Trouble in Cuba

Don’t play dumb, we know that China is propped up by trade with the west. Take away that trade and how long do you think their system lasts? Let’s also not pretend that the Chinese people aren’t exposed to western culture and the internet. Just because the regime hasn’t fallen as of yet doesn’t mean it won’t fall eventually. Let’s also not pretend that it didn’t fall in Europe already.

How does the US support itself?

Does it not trade?

Your regime hasn't fallen yet either, but every political entity dies eventually.

Aaaaand there’s the gaslighting.

No, there's honesty about things you don't like to hear.

I don't disagree, but it's important to factor in how quickly our planet industrialized and modernized in the 20th century. And how quickly our population exploded such that it was possible to kill more people just by virtue of more being being alive. The Nazis used industrialization and other modern things to carry out the holocaust, and then communism continued that trend. Better technology means more organized and efficient ways to kill, which means more mass killings and genocide. Not that genocide never occurred before the 20th century, but that humans just suddenly got better at it. And it wasn't just communists doing it.

To me, those atrocities are more symptomatic of the rapid, unchecked technological progress humanity made in the 20th century.

This.

You can say that about every major economy--there isn't a single one that doesn't benefit from trade.

The leading capitalist states only exist because of genocides and other crimes which are entirely comparable to those carried out under "communism".

Manifest Destiny and the British Empire - that's the high ground? Really?!

The Ukraine was conquered by force back in 1921 by the Soviets. Pretty much all of Eastern Europe would like a word with you, as they were conquered countries forced to labor for the Warsaw Pact under puppet states put into place through overt invasion. The Soviets were just as responsible for kicking off WWII as the Nazis were, and their deal included German inaction on their attacks on Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and the partition of Poland. China is subjugating overtly Tibet and Hong Kong. The Korean War was the attempted military takeover of the South. The Third Indochina War, the Sino-Vietnamese War, the 18 years of warfare of the Communist Insurgency in Thailand.

Communism has been VERY aggressive at times.

Waaahhhh! Everyone is disagreeing with my incorrect idea of communism!!! Waaaaahhhh!

How long do you think YOURS does?

If it's longer, why is your system propping them up?

Why not just cut them off?

Could it be that actually YOU are more reliant on THEM than you might wish to admit?

Why is that?

Couldn't possibly be access to cheap goods and labour, things CAPITALISM demands, could it?

While true, that doesn't change the fact communism did its fair share of genocides, and killed tens of millions in attempting to enforce their ideology on peasants causing unprecedented famine. Mao alone killed between 35-50 million because of his reorganization of agrarian practices were ill conceived in just five years. That wasn't technology, that was ideology.

Manifest Destiny was only possible due to the rapid decimation of native americans due to disease.

If you want to pin the fact the natives had no inherent resistance to western disease on the European powers it would no doubt be among the largest if not the largest loss of life in world history.

I'm just not sure that's fair, as the overwhelming majority of that was unintentional.

Manifest Destiny simply wouldn't have occurred if there were 100 million natives there to resist it. It's why the Vikings failed in their attempts, or why India is now 1.3 billion strong when it faced colonization in the same manner as the Americas.

I don’t know, a few millennia? Do you know anything about the history of China?

Now for Cuba, I think Biden should consider allowing remittances to flow again. It was a horrible move by Trump, but it didn’t harm him because he knew that South Florida Cubans would still vote for him because of the “socialist” dog whistle.

India was fucked up for decades and India/Pakistan relations are STILL fucked up because of the British Empire. I wouldn't use them as an example of successful resistance so much as survivorship. If the Nazis hadn't broken our military might, the UK would likely still be fucking India up the arse today.

I wasn't giving kudos to the UK over how it handled decolonization, I was pointing out that they did successfully emerge as a prominent nation state even after a century of colonization because the civilization didn't falter due to a dozen pandemics hitting it in the space of 30 years.

Yes, but you said "Manifest Destiny wouldn't have worked if there were 100 million natives to resist it". The UK fucked India up despite that. Ghandhi was a mover and a shaker, yes, but the post-war situation was far different. We'd essentially absorbed a lot of India into British culture (unlike the US, where we and other Europeans exported it). If WW2 hadn't occurred, I think India might have waited another 50 years for total self-rule.

You're the one holding up the existence of protests in Cuba as evidence of the impending failure of communism, while recognizing that protests in other countries (your own included) didn't necessarily mean the government is about to fall or deserves to fall.

Just seeing the word "communism" short circuits what little common sense you seem to have. You can't even recognize that Cuba abandoned the pursuit of pure communism a while ago.

