Some thoughts about Fidel Castro

I have been listening to the audiobook autobiography of Fidel Castro.  It was in the form of an interview in 2005 between foreign journalist Ignacio Ramonet, and Fidel himself.  The transcript had to be approved by Castro first before publication, and was translated into English, and performed by 2 actors for my enjoyment.  I borrowed it from the Public Library. 

One major theme throughout the tale was ethics.  Fidel explained that there is subjective and objective ethics.  Subjective ethics are about honor, protecting the innocent, being able to sleep at night.  Subjective ethics are about seeing international corporations coming into a nation and exploiting the human and natural resources to depletion for their own profit, and seeing the indigenous people being robbed of their capital legacy. 

Another shocking realization that has lifted the wool from my eyes is that the USA, the land I was raised to think had the moral high ground, has been sponsoring terrorism on the sovereign nation of Cuba for 55 years starting with our beloved JFK.  The fact that the microscopic nation of Cuba has persisted this long in spite of the acts of aggression from its giant nearby neighbor only attests to the validity of Castro’s assertions. 

And why should giant USA be threatened by the tiny little Caribbean nation of Cuba?  Why not be friends and trading partners like we are with Communist China?  The obvious reason is that the validity of Castro’s philosophy of ethics is so infectious, that it threatens the corporate oligarchy, which has been in control of our government for longer than we think. 

Castro actually admired JFK for withdrawing from the 1961 Bay of Pigs and admitting defeat.  He understood that Kennedy had inherited the plot from Eisenhower.  Castro’s forces had taken 1200 prisoners of war, which they ethically exchanged in 1962 with lawyer James Donovan for $53 of private medical supplies.  On the other hand, the non-violent Cuban 5 in the USA unethically all got life sentences, and Luis Posada Carriles, a convicted terrorist, lives free in luxury in Miami. 

Once again, our media portray Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as dangerous maniac armed revolutionaries.  But when you read their writing, they were totally rational and ethical.  They both saw the corporate machine robbing every resource possible if not stopped by persons with ethics.  They heroically stood up to the plate, but corporate censorship and spin have rewritten history to make the corporate oligarchy the good and moral side, and Castro and Guevara were on the bad and destructive militant revolutionary side. 

What Fidel & Che began to fight is upon us all with spades now, worldwide.  We are drowning in the toxic wastes of the for profit corporate depletion of our natural and human resources.  We are fed up with governments that serve corporate interests over the interests of the electorate, and enable our nation to descend into a banana republic.  Let We the People unite to non-violently create a “wall of separation between corporation and state” by amending the Constitution to define a person under the law as a human being, and money is not speech.   And with another amendment to mandate public funding of political campaigns with an eight-week campaign limit. 

Thoughts about Anarchism

The word "Anarchist" is used with very different meanings depending upon who is talking. merriam-webster.com says "1) a person who rebels against any authority, established order, or ruling power. [That could be any teenager.] 2) one who uses violent means to overthrow the established order." That description could include George Washington, the Tea Party, as well as Che Guevara. It could also mean meatheads that get a thrill out of provoking a riot. I've noticed plants from White Supremacist camps who are charged with provoking a riot; these are also included in the definition of anarchist.   

But there are also non-violent Anarchists, who advocate the reduction of central government influence, and increased local control of government, by non-violent means. Non-violent anarchist used to be #3 in the dictionary meanings, but seems to have been purged. Often those from Europe and South America understand this aspect of Anarchism.

In other words, Anarchism is when the People take control of the government whether it be through violent means or by non-violent means. If this is true, then Anarchism may be the only true Democracy!.

Capitalism is conflated with Democracy

 The Gringo in Chile wrote to me and said:

Good Morning Bodhi,

As for our new administration.  To me,  it feels like America is making great moves towards global unity.  I am some what confused about our involvement in Afghanistan.

What's your take on this "hot" area?  I feel this Administration is making more progress with health reform and global peace that I have seen during my entire life.  Love to hear your opinion.  

From Chile,

Gringo

My reply: 
The war profiteers own our big media corporations that control the mainstream airwaves.  Anti-war political candidates are excluded during election campaigns from airing their voices on mainstream media.  They are ridiculed and belittled, with character assassinations.  The only candidates that we see on TV are the ones that have agreed to collaborate with the war profiteers. 

That said, Obama got elected with a little help from the war profiteers.  Don't forget, Obama refused public financing of his campaign and therefore, raised more money than any other candidate in history.  A significant portion of his campaign funding came from the war profiteers. 

