Last Updated: Friday - 09/24/2010

A long list of support for military takeovers

Forty-five years ago, Erich Fromm wrote in The Art of Loving: "Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard while every action of oneself is judged by another. The enemy is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble."

The Operation Enduring Freedom against global terrorism should be seen in this light. As free speech and freedom of the press is subjected to censure, it becomes clear that uninterrupted free trade is the real objective of Enduring Freedom.

The news about Operation Veritas, as Tony Blair calls it, is limited to blurred video game images and carefully phrased government bulletins.

As for free speech, let us consider two Canadian incidents: The 81-year-old veteran who made a jocular remark about a bomb in his wife's tiny cosmetic purse and the statement by Sunera Thobani that "the path of U.S. foreign policy is soaked in blood."

Both people were jumped on by "guardians of the national interest." Now that we are at war we don't want to be confused by facts. This war is declared not against a nation but against global fascist terrorism wherever it rears its ugly head.

The basic fact is that since the Second World War to defeat fascism, the U.S. organized under its protection and sponsorship a neo-fascist system of client states ruled by terror and torture, to serve a small local and foreign business and military elite.

Here is a partial list of U.S. client states which used terror on an administrative basis for some period during the last few decades since the Second World War - Greece, Portugal, Spain and Turkey, each with their own gruesome history of closeted skeletons.

The systemic use of torture by these client states was functionally related to U.S. economic interests to stifle unions and civil society "subversion" which might interfere with the freedom of business action.

The Latin American list is longer, starting with the overthrow of the democratic Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 and replacing it with a regime of torture and oppression which cost the lives of 200,000 citizens, 150,000 disappeared, a million people displaced and hundreds of villages razed to the ground.

Since 1960 over 18 Latin American regimes were subjected to military takeovers, some by sabotage and subversion, others by direct aggression. In each case the U.S. involvement to install and maintain fascist regimes was crucial.

Here is the list in alphabetical order: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Yet the fundamental belief among U.S. citizens and in allied nations is that the United States is dedicated to furthering the cause of democracy and human rights throughout the world.

Each president from Truman and Eisenhower on has said so and we believed like a dazed Alice in Wonderland.

Finally, there has been the involvement in Africa, from Tunisia and Morocco to South Africa and elsewhere; the involvement in Indochina, Korea, Cambodia and Vietnam, the installment of Suharto in Indonesia which took 500,000 lives and the brutal martial law of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.

I'm running out of space, but let's not forget the U.S. imposed terror regime of the Shah of Iran in 1953 and the various dictatorships in the Middle East.

And now we are fighting the fascist regime of the Taliban, also installed by the U.S. What's next? The Northern Alliance?

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