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Comment by erokar | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

>> "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.

> 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/report/freedom-world/2016/cuba

Edit: Additional reports from Ammesty International, Human Rights Watch and RSF below also.

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.

It's a little rich of the Russian representative to claim that, given that Russia has just withdrawn from the International Criminal Court.

For what it's worth, Human Rights Watch's report about Cuba is also pretty damning:

> The Cuban government continues to repress dissent and discourage public criticism. It now relies less on long-term prison sentences to punish its critics, but short-term arbitrary arrests of human rights defenders, independent journalists, and others have increased dramatically in recent years. Other repressive tactics employed by the government include beatings, public acts of shaming, and the termination of employment.

As is Amnesty International's:

> Despite increasingly open diplomatic relations, severe restrictions on freedoms of expression, association and movement continued. Thousands of cases of harassment of government critics and arbitrary arrests and detentions were reported.

And Reporters Sans Frontieres rank Cuba 171 out of 180 countries in the world for Press Freedom.

US is not part of International Criminal Court either. So what's the point?

As a legal un-person in the US, I have to view this with ironic amusement. A good deal of US economic prosperity seems to depend on the maintenance of a despised underclass, at least according to certain politicians. As a member of said underclass, it's a bit hard to take the moral posturing here very seriously. I'm sure Cuban apologists for their governments' excesses also mouth pieties about their country being 'a nation of laws' and cite legislative formalities as a figleaf for their moral embarrassment.

Do you want dozens of other sources to confirm it, if Freedom House isn't enough? It's obtuse to claim Cuba has political freedom.

I'm not sure I'd count that source as valid after reading what they wrote in /brazil. The text has the same opinion as the media they rate as "partially free". They're defending the side that won without really understanding what happened there. I wonder how better the analysis on Cuba could be.

Fidel Castro leaves behind a nation awash with tears and blood from thousands of executions, tens of thousands of political prisoners, concentration camps for gay men, labor camps for those who thought differently, listened to jazz, or even just had long hair.

These are facts I learned only after doing more research, after listening to friends who are gay and who did years of research.

So we all need to be careful not to repeat the trope "but healthcare and education were good and free and available to all". I for many years allowed those reports, parroted so often, to soften my judgment of Castro. But now learning of the extent of the horrors of oppression, those outweigh any social welfare "results".

And now I have had cause to question even those results as I read and learn of a healthcare system where critical operations that were performed only after agonizing waits for eight months and then by doctors and nurses so starved of supplies that they sometimes operated with bare hands.

Castro should be remembered for the suffering he caused - all of it preventable. The best way to him sum up is to consider that he created an island prison where nobody was allowed to leave without his permission - and for an unbearable number of years most of the world applauded him. I hope you will remember this and hear the cynical trying to tie themselves to a "distinguished legacy" when politicians comment today.

Yes, Cuba was a shitty place for gay people before 1981. Then the government declared that homosexuality was a valid variation of human sexuality and that previous attitudes towards it were unacceptable.

Keep in mind during the same period that Cuba was repressing homosexuality, so was the United States. Cuba did not ignore the AIDS epidemic that killed literally an entire generation of gay people. The Cuban government did not laugh and call it the gay plague.

I don't like Cuba. I'm not a state socialist. But I find it disconcerting that everyone is so passionately piling up their attacks on the Cuban government but would never scrutinize the US government in such detail. There are people in this thread who are bringing up actions the US have taken that would be considered objectionable by the same standards, but they aren't being addressed; they are being brushed aside as irrelevant or incomparable.

Imagine being that drunk on propaganda. As if the United States did not forcibly dismantle political parties it deemed dangerous in the United States. As if the United States did not repress its LGBT minorities. As if the United States doesn't bully the entire world in order to get its economic benefits. As if the United States doesn't torture and murder civilians. As if the United States and capitalism are completely blameless for the extreme poverty in Detroit or Flint.

It's really sickening to watch people deny or downplay the violence inherent in the perpetuation of their favorite system of government. Ironic, I guess.

I agree that Fidel Castro made many mistakes and is responsible for many atrocities. But the plight of Cuba is not his doing alone.

He leaves behind a Cuba that was embargoed by the US, their closest and largest trade partner after the US had staged a failed invasion to overthrow the government. This forced them into the Soviet sphere of influence for supplies and trade.

Then, when the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the cold war, it could no longer support Cuba. The island nation was driven further into poverty and essential goods like food and medicine became scarce.

