What Did Che Guevera And Kim Il Sung Have In Common?

[Matiasba]

I am 100% positive sure that if you show these pictures to any spanish speaking neutral person in the world, they will tell you that its not racism.

 

[scotttswan]

I am 100% positive sure that if you show these pictures to any spanish speaking neutral person in the world, they will tell you that its not racism.

and you'd be wrong.

 

[ajoknoblauch]

I am 100% positive sure that if you show these pictures to any spanish speaking neutral person in the world, they will tell you that its not racism.

So, Occam's razor does not apply here...

 

[ElCordobés]

The Dutch continue to celebrate Sinterklaas aka St. Nicholas with the Zwarte Piet each December.

My wife's mom is from the Netherlands. The first time I went to a Sinterklaas heritage festival with her in 1997 in Minnesota--there were children and adults in blackface. "Aren't the kids cute?" they said. Me: "Yes, indoctrinating children into racist traditions is adorable." (I don't think I was that blunt, but that's how I felt). I was assured they were just black from going down the chimney. Me: Nope, this is straight up racist.

We were out in the suburbs of Minneapolis/St. Paul--not exactly flourishing hotbed of diversity at the time. Not an excuse...they were simply that clueless.

The Netherlands is still trying to come to grips with their racist traditions.

http://edition.cnn.c...-pete-protests/

http://www.newstates...it-take-so-long

 

[ElQueso]

Very good points Steve, about the Democrats closer to their origins.

Also, let's not forget very prominent guys like Robert Byrd (served as a U.S. Representative from 1953 until 1959 and as a U.S. Senator from 1959 to 2010), as a more recent example of what the Democratic party, at least in some places, is able to tolerate, as well as news services like CNN and MSNBC.

Byrd joined the Klan at the ripe young age of 24 — hardly a young’un by today’s standards, much less those of 1944, when Byrd refused to join the military because he might have to serve alongside “race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds,” according to a letter Byrd wrote to Sen. Theodore Bilbo at the height of World War II.

MSNBC.com reported that “Byrd’s success on the national stage came despite a complicated history on racial matters. As a young man, we was a member of the Ku Klux Klan for a brief period, and he joined Southern Democrats in an unsuccessful filibuster against the landmark 1964 Civil Rights.” (The Ku Klux Klan no doubt objects to being called complicated, and has held since Day 1 one that there is nothing wishy-washy about castrations, lynchings or burning folks alive.)

CNN also gave Byrd a pass on his association with the early 20th-century homegrown terrorist movement, writing in the 20th paragraph of Byrd’s obituary that “He blamed ‘that Southern atmosphere in which I grew up, with all of its prejudices and its feelings,’ for his opposition to equal rights, which included joining the [domestic terrorist outfit] Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s.”

But I suppose it's OK to have once held those beliefs as long as you are truly repentant over "youthful mistakes" of the past and have done a great job in your career to advance the freedom and rights of everyone, eh?

No single obituary of Byrd mentioned his 2001 use of the term “white nigger,” an early 20th-century anachronism that Byrd employed not once, but twice during an interview with Tony Snow.

http://dailycaller.c...l-klan-chapter/

My family are staunch Republicans, for the most part. My immediate family is about as non-racist as one can imagine, particularly for people who were born when racism was pretty much accepted. But my grandmother married a man about 30 years ago, after her second husband died, who was a died-in-the-wool Democrat from Arkansas. My second step-grandfather was a true racist. He also flew for JFK (on some of his flights) in the late 50s during his presidential campaign. More stories that would just amaze those who were willing to listen and get past his racist crap. I'm not really sure why my grandmother married him, but you can bet there were a number of problems at family get-togethers when he started up. He was long involved in the Arkansas Democratic machine (along with unions in Chicago, later) and had many, many stories about the dead people who voted in the 50s and 60s for Democrats and even alliances with the KKK and blocking black voters, etc.

But that's OK. Guys like Ajo don't really care about what their party's representatives and senators really believe. Because it's all about "making things equal for everyone" - by force if necessary (remember Nancy Pelosi's quote about getting "Obama" Care enacted: “We’ll go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, we’ll go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in but we're going to get health care reform passed for the America people." Not very democratic to me, more like "We're going to do everything we have to do to ram this down everyone's throat whether they like it or not), even those who they may personally want to discriminate against, right? And heaven forbid should they actually admit that there are as many idiots that their party elects as the Republicans do! No, no, Democrats are perfect and Republicans are all Bible-thumping racists who only care about getting rich and squashing the insects who squirm beneath their feet.

In fact, the US is screwed not because of Republicans, but because Republican (the style of government, not the party) Democracy is as flawed as most (if not all) forms of government, as both parties in the US demonstrate on a daily basis and people like Ajo who wave their little party flag support the jackasses who will do and say anything for power and money. But keep fighting the "good" fight Ajo, for all those poor people who need a handout just to keep going amidst the race bating and enabling that Democrats (at least those in control of the party, not necessarily the dupes who vote for them) love to use to justify their tyranny, much like Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction to get us into Iraq and all of us under the thumb of the PATRIOT Act, along with other forms of tyranny the US continues to embrace.

