[Occupymendocino] Fwd: [MCN-Discussion]- Why They Hate Us: The Real American History

[DANIEL BAKER]

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From: Nicholas Wilson <nwilson at mcn.org>
Date: Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 11:54 AM
Subject: [MCN-Discussion]- Why They Hate Us: The Real American History
To: discussion at lists.mcn.org


*This Is Why They Hate Us: The Real American History Neither Ted Cruz Nor
the New York Times Will Tell You*We talk democracy, then overthrow elected
governments and prop up awful regimes. Let's discuss the actual history.
*By* *Ben Norton* <http://www.alternet.org/authors/ben-norton-0> / Salon
<http://www.salon.com>


*November 20, 2015 *The *soi-disant* Land of the Free and Home of the Brave
has a long and iniquitous history of overthrowing democratically elected
leftist governments and propping up right-wing dictators in their place.

U.S. politicians rarely acknowledge this odious past ­ let alone
acknowledge that such policies continue well into the present day.
In the second Democratic presidential debate, however, candidate Bernie
Sanders condemned a long-standing government policy his peers rarely admit
exists.

“I think we have a disagreement,” Sanders said of fellow presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton. “And the disagreement is that not only did I
vote against the war in Iraq. If you look at history, you will find that
regime change ­ whether it was in the early ’50s in Iran, whether it was
toppling Salvador Allende in Chile, or whether it was overthrowing the
government of Guatemala way back when ­ these invasions, these toppling of
governments, regime changes have unintended consequences. I would say that
on this issue I’m a little bit more conservative than the secretary.”

“I am not a great fan of regime changes,” Sanders added.

“Regime change” is not a phrase you hear discussed honestly much in
Washington, yet it is a common practice in and defining feature of U.S.
foreign policy for well over a century. For many decades, leaders from both
sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, have pursued a bipartisan
strategy of violently overthrowing democratically elected foreign
governments that do not kowtow to U.S. orders.

In the debate, Sanders addressed three examples of U.S. regime change.
There are scores of examples of American regime change, yet these are
perhaps the most infamous instances.



*Iran, 1953 *Iran was once a secular democracy. You would not know this
from contemporary discussions of the much demonized country in U.S.
politics and media.

What happen to Iran’s democracy? The U.S. overthrew it in 1953, with the
help of the U.K. Why? For oil.

Mohammad Mosaddegh may be the most popular leader in Iran’s long history.
He was also Iran’s only democratically elected head of state.

In 1951, Mosaddegh was elected prime minister of Iran. He was not a
socialist, and certainly not a communist ­ on the contrary, he repressed
Iranian communists ­ but he pursued many progressive, social democratic
policies. Mosaddegh pushed for land reform, established rent control, and
created a social security system, while working to separate powers in the
democratic government.

In the Cold War, however, a leader who deviated in any way from free-market
orthodoxy and the Washington Consensus was deemed a threat. When Mossaddegh
nationalized Iran’s large oil reserves, he crossed a line that Western
capitalist nations would not tolerate.

The New York Times ran an article in 1951 titled “ British Warn Iran of
Serious Result if She Seizes Oil
<https://partners.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/052051iran-britain.html>.”
The piece, which is full of orientalist language, refers to Iranian oil as
“British oil properties,” failing to acknowledge that Britain, which had
previously occupied Iran, had seized that oil and claimed it as its own,
administering it under the auspices of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which
later became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and eventually British
Petroleum and modern BP.

The Times article noted that the U.S. “shares with Britain the gravest
concern about the possibility that Iranian oil, the biggest supply now
available in the Near East, might be lost to the Western powers.” The
British government is quoted making a thinly veiled threat.

This threat came into fruition in August 1953. In Operation Ajax, the CIA,
working with its British equivalent MI6, carried out a coup, overthrowing
the elected government of Iran and reinstalling the monarchy. The shah
would remain a faithful Western ally until 1979, when the monarchy was
abolished in the Iranian Revolution.



*Guatemala, 1954 *Less than a year after overthrowing Iran’s first
democratically elected prime minister, the U.S. pursued a similar regime
change policy in Guatemala, toppling the elected leader Jacobo Árbenz.

