Same job, different uniform.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Castro redux

Why in Hell does Fidel Castro...or Hugo Chavez, or any number of other "freedom fighters" around the world...continue to be lionized by the intelligentsia and the "beautiful people?" One reason is because these individuals tend to be in love with their own intelligence and their college educations, and that feeling of belonging to a portion of society that really "understands the world's complexities." The fact that they have yet to get over the bone-cracking dialectical reasoning of Marxism-Leninism is something that rarely occurs to the Oliver Stones and Sean Penns and Danny Glovers of the world.

Lenin's explanation as to why capitalism didn't evolve into socialism and then into communism largely has to do with his idea that capitalists bribed the people of the developed world through better goods and higher wages to accept capitalism. It is a lifestyle and mode of living entirely dependent on "colonizing" the under- and undeveloped countries of the world by paying their people "slave wages" or stealing their commodities for use in the international capitalist machine.

So if you buy that basic argument and your heart bleeds for the poor of the earth (who are often much better off as part of the world economy than when left to the tender mercies of their indigenous "leaders"), then you might very well believe that Castro (or Che Guevara) is a hero of sorts because he kept sticking it to the capitalists, whatever the cost to his own people. People like Castro advance the cause of socialism by getting in the way of the imperialist swine, who are trying to delay the golden dawn of communism, so whatever evil they might have to do in the pursuit of the greater good is forgivable.

Of course, if you buy that argument, you might very well be awake on the night before Easter looking for the bunny to deliver eggs, but we all have our blind spots.


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