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It's not US foreign policy alone that creates anti-American terrorists. You don't see Cubans burning US flags or chanting N things against the US despite >50 ye

by dgut 8y ago

It's not US foreign policy alone that creates anti-American terrorists. You don't see Cubans burning US flags or chanting N things against the US despite >50 years of embargo and what not. You don't see the Vietnamese doing that either. There is another element to it. As a Cuban, I wish the US had intervened in Cuba when it had the opportunity, back in 1959.

gammateam 8y ago
Yeah the other element is the definition of Jihad It is a requirement to excise foreign invaders from Islamic lands and this is totally incompatible with the Western mentality and propaganda of "lets punish them in retaliation for that" The US masquerades 9/11 as the start of this, more accurately that its rouge asset attacking us was the start of this. Decades of meddling in the middle east stirred a hive, and the rouge asset intentionally created a decentralized adhoc army (Al Queda) that exploits the definition of Jihad for the SOLE REASON of entrapping a large scale army in a war of attrition until its budgetary constraints tears that country apart from the inside. THATS THE LITERALLY THE POINT AND WHAT HAS HAPPENED, Bin Laden says it in his cave livestreams, watch them again because they probably never played them verbatim on your local news channel back in the early 2000s except to guess whether he was still alive or pre-recorded it. But they were relevant messages, and he played everyone like a fiddle: Corporations, nation states, and the American condition which they would both predictably exploit for support to walk right into his construct. The US - and more specifically Europe which is now forcefully conscripted in NATO and is more easily accessible and attacked - would be safer by leaving the Middle East to regional powers. Yes, the regional powers that maintain order in a way that we disagree with.
dsr_ 8y ago
If the US foreign policy apparatus hadn't had its head jammed quite so firmly up its ass, they would have accepted the overtures of friendship from both Castro and Ho instead of scorning them. Imagine Vietnam coming out of their war for independence from France with a democratically elected government starting in 1954. Imagine Cuba being the major US ally in the Caribbean and primary vacation destination, with Fidel Castro serving as President from 1960 through 1970 in a constitutional republic. Both of those scenarios were within the realm of possibility -- but not with the Yale and Harvard asshats ruling the State Department.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Imagine Cuba not being overtaken by armed rebels, and then keeping it living in the 1950s for the next 70 years.
  - Synaesthesia 8y ago
    Is the US who kept it in the 50’s. It wasn’t even a socialist revolution. But you must understand, they confiscated US property. That’s the crime they committed.
    - darawk 8y ago
      > It wasn’t even a socialist revolution. Was it not?
      - vidarh 8y ago
        It's "complicated". Castro's "26th of July Movement" (M-26-7) originally had very limited political goals. Beyond overthrowing Batista, they included some redistribution of land and some degree of nationalisation of public services, and confiscation of a lot of companies and property they considered basically fruits of Batista's corruption, but beyond that there were wide disagreements, and there certainly was not a clear agreed goal of introducing socialism at the outset. Castro had been on friendly terms with Batista for years before. Batista gave him money for his honeymoon, and even considered him for government. Some saw him as radical, but Batista at least considered him as a potentially viable cabinet minister, despite himself being very much explicitly anti-socialist, though of course it's possible Batista saw it as a way of pacifying him. Castro may well have had exposure to socialist ideas before then, but at the outset he was basically a nationalist with anti-imperialist views. It was first after Batista's coup and crackdown on dissidents, that Castro seriously started pushing a more radical agenda publicly. Even them, after overthrowing Batista, Castro looked to the US as a potential ally. But when exactly Castro started supporting Marxist-Leninism is open for debate. Castro denied it into '60 at least. Late in '61 he then claimed to have been a Marxist-Leninist secretly for some years, but he clashed with the more Soviet friendly parts of his own movement at times, and the Soviets themselves doubted his sincerity - not least because of his past overtures to the US, and how his "admission" coincided with increasing Soviet financial support. Whatever Castro was or was not early on, there was a decade long period of Castro moving closer and closer to the Soviets where you can see the process going in lockstep with each new US rejection and each new Soviet overture, and where there's a very real possibility that the US could have turned Cuba into an ally and encouraged more liberal policies. Of course we'll never know.

