With former Cuba President and revolutionary icon Fidel Castro’s passing, it’s a good moment to quote an insightful response US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt supposedly gave about a decade prior to Cuba’s revolution, after Roosevelt’s Secretary of State called then-Nicaragua President Anastasio Somoza Garcia a bastard:
“Yes, but he’s one of our bastards.”
Explains a lot, doesn’t it?
No?
Then perhaps a more recent story about US ally Saudi Arabia torturing a disabled man for his participation in a peaceful protest. The man has been sentenced to be executed.
Put these two stories together while keeping in mind that The Kingdom is one of the world’s most notorious human rights abusers that has never been subjected to regime-change planning by the US government, and Fidel Castro’s US “problem” becomes clear: he wasn’t one of our (their) bastards.
The whole “Socialism vs Democracy” argument [note: highly deliberate use of fallacy here] doesn’t work since the US sold wheat to the evil Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War.
And a debate among Americans about what kind of bastard to call Castro isn’t relevant since the US has a long history of supporting dictators.
Plus, America’s support of Pol Pot — a mass murderer so far off the meters where calling him a dictator would be akin to saying Mr. Pot is saved, sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost — leaves the country with no moral equity to judge bastards.
Any debate about Castro and his legacy needs to begin with this: he became the wrong kind of bastard and the US turned on the decades-long anti-Castro propaganda and regime change planning machine after he decided to end Cuba’s status as a colony …
song currently stuck in my head: “bunalimlar” – bunalim
[Note: I previously wrote that Munir al-Adam, the disabled Saudi man sentenced for execution, has been killed. The execution has not yet occurred, and I made the correction to this post.]
mentalunrest.com 