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Opinions on Che Guevara (12/28/2010)
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Here's something I'd like to start doing. Everyday I will post a discussion in which we discuss and share opinions on important figures of past and present. Today's person is Che Guevara, what do you think of him? Che Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat, military theorist, and major figure of the Cuban Revolution. He traveled the world to preach communism to whom he believed to be oppressed peoples. He was captured and later executed in Bolivia by a joint CIA-Bolivian task force. After his death, he became an international symbol of communism. What are your thoughts on Che Guevera, his life, his works, and his beliefs?
Read more on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara
Read more on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara
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This isn't a lecture hall. Discuss.
It's good etiquette to put your own point/view/opinion first, saves you looking like a troll like good ol' saturn.
I have just moved this to the Politics and Debate forum as I think you will get more replies here.
As Rubberskin said it might be a good idea to kick the discussion off by giving your opinion...
LauraO
Does the Guevara estate actually sanction half the tat that's sold with his mug on it?
He's staple t-shirt and poster material for white guys with dreads.
Batista, the dictator who was in place in the time and pandering to the USA (much in the way the USA backed the overthrowing of Salvador Allende in Chile, replacing him with Pinochet), as governing the country with an iron fist. His 'friends' were organised criminals, elections were staged, dissidents were jailed and people were living in dire poverty...
I think if in the UK, the same methods of guerilla warfare were used, it could be criticised more harshly, but this was not the UK.
Is this what you mean?
What other ways could the movement have took to overthrow the regime?
(Sorry, I didn't really give an opinion on Che, just on armed revolt in the Cuban revolution, when Che did much much more!)
Not really :no:
You seem to be missing a bit of the context - Batista was corrupt, but the people killed by his regime probably number less than 2000. Under castro they're about 30,000 dead (Che ran the firing squads which killed a fair few of them). Batista was corrupt and didn't allow free elections, which is exactly the same as before except Castro doesn't even bother having elections to fix. Batista was close to the US, Che and Castro were close to the USSR - which was the nastiest of these two regimes?
The Castro revolution was a cure which was much, much worse than the disease
I do wonder what the next topic for discussion will be? Laventry Beria -effective policing co-ordinator? Herman Goerring - much maligned airman?
Batista was deeemed Right Wing, Guevarra was Left Wing, and the Left are always in the right no matter how many die (100s of millions under Communism) because it's all in the name of peace and equality
I thought you would know this?
Throw in your musings and we'll see eh?
blawaferehfuerfhrufh
Quite so! Obviously you are deeper than you let on, your mind penetrates like a mighty phallus.
Or perhaps they just don't make up statistics?
From Wikipedia.
Forget a zero did you Flashman? So an alleged 20,000 in 11 years compared to an alleged 30,000 (although high estimates put it at 80,000) in 49 years? And then add to that the social policies implemented by each government, and you don't have to be left wing to pick the Castro regime as the least bad of the two options mentioned. Which isn't to say he shouldn't have stood down a long time ago (logically, at the end of the Cold War).
Actually, scratch that. The high estimates of Castro's death toll include refugees dying on boats.
How many people did Stalin kill?
How many people have the USA killed, through economic programs, war, supporting dictators, deforestation ect ect ect
It's not as simple as who was worse and it's not just about domestic affairs either. Both have done a lot of horrible things and whilst the Soviet Bloc collapsed, the USA still continues to kill a lot of people, even if they aren't on their own soil, or always from their own bombs.
Who was worse does not matter if you're being tortured, or if a bomb has just been dropped on a health centre, but your kids need medicine to live. It's not a competition imo.
Actually I didn't , I just didn't use Wikipedia as a source
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat7.htm#Cuba52
43.Cuba (1952-59)
◦Batista regime (1952-59)
■Mario Lazo, Dagger in the Heart : American Policy Failures in Cuba (1968), calls Castro's charge that 20,000 were killed by Batista a "cynical falsehood". He says "total deaths ... not more than 900 on both [sides]"
■Mid-Century World, Newsweek (1970) believes the accusation: 20,000 executions in 2 years. (This is probably the only mainstream American source that does. Most simply ignore it.)
■Hugh Thomas, Cuba, or, the pursuit of freedom (1971, 1988): 1,500-2,000 deaths as a direct consequence of the political crisis, 1952-58, including war.
■Gilbert: 2,000 deaths in 6 years of war and punitive actions.
◦Civil War, 1958-59:
■B&J: 5,000
■Singer: 5,000 battle deaths, 1958-59
■Eckhardt: 2,000 civ. + 3,000 mil. = 5,000 (1958-59)
■WHPSI: 3,977 deaths from political violence, 1956-63
I actually used Eckhardt and assumed all the civilian deaths were a direct responsibility of Batista (a big assumption of course). I didn't include military as I don't believe soldiers killed in battle should be included under democide, nor is it really fair to assign them to either Castro or Batista (if I had figures of PWs shot I would include them under democide of course).
On the 30,000 I went from this site
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html
Going from the site I just used on Batista so I'm being fair
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat6.htm
I think the figures (disputable though they are) perhaps rest more on Batista killing less
Apologies I know you had this later, but it makes more sense to reply here. I actually don't see why Castro shouldn't take responsibility for this - if he had allowed people to leave (as democratic states do) they wouldn't have taken to the sea in leaky and dangerous craft. His regime does bear direction relation for those that died in the same way the East German regime bears responsibility for those who died escaping its borders.
Why just the social - Castro's economic policies have left his country relatively worse off than the majority of its neighbours - that has a human cost in life expectancy etc.
It should also be noted that the Cuban Health Care system lacks independent verifications and when there is independent research it doesn't neccessarily co-incide with the official Cuban sponsored view
http://www.miscelaneasdecuba.net/media/pdf/Article-Hirschfeld-Press.pdf
Logically I would have said about 1960, allowing him twenty one years of murder and repression hardly seems compatible with any defence of democratic values or liberalism...
So what do do you believe is the combined death toll worldwide under Communist regimes? Roughly.
Why does the system of Govt make any difference?
Are is this a pissing context over which cause the most deaths? If so, it's wasted time because you will never get a true figure... or one even close.