Is the people who are changing things. Tyrants beware!

The above leaders have all pledged support for Gadhafi. Who's next?

To say that uprising in Libya and Syria is a foreign plot is an insult to people who are fighting for their freedom

Last Tuesday, in a joint statement, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez denounced what they called the West's “imperialist aggression” in Libya and Syria.

It is a wonder they did not try and get Cuba’s retired President Fidel Castro or Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to endorse their condemnation. They would have certainly obliged. Back in March, Castro’s verdict on the Libyan uprising was that it was an American plot. Just over a week ago Mugabe called NATO “a terrorist group” because of its airstrikes against Qaddafi’s forces.

The notion that the uprisings in Syria and Libya are a Western plot is not merely a gross distortion of the truth; it is a vicious slap in the face of ordinary Syrians and Libyans. They are the authors of the uprisings, not the Americans or the French or the British. The hundreds of thousands of Libyans who rose up against Qaddafi's iron grip on power and the young Libyans fighting, and dying, to free their country did not do so because of a foreign plot. They did so because they wanted to be free and were inspired by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. They took their destiny into their own hands. It has been the same for the hundreds of thousands who have taken to the streets of Syria's cities, willing to die for freedom and, in some cases, doing so. The suggestion that they are agents in a plot devised by NATO and the CIA is an insult to them and the memory of the thousands who have been killed.

In any event, if it were an American plot, it was one for which the Americans should be congratulated for getting their Middle East policies right for a change and doing something that was genuinely in tune with mass public sentiment.

The fact that men like Chavez trot out this lie says everything about them and their politics and nothing about reality. They have a world view that is hopelessly outdated — a world divided into thieving imperialists and, battling against them, anti-colonialist liberation movements led by themselves. That has long gone. The world has moved on. But it is a vision these dictators are desperate to retain. It is their justification for their dead hand on the levers of power.

The same was said by the ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak of the protests in Egypt before he fell; they were organized by outsiders, he said. Qaddafi and Assad have come up with different villains behind the opposition to them — they accuse hard-liners — but the thinking is the same. They need someone to blame for the crisis and refuse to admit they are the problem.

For all their populist rhetoric and their glorification of their “people's struggle” against “imperialism,” it is their own people that the likes of Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Qaddafi and Assad fear their most. So they come up with nonsense about foreign or terrorist plots.

No one is taken in. The Syrians and the Libyans, like the Egyptians and the Tunisians beforehand, know that their uprisings are their alone, not something cooked up in the Pentagon. Others may support them, morally or with money or even arms and air raids, but the Arab Spring is a genuine Arab affair. Those who have to pretend otherwise show how little they understand the momentousness of what is happening.

Source: Albawaba

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Libya is no Cuba, Gadaffi is no Castro or Che

Gadaffi and Castro in the "old times".

"The only real power comes out of a rifle." Joseph Stalin

"Death is the solution to all problems - no man, no problem." Joseph Stalin

"I trust no one, not even myself." Joseph Stalin.

“I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated!” Che Guevara 1956.

A tribal dictatorship on Gadaffi’s model is vastly different from a Stalinist one on the Castro model. Gadaffi’s goons-for-pay are certainly murdering people in Libya—but it appears a haphazard and tardy affair. “A bumbling, haphazard and amateurish affair,” veteran Stalinists Fidel and Raul Castro are probably nodding to themselves. “We could have shown Gadaffi the proper remedy for these matters.”

“When even a portion of your armed forces turn against you—you’ve had it,” any Stalinist could have advised Gadaffi. “You nip these things in the bud.”

Upon arriving in Havana in Jan. of 1959 Che Guevara immediately recognized the moat around Havana's La Cabana fortress as a handy-dandy execution pit. At Babi-Yar, Hitler's SS had to dig one. Here Che Guevara and Fidel Castro had one ready-made and so they put their firing squads to work in triple-shifts.

Cuban-American Scholar Dr. Armando Lago documents 1,168 firing squad murders in the first few months of 1959. The Black Book of Communisms estimates 14,000 by the end of the 60’s.Vengeance – much less justice – had nothing to do with this bloodbath. Che's murderous method in La Cabana fortress in 1959 was exactly Stalin's murderous method in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Like Stalin's massacre of the Polish officer corps in the Katyn forest, like Stalin's Great Terror against his own officer corps a few years earlier, Che's (Castro-ordered) firing squad marathons were a perfectly rational and cold-blooded exercise that served their purpose ideally. This bloodbath decapitated – literally and figuratively--the first ranks of Cuba's Contras.

The victims were overwhelmingly military and police officers. Watching how many of these refused blindfolds and yelled defiantly at their murderers before the volley shattered their bodies show that the Cuban Bolsheviks had been diligent in rounding up the right victims. dustry" in Cuba (tourism) is run primarily by Cuba's generals. They also run the export industries. If anyone craves “stability” in Cuba, it's these high-rolling graduates of Cuba' Military Academy—but not just because of fiduciary considerations.

