{"id":295,"date":"2017-05-07T22:11:24","date_gmt":"2017-05-07T12:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/?p=295"},"modified":"2026-02-22T22:10:54","modified_gmt":"2026-02-22T12:10:54","slug":"on-castros-resignation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/2017\/05\/07\/on-castros-resignation\/","title":{"rendered":"On Castro’s Resignation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, no, not really. The title should really be something like \u2018Thoughts on the Occasion of Castro\u2019s Resignation;\u2019 but then people might expect poetry. All I wish to do here is make some remarks with reference to a conversation that I had with a small group of graduate students a year or two ago in which Castro\u2019s Cuba came up.<\/span><\/p>\n

In that conversation I suffered through a series of fashionable leftist imbecilities while holding my tongue for the sake of good fellowship. (I had been warned previously about my \u2018rudeness\u2019 when I suggested to a graduate in \u2018Peace Studies\u2019 that her proposal to spend a year teaching \u2018conflict resolution\u2019 to children in Cambodia was a piece of ridiculous self-indulgence, misery tourism, patronising modern missionary work, of no earthy use to the Cambodians, and a transparent excuse for exotic adventures (Save Redfern first!)) Anyway, in the course of this conversation there was much said about the totalitarian horrors of Joh Bjelke-Petersen\u2019s period of rule in Queensland. There was outrage at the corruption, the failure to enact decent welfare legislation, the bulldozing of ancient (well, old, anyway) landmarks in the dead of night, the control of the press through fear, and so on. The Joh regime was apparently an appalling thing that no right-minded person could defend, and could even justify massive protest to the level of revolution. Maybe so. I can\u2019t judge whether these complaints are well-founded or not, since I wasn\u2019t here, and no one\u2019s interested now anyway. But I was surprised to hear just a few minutes later that Cuba has a much better<\/span> health system<\/a> than Australia, so Castro has to be admired for that. And, of course, for doing this in the face of a bullying superpower\u2019s unjustifiable embargo. The claim is ludicrous in many ways, but that isn\u2019t the point of this memoir. When I wondered, quietly and politely, whether he should really be forgiven for running a tropical gulag, imprisoning, librarians, murdering opponents, hiring his army out to the Soviet Union, oppressing even the sainted homosexuals, etc. just because he had given Cubans a good health system, the response was that, well, people will put up with a good deal of government misbehaviour if they can just be assured of the necessaries of life.<\/span><\/p>\n

This logical blindness was so staggering to me that I was unable to formulate a polite reply. I think my offhand comment was that they weren\u2019t so forgiving to Joh. Not that I think that they should have been – but, really, compare the two cases. I was reminded of a<\/span> comment<\/a> by John Derbyshire that captures one impression I took from that conversation perfectly:<\/span><\/p>\n

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy. Won\u2019t they ever learn? No, their stupidity is impenetrable. They will never learn.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The other impression I took (hardly a novel one) was that \u2018the left\u2019 will put up with an amazing amount of oppression of other people<\/em> as long as it can be painted as twisting the tail of the Great Satan. That wouldn\u2019t be so objectionable or dangerous in itself – \u2018the right,\u2019 for example, would admit that the<\/span> comment<\/a> \u201che may be a son of a bitch, but he\u2019s our<\/em>son of a bitch\u201d describes the motivation for much of the foreign policy that they approve. The problem with the left is that they just can\u2019t be honest about this. Instead they have to twist their principles into a mess in order to justify their natural desire to support the enemy of their enemy. They must <\/em>convince themselves that their partisanship is justified by something nobler and purer than that, because they <\/em>are nobler and purer than that. It is almost inevitable that conceptual incoherence and practical incompetence will follow from such a practice; and this is what we see. Cuba isn\u2019t even nearly the most egregious case. The very worst was the support of the Soviet Union or Maoist China; but the most pitiable is the current tendency of the left to associate itself with the resurgent Jihadist movements in Islam, treating them as if they were some sort of national liberation movement, or anti-imperialists, or anti-free traders, or what have you.<\/span><\/p>\n

Further reading:<\/span> Norm Geras \u2018The Reductions of the Left\u2019 Dissent<\/em>, Winter, 2005<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, no, not really. The title should really be something like \u2018Thoughts on the Occasion of Castro\u2019s Resignation;\u2019 but then people might expect poetry. All I wish to do here is make some remarks with reference to a conversation that I had with a small group of graduate students a year or two ago in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":297,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions\/297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}