More power to you all. Literally. Too much.

And what "Che" Guevera said in the quotes, at least shown in the thread, sounded a whole like what I used to hear as a kid growing up from everyday people in the US. The US sure has come a long way, despite what Democrat race-baiters and enablers have to say about it, but I often wonder why hasn't Argentina?

I've made comments to Matias previously that I understood that some of the names used here are not meant in a racist manner. I understand that 100%. But Matias (sorry, "9600 and counting" - I can't use that name!) doesn't seem to recognize the large amount of racism that inundates this country on a regular basis, at least within everyday conversations. I hear things here, and my family continues to experience them, much worse than anything I can remember from later times when I lived in the US, but seems much more like when I was younger. I only have about 9 year's experience here, and it may well be that things have changed a lot in the last 40 years or so - but if so, then as to racism Guevara must not have been all that bad for his time, because I hear pretty much the same thing as in those quotes fairly often here.

 

[camberiu]

ElQueso,

The old paleo-conservative GOP was a very different animal than the post-Nixon GOP. You read the writing of the old leadership, like Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater and you'd never guess that those old conservatives had anything to do with today's GOP. For them, conservatism meant small government, a non-interventionist foreign policy and a strict adherence to the constitution. The social conservatism that we see today is a completely new thing.

"About this whole judgment there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record which we shall long regret"
--Robert Taft on the Death Penalty

"I am as much against Communist aggression as anyone. . . but we can't let them scare us into bankruptcy and the surrender of all liberty, or let them determine our foreign policies."
--Robert Taft on the cold war hysteria and the growing militarization of the United States

""I do not believe any policy which has behind it the threat of military force is justified as part of the basic foreign policy of the United States except to defend the liberty of our own people."
--Robert Taft on US interventionism

"You don't need to be straight to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight."
--Barry Goldwater on gays serving in the military

"On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism.""
--On the growth of religious/social conservatism within the GOP




In regards of racism in Argentina now vs. 40 years ago: Now at least there are discussion about whatever happened to the black Argentines. 40 years ago there would have been no discussion. They would simply look at you and say "there are no blacks in Argentina and never were". That is progress.

 

[ajoknoblauch]

As if there were ever any doubt that Republicans consciously transformed themselves into the apologists of racist privilege: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1953700. Goldwater and Reagan led the way:

"Goldwater said he supported the white Southern position on civil rights, which was that each and every state had a sovereign right to control its laws. The Arizona Republican argued that each American has the right to decide whom to hire, whom to do business with and whom to welcome in his or her restaurant. The senator was right at home with Southern politicians who called the Civil Rights Act an attack on 'the Southern way of life.'"

"Reagan lost the nomination to Ford in 1976. But when the former California governor ran for the presidency again in 1980, he began his campaign with a controversial appearance in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers had been brutally killed. It was at that sore spot on the racial map that Reagan revived talk about states' rights and curbing the power of the federal government."

 

[camberiu]

"Goldwater said he supported the white Southern position on civil rights, which was that each and every state had a sovereign right to control its laws. The Arizona Republican argued that each American has the right to decide whom to hire, whom to do business with and whom to welcome in his or her restaurant. The senator was right at home with Southern politicians who called the Civil Rights Act an attack on 'the Southern way of life.'"

As a brown skinned minority living in the US, I don't find that racist at all. Racist were the Jim Crow laws. This is very different. There can be no freedom of association without freedom of dissociation. Each person should have the freedom to do business with whomever they want, based on their own criteria and judgement. Goldwater was absolutely right. If someone don;t want to do business with me or hire me because I am Brazilian, that should be their right. To defend that freedom is not a racist position. That is a libertarian position. The one that believes that no one should be coerced into doing something they don;t want to do.

The position that that many "progressives" take is the opposite. That the state should coerce people into doing something that they don;t want to do in the name of the "collective good". Che Guevara believed in that too, and took that logic to its ultimate conclusion.

 

[sleslie23]

As a brown skinned minority living in the US, I don't find that racist at all. Racist were the Jim Crow laws. This is very different. There can be no freedom of association without freedom of dissociation. Each person should have the freedom to do business with whomever they want, based on their own criteria and judgement. Goldwater was absolutely right. If someone don;t want to do business with me or hire me because I am Brazilian, that should be their right. To defend that freedom is not a racist position. That is a libertarian position. The one that believes that no one should be coerced into doing something they don;t want to do.

The position that that many "progressives" take is the opposite. That the state should coerce people into doing something that they don;t want to do in the name of the "collective good". Che Guevara believed in that too, and took that logic to its ultimate conclusion.

So, if a state wants to reinstate slavery, that's ok with you because states shouldn't be "coerced" into doing anything? I don't think even Steve or Queso are willing to adopt your brand of libertarianism.

I don't really think you think that, but I do think you need to explain yourself a little better.

 

[ajoknoblauch]

As a brown skinned minority living in the US, I don't find that racist at all. Racist were the Jim Crow laws. This is very different.

There is no difference whatsoever. Undoing the Jim Crow laws was the whole point of the Civil Rights Act, which Goldwater opposed - thereby approving of those same discriminatory laws.