the fact that the Miami anti-Castro squad contains so many flaming assholes.
13 - And his American aide (and his aide's husband, although he survived the attack). But hey, you can't have a transition to a market economy without car bombing a few law abiding Americans lining up trade unionists in a soccer stadium and having them shot torturing teenagers breaking a few eggs. I hope Kissinger's next.
I agree with 11. I tend to be way less informed than most of the commenters here, and it's easy to get trickle down mushy-liberal Castro information that makes you feel this way. I call it Castromation.
3..2..1...someone makes a Castration joke.
Yes. There's a beginning of a grain of truth to the 'apologetics' accusation, in that I'd say that Castro's Cuba is probably a better place to live than a bunch of countries we have no problem having diplomatic relations with. There are all sorts of lousy things about his government, but I wouldn't consider it remarkable, other than in longevity, among unfree countries. And there are some remarkably good things about it as terribly poor dictatorships go: the health care system, the literacy rate...
Oh man, can we not do the Castro thing here? He has nothing at all to do with Pinochet, and the only purpose served by comparisons between the two completely different dictators in two completely different contexts is to make one of them look better.
Besides, it counts as an analogy, and is thus banned.
Yeah, my feelings about Castro are colored by the fact that the Miami anti-Castro squad contains so many flaming assholes.
I know mine are, too.
Living under Castro might be less psychically painful than having to read Glenn Reynolds every day.
Is the famed "moral equivalence" I keep hearing so much about?
There is also the matter of seeing Castro's victory against Somoza as a victory for the forces of progress, which I think is a valid viewpoint.
By Somoza do you mean Batista, or am I the one who's confused?
28: It could be worse. Imagine having to listen to a five hour Glenn Reynolds speech. Does he even have that much material in him?
31 -- I am, of course, the confused party in this transaction. Thanks.
My inner bias toward the underdog generally leads me to give left-wing dictators the benefit of the doubt, for two reasons:
a) Underdog status w.r.t. the US (now more true than ever, given the lack of a Soviet Union as a countervailing force)
b) Their ideology contains elements of underdoggery as well
NOTE: This is only true for dictators with actual left-wing ideology, not random leaders of a tribal war who decided to seek material support from Russia/Cuba/Albania rather than the US
NOTE: I do not actually know what "countervailing force" means
Somoza s/b Batista
or possibly
Castro s/b Ortega
Fun fact: The last elected leader of Cuba was.... Batista! (He lost a subsequent election, refused to accept the results, and the rest is history.)
NOTE: I do not actually know what "countervailing force" means
Yes you do. Galbraith coined the term, as "Countervailing Power," in American Capitalism, 1952, to be intuitively obvious, and you've used it correctly here.
In case anyone is interested in the up-to-the-minute breaking news on Pinochet, they're wheeling him into the cremation chamber right now. For a brief moment, those of all religious and political persuasions will be able to agree that Pinochet is burning in a fiery pit.
I ask this in ignorance: Has Castro committed any major crimes aside from not having elections and not allowing free enterprise? Like is he a GW Bush-level war criminal or anything like that?
The really funny thing is that establishing a market economy really does seem to require human misery on a biblical scale (viz. the history of modern Europe).
I ask this in ignorance: Has Castro committed any major crimes aside from not having elections and not allowing free enterprise? Like is he a GW Bush-level war criminal or anything like that?
People seem to always talk about the horrors of families being broken up as the children are sent away to state-run schools at an early age.
I am anti-anti-Castro too if we're talking about the US exile community, they're nuts. But you can be anti-Castro and anti-anti-Castro-nuts. A lot of the oppostion in Cuba manages this, as I understand it. So does, e.g., Randy Paul.
And sorry about participating in the threadjack, but FL started it.
You can't build a dictatorship without executing a few hundred political prisoners. About the best you can say about Castro on this score is that he kept the ratio of political executions to years in power in check compared to Stalin or, say, Pinochet.
Does he even have that much material in him?
He could stretch out the indeeeeeds.
You know who else appeals to mushy liberalism the way Castro does? Hugo Chavez.
