Just Ideas Will Triumph or Disaster Will Triumph

by Fidel Castro Ruz, 1 September 2014 Translated by Joshua Tartakovsky

The world hasn’t had a respite from war in recent years, particularly since the European Economic Community, under the tight and absolute direction of the United States, decided the hour has come to settle scores with what remained of the two great nations which, inspired by the ideas of Marx, have carried the heroic feat of putting an end to the colonial and imperialist order imposed on the world by Europe and the United States.

In former Russia, a revolution erupted that shook the world.

It was expected that the first great socialist revolution would take place in the most industralized countries in Europe, in England, France, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It, however, took place in Russia, whose territory extends across Asia, from the northern Europe to southern Alaska, the latter of which had been Tsarist territory, sold for a few dollars to a country that would subsequently be most interested in attacking and destroying the revolution and the nation that gave birth to it.

The greatest achievement of the new state was the creation of a Union capable of gathering together its resources and sharing its technology with a great number of weak and less developed nations, inevitable victims of colonial exploitation. Would it not be useful in today’s world to have a real society of nations that would respect the ways, faiths, cultures, technologies and resources of the accessible places on the planet, that so many humans would like to visit and to know? And would it not be far more just that all of the people, who today in fractions of seconds communicate with one another across the planet, would see in others a friend or a brother and not an enemy ready to exterminate him with the means produced by the human capacity to create knowledge?

Believing that human beings are capable of having such objectives, I think that no one has the right to destroy cities, assassinate children, smash homes, sow terror, hunger and death world-wide. In what corner of the world can they justify such actions? If you recall, at the end of the carnage of WWII, the world was thrilled with the creation of the United Nations because a large part of humanity imagined such prospects, though it did not fully define its objectives. A colossal deception is becoming obvious today as problems appear suggesting the possible outbreak of a war using arms capable of putting an end to the human existence.

There are unscrupulous individuals exist, and it appears not only a few, who consider virtuous their willingness to die, but above all to kill to defend their shameful privileges.

Many people are astonished to hear the statements of some European spokesmen of NATO expressed in the style and look of SS Nazis. On occasion, they even dress in dark suits in the middle of the summer.

We have a powerful adversary in our closest neighbor: the United States. We had warned them we would resist their blockade, though it could come at a very high cost for our country. There is no worse price to pay than to capitulate to an enemy when he has no reason nor right to attack you. This was the sentiment of a small and isolated nation. The rest of the governments of this hemisphere, with rare exceptions, had joined the powerful and influential empire. [Our willingness to resist] was not a matter of a personal attitude on my part; it was the sentiment of a small nation which, since the beginning of the [last] century, had been not only the political but also the economic property of the United States. Spain had ceded this country to the U.S.A. after we had suffered five centuries of colonialism and an incalculable number of deaths and material losses in the struggle for independence.

The empire reserved the right to intervene militarily in Cuba on the basis of a treacherous constitutional amendment that a powerless Congress, unable to resist, had passed. Apart from being the owners of almost everything in Cuba — abundant lands, the largest central sugar refineries, the mines, the banks and all the way up to the privilege of printing our money — they prohibited us from producing food grains sufficient to feed ourselves.

When the USSR disintegrated and when the Socialist Camp disappeared together with it, we continued to resist: the state and the revolutionary people together, we continued our independent march.

I do not wish, however, to dramatize this modest history. I prefer instead to emphasize that the politics of the empire are so dramatically ridiculous that it will not take long before it will be consigned to the dustbin of history. The empire of Adolf Hitler, inspired by greed, passed into history with no more glory than that of the aggressive and bourgeois governments of NATO, which have become the laughing stock of Europe and the world, and whose Euro, just like the dollar, will soon become worthless, as they come to depend on the yuan and the ruble, as the booming Chinese economy becomes closely united with the enormous economic and technical potential of Russia.

Another thing that has become a symbol of imperial politics is the cynicism of the West.

As is known, John McCain was the Republican candidate in the 2008 elections. He came into the public light as a pilot who was shot down while bombing the population of the city of Hanoi. A Vietnamese rocket reached him hard at work, and the plane and pilot fell into a lake located nearby the capital, on the outskirts of the city.

An old, retired Vietnamese soldier who was making a living working nearby saw him fall out of the plane and went to the aid of the wounded pilot; as the old soldier offered assistance, a group of Hanoi residents, who had suffered from the aerial attacks, ran to settle scores with this murderer. The same soldier persuaded them not to do so, since the pilot was a prisoner and his life was to be respected. The Yankee authorities themselves contacted the government and begged that no action will be taken against the pilot.

Besides clemency being the policy of the Vietnamese government in respect to its prisoners of war, the pilot was a son of an admiral in the U.S. Navy who had played a prominent role in the Second World War and was still occupying an important position.

The Vietnamese had captured a big fish in that bombing and. as is logical, thinking about the inevitable peace talks that will put an end to the unjust war imposed on them, developed a relationship with the prisoner, who was very happy to draw all the possible benefits from this adventure. Of course, no Vietnamese had recounted this to me, nor have I ever asked them about it. I read about it and the details tally with what I learned later. I’ve also read that Mr. McCain has written that as a prisoner in Vietnam, while being tortured, he heard voices in Spanish advising his torturers what to do and how to do it. They were voices of Cubans, McCain claims. Cuba never had advisers in Vietnam.

Their military knew very well how to conduct their war.

General Giap was one of the most brilliant commanders in our times, who in Dien Bien Phy managed to place the artillery canons in remote, rough jungle terrain, something that the Yankee and European militaries considered impossible. With these canons they fired at such close range that it was impossible to neutralize them without nuclear bombs which would also have killed the invaders. Other relevant steps, all difficult and complex, were employed to encircle the invading troops and force them to an embarrassing surrender.

The fox McCain drew out all possible advantages from the military defeat of the Yankee and European invaders. Nixon could not persuade his National Security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to accept the suggestion of the president himself, who in moments of relaxation asked, “Why don’t we drop one of these bombs, Henry?“ The true bomb dropped when the president’s men tried to spy on opponents of the opposition party. That could not be tolerated!

Despite that, the most cynical act of McCain has been his performance in the Middle East. Senator McCain is the most unconditional ally of Israel in Mossad’s machinations, something that even his worst adversaries could not imagine. McCain has participated together with Mossad in the creation of the Islamic State, which has seized control of a significant part of Iraq as well as, they say, a third of the territory of Syria. The IS already has an income of billions and is a threat to Saudi Arabia and to other states in this complex region that supply the most important part of global oil.

Would it not be preferable to struggle for the production of more food and industrial products, to construct hospitals and schools for thousands of millions of human beings who are in desperate need, to promote the arts and culture, to fight against epidemics which cause the death of more than half of those infected, to devise solutions to finally eliminate diseases such as cancer, Ebola, malaria, dengue, Chikungunya, diabetes and other illnesses that affect human beings?

If today it is possible to prolong life, health and the productive time of persons, it is perfectly possible to plan for the development of the population so as to increase productivity, culture and the development of human values.

Just ideas will triumph or disaster will triumph.

Fidel Castro Ruz
August 31 2014
10:25 p.m.

Joshua Tartakovsky is an editor at Global Independent Analytics, currently in Donetsk.

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