I mentioned in my page on How To Hide An Empire that I consider Washington Bullets as a companion text.
Like Immerwahr, Prashad's book covers American imperialism in the 20th century. Most poignant to us is the chapter MANUAL FOR REGIME CHANGE, and subsequent chapters which cover how the US dominated Latin America and West Asia. Forgive me for the lack of annotations, I'm very tired from work and it was a struggle to post this at all.
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◆ ‘BRING DOWN MORE US AIRCRAFT’
▪ But the biggest price is not paid by the intelligence services. The biggest price is paid by the people. For in these assassinations, these murders, this violence of intimidation, it is the people who lose their leaders in their localities. A peasant leader, a trade-union leader, a leader of the poor.
▪ It was in the battlefields of the South that Washington pushed against Soviet influence and against the national liberation projects, against hope and for profit.
▪ Imperialism is powerful : it attempts to subordinate people to maximize the theft of resources, labour, and wealth
◆ TRUSTEESHIP
▪ The League of Nations Covenant (1919) assembled the lands of the natives into ‘trusteeships’, so that their masters could believe that their domination was sanctified by law. It was in Article 16 of the Covenant that the ‘peace loving nations’ – namely the imperialists – said that they had the ‘obligation’ to maintain peace and security
▪ Haiti, which, like Nicaragua, was in the League of Nations, saw its people rise up against the pro-US dictator Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in 1915, whose death in the streets of Port-au-Prince gave the US the excuse to send in the marines; they remained in Haiti till 1934. Fifteen thousand to thirty thousand Haitians died in the repression, though this did not stop a peasant rebellion in 1919–20 and a series of strikes in 1929
◆ ‘SAVAGE TRIBES DO NOT CONFORM TO THE CODES OF CIVILIZED WARFARE’
▪ Discussions around the First Geneva Convention in 1864 made no mention of the colonial wars. There was nothing about the terrible repression against the Indian uprising of 1857, nothing about the savagery in the crackdown against uprisings of enslaved people in the Americas, silence about the genocidal killings of indigenous peoples in Australia and the Americas – silence.
▪ The Daily Chronicle described the scene vividly : ‘Non-combatants, young and old, were slaughtered ruthlessly, without compunction and without shame.’ The use of the legal word ‘non-combatants’ is significant. The editor of the paper – Robert Donald – tolerated war, but not slaughter. The Italian air force, which saw the value of the bombing, wrote in its communiqué from the field that the bombs ‘had a wonderful effect on the morale of the Arabs’, namely that the Arabs were terrified of the colonizers. Robert Donald’s British air force would mirror the Italians in the campaigns against the Iraqis in 1924. British jurist J.M. Spaight wrote in Air Power and War Rights (1924) that aerial bombardment has ‘almost limitless possibilities’. ‘It can turn the old, crude, hideous, blood-letting business into an almost bloodless surgery of forcible international adjustment
◆ NATIVES AND THE UNIVERSAL
▪ When he visited Gambia, then a British colony, in 1943 after the Casablanca Conference with Churchill, Roosevelt noted, ‘The thing is, the colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of these countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements – all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war
◆ UN CHARTER
▪ From 1945 to 1989, the USSR operated as an umbrella against the fully lawless usage of these UN loopholes, these mechanisms to offer the old colonial states a back door to continue their colonial wars in a modern form. The importance of this shield was evident within the first decade of the UN’s operations. The USSR boycotted the Security Council because the UN did not replace the Nationalist Chinese delegate with the delegate from the People’s Republic of China; during this period, the West weaponized the UN to authorize its intervention into South Korea against the Communist forces in the north. The USSR reversed its boycott as a consequence of this inability to veto the UN’s action. It returned to the UN. The first 56 vetoes in the UN Security Council were made by the USSR. The importance of the shield comes mainly on the anti-colonial, national liberation question. It was the USSR that used its veto to defend the process of national liberation, from the struggles of the Palestinians to the struggles in South Rhodesia, from the South African freedom struggle to the liberation war in Vietnam
▪ While the Soviet Union preaches its concern for the liberation of dependent peoples,’ the US officials wrote, ‘it has ruthlessly converted every territory over which it has acquired domination into a vassal of the Soviet state.’ This was written in August 1953, while the CIA overthrew the democratic leader of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh
◆ ‘I AM FOR AMERICA’
▪ When offered a very small amount of the Marshall Plan – less than what was given to Germany, the key belligerent of the war – the USSR declined the money and relied upon its own population to generate resources. The USSR was in no position to exert its power across the world, except through the prestige gained by the Soviet people for their stubborn resistance to the Nazi blitzkrieg and through the global impact of Communists in the anti-fascist resistance.