39: The Castro regime has been pretty quick to lock people up for long periods—not just political prisoners, but also homosexuals and anybody infected with HIV.
41, 42: As dictators go, that actually sounds pretty good.
Of course, I read Machiavelli at a very young age.
By the way, I strongly disapprove of the 'enemy of my enemy must be my friend' line of argument. I think this is about the only thing the Republicans in the US have going for them, and it is a very persuasive argument. Anyone who's been reading Balloon Juice over the last few years has seen how a person can be persuaded into advocating for politicians and policies he totally disagrees with, by remaining distracted by the unsavory nature of some of the opponents of those politicians.
42: I think the numbers are quite a bit worse than a few hundred; more like a few thousand.
I know several people who looooove Castro, but they're basically naive Trotskyists.
39:
"Has Castro committed any major crimes aside from not having elections and not allowing free enterprise?"
yes. (Those are about half about Cuban repression and half about stupid US/exile policies).
As to the second part of your question--I suppose as far as total body count he's got nothing on the Iraq war. As far as imprisonment without trial & without Red Cross access my impression is he puts Bush completely to shame.
A lot of the opposition in Cuba manages this
The worst way to approach anything is through the hardened views and politics of an American ethnic/exile/interest community. My friends and neighbors among the Assyrians, Iraqi Christians, have been very slow to give up support for Bush and the war, despite being horrified by what they see and hear of what's happened to their country. And this is important to know not just generally, but because world politics in my neighborhood affects local elections. The current alderman whom I'm working to unseat once more-or-less ran against Yassir Arafat.
And what could be more bracing then the experience of reading Haaretz, and realizing the range of views perfectly permissible in Israel?
There was also the bit with the Cuban mercenaries in Angola. Not sure what Angola did to deserve them, or indeed anything more beyond their presence, but they were still there.
At least the people who think Castro is great don't also think of themselves as champions of democracy.
53: Of course they do. Democracy means power to the people.
Hmm. They were there to fight some sort of nasty civil war against people backed by the US. Seems like normal cold-war proxy politics to me, but there are definitely those who would consider that behavior a war crime.
Everything that took place in Angola was a war crime. America has no grounds whatsoever to criticize Cuba about that (see: Savimbi, Jonas).
53: We need to declare a moratorium on use of the word "democracy" in political discussion, at least for a couple months. "Parliamentary capitalism" would be a good word to refer to Actual Existing Democracy, and to refer to something like "the really good thing people think they intend when they say democracy," we could use the term "sheer fantasy."
Are we really playing a game of "my Latin American dictator is better than yours"?
Hey! I'm not saying Cuba was uniquely bad or anything, it just came to mind when I was thinking about the question "was Castro a George W. Bush-level war criminal, or did he just create a socialist paradise in Latin America?" and which led me to the opinion of "Castro isn't uniquely bad, and not to the Bush level, but he contributed to his share of misery in far off places."
Yeah, all I meant to do is note that I could be accused of Castro apologetics for thinking that he wasn't a remarkably awful poor-country-dictator, just an awful poor-country-dictator with some unexpectedly redeeming features. He's still awful.
was Castro a George W. Bush-level war criminal, or did he just create a socialist paradise in Latin America?
Right, that was precisely the question that I was asking.
I think the most interesting parallels to be drawn are between George W. Bush and Salvador Allende, actually. But I won't draw those parallels because it's banned.
One annoying double standard I'm seeing between Castro and Pinochet is that everybody (like WaPo) seems to want to grudgingly give Pinochet credit for things that happened during the democratic governments that followed him (and, ineded, to give him credit for their very existence); but you'll never see the Washington Post grudgingly giving Castro credit for things that have happened in Cuba over the last 50 years.
I think the most interesting parallels to be drawn are between George W. Bush and Salvador Allende
Jenna and Barbara had better start working on their writing.
Or maybe you will. I ban myself for saying that without any evidence, even if it happens to be true.
And it seems like he's not uniquely bad, but he's certainly up in that top tier as far as Latin American dictators go, and he gets much better press in some circles (that I'm sure are unrepresentative and trotted out to be made fun of) than anyone else in that top tier. He's also got some unsavory enemies.