And what did the US do at that point? Did they reopen diplomatic relations and try to find some rapprochement after an era of high tensions? No. Instead they decided that now was an excellent time to extend their embargo to include food and medicine as well, which were up to that point exempt from the trade ban.

To point to a single man and his inner circle as the sole cause for the sad state Cuba is in today is just as absurd as to deny the wrongs of the Castro regime, nor did he only do bad things for the Cuban people. The "trope" of education and healthcare being available to all is not some straw man. It is a legitimate achievement, and one that many nations the world around have not been able to match, no matter their affluence.

>I agree that Fidel Castro made many mistakes and is responsible for many atrocities. But the plight of Cuba is not his doing alone.

In American English, the phrase, "He murdered thousands," can't be followed by the word "but..."

Obama didn't murder thousands? Yet I hear good things about him. FDR? Any US president basically? The people responsible for staging coups abroad to replace democratically elected leaders, install sympathetic dictators and overall fuck up life in a region for 50 years?

Yet I hear good things about them too. Why can't the same be applied to Fidel? He committed atrocities and he did good for the country. And indeed much of the suffering (the "millions" not the "thousands") was directly caused by US actions, so don't come with the holier than thou.

FDR and Obama murdered thousands of their own citizens? Jeeze, I need to brush up on my history...

Which nation a person belongs to does not decide his or her worth.

I'm a cuban american and I don't see how people don't understand the most obvious viewpoint. You can condemn both the evil actions by the US and by Fidel. The fact that they've both committed atrocities doesn't mean that we can't criticize either harshly, it means that we MUST criticize BOTH. I hate the whitewashing of Obama's wars. Its a BIG reason I was against Hillary (and pro Gary Johnson). The left is spineless and completely abandons the anti-war rhetoric when its their team. AND I hate the apologism I'm hearing about Castro. He was an evil, hateful, murderous, greedy, lying dictator.

Greedy? I have not really heard of him siphoning of money like other dictators but would happily read any info you have on this sort of behaviour.

Wholeheartedly agree with you. I consider myself to be on the left, in the classical sense, but the political discourse of the United States does not tolerate multi-faceted and nuanced opinions about the issues.

The groupthink is prevalent on both sides of the aisle - you're either on my team or you're on the other. What sucks is when you're ostracized from both.

Many highly educated professionals in Cuba live in poverty while the top ranking officials live lavishly. The Castro family takes vacations abroad, aboard fancy yachts in fancy hotels while regular citizens are not allowed to leave the island and until recently not even allowed to stay in Cuban hotels (i say recently because that was the case when i lived there and i'm not 100% sure that's changed). There's no good he did that equates or overcompensates the harm to the general population.

Obama didn't have his fellow-citizens shot by firing squad without a trial merely because they were political opponents, like journalist Yvonne Conde's uncle [1].

Agreed the sanctions were unproductive. More than anything else, US sanctions helped Castro stay in power for half a century.

But to blame the sanctions for his atrocities - or to say the good he did outweighed the bad - is to be willfully blind: When Cuban government ships spotted a tugboat full of refugees headed for Florida on July 13, 1994, they blasted it to pieces with high-pressure fire hoses. “Our tugboat started taking on water,” recounted one of the survivors, María Victoria García. “We shouted to the crewmen on the boat, ‘Look at the children! You’re going to kill them!’ And they said, ‘Let them die! Let them die!’” Forty-one of the refugees did. [2]

While you write about the good things he did from your comfortable home with high speed internet, with the rule of law in a capitalist liberal democracy, this is how desperate his citizens were to leave this country of “good things”, and how barbarous was Castro against his own people.

[1] https://twitter.com/YvonneMConde/status/802587003057410048 [2] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/...

Over the course of Fidel's rule, the US has committed many atrocities in the name of liberal democracy. Don't forget that we, not they, are the world's greatest incarcerators. We, not they, firebombed villages in Vietnam and Cambodia. We, not they, persecuted protesters in the civil rights movement.

Fidel was a tyrant, that's for sure. But lack of tyranny has hardly prevented American atrocity, often wrapped in layers of policy, plausible deniability, and indirection of responsibility. It's far easier for us to think of our voters and leaders as mostly good people, whereas Fidel personally owns all of the excesses of the Cuban state.

> In American English, the phrase, "He murdered thousands," can't be followed by the word "but..."

Then I hope you've been holding up to the same standard almost every American leader from the latter half of the 20th century till now - whether through political interference, violent regime change to authoritarian leaders, proxy wars, drone strikes or straight up war without a cause.