Now that he has been elected, his campaign promise was to get out of Iraq and fight the REAL war in Afghanistan where Al'Quida is located.  He was never the "peace" candidate.  Now that he is in office, he doesn't necessarily have to comply with the generous supporters that want favorable conditions for more war.  On the other hand, if he crosses the war profiteers, they will assassinate him - DEAD.  If he crosses the peace-niks, they will complain without violence, maybe have another sit-in.  If someone constantly had a sniper pointing a killer weapon at you just in case you slipped-up the rhetoric, what would you say? 

I believe Obama will maintain perpetual war to keep the war profiteers happy while he tries to slip in some popular reforms under their noses.  The same with Wall Street and Health Insurance.  He took their money for his campaign also.  That's why he is approving more corporate giveaways to banks and insurance companies. 

In Peace,  Bodhi

Gringo replied:

Good Morning,

Great piece of work and very clear.  Oh!

Guess its difficult to stay optimistic while being aware of the facts.  

I have no idea how we can continue to finance these wars.  

As a people we must continue to downsize.  Grow our own food.

Be Peace,  share Peace,  just maybe someday Peace will prevail.

Been researching quite a bit about this incredible Che Guevara, as he is so popular with Latin Americans.  His photos are everywhere in Chile.  I started by taking an American, capitalistic attitude towards this guy but after some research I find myself understanding this Man.  In fact,  I am beginning to like him!

In two days we'll begin this 900 mile trip to the central coast....taking the same path that "Che" did in, what, 1957?  I have decided that southern Chile, although quite beautiful, is to pro-German.  Everyone is trying to be white and caught up in this western mentality.

My reply re: Hola Bodhi

Did you mention Che Guevara because you read my comments about him in my blog?

I also began with the usual capitalistic hype about Che.  He is portrayed as an insane, revolutionary thug.  But now I understand that the CIA disinformation campaign prefers to keep us intellectually uninformed, and emotionally charged against such an "enemy" of capitalism.  Additionally, American education has historically conflated democracy with capitalism.  In regard to Che Guevara, they want us all to be Tea-Baggers.  And they have succeeded for 40 years. 

Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism are economic systems.  Democracy, theocracy, plutocracy, dictatorship, monarchy, feudalism, are political systems.  There is nothing automatic about capitalism being a democracy or communism being a dictatorship.  Such is the misinformation in our American educational system. 

On the contrary, when you think about it carefully, capitalism is an economic model where a corporate CEO that usually answers to a corporate Board of Directors dictates all policies from the top down.  There is nothing democratic about it at all.  On the other hand, communism is an economic model in which classically, all the factory workers own the means of production equally, and theoretically all have equal say in the management of the assets and the profits.  That sounds far more democratic to me.  I say classically, because Marx and Engels did not include farmers in the proletariat.  Mao Tse Tung was the one who expanded the proletariat to include not only factory workers but also farmers.  And I say theoretically because the major models of communism in the world today are dictated in practice from a central committee, quite contrary to the theoretical model.  An economic system in which all the workers have a say in the management of the assets sounds way more democratic than the capitalistic system.  How did the disinformation campaign ever convince us of the opposite?

19th Century Robber Barons Paved the Way

I just finished reading Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow by Dee Brown. It was a painstaking report of how the frontier was settled by the railroads. It began with a few honest visionaries who failed to get enough backers to fund a railroad project. Then big business got involved. They wrapped the railroads in the American flag and made it a patriotic duty. They convinced Congress of the necessity of connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific oceans, which then passed legislation that granted cash money and tens of thousands of acres of land for every mile of track that was laid. The corporate profiteers laid track on the longest routes possible to reap ever more money and land from Congress. Congress took federally granted lands from the Native Americans and transferred it to the railroad companies without notifying the tribes. Then they sent Civil War generals Sherman and Sheridan to wipe out the Indians that were blocking the railroad from entering tribal lands.

The railroad companies then subdivided the land grants and sold them for a huge profit. There was more profit in subdividing the land than in the RR itself. The railroad companies gave Congress doubly inflated estimates of the cost of building the railroads bilking the Treasury of huge amounts of grants. A couple of railroad companies even set up shell holding corporations to siphon off the biggest profits. They additionally sold stocks and bonds in the railroads; if your town didn't buy RR bonds, then the tracks didn't come your way.