Neil -- no, let's hear it! If that greedhead is gonna start charging us to post, that totally changes the dynamic as far as what control he can exert over our content.
Back to Pinochet, anyone here who reads ObWi, could you drop into the current Pinochet thread and tell me if von has lost his mind or what? And anyone with a longer historical baseline on ObWi, can you tell me why von still seems reasonably respected around there? Did he used to be sane?
69(!) -- funny, I think of you as one of the ObWi old-timers -- and certainly as the Unfogged poster with the longest-term association with ObWi. Am I mistaken?
60 is more or less right, I think. However, it is disconnected from the context of the Cold War, where Castro had a special place in our list of opponents because of his regime's very visible and vocal role in the expansion of Soviet power in the Americas. Once the Cold War ended, Castro was, as LizardBreath notes, just an awful poor-country-dictator with some unexpectedly redeeming features, although many of those redeeming virtures are related to the Cold War and selling the socialist dream.
The analogy is really quite lame and only has to do with both Bush and Allende claiming new and controversial powers for radical reforms after winning (or not winning) extremely close and divisive elections.
I think Von has something of a contrarian chip on his shoulder. He has some accrued respect for willingness to re-examine his positions; also, he's sometimes taken some of the more rabid right-wingers to task.
69(!)
Must you do that every time you refer to a comment numbred 69?
72: If Katherine is around here, she way predates me at ObWi. I've been reading it for a couple of years, but I've always had the sense there was a lot of history before my time.
73: isn't it even more intertwined than that? Once the Cold War ended, the justification for acting as if Castro was especially bad disappeared, because he was no longer a Soviet client state, but at the same time a lot of his redeeming features of creating the socialist dream and such also went away because he was no longer a Soviet client state and so didn't have the money. Isn't Cuba's economy now mainly resorts and brothels for Europeans?
anyone here who reads ObWi
That kind of stubbornness has been my principal impression of the place every time I've ever visited. von doesn't even seem remarkable to me.
Even when someone won't let go here, there are more jokes, worth more than $5, every one.
Yeah, the stubbornness got to me eventually. That and the poorly repressed long-standing animosities.
dear LB,
I'm sorry that it has taken you this long to realize that von, SH, and slarti are completely *not* worth talking with. It is a dead loss of your time, patience, and energies.
I have never understood why any of them are held in any repute over there--they are pretty much just Red Staters who can spell. Mostly.
Sure, there's the occasional veneer of sweet reason and moderation. But it never takes long for the truth to emerge.
OW used to be somewhat fun to hang out at. But it has just gone more and more deeply dysfunctional in the last year or two. (hilzoy always excepted of course).
Von can be reasonable, but what he's saying about Allende is rank revisionism, and his notion that some gummints just need topplin', and we are the ones to decide it, well, that's just nuts.
I actually haven't quite realized it with respect to the latter two -- I never got to know von particularly well in the first place. I like arguing, and both SH and Slart will argue their points fairly at least sometimes, which is as much as you can say for most people.
But what kb says is correct; there's not much point in trying to argue with any of them. My definition of "reasonable" has degraded seriously since I started reading blogs. I find ObWi's comment section to be pretty consistently dreary reading.
I suppose I have moved from arguing there a lot to wandering by and sniping occasionally.
85--
actually, the OW snipes of yours that I have seen have impressed me as genuine contributions to the debate over there.
Utterly unproductive drive-bys are more my line of work.
15 If we replace Castro with Pinochet in this post do you still agree with it?
We've secretly replaced a left-wing communist dictator with a right-wing fascist! Let's see if Labs can tell the difference.
I was one of the original posters.
Von has always driven me crazy in a way that some more conservative people don't for what I perceive, maybe unfairly, to be his blind support for "moderation" for its own sake, without any regard at all for the merits of an argument. Since I think that attitude has completely poisoned the news media and Washington CW in general, I react very very poorly to it.