The truth is that in most people and things, we're inclined to overlook the good for the bad or the bad for the good, depending on our preconceived opinions. Most leaders - especially revolutionary ones - are this, but taken to the extreme, often liberating an entire populace while oppressing another. Which is why they often are notable for both, but more notable for one than the other depending on whether the person you're talking to suffered or prospered under their rule.

We shouldn't be afraid to say in the same breath that a person increased welfare and happiness for some and yet decreased it for others, stood up to imperialism and yet also was the pawn of larger global interests, was persecuted even while he persecuted others, was demonized even while he demonized others, was the target of many assassinations even while he ordered the murder of others, was spread lies and misinformation about even while he spread lies and misinformation about others. All of this happened together.

This doesn't mean it's balanced one way or another, or that one makes up for the other at all. This isn't excusing murder and atrocity - it's giving credence to the complexity of events. It's understanding how the life you live and the limited environment you live it in is very different from the experiences of others, and that people's realities, cares and worries are shaped more by things near them and less by things that don't affect them. It's a way towards understanding why others hold they opinions they do, and also a gateway to criticizing our own leaders and idols in the same way. Leaders should not be deified or demonized, but understood as a whole, wether to understand what to repeat and look up to or understand what never to allow to happen again.

You're forgetting some details there. In the 1920s, Cuba was a big producer of sugar, and their largest trading partner was the US. US companies owned 60% of the sugar production. But during the great depression, the US introduced tariffs on a wide range of goods (from everywhere), and the Cuban sugar industry collapsed.

Then when Fidel came to power one of the things he promised was to reduce the reliance on US trade. And he nationalized all of the private property and assets belonging to American individuals and companies.

And in response to that, the embargo was introduced. AND THEN there was the Bay of Pigs.

So lets not pretend the embargo is what destroyed US Cuban trade. Fidel did that all by himself, without the help of the embargo.

Also, the US didn't push Cuba into the Soviet sphere.. Fidel already had close tied to the Soviets before the embargo. It was one of the reasons for putting the embargo in place.

From your description, it actually sounds like the US and its tariffs were responsible for the collapse of the Cuban economy. That happened decades before Castro came into power.

The tariffs were not Cuba specific. They were part of the US withdraw from the world during that period. Cuba was affected, as were many countries. There's a reason it's called the Great Depression.

Keep in mind the Great Depression was worldwide, not just the US. It affected many countries, including those who did not trade with the US.

And yes, this happened decades before.. but it was one of the reasons Fidel came to power. In other words, there was already a strong anti-US sentiment in Cuba because of this and the forced military leases (which date back to the 1800s).

You just said the US caused the sugar trade to collapse and then said Castro destroyed trade himself. Are you referring to trade besides sugar? Why WOULDNT Cuba decide (realize) that they need to protect themselves from the US?

The Great Depression was worldwide, not US specific. Cuba was affected by it, as were many countries. And while the tariffs definitely contributed to Cuba's problems during the Great Depression, it's a little unrealistic to think Cuba would be unaffected by the Great Depression.

This was 30 years before Fidel, before the embargo. The point was, you already had this anti-US sentiment in Cuba before Fidel came to power.

US Cuban trade did not end at that point. But when Fidel came to power (30 years later), he used that anti-US sentiment to nationalize all American property in Cuba. That is what actually ended US Cuban trade.

It didn't help that the US actively supported the previous dictatorship in Cuba that Fidel was red to overthrow. And whilst the US didn't really help batista to stop Castro it is hardly surprising that Castro did not want to deal with the US.

>But now learning of the extent of the horrors of oppression, those outweigh any social welfare "results".

>Castro should be remembered for the suffering he caused - all of it preventable.

>"distinguished legacy"

Isn't all the same true about Obama[0][1][2], perhaps to a lesser degree but still true? Will we eulogize him in the same way?

[0]http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/06/07/obamas-surveillance-stat...

[1]http://www.mintpressnews.com/barack-obama-the-nobel-peace-pr...

[2]http://warisacrime.org/content/why-obama-torturing-private-b...

You can apply this analysis to anything. The US bills itself as the 'land of the free' while imprisoning more people than any other country, frequently in deplorable conditions by the standards of what we know about human psychology, penal theory and so on. How exactly are you weighting the good and bad factors here? How do you criticize the economic policies that led to doctors being desperately short of supplies without mentioning the bizarre asymmetry of US sanctions on a tiny island with few economic resources of its own? I was not a fan of Castro but to be honest I don't think that Americans have much standing to criticize him given the frequently atrocious nature of their own country.