Once the Native Americans were crushed and the land grants were subdivided, the RR companies sent solicitors all over Europe to bring whole communities to their dream of new hope in America. Europeans would give their life savings to the RR companies for the lots in the prairies and mountains of the west and get 3-year mortgages on their houses. Just like the sub-prime mortgage debacle of today, most of the European immigrants ended up broken and penniless. The railroads effectively ruined the lives of generations of settlers as well as generations of Native Americans from whom the land was stolen.

After all the tracks were all laid, and the immigrants were settled in the subdivided lots, then the RR monopolies charged enormous fees from farmers to transport their produce to markets. The high transportation fees made farming a money losing endeavor.

The Supreme Court ruled twice within 15 years against the railroad companies taking federally appropriated tribal lands. Yet, Congress ignored the Supreme Court. Many members of Congress were also involved in the RR profiteering. The railroads of the 19th century were akin to the war profiteers and oil companies of the 21st century. Both sets of profiteers own Congress on both sides of the aisle. Even our esteemed president Abraham Lincoln reaped profits from railroad land speculation. Don't forget, it was Democrat John Kerry who amassed the largest profits of anyone in Congress from his investments in Iraq.

In addition, a Supreme Court ruling in 1886, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, gave "personhood" under the 14th Amendment to the RR corporations in order to have legal standing in court and be taxed. I read that Supreme Court ruling several times. It was not, in fact, the ruling itself that gave "personhood" to corporations, but, rather, the railroad barons got human rights for corporations inserted in the court reporter's headnotes on the case. Since that time, the mega corporations have exploited that single court reporter's note, and layers of statutes have built upon it.

After all the profits were tidily secured in the private pockets of about 70 RR barons, the house of cards fell and the railroads went bankrupt. RR stocks and bonds became worthless. Tracks were left unused. Towns were laid waste without the RR to connect them to markets. The profiteers anticipated the fall and sold their stocks and bonds at a profit before the prices plummeted. It took two decades for the American public to notice the monumental rip off. Congressional investigations exposed the fraud, but they didn't want to go too deep into the details, since too many members of Congress had an embarrassing history of involvement.

One of the lessons I learned from this story was that the neo-cons have a longer history in America than the massive mid-20th century post-war immigration that I know about. Another lesson I learned is that corporate profiteers like Jay Gould, Durant, and Henry Villner can get ever more creative to invent ways to separate innocent victims from their money. Very Rovian. The third lesson was that fascists care nothing for the sanctity of life; they kill not only the enemies, but also kill their women, children and elders. Sherman and Sheridan killed whole villages of undefended Native peoples on tribal lands tantamount to genocide. Warriors would leave their villages undefended because they couldn't imagine that unarmed innocents would become targets. Nowadays, state-sponsored terrorism like the occupation of Iraq doesn't hesitate to kill everyone whether they are insurgents or not. What Che Guevara taught us was that protecting the innocents and only fighting the armed warriors wins the popular sentiment to your side. Batista killed anyone, which led to his defeat by the popular revolution.

Some thoughts about Ernesto Che Guevara

I recently finished “reading” the biography of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson. I chose the book on tape from our local public library while escaping from the spate of murder mysteries into the non-fiction section. It was the thickest set of cassettes on the shelf and I was anticipating a long 2 hr/day commute for at least six weeks.

I was amazed at the portrait of a learned prince of the Argentine upper crust driven to fight to the end of his life to defend social justice against corporate imperialism. It was nothing like the unlearned impression that I previously had of an insane, radical revolutionary. He reminded me of the characters my sons embody in their video games who fight overwhelming odds to defend the good.

When I sought to share my insights about Guevara, people would glare at me at the mention of Che’s name like I must be a pinko red communist armed revolutionary. I am shocked at the spontaneous negativity immediately generated at the sound of his name more than 40 years after his death.

Ernesto Guevara took a motorcycle journey in 1953 in his first year of college and saw the plight of the exploited masses in their own lands. It touched him to the core. He saw a pattern of colonial governments granting Latin American and African nations their independence, only to have North American or European corporations move into the wake. Che called the phenomenon “Neo-colonialism.”

