Bush, Whack

The article in the Slant section entitled “Bush, Whack”, by David Faris (March 19th, 2008) attempts to criticize some of the policies of the current administration.

However he, like many other supporters of the Democratic Party, fail to acknowledge that many of these illegal, immoral and criminal policies have been approved by a Democratic lead Congress and Senate. The Democrats are responsible for continuing to authorize funding for the Iraq war, and many of them voted for the war.

The talk about “our moral standing in the world (whatever that is)” is naïve, since many in the world have regarded the US as an outlaw state, and its leaders (including Clinton) as war criminals.

But the claim that Cuba is one of “the worst regimes in human history” can only be made someone who has swallowed all the US propaganda against the island, or by a child.

Cuba has been the subject of terrorist attacks since the triumph of the Revolution in 1959, even by Kennedy, who was president when the US organized the Bay of Pigs invasion. There has been an immoral blockade since the early 60’s which the UN has overwhelmingly rejected for about 15 years, backed by Democratic as well as Republican Administrations.

Cuba does not invade and kill hundred of thousands of civilians. Cuba does not apply sanctions that kill half a million Iraqi children (like Clinton did). Indeed, Cuba’s rates for literacy, life expectancy and other indicators are far superior when compared to the US.

As far as for so-called “freedom”, the US’ incarceration rate is the highest in the world, much higher than Cuba’s. And people who are incarcerated in the US are of course, black and Latinos. So not only does the US put more people in jail than Cuba, but has a racist for-profit system that Cuba does not.

Since the triumph of the Revolution, millions of people all over the world have died as a result of US foreign and domestic policy. Both parties have enabled these policies. On the other hand, Cuba’s effect in many countries has been the opposite: sending doctors even to places like Costa Rica. And receiving university students with free scholarships (even American students) because they can’t get it in their countries.

Are we just supposed to believe that these claims against Cuba are so true that they do not have to be supported by evidence?

I must take exception to the confused paragraph:

"Earlier this month, the Bush administration, oblivious to the damage our policies of extrajudicial kidnapping and officially sanctioned torture are doing to our moral standing in the world, vetoed a bill that would have suspended the practice of "waterboarding." As they have for some time, Bush and his cronies now stand openly behind filthy practices used by some of the worst regimes in human history, from Castro's Cuba to Pinochet's Chile."

It's clear that Mr. Faris means well, but is quite young. He senses there is a problem, yet because he has so far failed to grasp the depth of it, he falters and runs aground on his life-long inculcation in the standard canon of American propaganda. We can all learn something from this.

Beyond the conceptual trouble with "extrajudicial kidnapping" (kidnapping of course always being outside the law, outside a court's power to approve) as a new term for people who have been disappeared by US neo-fascist forces, or the difficulty with tolerating torture based on whether or not it receives the correct "sanction" from a regime, this single paragraph, taken as a whole, serves as an example of the insidious consequences of American propaganda on the American population itself, even when members of that population are well-intentioned and do struggle to be free of it. No one should be faulted for youth, yet that does not excuse the spreading of gross misinformation, particularly when that misinformation precisely mirrors stock lies the very government he criticizes has spent scores of years and billions of dollars to invent and propagate.

That Fidel Castro or the nation of Cuba has anything in common with either the neo-fascist US Empire, or with the Chilean dictatorship of Pinochet, is preposterous, especially on the issue of torture, and is a delusion only an American-raised youngster could ever believe. Of course the reality is that Castro supported the democratically elected Socialist President Salvador Allende, visiting Chile and leading mass rallies in '71, which itself was used to justify the US drive to overthrow him via military coup, first via Nixon's earmarking of $10 million for the effort to block or remove him (see the Hinchey Report, _CIA Activities in Chile_), then via the CIA and Project FUBELT (a.k.a., "Track II" plan), which promoted the coup that installed Pinochet and supported the bloody junta and its neoliberal "el milagro económico" for decades to come. Throughout the 20th century the US has installed and supported the world's worst dictators, who ruled by terror and torture across the globe, while revolutionary Cuba has always fought this, on its own shores (Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs), in Algeria on the side of the FLN against French colonialism, in Angola fighting US-backed South African apartheid forces, in Nicaragua against the Somoza dictatorship, in Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, Mozambique, even Che Guevara fighting in the Congo, after the US-backed assassination of Lumumba, again attempting to prevent the rise of a US-backed dictator, the now-infamous Mobuto. If a nation could be said to be pro-dictatorship and pro-torture, one must conclude that the United States, by its behavior, is that one. And Cuba has not just been its opponent in this, but its _opposite_.

A gaff of this magnitude, lumping revolutionary Cuba in with torturing dictatorships, shows a specially American kind of educational deficit, one which should be remedied as soon as possible, particularly if one is worried about American embarrassment. Any factual material or demographic statistics on Cuba should be sufficient to the task (e.g., highest educational scores for Grade 4 in all Latin America, lower infant mortality than the US, high quality free healthcare for all, life expectancy equivalent to the US even with the blockade, etc.). It is also worth noting that no sound evidence of torture on the island of Cuba has ever been produced, though Fidel has called for any evidence on numerous occasions, with one exception: the US-occupied and controlled base at Guantánamo.

Jumping on the now-stylish anti-Bush bandwagon, without first having a fundamental grasp of the basic nature of the US position and actions in 20th and 21st century geopolitics, leads to puffed up arguments that are easily deflated, potentially even by the foolish and duplicitous forces Mr. Faris attempts to skewer. Sweeping, even hyperbolic terms like 'all human history' presumes a broad and thorough knowledge that is precisely what the American propaganda system denies its victims. Those victims must be made to know this. It should be our task and our first responsibility, we who have been raised in a cauldron of lies, to remedy this deficit, purge the lies even when they are dear to us, and seek out the truth, even if it hurts the ego. The truth about Cuba is a first order of business, not least because our own government will not let us go there and that itself, far more than any Project Universal Wiretap, should set us to thinking.

So long as a significant number of Americans believe that the Bush regime is exceptional, rather than a slightly more inept continuation of a century-old pattern of lies, terror, torture, and even genocide, we'll continue to hear the nonsense about "our moral standing in the world," and consequently continue to be held daft and arrogant by a majority of the world's people. The dangerous and alarming truth is not that George W. Bush is an imbecile whose policies have slaughtered millions, directly and indirectly, as a statistical majority of people already know that. The dangerous and alarming truth is that we ensure the continuation of this pattern so long as we seek to pin the blame on a single individual or a single administration, rather than on our own refusal to put two and two together and finally _see_ what the current American political system is. The primary problem, and the primary reason there can be a President Bush II at all, is us, and that includes Mr. Faris, unless some serious study is undertaken straight away. There was a reason Che Guevara called the United States of America "the great enemy of mankind." The rest of the world already knows that reason. So should Mr. Faris.