Showing posts with label Slavery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Slavery. Show all posts

27 November 2016

Fidel está muerto

So there is a reason to cheer, the death of Fidel Castro, should be a cause of celebration and reflection for everyone who believes in individual freedom, world peace, human rights and has both liberal and conservative values.  For the regime he founded continues to be one marked by violence, intimidation, intolerance and denial.

Castro interrogating a farmer as private property rights get abolished

Castro was a thug, a murderer and a warmongerer.  He urged Khrushchev to attack the US with nuclear weapons, which would have triggered World War Three.  

He incarcerated political opponents, labelling anyone who opposed the regime as "mentally ill" so they could be locked up indefinitely for not realising how lucky they are to be under socialism.  

He imprisoned Cubans who had HIV, he ran a prison state that saw Cubans flee at their own risk by boat to the United States.  Americans didn't flee to Cuba to embrace socialism.

Cuba under Castro was propped up by the USSR, in effect, poor Russians helped keep Castro's revolution alive.  A policy that ended with the collapse of the USSR, but from then on Cuba's rhetoric was that it was poor because the US embargo hindered it.  How a socialist state can claim that its prosperity is dependent on trading with a capitalist liberal democracy remains a mystery.

Cuba's joke is the large numbers of vintage American cars roaming the streets, only recently supplemented by Chinese vehicles.  This is seen as quaint, but is reflects poverty. 

One of the great claims about Cuba's "successes" is statistics around education and healthcare, because it claims low levels of child poverty and life expectancy that is high compared to other Latin American countries.  Yet the source of these statistics is entirely the Cuban one-party state, which imprisons its critics, so has to be at least treated with a high degree of scepticism.   Whenever foreigners inspect the Cuban healthcare system, they get to see what the regime wants them to see.   The UN may take the reported statistics from all member states on face value, but that's naive and absurd.  Only once Cuba is free will the veracity of these claims be clear, for now it is at best opaque. 

Of course, the usual suspects have come out singing paeans over Cuba.  Red Ken Livingstone couldn't help himself on BBC Radio 4 today saying that Cuba was "open and relaxed", even though it is a criminal offence for anyone other than the state to publish or broadcast, and when confronted with the regime's intolerance he said that in the UK anyone supporting Hitler was imprisoned. Odious little worm.

Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn said he was a "champion of social justice" and dismissed imprisonment of dissenters and continued authoritarianism as saying "there are problems of excesses by all regimes",  confirming the man is a moral relativistic sympathiser with dictatorship.

Vladimir Putin said he made his country free, well maybe by his standards..

President of the EU, Jean Claude Juncker said Castro was a "hero to many", which indicates the quisling relativist tolerance of a man and an organisation that ought to be celebrating the end of a man, whose regime provided support and succour for brutal regimes that impoverished and denied the human rights of citizens of 12 current EU Member States.  

Canadian Prime Minister, the illiberal Justin Trudeau lionised him as having "deep and lasting affection" for the Cuban people, including those he killed for opposing him.

Sinn Fein, which until recently lionised terrorism as a legitimate technique to change minds and power, is commemorating him as a hero.

The position people take on Castro should be your litmus test for their morality.

Castro used violence against those who opposed him.  He criminalise anyone who published or broadcast any criticism of his regime, so he was intolerant and authoritarian.   Dismissing any politicians whose core strategy is to do violence to his opponents is appeasement of dictatorship, rejection of any liberal values whatsoever, and places his supporters in the same mould as fascist apologists.  

To claim that "well he gave them education and healthcare" justifies a system of terror for anyone criticising the government or any of its policies or any of those with the privileges and trappings of power, is the justification of a fascist.   For "he" gave them nothing.  He ran a prison slave state which forced teachers and doctors to do the bidding of the party, he used his comrades of another slave state - the USSR- to supply the equipment, technology and training - to deliver a system that could have been delivered under liberal democracy.   Indeed, Chile's post-Pinochet success demonstrates that a liberal free-market democratic government can deliver the prosperity, including high standards of education and healthcare, without pointing guns at its citizens for criticising the regime.  

The best that can be said of Castro is he replaced another vile dictatorship - the Batista regime - and that he could have been worse.  However, pardon me if I don't think reaching the abominable barbarities of Kim Il Sung, Enver Hoxha or Nicolae Ceaucescu is an "achievement".

So to hell with Castro.  Some of the people who claimed with Donald Trump being elected, he is the "new Hitler" are mourning the loss of a man who was much closer to Hitler than Trump is ever likely to be.  

If someone is an apologist for Castro, or says he "made mistakes" or " his human rights were dreadful but", then they are excusing the blood spilt, the poverty, the propaganda, the utter denial of human liberty, and the politics of fear, terror and the jackboot, over the politics of debate, diversity and tolerance.