I have to agree with the poster above in observing that much of the criticism here is nothing more than the regurgitation of propaganda that people have been fed since birth, and I question the ability of many posters here to distinguish between derived and received opinions on this topic.

This is why I ask how you're weighting the good and bad factors. No doubt your feelings are sincerely held, but since we're not privy to your personal moral calculus, how else can we evaluate it, or make meaningful comparisons with prior alternatives? This might seem academic, but it matters. I would likely have done quite badly as an individual in Castro's Cuba and would probably have been in a hurry to leave; on the other hand I can't but be aware of the dreadful conditions there that led to the overthrow of the Batista government in the first place, nor of the US' intransigence in refusing to tolerate a neighboring country following a path of political self-determination on purely ideological grounds, and putting it under extreme economic pressure for doing so. To use a Christian metaphor, don't be in such a hurry to point out the mote in your neighbor's eye that you miss the beam in your own.

'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.

> 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.

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.

> I don't even care what Fidel's dream was for Cuba because the end never justifies the means IMO.

Well, history is effectively written by the victors, so it will be written so that the ends will retroactively justify the means, or at the very least will be scrutinized far enough into the future that we can disengage emotionally.

If Castro's dream was to avoid Cuba from turning into a Haiti or a Honduras, it was a resounding success. If it was about turning it into a socialist utopia where people lived as if was the first world, it would probably be unrealistic in the first place but things remain to be seen.

The point is that, in fact, we do justify evil when it aligns with our policies and goals, because a lot of our well-being depends on it. The American quality of life depends a great deal on the intervention and installment of puppet regimes in countries that provide natural resources to guarantee a steady stream of supplies for manufacture; that was the basis of the Monroe Doctrine and it justifies atrocities to a level where Castro's worst was just baby play.

I actually do agree that there is evil in the repression of the country, but at the same time good is not the absence of evil either, and you can't talk about the evil without recognizing the successes of the Cuban regime. Otherwise you cannot even begin to make a single claim on the good things of the US because it has been based, to a great degree, on the control and oppression if millions of innocent people through projected global power.

> 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.

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... :-)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

>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.

>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.

>us who have been directly affected by Castro's actions

Do you believe this puts you into a position of objective analysis?

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.

Only if you believe that "normal" humans can't be responsible for terrible suffering. Countering that belief is, I think, the OP's point.

Yes. I don't disagree with a single word of that. I took jknoefpler's comment as an invitation to reflect on the fact that Castro, and even H----r, are members of the same species as us, and what that might say about the human condition. Nothing pleasant, surely, but part of the truth of what we are. And this might be a better conversation to have than comforting ourselves by distancing ourselves from these people with unthinking use of labels like "evil".

I could be wrong. There may well be people in this thread actually trying to justify or minimize Castro's actions. In any case, it doesn't look like there's much prospect for a good conversation in this thread at this point. We're still waiting for the solution for how to have good conversations about touchy topics in anonymous internet forums!

I think this is exactly the point!

This is why people often seem to say "he seemed so normal" in bewilderment when someone they knew commits mass murder.

Given that one of the changes that happened under Castro was (supposedly) to make the country have a more just distribution of wealth along racial lines, I find your "white/black" word choice amusing.

Perhaps, given the lack of slave reparations, the nationalizing of American property in Cuba is not the injustice that many in Florida would like us all to believe.

"It's to refrain from leaping straight to applying labels."

No - I'm objecting to this with this comment.

Moral relativism is a problem in our era.

Castro is Bad.

Period.

For a second I though you where talking about the renditions to Guantanamo, but no, of course that is different.

The people in Guantanimo are mostly terrorists (label) and very bad (label).

This why they are treated as such.

Castro is also bad (label), which is why Cubans revile him.

The people in guantanomo are mostly terrorists, except for the ones that aren't, but they will be treated so badly that they will probably become terrorists so really guantanomo is like a minority report prison for terrorists.

> locking his people in a prison island...

Oh the irony. Gitmo is in Cuba too :)

Gitmo is a prison full of terrorists.

Cuba is a land full of regular citizens.

See the difference?

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).

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.

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

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.

Do tell, when is the last time a sitting US president has murdered his political opponents?

Fred Hampton is the most recent in my mind that isn't (in my view) ambiguous.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton

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.

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

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.

I never once said that. In fact I asked for clarification on the incident but you seem unwilling to give that.

