Democrats have their favorite dictators too, mostly foreigners like Hugo Chavez and Castro. I wasn't a fan of the Watchmen, it was obviously a left wing propaganda piece in comic book form.
I don't know anybody who is oblivious of the economic malaise of the Castro regime and a friend of it.
Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Ed Asner, Danny Glover, off the top of my head.
Chavez gave millions of citizens access to political participation.
All Venezuelans already had the right to vote. That's how he got elected.
Sure, there are some authoritarian tendencies and he might even become second Castro but it is not like Venezuela was democratic before him.
Yes, it was. They've had direct elections for president since the 1950's.
Let's also not forget that the guy has been democratically elected whereas the reactionary forces tried to illegally oust him from office ten years ago.
Chavez, a military officer, started his political career by attempting to overthrow a directly elected president in a coup d'etat.
Sure, this is not stuff the average John De who merely consumes corporate American media which has a pretty severe bias when it comes to Chavez knows but reading or watching crap is no excuse. There is never an excuse for ignorance or having been fooled.
No, there's certainly not. We have the internet now. I'm amazed that Benito Mussolini's family hasn't sued Chavez for copyright infringement in his speeches.
In general the history of the right in South America which has been intertwined with North American imperialism is one of authoritarianism, not one of democracy.
The history of the left in Latin America is also one of authoritarianism. In fact, it's generally the same people from the same families that have run the place since the 1600's. So do you support the right-wing generalismo, or vote for the left-wing socialist revolutionary, who is the generalismo's brother? All they're doing is playing tag team.
You showed some posts ago that you belong to the same "fuck democracy as long as me and my buddies can do whatever the hell we want" school. On this side of the big pond we had a name for big business working together with the state: fascism.
And that's why we call GM "government motors", and why GM is trying to buy out the government ownership, saying it's badly damaging their brand.
One key problem in South America is the extreme form of land inequality. Joe Stiglitz has shown over 30 years ago (Incentives and Risk Sharing in Sharecropping) that land inequality can have a negative influence upon efficiency.
So the bit of land redistribution that some of the left governments in South America have achieved does not merely distribute the cake more equally but also makes it grow faster.
But to solve the land inequality problem you need to allow the peasants to actually
own land. Most left-wing governments won't go that far, because they claim the peasants will be exploited by real-estate investors or big farms, which means the peasants can't actually profit from land ownership, they can just grow food for the big families' export business, pay tax for the privilege, and save the big families the bother of playing landlord.
Basically, the left set them up to run their own Indian reservations, not allowing them to conduct business outside of the limited system, whereas the right had claimed to own the reservation. They're still screwed.
But whom am I talking to, if you call Marx who has been one of the most important thinkers of the late 19th century a bastard you merely reveal your right-wing anti-intellectualism. And no, reading Marx doesn't imply that you become a Marxist, it implies that you become educated, that you know what you actually speak about.
Um, no. Marx never held a job, so he's not really someone who would know about working. What he wrote was so incoherent that Engel's had to try and edit it into something that sort of made sense, if you didn't think about it very hard. His great insight, the labor theory of value, can't explain a baseball card. He never had a clue what capital was, and just churned out a conspiracy theory that makes L. Ron Hubbard look like someone grounded in reality.
Much of Marx's theory was based on reports by Engels about the American experiments being carried out by industrialist Robert Owens, but Robert Ownes was lying his ass off. All his socialist experiments were utter disasters, collapsing withing two years. By the late 1800's many leftist thinkers were having to abandon most of what Marx wrote because its predictions were utterly failing. Their necessary revisions led pretty directly to Fascism and Nazism.
The trick Marx used to hook his followers is to cast his babblings as a big, big secret that's been kept hidden from the working class, so that when people read it they think they're gaining some sort of revolutionary insight. They're not. It might as well be about the Knight's Templar and the Bilderbergs, or Thetans and Xenu.