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What happened in Brazil in 1964 and Indonesia in 1965 may have been the most important victories of the Cold War for the side that ultimately won—that is, the United States and the global economic system now in operation.
Most shockingly, and most importantly for this book, the two events led to the creation of a monstrous international network of extermination—that is, the systematic mass murder of civilians—across many more countries, which played a fundamental role in building the world we all live in today.
I fear that the truth of what happened contradicts so forcefully our idea of what the Cold War was, of what it means to be an American, or how globalization has taken place, that it has simply been easier to ignore it.
“The world will celebrate what we do today, because we are stopping Brazil from turning into another North Korea.”
The Act of Killing,
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The Look of Silence,
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certainly more so than any story of the Cold War that is focused primarily on white people in the United States and Europe.
In order for the new white and Christian country to take form, the indigenous population had to get out of the way.
One way to put this is that they wanted religious freedom. Another is that they wanted a society that was even more homogeneous, fundamentalist, and theocratic than the one that existed in seventeenth-century Europe.
The United States remained a brutally white supremacist society. The consequence of the a priori dismissal of the native population was genocide.
Throughout the Americas, from Canada down to Argentina, European colonization killed between fifty million and seventy million indigenous people, around 90 percent of the native American population. Scientists recently concluded that the annihilation of these peoples was so large that it changed the temperature of the planet.2 In the new United States of America, the destruction of the local peoples continued long after the declaration of independence from British rule.
When the United States entered World War II, it was what we would now consider an apartheid society.
a senator from Missouri named Harry S. Truman said, “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”
at least twenty-seven million Soviet citizens had died.
as well as the fact that it was communists who often resisted both fascism and colonialism earliest and most forcefully around the world—
All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.”
“I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”
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and employed a new chemical called napalm, only recently developed at a secret Harvard lab, to crush rebels who had fought against Hitler’s forces.
In their worldview, you certainly didn’t get socialism just because you wanted it.
Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, whose party remained popular for decades, said that the United States was a nation led by ignorant “slaveholders” who now wanted to buy entire nations just as they had bought human beings.
If you are simply promoting mild social reform, well, that is exactly what a communist would do, in order to conceal their true motives.
And if there are a lot of you, or you’re openly, proudly communist, that’s just as bad.
“Jakarta Axiom.”
And in 1954, when a special Senate committee recommended that Joseph McCarthy be condemned for breaking Senate rules, John F. Kennedy was the only Democrat not to vote against him.44
Americans were
“more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people.”
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill blamed the Indians for the famine his own government caused, saying it was their fault for “breeding
like rabbits,” and asked why Gandhi—whom Churchill loathed—hadn’t died yet.48
His team—often called his “gang of weirdos”
“Doing in the enemy is the right thing to do. Of course, there are some restraints on ends and means. If you go back to Greek culture and read Thucydides, there are limits to what you can do to other Greeks, who are a part of your culture. But there are no limits to what you can do to a Persian. He’s a Barbarian.” The communists, he concluded, “were barbarians.”
Almost all were captured or killed.
The Third World offered that opportunity.
The Netherlands called the attempts at reconquest “police actions,”
in the Congo, brutally controlled by the Belgians since King Leopold II established the Free Congo State in 1885 (and the United States rushed to be the first country in the world to recognize the colony),
“All those in our colony are unanimous in stating that the blacks are still children, both intellectually and morally.”
Among the Congolese delegation, she swears she met a charming young man by the name of Lumumba, but she didn’t know much else about him at the time.
“were not only ineffective but probably morally reprehensible in the number of lives lost.”
Once again, the CIA’s well-funded covert operations came up short against actual, battle-hardened communist soldiers dedicated to achieving victory. In Iran, however, where there was no such contingent, the young CIA found its first big win.
John Foster had two lifelong obsessions, according to historian James A. Bill: fighting communism and protecting the rights of multinational corporations. These came together in Iran.
When CIA station chief Roger Goiran argued the US was making a historic mistake by aligning itself with British colonialism, Allen Dulles recalled him to Washington.
But Roosevelt convinced them by saying that if they refused, he’d kill them.
In a bit of bizarre psychological warfare, Lansdale also collaborated closely with Desmond FitzGerald—a Wisner recruit at the CIA—to create a vampire.
where they would score the victory that would serve as a template for future covert interventions into the next decade.
In vain, a twenty-five-year-old Argentine doctor living in Guatemala City
at the time, named Ernesto “Che” Guevara, volunteered to go to the front, then tried to organize civilian militias to defend the capital.
He also showed Díaz a long list of Guatemalans who would need to be shot immediately. “But why?” Díaz asked. “Because they’re communists,” Peurifoy responded.
Castillo Armas, the US favorite, took over. Slavery returned to Guatemala. In the first few months of his government, Castillo Armas established Anticommunism Day, and rounded up and executed between three thousand and five thousand supporters of Árbenz.
Whatever their reasons, the United States established a reputation as a frequent and violent intruder into the affairs of independent nations.