"but you seem unwilling to give that"

No, you seem unwilling to read the link I gave? From the article:

"That same month, on April 23, 1976, the Church Committee released its Final Staff Report on the FBI and CIA’s rampant domestic illegalities which included a chapter entitled “The FBI’s Covert Action Plan to Destroy the Black Panther Party.” The chapter concluded by highlighting the Hampton raid as a COINTELPRO operation and quoting from the bonus documents that we had obtained only weeks before."

I read the link. They were cleared several times on the given incident. Instead of taking a charitable approach you throw out your political bullshit.

Hillary expressed a wish to "drone" Assange, and Obama actually "droned" a lot of people (that the US has branded "terrorists").

Killing terrorists does not put you on the same level as Castro.

I'm sure most of the Afghanis and Iraqis who've been oppressed by the US for decades would agree. /s

No, it doesn't. However, you seem to be fairly convinced those people are all terrorists and not just political opponents that are under our drones' crosshairs.

I guess the people massacred at that MSF hospital were terrorists, too.

> I guess the people massacred at that MSF hospital were terrorists, too.

That wasn't a drone strike. That was an accidental attack by an AC-130 gunship.

I'm sure folks in Yemen or Afghanistan are a political threat to Obama. Right.

Ah, you're right. It wasn't a drone, it was humans massacring a MSF hospital by accident. I guess the irony of it should be self explanatory.

If humans can attack during at least 30 minutes a (well-known) position by mistake, why should I believe that every single droned person was a terrorist?

Droning doesn't kill only terrorists. There's plenty of collateral deaths (what do you think the ratio is, 1:10 intended targets to unintended when explosives are involved in civilian settings?) not to mention the labeling of who is and isn't a terrorist is hardly infallible. Of course those giving the go ahead are so far removed from the consequences that it must become easier and easier to order drone strikes when intelligence tells you it will "save American lives".

Again, Castro went about killing or jailing all those who opposed him. My original statement was that no US president has done so.

I think that considering just how much "droning" is basically inneffective in its purpose and just ends up killing thousands, it's really not any worse morally.

That's one man's opinion.

I think most replying to this comment are too young to remember that the CIA made several unsuccessful attempts to kill Castro himself, and Muammar Gaddafi. And those where the unsuccessful attempts that we know.

I hadn't quite considered that. I suppose that very well might count, though I was particularly thinking in the domestic sense.

Domestically there was Anwar al-Awlaki who was a US citizen who proselytised against the USA. His 16 year old nephew who was also a citizen was killed as well, despite no known involvement.

To be fair, earlier in the year the administration promised to implement additional safeguards and oversight for these programmes, but brass tacks a progressive administration killed US citizens in non-war zones because of an executive decision with no due process.

If everything is equally bad, would you prefer to be brainwashed in North Korea or South Korea?

If North Korea were a wealthier country because of extensive natural resources, an established industrial base, and distributed the money more reasonably, then you're making an actual dilemma.

Why, instead of taking a comically bad example, you don't pick a more controverte place like Singapore, an organized state where drug consumption leads to the death penalty and you will be suppressed it dissent is attempted, yet has one of the highest standards of living in the world?

> instead of taking a comically bad example

On the contrary, my example is probably the best you can get because the point I'm making is the equivalence between one government and another, or between US presidents and Castro is a false one. No one is saint obviously but the offenses have a different gravity hence we have as different societies as North and South Korea.

Some Western people might feel like the US or the UK are literally totalitarian states but they just didn't live under autocratic regimes.

Speaking of which, the false equivalence narrative is actively exploited by such regimes to legitimize their own miserable state of affairs. It's fascinating how it works but apparently if something is bad in, say, Russia and also bad in the US (as told by the state TV), Russian citizens are fine with their conditions not being improved.

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.

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.

>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?

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.

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.

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.

You really think it became peaceful ca 1100? :-)

Please read some history. It was no better, it was just not internationally infamous clan societies for a while. Then we had violent national states (check e.g. Polish deluge or the 30 year war).

Fair point :). I guess I need to learn more about Scandinavian history. Any books you can recommend?

For Scandinavian history, only in Swedish. :-)

But I think the same pattern is found everywhere. Most cultures were much more violent in the past. I think Pinker wrote a book about the phenomenon, he is good (I haven't read that but others).

(Let me note that reading about the Polish deluge was one of the shocks of my life, the Swedish school system really didn't mention much about the Polish side of it. I guess the Germans are the only ones that ever took any form of responsibility for historical atrocities.)

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.

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.

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.

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