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On the contrary, it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is. Of course it might be wise to try to analyze what genetic/family/social/economic/political

by erokar 10y ago

On the contrary, it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is. Of course it might be wise to try to analyze what genetic/family/social/economic/political factors shape people like Castro, Gaddafi, Franco etc. — but if you think you're dealing with people like you and me you fail to grasp the phenomenon. Dictators that prosecute and murder their opponents, like Castro did, share a very predictable set of psychopathic/narcissistic/paranoid personality characteristics. They are, by definition, not normal.

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bnegreve 10y ago
> Dictators that prosecute and murder their opponents, Sorry, this is not a discriminative feature of dictators, non-dictators also prosecute and murder their opponents. (e.g. see any government involved in a war) The difference is that you feel like they are right to do it.
- berntb 10y ago
  You seriously argue that there is no difference between a democracy and a dictatorship. A trivial counter example -- if you causally dismissed your government as a Cuban in Cuba online, what happens? (Since Cuba has a really, really strict control of the Internet last I looked, it is of course a bit of an academic question...) Edit: This comment is really jumping up and down in votes... :-)
  - Daishiman 10y ago
    Well, ask people in Honduras or Nicaragua, which are "free" countries, effectively how much better they have it than Cubans. Hint: they don't, because their countries are "democratic" in theory yet they're overrun by gang violence, misery to a level that makes the worst of Cuba a paradise, and have state actors that claim democracy in theory yet will do what they need to keep their power. If anything, the history of Cuba's attempted overruns by the US only serve to justify the regime's paranoia.
    - berntb 10y ago
      Strange, all the loops which left wing people jump through, to support murdering dictators... :-( So, why didn't you compare with working democracies there.. instead of with cleptocracies that had coups and civil wars? What is the real problem with doing as normal people and condemn all dictators? Castro had options, he could have gone to Western Europe and asked for help in e.g. the 70s, as part of a democratization program. (And when Cuba didn't have free money by being a client state, they even had problems feeding the population.)
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rukuu001 10y ago
It's important to call out evil acts, but 'evil' is also a label that categorizes people. Labels and categories can be a deterrent to critical thinking. This is dangerous when genuinely evil people apply the label 'evil' to people they wish to persecute.
- edblarney 10y ago
  Ok, ok. Especially for locking his people in a prison island - an act which can't remotely be defended as 'in the interest of the people or socialism' or any progressive cause ... Fidel - borderline evil. Somewhat nuanced. Definitely bad. Not as bad a Hitler. There you go.
  - zazen 10y ago
    >Fidel - borderline evil The point isn't to quibble about the label. It's to refrain from leaping straight to applying labels. The pleas you're seeing for a calmer and broader conversation are not attempts to exculpate Castro.
    - fspear 10y ago
      >The pleas you're seeing for a calmer and broader conversation are not attempts to exculpate Castro. Those of us who have been directly affected by Castro's actions feel that justice was never made, his legacy is not something we want celebrated or glorified. Yes, it was not all black but the black/white ratio of Castros's regime is more 80/20 than 50/50.
      - narrowrail 10y ago
        >us who have been directly affected by Castro's actions Do you believe this puts you into a position of objective analysis?
        fspear 10y ago
        No. And I'm not against objective analysis, however by humanizing such individuals in the name of "objectiveness" you are disregarding the suffering of a lot of people.
k-mcgrady 10y ago
>> "On the contrary, it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is." Judging on the comments on this thread most people (I'm not specifically referring to you) are making statements based on what they've heard, not by what they've personally researched, and unfortunately a lot of that information is biased or propaganda. I'm not coming down one way or the other but something I found very interesting was comparing the comments in this thread to those of world leaders. The vast majority of world leaders, including those in modern, developer, western states, are praising Castro for helping bring down apartheid, providing good health care and education to his citizens etc. My point really is that on this issue as persons views are clearly shaped by the propaganda they are exposed to and their personal political opinions (e.g. socialism is evil, socialism is fair and good). Like most people Castro did good and bad. Some of the things he did may be construed as evil but he also did quite a lot of good things so brandishing the person as evil rather than considering all of the factors is foolish.