In 1944, Guatemalans waged a revolution, toppling the U.S.-backed
right-wing dictator Jorge Ubico, who had ruled the country with an iron
fist since 1931. Ubico, who fancied himself the 20th-century Napoleon, gave
rich landowners and the U.S. corporation the United Fruit Company (which
would later become Chiquita) free reign over Guatemala’s natural resources,
and used the military to violently crush labor organizers.

Juan José Arévalo was elected into office in 1944. A liberal, he pursued
very moderate policies, but the U.S. wanted a right-wing puppet regime that
would allow U.S. corporations the same privileges granted to them by Ubico.
In 1949, the U.S. backed an attempted coup, yet it failed.

In 1951, Árbenz was elected into office. Slightly to the left of Arévalo,
Árbenz was still decidedly moderate. The U.S. claimed Árbenz was close to
Guatemala’s communists, and warned he could ally with the Soviet Union. In
reality, the opposite was true; Árbenz actually persecuted Guatemalan
communists. At most, Árbenz was a social democrat, not even a socialist.

Yet Árbenz, like Mosaddegh, firmly believed that Guatemalans themselves,
and not multinational corporations, should benefit from their country’s
resources. He pursued land reform policies that would break up the control
rich families and the United Fruit Company exercised over the country ­
and, for that reason, he was overthrown.

President Truman originally authorized a first coup attempt, Operation
PBFORTUNE, in 1952. Yet details about the operation were leaked to the
public, and the plan was abandoned. In 1954, in Operation PBSUCCESS, the
CIA and U.S. State Department, under the Dulles Brothers, bombed Guatemala
City and carried out a coup that violently toppled Guatemala’s democratic
government.

The U.S. put into power right-wing tyrant Carlos Castillo Armas. For the
next more than 50 years, until the end of the Guatemalan Civil War in 1996,
Guatemala was ruled by a serious of authoritarian right-wing leaders who
brutally repressed left-wing dissidents and carried out a campaign of
genocide against the indigenous people of the country.



*Chile, 1973 *September 11 has permanently seared itself into the memory of
Americans. The date has also been indelibly imprinted in the public
consciousness of Chileans, because it was on this same day in 1973 that the
U.S. backed a coup that violently overthrew Chile’s democracy.

In 1970, Marxist leader Salvador Allende was democratically elected
president of Chile. Immediately after he was elected, the U.S. government
poured resources into right-wing opposition groups and gave millions of
dollars to Chile’s conservative media outlets.

The CIA deputy director of plans wrote in a 1970 memo
<http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/10/40_years_after_chiles_9_11>, “It is
firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup… It is
imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so
that the USG [U.S. government] and American hand be well hidden.” President
Nixon subsequently ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream” in Chile,
to “prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.”

Allende’s democratic government was violently overthrown on September 11,
1973. He died in the coup, just after making an emotional speech, in which
he declared he would give his life to defend Chilean democracy and
sovereignty.

Far-right dictator Augusto Pinochet, who combined fascistic police state
repression with hyper-capitalist free-market economic policies, was put
into power. Under Pinochet’s far-right dictatorship, tens of thousands of
Chilean leftists, labor organizers, and journalists were killed,
disappeared, and tortured. Hundreds of thousands more people were forced
into exile.

One of the most prevailing myths of the Cold War is that socialism was an
unpopular system imposed on populations with brute force. Chile serves as a
prime historical example of how the exact opposite was true. The masses of
impoverished and oppressed people elected many socialist governments, yet
these governments were often violently overthrown by the U.S. and other
Western allies.

The overthrow of Allende was a turning point for many socialists in the
Global South. Before he was overthrown, some leftists thought popular
Marxist movements could gain state power through democratic elections, as
was the case in Chile. Yet when they saw how the U.S. violently toppled
Allende’s elected government, they became suspicious of the prospects of
electoral politics and turned to guerrilla warfare and other tactics.


