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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27876 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Leftists and left-centrists are prone to hero-worship too, of figures like Lenin, Kennedy, Che, MLK Jr., Obama, etc.

I think one difference between the highly online left and the highly online right, though, is that the right is much more likely to openly hero-worship people based on a "might makes right" principle, whereas leftists prefer to say that when their favorite people cause harm, it is for the sake of the people.

So, for example, it is easy to find highly online right-wingers who think that Roman Emperors were cool basically just because they were strong and powerful and they dominated others and killed whoever stood in their way. Whereas it would be extremely rare to find a leftist who openly glorifies Stalin for being some kind of smart and effective self-aggrandizing conqueror - the vast majority of them would only glorify Stalin because according to them, he helped the people.

Which is not to say that highly online right-wingers do not care at all about being loved by the people, of course. Most of them do. It is hard to find any online Hitler-lover, for example, who does not keep ranting about how "the volk loved their Führer", blah blah blah.

No leftist is very famous for winning great battles against insane odds. Trotsky is about as close as you get to that level but he's still at least a tier below Napoleon, Alexander, Cortes or Julius Caesar. Giap and Mao were more about persistence and skillful execution than aggressive masterstrokes.

Giap's quote sums up their (very successful but less glamourous) methodology: "Accumulate a thousand small victories to turn into one great success."

Bolívar? He gets credited as a centrist, but that’s in comparison to the governments which followed him.

Napoleon was on the political left of his day in an important sense, and Caesar was a populares.

Fidel Castro overthrew Batista's government and seized all of Cuba with an initial force of about 80 men, all but about 20 of whom got killed or captured on the first day of Castro's invasion. It is a rather underappreciated feat of generalship. It reminds me a lot of Cortez conquering the Aztec Empire with a far-outnumbered force, by making allies with the locals.

The Aztec empire could field hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Cuba was not even a regional power.

Castro got crushed, imprisoned and was only released thanks to the mercy of his opponents. There was no Noche Triste where Castro fought his way out of the capital to regroup, he only got out of prison because some politician thought it might be a good look. Then he had an opportunity to come back and start an insurgency.

Castro's leadership during the invasion should not be judged based on the fact that his opponents released him from prison at some point before that. That makes no sense. It would be like discounting Hitler's political feat of raising the Nazi Party to total rule of Germany because he had gotten released from prison after the Beer Hall Putsch.

Taking control of an island of millions of people that is ruled by a government that is supported by the strongest country in the world and which is only about 200 miles away, with only about 80 men, is pretty impressive!

Hitler's coup-launching and general martial abilities were poor. He was very charismatic, as was Castro (and Cortes for that matter). But what were his military feats? I'm focused purely on that. In Hitler's case, it was his generals who did the fighting, he directed grand strategy and messed things up, failing to sufficiently mobilize the German war economy until it was too late.

Castro managed a revolution in a poor, coup-prone country. The US pulled away from Batista the moment he was seriously threatened. They had Cantillo launch another coup against him, the whole thing was a shambles. He didn't face really substantial opposition like Giap did.

I'm not arguing that Hitler was a military genius. He certainly had his moments, for example he correctly sided with the Ardennes option during the planning of the invasion of France. But his track record as a military leader is mixed. My point, and the reason why I brought Hitler up, is that judging Castro's achievements in the Cuban Revolution based on the fact that he had been let out of jail by his opponents at some point in the past does not make sense.

I don't understand why you don't want to admit that invading Cuba with 80 men, getting most of them killed on the first day, fleeing to the mountains with 20 men, and then building a base of support that allows you to conquer the whole island two years later, is not a great feat of generalship.

I do want to admit that it's not great generalship! That's my whole argument.

The reasons Castro won were predominantly political, not military. Throughout his whole life, he displayed military ineptitude. He got released from prison after failing his first attempt at revolution, losing the battle. He fumbled his landing attempt, arriving late:

The plan had been for the crossing to take five days, and on the Granma's scheduled day of arrival, 30 November, MR-26-7 members under Frank País led an armed uprising in Santiago and Manzanillo. However, the Granma's journey ultimately lasted seven days, and with Castro and his men unable to provide reinforcements, País and his militants dispersed after two days of intermittent attacks.

He lost 75% of his men in the first few days of landing. Cortes didn't do that! As I read further, Castro even gets support from the CIA! So much for defeating the strongest government in the world...

In the Sierra Maestra mountains, Castro was joined by Frank Sturgis who offered to train Castro's troops in guerrilla warfare. Castro accepted the offer, but he also had an immediate need for guns and ammunition, so Sturgis became a gunrunner. Sturgis purchased boatloads of weapons and ammunition from Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) weapons expert Samuel Cummings' International Armament Corporation in Alexandria, Virginia. Sturgis opened a training camp in the Sierra Maestra mountains, where he taught Che Guevara and other 26 July Movement rebel soldiers guerrilla warfare.

Castro won because apparently everyone, US deep state goons included, favoured him over the disintegrating Bastillo regime. He was charismatic, not a great military leader. And even if he had beaten the Cuban government solely with force of arms, that still wouldn't make him a great leader. Beating a weak Cuban government is not a sufficient feat to put you up there with Cortes.

Cortes beat an utterly hated Aztec Empire that probably had less support from the population it ruled than Batista's government had from its. And like Castro, Cortez also came within a hair's breadth of being destroyed at one point. Plus Cortez was going up against an empire that had technology equivalent to the European Bronze Age, whereas Castro was going up against a country that had the same level of technology that he did.

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