- kristianc 10y ago
  > Judging on the comments on this thread most people (I'm not specifically referring to you) are making statements based on what they've heard, not by what they've personally researched, and unfortunately a lot of that information is biased or propaganda. By any objective measure - and according to experts on human rights and liberty - Cuba is one of the most repressive countries on earth. https://freedomhouse.org/country/cuba https://freedomhouse.org/country/cuba https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2016/cuba https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2016/cuba Edit: Additional reports from Ammesty International, Human Rights Watch and RSF below also.
  - narrowrail 10y ago
    Well, Freedom House, according to wikipedia: "U.S. Government funded non-governmental organisation (NGO) that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom, and human rights Representatives of Cuba said that the organization is a U.S. foreign policy instrument linked to the CIA and "submitted proof of the politically motivated, interventionist activities the NGO (Freedom House) carried out against their Government". They also claimed a lack of criticism of U.S. human rights violations in the annual reports. Cuba also stated that these violations are well documented by other reports, such as those of Human Rights Watch. The Russian representative inquired "why this organization, an NGO which defended human rights, was against the creation of the International Criminal Court." There is so much propaganda regarding this little Caribbean island, that it is wise to carefully consider one's sources.
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lossolo 10y ago
You see world in black and white only. There is no black and white, there are only shades of gray. You think that those people were psychopaths from the beginning? Then you are wrong. A lot of dictators were idealists, they would do everything for their country, sometimes too much. They were loving fathers and sons. Some of them truly believed in equality for all and wanted to make their country better, life of their citizens better. I assure you, people can change a lot in their life, who knows what would you do or anyone else if you would live those people life. Sure you can deny that you would never kill anyone or hurt anyone in your life, but it's very naive. You say they are not normal, what about all those who killed people in terrorist attacks, a lot of them were by your definition "normal" before they did that, they never ever thought they would be capable to hurt any other human. They did it because environment variables changed, they have changed. You think you know what you would do in every situation in life but the truth is that no one knows until certain situations happen. Of course their actions should be condemned but what you wrote is just wrong, a lot of them were like us until they stopped.. Most murderers do not born as murderers, they are made murderers.
- berntb 10y ago
  People are "programmed" by culture. It wasn't so many generations ago when people with similar genes as me (a Scandinavian) did organized clan warfare with slavery, murder, plunder and everything else we see as bad in today's Western world. But the people then were "loving fathers and sons" too, of course. Attitudes to things you/we deplore are trivially cultural. Your argument as a whole was a bit funny... You use personal arguments about someone else as thinking in black and white -- then define people with different backgrounds as good or bad, according to our local cultural definitions.
  - umanwizard 10y ago
    Your argument doesn't prove violence is cultural. Maybe Scandinavia is peaceful now because most of the people with violent genes left. You're descended from the guys who stayed, not from the ones who left to colonize Iceland, Greenland, Britain, Normandy, etc.
finid 10y ago
Dictators that prosecute and murder their opponents, like Castro did,... The US govt has done that too, so US presidents are no different from people like Castro, Franco, etc. We have just been brainwashed that our leaders are the good guys and the other guys are the bad guys.
- 67726e 10y ago
  Do tell, when is the last time a sitting US president has murdered his political opponents?
  - agottem 10y ago
    2011, Osama bin Laden was murdered. Hell, the US has setup a prison where we send people we don't like to be indefinitely detained and tortured without trial. Make no mistake, Obama would love to get his hands on Assange or Snowden and imprison them for life as well.
  - dannypgh 10y ago
    Fred Hampton is the most recent in my mind that isn't (in my view) ambiguous. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
    - 67726e 10y ago
      Given the numerous trials and inquests, include one which made sure to include members of the community, it certainly seems ambiguous. I'll ignore the fact that I mentioned head of state for the purposes of discussion, but what in your mind makes the situation unambiguous? I've only know heard of Fred Hampton, outside of a Rage Against the Machine mention so I'm certainly not well informed on the matter.
      - dannypgh 10y ago
