Perhaps the most stomach-turning recurrence of Yuri Andropov’s anti-American narrative is Osama bin Laden’s 2007 taped speech, in which the leader of al-Qaeda recycled Vietnam-era leftist legends, applying them to Iraq:
In the Vietnam War, the leaders of the White House claimed at the time that it was a necessary and crucial war, and during it, Rumsfeld and his aides murdered two million villagers. And when Kennedy took over the presidency and deviated from the general line of policy drawn up for the White House and wanted to stop this unjust war, that angered the owners of the major corporations who were benefiting from its continuation. And so Kennedy was killed, and al-Qaeda wasn’t present at that time, but rather, those corporations were the primary beneficiary from his killing.
Compare this to a statement by Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s leftist president, with regards to Honduras: “If the oligarchies break the rules of the game as they have done, the people have the right to resistance and combat, and we are with them.” True to the established template, Chavez rejects the possibility of common people resisting a leftist takeover, so the culprit must be some mysterious unidentified “oligarchies.” Painting by numbers, he predictably ends up with a picture of a CIA conspiracy.
Only this time, given President Obama’s ideological affinity with the ousted would-be dictator, Chavez’s caricature of defenders of liberty as CIA puppets isn’t working.
An expert in the region, J. Michael Waller, explains that the CIA indeed has been involved in Latin American politics with varying degrees of success:
One of its state-of-the-art operations occurred in the early 1950s when President Eisenhower authorized the CIA to overthrow the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, who was subverting Guatemala’s fragile democratic institutions to set up a leftist regime. The U.S. correctly joined many Guatemalans in fearing that Arbenz would bring his country into the Soviet camp. This was early in the Cold War, and it pre-dated Fidel Castro’s revolution.
But that successful operation also happened to be the last of its kind:
Had President Kennedy not gotten cold feet and aborted the CIA-run attempt to overthrow Castro in 1961, abandoning Cuban resistance fighters at the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro never would have consolidated his power and subverted the hemisphere and other parts of the world, and we never would have had a Cuban Missile Crisis.
Most of the other CIA political operations in Latin America were aimed at defeating the pro-Soviet left; interestingly, the CIA covertly funded the center-left, including socialists, to keep them from falling into the Soviet camp. The CIA almost never covertly supported right-wing forces; those forces were perfectly capable of operating on their own, and many were clumsy and even unnecessarily brutal in crushing the extreme left.
When the Marxists took power in Nicaragua in 1979, with the help of Jimmy Carter, it was the poor rural peasants who led the counter-revolutionary revolt. Campesinos from the countryside took up arms to fight the socialist revolution, because the Sandinistas began taking away their land, forcing them to work on collective farms, and conscripted them into a gigantic revolutionary army with Soviet weapons and Soviet-bloc trainers. The peasant resistance was supported by elements of the old Somoza regime who were the only ones at the time with military leadership experience, but the rank-and-file combatants were overwhelmingly poor peasants. Many of the fighters were former Sandinistas who had grown disillusioned with the socialist ideal.
Waller does not hide his sympathies:
I know this firsthand because I was with the Nicaraguan “contra” fighters at the time, between 1983 and 1989. They got started on their own and, without any foreign assistance, formed Latin America’s largest peasant guerrilla army since the Mexican Revolution. The “contras” had a functioning army two or three years before receiving American military support, authorized by Congress and administered through the CIA. They succeeded in preventing the Marxists from establishing a socialist dictatorship.
Today the CIA operates more tightly than ever under strict laws and bureaucratic guidelines, and the oversight committees in Congress are informed of every significant covert operation. Every such operation requires a presidential “finding.” The CIA cannot operate on its own. So if the CIA was involved in ousting former Honduran President Zelaya, as Hugo Chavez is claiming, then it was with the personal authorization of President Barack Obama and with the knowledge of the Democrat leadership in both houses of Congress.
The lunatic left like Hugo Chavez need the CIA boogeyman to justify their own extremism. We don’t hear such anti-CIA accusations coming from the more mature, “responsible” left as in the leaders of countries like Chile and Brazil. Not even the newly elected president of El Salvador, Mauricio Funes of the Marxist FMLN party, is accusing the CIA of being involved in the Honduran events.
So if the CIA was behind the ouster of Hugo Chavez’s Honduran ally, it would be because Barack Obama personally authorized it. The idea is an absurdity on its face.
