>>> Jacob Segal <jpsegal at rcn.com> 04/25/00 11:50AM >>>
>>>> Jacob Segal <jpsegal at rcn.com> 04/23/00 01:32PM >>>
>Interesting too for Yoshie to compare the cult of personality in North
>Korea to the cult of the Founding Fathers in the US, but I do think that
>the cult in North Korea is of a seriously greater intensity and allow for
>no dissent at all.
>
>________________
>
>CB: How about the slaves the Founding Fathers like Jefferson and
>Washington owned ? Did they have any power to dissent ? How about the
>Native Americans ? Did the Founding Fathers allow them to dissent ? How
>about the all of the white women who couldn't vote ?
>
>How ridiculous to claim that a genocidal,slave , male supremecist system
>allowed more dissent than N. Korea 2000.
>
>CB
Surely it is obviously I meant contemporary US society. Clearly, the US as a slave society and genicidal towards native-Americans was much worse than Communist North Korea.
Question for Charles Brown: When you speak of Cuban democracy it seems to me that the "Cuban people" become a homogenous group without internal disagreements and division.
___________
CB: Why ?
_________ Democracy without disagreement is no democracy at all, which is the problem with US democracy, as you correcly point out. The construction of a Cuban people this way reminds me of the jinogistic assertion of the will of the American People, again understood as a single entity.
____________
CB: The questions you pose raise the fundamental meaning of democracy. Like anything else, it must be analyzed as a contradiction. Theoretically, the U.S. Constitution lays out these fundamentals. The Constitution starts out with the words , "We, the People,...", which is an assertion of popular sovereignty as the first principle of democracy. But , as you point out, a "people" are not only a unity, but a diversity. So, the contradiction I refer to is well said in the famous U.S. motto, e pluribus unum, out of many one or unity in diversity. And the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights for example, theoretically, addresses the tension between the unity of the whole people with the millions of diverse individuals who compose this whole. ( This is also a relation of the whole and the parts).
The Cuban nation has this same dialectic of unity in diversity. However, not all diversity is in antagonistic contradiction with the overall national unity. In fact, many advantages come to the many different individuals from the social whole. Individual humans are social beings. The social division of labor in modern society means that every individual lives based on the coordinated activity of millions of others etc. So, conflict with the larger unity is not the sole or even prime characteristic of diversity and individuality.
Sorry to go on so long, but an important point with Cuba is to recognize the true military , political and economic threat to its independence from the U.S. I won't go into that whole history here, but the point is nations require greater unity when they must carryout military and political defense or must remain in a posture of defense for decades. This concrete circumstance forces Cuba to skew its political structure in the direction of unity in some ways.
However, I must say that the many, many reports on life in Cuba that I have read or heard over the years , both pro and con, give me the impression that there is as much individualism in Cuba as the U.S. There is a lot of what I would call artificial individuality in the U.S. Also ,the claim that the U.S. is so tolerant of dissent compared to other countries is very exaggerated , by my experience. Dissent on particularly important issues is openly and effectively crushed in the U.S. In the main and on a day to day basis ,this is done through the rule of $$$$$$$$$ , however, if necessary terror, force and the state apparatus ( law) will imprison communists or carry out assassinations , etc. The U.S. system cleverly uses "civil" repression ( and stupification as with television mentality, church, et al.) with intermittent "criminal" repression, but nonetheless , dissent is effectively corralled, and the status quo maintained
Also, since the Cuban circumstance is true defense against an imperialist aggressor, and Cuba is not an imperialist aggressor, the substantial unity of the vast majority of the Cuban population on independence from the U.S. is not jingoism, and is in fact the exact opposite of jingoism as it is self-defense against U.S. jingoism. (Cuba is a former U.S. colony, i.e. a definitive object of U.S. jingoism).
CB