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November 28 - December 4, 2024
Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had given some advice to Truman—in order to get what they wanted, the White House had to “scare the hell out of the American people” about communism. Truman took that advice, and it worked wonders.
A young actor named Ronald Reagan imposed a loyalty oath on all the members of the Screen Actors Guild, the powerful union he led at the time.
It's always Reagan
That young doctor, Che Guevara, believed he learned an important lesson in 1954. He came to the conclusion that Washington would never allow mild social reform, let alone democratic socialism, to flower in its backyard, and that any movement for change would have to be armed, disciplined, and prepared for imperialist aggression.
Nationalism in the Third World meant something very different from what it had meant in Germany a decade prior. It was not about race, or religion, or even borders. It was built in opposition to centuries of colonialism.
“Let me explain—‘Cold War’ is the name they have given to the process by which America tries to dominate countries like Indonesia.”
Capitalist imperialism, Che believed, would wage war on any democratic socialist project, and therefore armed struggle and a tightly controlled state were the only options open to Third World revolutionaries.
“I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.”16
US motto
They were executed, murdered one by one, over just a few months, for affiliation with an unarmed political party that had been entirely legal and mainstream just weeks earlier.
They were sentenced to annihilation, and almost everyone around them was sentenced to a lifetime of guilt, trauma, and being told they had sinned unforgivably because of their association with the earnest hopes of left-wing politics.
But Washington shares guilt for every death. The United States was part and parcel of the operation at every stage, starting well before the killing started, until the last body dropped and the last political prisoner emerged from jail, decades later, tortured, scarred, and bewildered. At several points that we know of—and perhaps some we don’t—Washington was the prime mover, and provided crucial pressure for the operation to move forward or expand.
US strategy since the 1950s had been to try to find a way to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party, not because it was seizing power undemocratically, but because it was popular.
But how could the international press, and the State Department, remain entirely untroubled by the fact that this was achieved through the mass murder of unarmed civilians? Howard Federspiel, at the State Department, summed up the answer perfectly. “No one cared,” he recalled, “as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered.”
Living in Guinea, Nkrumah came to a new conclusion about the nature of neocolonialism. Given the state of the world, and considering the success of Western imperialism, the only path to revolution was protracted guerrilla struggle.39
of the Tricontinental Institute, put it, “The destruction of the Left had an enormous impact on the Third World. The most conservative, even reactionary social classes attained dominance over the political platform created in Bandung. As an adjunct to the military regimes, the political forces that emerged rejected the ecumenical anticolonial nationalism of the Left and the liberals for a cruel cultural nationalism that emphasized racialism, religion, and hierarchy.”
Washington was not worried that Chile’s economy would be destroyed under irresponsible left-wing mismanagement either, or even that Allende would harm US business interests. What scared the most powerful nation in the world was the prospect that Allende’s democratic socialism would succeed.
a moderate Cameroonian newspaper called Allende’s downfall “a slap in the face of the Third World.”
Manuel Contreras, a close collaborator with the CIA who created Pinochet’s deadly DINA secret police, knew that the point of state terror was not just wanton destruction of enemies, but to make resistance impossible and solidify the dominant political and economic structures.
The men behind Operation Condor often considered the nonviolent democracy and human rights activists operating abroad to be even more dangerous than armed guerrillas at home.
almost every political ideology in the world—not just the socialism and Marxism dominant in those guerrilla groups—allows for armed resistance against tyrants, and that includes the US revolutionary tradition.
In 1983, D’Aubuisson summed up the actually existing anticommunist ideology very well. “You can be a Communist,” he told reporter Laurie Becklund, “even if you personally don’t believe you are a Communist.
“In an historical sense—and especially as seen from the South—the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means,” writes Odd Arne Westad. “The new and rampant interventionism we have seen after the Islamist attacks on America in September 2001 is not an aberration but a continuation—in a slightly more extreme form—of US policy during the Cold War.”64
Ilom keeps sending more of its youth up north. This is not about love for the United States, or the American dream. They don’t want to go. They know who was responsible for the violence they’d suffered.
“I guess it’s funny—well, maybe ‘funny’ isn’t the word—but we know who is responsible for the violence that destroyed this place. We know it was the United States that was behind it. But we keep sending our kids there, because they have nowhere else to go.”
this loose network of extermination programs, organized and justified by anticommunist principles, was such an important part of the US victory that the violence profoundly shaped the world we live in today.
We do, however, live in a world built partly by US-backed Cold War violence.