That thread is driving me crazy because I'm pretty certain they're engage in total revisionism, but it's outside my area of expertise so I can't prove this.
And anyone with a longer historical baseline on ObWi, can you tell me why von still seems reasonably respected around there? Did he used to be sane?
I've been reading ObWi since the very very very beginning... von's respected because he's one of the founding members and is still coasting on the residual goodwill. He did in fact used to be sane; more accurately, he used to be more engaged with the place. Nowadays he only shows up rarely, and with the other stuff going on in his life (which he's mentioned at ObWi), I don't get the sense he's committed to actually engaging in debate.
I'm pretty certain they're engaged in total revisionism
Rest assured, they are.
(and yes, the comment section has weird dysfunctional family dynamics due to an attempt at ideological diversity that's never quite worked. But hilzoy is one of the smartest people I know, other posters have their moments, and I can't resist the allure of having a place to post on my various grudges and have a reasonable # of people read it.)
Well, they're openly engaging in unsupported counterfactual claims: that Allende was just about to institute a dictatorship (which is what I assume they mean by 'communist'. If they just mean a communist rather than socialist democratically elected government, I'm not sure why that justifies anything.) At that point, it gets hard to argue: it turns into "Wait, how do you know that?" against "God, you are so naive."
"von's respected because he's one of the founding members"
this is another bloggish custom that I completely do not understand. For a while, there seemed to be a rule at OW that one could not speak ill of the deeply insane Tacitus, because he was something called a "blog father"?
This combined some sort of deference to tradition with some sort of patriarchal hierarchy (I think that's happened before, come to think of it) in a way that made my gorge rise.
I respect hilzoy because she's smart and writes well. She even researches stuff she's talking about, before she writes about it. whether she was or was not a founding member of this or that, or blog-mother of something else, seems just bizarrely irrelevant to the question "is this somebody worth listening to and arguing with?"
but then, these blogs, I find very strange sometimes.
I kind of think that way -- I think a lot of it comes from the fact that it was much easier to build up an audience back in the day. So, from my point of view, Unfogged doesn't have a huge readership, but it's much bigger than what I'd have if I'd started my own blog rather than joining on here, because Ogged built the place up back when the blogodrome was gelling. So, to the extent I like having readership, I'm parasitic off Ogged's prior efforts.
I can see a similar thought process, if it's true, that ObWi wouldn't exist with a readership if Tacitus hadn't nurtured it, inspring a certain amount of gratitude.
What a remarkable thread. For me, the high point came early on:
One would have liked to have the option of choosing a non-Allende, non-Pinochet to be Chile's leader. But we did not (and do not) live in that world.
As if the preference between outcomes is the only relevant fact. How brave to make the hard choices whose burdens fall exclusively on others.
ObWi wouldn't exist with a readership if Tacitus hadn't nurtured it driven it away from his site.
And to make the choices that aren't yours to make in the first place, I meant to add.
As an addendum to 98, I just have to marvel at the thought that John Thullen used to comment at the old Tacitus site. I'm sure with encouragement and freedom he's gotten a lot...more so, but it's still wild to imagine him and Trevino interacting.
100: I've toyed with the idea of trying to entice Thullen over here: he seems like our sort. Then I think that intentionally poaching someone else's commenters is wrong.
Shirring them, on the other hand, is unexceptionable.
intentionally poaching someone else's commenters is wrong
With that kind of attitude, it's no wonder Democrats have been wandering in the desert for lo these many years.
Not only did Thullen comment at the Tac/itus site (y'all should really start google-proofing his name), but so did Tim Burke and Brian Ulrich, at least occasionally. The blogosphere really was different a few years ago.
What's he going to do if he googles this page, scare us or something?
No, but he'd be an annoyance for a while. Although given the way he reacts to people making fun of him, maybe it'd be amusing.
Our servers groan under the weight as it is, LB. If that leaden prose shows up here, we're sunk.
Tacitus was sort-of-friends with Kos, for God's sake.
It's interesting following strangers' ideological development over time. I notice it most in conservatives, since it's closely related to whether I can stand arguing with them.