◆ SOLIDARITY WITH THE UNITED STATES AGAINST COMMUNISM
▪ As Marshall sat with leaders of some of the hemispheric states, on 9 April 1948 a gunman shot to death Jorge Gaitán, a presidential candidate who was the champion of Colombia’s poor. Not far away, a World Bank mission led by its president John J. McCloy was in town to provide the intellectual cover not for a Marshall Plan but for the entrapment of Colombia’s economy into the web of US transnational corporations and of the bank accounts of the Colombian oligarchy. People took to the streets of Bogotá, angered by the assassination of Gaitán; their unrest is known as the Bogotazo. Marshall, inside the OAS meeting, said that these protests were ‘the first important communist attempt in the Western hemisphere’. He was wrong about that. It was another gasp of a country that faced from 1948 a terrible phase of violence known – precisely – as La Violencia; the Colombian oligarchy simply would not permit the masses to enter history, and so they used the full arsenal of state power to execute hope from their country. In the name of anti-Communism, the Colombian oligarchy subordinated itself to Washington, DC.
▪ The US initiated the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954 (the Manila Pact), and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in 1955 (the Baghdad Pact). These ‘treaty organizations’ were created to yoke in the post-colonial states into a close embrace with the United States, and to encircle the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the Democratic Republic of Korea. In February 1950, the USSR and the PRC signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. This is what had to be undermined.
◆ ‘NO COMMUNISTS IN GOV. OR ELSE’
▪ The classes that favoured imperialism were frequently the old aristocracies, the landed oligarchy, and the emerging capitalists;
▪ In West Germany, the CIA was quite happy working with a Nazi intelligence officer – Reinhard Gehlen – who formed the anti-Communist Gehlen Organization, which then was essentially absorbed into the West German Federal Intelligence Service, which Gehlen ran
▪ Konstantinos Tsaldaris’s right-wing government was bathed in monarchism and gangsterism (with its mafia-like parakatos on the streets), but it was also energized by money and support from Washington, DC. Dollars brought back to life the cadaver of Europe’s reactionary political bloc. It had permission to use maximum force against the Communists. Washington would manage the world media on behalf of this doddery fascistic government.
▪ ‘I told Ramadier,’ Marshall wrote in his diary, ‘no Communists in gov. or else.’ It was a direct threat. A wave of strikes in France and a mafia attack on Communist militants in Italy provided the two Prime Ministers their excuse. The Communists were removed from government. Washington blessed the Prime Ministers, and then paid them off. The money did not come only from the US Treasury. It also came from the transnational corporations. Exxon Corporation contributed almost $50 million to the Christian Democrats in Italy from 1963 to 1972. This was a soft coup against the Communists.
◆ ‘NOTHING CAN BE ALLOWED’
▪ That term was key to Truman – the Free World. The term emerged during the Second World War to refer to the countries that fought against fascism, although many of those countries – such as Britain and France – held colonies where they maintained authoritarian regimes
◆ THIRD WORLD PROJECT
▪ property. It was not that Castro came to Havana as a Communist, but it was that the wretched resistance of the owners – whether in Cuba or in the United States – made him into a Communist
▪ The violence of the armies of national liberation was, as Amílcar Cabral put it, ‘to answer the criminal violence of the agents of imperialism. Nobody can doubt that, whatever its local characteristics, imperialist domination implies a state of permanent violence against the nationalist forces
▪ No question that two decades later the apartheid regime of South Africa would not have fallen without the victory of the Angolan liberation forces, with the Cubans against the South African regime in the 1987–88 battle of Cuito Cuanavale. Democracy in Portugal and in South Africa was taken by the gun. It was not given by liberalism. This narrative is now submerged
▪ The great decolonization process – whose highpoint was in the 1960s and 1970s – became the prelude to poverty and war that now racks the former Third World. Beneath the paving stones in these colonized lands there is no beach. Beneath the paving stones, the corpses of freedom fighters.
◆ EXPOSE THE US ‘UNNECESSARILY’
▪ The war against the English was premised against a desire by the European settlers to break out of the Thirteen Colonies and conquer the entire continent; this was a war for colonization, not a war against colonialism
▪ this ‘internal colonization’, with its full-scale genocide of the Native peoples, did not fully appear to be colonialism since it was muddied by conceptual blankets such as ‘territorial expansion’ and the ‘frontier of settlement’.