He met Fidel after the popular uprising in Guatemala which ended the pro-corporate regime of General Jorge Ubico. The general elections that followed resulted in the socialist government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzán. After a year of sweeping land reform acts that antagonized the U.S.-based multinational company United Fruit Company, Arbenz was assassinated in a CIA-backed coup. Over the next four decades, the succession of military rulers would wage counter-insurgency warfare destabilizing Guatemalan society. The violence caused the deaths and disappearances of more than 140,000 Guatemalans, and some human rights activists put the death toll as high as 250,000. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'%C3%A9tat

The short-lived success of Arbenz followed by CIA backed assassination left an indelible impression on the young revolutionaries, Ernesto and Fidel. Time and again they witnessed the same pattern: as soon as corporate interests were threatened, the democratically elected leader was assassinated with the help of the CIA, and replaced by a corporate friendly dictator.

Che reasoned that if you convinced the peasants that they could achieve self-determination, they would join the revolution. Castro and Guevara achieved this dream in Cuba where they overthrew the pro-corporate dictator, Batista, nationalized the natural resources, and have managed to maintain their sovereignty from neo-corporate invasion for over 50 years.

Guevara was a man of strong principles. He insisted on marital fidelity and treating women with respect. Rapists faced the firing squad after being tried in a court of their peers. He used to read Pablo Neruda poems out loud to his wife for entertainment. He was a Renaissance Man. Whatever he couldn’t do, he learned (except dancing). He was a military strategist, an economic strategist, a master chess player, as well as a medical doctor, healer, and philosopher. He was a published author and ran several newspapers and magazines. He was anything but a thug.

Like the heroes of old, Che sought to defend the lives of the common people which were being threatened by the evil of North American corporate exploitation. He led a revolution to free the people. Was Che any different than George Washington or Thomas Jefferson who were also products of the upper crust who took up arms to free their own country from the imperialist exploitation of Great Britain? Our founding fathers were militant revolutionaries inspired by radical philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Paine, and Frenchmen Voltaire and Rousseau. Che was driven by the philosophy of Carl Marx. Both our founding fathers and Guevara were militant armed revolutionaries driven by philosophies of social justice.

Today, as we watch the decline of American democracy guided by pro-corporate neo-con philosophy, the erosion of the Bill of Rights, and the government protection of corporate interests at the expense of the people, it becomes apparent that Ernesto Che Guevara predicted it all. He was a man before his time. He tried to nip the economic and political monster we face today in the bud. But with the help of our CIA, he was eliminated.

What really surprised me about reading his biography, was the powerfully negative reactions I encountered at the mention of his name. If I mention Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, I got responses imbued with positive energy. When I mention Che, I am assaulted with incredible negative energy. The propaganda machine that convinces people to vote against their own best interests has had a lasting legacy in the case of smearing the name of Ernesto Che Guevara, defender of the common people.

Che Guevara and Manifest Destiny

I have been listening to the biography of Che Guevara on tape as I drive an hour to and from work each day. Che’s life, even so many decades ago, sounded very modern and little different than the lifestyle we enjoy in this United States. The author portrays Che, and his buddy Fidel, as products of their environment. Both were descendants of the wealthy, privileged class, and were bothered by the social injustices brought about by the invasion of Europeans to the Americas. The European settlers confiscated the land from the indigenous people and treated them worse than dirt. In addition, the United States came in and exploited the natural resources for their own exclusive profit at the expense of the citizens of each country.

The United Fruit Company, and companies that owned the coffee plantations, the mines, and the forest products made huge profits and collaborated with oppressive militias to enrich themselves and keep the locals in servitude. Beginning with Guatemala in 1953, every time a populist leader was elected, the CIA would assassinate him and install a dictator who protected the North American industrialists. A few Caucasian locals who collaborated with the North American companies got filthy rich while the rest of the population lived in squalor. Both Che and Fidel descended from such wealthy landed families.

I mentioned this to T.A., an acquaintance of mine at the post office the other day. He replied that if the indigenous people weren’t organized enough to manage their own natural resources, it is only right that the North Americans would come in and take the natural resources, just like they did with the Native Americans. I am aware that T.A. is a Christian and I supposed he was referring to the Christian belief of “manifest destiny” which justified the robbery and exploitation of Native Americans in the USA.

I didn't reply to this at the time because I am slow on the uptake and try to think about things before I speak. The more I think about what T.A. said, the more I realize how immoral it is to take what someone else has just because I am bigger, stronger, more organized, or believe it is my manifest destiny. T.A. was partly referring to historical patterns; when rich natural resources exist, historically someone comes in to exploit it. But, just because the historical record illustrates the pattern, that doesn’t make it right.