Although an immense majority of people in my circle and reading the blog agreed with this capture, there might be a couple that are not very agreeable with the message:

There was a reply to my answer and I passed along some my thoughts:

There is also a big component of Family/Personal history which leads me to feel the way I do about both set of idiots.

My mom and dad  were born four and five years before the Spanish Civil War. Dad has passed away and mom is still puttering around the house. Both endured the misery of living in a country at war with itself because fascist and communists thought they were the best option and justified the shit they pulled on people. The fascists won and my folks lived in the abject poverty of a ravaged country under an asshole dictator. My Grand Uncle and Grand Aunt had done the unthinkable at that time: They eloped and with the little money they had, bought passage to Cuba  and with a lot of effort opened a bodega which evolved into a supermarket and a fine meats butcher shop which even made deliveries! Well you can imagined what happened to their hard work and properties after  bunch of bearded assholes took over the island in 1959. A year and a half later, the Communists had appropriated the effort of  30 years but were kind enough to let them work for peanuts.

By then my folks had moved to Venezuela, escaping an Europe incapable of sustaining its decimated population. And even though they landed in a country under the power of a fascist, something wonderful happened in 1958 and the country became a democracy after deposing the fascist asshole.

So when I was born, I was the citizen of a free country (pretty free for Latin American standards) and my Grand Uncle and Grand Aunt and their children (adults by then) escaped Cuba… well one almost didn’t since he had the balls to be a part of the Bay of Pigs invasion. He got caught was sent to prison, tortured and was scheduled to be executed, but bribes were paid by my Gran Uncle who obtained his release under the condition he left Cuba forever. He had lost almost half his regular weight and all the hair on his head in less than a year; it never grew back. Many times I asked him point-blank what happened to him in prison. For some reason I was the only one he would not lash out for asking, but his answer was always the same: “Carajito , es mejor que no sepas” (Young one, you are better off not knowing.) He took what happened to him to his grave.

They settled in Puerto Rico, opened a smaller version of their butcher shop (With delivery! They were very proud of that) and lived a comfortable life till their deaths. Although they fared better than many of their friends and countrymen, there was always a sadness about Cuba. It was their sweat and blood that was stolen.  And even the Fascist didn’t fuck with that too much.

So, by the 1960s, my family had experienced the “joys” of both sets of Authoritarianism. I was drilled hard about the evils of both since I could build a coherent sentence, but you are a little kid and although you respected your elders, well, the tales got boring.

In the early 1970s it is decided that I should travel to Spain to visit the kin I did not know. It was to be my first plane trip (in a DC-10, 8 hours) with my mom and my Grand Uncle and Grand Aunt and her kids. I met my Grandparents who owned a little farm and some land that mostly grew rocks and again, being a kid, I had fun screwing around in the hills of Galicia.

We drove back to Madrid and my Grand Uncle insisted that we needed to get some culture, so we did the touristy thing. We visited The Escorial palace, some famous squares and churches and one of the last things we visited was the still under construction  Valle de los Caidos (The Valley of the Fallen). According to Wikipedia:

” the monument was meant to be a “national act of atonement” and reconciliation. The Valley of the Fallen, as a surviving monument of Franco’s rule, and its Catholic basilica remain controversial, in part since 10% of the construction workforce consisted of convicts, some of whom were Spanish Republican political prisoners.”

And that is what the 11-year-old me saw through loaned binoculars: Chained prisoners breaking granite with pickaxes in the Spanish summer. That ruined my trip to Spain to the amount I did not care to return for another 10 years and only because my mother begged me so she would not go alone to visit her kin.

In my late teens, I met a survivor of a Venezuelan fascist concentration camp that existed till 2 years before I was born (Imagine Devil’s Island for political prisoners). I saw the scars of the shit they pulled on him and he had difficulty walking because he was forced to spend days standing on the edge of a tire rim which deformed the bones inside his feet.

Basically, by the time I went to college in Venezuela, I was a radicalized asshole that could not stomach Fascism or Communism. The trend still continues to this day specially when everything we built and worked for in Venezuela is now communist detritus.

So some Young KKK/Nazi asshole is never gonna see daylight again because ran over a bunch Communists Assholes? That is the universe balancing out Karma among members the Asshole Universe.

It is a beautiful thing to watch. Pass the pop corn.