        The FBI reports to the head of state. Are you somehow arguing that it's /better/ if the politician relies on others to do their violence for them? (As if Castro himself was the sole person to arrest or execute his enemies...) Suggested reading as to why it's not ambiguous: http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4375527 http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4375527 The history of how the FBI suppressed Black, Native, Latino, and New Leftist organizations more generally is a bloody one. Cuba has never had a monopoly on authoritarian behavior in the Western Hemisphere.
Chathamization 10y ago
There doesn't seem to be much consistency with what gets called evil, however. You tend to find many more people who call Castro evil than call Xi Jinping evil. I remember a time when the newspapers would almost always talk about human rights when they wrote about Cuba, but never mentioned it when they talked about UAE (and talking about Dubai as if it was a wonderful resort).
samirillian 10y ago
'it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is' Really have to question this reification of "evil" per se. Evil is most immediately a religious construct. Or, in the words of Hannah Arendt, it is "banal." When did calling people evil ever lead to more justice in the world? As if George W Bush having the courage to call Iran and Iraq and Libya the "Axis of Evil" led to the US promoting peace in those countries? No, there's been a proportional increase in US-led suffering (death toll in Iraq post-invasion around .5 million). I don't honestly know too much about Fidel Castro, but take a minute to look at the US-installed Batista, who was overthrown. And, gawd, what about JFK? What about Kissinger These leaders had all the advantages of starting out in a relatively functional industrially-developed democracy, and they managed to do all kinds of evil, mainly to countries like Cuba. Tangentially, IMHO, I don't believe Castro was nearly as "pathological" a human being as a number of US presidents.
- bad_user 10y ago
  > Evil is most immediately a religious construct. No dude, "evil" is a social and cultural construct. We are doing this as a species, as in relying on taboos and moral rules, in order to survive. It's why we don't fuck our relatives, kill our children or eat our dead. This inherited culture is how 7 billion of us live on this earth without killing each other. And we need it because frankly many of us are too stupid to be rational all the time. As for calling "evil" when seeing it, this is basically about communicating to other human beings a danger sign that can be universally understood. Which is in itself an act that can be used for evil, like the US propaganda for entering Irak, but then again we are flawed creatures trying to live our lives. What I'm trying to say here is that this isn't an argument that you can win. And I'm not even sure that being more rational would be good for us. Because IMO even perfectly rational people can be easily fooled into believing flawed statistics and logical fallacies and I don't even care what Fidel's dream was for Cuba because the end never justifies the means IMO.
  - samirillian 10y ago
    I'm not saying that the term "evil" should have no currency at all (I used it later in the comment). I'm questioning the usefulness/honesty of the metaphor for describing political actors. If we call Fidel Castro evil, it is either for essentially propagandistic purposes or, if used in earnest, it leads to a slippery slope. Heads of state always wield the power of life and death over some group of people--since, in the words of Weber, to be a state is to have a monopoly on violence. How many people have to unjustly die or be imprisoned as a result of a leader's choices for that leader to be evil? If we try to avoid this sorites' paradox (how many grains of sand make a pile) by psychoanalyzing the leader, then we must talk of pathology rather than morality. But psychoanalyzing a head of state leads to wild speculation/sneaking the assumptions back into the question (well, he must be a megalomaniac because he killed x people). So, we discover that neither morality nor psychology are particularly useful conceptual tools when addressing essentially political/structural actors (as Gramsci observed). In practice, calling people that the USA doesn't like evil is just lazy, and usually justification for making the population of said state even more miserable than already were under their "evil" leader.
urda 10y ago
I'm actually a little terrified that this is not the first comment I have seen on HN today that is praising Castro. This is NOT ok, and I'm shocked that it's even a thought to entertain here on HN.
- dang 10y ago
  HN is a large forum. There's no reason to expect it not to reflect the divisions of the society at large—or rather societies, since users here post from many places.
krmboya 10y ago
This makes me wonder of what one would say of the faceless individuals that worked behind certain governments to indirectly cause death and suffering of millions of people, say in a place like Africa. Like the well-known western government(s) that deliberately destabilized The Congo early in its independence and installed a dictator, because they did not like the ideological leanings of whoever was in power then? A conflict that still continues 56 years later? But then it becomes hard to pick out a specific person and say how evil they are, and how they're different from me and you.
