Gaddafi: Dictators, Cruelty, and Longevity

Sadly, the dictatorship of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi (or al-Gaddafi), is not guaranteed to fall. Muammar grabbed power in a military coup in 1969 when he was only 27 years old. While admitting he is a pretty remarkable man, going from poor Bedouin born in a tent to dictator of a nation in a very short time, there is little else good to say about him. He was a noted anti-imperialist, which is well and good, but that is not an excuse for crushing the life out of the people of Libya.

Gaddafi could have just abdicated, but he chose instead to kill as many people as necessary to maintain his power. He's an old buzzard now, 68 years old, but if he can kill enough people he might hold onto power and live another couple of decades. Sadly, uprisings often don't work against the most ruthless dictators. A lot of factors come into play.

Chiang Kai-shek was as ruthless as they come. We are taught to hate the war crimes committed by Japanese militarists in China before and during World War II, but Chiang actually killed far more of his own people than the Japanese did. He got the boot from the Chinese Communist Party, only to take over Taiwan and crush it under his heal. He was still in charge of Taiwan when he died. He was a U.S. sponsored dictator.

General Francisco Franco was the most Roman Catholic, fascist dictator of Spain from 1936 until his death in 1975. He should have gone to the gallows with Hitler's crew, but the U.S. security establishment was more afraid of another dictator, Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, when Germany was finally defeated. So Franco kept murdering people until the day he died, with U.S. support. The U.S. got to put some air bases in Spain in return.

There have been successful, and failed, revolutions against both left-wing and right-wing dictators. There have been a surprising number of dictators and monarchs who allowed or even encouraged democracies to develop and replace them. England, after all, evolved from a mainly monarchist to a mainly democratic system. Some monarchs cooperated with the process, others resisted. One, Charles I was beheaded by order of Parliament; another James II, was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

For dictators force of arms does not insure success, defined as keeping a hold on power, but failure to slaughter, or at least imprison, opponents is a guarantee of failure. Often the opponents are not about to establish a democracy, but want to replace one dictator with another. The overthrow of the Fulgencio Batista by Fidel Castro in Cuba in the 1959 is as good example of that as any.

Republics (which allow a limited set of citizens to elect their leaders, as in the original U.S.A.) and democracies don't have a monopoly on goodness. Nor are all dictators all bad all of the time. What allowing a large group of citizens to share in power does is allow for flexibility and growth. With few exceptions, the type of person who aspires to, and obtains, a dictatorship has a pretty inflexible mindset. That means creativity and experimentation gets stifled. Sure, a Napoleon Bonaparte or Joe Stalin might promote scientific advancement, and sometimes a central command can jump start an economy, as Hitler and others showed. But in the long run thought, culture, and business become inflexible under dictators and start losing out to more flexible systems.

Muammar Gaddafi's real power came not from any particular brilliance but from oil. The great powers, corporations as well as nations, wanted Libyan oil, and were willing to leave Gaddafi in place as long as the oil and its profits flowed. The same is true of the Saudi dictatorship.

I hope Gaddafi is overthrown by the people of Libya, not by intervention from Europe or the U.S. However, I won't be surprised if he again manages to kill everyone who disagrees with him. Sadly, if that happens, it will encourage other dictators to reply to popular yearnings for freedom with bullets, not reform.

Cuban Thugs And U.S. Cuba Embargo Policy

In 1933 Fulgencio Batista became the de facto ruler of Cuba in 1933 and governed, with some interruptions, until overthrown in the Cuban Revolution of 1959. In such a long reign he may have done some good, but he was noted for executing political opponents without trial. He forged an alliance with U.S. organized crime groups and allowed them to build casinos and hotels in Cuba.

When Batista was overthrown and exiled most of his most prominent supporters fled to the United States, where they mostly settled in Miami. As with any sufficiently large group of people, probably many had good qualities. They were united in a hatred of Castro's new regime in Cuba.

I am not a fan of Fidel Castro. He did a good job overthrowing Batista, but his Leninist brand of communism is repulsive. People of many political tendencies united to get rid of Batista, but in the end non-communists were deprived of any say in the government.

The Democratic Party had close ties to organized crime during this era (the 1950's) and that may have given Jack Kennedy (JFK) the edge needed to win the U.S. election for President in 1960. While there were many reasons for the U.S.'s attempted invasion of Cuba in 1961 (Bay of Pigs Invasion), recovering casinos for Meyer Lansky and friends was part of the agenda. President Kennedy's failure to use U.S. military might to recover Cuba probably led to his assassination.

Even though the U.S. traded with communist leader the USSR and with all sorts of dictatorships, in 1962 an embargo was declared against Cuba that is still in place today. Today Cuba is one of the few countries in the world that the U.S. does not trade with.

If you want to know why, you have to look beyond the Fidel is Evil hypothesis. I don't like Fidel, but he hardly qualifies as a truly evil dictator. Many nations we trade with have killed far more political opponents than Fidel has. Saudi Arabia's government is much more oppressive, just to give one example.

One reason we don't trade with Cuba is that except for some old mafia casinos the island does not have anything we badly need. Its main product is sugar. Sugar growers in the U.S. are politically powerful; the embargo is just fine with them.

The real reason the embargo stays in force is that Florida is now a swing state, a state that could vote either Republican or Democrat in a Presidential election. In 1960 there were no Republicans to speak of in Florida, but in 1952 Eisenhower had won the state. Richard Nixon won Florida in 1968 and it has been in play ever since, most notably in 2000 when disputed electoral results had to be decided in the Supreme Court.

Remember those thugs of Batista that moved to Miami? They made pretty good citizens, working hard and running honest businesses. But they formed a voting block that is crucial to winning a Florida Presidential election. True, many of them are in their graves or quite old now, but the living will be a force at the ballot box for at least another decade.

Meanwhile, the rights of all other Americans are being trampled on. They always tell us we live in a free country, but we are not free to visit Cuba. In effect there is a Capitalist Curtain between southern Florida and socialist Cuba. I guess the powers that be are afraid so many of us might defect to the soviet paradise that capitalism would collapse in the U.S.

The Democratic Party is at least as responsible for this mess as the Republican Party. When you only allow a two-party dictatorship, as in the United States, you are going to end up with all sorts of messes.