Treat the apologists of Castro accordingly.  The people in Miami celebrating his death lived under him, or have relatives who do.  The people elsewhere mourning are exercising the freedoms that Castro never tolerated and Cuba doesn't tolerate today.

Let's hope Mugabe doesn't see out the year as well.

Let's hope Cubans in the New Year gain the freedom to speak openly and honestly about the past 55 years of their country, even though thousands of so-called "liberals" in the West couldn't really care less.

UPDATE:  In 2008 I wrote the Top Ten Reasons Castro should be hated.

In 2010 I wrote on how the Green Party of NZ appeased the Cuban dictatorship

Read Katherine Hirschfeld's critical review of Cuba's healthcare system, including how much of it is "informal" and how it is illegal to refuse any healthcare including abortions. 

05 September 2013

Gareth Morgan thinks I am ignorant about the DPRK



I'll take him on anyday about Korean history, and as long as he doesn't use the Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang edition of History of Korea, he might have a chance.  However I doubt it.

The man who claims that reporting the facts about the DPRK is a "beat up" and "completely wrong".

The man who says they are "wonderfully engaged, well-dressed, fully employed and well informed".

I doubt he got to meet anyone with English that wasn't pre approved, so he couldn't seriously "engage", and I very much doubt if he was able to freely talk to anyone without others being present.  

Well dressed?  Well he didn't meet this girl, because she is dead, she was "fully employed" hunting rats and looking for grass for survival.

Well informed?  Yes, thinking your founding leader saved the country, that the USA started the Korean War and the country's poor economic performance is due to a blockade, and south Korea is a poverty ridden colony of the USA - really well informed.

It's lack of international money he bemoans, but then borrowing from Western banks and simply defaulting doesn't exactly make for a credit rating worth glancing at.

Then Jo Morgan has been tricked well.  17 minutes of naive observations that the Korean Central News Agency wouldn't be ashamed of using, seemingly interviewed by Nick Tansley - former ZM Wellington clown.  Not a high calibre journalist.

She talks about the wonderful local produce!  The wonderful "muscular" young men, and how south Korean journalists said young men in the south were getting obese.  She seems to bemoan the "Western softness" of Seoul.

She talks about how everyone is expected to do some manual work - fabulous and how fit they are.

She blames the manual labour on "sanctions", swallowing the state propaganda.

She "reckoned" 50-60% have cellphones, but then that was those she saw - the elite.  She dismissed bans on foreigners using cellphones as "just a rule for foreigners", not because it risked live reports of what goes on.

She was gobsmacked - rightly - about the Arirang Mass Games (which are a remarkable spectacle), although again thinking it reported the "history" of the country, rather than it being propaganda and a symbol of how people are only important if they are in a mass collective action.

"You can't tell me these people are miserable" from seeing members of the elite singing and laughing together.  No they aren't Jo.  No.  

"They seem well fed" says the woman who didn't spend time on Google Earth to note the burial mounds for the starving.  

"our escorts were making sure we didn't get lost"  Too funny.  Really.  Seriously, not there to ensure you didn't go explore on unapproved routes?

"The people want their children to be able to ride down into the south, they want reunification" Yes, they do, but the regime doesn't want it, unless it involves it being on their terms - which they know will never happen.

Finally, Gareth thinks division of Korea is due to "great powers".  It was originally, for the USSR installed Kim Il Sung in the north, against the UN mandated declaration of the Republic of Korea as the government of the whole peninsula and resisting the (admittedly very flawed) elections that were meant to be the basis for a new government.  Korea could be reunified tomorrow, except the regime in the north doesn't want to surrender its slave state that sustains a tiny elite, and the south doesn't want to be a slave state.

It's not about foreign powers, unless you believe the withdrawal of US troops (one deterrent to north Korean aggression, which is demonstrable)

NKNews (subscription once you read more than the minimum number of articles) reports on the trip.  

Gareth says "the farms are perfect. They have no pollution”, 

the standard of living was probably like south Korea "20 years ago"... astonishing.  

Think maybe 50 years ago, the last time north Korea and south Korea were roughly equals in per capita income.  North Korea WAS the rich half of Korea, south Korea the poor peasant half... 

Capitalism made south Korea one of the top 20 economies in the world and now up with developed countries.  

Shame Gareth is still admiring the system that has trapped, literally and economically, the people of the north in a 1960s timewarp.

I look forward to him admitting he is wrong, confessing he didn't know as much as he wished, and sorry for saying things complementary about a country that has such a vile government.  I look forward to him noting that much of what he was told in the country was false and they were probably shown only what was permitted, in order to show the country in the best light, and that it sends shivers down their spines to think of children being in gulags today.