anigbrowl 10y ago
The pathology you describe is nothing more than 'leadership' - a personality type that is commonly glorified - taken to an extreme degree. People are, to a large extent, reflections of each other.* Castro was in many respects the focused reflection of how the United States has historically behaved towards smaller weaker countries within its orbit. * A tendency which is underappreciated in politics. Consider for example, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as an instantiation of George W. Bush for the Iranian political market.
andrepd 10y ago
>Dictators that prosecute and murder their opponents, like Castro did, share a very predictable set of psychopathic/narcissistic/paranoid personality characteristics. Do they? What facts have you go to support your thesis?
abandonliberty 10y ago
Is is dangerous to not call out evil for what it is; unfortunately, you're looking at a symptom rather than the cause. Effort wasted hating Castro, Hillary, Trump, climate change policies, or GB surveillance laws is lost from actually fixing our world. It is easier to hate people than to accept that their behavior is emergent and afflicts us as well. The most intelligent, benevolent AI or angel will fail in our complex systems/organizations. This is an incredibly desperate understanding, particularly when you realize that those in power are disincentivized from making improvements. Organizations DEMAND 'evil' behavior. It is not User Error. CGP Grey has a great video that can help open your mind, if you are willing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
ianamartin 10y ago
Good and Evil are great examples of abstractions gone wrong. They are too high level to mean anything now. They've become a psychological comforting mechanism where we apply "good" to things we like or want to like and "evil" to things that we don't. But the words themselves connote something deeper than that--something foundational about morality. It's convenient. Tidy. We all want to think of ourselves as "good." We don't want to think that we, individually or as a nation or whatever group identity we cling to, is capable of being "evil." Calling something evil is a way of creating cognitive distance between ourselves and what we don't like. I think it's dangerous. Literally dangerous to engage in the world this way. The real fact of the matter is that perfectly normal, sane, rational, "good" people are capable of doing atrocious things. Even you. Even me. Hitler wasn't fundamentally different from any of us. Any one of us could become just as bad under the right (wrong?) circumstances. Pretending that we are different in some basic way paves the path for us to become "evil." It allows us to believe that we are immune to certain types of bad actions. But we aren't. Any single individual among us has the capacity to do awful things. Some people were simply able to scale awfulness effectively. That doesn't make them fundamentally different from us. Calling some individual "evil" isn't semantically different from applying the "good" label to yourself. And when you believe that you are good, it's a lot easier to bend the rules. There's a specific and frightening chain of logic that goes like this: I'm good. Good people don't do evil things. So this [insert bad behavior here] is good. Because I'm good. But the good/evil lens of the world has another drawback. It removes accountability and consequence. If I believe that I'm "good", there's no credit to be given when I choose not to do "evil" deeds. Of course I wouldn't do that. I'm not "evil". When you apply a label like "evil" to a person, what else could you expect? Of course that person is going to do horrible things. That person is "evil." The Good/Evil abstraction is pernicious, self-fulfilling, and circular. We need to be better than that. We need to own up to the full spectrum of our nature and accept it so that we can guard against the worst parts of it. Pretending that we are not capable of being "evil" is pretty much the foundational mechanism that allows truly terrible things to happen.
pvaldes 10y ago
Both parts were evil. I don't justify what he did, but we should not forget that they tried to kill him on more than 600 occasions. To plot to assassinate a person in other country just because this seems convenient for your interests is, in its own nature, 100% evil. Trials were created for some reason. I bet that even the more equilibrated mind would become extremely paranoid and ruthless in that scenery.
phs318u 10y ago
It seems to me that Americans have a huge blind spot that lets them focus on Fidel Castro, without reference to the many dictators that the US government installed or supported (Noriega, Pinochet, Karimov, Sadam, Shah of Iran,...) often by helping to overthrow democratically elected governments. Seriously, are you guys not aware at just how hypocritical this appears? Bottom line, as has been posted already, and much to the chagrin of demagogues and their supporters, the world is not comprised solely of "goodies" and "baddies". Realpolitik is shades of grey. It's possible for leaders, governments, regimes, parties, to have done both good and bad things. This applies as much to "us" as "them". Sorry to rain on your[1] patriotism parade. [1] 'you' collectively. Not erokar individually.