*Modern example: Egypt, 2013 *These are just a small sample of the great
many regime changes the U.S. government has been involved in. More recent
examples, which were supported by Hillary Clinton, as Sanders implied,
include the U.S. government’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and
Muammar Qadhafi in Libya. In these cases, the U.S. was overthrowing
dictators, not democratically elected leaders ­ but, as Sanders pointed
out, the results of these regime changes have been nothing short of
catastrophic.

The U.S. is also still engaging in regime change when it comes to
democratically elected governments.

In the January 2011 revolution, Egyptians toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak, a
close U.S. ally who ruled Egypt with an iron fist for almost 30 years.

In July 2013, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed
Morsi, was overthrown in a military coup. We now know that the U.S.
supported and bankrolled
<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/07/2013710113522489801.html>the
opposition forces that overthrew the democratically elected president.

Today, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a brutal despot who is widely recognized as
even worse than Mubarak, reigns over Egypt. In August 2013, Sisi oversaw a
slaughter of more than 800 peaceful Egyptian activists at Raba’a Square.
His regime continues to shoot peaceful protesters in the street. An
estimated 40,000 political prisoners languish in Sisi’s jails, including
journalists.


In spite of his obscene human rights abuses, Sisi remains a close ally of
the U.S. and Israel ­ much, much closer than was the democratically elected
President Morsi.

In the second Democratic presidential debate, when Sanders called Clinton
out on her hawkish, pro-regime change policies, she tried to blame the
disasters in the aftermath in countries like Iraq and Libya on the
“complexity” of the Middle East. As an example of this putative complexity,
Clinton cited Egypt. “We saw a dictator overthrown, we saw Muslim
Brotherhood president installed, and then we saw him ousted and the army
back,” she said.

Clinton failed to mention two crucial factors: One, that the U.S. backed
Mubarak until the last moment
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-zunes/us-continues-to-back-egyp_b_815132.html>;
and two, that the U.S. also supported the coup that overthrew Egypt’s first
and only democratically elected head of state.



*Other examples *There are scores of other examples of U.S.-led regime
change.

   - In 1964 the U.S. backed a coup in Brazil, toppling left-wing President
   João Goulart.
   - In 1976, the U.S. supported a military coup in Argentina that replaced
   President Isabel Perón with General Jorge Rafael Videla.
   - In 2002, the U.S. backed a coup that overthrew democratically elected
   Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Chávez was so popular, however, that
   Venezuelans filled the street and demanded him back.
   - In 2004, the U.S. overthrew Haiti’s first democratically elected
   president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
   - In 2009, U.S.-trained far-right forces overthrew the democratically
   elected government of Honduras, with tacit support from Washington.


The list goes on.

Latin America, given its proximity to the U.S. and the strength of
left-wing movements in the region, tends to endure the largest number of
U.S. regime changes, yet the Middle East and many parts of Africa have seen
their democratic governments overthrown as well.

>From 1898 to 1994, Harvard University historian John Coatsworth documented
<http://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/book/united-states-interventions> at
least 41 U.S. interventions in Latin America ­ an an average of one every
28 months for an entire century.

Numerous Latin American military dictators were trained at the School of
the Americas, a U.S. Department of Defense Institute in Fort Benning,
Georgia. The School of the Americas Watch, an activist organization that
pushes for the closing of the SOA, has documented many of these regime
changes
<http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/02/11/half-a-century-of-u-s-interventions-in-latin-america-in-one-map/>,
which have been carried out by both Republicans and Democrats.

Diplomatic cables
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/latin-america-wikileaks-hugo-chavez-rafael-correa-obama-venezuela-intervention/>
released by whistleblowing journalism outlet WikiLeaks show the U.S. still
maintains a systematic campaign of trying to overthrow Latin America’s
left-wing governments.

By not just acknowledging the bloody and ignominious history of U.S. regime
change, but also condemning it, Sen. Sanders was intrepidly trekking into
controversial political territory into which few of his peers would dare to
tread. Others would do well to learn from Bernie’s example.

--Ben Norton is a politics staff writer at Salon. You can find him on
Twitter at @BenjaminNorton <http://twitter.com/benjaminnorton>.

Source:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-they-hate-us-real-american-history-neither-ted-cruz-nor-new-york-times-will

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