Excellent analysis!
One can see how the internal cognitive dissonance within the Obama administration would lead to the Holder backed investigation of ‘evil’ CIA interrogation techniques and the lack of any denial by Obama of CIA involvement in the ousting of Zelaya in Honduras.
We’ve known for years that the far left are the most racist element in American society in their disdain for peoples of any color striving for freedom. When confronted with the truth of genocide in South East Asia after the fall of Saigon, more than one leftist told me “I don’t care”, which pretty much summed up their feelings about anything outside of their pet causes.
For years I have been telling people that the lefty anti-war protests were not about war, but about power. Now that one of their own has become the president the truth becomes evident. Funding for the anti-war groups has shriveled to next to nothing, but the battle to subvert American freedoms and liberty is being funded at a rate that boggles the imagination. God help America if they succeed. We are now in somewhat the same position as the campesinos of Central America and the people of Honduras.
Give this administration what it wants and we will end up in the same position as the people of the old Soviet Union, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
The historical aspect was well done, but using a movie script to illustrate a point implies a lack of professionalism. The subject matter is too important to use a movie in the analysis. Most Hollywood productions and character have propaganda motives and messages. A political writer should be above the level of employing a propaganda medium. Being published in blogs for better or worse contributes to the historical record, providing material for future generations. It is sad to think that will think we used cinema as a basis for critical analysis. Better luck next time.
Agree the analysis is superb.
Dumocrats and mouth breathing moviegoers don’t read analyses, and if they did, the education in the U.S. leaves them incapable of following it.
What’s needed here is for the good analysts like you, Oleg, to enlist the help of propagandists like the useful and most destructive idiots Clooney, Baldwin, Redford, etc.
I believe the last I’ve seen was Ayn Rand, long dead.
Latin America’s problems today have very little to do with contemporary ideologies or alleged interference from the outside. Few people understand the deep historical and cultural antecedents that have shaped the region stretching back to the early 16th century. Spain and Portugal established empires in the New World long before the other colonial powers ever got in the game. The combination of royal absolutism and mercantilist economic policies retarded political and economic development in the region from the very beginning.
The changes over the centuries from royal rule by viceroy to creole rule by a new aristocracy, to dictator, and thence to popular revolt leading to a new oligarchic elite are but changes from tweedle-dee to tweedle-dum. C.E. Chapman said it best: “The majority (of officials) were both mediocre and corrupt. It was the last-named type which stamped itself upon the traditions of Spanish America, to become the norm in political life, greatly esteemed, indeed, but not so much for character and achievements as for position in society and opportunities for wealth.” Castro and Chavez are merely the next in a long line of looters.
Did the Soviet Union and the United States compete for influence in Latin America? Well, yes. But the geopolitical game has less to do with current conditions in the region than tradition. Latin America swings on a pendulum, always two steps forward and one step back. It’s likely to remain that way for some time to come.
2. Steve Sampson. Would Leni Riefenstahl’s work in the 1930’s be admissible in a study of Nazi culture?
More lies! Everything is a CIA plot! Even this! This too. Even me. Even you.
Great series, Oleg. Speaking of movies, it’s a pity that the movie Burnt by the Sun is not more popular. Beautiful, beautiful movie.
I wonder whether the world will ever recover from the damage to the free imagination wrought by the Politburo and its KGB. Probably not. What a pity.
“Spain and Portugal established empires…”
Spain’s traditions of anti-intellectualism and anti-capitalism were exported to the new world. The natives were probably discouraged from doing anything serious with their lives. They were presumably just a bunch of dumb Indians who should know their place in the larger scheme of things. I highly recommend reading Rodney Stark’s, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. The idiocy of the well meaning Charles V and his equally dense son Philip II severely damaged Spain’s economy. Thank God that the British colonized much of North America—or we also could also be second-rate nations in the 21st Century.
Remember that these are the same Einsteins who think running around breaking windows causes prosperity.
It’s a lot worse than that. Their ethnocentrism and racism causes them to see non-whites as children, who can’t get by without their help. This is the reason why they have such extravagant expectations of the Israelis and no expectations of the Palestinians. They don’t see Arabs as full-fledged grown up people. They indulge them as children.
So not only can’t they conceive of Arabs as responsible, they also can’t conceive of them as desiring a modern democracy. And I believe that if you got an ounce or two of ethanol into one, they’d tell you that straight up.