by dgut 8y ago

gammateam 8y ago

Yeah the other element is the definition of Jihad It is a requirement to excise foreign invaders from Islamic lands and this is totally incompatible with the Western mentality and propaganda of "lets punish them in retaliation for that" The US masquerades 9/11 as the start of this, more accurately that its rouge asset attacking us was the start of this. Decades of meddling in the middle east stirred a hive, and the rouge asset intentionally created a decentralized adhoc army (Al Queda) that exploits the definition of Jihad for the SOLE REASON of entrapping a large scale army in a war of attrition until its budgetary constraints tears that country apart from the inside. THATS THE LITERALLY THE POINT AND WHAT HAS HAPPENED, Bin Laden says it in his cave livestreams, watch them again because they probably never played them verbatim on your local news channel back in the early 2000s except to guess whether he was still alive or pre-recorded it. But they were relevant messages, and he played everyone like a fiddle: Corporations, nation states, and the American condition which they would both predictably exploit for support to walk right into his construct. The US - and more specifically Europe which is now forcefully conscripted in NATO and is more easily accessible and attacked - would be safer by leaving the Middle East to regional powers. Yes, the regional powers that maintain order in a way that we disagree with.

dsr_ 8y ago

If the US foreign policy apparatus hadn't had its head jammed quite so firmly up its ass, they would have accepted the overtures of friendship from both Castro and Ho instead of scorning them. Imagine Vietnam coming out of their war for independence from France with a democratically elected government starting in 1954. Imagine Cuba being the major US ally in the Caribbean and primary vacation destination, with Fidel Castro serving as President from 1960 through 1970 in a constitutional republic. Both of those scenarios were within the realm of possibility -- but not with the Yale and Harvard asshats ruling the State Department.

oh_sigh 8y ago
Imagine Cuba not being overtaken by armed rebels, and then keeping it living in the 1950s for the next 70 years.
- Synaesthesia 8y ago
  Is the US who kept it in the 50’s. It wasn’t even a socialist revolution. But you must understand, they confiscated US property. That’s the crime they committed.
  - darawk 8y ago
    > It wasn’t even a socialist revolution. Was it not?
    - vidarh 8y ago
      It's "complicated". Castro's "26th of July Movement" (M-26-7) originally had very limited political goals. Beyond overthrowing Batista, they included some redistribution of land and some degree of nationalisation of public services, and confiscation of a lot of companies and property they considered basically fruits of Batista's corruption, but beyond that there were wide disagreements, and there certainly was not a clear agreed goal of introducing socialism at the outset. Castro had been on friendly terms with Batista for years before. Batista gave him money for his honeymoon, and even considered him for government. Some saw him as radical, but Batista at least considered him as a potentially viable cabinet minister, despite himself being very much explicitly anti-socialist, though of course it's possible Batista saw it as a way of pacifying him. Castro may well have had exposure to socialist ideas before then, but at the outset he was basically a nationalist with anti-imperialist views. It was first after Batista's coup and crackdown on dissidents, that Castro seriously started pushing a more radical agenda publicly. Even them, after overthrowing Batista, Castro looked to the US as a potential ally. But when exactly Castro started supporting Marxist-Leninism is open for debate. Castro denied it into '60 at least. Late in '61 he then claimed to have been a Marxist-Leninist secretly for some years, but he clashed with the more Soviet friendly parts of his own movement at times, and the Soviets themselves doubted his sincerity - not least because of his past overtures to the US, and how his "admission" coincided with increasing Soviet financial support. Whatever Castro was or was not early on, there was a decade long period of Castro moving closer and closer to the Soviets where you can see the process going in lockstep with each new US rejection and each new Soviet overture, and where there's a very real possibility that the US could have turned Cuba into an ally and encouraged more liberal policies. Of course we'll never know.