by erokar 10y ago

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bnegreve 10y ago

> Dictators that prosecute and murder their opponents, Sorry, this is not a discriminative feature of dictators, non-dictators also prosecute and murder their opponents. (e.g. see any government involved in a war) The difference is that you feel like they are right to do it.

berntb 10y ago
You seriously argue that there is no difference between a democracy and a dictatorship. A trivial counter example -- if you causally dismissed your government as a Cuban in Cuba online, what happens? (Since Cuba has a really, really strict control of the Internet last I looked, it is of course a bit of an academic question...) Edit: This comment is really jumping up and down in votes... :-)
- Daishiman 10y ago
  Well, ask people in Honduras or Nicaragua, which are "free" countries, effectively how much better they have it than Cubans. Hint: they don't, because their countries are "democratic" in theory yet they're overrun by gang violence, misery to a level that makes the worst of Cuba a paradise, and have state actors that claim democracy in theory yet will do what they need to keep their power. If anything, the history of Cuba's attempted overruns by the US only serve to justify the regime's paranoia.
  - berntb 10y ago
    Strange, all the loops which left wing people jump through, to support murdering dictators... :-( So, why didn't you compare with working democracies there.. instead of with cleptocracies that had coups and civil wars? What is the real problem with doing as normal people and condemn all dictators? Castro had options, he could have gone to Western Europe and asked for help in e.g. the 70s, as part of a democratization program. (And when Cuba didn't have free money by being a client state, they even had problems feeding the population.)
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rukuu001 10y ago

It's important to call out evil acts, but 'evil' is also a label that categorizes people. Labels and categories can be a deterrent to critical thinking. This is dangerous when genuinely evil people apply the label 'evil' to people they wish to persecute.

edblarney 10y ago
Ok, ok. Especially for locking his people in a prison island - an act which can't remotely be defended as 'in the interest of the people or socialism' or any progressive cause ... Fidel - borderline evil. Somewhat nuanced. Definitely bad. Not as bad a Hitler. There you go.
- zazen 10y ago
  >Fidel - borderline evil The point isn't to quibble about the label. It's to refrain from leaping straight to applying labels. The pleas you're seeing for a calmer and broader conversation are not attempts to exculpate Castro.
  - fspear 10y ago
    >The pleas you're seeing for a calmer and broader conversation are not attempts to exculpate Castro. Those of us who have been directly affected by Castro's actions feel that justice was never made, his legacy is not something we want celebrated or glorified. Yes, it was not all black but the black/white ratio of Castros's regime is more 80/20 than 50/50.
    - narrowrail 10y ago
      >us who have been directly affected by Castro's actions Do you believe this puts you into a position of objective analysis?
      - fspear 10y ago
        No. And I'm not against objective analysis, however by humanizing such individuals in the name of "objectiveness" you are disregarding the suffering of a lot of people.

k-mcgrady 10y ago

>> "On the contrary, it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is." Judging on the comments on this thread most people (I'm not specifically referring to you) are making statements based on what they've heard, not by what they've personally researched, and unfortunately a lot of that information is biased or propaganda. I'm not coming down one way or the other but something I found very interesting was comparing the comments in this thread to those of world leaders. The vast majority of world leaders, including those in modern, developer, western states, are praising Castro for helping bring down apartheid, providing good health care and education to his citizens etc. My point really is that on this issue as persons views are clearly shaped by the propaganda they are exposed to and their personal political opinions (e.g. socialism is evil, socialism is fair and good). Like most people Castro did good and bad. Some of the things he did may be construed as evil but he also did quite a lot of good things so brandishing the person as evil rather than considering all of the factors is foolish.

