Che Guavara...forty years on.

Well, that's a word we learn around here at a early age..

Caudillo

Damned Irish!!!

Think of Napoleon & other "men on horseback" (including wannabes such as Boulanger).

Francis,

No matter how much you give way to your inherent Gaullic aggression, I will always forgive you - because I am such a nice guy.

Caudillismo.



Ehem, bravissimo, that is. (Though more Latin than Gaullic, I think.)

According to the DRAE (Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy) a caudillo is 1. "a man who heads, commands and guides people into war", 2. "A man who directs a guild, community or body".

According to the DUSAE (Dictionary of the use of Spanish in the Americas and Spain), a caudillo is 1."A man who holds the supreme command, both military and civilian"; 2. "A person who commands and guides a group of people, usually a group of armed people".

The DUSAE goes further: "The Caudillo is different from the leader... He's, by definition autocratic and impositive, guides himself by intuition... and has always the last word. While the leader shares power and decisions, the caudillo tends to be solitaire, but loves and promotes the personality cult."

Caudillo derives from the latin capitellus (small head) and appeared first in the Covarrubias Thesaurus (1611) with only its military meaning.

While the only head of State who named himself Caudillo is Spain's Francisco Franco ("Caudillo of Spain, by the grace of God", was his official title), it applies more often to Latin American despots.

Your problem, George, is that in matters of nicety, you'll never be able to touch me...

Francisco Franco got offizially the title "Caudillo" as well as Oliveira Salazar (he 'caudilho', of cours).


I think, "Führer" and "Duce" were used similar.

That may be, but I am always exactly as nice as I wish to be.

Yes, which denotes some ulterior motives and a consumed machiavelism..

But I forgive you, me being naturally nice..

I seek only to amuse myself.

Actually you are indeed a very amiable and nice guy. I suspect, however, that you confuse my appetite for irony and amusement, with Machivelian manipulativeness. My intentions are all good - well mostly.

See how manipulative you are?

But I suspect that you are trying again to get a rise out of me, which, obviously, will never happen..

Georgeob is of the wrong persuasion to get a rise out of you Francis

Che was NOT a good guy. He ran Castro's prisons for a time and there were many atrocities committed in the name of the movement. Decent was absolutely not allowed and dealt with in a ruthless fashon.

I went back to this subject in a holiday season blog on Observationalism (where I seem to be the only one left posting) - 'tis the time for revisiting timeless subjects, after all.

I did catch myself that at first blush, I totally took the numbers which you cited from Rummel's research, Thomas, at face value. They seemed predictable enough, after all. But I revised my post a little bit after reading up a bit more about Rummel. It was his own webpage, which you linked in, which first made me wonder a little, and then the Wikipedia page on him, notably the "Criticism" section. Now I'm back to wishing for alternative sources for the same kind of estimates.

I am not seeing criticisms for his figures re Cuba there...are you generalising from the criticism re the USSR?

Just that when I read that the man's use of numbers has been accused of padding, or at least of sharp deviations from the standard estimations, I became a lot more wary. I'd really just taken his numbers, as posted by Thomas, at face value, but apparently they're fairly controversial.

I mean, if he took Conquest's numbers on Soviet deaths, for example -- I read Conquest's "The Nation Killers", and it was expertly written, harrowing research. But yes, I mean, he's definitely on the far end of the scale in some respects -- so it doesn't, to me, give a good impression of Rummel's methodology if he did indeed just adopt Conquest's numbers. You'd want to base your numbers on a comparison and evaluation of available estimates, right, rather than just go with one at the highest end of the scale and work from there? Again, not passing judgment on what the right number was - I'd want to go back to Anne Applebaum's brilliant Gulag, for example, which contains a wealth of numbers that might well corroborate Conquest's, just that, yeah -- the Wikipedia para suggests that Rummel used a number that was over twice the standard assessment, and when questioned about it, referred to Conquest. That doesn't seem persuasive.

Also, I admit, it doesn't help that his Wikipedia page gave me the impression that he was very intelligent, but also fairly out of the mainstream, while his own webpage, at first glance anyway, and the one or two random articles of his I now read, gave off almost a crackpot vibe. For example the article in which he rants on about how US academia is dominated and controlled by leftist forces that indoctrinate students and stifle conservative and libertarian dissent ... did you know that in the humanities and social sciences at US universities, "there are more communists (they call themselves Marxists), than either libertarians or conservatives together"?

(Aside from the Okie-esque contention itself, since when does Marxists = communists?)

Anyway, bla bla etc and this is fairly deep into the weeds. I don't doubt his main finding - that the Castro regime was more bloody still than the Batista dictatorship it replaced. That would certainly fit the pattern of communist dictatorships, unfortunately. None of the above even needs to mean that his numbers are necessarily incorrect at all. There's plenty of scientists and academics who are scrupulous and precise to a fault in their core research and go off on various ill-advised limbs outside it. And the snippet on Wikipedia about his Soviet numbers is too elliptic to say much about.

Just that now, I'm less likely at least to take his numbers at face value. I mean, I obviously lack the know-how to corroborate the numbers myself - so yeah, it's all about how authoritative this or that source seems. Now I'm back to longing for an alternative source to confirm or contest these numbers, as the case may be.

Follow-up post:

Che (cont.), a photo gallery: the irony of the icon

Although it is never good policy to take anyone's numbers at face value, I think we're basically safe on this particular point.

1) In the Wikipedia article, the greater part of the "criticism" section concerns his theory about how democracies are much more peaceful than dictatorships. This theory, even if refuted, is irrelevant to the numbers.

2) The case against Rummel's facts, as presented in the article, is intellectually lame. It's a mere statement that his numbers are controversial, followed by a he-said-she-said story, neither side of which the author researches. The authors of the Wikipedia article makes no effort to research the claims of either side by themselves. I have given up paying attention to this kind of writing, having lived in America for a year now, and having read too many similarly lame reporting about "the controversial theory of evolution". I admit, though, that that's just my personal policy. It is not a factual rebuttal of the article, which would take more research work than I'm willing to invest at the moment.

3) Fortunately though, we needn't go into that. Let's just assume Rummel's critics are right. Let's give all the benefit of the doubt to the communists. Let's suppose Rummel's conservative caused mistakes of the same magnitudes as it did for the soviet communists. So, what if Rummel downplayed Batista's murders by a factor of two, and exaggerated the murder rate of Cuba's communists, also by a factor of two? Then the communists are only four times more murderous than Batista was, rather than fifteen times.

So even if we assume a very generous margin of error for Rummel, it doesn't change the conclusion: If you would reject a Batista T-shirt because Batista was a butcher, you have no reason to wear a Che Guevara T-shirt either.