Who Rules the World? (American Empire Project)

by Noam Chomsky

The way to deal with a virus is to kill it and inoculate any potential victims. That sensible policy is just what Washington pursued, quite successfully. Cuba has survived, but without the ability to achieve its feared potential. And the region was “inoculated” with vicious military dictatorships, beginning with the Kennedy-inspired military coup that established a terror and torture regime in Brazil shortly after Kennedy’s assassination. The generals had carried out a “democratic rebellion,” Ambassador Lincoln Gordon cabled home. The revolution was “a great victory for free world,” which prevented a “total loss to West of all South American Republics” and should “create a greatly improved climate for private investments.” This democratic revolution was “the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century,” Gordon held, “one of the major turning points in world history” in this period, which removed what Washington saw as a Castro clone.