[PEN-L:9555] Re: Re: My Ideologies

["William S. Lear" <rael@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday, July 22, 1999 at 18:58:47 (-0400) Doug Henwood writes:
>...
>But it's in no small part relentless U.S. opposition to even the
>mildest reformism in the "Third World" that has helped make
>revolutionary movements more brutal than you or I would like. Who
>knows how the Cuban revolution would have turned out had the U.S. not
>tried to smother it in its crib? Who knows what would have happened
>elsewhere in Latin America & the Caribbean if the Cubans had been
>allowed to go their way? What would have happened in Nicaragua if
>Reagan hadn't unleashed the contras? What would have happened in the
>USSR had the "West" not been hostile for 75 years? What would
>have.....?

Not to mention the fact that the USSR was never the enemy.  The enemy
has always been the US population, which had to be terrified of a
monstrous enemy, so they would support a repressive state and wouldn't
get crazy ideas about organizing the state to serve the ends of
democracy rather than those of the plutocrats who pull the strings.
We never have had a problem with the most bloodthirsty of governments,
and the USSR was pleasantly serviceable for scare purposes.  Frank
Kofsky, (among many, many others) shows this in brilliant detail in
his wonderful *Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948*.

And really, isn't the proper counter-counter-factual not "Who knows
how the Cuban revolution would have turned out had the U.S. not tried
to smother it in its crib?", but "Who knows how the Cuban revolution
would have turned out had the U.S. aided, as it had every moral
obligation to do, in the overthrow of the monstrous dictatorship that
had strangled Cuban democracy with U.S. help?"


Bill