kristianc 10y ago
> Judging on the comments on this thread most people (I'm not specifically referring to you) are making statements based on what they've heard, not by what they've personally researched, and unfortunately a lot of that information is biased or propaganda. By any objective measure - and according to experts on human rights and liberty - Cuba is one of the most repressive countries on earth. https://freedomhouse.org/country/cuba https://freedomhouse.org/country/cuba https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2016/cuba https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2016/cuba Edit: Additional reports from Ammesty International, Human Rights Watch and RSF below also.
- narrowrail 10y ago
  Well, Freedom House, according to wikipedia: "U.S. Government funded non-governmental organisation (NGO) that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom, and human rights Representatives of Cuba said that the organization is a U.S. foreign policy instrument linked to the CIA and "submitted proof of the politically motivated, interventionist activities the NGO (Freedom House) carried out against their Government". They also claimed a lack of criticism of U.S. human rights violations in the annual reports. Cuba also stated that these violations are well documented by other reports, such as those of Human Rights Watch. The Russian representative inquired "why this organization, an NGO which defended human rights, was against the creation of the International Criminal Court." There is so much propaganda regarding this little Caribbean island, that it is wise to carefully consider one's sources.

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lossolo 10y ago

You see world in black and white only. There is no black and white, there are only shades of gray. You think that those people were psychopaths from the beginning? Then you are wrong. A lot of dictators were idealists, they would do everything for their country, sometimes too much. They were loving fathers and sons. Some of them truly believed in equality for all and wanted to make their country better, life of their citizens better. I assure you, people can change a lot in their life, who knows what would you do or anyone else if you would live those people life. Sure you can deny that you would never kill anyone or hurt anyone in your life, but it's very naive. You say they are not normal, what about all those who killed people in terrorist attacks, a lot of them were by your definition "normal" before they did that, they never ever thought they would be capable to hurt any other human. They did it because environment variables changed, they have changed. You think you know what you would do in every situation in life but the truth is that no one knows until certain situations happen. Of course their actions should be condemned but what you wrote is just wrong, a lot of them were like us until they stopped.. Most murderers do not born as murderers, they are made murderers.

berntb 10y ago
People are "programmed" by culture. It wasn't so many generations ago when people with similar genes as me (a Scandinavian) did organized clan warfare with slavery, murder, plunder and everything else we see as bad in today's Western world. But the people then were "loving fathers and sons" too, of course. Attitudes to things you/we deplore are trivially cultural. Your argument as a whole was a bit funny... You use personal arguments about someone else as thinking in black and white -- then define people with different backgrounds as good or bad, according to our local cultural definitions.
- umanwizard 10y ago
  Your argument doesn't prove violence is cultural. Maybe Scandinavia is peaceful now because most of the people with violent genes left. You're descended from the guys who stayed, not from the ones who left to colonize Iceland, Greenland, Britain, Normandy, etc.

finid 10y ago

Dictators that prosecute and murder their opponents, like Castro did,... The US govt has done that too, so US presidents are no different from people like Castro, Franco, etc. We have just been brainwashed that our leaders are the good guys and the other guys are the bad guys.

67726e 10y ago
Do tell, when is the last time a sitting US president has murdered his political opponents?
- agottem 10y ago
  2011, Osama bin Laden was murdered. Hell, the US has setup a prison where we send people we don't like to be indefinitely detained and tortured without trial. Make no mistake, Obama would love to get his hands on Assange or Snowden and imprison them for life as well.
- dannypgh 10y ago
  Fred Hampton is the most recent in my mind that isn't (in my view) ambiguous. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
  - 67726e 10y ago
    Given the numerous trials and inquests, include one which made sure to include members of the community, it certainly seems ambiguous. I'll ignore the fact that I mentioned head of state for the purposes of discussion, but what in your mind makes the situation unambiguous? I've only know heard of Fred Hampton, outside of a Rage Against the Machine mention so I'm certainly not well informed on the matter.
    - dannypgh 10y ago
      The FBI reports to the head of state. Are you somehow arguing that it's /better/ if the politician relies on others to do their violence for them? (As if Castro himself was the sole person to arrest or execute his enemies...) Suggested reading as to why it's not ambiguous: http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4375527 http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4375527 The history of how the FBI suppressed Black, Native, Latino, and New Leftist organizations more generally is a bloody one. Cuba has never had a monopoly on authoritarian behavior in the Western Hemisphere.