Really, I do...

11 August 2009

Bullshit on right and left

Right wing bullshit

Well known is the inane bullshit promoted by some on the conservative right that Barack Obama's birth certificate is fake or not original or something of the like. It is a very sad sign of the Republican Party that too many of its own kind will latch onto this rather than argue the very valid points about Obama's policies. Arguing against his socialised healthcare and his "spend it up large and hope" big government economy boosting policy seems too hard. I am no supporter of Obama, but I am quite convinced that he was born in Hawaii. Those continuing to ride on this bandwagon will look crazier as time goes on, and show how little they truly have in cogent arguments against the man. It is like "we can't say he's no good because he's black, so we'll say he's not American instead". Mindless, conspiratorial rubbish. In fact, it is the sort of thing that should cost the anti-business, pro-big government halfwit, Lou Dobbs, his job at CNN. Dobbs has long campaigned against free trade, foreign investment, globalisation and conspired against China's economic success. I also guess none of these wingnuts wishes the constitution would be different to allow Arnold Schwarzenegger to stand for the Presidency?

Left wing bullshit

On the left is a New Zealand blog that prides itself on being fair, honest and open. No Right Turn is a blog I usually disagree with, but does make some well researched points from time to time. However, to characterise the stupid referendum on smacking (stupid because of the wording) as "New Zealand is voting on whether it should be legal for parents to punch children in the face or hit them in the head with a piece of concrete" is an outright lie.

That was never legal before, and is not legal now, and indeed despite the poorly worded referendum, smacking is NOT punching or hitting the head with concrete. However, it does show how some on the left use language to distort and lie, to get their own way. To demonise their opponents as grossly violent child abusers, rather than average parents who use mild smacking as correction.

Bear in mind I despise smacking, I despise corporal punishment altogether and wish it would never be used - I also despise criminalising those who use it mildly. It is NOT for the state to say that using force against children is wrong. It isn't. It is sometimes in their best interests to protect them (or others) from danger. Which is why I don't have a strong view on how to vote in that referendum. I don't believe smacking is "good parental correction", but I also don't believe it should be a criminal offence, unless it is repeated and physically damaging. I do not endorse the current law, but I equally do not endorse the view by many that smacking is a "good" thing.

So do I vote to endorse smacking, or do I vote to endorse an interfering state criminalising behaviour I don't think should be criminalised? Or do I abstain?

In that same article he cites a New York Times article that is quite disconcerting, about how some disabled children have been physically punished. That indeed is disturbing, but then to say "Just another example of what a cruel and barbaric place the US is". Of course, it really is, a barbaric place that millions try to flee, so much crueler than New Zealand, where all children are raised by loving parents who would never abuse their kids.

Funny how he has never ever blogged about the gulags that keep children as slave labourers in North Korea. He wouldn't, of course, endorse that at all, but why do these Nazi style concentration camps, with summary executions, rampant torture, incarcerating entire families from elderly to babies as political prisoners, NOT get the same passionate attention as does the torture of Islamists in Guantanamo Bay?

Imagine if the political left actually starting protesting on a grand scale about this atrocity. Oh what government does the North Korean regime condemn the most? The USA - guess they are not all that bad then, right?


17 July 2007

Greens continue to ignore Camp 22

So the Greens had a "day of action against genocide" on Bastille Day.
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How absolutely disgusting.
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How dare Metiria Turei claim that current policy on aborigines is akin to the Holocaust, akin to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians, akin to the Hutu genocide against the Tutsi, akin to Saddam's slaughter of Kurds, akin to Year Zero in Cambodia (not strictly genocide, but was mass murder of people according to a stereotypical group), or even akin to policies towards Aborigines in the 19th century? She diminishes what the word "genocide" means - the deliberate or reckless killing of a large number of people of a particular ethnic group.
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and how can she remain ignorant of Camp 22, No. 14 Gaechun camp, No. 18 Bukchang camp, No. 15 Yoduk camp, No. 16 Hwasong camp and No. 25 Chongjin camp - all slave labour camps, enslaving children as political prisoners? The silence from the Greens is deafening.
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While you're at it, get Rodney Hide and Heather Roy to support this too, they have every reason to do so. The North Korean gulags are an atrocity that should not be tolerated in the 21st century, and we should not let concern over its nuclear weapons arsenal blind us to this. I don't expect Winston Peters to give a damn as foreign Minister, I mean honestly, you really think MFAT would dare ruffle feathers by allowing him to send a formal protest to Pyongyang about it?
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More importantly, would those who proclaim NZ's "independent foreign policy" on something as virtually meaningless in real terms as nuclear armed ship visits, want to stick their neck out and have New Zealand demand the closure of North Korea's gulag? If not, why not?