13 Jan 2024 7:27 am
Zeets2: "Yes, abuse and torture certainly were used on prisoner terrorists at Abu Ghraib. The big difference is that once those allegations were proven in the court-martial, 15 soldiers who committed those crimes were tried and convicted."
The reality that there hadn't been a single suicide bombing in Iraq until 2004, roughly ten months after the US's illegal and cowardly invasion, is enough to know who the terrorists were. To be sure, the terrorism that unfolded in Iraq in 2004 was a direct result of the US invasion and brutal occupation of Iraq.
Zeets2: "Which of your fabled socialist/communist governments EVER handed down equally severe penalties adjudicated in a fair trial by those governments you honor?"
Soviet military personnel, for example, were prosecuted and punished in the 1940s by the Soviet command and military tribunals. In the first months of 1945, over four thousand Soviet officers were convicted for crimes against the local population in Germany. And those were just the officers, for several thousand rank-and-file soldiers were also convicted. Many were executed in front of their units. Zeets2: "Furthermore, you cannot accept as fact the unprovable claim that Cuba 'following the path of the US' STILL 'wouldn't have been allowed to do so.' During Batista's rule, the economic relationship between the US and Cuba wasn't a mutually beneficial trading relationship between two capitalist states like the financial relationship between the US and Germany. It was a typical imperialist relationship between the world's most powerful capitalist nation and a tiny Third World country. Ergo, and like all imperialist relationships, recourses, in this case mainly sugar, tobacco, and nickel, were mostly taken out of Cuba in their raw form. That means Cuba, by design, had few domestic industries that could have processed those resources, added value, employed Cubans rather than enslaved them, and built a meaningful tax base. In other words, Cuba was denied the ability to develop a domestic capitalist economy, for it was there to be milked by the US and other capitalist powers. Batista's role was mainly to protect the interests of US and European capitalists against the aspirations of his "fellow" Cubans. So, it wasn't a matter of the US and Cuba continuing a normal trading relationship because such a thing never existed in the first place. But Zeets2 is correct in as much as "the US would have LOVED to continue" that relationship because it was a one-sided arrangement in the US's favor. And it was not unique to Cuba, not then and not now.
Zeets2: "It was only the anti-American propaganda of the US as nothing more than 'imperialists' that forced us to break those ties, with businesses losing millions in investments as Castro nationalized every means of production, much to the detriment of the Cuban people. According to you, such theft was justifiable and should have been ignored, and it should have been America "kissing the ring" of Castro, and that was not about to happen."
Yes, such "theft" was justified, just as American colonists' "theft" of British assets was warranted. Do you, Zeets2, agree that the colonists' theft of British assets was justified? Is it only dark-skinned revolutionaries that haven't the right to thwart their oppressors?" Finally, it's not easy to imagine how the Cuban government's nationalization of foreign-owned assets was "much to the detriment of the Cuban people." After all, before their revolution, the Cuban people suffered the second lowest overall living standards in the Western hemisphere, next to then-equally exploited Haiti. But by the 1970s, well after the said nationalizations, Cubans enjoyed Latin America's highest overall living standards. Indeed, the Cuban Revolution has been enormously beneficial for Cubans.