Chathamization 10y ago

There doesn't seem to be much consistency with what gets called evil, however. You tend to find many more people who call Castro evil than call Xi Jinping evil. I remember a time when the newspapers would almost always talk about human rights when they wrote about Cuba, but never mentioned it when they talked about UAE (and talking about Dubai as if it was a wonderful resort).

samirillian 10y ago

'it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is' Really have to question this reification of "evil" per se. Evil is most immediately a religious construct. Or, in the words of Hannah Arendt, it is "banal." When did calling people evil ever lead to more justice in the world? As if George W Bush having the courage to call Iran and Iraq and Libya the "Axis of Evil" led to the US promoting peace in those countries? No, there's been a proportional increase in US-led suffering (death toll in Iraq post-invasion around .5 million). I don't honestly know too much about Fidel Castro, but take a minute to look at the US-installed Batista, who was overthrown. And, gawd, what about JFK? What about Kissinger These leaders had all the advantages of starting out in a relatively functional industrially-developed democracy, and they managed to do all kinds of evil, mainly to countries like Cuba. Tangentially, IMHO, I don't believe Castro was nearly as "pathological" a human being as a number of US presidents.

bad_user 10y ago
> Evil is most immediately a religious construct. No dude, "evil" is a social and cultural construct. We are doing this as a species, as in relying on taboos and moral rules, in order to survive. It's why we don't fuck our relatives, kill our children or eat our dead. This inherited culture is how 7 billion of us live on this earth without killing each other. And we need it because frankly many of us are too stupid to be rational all the time. As for calling "evil" when seeing it, this is basically about communicating to other human beings a danger sign that can be universally understood. Which is in itself an act that can be used for evil, like the US propaganda for entering Irak, but then again we are flawed creatures trying to live our lives. What I'm trying to say here is that this isn't an argument that you can win. And I'm not even sure that being more rational would be good for us. Because IMO even perfectly rational people can be easily fooled into believing flawed statistics and logical fallacies and I don't even care what Fidel's dream was for Cuba because the end never justifies the means IMO.
- samirillian 10y ago
  I'm not saying that the term "evil" should have no currency at all (I used it later in the comment). I'm questioning the usefulness/honesty of the metaphor for describing political actors. If we call Fidel Castro evil, it is either for essentially propagandistic purposes or, if used in earnest, it leads to a slippery slope. Heads of state always wield the power of life and death over some group of people--since, in the words of Weber, to be a state is to have a monopoly on violence. How many people have to unjustly die or be imprisoned as a result of a leader's choices for that leader to be evil? If we try to avoid this sorites' paradox (how many grains of sand make a pile) by psychoanalyzing the leader, then we must talk of pathology rather than morality. But psychoanalyzing a head of state leads to wild speculation/sneaking the assumptions back into the question (well, he must be a megalomaniac because he killed x people). So, we discover that neither morality nor psychology are particularly useful conceptual tools when addressing essentially political/structural actors (as Gramsci observed). In practice, calling people that the USA doesn't like evil is just lazy, and usually justification for making the population of said state even more miserable than already were under their "evil" leader.

urda 10y ago

I'm actually a little terrified that this is not the first comment I have seen on HN today that is praising Castro. This is NOT ok, and I'm shocked that it's even a thought to entertain here on HN.

dang 10y ago
HN is a large forum. There's no reason to expect it not to reflect the divisions of the society at large—or rather societies, since users here post from many places.

krmboya 10y ago

This makes me wonder of what one would say of the faceless individuals that worked behind certain governments to indirectly cause death and suffering of millions of people, say in a place like Africa. Like the well-known western government(s) that deliberately destabilized The Congo early in its independence and installed a dictator, because they did not like the ideological leanings of whoever was in power then? A conflict that still continues 56 years later? But then it becomes hard to pick out a specific person and say how evil they are, and how they're different from me and you.