The Red Terror had come to Cuba.

Today Cuba's military is fat and happy -- has been for decades. They run Cuba. The only thing properly describable as an "in

Tito Rodriguez Oltmans, a former Cuban freedom-fighter and political prisoner, watched many of these men, as young cadets, perform one of the requisites for graduation from Cuba's military academy of the time. "They were all armed with Belgian .308 caliber FALs as they lined up for the firing squad," recalls Mr. Rodriguez, a prisoner in La Cabana prison in the early 1960s. "Every evening the cadets would be bused in from the Managua army base and the Mariel naval base near Havana. As darkness fell the condemned patriot -- shirtless and gagged -- would be dragged to the execution wall and bound. The cadets would line up only four meters in front of the patriot and all had loaded weapons." ... FUEGO!

A brief aside: historically and almost universally, most members of a firing squad shoot blanks, to assuage their conscience. But such assuaging would contradict the Cuban firing squads' most vital purpose, secretly named "El Compromiso Sangriento" (the Blood Covenant.) This tried and true Soviet scheme was presented by Soviet GRU agent Angel Ciutat to Che Guevara just weeks after he and Fidel entered Havana in January 1959. The scene was a meeting at Che's palatial (and recently stolen) estate in Tarara just west of Havana. Every candidate for officer, suggested Ciutat, would take his place in a firing squad and pull the trigger with live ammo.

In front of a genuine Soviet GRU agent, Che (who often signed his name Stalin II) was undoubtedly smitten and instantly embraced the idea. So let's see here: a policy suggested by a Soviet butcher and adopted by an Argentine hobo for murdering Cuban patriots, instantly became government policy in newly "nationalist" Cuba.

As recently documented by Cuban-American scholar Jose Azel, Cuba’s “Social media” is so tiny as to be essentially irrelevant. Cuba—a nation with more phones and TVs per capita than most European countries in 1958--today has fewer internet connections per-capita than Uganda and fewer cell phones than Papua New Guinea. The Stalinist regime is very vigilant in these matters.

Castro’s police state controls what its subjects, read, say, earn, eat (both food and amount), where they live, travel or work. In the mid 1990's the Catholic Human Rights group Pax Christi headquartered in Belgium, visited Cuba and (secretly) conducted a study on the status of the neighborhood snitch committees known as CDR's. Castro, under East German STASI tutelage, installed these in 1960, making a potential regime spy out of half the population. Instilling the pervasive fear and a mutual-suspicion society is essential to every communist dictatorship.

“Fear is the basic instrument of (Cuban) political control,” concludes the study. "There is one CDR for every 140 Cubans. The information at the State Security’s disposal can be used to threaten and intimidate anybody. There is no place to escape the tentacles of the State. Most ordinary Cubans reported that they remained intensely wary of CDR surveillance, even while conversing in their own homes.”

The CDRs also supervise the issuing of the monthly food ration cards to all Castro's subjects. “Food is a weapon” famously snickered Stalin's foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov during the Ukrainian Holocaust. 

Humberto Fontova 

From: TownHall

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Qaddafi's Friends in Cuba

A friend in need is a friend indeed?

With the unrest in Libya and particularly with his recent public relations debacles, leader Muammar Qaddafi is rapidly losing any remaining fans. Yet down in South America, apparently, a few stalwarts remain.

Fidel Castro penned a column in Cuba's Granma, warning of Libya's appeal to the United States because of it's vast petroleum reserves. "For me it is absolutely evident that the United States is not worried about peace in Libya, and will not hesitate to give NATO the order to invade this rich country maybe in a matter of hours or very few days," he wrote. Perhaps tellingly, though, while the two leaders have been allies at times, Castro was reticent with outright support for Qaddafi, noting that "we have to wait the necessary time to know with rigor how much is fact or lie."

In a look at the history of Qaddafi's relationship with Venezuela, Caracas daily El Universal reported that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez proclaimed his support for Qaddafi in 2009, claiming that "Qaddafi is to Libya as [Simon] Bolívar is to us." Simon Bolivar was involved in the liberation of much of Latin America from colonial rule. The superlatives didn't end there, Chavez calling Qaddafi a "revolutionary soldier," "a leader of of the Libyan revolution," and a "leader of all of Africa as well as Latin America."

Chavez and Qaddafi, both leaders of oil-rich nations, have had an unlikely relationship blossom between them in the past few years. El Universal reports that Chavez has visited Libya five times. Libya awarded Chavez with the "Qaddafi Human Rights Prize" in 2004. In March 2009, Qaddafi named a football stadium in Benghazi after Chavez. On his end, Chavez made Qaddafi the special guest at a conference between African and Latin American countries held on Venezuela's Isla Margarita later that year, where he also presented Qaddafi with a replica of Simon Bolivar's sword. Rumors were swirling as recently as last night that the Libyan strongman had made his way to Venezuela to seek shelter.

By Eli Rosenberg

From: The Atlantic Wire

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