Anyway, given his relationship with David Hart, I say we just rename him “Silver Birch Online” and have done with it.

I do know that the various guerilla armies that were trained in China are said to have introduced the more virulent, quinnine-resistant malaria into Africa (from China or Vietnam as I recall). There’s an article on this in the (South African) Daily Mail & Guardian of a few years back – a full online archive is available on their website.

dsquared, thanks for the links. I’ll read them in due course. Regarding your:
“I am slower than you to hang someone for being an idiot about third world guerillas in the 80s”
I’m against capital punishment, and I don’t believe that pointing out the contradictions and/or opportunism in someone’s behaviour is hanging them. If anything one could say that PDS has hung himself – because he has been exposed as being as vulnerable to criticism as the people he attacks mercilessly from his own high horse every day.

And if you think about it he could have said “mea culpa, I was a bit of a follower of stupid causes as a student” and nobody could really hold that against him. But instead he came out with his guns blazing, apparently using a law which he has publicly criticised, to silence criticism.

And the criticism of him has not been personal (like much of the gay-bashing innuendo we see on his site for example) but has been substantial criticism of his actions and behaviour, and of the disreputable people he has chosen to be associated with.

As far as Cubans in South America – they were definitely in Argentina and Bolivia and probably elsewhere as well. The latter is particularly significant as every 17 year old’s favourite T-shirt and some of his loyal band went almost directly from Angola to there. And it is, of course, where he (of the beret and the diaries) famously kicked the bucket – or, more acurately, the CIA threw it at him.

Bar one or two tidying up exercises, mainly when Sunny Hundal’s interview with Guido is released, I’m out of the blog war business. Trying to act in good faith in these matters is largely fruitless and demoralising.

You are, for my money, the best blogger in the country – your post on personal responsibility won the ‘Reactionary Snob Award For Best Blog Post’ in the annual snobbies.

Don’t waste your time with this nonsense – get back to what you do best.

RS

Never heard that one myself. I don’t really know much about South America though – did the Cubans send troops to Nicaragua or something? Cuba certainly contributed a lot of malaria treatment facilities to Angola.

I guess they could have been a vector for the malaria parasite, but I’m not aware of it ever having been wiped out in Latin America. This chart seems to show a big spike in malaria cases in Colombia shortly after the Cubans withdrew in 1989, but the people who put it together say it’s an El Nino cycle event. It also shows endemic malaria since before the Angolan civil war began, so I don’t think the Cubans can be wholly responsible.

http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/climate_impacts_and_tropical_diseases_in_columbia

In general, though, the track record of Cubans in Africa is yet another data point for the thesis “fucking around in other people’s civil wars is a really stupid idea”. About the best that could be said of them is that they didn’t massacre prisoners, much.