Nowhere did I assert that India wasn't conquered. Manifest Destiny wasn't just expansion, it was replacement.

What I am saying is that if the native people in the Americas weren't stricken down by the worst series of pandemics in world history, they too would have a large population and no doubt their own nation states.

As to India 'being fucked', they aren't even a fraction as fucked as the native americans. And that should be readily obvious to anyone with a passing familiarity with their respective situations.

But that wasn't an overt attempt to kill all the natives, it happened independently. The settlers took full advantage though, to be sure.

India had one quarter of global GDP before the British took over. That was down to 4% when they left. The interim period is one of (entirely preventable) famine, massacre and theft. India is not a good counterexample here.

As for disease killing the natives in North America, that is not the full story, nor was it any kind of historical accident. Outbreaks were in some cases deliberately caused and in others made much worse because of attendant slavery, famine and other disasters also caused by European invaders.

And these things are only the tip of the iceberg.

Of a different character than commie crimes? Certainly, in many respects. But similar in magnitude.

The point being that all of this is extremely myopic and opportunistic. Cuba is the subject of this kind of focus because and only because they defy US hegemony. Concern for human rights is a sham.

Yup.

For the fourth time, I'm not saying India is a counterexample, I'm saying that it's a different issue, and that what happened to the native americans was much worse, BECAUSE of the multiple pandemics. And no, that wasn't intentional, as Europe hadn't discovered the germ theory of disease at the time. The native american tribes were almost entirely wiped out - and almost all of that happened centuries prior to the policy of manifest destiny. European diseases had been ravaging native populations for 350 years prior to any US political philosopher talking about the US right to expand from coast to coast.

I'm sure you can then cite specific examples of where European settlers intentionally killed natives with disease then. They aren't as prevalent as you think, and several have been debunked.

The current thinking is that the trade network drove the disease beyond areas the Europeans had visited, and when they came decades later they found evidence of villages, but very, very few people.

The 'Great Dying' as it has been dubbed wiped out nearly 90% of the native population by 1600. Wave after wave of smallpox, typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever and pertussi devastated community after community. And it's believed that the village population center was the perfect victim - just enough people to ensure a few got away to spread the disease, but not nearly enough to ever recover.

Manifest Destiny, that was the example given? Absolutely not. First contact with the Spanish Empire? Yes.

The fact you keep conflating this, and IIRC this is the third time I've explained it to you, goes to your ideological bias.

The US has quite a mixed record when it comes to human rights, to be sure, and is subject to justified criticism on that score.

But there's 2 million Cuban Americans in this country that would disagree with you vehemently that human rights isn't an issue in Cuba, or that their backing of US policy is about US hegemony.

Do you really want to offset that against the number of invasions launched by capitalist nations in the same period?

Worse, post WW2?

Can't you see how muddy that gets?

I don't know for sure but I'd posit that post WW2 the US alone has invaded more nations than the entire communist bloc combined.

Also I can't help but note you talk here about poorly implemented strategies and their unintended outcomes, but then go on to question @RickDeckard referring to Manifest Destiny due to the accidental deaths caused by disease.

Consistency.

How many have died as a consequence of the unintended consequences of poorly planned or considered commercial enterprise? How many millions died across the Afican sub continent due to the social and environmental impact of imperial colonisation?

India?

You're committing the same error that @Obiwan-Can-Blow-Me did from the OP onwards in tending to weight your selection in terms of a perception which makes the goose's regrettable mistakes the ganders genocide.

Just to be clear, yes I'm invoking cultural bias.

Not at all what I said. Human rights very much are an issue in Cuba - and in many other places which recieve no such attention.

Interesting how people underestimate the scale of damage done by the empire in India.

Also interesting how the drift of this debate is overlooking that both examples actually serve as instances of Western calitalist policy making causing deaths in the millions.

I’m totally fine with cutting ties with China, the Saudis and any other hostile countries that either want to steal IP or you know, send terrorists over here to kill 3,000 people in NYC.

No I didn’t, I asked a question, it didn’t say it was inevitable.

America's killed a fuckload of innocent people abroad as well, because their government did something they didn't like.

Regardless, the US government doesn't seem to share your willingness to cut ties with China, whether it's Dem or GOP in the White House. Trump railed against them, sure, but he was begging for Jinping's taint on his searching tongue.

Yes I do, I know about the Mandate of Heaven. I was talking about the current government, not China as a whole. I know that China is the oldest, unbroken country, but the Mandate of Heaven granted to the communists will eventually fall.

As will the US Constitution.