▪ All this is verbiage for a simple motto : the US government will make the world safe for the capitalist system whose major beneficiaries were transnational corporations (most of them based in the West). In fact, there is no need to annotate the policy document. The US, the authors write, has an ‘economic interest in assuring that the resources and markets of the less developed world remain available to us and to other Free World countries’.
◆ MANUAL FOR REGIME CHANGE
▪ Anyone who pushed an agenda that resembled economic nationalism, anything that threatened the market domination of transnational corporations and that offered an advantage to the Communists had to be removed
▪ 1965, ‘Aid, therefore, to a neo-colonial state is merely a revolving credit, paid by the neo-colonial master, passing through the neo-colonial state and returning to the neo-colonial master in the form of increased profits.’ When Chile went to the Paris Club to negotiate the terms to reschedule its $1.862 billion in debt, the US delegate at the Club sniffed. The US owned $1.227 billion of this debt, so it raised the issue of both compensation to the copper transnational firms and Chile’s suspension of debt repayment. Pressure on Chile mounted, as international finance dried up. In the Inter-American Development Bank, the US holds 40 per cent of the votes and effectively runs a veto; its loans to Chile fell from $46 million in 1970 to $2 million in 1972. The World Bank, controlled by the US, made no new loans to Chile between 1970 and 1973. The Export–Import Bank reduced Chile’s ratings from B to D – the lowest level. Trade continued, but firms began to ask for cash upfront for the purchase of goods. All this occurred as the copper prices fell by 25 per cent; as global inflation increased imported food prices rose.
Inflation escalated to over 1,000 per cent, and the Allende government began to print money and to ration goods in order to prevent a total decline in living standards.
A combination of Nixon’s ‘invisible blockade’, the panicked reaction to the sanctions by the government, and the adverse international conditions (low copper prices, high food prices), ‘created the conditions’, as Kissinger put it, for a coup. Nixon answered, ‘[T]hat is the way it is going to be played.’
▪ The CIA went into motion. The money was spent on ‘strikes’ and on ‘protests’, which obliged Pinochet to send his troops out of the barracks. Without the ‘demonstrations’, there was no legitimacy for the army to act.
▪ The Guatemalan military officers were told by US military advisors that if they did not overthrow the government, the US would invade. It was a threat that unsettled many otherwise loyal officers; they would either stand down when the coup happened or join the coup itself
▪ The CIA’s Frank Wisner met with the Free Trade Union Committee’s Jay Lovestone (a former US Communist Party leader), who then began to courier cash to the anti-Communist trade union Force Ouvrière and to Le Milieu (the mafia), but more precisely the Corsican front. The deal was that the mafia would intimidate the union members and murder Communists, while in exchange the French and US authorities would allow them to bring heroin into Europe. This was known as the French Connection. Additionally, the CIA sent a psychological operations unit to undermine the reputation of the Communists. When a ship arrived with 60,000 sacks of flour and when the dockers refused to unload it, the CIA spread the story that the unions and the Communists were against the hungry.
▪ The Indonesian Army and its allies – mainly fanatical anti-Communists, including religious groups – killed at least a million people in this pogrom. What is beyond doubt – even though the US refuses to release fully its documents on this period – is that the United States and the Australians provided the Indonesian armed forces with lists of Communists who were to be assassinated, that they egged on the Army to conduct these massacres, and that they covered up this absolute atrocity
▪ The idea of the ‘conspiracy theory’ was developed by the anti-Communist philosopher Karl Popper in his 1945 The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper was against the view that war, unemployment, and poverty were the ‘result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups’. Theories of society – such as Marxism – which attempted to understand the social mechanisms of war and unemployment could be softly dismissed as merely conspiracy theories
◆ PRODUCTION OF AMNESIA
▪ What freedom meant was not the freedom to be fully alive – to have the resources to eat, to learn, to be healthy – but to have free elections and a free press; although even this entire definition had the ring of falsity, as the people of France, Greece, and Italy had experienced in the near aftermath of the Second World War, and as the people of the Third World found as the imperialist powers asserted their right to reclaim their lost colonies
◆ ‘BE A PATRIOT, KILL A PRIEST’
▪ The CIA funded Catholic Action, a lay group with ties to the Order but even more with the far-right fascistic elements who helped prevent the Communist election victory in Italy and who would provide intelligence against any left-leaning priest
◆ ‘I STRONGLY URGE YOU TO MAKE THIS A TURNING POINT’
▪ The CIA and US military intelligence began to operate against the People’s Democratic Republic of Southern Yemen, which was governed by the Marxist National Liberation Front from 1969, and had drastically improved the conditions of its people (including land reform and equal rights for women); this government had to be undermined.