They also look at the white working class the same way, but with a twist: while they are sure that these poor slobs need their enlightened help, they aren’t in any way indulgent. With “brown” people, they’re like indulgent parents. With poor whites, they’re more like abusive parents.
In the end, you can’t ever understand political ideology without understanding individual psychology. This narcissism-driven messiah complex is what motivates all “progressives”. Empires such as the USSR come and go, but narcissism is forever. That’s why we still have these pricks, and always will.
The current administration seems determined to try and destroy the United States from within.
Between:
- the attack on our own information gathering organizations
- attacks on the grass roots revolution known as the Tea parties
- attacks on those voicing their fear and concerns about the government takeover of Healthcare
- the attacks on the free press known as The Fairness Doctrine
- The entitlement of the White House to shut down the internet if it feels it needs to to protect the country (too vague)
- Runaway debt
- Socialistic takeover of ever increasing portions of our economy from auto industry, banks, green industry initiatives, increased government jobs, and soon to be Healthcare.
- Open borders policies in order to increase minority proportions of our country.
- rationing of Healthcare (as a means of limiting the elderly?)
- Lack of support and recognition of our traditional allies in favor of dictators and despots.
- Policies that promote continued increases in unemployment and the unemployable.
- and what appears to be, in my opinion, a complete disregard of the Constitution in favor of remaking this country into some as yet undefined vision.
With soon to come tax reform, already increasing taxes, the promised reduction of my income by 30-40% (I’m a specialist) and the controls on my practice that would be imposed by the Healthcare Reform Bill, I will have no choice but to retire and either pick up a new profession, stay retired, or leave this country in favor of some other portion of the world.
Either way the costs of running the government continue to increase and the tax base continues to decrease.
The need for an information gathering community is decreasing. This administration and congress is doing far more damage than any terrorist or enemty country could safely do to it. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if those countries and organizations aren’t specifically thwarting anyone from interfering with this government. The last thing they’d want to do is re-unite this country to a common cause.
Calvin Ball – excellent analysis, right on target.
“One of its state-of-the-art operations occurred in the early 1950s when President Eisenhower authorized the CIA to overthrow the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala…. Today the CIA operates more tightly than ever under strict laws and bureaucratic guidelines, and the oversight committees in Congress are informed of every significant covert operation.”
Ah, for the good old days, when we and our congressmen could all be “good Germans” and not know what was being done in our name.
Calvin Ball – very well said indeed.
Thank you all for your insightful comments.
Sampson, What is with you? Are you a Moby?
You were on a neo-neocon post the other day with the exact same nonsense, the same puerile attempt to discredit the author all the while posing as a “reasonable conservative”, and in both cases you made no real positive contribution to the discussion.
You are stating to stink to the high heavens. Another astrotufer?
What is really shameful is this arrogant “evaluation” of writers here. “Better luck next time” indeed. You are just a cipher, get off you high horse and get over yourself. You contribute nothing but shameful passive-aggressive undermining. You are on no position to evaluate anyone–you have not established that level of credibility. Mind your manners, they are rather foul. Leave if you cannot.
Back up your opinions with rational argument and fact or leave.
4 ~Paules, 8 David Thompson Here’s more fuel for you.
Eight centuries enslaved to the Caliphate have left Hispanics with a less than Renaissance mind set. During only five centuries of ‘Christendom’ they just tapered off the Caliphate, transitioning by centuries of Inquisition tapered into centuries of Dictatorships.
Eight centuries of Arab ownership of the Iberians embued them with a culture and a language infused with Arab passivity toward concepts of responsibility and accountability. Example:
English: I broke the glass.
French: J’ai caissez le verre.
Spanish: El vaso se cayó y se rompió. (The glass fell and broke itself).
While French and Italian form the responsible, accountable sentence as do other Indo-Euopean languages, Spanish holds over the Arabic passive “not me!” form.
When an infant learns its mother tongue from its mother, what gets programmed into its little behavioral microchips.
Latin America’s problems are and have always been Latin American. North America, CIA or not, has only inflicted them with science, technology and products, including loans, that they couldn’t come up with themselves.
Add also that no matter how heavy a hand the CIA had in Latin American politics, the USSR did still worse. And if the Soviet Union breaks a rule of international politics first, surely America cannot remain bound by it – otherwise it puts itself at a disadvantage.