An Ignorance of History is worth a Pound of Stupidity
Today, the President of the United States of America posed for a photograph in front of a giant Che Guevera picture in Cuba. While I stand in favor of opening the passage to Cuba (even if just for cigars or tobacco for the cigar rollers that fled) this struck me as comically ironic. A president with a penchant for gay rights — a cornerstone of his presidency is the legalization of gay marriage and the rainbow lights on the White House — and a man that happens to be half African descent, is standing for a picture in front of a racist, anti-gay revolutionary responsible for untold human suffering.
Most people are only familiar with Che through the ridiculous shirts that were, at a time, extraordinarily popular among the same sort of cultural revolutionaries that decry capitalism while drinking a Starbucks and surfing corporate-backed media sites on their Apple laptop, but the man actually existed and actually caused a great deal of problems for humanity in general.
He was not some hero. He was a vicious warlord.
For a group that so opposes fascism, authoritarianism, and most other -isms, there sure are a great deal of people on the left with open adoration for bad men, doing bad things, for bad reasons. Mao, Stalin, Che — the only difference between them is the number of victims. All were racist mass-murdering psychopaths, all of them would oppose rights for homosexuals. Clearly, the only time opposing rights for gay people becomes a problem is if Jesus Christ is part of the equation.
That’s foolish; stop worshiping these psychopaths and then lecturing me about how Donald Trump is Hitler, or comparing supporters to brown shirts (which, I would wager, is spoken by a great deal of people with no idea what it means).
This isn’t even the extent of Obama’s lack of respect for himself and his nation. When he arrived, Castro was nowhere to be seen. He did not even come to greet the President — he made the President come to him. It may sound like chest-puffing machismo to expect anything different to some, but to me it is simply a matter of politics and respect. Obama is ending decades of strife between the two nations, Obama is spending much of his remaining political capital on this — and damaging the chances of his own party among Cuban Americans in November, a group focused in Florida — and Castro can’t even meet him at the airport?
Have some respect for yourself, Mr. President.