Senate The legacy of Fidel Castro (1926-2016), and the future of Cuba

We invented an entire crisis in order to go in and "free" people and depose Arbenz when all he wanted was moderate land reform. We were entirely cynical, sometimes deviously so, in that era.

 

For once I agree with you!

 

Jesus.

 

I agree with you.

 

I will second that.

 

Go ahead

 

I guess my point is that, the impression I've always gotten is that all those little "Third World interventions" were not so much the result of willful malice than it was due to a misunderstanding...or at the worst, some officials in our government who were blinded by zealotry and then misguided their higher-ups.

 

Host of the Bethsaidan gameshow Loaves and Fish



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I think the cold war anti-communism led to decisions that needlessly caught well-intentioned people/smaller nations in that widely cast net.

edit:

slightly_unhinged, that is either Jesus or The Dude, Jeff Bridges.

I know it is Jesus.

 

Just call him Buddy Christ.

Doesn't it just..."pop"? Buddy Christ.

Sent from my Who Cares **** You

 

Knock it off

 

Pretty sure he's banned, man.

 

I think it's (present tense, because it's not going away) the result of people who aren't as smart as they think they are reading Machiavelli's The Prince, taking it seriously, and deciding to give it a go.

 

Only temp I hope.

 

Or were they already inclined to think that way? Did Machiavelli create self-interest and real politik or merely describe what was already there?

 

AlphaRed: You're absolutely right: Fostering discord and bolstering oligarchy for the sake of transnational corporations is, in the long view, exceedingly stupid--inevitably culminating in Blowback--but that's precisely what the American government did. Recall that Eisenhower's cabinet was comprised of businessmen--led by John Foster Dulles, of Sullivan and Cromwell--who harbored an antipathy towards Roosevelt and his New Dealers and whose panacea was of an unregulated and unfettered free market. As such, they perceived the Arbenzes and Mosaddeghs and Ho Chi Minhs as severe threats to their world order, regardless as to whether they were mere reformers or outright radicals. In the case of the Mosaddegh "problem", all they had to do was inform Ike that while the Iranian leader himself was not communist, he was a tepid leader who would soon be overthrown by a Soviet-sympathetic insurgency (which was poppycock). Ike gave the go-ahead, John contacted his brother Allen, Allen coordinated with Kermit Roosevelt, and the rest was history.

It was stupid, all right, but no moreso than, say, arming Muslim militants with the aim of handing the Soviets their own personal Vietnam in Afghanistan, or the current Bush/Obama policy of Middle Eastern invasions, occupations and drone bombings in order to quash terrorism.

Also, while in some respects Britain and France were encouraged to decolonize, there was still plenty of wrongdoing. In the most notorious sphere, that being Vietnam, France immediately set out to reassert its dominance, and used its NATO positioning as leverage to get Truman to not only condone its rape of Indochina, but to fund it. (Ho Chi Minh, who valorized the United States and its Declaration of Independence, begged Truman to recognize Vietnam's independence several times; the President never responded.)

 

Ho Chi Minh actually lifted entire sections of the Declaration of Independence and used them for his speeches and writings(Declaration of 45 was one).

I can't remember the specific line might have been the opening Life Liberty and Pursuit of Hapiness. Not sure.

edit: Looked it up. It is the Self-Evident...Life Liberty line. Started reading it just now again after a few years. Pretty remarkable document and….can't really argue with much of it.

 

AlphaRed: In regards to the Cold War, I wouldn't lump everyone into one category. There were men like Dean Acheson and Robert McNamara, whom I would describe as misguided or myopic, and then there other personalities, such as the Dulles brothers and Henry Kissinger, who evinced a breathtaking disregard for human life, and who harbored far darker motivations than mere containment.

It's kinda like the Dr. Strangelove coterie. You have your Turgidsons, Rippers, Muffleys and the Doctor himself. Disparate in temperament and ideology, but all part of the same warped, paranoiac, doomed reality.

 

Here is part of the complexity of the whole thing down to even individuals. Case: Eisenhower.

President during the deposing of Arbenz.

However, also said this about fighting a "preventive war" with China over Taiwan(then known as Fermosa):

All of us have heard this term "preventive war" since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it.... I would say a preventive war, if words mean anything, is to wage some sort of quick police action in order that you might avoid a terrific cataclysm of destruction later. A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today.... I don't believe there is such a thing, and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.

He knew that nuclear weapons had changed conditions since Hitler's day and had adapted accordingly. He wasn't wedded to idealism like the hawks and doves of his day. But he also wasn't above deposing rulers who he found to be insufficiently anti-communist or even those who had notions of agrarian land reforms striking at long standing feudal land systems that would have made things more democratic(Arbenz/Guatemala).

He was a realist and they are a mixed bag for hawk and dove ideologues wedded to visions.

 

The main instigator for the coup against Arbenz in Guatemala was... United Fruit. I won't list all the conflicts of interest, but in the seditious and unholy tradition of suggesting books on the topic that people won't read, Bitter Fruit by Stephen Schlesinger is an excellent account.

Or: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Guatemala

Ehhhhhhh. Not really? I mean the priority was empire building with anti-imperialist rhetoric, and shoring up the alliance against the dreaded Commies. It's fairly telling that the US sided with Nasser against France, Israel and Britain and Suez during an election year.

EDIT: Formosa, Shane. And it was only called that in European circles by this time. You can find some vestiges of the Formosa name in Taiwan now, such as in giant floral letters en route to Chiang kai-Shek airport, but the name Taiwan as the informal "Republic of China" name has been in use since WWII.

Republic of China as a name is from at least 1912.

 

Ahh so it was known as RoC there but not yet to Europeans? Apparently by Americans too. Did they ever call it Republic of China and not Taiwan? Figures I misspelled Formosa. Only heard of that name. Known as Taiwan as long as I've been around. I still remember a place called Kampuchea on some school maps.

 

The Porguese called it ilha Formosa which meant "beautiful island". Taiwan came into use in the 19th century after the indigenous tribe (the actual Taiwanese, not Han Chinese et al). But the Republic of China was founded in 1912 by Sun Yi Xian, or as the West know him Sun Yat-Sen and it included Taiwan.

Obviously when Chiang Kai-Shek (Jiang Jie Shi) fled the Commies in 1948 he moved his government to Taiwan and kept the RoC name.

America would have called Taiwan "China" up until Nixon had PRC normalised as China.

 

Ah I see now. So we called China the PRC until Nixon and Taiwan actually is an indigenous name?

 

Yeah, the Taiwanese are an aboriginal Chinese tribe there. The Han, in particular, were given access to the island by the Dutch and Portuguese and that's how the ended up basically the dominant faction there.



A Taiwanese aborigine.

 

Are they protected or recognized at all?