Good or Bad for the Jews

"Good or Bad for the Jews"

Many years ago, and for many years, I would travel to Morocco to visit uncles, cousins, and my paternal grandmother. Some lived in Tangiers;...

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Castro and the Nazis: Makes Perfect Sense

As we come up on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, we see newly declassified German intelligence documents reporting that Fidel Castro hired Nazi SS officers, tried to get former German paratroopers to help train his army, and sought to buy Belgian-made weapons from right-wing extremists. He apparently was so distressed with what he saw as USSR timidity in dealing with the US, that he wanted to develop his own sources of training and equipment. This goes along with information in Khrushchev's autobiography and elsewhere, that Castro was upset with the USSR for not pushing for nuclear war with the United States.


I have written before about Castro, and during my career at State had long dealings with Cuban "diplomats" all over the world. The regime and its representatives are thugs. No other word aptly captures their nature. The Western defenders of Castro are ignorant fools, dishonest leftist hacks, or so blinded by anti-Americanism that they'll defend anybody who "stands up" to Uncle Sam -- or all of the above. They, in other words, have the traits we increasingly see in our university graduates, Hollywood elites, and in much of the media.

Let me repeat some things I have said before: No contradiction exists between Castro being a Communist, and Castro dealing with post-WWII Nazis. The Castro brothers inherited a virulent strain of anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism common among certain educated elites in Latin America. A legacy of Spain and old-time Spanish Catholicism, it started as hatred and resentment for upstart Protestant England, and in Latin America morphed into hatred and resentment for upstart “Protestant” USA. 

The brothers got a double dose of the virus. Their father was a Spanish-born veteran of the War of 1898 who stayed on in Cuba. We can imagine family conversations when the topic turned to the USA. This household environment combined with that era's Spanish Jesuit schooling would have turned just about anybody anti-American. As I have noted before, Communism in Latin America is a natural complement to a pre-existing intellectual and emotional strain of anti-Americanism, anti-Protestantism, and anti-capitalism. Once the brothers assumed power, it is not at all surprising that they would throw in with the Soviets; Raul was in all likelihood a KGB informant since the early 1950s.

There seems no doubt that had Nazi Germany been around in the 1950s as the world's preeminent anti-capitalist, anti-democracy, and anti-USA power, Fidel, Raul, and the racist gangster Che (Note: read what he had to say about Mexicans) would have hitched their wagons to the Hitler train.

There is no real conflict between Communism and Nazism except, of course, of which one takes power. They are both phenomena of the left; both believe in the state over the individual; in state-control of the economy; and in crushing religion and other independent sources of power and potential rivalry to the state. They do not believe in rule of law, tolerance of diversity, and protection of dissent. The biggest difference is that the Communists were much more successful at bamboozling the "educated elites" and used much smoother words to try to disguise their evil natures. The Nazis were always too bombastic, "in your face," and made little effort to hide their true aims. All that stylistic and cosmetic nonsense aside, Fidel, Raul, Che, Kim-il Sung, Stalin, etc, would have been perfectly happy as Nazis and to espouse their anti-capitalist, anti-democracy, anti-religion, and anti-individual line. We should find nothing surprising in the Castros' efforts to reach out to Nazis for help in carrying on their mad war against the Cuban people and the United States.

There is no difference between El Jefe and Der Fuhrer.

18 comments:

  1. paul vincent zecchinoOctober 17, 2012 at 7:57 PM

    Thank you for The Juice about this bearded thug and his rotten regimeniks.

    It is an unending source of disheartening amazement that after fifty three years of this commie rat vomiting all over his own citizens and the rest of the world, he still finds so many hare-brained dumbbells to support him.

    Here's one of many definitive quotes from the commie with a bag:

    "Yanqui businessmen are fools, adventurers, and piratical idiots. Of course we shall do business with them, take what belongs to them, and then kill them."
    - 'Dr.' fidel castro-ruz
    ca. 1995

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  2. "Spanish Jesuit schooling ", ah yes, who could forget Liberation Theology and that plague of the earth Guitar Masses.

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  3. The propaganda is always, always, the same; the rich are getting richer off the backs of the poor who are getting poorer. The new sheriff in town will level the playing field, take from the rich, give to the poor, and all will be happy in the new utopia. The poor are never encouraged to use their own ingenuity to pull themselves out of poverty, nay, the government will do it for them. But the poor, and some intellectual elites, buy into the fairy tale. Germans who were suffering the results of the Wiemar Republican and World War 1 believed it; Cubans who suffered from mismanagement of a very rich nation believed it, and in the end, all they got was even greater suffering.