anigbrowl 10y ago

The pathology you describe is nothing more than 'leadership' - a personality type that is commonly glorified - taken to an extreme degree. People are, to a large extent, reflections of each other.* Castro was in many respects the focused reflection of how the United States has historically behaved towards smaller weaker countries within its orbit. * A tendency which is underappreciated in politics. Consider for example, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as an instantiation of George W. Bush for the Iranian political market.

andrepd 10y ago

>Dictators that prosecute and murder their opponents, like Castro did, share a very predictable set of psychopathic/narcissistic/paranoid personality characteristics. Do they? What facts have you go to support your thesis?

abandonliberty 10y ago

Is is dangerous to not call out evil for what it is; unfortunately, you're looking at a symptom rather than the cause. Effort wasted hating Castro, Hillary, Trump, climate change policies, or GB surveillance laws is lost from actually fixing our world. It is easier to hate people than to accept that their behavior is emergent and afflicts us as well. The most intelligent, benevolent AI or angel will fail in our complex systems/organizations. This is an incredibly desperate understanding, particularly when you realize that those in power are disincentivized from making improvements. Organizations DEMAND 'evil' behavior. It is not User Error. CGP Grey has a great video that can help open your mind, if you are willing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

ianamartin 10y ago

Good and Evil are great examples of abstractions gone wrong. They are too high level to mean anything now. They've become a psychological comforting mechanism where we apply "good" to things we like or want to like and "evil" to things that we don't. But the words themselves connote something deeper than that--something foundational about morality. It's convenient. Tidy. We all want to think of ourselves as "good." We don't want to think that we, individually or as a nation or whatever group identity we cling to, is capable of being "evil." Calling something evil is a way of creating cognitive distance between ourselves and what we don't like. I think it's dangerous. Literally dangerous to engage in the world this way. The real fact of the matter is that perfectly normal, sane, rational, "good" people are capable of doing atrocious things. Even you. Even me. Hitler wasn't fundamentally different from any of us. Any one of us could become just as bad under the right (wrong?) circumstances. Pretending that we are different in some basic way paves the path for us to become "evil." It allows us to believe that we are immune to certain types of bad actions. But we aren't. Any single individual among us has the capacity to do awful things. Some people were simply able to scale awfulness effectively. That doesn't make them fundamentally different from us. Calling some individual "evil" isn't semantically different from applying the "good" label to yourself. And when you believe that you are good, it's a lot easier to bend the rules. There's a specific and frightening chain of logic that goes like this: I'm good. Good people don't do evil things. So this [insert bad behavior here] is good. Because I'm good. But the good/evil lens of the world has another drawback. It removes accountability and consequence. If I believe that I'm "good", there's no credit to be given when I choose not to do "evil" deeds. Of course I wouldn't do that. I'm not "evil". When you apply a label like "evil" to a person, what else could you expect? Of course that person is going to do horrible things. That person is "evil." The Good/Evil abstraction is pernicious, self-fulfilling, and circular. We need to be better than that. We need to own up to the full spectrum of our nature and accept it so that we can guard against the worst parts of it. Pretending that we are not capable of being "evil" is pretty much the foundational mechanism that allows truly terrible things to happen.

pvaldes 10y ago

Both parts were evil. I don't justify what he did, but we should not forget that they tried to kill him on more than 600 occasions. To plot to assassinate a person in other country just because this seems convenient for your interests is, in its own nature, 100% evil. Trials were created for some reason. I bet that even the more equilibrated mind would become extremely paranoid and ruthless in that scenery.

phs318u 10y ago

It seems to me that Americans have a huge blind spot that lets them focus on Fidel Castro, without reference to the many dictators that the US government installed or supported (Noriega, Pinochet, Karimov, Sadam, Shah of Iran,...) often by helping to overthrow democratically elected governments. Seriously, are you guys not aware at just how hypocritical this appears? Bottom line, as has been posted already, and much to the chagrin of demagogues and their supporters, the world is not comprised solely of "goodies" and "baddies". Realpolitik is shades of grey. It's possible for leaders, governments, regimes, parties, to have done both good and bad things. This applies as much to "us" as "them". Sorry to rain on your[1] patriotism parade. [1] 'you' collectively. Not erokar individually.