Well, Ogged had a kinda sorta friendly relationship with Instapundit. Again, the blogindibulum was smaller and friendlier back then.
you know, a day ago I would have thought your desire to lure Thullen over here was motivated by philanthropy.
but now that you are part of ogged's giant pay-per-post money-making pyramid scheme, I can see you really just want to bilk the poor guy.
and in any case--how do you know that he is *not* here already?
perhaps even--dare I say it--under an *assumed name*?
105--
and how long is it going to take before there is a toggle on goo/gle sea/rches that says "removes inserted slash-marks?"
random typography just ain't going to protect you from the man.
110: I seem to recall back in the day Instapundit was buddies with Tom Tomorrow and Eric Alterman.
Back then Glenn considered them part of the decent non-idiotarian left.
I too remember those earlier, simpler times when it took me an hour to read my favorites blogs left and right, and then get back to work. It is wierd to think that it has been five years since the blogosphere really exploded.
I can't really see why von happened to pop in and pick that fight with hilzoy, it was nonsensical to me from the start (von and his fight-picking, that is, not hilzoy).
Not that I was doing a great job of contributing to the discourse (other than indicating I thought von was insane).
come on, ugh, von *had* to intervene.
when she was saying all that stuff about allende being her favorite politician of all time, and a perfect champion of her views on political philosophy, did you really expect him to sit in silence and not protest?
also, that part where she said she loves all communists and regrets not having had mao's baby--I mean, who wouldn't pick a fight with that?
Dammit, man--at least he had the courage to speak up!
kb - well, now that you put it that way, it's all very clear. Plus I heard a rumor she slept with Allende to make up for the whole Mao oversight.
It seems like the conservative blogosphere has changed much more than the liberal one. Maybe it's just my perspective, but the contortions required to be either a still-loyal Bush supporter or a now-critic who rejects him only for not being successful enough at the brutality have really taken a harsh toll on a lot of people's moral sense and general intellect. So many people I used to find interesting and sometimes even enlightening now seem not just unwilling to engage in basic consideration of costs or consequences, but doing their best to be unable to.
I don't think that's just your perspective, Bruce. When the slurs shifted from silly, naive hippies to treasonous, noose-worthy traitors, it was clear that war fever had caused wide swaths of the right to blow a mental gasket. What I find especially galling is to have them now tut-tutting about a lack of civility in political discourse.
No, no, fuck YOU very much. Perhaps after Glenn Reynolds and Co. spend as much time SingTFU as they spent expounding upon my deep, personal love for Osama bin Laden, then I will think they might have something of value to add to a conversation beyond presenting an easy target for mockery. Perhaps.
I don't have anything against people who supported the war. I find it mostly inexplicable, but people can convince themselves of all manner of crazy-ass things. The folks who felt it necessary to demonize anybody who opposed it, though? I don't know how long it will be before I'll be willing to extend them any hint of civility.
I don't think that the contortions required to be a Bush supporter are really all that arduous. What's particularly hard is being a Bush supporter while pretending to care about democracy and the Constitution. Since paying lip service to these things is totally obligatory in the American political scene, we see the bizarre cognitive dissonance.
In contrast, there are thousands of hardcore Pinochet supporters in Chile, and they came out in force for his funeral. They cheered the coup, they booed the civilian Minister of Defense, and generally expressed their political approval of a man who stated that democracy inevitably leads to communism. They don't support him in spite of the fact that he tortured and killed his enemies; they support him because of it. And since they don't have any reason to pretend otherwise, they don't.
The Bush supporters in the U.S. are the same way, I'm convinced. (And I became more convinced when I read about the pinochetistas attacking journalists arriving to the hospital where Pinochet died, shouting that they were enemies of the country.) The contortions required are only in pretending that they love American ideals as much as they love Bush for violating them.
This is one reason why it's so important, I think, to loudly repudiate Bush's violation of the American ideals. The worst case scenario is that these guys don't have to keep lying and can unashamedly announce that they're glad that he tortures any Muslim who gets caught up in the net. It can happen.
Pinochet's grandson ejected from the army after a speech threatening the judiciary.