    Yet, even this nation is being exposed to a man who has bought into the "social justice" meme, and half of Americans followed him. "For the common man" is their cry, not even knowing enough of history to know who the real common man was. We can look at Communist/Marxist nations and say "but what have they acheived and look how desparate their people are" and we get back in response that the reason those examples failed is because the right people were not in charge.

    I have friends who are first generation Americans whose parents fled Castro's Cuba. Their parents were not political, or even revolutionaries, just normal Cubans working to support their family, yet they lost everything to the state. And they hate Barack Obama, Jr. as they say they see in him what they saw in Castro; a man who claimed to be for the little guy all the while wanting nothing but power over them.

    Zane

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    1. Zane, I've noticed that Leftists who are quick to "cry" racist at everyone else are pretty racist themselves. Ask them why the application of Marxism to the practical problems of politics and production failed to unleash the "unprecedented productive forces" promises, and they blame it on the stupid Slavic Uentermenschen, the primmitive Asiatics of China, and the fact that too many of Cuba's white people (never mind that Cuban Blacks and Chinese also came) moved to Florida.

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  4. Great post - thanks again for your service and insight.

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  5. No surprises here. Syria, Egypt and a few countries in South America took in Nazis to help build military and intelligence capacity. In fact, they were honored guests down there.

    PS. One minor difference between Nazism and Communism: Nazis allowed private property.

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    1. Yes, but they were not in power long enough to have nationalized it all. Had they remained, private property would have been taken as in Communist regimes

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    2. "One minor difference between Nazism and Communism: Nazis allowed private property."

      And so did the Communists initially. When the Bolsheviks took over from the Mensheviks their grip on "the leevers of power" was a bit too shaky to implement all of the policies they wanted. It was only after their power as established that full Nationalisation took place (e.g. collectivisation of farms, the destruction of the Kulaks etc.).

      The ONLY difference between Nazism and Communism is that we defeated the Nazi regime, dismantled it brick by brick and published the findings to highlight the evils of the regime.

      Many Communists in Germany in the 1930's joined the Nazi party when they gained power.

      Phil B

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  6. Don't forget that all the leaders behind these evil ideologies were more than happy to skim off plenty for themselves at the same time. A great cocktail of death and hypocrisy!

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    1. Good point. Next time I will skim that idea off you and give you no credit for it!!!

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  7. DiploMad, I have a question you can surely answer:

    how far down the food chain in State is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Progress, Bureau of Diplomatic Security? IOW, how far down the food chain from Hillary Clinton is Charlene Lamb?

    Zane

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    1. Pretty far down. Above her is the Director of Diplomatic Security, Undersecretary for Management, the Deputy Secretary, and then the Secretary.

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    2. Thank you for your response. Which brings me to my second question:

      is it SOP to allow someone so far down the food chain to make the decision on what security is provided to embassies/consulates? Is that often a decision handed to a lower level SD employee?

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    3. No. She would make a recommendation that would go to the Director; depending on the importance it might be made there or handed up to the Undersecretary, especially if there's a budgetary implication. Anything that might have political implications, such as this, would also be discussed laterally with the Near East bureau and perhaps even the Undersecretary for Political Affairs.

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    4. From the the discussion here in these replies and the U.S. activity of the last two years, I would assume that diplomatic security and ambassadorial activities would be large item on the Secretarys' and POTUSs' agenda.

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  8. I don't disagree with the basic point on Castro. However, collocating Castro's Cuba with Nazi Germany would need a bit more evidence than the active recruitment of Nazi's.

    For example, I know another country that took on Nazi war criminals for the military/scientific skills that they had, and turned a blind eye to their historical "issues". Specifically, you could put the name "Werner von Braun" up there. I don't consider the country that sheltered him to be a Fascist state, at all.

    In fact, I think that the list of countries involved in this practise is quite long.

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  9. The point was the ideologies of communism and nazism are not radically opposed as some would have you believe. Von Braun was not a Nazi, and in fact was arrested by the Gestapo for his "defeatist" attitudes.

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  10. Interesting WSJ story. Wonder about your views on this.
    http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-last-diplomat-1480695454

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