▪ People such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a fundamentalist who threw acid on the faces of female students at Kabul University, would become the main recipients of CIA funds through Operation Cyclone – a CIA programme to finance and arm the mujahideen, fighters for God, against the Afghan government
▪ against the Afghan government. It was this programme that created the chaos that provoked the Afghan government to seek help from the Soviet Union. ‘We didn’t push the Russians to intervene,’ Brzezinski later said, ‘but we knowingly increased the probability that they wou
▪ What is important here is that Brzezinski was talking to Kim in November 1980. In May of that year, in the southern city of Gwangju, a popular uprising fought against the Chun dictatorship. Chun sent in the military on 18 May, who opened fire and killed hundreds – if not thousands – of people. Chun defended his action saying that he was preventing a Communist coup, instigated by North Korea
◆ ‘THE SHEET IS TOO SHORT’
▪ It was in this period that the US and its allies put pressure on the International Monetary Fund, and on the various private and public lending agencies, to tie loans of all kinds – even for short-term liquidity challenges – to structural adjustment of their own internal economies.
▪ In Zaire, IMF officials told the government through 1976 to 1978 to devalue the currency by 42 per cent, which led to a five-fold increase in consumer prices and a drop in real consumption expenditures by one-third. IMF officials essentially took command of the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank. In 1977, the IMF arrived in Lima with a proposal from a Citibank-led consortium to the dictatorial regime led by General Francisco Morales-Bermúdez Cerruti and his military junta; the consortium would offer to sell Peru’s natural resources and take care of Peru’s substantial debt. Billions would eventually flood out of the country
◆ ‘OUR STRATEGY MUST NOW REFOCUS’
▪ In 1996, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went on 60 Minutes. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) had released a report on the impact of US-driven UN sanctions on Iraq. It showed that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died because of these sanctions. Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes asked Albright, ‘We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?’ Neither 60 Minutes nor Albright contested the UN report, or the damage done to Iraq. Albright did not wait for a second. She replied, ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.’ That was that, then. The total destruction of Iraq was worth it. But what was being purchased at that price? It was US supremacy.
Sitting in one of the regime’s palaces on 24 February 1991, Saddam
◆ ‘RISING POWERS CREATE INSTABILITY IN THE INTERNATIONAL STATE SYSTEM’
▪ There have been at least 120 reported rapes since 1972, the ‘tip of the iceberg’, says Takazato. Every year there is at least one incident that shakes the conscience of the people – a terrible act of violence, a rape or a murder.
◆ ‘PAVE THE WHOLE COUNTRY’
▪ If the US sanctions regime against Iraq could be shown (as FAO did show) to have been responsible for the death of half a million children, that was not to be seen as either the operations of a rogue state or of a terrorist – that was simply unfortunate. If a rogue state or a terrorist killed a few hundred people or even ten people, it was a human rights catastrophe
◆ MAXIMUM PRESSURE
▪ The United Nations has repeatedly said that sanctions are not a humane policy and must no longer be allowed to be part of the arsenal of the powerful nations. Exceptions for medicines and food are routinely argued for
◆ ACCELERATE THE CHAOS
▪ A report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that during the calendar year from August 2017, Trump’s sanctions had killed at least 40,000 people and reduced the availability of food and medicines
▪ medicines. As these sanctions remain in effect, they prevent 80,000 people with HIV from getting anti-retroviral drugs, they prevent 16,000 people from getting regular dialysis, they prevent 16,000 with cancer from getting treatment, and they prevent four million people with diabetes and hypertension from getting insulin and cardiovascular medicine. The social impact of these sanctions has been catastrophic
◆ SANCTIONS ARE A CRIME
▪ On paper, the unilateral US sanctions say that medical supplies are exempt. But this is an illusion. Neither Venezuela nor Iran can easily buy medical supplies, nor can they easily transport them into their countries, nor can they use them in their largely public-sector health systems. The embargo against these countries – in the time of Covid-19 – was not only a war crime by the standards of the Geneva Conventions (1949) but was a crime against humanity as defined by the United Nations’s International Law Commission (1947).