quote:
Ah, but it's "communist" enough in that the government (a) controls industry, with the upshot that foreign corporations would not be allowed to exploit Cuba's resources, and (b) conducts political repression.
Of course, this definition of "communist" is ideal for propaganda purposes, but I don't think it really justifies assassination plots against Castro and all that other stuff!
Actually political repression is not a requirement of communism despite what you may have read in some people's posts on this and other sites.
The sad reasons that political repression and communism have gone hand in hand in people's perceptions are twofold.
Firstly, the sorts of people who can fight their way into a position where they can set up a communist administration (in a very Darwinist, freemarket kind of a way i might add) also happen to be the kind of scaredy cats who think that political repression is the only way to keep power. Keeping power should not be a priority in a proper communist society, but those people justify it, saying that the ethic of communism would be diluted if they themselves personally are not in charge. Also, they must be well scared that people would vote them out if they were given a choice. If they had implemented real communism, the theory is that everybody would be really content and wouldn't want to vote them out, so this kind of "communism" is clearly not the real thing.
The second reason is entirely down to the witchhunt mentality exploited by people since time immemorial, which riles people into an unrealistic lather over people who are "not like us". The more public instances of this, that i have heard of anyway, tend to be Brit empire, and US type exploitations of people's emotions, from the crusades (especially the children's crusade) through the English and American witch-hunts, McCarthyism, the blind rage that comes with fighting a war, racism towards the Germans, the Japanese, the VietNamese, the Argentinians, the Iranians, conversely the Iraqis and most recently the Afghanis.
Nevermind that all of these stereotyped people are scapegoats. Go to one country and people will hate communists, go to another country and people will hate capitalists, travel again and people will hate blacks, move once more and the whole country will hate whites. What are their reasons? abstracts, nothing more. What has happened is that every government has a propaghanda machine to direct the hate of the people under its administration, since the people would presumably all just hate things anyway, and it's better (in the eyes of the state) for it to be controlled. This means though that the pet hates of the powerful or the influential become the passions of a nation, and reasons to march off to war. After all it keeps morale up, keeps the economy turning, reduces the population boom and keeps people from thinking for themselves.
Amongst the countries of the world with the most money, the US government has the biggest clout. Why? it has the most cunning propoghanda department. Consequently other nations such as Australia and England fall over themselves to back the US because the US markets itself as a winner in all cases. This is very similar to those dumb managers/employees/IT buyers/whoever who blindly plump for Microsoft, and shell out megabux for stuff that never works right.
So, the anticommunism thing is a residue from the post ww2 anti-russia thing, and is framed in the light of the unsophisticated but effective propoghanda of McCarthyism. This method would never work today (remember mass media was a new thing, Hitler had been the first real "media-whore" and the concepts of spindoctoring were not refined until the seventies when everybody had decided to forget peace and love for everybody and just look out for number one) but the knock on effects have been played upon expertly by successive generations of PR experts. The US can afford the best PR, and it has the mentality for it anyway, so it's only natural that they should be world leaders in this period of human history.
Of course this leaves anybody who does not jump on the USA bandwagon firmly on the "wrong" side of the fence in the mind of any "right thinking" citizen of the free world.
So it's all a matter of perspective, and these things like restriction of freedom et cetera are not the exclusive domain of one model of a political structure or another. I could probably argue that capitalism had the corner on repressing people's politics (and certainly the US would be rich in examples).
This is not to say that i think Cuba has a great government, all i'm saying is that they're not a communist government, and that those definitions of communism mentioned in this thread can be applied across the board to all other governmental models to equal effect, depending on perspective.
[ June 05, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]
[ June 05, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]
